'The Hurt Locker': Hollywood's unsettling view of the Iraq war

World War I, largely seen as mass carnage with no high purpose, inspired films fiercely antiwar – “All Quiet on the Western Front,” “The Big Parade,” “Wings,” “Dawn Patrol.” By contrast, World War II, seen as a necessary call to arms against an enemy bent on global domination, produced films reflecting that high purpose while underscoring combat’s hellishness – “They Were Expendable,” “Battleground,” “Twelve O’Clock High,” “The Best Years of Our Lives.” With Vietnam, widely seen as a bad war, Hollywood reverted to a fiercely antiwar stance – “Apocalypse Now,” “Platoon,” and “Coming Home.” 

Moreover, the characters portrayed in these films possessed a moral compass of some sort, which induced nausea in them about the act of killing they were forced to engage in, while also making them worthy for us to root for. Losing a grip on that compass is the Colonel Kilgore character in "Apocalypse Now," who exulted in “the smell of napalm in the morning.” 

But “The Hurt Locker,” far from being antiwar, and despite the filmmakers’ professed dedication to our troops in Iraq, finally nets out as pro-war. Horrifying proof of this war-love is the ending, when Will, unable to connect to his wife and infant son back in the States, emotionally and morally vacant, mutely returns to Iraq for another tour of duty, another adrenalin fix of detonating bombs. The bottom line: War is Will’s only option, one that sooner or later will kill him – which, it is clear, is the end he seeks. For Will is a walking suicide, and so, it would seem, is his hurt locker of a culture. What a pity that Hollywood, in voting it Best Picture, was blind to the film’s death-loving heart, but then, so were many critics, a culture’s ostensible gatekeepers.

Instructive at this juncture is the prophetic work of the great Greek dramatist Euripides, specifically his tragedy “The Trojan Women.” 

Writing of Greece’s sacking of Troy, an event by then 800 years in the past, Euripides sought to stir his countrymen to the nation- and soul-destroying perils of Greece’s resurgent militarism. From first to last, the play articulates the miseries that war visits on both conquered and conquerer, citing especially the hubris of the conquerer and warning: “How are ye blind,/ Ye treaders down of cities, ye that cast/ Temples to desolation, and lay waste
 / Tombs, the untrodden sanctuaries where lie/ The ancient dead, yourselves so soon to die!” 

Moral weight clearly lies with the conquered, signaled by the play’s title and borne out in the suffering of the widowed women, who are assigned as concubines to the conquering generals. Cassandra’s curse leveled at the “winners” echoes Euripides’s brief: “To die in evil were the stain!” For all his valor, Euripides did not win his day’s Oscar, but met with such disdain from both the public and the ruling war factions that he exiled himself to Macedonia. Greece fell to Rome several generations later.

If America is to reverse its own unfolding tragedy, it will need to kick the suicidal habit of war. Thus the stories we tell ourselves will be key. Once upon a time, Hollywood, our preeminent storyteller, appealed to a high common denominator in telling our stories, of war and peace, life and love, but in recent decades, that denominator has been lowered. Yet, promisingly, there is a new yearning now in the American public for something higher – call it hope, change, “the upper air.” 

Will Hollywood grease the skids down – or point the way up?

Carla Seaquist, a playwright, is author of the play “Who Cares?: The Washington-Sarajevo Talks” and is working on a play titled “Prodigal.” Her book, “Manufacturing Hope: Post-9/11 Notes on Politics, Culture, Torture, and the American Character,” was recently published. She blogs at Huffingtonpost.com. 

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