In her 1992 book Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism, and History, sociologist Vron Ware argues that imperialism provided opportunities for British white women that were unavailable to them otherwise. At the metropole, white middle-class women were supposed to stay at home, raise children, and do little else. But if they traveled to the colonies, women could be educators or lead charitable missions; they could travel, have adventures, do intellectual work, and be celebrated and respected for it. In the colonies white women’s whiteness became relatively more important than their sex. The disempowerment of colonial subjects empowered white women by proximity.
Ware’s argument is uncomfortably relevant to Kathryn Bigelow’s groundbreaking The Hurt Locker. The 2008 film was widely critically praised and became the first film by a woman director to win an Oscar for Best Picture.
The Hurt Locker’s success isn’t difficult to understand; it’s a visually intense film, which uses hand-held cameras, extreme close-ups, and grungy realism to powerfully evoke the heat, terror, and misery of the Iraq War. It also replicates the central focus and message of many previous war movies in ways that reflect colonial perspectives and priorities. Bigelow’s success, like that of the women Vron Ware discusses, is made possible, at least in part, by the dynamics of subjugation.
The movie’s set in 2004, a year after the illegal US invasion of Iraq. It focuses on a U.S. Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal led by Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner.) James is a skilled expert in disposing bombs. He’s also a reckless adrenaline junkie, whose courage often crosses the line into wantonly endangering himself and his team—Sergeant J.T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty).
The movie has no overarching plot; instead, Bigelow has crafted a series of more or less repetitive set pieces, in which the team is called in to deal with bombs. The movie is mostly set in urban areas, distinguishing it from Vietnam films (with the notable exception of Full Metal Jacket). The rhythm of rising tension and release, with no real direction or outlet, is masterfully unnerving and monotonous. Bigelow captures the terror of war as well as its boredom in ways that few Hollywood films have managed. There’s no real mission, and no point; just the same job, over and over, while, not infrequently, people die.
This isn’t a pro-war movie. It’s not anti-war either. The war is treated like a kind of natural disaster, and no one in the film ever asks if what they’re doing is just.
That’s fairly typical of critically-acclaimed war films. The movie’s singular focus on Americans is also in the tradition. The Iraqis here are hostile faces outside the Humvee, staring down from rooftops or from a shop window. Their words are not translated through subtitles, and you learn little to nothing about their hopes, fears or motivations. When you do start to get slightly closer to a boy selling DVDs, or a professor, Bigelow steers the film away with a haste that feels deliberate. The movie isn’t about Iraqis, and doesn’t want to be about Iraqis. It’s about American soldiers, and what war does to them.
This is again typical of American war films, which treat war as a dark night of the soul for America, and are only really concerned with Vietnamese or Iraqi people insofar as they create the conditions for US soldiers to come face to face with their fears, their courage, their moral choices.
In the case of James, the ultimate revelation is that he loves being a soldier; it’s what he’s good at, and what he’s meant for. When he goes home to his child and wife (Evangeline Lily), practically the only woman with a (brief) speaking part in the entire film, he’s bored and alienated. The final scene of the film tips Bigelow’s hand; we see James back in Iraq for another tour of duty, striding forward in his bomb suit to defuse another explosive while pounding triumphant rock music plays. We’re supposed to admire James and even cheer him on. He’s competent; he’s brave. He’s not the ideal soldier perhaps. But he’s the soldier we need.
The film opens with a quote from writer Chris Hedges: “The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug.” You might as easily say that colonialism is a drug—or that the war movie is. We take periodic doses of that last one to remind us that we’re still virtuous and sympathetic even if we do bad things. But mostly the movies seem determined to remind us that war’s important, and that we’re important for participating in it. War movies like The Hurt Locker—male, violent, grimy, serious, complex, real—show us that Americans are the nuanced protagonists of our own stories, even if those stories occur on other people’s land, in other people’s homes, with other people as the main casualties. War may be hell, but it’s our hell. War movies are wars made for us, just as James is made for war.
There’s no question that The Hurt Locker is well-made. Women have made excellent movies since cinema began, though. Getting an Oscar for your movie requires something else. In this case, the something else is the colonial war movie, and its insistence that, in the middle of suffering and chaos, certain men matter. And, apparently, certain women too.