The rub of it

With The Hurt Locker the Western public and specifically the United States of America has a pared down examination of the situation on the ground in Iraq. For ease of viewing The Hurt Locker is ostensibly an apolitical representation of the Iraq war: a paradigm that suits the complicit sensibilities of Western audiences. The character study aspires to being guilt and complicit free but ends up as diet analysis. To take The Hurt Locker at face value is to overlook the film as an agent of United States hegemony in the field of popular consciousness.

The film opens with a U.S. Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) unit in the heat of their task defusing bombs and comes complete with requisite war movie banter. However the dialogue, short and lean as it is, is laced with signs that suggest Hollywood war movie motifs that push American hegemony. When Sargent Thompson bemoans how if the Iraqi’s are going to leave bombs on the road side then they will blow up the neighbourhood, neutralise the situation and in the process give the locals something to think about. This line is delivered in an exasperated tone and is so fleeting it is almost forgettable. But it does slip in and the ideologies that the line mask are being played out

This shock and awe gung-ho approach is reductive and toes the line of a post Cold-War mono-power world. We are presented with the silent push of United State hegemony; the soldier believes in what he is saying, and we the audience are coerced into taking the side of the soldiers. The uses of some subtle set up shots frame the Iraqi civilians, who are standing around the bomb site, with silent hostility and potential menace. As the soldiers take shrewd glances around the bomb site the camera follows their gaze and with quick shoots that root out potential threats, we the viewer are given the impression that all Iraqi’s are a threat and there is need for this EOD unit to teach Iraq a lesson in tough love, bring freedom to their neighbourhoods and wrestle then from the grips of insurgency.

Sargent Thompson immediately goes on to wonder if it is strange that right then he craves a Hamburger. The message, it would appear is that these U.S. troops would rather be home in their own neighbourhoods than disposing bombs in a foreign land. And this suggests an early war film motif of reluctance in going to war but all-the-same fighting the good fight. During World War II the United States was forced into entering the war and Hollywood positioned the United States as heroic and reluctant fighter, see Sargent York. Now in the early 21st Century Sergeant Thompson speaks with the belief that fighting in Iraq is a good and just thing. It would appear that history rhymes.

Much like how the EOD unit explores and digs around a potential IED, when the composition of the opening scene of The Hurt Locker is explored it becomes apparent that a silent hegemony is guiding the narrative of the scene, one that presents the United States and it’s actors as reluctantly and justly bringing good to a foreign land. And this is a silent method of validating the war and gaining public complicity.

Somewhere over the rainbow

Back just before the turn of the millennium we were given, with Fight Club, an example of the disorientating and debilitating effects of air travel, for Edward Norton’s character it was the medium that took him further into his isolation. Then with the 9/11 attacks air travel tucked terror under its wings and we were presented with the plane as potential coffin, see Snakes on a Plane and United 93.Verily the care free days of air travel are a faded contrail in Hollywood’s skies and Frank Sinatra does really sound dated when he crops up on the iPod play list.

So, no surprise that Jason Reitman’s latest Up in the Air a film about a travelling ‘axe-man’ deals with the isolation and alienation of frequent flyers. Up in the Air starts of upbeat enough with the opening credits taking in super crisp aerial shots of the American city and landscape and this is coupled with a cover of Woody Guthrie’s ‘This Land is Your Land’. Yes from a distance all looks fine and dandy. But the credits end with a plane touching down. Upon arrival in the film proper we meet Ryan Bingham, played by the ever suave George Clooney and as per usual on face value everything couldn’t be better in the world of a Cooney character. It’s by getting to know these characters that we learn of their emotional delicacies that is lie behind that winning smile with perfectly formed white teeth. Yet Reitman and Clooney, with the help of some swift editing that captures a poetic flow of calculated movements, introduce us to a character who seems to have their life so organised and controlled that they can moonwalk through it.

Bingham is a T-Rex of his chosen profession, he flies around the country arriving at some company or another in one location or another that’s outsourced the wielding axe of downsizing to his Omaha based company. Job done and off to the next company in the next city and so on. This is how Bingham lives: an itinerant staying in traveller hotels, clocking up air miles and of course with the present economic depression its boom time for those that make a living out of firing people. But flying is a huge overhead and a new age seems to be dawning in Bingham’s world where web cams and Skype enable the wielding of the redundancy axe from one fixed location. Bingham’s chosen lifestyle is in danger of extinction and that spells the demise of the personal touch that Bingham has mastered of ‘easing’ a person into the dark waters of redundancy. Not to mention that Bingham would be fixed to one location and with one foal swoop the lightness in his life would be gone: grounded.

But this sudden prospect of job transformation and the coincidental on the road romance that appears to be bearing fruit of deeper attraction and a yearning for loyalty brings about a self reappraisal of Bingham’s life. And this, it would seem is the real object of the film in highlighting a latent desire in a physically removed individual for companionship and some place to call home.

Mid-way through the film Bingham propositions that we are not ‘monogamous swans’ – meaning that we are destined to live and die alone. Too which we may ask ourselves, have we as western individuals evolved to a hyper state of individualisation and its downstream effects of isolation and lack of permanent emotional relationships? Guru Bingham believes this detached and visceral assessment of existence, but one gets the impression that his heart isn’t in this proposition.

The flight path of the second part of the film courses Bingham’s existential dilemma, how does one remain physically up in the air yet able to be emotionally grounded with a home that one looks forward to returning to. And the film answers this by suggesting that the choices are ours to make and formulate.

Another round of laughs

Form the get go Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath A.K.A. agent OSS 117 takes centre stage; he descends kitsch open plan stairs with a thick pile of carpet onto a warmly lit sunken dance floor with an assumed gravitation that suggests that any woman that he deems fit will soon be swept of her feet and into bed. And this is pretty much how the open of the latest OSS 117 film Lost in Rio plays out. Although before OSS 117 can claim the girl first he must save the night from near disaster, which of course is done with the ease of a consummate magician conjuring up his latest spellbinding trick. Suspend that belief for this is most definitely over the top.

The latest OSS film is set in a super retro Rio de Janeiro, where OSS 117 must hunt down Nazis and along his slapstick way unwittingly offend nearly everyone he meets with his arrogance, misogyny, idiocy, tackless bumbling, colonial and near racist ways that somehow win the day. Any further plot details really are superfluous as we all know how these spy spoofs go; it’s just a question whether or not the film is any good. And with its great period set design, pace, location shots, editing, score, enthusiastic acting (again Jean Dujardin is on over-the-top form) and untiring set pieces OSS 177: Lost in Rio is another ridiculously intoxicating flick directed by Michel Hazanavicius. The film may lack some of the first’s freshness but this is a minor asides. The mere sight of OSS 117’s raised and confounded eyebrows and the lingering shot of the aforementioned eyebrows is alone worth viewing OSS 117: Lost in Rio.