The Rules of ‘Disengagement’

by Gaetana Caldwell-Smith / August 2009

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

San Francisco filmmaker Karen Bigelow’s latest film, “The Hurt Locker,” takes place in 2004 in 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 bomb-squad unit’s tour, made up of three guys whose job it is to defuse IEDs. Guy Pearce plays Sgt. Matt Thompson; Anthony 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 defuse 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’ viewpoint. 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 American soldier. A soldier opens the lid of one and tosses in Thompson’s personal effects.

His replacement is hot-shot Sgt. William James (Jeremy Renner), who pisses off his comrades with his so-what-if-I-get- killed attitude. James is so sure of himself that at one bomb site, he sheds his padded protective gear and helmet, saying, “If I’m gonna die, I wanna be comfortable.”

Sanborn wants to kill Iraqis if they don’t obey orders. He sees Iraqis the way the military programs its soldiers to see them—they are all Hajis. He hates Iraq and the Hajis, evident in how Mackie delivers Sanborn’s lines. Eldridge is the story’s weakling, the scaredy-cat. He takes his troubles to Colonel John Cambridge (Christian Camargo), the company shrink. When Owen challenges his ability as a fellow soldier and Cambridge takes him up on it, you can see the outcome a mile away.

At one point, the three come up on employees from Blackwater (headed by Ralph Fiennes in a cameo role) whose truck has a flat. The scene takes place in the middle of nowhere. An ambush ensues. Director Bigelow takes her time here. We wait with the team as they try to spot snipers through telescopes. We see what the men see: underwater images created by heat waves of parched land and a small, squat concrete bunker, until a red sun goes down. The scene is heart stopping.

Much of the major media has praised the “realism” of this film. Screen writer Mark Boal (who also wrote “The Valley of Elah,”) had gone to Iraq on a writing assignment and so claims he knows how to portray the life. Still, some 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 completing 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 earlier films about the Iraq War (Gulf War included) were ignored 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 hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians would not have had to die. (Many are still dying every day.)