an apology for imperialism

Rating: 1/10 (15 May 2010)

The Hurt Locker is really an abominable film. It presents itself as an apolitical portrayal of the difficult lives of some US troops in Iraq--and it portrays those lives as incredibly difficult and the soldiers as meriting much sympathy. However, the film can only do this by narrowing its focus so extremely that it completely falsifies the situation that it describes.
The basic problem, as with virtually all American films of imperialist conquest, is that although 99% of the people in the situation portrayed in the film are Iraqis, they exist merely as a backdrop for the wondrous portrayal of the American occupiers.
The significance of this can be seen easily if you imagine a film about the WWII Nazi occupation of, say, Poland, or the Japanese occupation of north China. A film about this, that focused with intense sensitivity on the sorrows and travails of the imperialist troops while just shedding a generalized tear over the difficulties of the local civilians caught in a war zone--the imperialist propagandistic character of such a film would be perfectly obvious--would even eclipse everything else about the film. But in The Hurt Locker, we're supposed to see the film as non-political and only focus on the poor American soldiers. This focus of the film is carefully built in to the mission of the soldiers shown: they're not fighting Iraqis, they're just defusing bombs.
I'm not denying the sorrows of the soldiers. Yes, to be in that situation is absolutely horrible. But the Americans are not there doing a good deed at the behest of their friends the Iraqis. The Americans are invaders. Of course, the ordinary soldiers didn't decide on their own that they wanted to invade Iraq, but they have been caught up in the war deliberately started and continued by their government. The great horror of the war that is completely absent from the film is the horror of naive young people who are tricked into participating in the imperialist subjugation of another country. The American soldiers are victims, but they must also be held responsible for their actions, which are criminal. As the war continues, their experience gives them some insight into this terrible dilemma, which appears toward the end of the movie when the most balanced of the soldiers says that his life there is meaningless: 'I hate this place.' The utter futility of their situation can also be appreciated if you compare it to my example of WWII imperialist occupying troops. The Iraqis are more effectively hostile to the American soldiers than the people of occupied France or Poland were to the Nazis. Occupying troops know that any friendly or accommodating civilian can actually be a supporter of the resistance. But the Iraqis are more committed and more organized and more lethal: the friendly civilian can also be a suicide bomber, and any onlooker can dial his cellphone at the proper moment and set off a bomb hidden in a pile of trash. Yes, the American soldiers in Iraq have it worse, in many ways, than the German troops in Eastern Europe, and this shows the weakness of the US policies and the strength of the Iraqi people's resistance. The German army was driven out of Poland and France by the attacking armies of the Allied countries; the American army is getting driven out of Iraq by the Iraqi people (even the US media have pretty much given up on the idea, once pushed very strongly, that the Iraqi resistance was armed, organized, and directed by the Iranians).
But all of this is of course far outside the tiny focus of The Hurt Locker, which tries to show that the angst of the American soldiers is far more important than the political situation or the agony and heroism of the Iraqi people, which is the actual source of that angst.
So The Hurt Locker is a film about the white man's burden. Gosh, imperialist conquest is so hard and takes such sacrifice--but imperialist conquest is a given, not to be examined or questioned. The Hurt Locker is an abominable film.