The Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow on set in Jordan.
The two war movies up for Oscars this Sunday are as far apart as Bugs Bunny is from Baghdad. James Cameron’s wondrous Avatar is built on tropes straight from the Sixties. The Hurt Locker, directed by his ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow, feels as if it came straight off the evening news from the days when Iraq seemed to be blowing up every day. The Academy must decide between a movie no one could take seriously and one that zones in on the crux of war: a man’s willingness to risk death.
People, my wife for one, like to say that if women ran the world there’d be no war. The few women in Bigelow’s movie appear only briefly. (The protagonist, William James, has a child-bound wife but she is there only to provide distant and brief background.) Women do run some countries, and they do just about everything else men do. But they do not fight as warriors, at least not in the same way. Size and strength are not the only reasons women don’t fight, a fact Bigelow emphasizes by putting her burly protagonist in a military operation that really calls for a woman’s physique and touch. James would have had an easier time inside a booby-trapped car if he had slight shoulders and small hands. Someone who practiced yoga and never drank anything stronger than chai would be more flexible and steady with tangled wires and explosives than a guy who drinks his liquor from the bottle as James does. Women may fly F-16s and drive trucks in war zones (a much more dangerous task), but they rarely join the Army’s bomb disposal units (only four percent of those serving in bomb disposal units in Iraq and Afghanistan are women). This may be for the same reason that car insurance companies charge young men higher rates than young women: men and women do not see risk the same way. When Bigelow’s camera puts you inside James’s blast helmet so that you waddle with him up to an improvised explosive device, his fear is your fear. But his nerve is not yours. He saunters up to bombs as if he’s about to throw a haymaker. Women do not behave like this. Bullfighters, racecar drivers and boxers possess a self-mastery—and a self-denial—that most of us will never really know.
But the director of The Hurt Locker brings you close. Which makes all the more baffling the epigraph that fills the screen, a line of slipshod poesy by the respected war correspondent Chris Hedges: “The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug.” That might have served as profound insight in Avatar, but in The Hurt Locker it only raises the question of how a director who could conceive such a spare and unremitting movie could also fall for such facile hokum. Nevermind the redundancy of “potent and lethal,” linking addiction and battle this way manages to misunderstand both at the same time. It’s just silly to suggest addiction comes in non-spiral flavors, that trembling for a fix or a drink is a “rush.” (The “rush” of intoxication is, as Jackie Gleason said of drinking on New Year’s Eve, “strictly for amateurs.”) Addiction is maintenance. There may be, as Churchill said, “nothing more exhilarating than being shot at without result.” But of all the reasons men go to war, surely the least of them is to see how close they can come to dying.
James does not find himself in Baghdad because he’s jonesing for war. Like the real-life war heroes you read of, he is an ordinary man doing a job at which he is expert. It’s not a “rush” because he might get blown up. His excellence is his reward, managing the risk is only one part of being excellent. Our military is full of men and women like him. They aren’t addicted to killing or to risking their lives. James is hardly describing war as a drug when he reluctantly answers a rip-snorting colonel who wants to know the best way to defuse a bomb: “The way you don’t die, sir.”
Just to be sure we understand James is not a strung-out war lover, Bigelow has the colonel, a jingoistic blowhard and a fool, call James “a wild man.” Using understatement to brilliant effect, Bigelow has James regard the colonel, who looks as if he’s just come from an air-conditioned office in the Green Zone, with the wary detachment of those who know better than to think war intoxicating.
With less than a year left to live, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to his daughter, "I wish now I'd said at the end of The Great Gatsby: I've found my line - from now on this comes first. This is my immediate duty - without this I am nothing.'”
This same reckoning is the coda to The Hurt Locker. Near the end of the movie James has found himself stateside, no more able to decide which box of cereal to choose in a supermarket than Dustin Hoffman’s graduate was able to emerge from the bottom of his parents’ swimming pool (where he looked out on an alien world from inside a scuba mask much as James looks out from his blast helmet.)
James tells his infant son, “As you get older some of the things you love might not seem so special anymore and by the time you get to my age, maybe it's only one or two things. With me, I think it's one.”
Imagine a woman saying these words to her child.
As long as men still feel they are nothing without a call to duty, they will look for a place in the world where they find themselves excellent at something. One of those places is, and has always been, battle.
Bigelow’s movie reminds us of this with every beat of its tense heart.
