Double Feature: In the Loop & The Hurt Locker



Released on DVD the same day in the U.S., the British comedy In the Loop and the American war movie The Hurt Locker make a fine pairing.  The first is a political satire about the behind-the-scenes machinations leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq that feels rather like an extended episode of the original version of The Office, while the second is a tense and intensely immersive view of six weeks in the life of an Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit in Baghdad in 2004.

Or, to put it all another way, In the Loop is the story of a bunch of repressed homosexuals who start a war rather than deal with their feelings, while The Hurt Locker, as Glenn Kenny pointed out, is a study of addiction.



Most of the characters in In the Loop are mid-level British or American politicians, the sorts of people who can't make very many decisions on their own, but like to think they can.  Though there are differences between the Brits and the Yanks, they do share one hang-up in common:  hardly a scene passes without the characters questioning each other's masculinity, using homophobia for a quick insult, or otherwise reinforcing a toxically heterosexist environment.  At the same time, all of the men in the film are schmucks, and at least a couple of them are psychopaths.  There are only a few women, but some of them are in prominent roles, and most of them are, if occasionally silly, generally reasonable and apparently against the idea of going to war just because it sounds like fun.

Two of the lower-level assistants have a brief fling, but that's it for sex in the movie -- personal and political battle is how these folks get their jollies.  General Miller has a reputation for promiscuity, but he also calls himself "the Gore Vidal of the Pentagon", not realizing exactly what that implies until he's told Vidal is gay; later, he makes a point of claiming, "I'm not like some little gay mercenary," while the events of the film show he is quite certainly mercenary in his actions.

The language of all the various  battles, though rich in the variety of its vulgar locutions, is extremely limited in its references, most of which are to some sort of sexual activity, sexual violence, genitalia, etc.  (For some of the most amusing lines, check out IMDB's compendium.)  You don't have to be Sigmund Freud with an erect cigar in your mouth to notice some repression giving itself a good return.

The result is amusing if, like me, you don't mind watching despicable people say despicable things to each other for an hour and a half, all in their quest to help start a war that none of them will fight in and that will certainly kill at least a couple of people who are vastly more deserving of a long life and happiness than any character in the film.

The characters in The Hurt Locker are more complex and sympathetic than the characters in In the Loop, and that includes at least one suicide bomber.  The central character of Staff Sergeant William James (who seems to have a single variety of religious experience: defusing bombs) is the one character in the film to really rise beyond typical war/buddy-movie stereotype, and most of the fault for that seems to be Jeremy Renner's, since he tells us much about James through his eyes, face, and body language.  James is a familiar enough character: tremendously skilled, but also a lone wolf addicted to risk -- sometimes blinded by the addiction, sometimes aided by it.  This could have been, as Jonathan McCalmont pointed out, a role for Mel Gibson, but Renner brings more consistent and complex physicality to this role than Gibson did when mugging his way through the Lethal Weapon movies.

The Hurt Locker isn't really a character study -- or, rather, it isn't just a character study.  This is where addiction comes in.  James is obviously addicted to war, and more specifically to defusing bombs in combat environments.  His addiction warps his relations with everything except the bombs, the things that will, in all likelihood, one day kill him.  He has moments where he saves lives and saves the day, but the film shows us just as many where his addiction distorts his sense of reality, ruins his judgment, and nearly leads to more deaths than just his own.

It's tempting to see James as admirable, even heroic, his macho individualism an essential element of his success, and it certainly may be essential to his success (so far) at defusing bombs, but that success comes at quite a cost to him and to the people around him.

Director/producer Kathryn Bigelow and many critics have proclaimed The Hurt Locker is unpolitical, but I'm with Jonathan Rosenbaum on this one -- while a film about the war in Iraq may eventually, far in the future, be only vaguely interesting on a political level, it's going to have political implications now, when the war is still going on, regardless of how hard the filmmakers work to avoid such implications.  The work of avoiding may muddle the implications or may sharpen them, and in the case of The Hurt Locker, I think they're sharper.

To avoid casting political aspersions, Bigelow and writer/co-producer Mark Boal focused simply on portraying the soldiers and their actions, sticking very closely to their point of view and keeping out any discussion of politics or the meaning of the soldiers' presence in Iraq and the work they do there.  Viewers will apply their own interpretations, as viewers are wont to do, and so, with the title of the movie unfortunately not Socialist Kenyans For Global Peace, Love, and Patchouli!, there will be crazy war nuts who say crazy things, as crazy war nuts are wont to do.  (Some undergraduates also apparently think Stephen Colbert is ironic about his irony.  There will always be outliers, and I, being a tolerant and compassionate liberal, suggest we taunt them mercilessly.)

The key to The Hurt Locker, it seems to me, lies in its portrayal of Iraqis.  After one particularly tense encounter, James says of a taxi driver, "If he wasn't an insurgent, he sure as hell is now."  Again and again, the soldiers are watched by Iraqis, and the impossibility of knowing who wants to kill the Americans and who doesn't is a central theme to every scene between soldiers and civilians.  But it's more complex than that -- as the reluctant suicide bomber toward the end of the film vividly demonstrates both to James and to us, the viewers.  Indeed, some of James's biggest failures happen when he tries to just go out and get the bad guys.  He and his fellow soldiers don't know -- don't, in fact, as the film makes sadly clear, even recognize -- the people they're trying to protect any more than they know the people they're trying to protect them from.  And yet we can't blame the guys on the ground for this -- we feel the immediacy of their situation, not just through good storytelling and acting, but through particularly visceral cinematography and editing -- and so if we're going to rise beyond just liking the movie because it's got soldiers and explosions and guns and stuff, we're forced to think about the system that put these guys here.  And if we've just watched In the Loop, that's not so hard to do.

The final shot of The Hurt Locker is unlikely to cause people to want to organize parades to celebrate endless war.  It is an image of the addict returning for another fix, throwing away everything else in his life for the thrill of one more high -- an image, in short, of futility and waste.

Popular posts from this blog

"Stone Animals" by Kelly Link

If Kelly Link isn't the best short story writer in the U.S., then she's the equal of whoever is. I first came to this conclusion a couple of years ago when I read her story "Lull" in Conjunctions: 39 , and I am absolutely certain of it now that I have read "Stone Animals" in Conjunctions: 43 . (Of course, I've also read her collection Stranger Things Happen , but, much as I admire it, nothing in that book is as breathtaking as the stories she has written since it appeared, particularly the two Conjunctions stories.) "Stone Animals" both employs and parodies the basic elements of suburban psychological realism, the sort of scaffolding John Cheever and so many other writers hung their words and laundry on: a family buying a house and moving into it, a father commuting to a desultory job in the city, a pregnant wife who is uncertain about her marriage, suspicions and allegations of adultery, existentially anxious children, a controlling b
Read more

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

If you expect Never Let Me Go to be about cloning, you will be disappointed. If you expect to be able to read it as a logical science fiction novel, one that extrapolates an alternate world that makes sense, you will find much to grumble about. You will not be satisfied. You will be annoyed, even bored. You will have missed the point. Cloning is a MacGuffin that Kazuo Ishiguro uses to create symbolic situations and characters that coalesce in a powerful vision of life. The symbolism doesn't quite reach the level of allegory, because it's difficult to assign definite meanings to each scene and person, but nonetheless it quickly becomes difficult not to think about certain themes: mortality, love, fate, memory, art, nature. Each paragraph either illustrates or expands one of these themes. In the first half of the book, the ideas the novel personifies do not gain a lot of emotion, but by the second half of the book the characters have become familiar, their personalitie
Read more

The Penny Poet of Portsmouth by Katherine Towler

     Dawn again, and I switch off the light. On the table a tattered moth shrugs its wings.      I agree. Nothing is ever quite what we expect it to be. —Robert Dunn Katherine Towler's deeply affecting and thoughtful portrait of Robert Dunn is subtitled "A Memoir of Place, Solitude, and Friendship". It's an accurate label, but one of the things that makes the book such a rewarding reading experience is that it's a memoir of struggles with place, solitude, and friendship — struggles that do not lead to a simple Hallmark card conclusion, but rather something far more complex. This is a story that could have been told superficially, sentimentally, and with cheap "messages" strewn like sugarcubes through its pages. Instead, it is a book that honors mysteries. You are probably not familiar with the poetry of Robert Dunn , nor even his name, unless you happen to live or have lived in or around Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Even then, you may not
Read more

"Loot" by Nadine Gordimer

I've intended to write about Nadine Gordimer's very short story "Loot" for years, ever since I first read it in The New Yorker , and for some reason I actually thought I had written a post here about it.  I recommended the story to a friend a few days ago and intended to include a link to my post about the story when, after a bit of searching, I realized I'd never written the post.  Now I will fix that mistake. From the first sentence, "Loot" is a story about time and history, about legends and imagination.  "Once upon our time," it tells us, there was a Great Event -- the greatest earthquake every recorded, the greatest of all measured "apocalyptic warnings".  Not only is it a Great Event (indeed, the Greatest of such events), but it is ours: we possess it. The second paragraph details the effects of this greatest event of ours.  Most giant earthquakes at sea produce floods and tsunamis, but not ours -- our special earthquake d
Read more

Reflections on Samuel Delany's Dark Reflections

At the Los Angeles Review of Books , I have a new essay about Samuel R. Delany's 2007 novel Dark Reflections , which is about to be released in a new and slightly revised edition by Dover Books . Here's a taste: In many ways,  Dark Reflections  is a narrative companion to Delany’s 2006 collection of essays, letters, and interviews,  About Writing . In the introduction to that book, Delany says that its varied texts share common ideas, primary among them ideas about the art of writing fiction, the structure of the writer’s socio-aesthetic world both in the present and past, and “the way literary reputations grow — and how, today, they don’t grow.” The book is mainly, though not exclusively, aimed at aspiring writers. It provides some advice on craft, but it circles back most insistently to questions of value, and especially to questions of the difference between  good writing  and  talented writing  — and what it means, practically and materially, for a writer to shape a li
Read more

What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell's debut novel What Belongs to You  is one of the most celebrated and successful gay novels of 2016. Its success seems to me both odd and gratifying. It is a book that garnered the attention of the literati, and not just the gay literati, though it certainly has that (Edmund White blessed it with a blurb). It received praiseful notice from nearly all the major literary institutions in the U.S. (and elsewhere). It is a remarkable novel, but were I a literary agent or publisher, much of what makes the novel remarkable would have caused me to assume it would not sell very well and would find, at best, a niche audience. (This is perhaps reason #28,302 that it's good I'm neither a publisher nor an agent!) I don't know the sales figures for What Belongs to You , but it hit the LA Times  bestseller list for a couple weeks, got tremendous review coverage, and often seemed to be among the books of the moment — I traveled a lot during 2016, and nearly everyw
Read more

The Snowtown Murders

The Snowtown Murders  (aka Snowtown ) inevitably draws comparisons to another brutal and disturbing Australian crime movie, Animal Kingdom , with which it shares some general plot elements and stylistic moves (both films were shot by Adam Arkapaw ). But where  Animal Kingdom  shows one young man's struggle to stay innocent in a family of thieves and murderers, Snowtown  depicts the power of a small-time messiah to employ hatred as an excuse for torture and murder. Both films focus their narrative on a quiet (eventually traumatized) adolescent surrounded by monsters, but Animal Kingdom,  for all its virtues, is primarily a drama of demons and angels fighting for a soul, whereas Snowtown  is less allegorical, less schematic, and more deeply disturbing. (A more meaningful comparison than with Animal Kingdom  would be with  Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer .) Though in some ways Snowtown  is the story of how Jamie Vlassakis goes from being an apparently gentle and unassuming t
Read more