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Virtue and Vice in the Hurt Locker

Kathryn Bigelow has described her 2009 film The Hurt Locker, which won six Oscars and many other awards, as having two aims. One is to take the audience as close as possible to a 'boots-on-the-ground' experience of the relentless, 360-degree threat within which US soldiers in Iraq have been operating. The other is to explore the psychology of soldiers who go willingly into such an environment and the psychological effects it can have on them. Much of the critical praise for the film concerns the first of these aims. Bigelow's use of at least four film crews for every scene affords the sense of being present in the situation, continuously shifting perspective, alert to possible danger. The relative anonymity of the scenery, clearly somewhere in the Middle East but not clearly anywhere in particular, fosters this uneasy sense of immersion in an unfamiliar scenario where the sources of danger are unpredictable. Protracted periods of silence, punctuated by incidental sounds that often turn out to be irrelevant, increase this tension. The occasional quiet ring of tinnitus imparts a sense of the incessant nature of the soldiers' anxiety. Much of the negative criticism of the film, on the other hand, concerns the psychology of its central characters. Some veterans of the war in Iraq have claimed that it is a wildly inaccurate portrayal of the attitudes and behaviour of professional soldiers. 2 It might be tempting to conclude that the film is a fine work of cinematography but one that fails in its aim of presenting a realistic account of daily life for US soldiers in Iraq. But this conclusion assumes that Bigelow's aim of exploring the psychological aspect of the soldiers' experience is part of her aim of presenting the audience with the realities of the Iraq war. If the aim of the psychology is realism, then it should indeed present the attitudes and behaviours common among US soldiers in Iraq. But if the aim of the psychology is to explore the different aspects of the soldiers' experience, and particularly if it is to explore a possible danger of their work, then it need not aim for an averaging of actual solders' behaviour.