Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker starts off by playing upon what I believe is the oldest and most primal human fear, developmentally speaking. You sit down in the theater with its stereo surround sound blazing, you watch a team of explosive experts use an all-too-clumsy robot to gingerly manipulate a roadside bomb in Iraq, and before you know it your heart is pounding because an explosion could occur at any moment and some part of your brain really, really does not want to be startled by a loud noise.
The whole rest of the film is essentially a demonstration of how life as a soldier (or civilian) in Iraq works in much the same fashion. Though far from the comfy confines of a movie theater on 13th Street, these people are similarly subjected to an environment where something brain-rattlingly terrifying could happen to them at any moment. Most of the film’s set pieces–and it basically moves from set piece to set piece, like Saving Private Ryan (with one key difference I’ll get to in a moment)–create tension and suspense simply by demonstrating, through a few shots of a byzantine network of alleys or featureless expanse of desert or cramped and hole-riddled warren of rooms, that there is literally no possible way that our trio of American soldiers could prepare themselves for every way in which that brain-rattlingly terrifying thing could happen. Keep your eyes in one direction and get shot from another. Defuse a bomb and get blown up by the one five feet away from it. Pop your head up to shoot someone and get shot in return. And unlike in Spielberg’s paradigm-shifting shakicam action epic, there’s no sense of forward momentum, no inexorable drive to the fulfillment of a quest. There’s just a countdown till the last day in Bravo Company’s rotation, a slow grind of hundreds of daily life-and-death situations, an increasingly indistinct and almost pointless parade of triumphs and tragedies. A tedium of terror. To the extent that the film has an ideological or political component, you can suss it out from there.
But it’s a very big world with a lot of people in it, and surely there are people out there who don’t just survive such a situation but thrive in it. That’s Sgt. James, our hero, played by Jeremy Renner just as marvelously as anyone who’s seen Dahmer or 28 Weeks Later would expect. Like Sanborn and Eldridge, the two other men in his three-man bomb squad, I spent much of the movie trying to figure out what makes this guy tick. Is he an arrogant, cigarette-smoking John Wayne wannabe, living every day as if this is the one during which he can walk away from an explosion in slow motion? Is he Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now, a bloody-handed sociopath glibly waltzing through the killing fields, knowing that some day this war’s gonna end but never quite allowing himself to finish the thought? Is he enacting some sort of slow-motion suicide by haji, running headlong away from responsibility for others and for himself alike until someone or something finally puts him out of his misery? Or is he just the best damn explosives expert anyone’s ever seen–as Eldridge puts it, “not very good with people, but a hell of a warrior”? In one brilliant scene, a murderous commanding officer follows up a near-disaster outside the UN compound with a creepily complimentary inquisition of James that seems to entertain all these possibilities at once.
Two key conversations convey one last possibility: that there’s no real method to James’s madness. We can rule out sociopathy, at least, because he clearly cares deeply about some of the violence’s victims–though his pathos in this regard turns out to be both dubiously inspired and stupidly, self-aggrandizingly addressed. But beyond that, how can he do it? I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know, he says; later, he casts life as a process by which the things you love are slowly revealed to be basically garbage, except for one or two real, true things. It’s love as a fix, and his love, his fix, is his pas de deux with death. He seemingly can’t help being the way he is any more than Bodie from Bigelow’s Point Break (or Johnny from Mike Leigh’s Naked, whom I thought of quite a bit by the end). In this light what looked like recklesness, like not caring, is revealed to be what he cares about the most. His body needs a blast radius.
Liked the film a lot, but there’s too much of it – it’s best when the characters defuse bombs (or MANHANDLE them, in James’ case), and much of the rest is surplus to the fantastic character work done in those scenes.
On an entirely different note, I almost missed the film because the German title back-translates to “Lethal Command.” Which makes me want to show the German distributor my hurt locker.