Sgt James Goes to Abottabad
Critics have a disruptive habit of adding context when we’d sometimes prefer to have none. When I saw The Hurt Locker in 2009, my initial reaction was that it was a fantastic film, unshakably intense and suspenseful, craftily shot, well acted (particularly Jeremy Renner’s madcap grittiness). It was easily the best movie I’d seen so far that year. But around Oscar time, I was linked, by a veteran-turned-journalist, to some articles criticizing the movie’s accuracy. (Here’s a good one in the New York Times; many more are cited on Wikipedia.) The insane recklessness of Sergeant First Class William James (Renner); the depiction of James’ team as both bomb disposal experts and master snipers; James’ miraculous nighttime run through Baghdad at the height of the insurgency; the unit’s undermanned three-person patrols — the list of errors and misrepresentations is endless.
A film can be great even if it is inaccurate, but the problem with this litany of errors is that it was largely subsumed in the excitement over the film, and that The Hurt Locker was repeatedly cited as the movie to finally “bring home” the enormity of the Iraq debacle. It claimed to show us what life was like for everyday soldiers, even as it offered something far different than reality. Screenwriter Mark Boal’s experience as a journalist embedded with a US bomb squad was trumpeted as evidence of the film’s bona fides.
One could counter that Americans shouldn’t be getting their history from pop culture, but the film’s own champions often stated otherwise: this movie’s different, we were told. Moreover, the continuing misapprehensions over the Iraq War — why it was launched, who we’re fighting, even the myth that it’s finished — show that errors of fact can be particularly enduring, as well as pernicious. (We owe much of this truth deficit, of course, to the Bush administration, which made lying and distortion an essential part of the build-up to and prosecution of the war.)
Unfortunately, the narrative of The Hurt Locker as accurate and as a corrective to past Iraq War films is likely to persist. And so it does in an essay by Alan Stone in the latest issue of the Boston Review (the issue overall is quite good). Stone’s essay begins with a look at the shifting story of the killing of Osama bin Laden and then considers how Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow, teamed again with Mark Boal, would do with an OBL movie, which they are currently developing. Much of Stone’s essay is well written and insightful about Bigelow as a filmmaker; he praises her portrayal of Sgt. James as “heartbreakingly human” and her depiction of the soldiers’ alienation from the Iraqi population. But Stone doesn’t mention the numerous inaccuracies bedeviling The Hurt Locker, a lack made ironic by the fact that his piece opens with a nimble summary of how the official narrative of bin Laden’s death changed quickly and dramatically in the event’s aftermath.
Clearly Stone is concerned with the role of mass media and pop culture in telling history and in how that process can be abused. “Which version of the [bin Laden] story will take its place in popular history?” he asks. Will it be the quickly discarded fable of OBL as a Kalashnikov-wielding martyr sniped while hiding behind one of his wives? Or will it be of the terrorist leader killed while unarmed and with no human shield, followed by a getaway marred by the scuttling of a crashed military chopper, which revealed its secret stealth technology? One assumes that there will be no mention of the raid’s collateral damage: the disintegrating US-Pakistani relationship; the deadly retaliatory attacks by al Qaeda against Pakistani targets; the many Pakistanis arrested for alleged cooperation with the CIA, including the doctor who was hired to run a fake vaccine program in order to glean samples of bin Laden family DNA and who remains in Pakistani custody.
Stone’s question is a good one and should be front-and-center for all reviews of what is sure to be a big-budget, highly marketed movie. (Bigelow is no longer an underappreciated, under-funded auteur, as she was pre-Oscar.) But I am not hopeful. The American public may have largely soured on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the average foot soldier remains a respected cipher, and the elite (that word is obligatory in these discussions) Navy SEALS are the most easily valorized of military actors. With so much money at stake, no studio executive would tolerate a morally ambiguous telling of an event that has, for understandable reasons, brought relief and even joy to so many people. The consequence is that Bigelow’s bin Laden movie may very well be entertaining, thrilling, and even occasionally soul-searching, but we know how the Hollywood version of the OBL story ends: a clean escape from Abbottabad, followed by a hosanna of applause.
2 Notes