The Hurt Locker

This is the kind of movie you don't love - you appreciate. It's the story of a bomb diffusing squad in Iraq and how the adrenaline that comes with their job (and with watching this movie!) makes war a kind of drug.

I don't have much to say gender-wise because there were no female characters in the film (except for a brief, inconsequential cameo by Evangeline Lilly). I would have loved for Kathryn Bigelow (remember, she won two big-time Oscars for this film) to make at least one of the bomb squad members female, but I understand why she chose not to. I don't know if women are even allowed to fill that role in the military.

I've been thinking about the fact that a female finally won the Best Director Oscar through a film cast only with males and about a subject - war- that tends to be associated with male viewership. Here are a couple of ideas I've had:

- Did she win the Oscar partly because people were impressed a woman could make a war film?

- Are there elements of the experience of being female that caused her to make this movie differently than she would have if she had grown up male? In the film, there's an interesting tension between a glorification of war and an acknowledgment of its horror, and also between the excitement and tedium of bomb diffusing. And the main character, Sergeant James, a kind of arrogant cowboy, is portrayed ambiguously. He seems at times like a hero and at times like a careless idiot. Do any of these choices have their roots in the fact that Ms. Bigelow likely didn't grow up doing things like playing war video games or dreaming of following in the shoes of fathers and grandfathers who were in the armed services? In other words, does that fact that she may have a little more distance between herself and the the idea of war make her more able to portray it in a novel way?

These are really just items for debate. We can't know the answers to them, of course, Just food for thought about a really well-made film.

Click here to go to The Hurt Locker's website.