Unlocking the Hurt Locker

An Academy award is the universal pinnacle for an artist engaged in the entertainment industry and over the years the awards have been 'trend setters' in aesthetics as well as in moral and social standards.

For that matter any award that is worthy of universal acknowledgement should have the inherent responsibility to contribute towards the advancement in civilization and world peace. It is in that light that such awards, like the Nobel prizes and the Academy awards come under international scrutiny of civilized values.

At this year's Academy awards ceremony, the majority of Awards (6), including the important ones for the Best Picture and Best Director were won by an American film called Hurt Locker and hence it behooves on us, as members of the global civil society to analyze what values this picture stands to promote and its contribution to civilization through the medium of cinema.

Young men

Hurt Locker is the colloquial term used by American GIs for 'explosives that are set to hurt and destroy soldiers'. Hence naturally the film is about the war fought by the US in Iraq and the story revolves around three elite Army men whose job is to identify and detonate such explosives so that the 'City is made safe for Iraqis and the Americans alike'. The young men caught in the war, no doubt, perform a daring and a crucial task under trying circumstances and the film is a suspense filled thriller. Basically it is the story of bravery and valour that reveals the finer points and the stakes of a bomb disposal squad engaged in enemy territory. The moot point in this war however is that, just as in so many wars the Americans have fought over the years in the name of world security, it makes it difficult to identify the 'people' the Army has come in to protect from the 'enemies' who perpetrate this global insecurity.

Besides that however there have been a few American films on the Iraq war but they have all fallen in to 'political category' and as a result were called either 'preachy' or 'patriotic' from the American perspective. Hence the producers of this film, at the very outset are said to have made it a point to make their effort 'apolitical'. The reputed American opinion too, shares the thought that the film is 'apolitical' and according to David Denby of the New Yorker 'the film isn't political except by implication - the mutual distrust between the American occupiers and the Iraqi civilians is there in every scene'. But the reality however is that apart from all that epitaphs and good intentions attributed to the movie, it so subtly treads the thin line in underscoring political justification of the war for the bravery and valour of troops engaged in the war. Thus it appears apolitical but when you consider the net impression the film makes on its audience the film makes heroes out of American elite forces while making every Iraqi, a character of suspicion with evil intentions.

Extension of politics

As Von Clausewitz has correctly stated, "the war is but a mere extension of politics by other means" it is difficult for anybody to envisage a war film that is apolitical. Therefore, a film that focuses only on the bravery of three young men engaged in a war that is universally accepted as an 'unjust' and an 'illegal' war invariably becomes a conscious misinterpretation of reality unless it covers the political background within which such bravery is warranted.

There have been many a war film on the First and Second World Wars and they have been essentially political and no film has yet been made to blow up the Boer war heroics and the Nazi jingoism. Japanese Kamikaze warriors have been extremely affective during the Second World War but their job was not in 'bomb disposal' but in 'bomb navigation'. But no one has yet made a film to detail their work and understand their thinking and worst still no Academy Awards have descended on such valour.

Iraqi war

One may argue here that the work of the American elite forces are to make thing safe and constructive whereas the work of such other warriors had been aimed at death and destruction. The fact however is that a war is a war and there cannot be activity meant to be safe and constructive within a war that on the whole is destructive. The safety of your enemy could be the destruction of your ally. As much as the World War II was illegal throwing a good part of the globe in to a state of sheer anarchy so are wars like the one that is fought in Iraq where millions are killed and injured with many more millions rendered homeless.

The difference then, in the film Hurt Locker directed by Cathryn Binglow as against the other films made on the Iraqi war is that it conceals the real nature of the American war in Iraq in two distinct and nuanced ways. First the film fails to imply that the bomb disposal squad operating in Iraq within an year of American operation is engaged in an 'illegal war' in which all their heroics are not only unwarranted but are 'war crimes' in the face of international law. Then it underscores the exigencies of a horrendous and a devastating war that has brought misery to millions to single out the bravery of a few men who were unfortunate enough to be stakeholders of that calculated and deliberate man made peril.

Thus the Academy award winning film Hurt Locker, contrary to popular belief, is an extremely political film in that it unlocks American adventurism but locks the humanitarian consequences. It is the new dimension in war propaganda.

[email protected]