The Hurt Locker, The Messenger, Brothers, Green Zone, and Avatar
Christian Ethics and the Movies
Reviewed by David A. Thomas, Prof. of Rhetoric, Emeritus, Univ. of Richmond[1]
“It is better to watch a good movie again than a bad movie once.”
War
The Hurt Locker, The Messenger, Brothers, Green Zone, and Avatar (2009)
During the past year, four movies about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan all received high praise from the critics, but they were all considered box office flops.
The Hurt Locker was the most honored movie of the year. It was nominated for nine Oscars and won six, including best film, best director, and best screenplay, plus three others for technical achievements. It won many awards from other major industry groups. It is a low budget movie with little known actors. At this writing, it has barely earned back its relatively modest production expenses.
The Messenger was honored by the Oscars with nominations for Best Supporting Actor (Woody Harrelson), and for best screenplay, but did not win. The movie lost money. Another current war movie, Brothers, was ignored by the Oscars, but it was recognized by some lesser awards shows. Also a low budget entry, Brothers made a decent profit.
Green Zone was a big budget film starring super-star Matt Damon, and directed by Paul Greenglass, who is an A-List director (no box office figures have been listed). Damon and Greenglass previously teamed up on the highly successful action movies, The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum, which together grossed over $250 million. These numbers signify a qualitative difference between Green Zone and the other war movies mentioned, in that it was designed first as a mass appeal action picture for the adolescent male demographic, which is the box office “sweet spot,” whereas the other three are designated as more serious adult dramas about the realities of the wars in which the U. S. has been engaged for almost a decade. Just by being a realistic war movie, apparently, Green Zone could not sell many tickets despite its high production values otherwise.
Social significance of these war movies. First, it must be noted that Hollywood has progressed in its willingness to treat war movies as serious social statements during the war itself. Reflecting back on the most powerful Vietnam War movies that were produced, including Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Apocalypse Now, and The Deer Hunter, they represented a sea change in the tone and treatment of war by Hollywood. Prior to the Vietnam War, Hollywood’s older war movies featured stars like John Wayne, Gregory Peck, and Charlton Heston as larger than life heroes in WWII movies. They all valorized America, demonized “Japs” and “Krauts,” and glorified war itself. War as such became synonymous with patriotism, fueled by the idea that WWII was “the good war.”
The realistic, more critical Vietnam War films mentioned were not made and released until that war had already been over for several years. They contributed to later negative attitudes towards our Vietnam policy, but they had no effect on public attitudes during the war itself.
In contrast, today’s war movies, Brothers, The Messenger, Hurt Locker and Green Zone, have mostly been small movies that only needed a year or two from storyboard to national distribution, so that they have been distributed while the war is still ongoing. Consequently, to the extent that they have been able to attract audiences, they have contributed to the public dialogue about the war in a way that they might possibly influence policy.
What are the major themes of these current war movies? Taken together, these four movies might be regarded as a suite of inter-related themes—though I am not suggesting in any way that the various producers coordinated them to accomplish an overall plan. Rather, in the case of these movies, art mirrors real life. Brothers tells the story of two brothers, one who served as a captain in the US Marines with multiple combat tours, and the other who stayed behind. The Marine was captured and presumed dead on his latest tour of duty, but eventually was freed and returned home, suffering from the terrible effects of being tortured as a prisoner, and from guilt over the atrocities he was forced to commit while a captive. Brothers is a powerful depiction of the combat post-traumatic stress (PTSD) suffered by our veterans, and its devastating impact upon their families when they return. The Messenger is not a combat-oriented movie, but rather, a story about the Army officers who are assigned to deliver the official notification of combat deaths to the families of the victims. The movie, thus, focuses more on the grieving families than on the combat troops who died in the wars.
Hurt Locker, the best of the group, is an action story about an elite bomb squad serving in the streets of Baghdad. The epigram at the beginning of the movie is a quote that states that “War is addictive.” This bomb squad is almost purely defensive. Their job is to locate and disarm the Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) planted by insurgents in the roadways and elsewhere as booby traps.
Taken together, then, these three movies may be seen as an argument that, for instance, psychological wounds can be as significant as physical wounds. And, although U. S. casualties of these wars are low relative to previous wars, there is still pain and suffering in the families of the troops who were killed. The Hurt Locker raises the question, what is being gained by continuing these wars, and exposing out troops to continuing jeopardy, now that they are primarily defensive holding actions by an occupation army?
The fourth movie in this selected set of titles, Green Zone, is set in 2003. It focuses on the issue of why we went to war in the first place, to find the supposed caches of “weapons of mass destruction” which Saddam Hussein was alleged to be hiding. No such weapons were found. The movie suggests that our nation’s decision makers knew in advance that their WMD intelligence was unreliable; but it represented their best available warrant for taking the U. S. into a war that was actually initiated for other reasons that could not be admitted. In other words, without the WMD argument to begin with, would Congress have authorized the war in Iraq?
Hence, Green Zone is a commentary on the shaky if not false justification for pursuing the Iraq war from its very outset.
These are not the only socially significant war movies about Iraq and Afghanistan. A couple of years ago, Stop-Loss (reviewed in this journal) was about the military’s practice of involuntarily extending enlistments and sending our troops back for multiple re-deployments, a sort of de facto draft by stealth. Rendition was about how the U. S. sends suspected terrorists to other nations for “enhanced interrogation,” i. e., torture. Lions for Lambs was about the disconnect in how the war was being promoted by the media as a cheerleader for the aggressive, “preemptive” U. S. policy, vs. the realities of the bad intelligence on the ground used as the basis for sending our troops into combat. In the Valley of Elah was also about PTSD, aggravated by official neglect, stonewalling, and cover-ups. And The Kingdom, the only one of the other recent war movies in this paragraph to make a profit, was a generic action film set in an unnamed Mid-East country. It was primarily an entertainment, not a social critique of the war.
Controversies. Most of these war films, including the Vietnam War movies, were made without the cooperation of official U. S. defense and military agencies because they were perceived, accurately, to be critical of U. S. policies. Some politicians, predictably, levied the charge that movies that criticize the war are unpatriotic and even harmful to our war efforts. For instance, The Hurt Locker has been criticized as being an unrealistic distortion of the motives and competency of our troops in the field, in particular, the reckless disregard for safety rules by an undisciplined squad leader, a “loose cannon,” addicted to the daily thrill of risking his and his team’s lives, for the adrenaline rush. The dramatic engine that drives the plot of Hurt Locker, like Platoon two generations ago, is based on a military unit which has two leaders, one of whom is a by-the-book professional role model, the other a rogue leader who is a bad example. As a plot device, a story about two competing characters, one of whom embodies unorthodox, usually dangerous values, has been used in many different film genres besides war movies.
Ethical Issues. Are these movies unpatriotic? Public debates over the wars seem to have quieted since the 2008 presidential election. Pres. Obama ran on a platform of closing Gitmo, ending the war in Iraq, and shifting our military attention to Afghanistan. Now, a year into his administration, progress has been made towards all three of those goals, though there has been little reduction in our Iraq commitment, and Gitmo has still not been closed.
These are complex issues that have apparently been put onto the back burner by the 2009-’10 year-long preoccupation with health care reform. Congress and the administration seem to be on the same page regarding the war, and the public has little interest in rehashing old issues that have seemingly been laid to rest. Yet the wars continue. While important adjustments have been made, some underlying issues remain unresolved. Having invested so much in those wars already, the U. S. has too much at stake in the whole Central Asia region to just pull out; but the nature of the conflict guarantees that there can be no true military solution without huge parallel investments in trade and diplomacy. As long as the military can operate with an all volunteer force, and the U. S. is not suffering casualties deemed too great to bear, we seem to be embedded in the current situation indefinitely.
There is a reason why movies, critical of our nation’s policy and conduct of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue to be made, despite their dismal economic prospects. They are arguments for examining the war’s basis, strategies, and conduct, and not just mindless teenage-demographic blockbusters. If the big issues are beyond debate, there still remain numerous subsidiary questions that need to be addressed. For instance, it could be argued that these movies have contributed to the VA’s decision to provide treatment and counseling for psychological casualties as a response to the public’s raised consciousness about combat PTSD.
No single movie can be said to have been a compelling knock-out argument. In the aggregate, over time, as the wars drag on, expanding into a decade and longer through serial “surges,” without demonstrable successful results, movies such as these can erode public support for the wars, and possibly lead to other policy changes. These movies do not argue for precipitate withdrawal, but they are graphic evidence that pursuing military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan, to the exclusion of other measures, including trade and diplomacy, is not without its own high costs to the U. S.
Can viewers watch these movies without feeling manipulated by ideologues? From my perspective, Hurt Locker in particular, and the rest of these movies in general, are not detrimental to our troops in the field. Not all of our military forces serve because they are committed to U. S. policies. Heroes are known to fight and die for their buddies, not necessarily to further whatever shifting political aims the politicians claim this month. Honest movie depictions of PTSD victims, and of grieving families on the home front contrast with the pro-war stances put out by hawkish TV pundits on cable news shows, and their paid military consultants/defense lobbyists.
There are true patriots on both sides of these issues. As Woody Harrelson remarked in an interview on the Today show, although his progressive politics are no secret, playing his part as the Army officer charged with delivering bad news in The Messenger led him to have a whole new appreciation for the sacrifices that have been made by our troops, and more sympathy for their families who also suffer greatly from their losses.
How about Avatar? A final footnote: Avatar, James Cameron’s 3-D blockbuster, is also a war movie. It is a two-and-a-half hour long Sci-Fi war movie. In this fantasy, the U. S. wages interplanetary war as the clear aggressor against a peaceful planet, in order to colonize and exploit their natural resources. There’s more than a subtle historical comparison with America’s genocidal conquest of Native Americans to tame and claim the wild West. To continue the analogy, in Avatar, the cowboys represent the bad guys. In the end, led by a disabled and disaffected U. S. veteran who becomes an “avatar,” the outgunned local defenders, riding horses and using bows and arrows, defeat the full armed might of the Americans, who, presumably, are driven back to their desolate homeland on Earth for good.
The noisy, computer-generated action in Avatar is non-stop, and very violent. It took over twelve years to produce, and estimates are that it cost nearly $250 million. It is the most expensive movie ever made. At present, worldwide box office receipts are approaching $1 billion, making it also the most profitable movie ever made. In terms of paying customers in theater seats, Avatar has outperformed all of the serious war movies that are discussed here by a ratio of at least 5-1. DVD sales and cable TV rebroadcasts are not included in these estimates, but they will only multiply the disparity in viewership, hence in receipts, especially among the young.
It has a PG-13 rating. As an animated film, it is marketed as a benign family film. Like Transformers before it, Avatar is practically an infomercial for the militaristic mindset.
Given this cash bonanza, Hollywood is gearing up to produce many more 3-D films on a massive scale. Plus, the new 3-D technology that made Avatar possible will soon trickle down into everyone’s home entertainment systems, not to mention innovative new educational, political, and even religious applications. This development must be counted as a collateral benefit of Avatar, irrespective of its pro-war dramatic content. The standard overhead projector is about to become as obsolete as the typewriter.
Avatar is a great movie; with amazing technical effects; but so far, I have not read any mainstream criticisms of its pro-war themes that are so patently aimed at huge juvenile and teen audiences worldwide.
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