(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.
