Hurt Locker
I should say I haven't seen the Hurt Locker yet; I plan to. In the meantime, Robert Scheer has this critique from the left.
According to press reports, members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences finally found a movie about the Iraq war they liked because it is "apolitical." Actually, The Hurt Locker is just the opposite; it's an endorsement of the politically chauvinistic view that the world is a stage upon which Americans get to deal with their demons, no matter the consequence for others.
1 Comments:
I think the review is a bit off the mark. If the movie had been an ultimately redemptive story, then I would've found it offensive, but as it is there is no redemptive moment (as far as I can recall). I don't think the fact that there are no developed Iraqi characters is in itself offensive, nor the fact that the movie isn't about the causes of the war. It would've been offensive if the invasion and the occupation were the background for the main character's personal growth, because the implication would've been that those things were somehow necessary and redemptive. Of course the war was nothing other than a catastrophe, which is reflected in the main character's regression. It's a tragic story, not a redemptive one. In a way making a movie about Iraqi resistance would be more offensive, because it would imply that the war was a dialectical moment in the birth of true Iraqi sovereignty and democracy, something which the architects of the war would embrace with open arms.
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