Review of The Hurt Locker (2008) by Erich R — 26 Aug 2012

Well, I tried again to watch this riveting Oscar winner.

I don't know why it's shot like a music video - I don't know why so many music videos are shot in a way that is antithetical to the way the human brain takes in information through the eye - and I don't know why it doesn't seem to bother so many people - but it makes the screen unwatchable for me.

It is not an intellectual choice on my part, although I can use my intellect to analyze the problem.

I might even be able to manage if it was just the fast cutting...or just the faux-photojournalist stitching, as in let's pretend that the audience is the cameraman, and so we see the camera zooming in and out as if it were trying to choose its focus...but these two together completely pull me out of the story - makes me want to scream - stop playing with the camera and let me see what is going on!

Greenblatt says it makes the viewer feel like he is in the war zone, and I guess Bigelow feels that way too, but no one I know who's been in a battle agrees with them.

The brain always tries to settle in on a picture so that it can figure out what is going on - yes, that is difficult to do in battle, but the brain makes an effort, and effort that is made impossible here, because the camera (via the camera work itself and the multi-angle cutting) forces, as it were, the eye to flit quickly from one impossible angle to another.

On the other hand, if I have to watch this kind of camera work and editing, in its style it seems to me about as well done as is possible, on its own terms.

In every other way, for my money, it's a stunning film. In particular, I like the use of silence, the composition of the story itself, the utterly natural dialogue that yet moves the story along without showing its stitches at all (completely opposite from the camera work in that regard), as well as the oft-praised acting and directing.

My friend and excellent young filmmaker Alex Keipper in his review made an interesting point about the theme, which is explicitly stated at the film's outset, and well developed. I have many thoughts on the subject, which I won't go into here, except to say that for me it is a little too pat an explanation to say that some men are attracted to battlefield as a 'drug'...Robert Capa was famously disdainful of the comment.

There is truth in it, no doubt, but it smacks a little of the bourgeois, of the outsider looking in.

If a man feels more alive in the face of danger, a feeling I've experienced myself, perhaps the problem is not in the so-called addiction, but in what is missing in the world 'back home'. Something starkly and poetically suggested in the supermarket scene, shelves stuffed banally with ridiculous deserts masquerading as childrens' breakfasts.

Which scene, indeed, is the more surreal?...the young Iraqi boy hawking pirated DVDs, or the blandness of abundance such that food itself has been made into entertainment, and American popular music, one of the great cultural gifts to the world, is reduced to the dullest possible orchestration to create a Muzak to shop by?