Follow Yr Dreams: "The Hurt Locker" As War-Porn Wanderlust

-Mike Ferraro

Given the subject’s prominence over the last decade, when considering the most influential American films of the last ten years you would be remiss not to focus part of your selection on a film or films that depict war in the Middle East. Of the slew of such films that have come and gone, a worthy contender for discussion, not least of all for its raised profile as last year’s big Oscar winner, is The Hurt Locker.

Because of the film's documentary or embedded reporter-style depiction of combat, and the level of purported objectivity such a style allegedly employs, the more generous reading of the film's treatment of war is that it depicts, like all good anti-war films, the cold and impartial carnage and madness of combat in all its abject horror.

A less generous reading would suggest that it glorifies violence and the rush of combat to a frightening and fantastic degree. Not only that, but more troubling, in the figure of veritable sociopath—or is it just plain old war junkie, the film has trouble making a distinction—James, the film glorifies the mentality that such senseless violence breeds.

In fact, the overt message of the film indicates the latter, less generous, reading.

Disarming IEDs, after all, is “gangster.” And war can be fun, advises the well-intended but preposterously fatuous officer-psychologist who trades the cushy confines of his desk for a day in the hummer on bomb-duty. Given the stunted trajectory and limited imagination of the film’s narrative arc, do I even need to add that he is blown to smithereens as a result of this stab at everyman heroism?

Whatever irony and intended message underlying such subtle filmmaking, the effect is lost on me. Simply put, moments like these come across as pure Hollywood-schmaltz. Even more simply, the psychologist is a straight-up dope.

I mean, they're all dopes, stuck in a godforsaken desert-hell, risking their necks for fairy-tales. But that is another discussion altogether, I’m afraid.

For the heart of the film lies in James' return home to his humdrum suburban-existence—the staidness and uniformity of which, the film suggests, is enough to justify his war-lust. There he confesses to his infant son that in life you only really love one or two things. Well, one thing, it turns out. The closing shot of the film is of James, shitkickers laced-up and crunching that infernal desert sand as he embarks on yet another tour of duty.

Sorry, kid, you gotta follow your dreams no matter how putrid.

I realize James’ confessional is supposed to be a big, brave moment of emotional honesty and character-revelation, one that shows—in a film, ostensibly, about such moments—the cyclical nature of, and our obsession with, violent masculinity. But, because of the schmaltz and one-dimensionality of everything that came before, it falls flat. Further, whatever the filmmakers' intentions, in the The Hurt Locker the Iraq War comes across as the pointless waste of lives and resources that it is and was engineered to be. And such revelations do not seem to be the point of this film. The film’s preoccupation with the glorification of war-violence, disingenuously and irresponsibly rendered under the guise of mock-objectivity and reporting, exacerbates this tendency in virtually every frame.

Still, I would like to think that the film adopts the attitude of say, Zola, or Brett Easton Ellis—that imitation is the most severe form of criticism, but honestly I don't think this is so.

In any event, the film taught me exactly nothing new regarding the madness of combat. Worse, each fragmented scene, stuck in its monotony, serves only to further desensitize the viewer to the obscene violence onscreen. And that is perhaps the film's most disconcerting aspect. Correlatively, the fact that the first female win for best director came under the banner of this type of war-porn tells us much about ourselves and sick cultural norms.

Sanborn was right: they should have blown that "rowdy boy" back to hell when they had the chance. 878 bombs disarmed or not, James is a liability, and the mentality that he embodies needs permanent erasure.

An impossible task, I know, but one worthy of our attention nonetheless.