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.
