Now that we have your attention.
Andrew Klavan’s written a terrific piece for City Journal looking at Katherine Bigelow’s “Hurt Locker,” which tanked at the box office, is a frontrunner to win this year’s Best Picture Oscar and has generated debate among conservatives over whether the dynamic action-director’s visceral look at a U.S. Army Bomb Squad is just another Iraq War film or something a little more worthy.
It’s a good debate… Be sure to read the whole thing and then feel free to have at it in the comments…
[I]s The Hurt Locker yet another piece of idiot agit-prop that makes our soldiers’ jobs harder and our enemies’ lives easier? The filmmakers and the media are desperate to convince us otherwise. For weeks before Hurt Locker‘s release, they loudly reassured the public that the movie was, in the words of Roger Ebert, “completely apolitical. It has no opinion on the war in Iraq, except that there is one.” Some conservative reviewers agreed. Mark Hemingway at National Review wrote that the film “is not a straight depiction of American heroism; but it is a revelatory examination of the experiences and motivations of U.S. soldiers.”
But John Nolte, the voice of reason who runs Andrew Breitbart’s indispensable Big Hollywood website, would have none of it. He condemned the film.
Nolte and I spent part of Christmas break in a friendly email argument over the matter. Nolte objected to the fact that the film’s protagonist, Staff Sergeant James, played by the excellent Jeremy Renner, is less a hero than an adrenaline junkie. He saw anti-military intent in the film’s two most ridiculous characters, a sadistic colonel played by David Morse and a ludicrous Army therapist who tells his patients that war “could be fun!” Hurt Locker, Nolte wrote to me, “says there are no heroes, no good men in the Military–only PTSD cases, lunatic Colonels, and those poor saps dragged along for the ride. A terrible depiction of who these men are.”
Nolte convinced me that there’s truth to some of this, but I still don’t think it’s the whole story. The Hurt Locker, unlike every other War on Terror film I’ve seen, exists in a moral universe that a sane man might recognize as our own. Insurgents murder without restraint, even enticing children into the blast area to kill as many as possible. U.S. soldiers are largely humane, trying their best to avoid violence and show mercy. That’s no more than an observation of the simple truth. Our culture is better than theirs and so, by and large, our people behave better.
Read the full article here.