(This occasional contribution comes from the team of Ken MacLeish and Zoė H. Wool. Ken is a doctoral candidate in anthropology and the Program in Folklore, Public Culture and Cultural Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He conducted 12 months of intensive fieldwork with soldiers and military families at and around the U.S. Army’s Ft. Hood in Killeen, TX. His dissertation explores the impacts of war and military institutions in everyday life via the concepts of attachment, vulnerability and exchange. Zoe is a doctoral candidate in socio-cultural and linguistic anthropology at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation is titled Emergent Ordinaries at Walter Reed Army Medical Center: An ethnography of extra/ordinary encounter. It focuses on the dialectic of the ordinary and extraordinary in the lives of soldiers who are marked by violence. )
You might have noticed the strong militarized thread running through this year’s list of Oscar nominated films. A not necessarily exhaustive list includes: The Hurt Locker, Avatar, Inglourious Basterds, The Messenger, District 9, The Most Dangerous Man in America, Burma VJ, and Star Trek.
As a couple of anthropologists who study American soldiers, we’ve been struck by the much-ballyhoed showdown between Avatar and The Hurt Locker, particularly because there’s been relatively little said about the fact that the protagonists of both films are soldiers (Avatar’s Jake Sully is of course a marine of some fictitious and unspecified variety, but we’re going to take a leap and dispense with the service jargon).
After several years of largely unwatched and un-lauded contemporary American war films (Lions for Lambs, In The Valley of Ellah, Stop Loss, Dear John, Redacted, The Kingdom), it is worth taking a moment to ponder the significance of fictionalized American soldiers being at the center of such dramatically different films at a moment when actual American soldiers and Marines have, until just recently, largely vanished from the headlines. Soldiers are a key figure and symbol mediating public assumptions about, and relationships to, war violence. We wondered what the competing images in Avatar and The Hurt Locker suggest about those assumptions and relationships.
The two films are a study in contrasts on a number of levels. Avatar is a $400 million blockbuster that shattered director James Cameron’s own previous box office world record. The Hurt Locker had a budget of $16 million, and writer Mark Boals and director Katherine Bigelow self-produced it with funds from European backers because they were unsure if it would ever see a full theatrical release in the U.S.
Avatar was filmed mainly in front of green screens with its actors in motion-capture suits, a curious parallel to the film’s body-trading premise. Its incandescent alien flora and fauna serve as the backdrop for a moralizing tale drenched in liberal sentiment. The Hurt Locker was filmed on location in Amman, Jordan, less than 200 miles from the Iraqi border. Its palette is essentially sepia-tone, rounded out with blood and the black smoke of bomb detonations, and it’s an essentially plotless examination of war detached from political narrative.
James Cameron wrote the script for Avatar more than ten years ago, so its parallels with the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan—insurgent locals, resource exploitation driven by corporate interests, and well-meaning “anthropologists” trying to forestall bloodshed (can you say HTS?)—arguably say as much about the abiding features of counterinsurgency war in general as about the current wars in particular. Mark Boals’ Hurt Locker script is based on his time as an embedded reporter with a U.S. Army explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) team in Iraq, and yet the film is less ‘about’ the Iraq War than it is about the pleasures and pathologies of making and being exposed to violence.
Above all, the films depict radically different relationships between their protagonists, the violence they make and endure, and the greater logic of that violence. Avatar is a redemptive tale. In Jake Sully, the film gives us a curious blend of wronged veteran and cynical mercenary who transforms into pure-hearted revolutionary. The details of Jake’s tragic biography, his exceptional biometrics, and his mix of defeated nihilism and warrior’s code contextualize his decision first to do some things that are really bad (like helping to decimate a population and a planet to extract natural resources for profit) and then some that are really good (like coming to understand that this kind of exploitation should be stopped at all costs). The Hurt Locker, on the other hand, provides little context for its three EOD team protagonists beyond their dedication to, and enthusiasm for, their job. A few jumbled bits of background suggest that they are bound only tenuously to anyone or anything outside of the claustrophobic masculinity of military life. But this closed-off immediacy is a kind of ethical commentary in itself, as the film invites its audience to imagine the human-scale experience of a narratively overdetermined event—like war—that must be lived without the luxury of the kind of measured, meaningful and redemptive context that Avatar provides.
In Avatar, the combat violence is both the evidence and the means of evil deeds and the mechanism for righting wrongs. The humans fight to destroy and exploit, or even for the (clearly unwholesome) pleasure of killing. Cameron depicts the film’s mercenary grunts with an abundance of quasi-realistic contemporary detail—from their uniforms and hairstyles to their technical jargon and slang—but he also shows them as vulgar, sadistic, abelist, and racist, the dark side to Jake’s human vulnerability and empathy and his soldierly discipline and determination. For the Na’vi, on the other hand, violence against living things is imbued with righteousness and spiritual and existential significance. In both its thematic connotations and in its action, the film’s violence is utterly transparent. Good violence and bad violence are clearly meant to be distinguishable. And Sully’s perhaps accidental quotation of an Airborne slogan “death from above” to describe Na’vi aerial hunting suggests that good violence can safely blend militaristic and mystical attitudes. The bad guys strike first and leave destruction where there was peace and plenty. The ballet of arrows and rockets and soaring beasts and hovering aircraft that articulate and allegorize just and unjust violences is presented in excruciatingly elaborate technical detail, making it clear exactly how each act of destruction contributes to the morally freighted conflict. Violence always has a meaning and a message, its ramifications in the material world mapping point for point onto a moral one.
If Avatar is orderly and transparent, The Hurt Locker is unruly and opaque, both thematically and aesthetically, refusing the anchored of ethical certainty. The sense of devastation is generalized, and the temporality of before, during, and after doesn’t necessarily apply: violence happens and it’s happening now, arbitrarily bookended by the last days of these soldiers’ deployment. Even the seemingly orderly unfolding of the calendar—signposted throughout the film with periodic title cards showing number of days remaining—becomes disordered as the time of passing days is effaced by the racing seconds of a detonation device. Sergeant First Class James’ arrival in the unit at the beginning of the film finds an uncanny echo at its end when he arrives again. Time simultaneously loops back on itself and also counts down at the pace of a calendar and of a time bomb and of a rotation. The unfolding of time that can give violence a redemptive logic in Avatar is, in The Hurt Locker, shattered and fragmented.
It is this fragmentation, rather than any solid explanatory framework that characterizes the violence in The Hurt Locker. There are threats everywhere, but the only identifiable enemies are at a distance—seen through a scope from hundreds of meters away—or utterly absent—the bombmakers who leave their creations for the soldiers to find. When James and his fellow soldiers Sanborn and Eldridge return fire on a shooter they cannot see, the script, camerawork and editing keep the shooter obscured for several minutes—an eternity by action movie standards. When a bomb detonates on the ground next to an unsuspecting soldier, he literally disappears in a cloud of smoke. Just as scenes of violence are deliberately evacuated of all but a physical intelligibility, The Hurt Locker makes no direct reference to the larger political and strategic logic of the war. In contrast to Avatar’s sweeping scale and redemptive violence, The Hurt Locker’s visual and moral universe is one in which violence resolves little, but is its own dilemma and its own reward.
None of this even begins to touch on some of the other themes that cross these films: the gendering of violence; the place of capitalism and entrepreneurship; the competing modes of bodily discipline and decay; notions of “cultural difference”; or countless aspects of technical execution and visual style. Clearly the contrasts of these two films, and the soldiers in them are good to think with. Our thinking has left us with a few questions about these portrayals of soldiers and war violence and what they might mean. We submit them here for your consideration:
- Is there any way of squaring the fragmentary and contingent quality of violence in The Hurt Locker and the ethics of grand ideas displayed in Avatar? And in either case, what does this mean for how we think about soldiers who carry out violence?
- What can we glean from both films’ portrayal of a deeply ambivalent relationship between the soldier and the military institution that he or she serves?
- What is the relationship between the very bodily solder and other inanimate or semi-animate instruments of war? In what circumstances does the soldier’s bodilyness dispose him to be read as just a body, and in what circumstances does it round out his humanity and heroism by serving as a sign of his discipline and prowess?
- Can soldiers ever also be seen as regular folks, and do they ever get to “be normal”? Or do they always have to choose between the chaos of war and a home that is (in one way or another) made strange?
UPDATE: Updated post to include Zoë H. Wool’s bio and byline.
For those interested in more critiques that focus on aspects other than the (condemnable, essentialist, racializing, confused) political message of Avatar, check out this piece by David Mendelsohn (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23726). Thanks to Ivan Kalmar for sending me the link.
Among other things, it’s an interesting look at technology, hybridity, and ideologies of the body in Cameron’s sci-fi ouvre.
Interesting that even in that discussion the question of the normative gendering of various types of bodies isn’t really addressed…even when we learn that Cameron sees an affinity between marine Jake Sully and Dorthy of the Wizard of Oz.
bq. Interesting that even in that discussion the question of the normative gendering of various types of bodies isn’t really addressed…even when we learn that Cameron sees an affinity between marine Jake Sully and Dorthy of the Wizard of Oz.
As discussed in his “Fresh Air interview”:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123810319, the female lead’s physique “subverts some genre norms”:http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BoobsOfSteel.
As someone with OCD issues around textual representation I want to point out that the ugly post above is not my fault. The arcane Textile Syntax formatting was followed to the letter but the blog ate it. Or refused to eat it, actually.
I’ve been having the same problems. Dear blog owners, please kill this Textile fetish and go with stuff that everybody already knows.
While there has been no lack of critiques of the movie “Hurt Locker” by real soldiers (I am a former member of the Army Corp of Engineers so I had much to say on it), one thing I am surprised about is the almost complete lack of media attention on the perspective of real soldiers towards the movie Avatar.
While many enjoyed the movie purely as a good story and beautiful work of art, most I’ve talked to immediately were disgusted with the movie. This is because they viewed it as essentially being about a Marine who was a traitor because he killed his fellow brothers in uniform.
When a soldier fights together with other soldiers, despite the questionable politics and rationale for the war, soldiers will almost always bond together as their very lives are dependent upon each other. For a fellow soldier to break this bond, it is considered treachery in the extreme. The real soldiers imagined what would happen if one of their fellow platoon members decided to go join the Taliban or the Iraqi insurgency.
It would have been devastating on moral, but there would have been no mercy on that soldier as despite all politics, a sacred code amongst warriors is violated.
This aspect of the movie Avatar is something that has been completely ignored even though it is a serious issue in the real world as we have seen with Muslim American soldiers helping Muslim extremists or in the case of Dr. Hassan, outright killing fellow soldiers at Ft. Hood, Texas. In many cases soldiers have converted to Islam and have left the military because of their new found religion practiced also by their enemy.
The beautiful spirituality depicted in “Avatar”, while a far cry from Islam theologically, gives audiences some ideas of the deep emotional and spiritual beauty that a typical Jihadist feels for his religion. This core belief system is the foundation of why he fights and goes well beyond politics. More importantly it motivates him to potentially do great acts of violence and even suicide in the name of that religion. Likewise we see “Avatar” main character, Jake Sulley, converted to this new exotic religion and culture. What does this say about the Western fascination with “the exotic” and especially the fascination by the field of anthropology? How do our biases towards “saving” the exotic manifest themselves in our views towards the current conflict between Western powers and Muslim extremists?
As social-scientists studying conflict, do we over-romanticize one side over the other due to power inequalities or do we show as intimately as possible the realities and brutalities of all sides of a conflict in order to better understand human nature and how to resolve conflict?
These are questions I believe we have to ponder in self-reflection anytime we write about modern conflicts if we are to better understand humanity. Otherwise we lock ourselves into a narrow ideological perspective and embroil ourselves in the ugly politics of war for better or for worse.
Chris:
Thanks for your thoughts on this. I really appreciate the insight about the way service members’ reactions to Avatar have been ignored. But there are a few (6.5 to be exact) rejoinders I’d like to make:
1–The marines Sully is fighting against are not his brothers in arms, they are (presented as) shills whose soldierly values have been replaced by the RDA corporation’s blood and capital lust. They are mercenaries, not marines. Sully, it seems, is the only real soldier (well, him and Trudy Chracon, but she’s the exception that proves the rule). The more accurate real life analogy would be US service members killing contractors working for Blackwater (oh, ‘scuse me, “Xe”) if they were running security for Total …but even that isn’t such a well fit analogy.
2–The analogy for Jake’s conversion to Eywa-sim (or whatever you might call it) would be a marine’s conversion to Islam after appreciating the value of the religion based on what s/he saw of life downrange…leaving the military after such a conversion wouldn’t necessarily be because you wanted to ‘kill infidels’, it might have something to do with…oh, I don’t know, coming to value other lives as human?!
2.5–This conversion stuff is also a poor analogy. Sully doesn’t convert to a religion, he becomes a different kind of creature in a different kind of body and this difference is one that turns on a changed relationship to nature, not to god. Also, Sully doesn’t join an insurgency, he leads a violent rebellion that resembles anti-settler wars more than anything else.
3–Your comments offer valuable insight, but not because of what you, and the (kind of homogenized) soldier you talk to have pointed out something about the meaning of the film that the rest of us missed. Rather, your comments are valuable because they point to the particular perspectives (that’s in the plural, mind you) of contemporary American soldiers, perspectives that are spoken for more than spoken and which address important issues in the politics of representation of war.
4–I appreciate the gesture of dignity in you’re calling him “Dr. Hassan”, but your implication that he was helping Muslim extremist is, how shall I say it, problematic. It’s an easy thing to say, especially given the ex post facto determination that his act was one of “Muslim extremism” and terrorism but I urge you to complicate this narrative. For some of the reasons why, you can look at my previous SM post on the topic.
5–Islam is beautiful. I mean, c’mon, have you read Rumi?
6–If you think anthropology is about saving the exotic, well, you must be Franz Boas. Nice to hear from you, thought you were dead.
Yeah, I don’t know about that Chris. I think the movie Avatar was more of an allegory of Capitalist corporations encroaching on native land for resource extraction. I think it would be much more accurate for what’s going on in South America right now as oil reserves are being found in the rain forest.
The movie was also a pure narrative. There was little real life messiness in it. The bad guys, and the good guys were archetypes, rarely found in the real world. So, in that sense it seems to mirror the discourse that you’ve found among some Islamists; the battle against pure evil form a righteous people.
I think also that if you remind the soldiers that those guys were contractors, mercenaries really, then their views would change. Soldiers hate mercs, almost entirely.
I mean I can see how some would have that view, but I’m sure there are a lot of red necks in the army that hated the environmentalist theme too.
I think what the movie better highlights, as far as aspects of soldiering, is the massive degree of cognitive dissonance that soldiers deal with in carrying out their jobs. In this case the dissonance caused a massive change in a Marine. In other cases it turns people into cold killers. It’s usually much more damaging to people though.
Oh, and it is also the perfect example of the stages of rites of passage. He spends the bulk of the movie in a liminal existence. He joins the Marines and in boot camp, he is transformed into a Marine, then he is transformed into a crippled former Marine, then a Navi. If you were to take Vladamir Propp’s universal stages of folklore, and overlaid it on the plot points, then they’d most likely line up perfectly.
In reply to Zoe:
1. You are correct. (I also did not refer to the mercenaries as Marines). These indeed were mercenaries. However so was Sully. My point is that even with mercenaries, there is a bond of brotherhood. Note Sully’s initial awe of the commander of the mercenary force. Sully was a former Marine and became a mercenary joining that new brotherhood of warriors. The gunship pilot who assisted Sulley also was a mercenary and then became a traitor by disobeying orders and shooting at fellow humans. Furthermore, the story spoke of Earth as a dying world so the treachery of these individuals may have been not only treachery towards their fellow soldiers but rather treachery to the entire human race that was depending on them. The destruction of one tribe’s home (despite horrific loss to the tribe) may have been justified in the minds of the humans who may have feared the loss of their entire planet. This side of the narrative is never fully explained in the movie. This battle of species is one that humans do every day as we destroy other species in the name of protecting our own. Do you tell the skyrocketing impoverished human population of Madagascar that they must stop having so many babies and stop cutting down trees to clear for farming so that cute cuddly lemurs can be saved? This is what environmentalists have done and it puts them in the dilemma of whether human lives are more or less of importance then non-human primates. Who should be the judge? I imagine that if we ever get off this rock and are able to send humans out into other galaxies, that we will be the vermin of the universe killing everything and anything that even remotely threatens us. That is the nature of humanity that is difficult to control.
2. You are correct. For the vast majority of soldiers who convert to Islam, it does not make them want to kill infidels, however there is the potential and a very strong danger of this because they are new to the religion. If indoctrinated by the wrong Islamic teacher, they may be totally ignorant to the more peaceful interpretations of the religion and the counter-arguments to the extremists. Extremist Muslims generally convert very gently and like all evangelical religious organizations, are experts at finding what a potential convert is seeking and then filling that need for them. As we’re talking about movies, a realistic portrayal of such conversions can be found in the movie, “Syriana.” Conversions always begin with the most beautiful aspects of a religion and Islam can be exceptionally beautiful. Once the conversion is secured and zealotry in the faith proven through the converts dedication to prayer and perfection of faith, does the teachings of Jihad begin and the political indoctrination. There is a parallel (but not as extreme generally) process amongst right-wing fundamentalist Christians when it comes to how they convert and politically indoctrinate converts.
2.5- For a Muslim, conversion is very much a transformation from the ignorant into the knowing. From the cursed to the blessed. From sin to righteousness and the true path to salvation. Likewise in Christianity, the baptismal process symbolizes this among other things. The movie Avatar is filled with such rights of passage when they depict the Na’vi ways. The primary differences in the movie and reality are that in the movie, the Na’vi are beautiful nature worshippers who walk around half-naked and who are scientifically proven to literally be ONE with their planet via their biology (scientific affirmation of spirituality for the stubborn atheist scientists in the movie as well as for atheist movie viewers). So yeah the Na’vi are a lot sexier then the Taliban for sure. As for being anti-settler, the humans weren’t planning on staying there aside from their temporary camps needed to get all of the unobtanium (sp?). They might bring in tourists later maybe.
3. Well the representations of soldiers I made are only opinions I gathered from particular soldiers in a very informal manner that was not the basis of any study. As Rick mentioned there are many different opinions that soldiers have so I’m only representing on area of opinion (but an interesting one I think).
4. Hassan was a Doctor was he not? I guess I could have also said “Major Hassan.” I didn’t use the term “Doctor” deliberately. Yes you are right that the narrative is vastly more complicated. Major Hassan “reportedly” had a history of mental health issues, however he also had a long history of being very zealous in trying to convert psychiatric patients in his care, over to Islam (violating a lot of ethical policies). Couple that with his again “reported” sympathies with Islamic extremists, dialog with a known Muslim extremist Shaykh (who just recently called for American Muslims to rise up and attack America) and the Army’s refusal to discharge him (a critical error on the Army’s part) and you have the ingredients of a potential terrorist. Too top it off multiple witnesses heard him yelling “Allah’u Akbar!” as he went on his killing spree. While this term is said daily by Muslims, it is generally said during times of great pain, great joy, or great anger and is a very pure expression of faith. Saying “Allah’u Akbar” (God is Great) obviously doesn’t mean that someone is a Muslim extremist. But saying this while killing people… then well if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck… . All of this nevertheless, is 2nd hand knowledge from media reports and thus may be inaccurate. A court of law will decide how accurate any of that is.
5. Islam is beautiful, or at least certain aspects are. But it is also NOT a pacifist religion and there is a lot of brutality in it. Also Rumi’s poetry is not based on Islamic theology, but rather is just his pure expression of total love for Allah. If you told a Salafi/Wahhabi Muslim that Rumi’s poetry was Islamic he would likely laugh at you and tell you to read the Qur’an and not “hippie Islam.” Sufi mystics are held in contempt by the more conservative Muslims of both the Sunni and Shi’a sects. I personally love Sufis as they think they understand the true essence of their religion and don’t get bogged down in all of the arguments concerning dogma.
6. I think that there is still that tendency to “save the exotic” left over from good ol’ “Papa Boas” and much of early anthropology. There are examples everywhere of anthropologists still trying to document or even revive dying cultural traditions and languages.
When this conversation got revived it occurred to me that another film in the running—Inglourious Basterds—was also a war film filled with pure fantasy and plenty of horrible mangling of bodies but it doesn’t seem to have drawn much of the sort of discussion that the other two have.
I just want to say that I just took an ambien so this might fall apart, but I’ll give it a try.
I think bringing in Inglorious Bastards in was smart. I loved the movie, and the only reason I did was because the Nazis were dehumanized. They personify evil, and you are allowed to want them dead. They are the one group.
In avatar you felt nothing for the company soldiers, because they had been marked in the movie as people that it was ok to hate. When you watch the FOX news, they do the same thing to anyone that isn’t with their agenda.
Hurt locker removed that, and complicated it. The enemy was a bomb, not a person. It make it mechanical. Here the conflict takes place within the mind of the soldier, which is were all conflicts actually take place. It strips the whole thing bare, and cuts passed honor, and patriotic bullshit, to get the actual man and process. It’s just a man, and he’s just doing a job. That’s the reality for most soldiers. Most soldier say they are their for god and country, but the reality is they were playing video games and movies and wanted to do that stuff in real life.
I know soldiers that can’t wait to go to Afghanistan and they don’t give a shit about democracy, or protecting the USA, they just want that rush back of being completely alive that you only feel in a place like that.
I have to disagree. The guys in the High Command were trolls, but I sergeant that got his head bashed in and the enlisted men in the basement (my favorite scene) were at least as human as the Basterds.
I especially liked Landa’s shock at Aldo’s lack of honor. Because working for the SS (or anyone else) is apparently completely honorable so long as it is officially sanctioned.
I don’t know, the basement scene had a really arrogant officer start it all, but that’s subjective to each person.
I think that cinematically the Nazis are always easy to dehumanize and kill en mass. More recently the Japanese have been humanized, as in the Sands of Iwo Jima. I think the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan has left everyone feeling uneasy, even when they reach for rationalizations. No one, however, ever thinks about the carpet bombing of cities like Dresden, in which many more people were killed.
I even kind of liked that guy because of the “Mr. Frankfurt” stuff. I also thought it was pretty brilliant to have an SS officer letting the American audience in on what King Kong is really about.
I also think the racial element makes the war in the Pacific uncomfortable to portray. I had not thought of it before I heard Tarantino point it out in an interview related to IB, but the war in Europe was our last war in which white people killed other white people.
It is interesting that the German Right is still making hay off the Dresden bombing and most Americans are not even aware of it.
I remember visiting the Peace Museum in Nagasaki. There were a bunch of school kids that got bused in, they way school kids get bused to museums in most places. The whole thing seemed to be lost on them, and they were more interested in playing around; pretty much like kids in most places that get forced to go to such museums.
My wife is Japanese and I was the first foreigner my in-laws ever met up close, let alone an American. My wife said that her father always talked shit about Americans, especially when he was drunk, but he loves me, and we got along the few times that we were together.
I think you can only really hate a whole group of people if you are separated from them. The cinema has a very powerful effect on either bringing us closer together, or father apart in this respect. Our brains don’t readily distinguish between the relationships we see on screen and in real life.