Kathryn Bigelow arriving at the Oscars on Sunday
I’ve always been a huge Kathryn Bigelow fan. Near Dark is certainly the greatest redneck vampire film ever made, and who can forget the flaming gasoline-wielding “ex presidents” in Point Break? I even liked the gun fetishist stalker in Blue Steel, so when The Hurt Locker came out last year, I was very excited. Pretty much as soon as it arrived in London, I called up my friend Jonah and off we went to see it in Piccadilly Circus.
Jonah and I met in Gaza. We are both journos who have spent a fair bit of time embedded with the US military in Iraq, which I guess either makes us the perfect audience or the worst audience for this film. I hate to say that when we came out of the movie, we were both disappointed.
Let me begin by saying what Bigelow did get right. The film, shot in Amman, Jordan, looks like Baghdad. The dirt, the dust, the omnipresent brown, the ugly concrete block architecture, the empty and garbage-strewn boulevards, the trailers on the American bases, all look real. The handheld 16mm cameras make it feel like documentary footage. The relationships between the soldiers are spot on. There is a wonderful scene where reckless cowboy Sergeant James spots targets for the sniper rifle-wielding Sergeant Sanborn. The two had just had a big fight but they work together with the practiced professionalism that is the hallmark of the US military. In combat, the dispute, the disagreements are forgotten. Each man does his job, supports his comrade.
Before making Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola famously made a list of all the things that should go into a Vietnam war movie. If I were to make such a list for Iraq, it would include: Egyptian interpreters who don’t understand Iraqi Arabic and their American bosses who don’t have a clue they are making up both questions and answers, US soldiers who spend their entire tour in Iraq never leaving the base, and grizzled Mississippian truck drivers earning over $100,000 a year hauling the pork chops and ice cream from Kuwait that feed the troops. But the most important thing I would include is the casual killing of innocent Iraqi civilians, not from malice but from fear and misunderstanding.
Three scenes are absolutely wrong. In one, Sergeant James escapes his base and roams Baghdad by himself, lost and confused, looking for an Iraqi he suspects of killing a boy. No, Americans never leave the base by themselves. In the second, the soldiers wander around their base, drunk out of their minds. One of the exceptional features of the Iraq war is it is probably the first war ever fought without alcohol or drugs. And, in the last and worst, our boys have their guns aimed at an Iraqi they suspect to be a car bomber. Despite his repeatedly not obeying their orders to back up, they don’t shoot him, even though they themselves might die.
I repeat, I have massive admiration for the American soldiers in Iraq. In my experience they are brave without being brutal. It is an honorable military: the most honorable and the least vicious I have hung out with. But its primary ethos is one of limiting US casualties. In the film, Sergeant James is a cowboy, eager to risk his life, yet ever careful of not risking the lives of Iraqi civilians. In my experience this is the wrong way around. The cowboys in the US military are never reckless with their own or their comrades’ lives, but careless with those of the Iraqis.
Maybe my criticisms are trivial and meaningless to those without experience in Iraq. I’m glad Kathryn Bigelow won the Oscar. She is a great director with stunning command of film language but, I have to say, The Hurt Locker gives an inaccurate portrait of the Iraq war.
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Amanda Craig:
“I disagree, though take these points. I imagine the three inaccuracies mentioned were all for the plot. I don’t imagine drugs or alcohol are missing, in reality.”
Jamie Rubbi-Clarke:
“You’d have said the same thing if Avatar had won – there’s not really a planet inhabited by giant blue cat people. This wasn’t the Best Documentary category.”
hm…i agree with you these are very good reasons now i am also conviced that she should`nt win
And Henry V does an equally poor job. Let’s not even talk about Lear’s mangling kingship and family.
While I have my own concerns about this movie in terms of misleading an otherwise ignorant audience as to the realities of war, and especially as fought by US forces, Mr. Streithorst is way off the mark in his obviously biased view of US military. While there are of course instances (as in any military in any combat setting)where individual soldiers commit criminal acts, to suggest that it is commonplace and “routine’ is simply not supported by the FACTS. It is ironic and characteristically hypocritical that he has fallen victim to the very thing he purports to critique–the genre of military movies that cloaks virulent anti-military agendas (depicting one war crime after another) with superficial technical (jargon, uniforms, equipment, special effects etc.)accuracy such as Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Casualties of War, Generation Kill, Jarhead ad nauseam.
I have been working in Iraq for last 6 years… Bigelow did include the soldiers who never leave their bases, in the case of bad-luck Colonel who dies in his first mission out of wire, couple of days before the end of their 1-year long deployment… I agree with everything else in the article, and would add one more thing which is missing: political background of the war, causing the honorable military to fullfil the economic and political objectives of not so honorary leaders… but the major awards very often go to the political targets, and not necessarily to the best candidate, plus let’s not forget teh movei is just an form of arrt and doesn’t need to be a transcript of reality, but can be played with a little bit, to make it more interesting for the audience…
Well, this is Hollywood, everybody knows its commercial tricks. No surprise.
Marco
Brazil
No surprise. This is Hollywood. Illusion, imagination, hallucination.
Marco Wildt.
Brazil
I stand by my position that in spite of the “gritty realism” the nuances of this genre of films in terms of the plot and characters do as much damage to the military in general as it does good in terms of the perceptions of the vast majority of viewers who have no real basis for comparison as civilians. They are the ones that the producers are trying to influence to their often anti-war, anti-military, anti-authority perspectives.
The upcoming and much bally-hooed (due to the Hanks/Spielburg/Goetzman involvement that brought us Band of Brothers) HBO series, “The Pacific” is no different. I attended a special advance premiere several weeks ago and was disappointed (though not really surprised) to see that in the very first battle sequence, there was a gratuitous scene of a captain cowering in his foxhole while his gallant men carried on the battle. While I realize such things happen in every combat, this was obviously added in by the producers since it does not appear anywhere in the books that the producers say were used as the basis for the screenplay. Indeed, if the producers were really driven by their professed quest for accuracy, they would know that for the officer to have been a captain in the Marines on Guadalcanal in 1942, this necessarily meant due to time in grade requirements he was of the “Old Breed”–those professionals who were in the Marines before Pearl Harbor and who generally performed heroically and competently, especially in the early stages of WWII when experience was at a premium.
My point is that given the limited screen time for any film, the producers make carefully chosen decisions for each and every scene included in the final cut. Accordingly, and especially when a scene is clearly fictional in that the source material does not support it, one has to ask why it was deemed worthy of inclusion. It does not take a rocket scientist to see why this scene was included (just as the many similar scenes in the other movies of this genre of cowardly and incompetent leaders, rebellious yet lovable and infinitely wise squaddies, routine criminal conduct etc.) as it plays into the well-documented biases of “Hollywood” against authority in general and the military culture specifically (notwithstanding the somewhat hollow protestations of some that they merely hate war but “love” the soldier when at the same time so often demeaning the soldier as someone who cannot do anything else in life).
Concerning what you called the three ‘wrongs’, just in case you didn’t get it: it was not a documentary, but a fiction movie.
About the use of alcohol I’ll agree with you if you stand that pirate DVDs are also out of question…
The critics pointing Sgt. James behaviour as far from reality would only apply, again, if it was a documentary.
Your criticism are trivial and meaningless to anyone who knew wasn’t watching a docummentary.
Rodrigo, Jamie, and Richard are of course correct that this was a fiction film, not a documentary. But one of the roles of fiction is to illuminate the truth.
Most people watching this film haven’t been to Iraq, haven’t been in the military. In the same way that most of us probably see Robert Redford’s face when we think of Bob Woodward, many viewers will naturally be influenced by the picture to make certain assumptions about the Iraq War.
Fiction does not have to tell the truth, but it should bring us closer to it. I think that The Hurt Locker, although an admirable film in many respects, deeply misleads its audience as to the nature of “cowboy” and reckless behaviour in the US military in Iraq. That is why I wrote this essay.
And Cinncinatus Jr, I nowhere in my review accuse American soldiers of committing criminal acts. The innocent die in war, unfortunately that is the nature of war.
However, I do think that the US military obsession with “force protection”, especially in the first few years of the war, did end up killing lots of Iraqi civilians unnecessarily, and probably played a part in inciting the insurgency.