Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, whom I’ve been neglecting of late for frontier biographies and true crime cop shoot-’em-ups, has a review of The Hurt Locker on the London Review of Books blog. I wasn’t a fan of the The Hurt Locker, and it looks from Zizek’s review that he shared my irritation. (Thanks to the Endless Thread.)
The Hurt Locker brought back to Hollywood the trend which also accounts for the success of two recent Israeli films about the 1982 Lebanon war, Ari Folman’s animated documentary Waltz With Bashir and Samuel Maoz’s Lebanon. Lebanondraws on Maoz’s memories of being a young soldier; most of the action claustrophobically takes place inside a tank. The movie follows four inexperienced soldiers dispatched to ‘mop up’ enemies in a Lebanese town that has already been bombarded by the Israeli air force. Interviewed at the 2009 Venice festival, Yoav Donat, one of the actors, said: ‘This is not a movie that makes you think: “I’ve just been to a movie.” This is a movie that makes you feel like you’ve been to war.’ Maoz has said his film is not a condemnation of Israel’s policies, but a personal account of what he went through: ‘The mistake I made is to call the film Lebanon because the Lebanon war is no different in its essence from any other war and for me any attempt to be political would have flattened the film.’ This is ideology at its purest: the focus on the perpetrator’s traumatic experience enables us to obliterate the entire ethico-political background of the conflict.
The Hurt Locker’s depictions of the daily horror and traumatic impact of serving in a war zone seems to put it miles apart from such sentimental celebrations of the US army’s humanitarian role as John Wayne’s infamous Green Berets. However, we should bear in mind that the terse-realistic presentation of the absurdities of war in The Hurt Lockerobfuscates and thus makes acceptable the fact that its heroes are doing exactly the same job as the heroes of The Green Berets. In its very invisibility, ideology is here, more than ever: we are there, with our boys, identifying with their fear and anguish instead of questioning what they are doing there.
There’s another trope that pops up with some frequency to do the same work, only instead of focusing on the trauma experienced by individual soldiers, it peddles a kind of mawkish brotherhood-between-soldiers as the greater moral good in war. There was a period there of about fifteen years when nearly every Vietnam movie ended with an overdub that ran something like, “In the end, we didn’t fight and die for our country, or for any grand ideal, but for the man next to us.” My favorite example was We Were Soldiers and Young Once. Or, looking away from Vietnam, The Four Feathers, which was one of the weirdest movies I’ve ever seen in its attempts to wriggle out from under the weight of historical reality.)
It’s an obvious dodge, of course. As in The Hurt Locker, it’s a way for the film writer and director to pretend to be making some kind of statement about something significant while ensuring nothing is ever said that could alienate a single potential movie-goer. (And, seriously, I probably would have liked The Hurt Locker better as a straight pro-Iraq War movie, because at least then it might’ve avoided its goofy clichés and cardboard characters.)
It’s also a pretty sketchy sentiment on the moral side, if you think about. After all, if the only thing that matters in war is the brotherhood created amongst soldiers, than there’s no culpability for individual soldiers in advancing the war’s aims. To think it through it to its logical conclusion, those Nazis on the Easter Front suffered horrendous hardships, and each probably bonded tremendously with his brother soldiers, but it seems like any movie about them would be just a bit remiss in not pointing out what their aims were.
