The Hurt Locker

Almost 50 of us attended last night's sneak preview of The Hurt Locker, courtesy of Equinoxe Films. First and foremost, This visceral movie is not for everyone. Some, unable to take it, lurched to the exits when they figured out what was in store. The G&M's Liam Lacey compared it to Georges Clouzot's Wages of Fear (1953). I had the same thought. In both, the audience sits atop a movie, charged with nitroglycerine. But The Hurt Locker will surely show up on almost everyone's top ten list in December. Here's why:

• I loved the miniscule director miniatures of the movie: the damaged, certifiably nuts, courageous leading character (what a breakout performance! who is this guy?); the mangy cats, the passive Arab onlookers, the endless ominous street litter (beneath every shard of paper may lurk bomb), the dopey shrink. Mark Boal, the screenwriter, was embedded with a bomb squad in Baghdad.

• I loved director, Kathryn Bigelow's immersive cinematic panache: the characters themselves ticking time-bombs; the multi-camera handheld documentary look, the near minimalist presence of music, the ominous off screen thwap-thwaps of choppers, the cries in the night. One of the stars gets offed in the first scene.

• I raised this issue after we screened both Hunger and Gomorra, as to whether as citizens of the world we have some responsibility of bearing witness to grim goings on. It's a complex question, one which I never fully answer to my own satisfaction. The Hollywood moguls to this day argue that movies can only be entertainment.

• I found The Hurt Locker spellbinding on other levels: we hear news reports of bombs going off in Baghdad markets; of suicide missions in Palestine; of maniacs in the London tubes, but seeing those incidents up close was indelible. If this were 1940, would filmmakers not have a real obligation to make films of the Holocaust? Would we, the audience, not have an obligation to go see them? In the future, I will not see/hear an Iraqi report of a bomb going off in the future without re-imagining horrors from this film.

• I was also struck by the brutal nature of much mundane daily bread work: the sheer terrifying stuff some people undertake day after day after day. Coal miners in West Virgina, chicken sexers in South Carolina. We never really get it in news reports, but on film the disconnected Jeremy Renner character day after day, doing bomb disposal, what he's paid for, awed me.

• A third note: the sheer incomprehensibility of ground-level war to those poor GI grunts on the ground. They can't identify the enemy, they don't distinguish between Shia and Sunni, they can't comprehend enemy savagery (placing the bomb in the corpse of that kid, rigging one of their own with a time-bomb). The protracted ambush in the desert was extraordinary, grunts firing off round after round into the desert void. And missing most of the time.

• America is bedevilled by a presumption of paranoid rationality. Since God exists....since Arabs are evil... since markets are effective... Which leads inevitably to disastrous consequences. Accompanied by its stone-faced absence of any appreciation for irony, self-awareness, humility for the irrational. A certifiably God-fearing, market-loving nut ran America's foreign policy for eight years. And his VP even moreso! Yet, I don't see the Obama/Clintonites acting with much greater sanity when it comes to deploying their men with guns. D'oh!