Culture

Why The Hurt Locker shouldn't have won

March 08, 2010
Kathryn Bigelow arriving at the Oscars on Sunday
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.