Horse Opera.
Hurt Locker wins lavish and politically sophisticated attention from Hollywood but not from the young people deployed to theater, and this tells me that what has happened is that the war in the ummah has now shifted into a safe enough political place for the scriptwriters and their producers that it is possible to present the romance and sentimentality without thinking about the ongoing threat and fight. Kathryn Bigelow's Hurt Locker is a recognizable and matter-of-fact version of late-produced Hollywood horse opera, more like Ulzana's Raid and less like The Searchers or the prototypical 1939 John Ford oater, Stagecoach, with its line about "Injun territory": young rebel in a dutiful band of brothers, surrounded by Injuns, family and meaning somewhere back in the world of women (Sam's Club shopping), punctuated by explosions and a sense of futility and injustice. The Hurt Locker Iraqis are far more compelling than our rootless hero cowboys, and this irony is an advance on the John Ford Injuns, who were just marauding demons. The responses (above) suggest that young soldiers in theater do not recognize or even approve of the rebellion theme in the Hurt Locker screenplay. Band of brothers does not work when rebels act singularly on their vanity or doubts. Why back up a selfish or impudent person; why trust him to back you up?
Hollywood, Iraq
What is also apparent in the familiar tropes of Hurt Locker is that Hollywood is not comfortable with the facts of the war in Iraq. The received narrative that worked for candidate Barack Obama was that the war was illegal and lost, and that it is necessary to evacuate Iraq asap. The facts do not support this prejudice. Yet Hollywood must now follow an Academy Award movie (which didn't earn well, but was cheap to make) with other, much more lavish, affairs. The new Matt Damon superman drama, Green Zone, looks to be a quick score on the horse opera theme, with a bigger budget and more defined virtue. More like a video game and less like a gabfest. Hollywood goes to war once it is safely removed from the political debate. It is too early to measure Afghanistan. POTUS Obama has not found a narrative in AfPak that Hollywood can embrace. The pursuit of AQ is not a useful metaphor for a business that depend on selling tickets worldwide. Horse opera, yep; stalking jihadis as if they are deer or King Kong, nope. (Detail: David Petraeus travels to New Hampshire to give a speech: the Iraq theme may be coming back for 2012. Smile.)
Hollywood has run out of script. Those boys in uniform over there in Iraq and Afghanistan are theirs now after all. They can't very well disparage them too much. Even hard-core leftists understand that. The worst that could happen is that some single issue anti-war types peel-off from the base. No chance of them jumping over to the Republican side anyway. All in all, it’s no big deal.
I haven’t seen the flick. Won't do so until the library gets it. I'm sure they'll get six copies of it the way thy got six copies of Al Gore's opus; six copies of Oliver Stone's "dub-ya"; six copies of "Sicko" etc. What can you expect of a library director who likely still displays anti-Bush stickers on the bumper of his mini-van.
I'm quite sure that, in a sense, Hollywood has been caught flat-footed. They had fully intended to follow the heroic narrative to its crescendo: A young virile president bombing militia camps in Montana; fighting some version of misguided tea partiers on the high seas; throwing open the borders to receive the multitudes who come to America for no other purpose than to genuflect before the historic boy “savior". I'm sure this film is already in the can, waiting for release. I’m sure it took millions in stimulus money to make. Chalk up another epic loss for Hollywood while John Wayne turns painfully in his grave.
http://peterkoelliker.blogspot.com/
It started to go downhill after Shane, although Will Penny was good. Today, everything is a rehash, retro, milk the cow for all it's got. It's not that there's no talent, it's that they don't go out and get the story. May be that's why Hurt Locker worked. Funny thing that Cameron's throwaway beat him.