The Rules of ‘Disengagement’

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“The Hurt Locker,” a film directed by Karen Bigelow, written by Karen Bigelow and Mark Boal.

an Francisco filmmaker Karen Bigelow’s latest Baghdad. Her film sometimes has a cinema verité look; the hand-held camera is the viewpoint of a very scared and anxious soldier whose eyes flit from one object to another.

The film opens on the last 39 days of a U.S. Army bombsquad unit’s tour, made up of three guys whose job it is to defuse IEDs. Guy Pearce plays Sgt. Matt Thompson; An­ thony Mackie is JT Sanborn; and Brian Geraghty is Owen Eldridge.

The squad works on scorching hot terrain and uses robots to analyze anything that could hide a bomb. When the ’bots malfunction, the team head, with the help of others members, dons a heavily padded outfit and a helmet to de­ fuse the bomb manually. (The outfit makes him look like a deep-sea diver from a 1930s giant octopus horror film.) U.S. soldiers backing up the squad point their guns and yell in English at Iraqi citizens to leave the area. Some men and boys go up to rooftops to watch; others peer from darkened windows. Are they just watching—or getting ready to detonate the bomb with a cell phone? There are many tense standoffs between the soldiers and Iraqis. In each, soldiers are at a loss as to what to do. They ask their superiors for clarification on the Rules of Engagement, yet no one seems to know exactly what they are. Bigelow’s story is told entirely from the soldiers’ view­ point. Every Iraqi is a threat, even friendly boys who only want to play soccer. No Iraqi is played sympathetically. The covered women are old and fat; they scream and rail in Arabic, flail their arms. Sneaky, suspicious-looking men lurk in doorways, hide in corners and spy from windows and rooftops, and one aims a video camera at Eldridge. A robot breaks down; Thompson has to find and defuse the bomb manually. He fails. A somber scene follows depicting a large, white room containing rows and rows of white boxes sitting on tables, each representing a dead elements don’t ring true, particularly in the gung-ho and rather foolish actions of the James character. Bigelow has included the obligatory scene of soldiers getting drunk and beating each other up to celebrate com­ pleting a task. The verbal racial tension that is established earlier erupts in this scene into violence when white guy James pins Sanborn, who is Black, beneath him and calls him “my bitch.”

Eventually, their tour ends; the team is on their way home. Seeing hot-shot James push a shopping cart down an eerily empty supermarket aisle, to a sappy supermarket soundtrack, in front of an endless row of cereal boxes, you can feel his humiliation. He seems to be saying: “I almost lost my life a million times for this?”

Major critics liked this film, saying that, finally, after ear­ lier films about the Iraq War (Gulf War included) were ig­ nored despite good reviews, “The Hurt Locker” will be the one to make it big at the box office. Possibly that’s because it is tightly focused on three American soldiers and avoids taking a political stance.

Yet when seeing the conditions under which soldiers are expected to fight—faulty equipment, inadequate supplies, scarce ammunition, no real direction, and confusion—and when we see the results of the military’s breaking down of the human soul, “The Hurt Locker” could be viewed as an antiwar film.

Watching it, one shouldn’t forget that if it weren’t for the U.S. rush to war, U.S. soldiers or those from our so-called Coalition Forces would never have had to be there, risking their lives. And the 5000-plus American soldiers and hun­ dreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians would not have had to die. (Many are still dying every day.) n