Hero Culture Redux

Flicks  |  Joe Tsali, Oct-Nov 2009

www.Helo-Magazine.com 

***********************

The Hurt Locker, 2008/9. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow, starring Jeremy Renner. A powerful, heavy metal superhero film disguised as a war film. Set in Iraq, a Staff Sergeant and his team risk life and sanity to diffuse explosive devices, and in the process learn about the limits to their humanity. It’s more about the emotional nuances of fear than about politics or Iraq. Very well crafted.

District 9, 2009. Directed by Neill Blomkamp, starring Sharlto Copley. The cutting edge in extraterrestrial realism, this film is an analogy for wars of identity but is disguised as a human-versus-alien showdown. You have never seen a film like this. Part mockumentary, part personal trauma tale, and part shoot your way out of a gun fight film, you will grip your seat the whole ride.

****************************************************************

Considering seeing the 2009 war films, The Hurt Locker and District 9? They are powerful films with incredible character, sharp realism and terrifying special effects. For those who’ve worked or lived in war zones and refugee camps, some moments in the films--drives in SUVs down alleys which divide fighting communities, trudging through displacement camps--may be just real enough to set off your post-traumatic stress symptoms.

In fact both films roll as if they had been hatched as brilliant scripts written by journalists aiming to reveal something deeper about human co-existence. However, they play on the screen like electrified superhero tales.

Long have humans idealized the warrior. For centuries hero epics have celebrated those guys and ladies who sacrifice everything, snatch the sword, Excalibur, and chop off the head of dragon / Nazi / Al Qaeda madman / The Joker / insert-your-enemy here.

Recently, Western filmmakers have gotten much closer to portraying realistic nuances about the inner character of said heroes in the context of actual wars, in some cases demonstrating painfully well how subjective the ideas of good and evil can be. Steven Gaghan’s terror war film, Syriana, Steven Spielberg’s exploration of a Mossad revenge spree, Munich, and ABC’s six-season existential television drama, Lost, are popular examples.

By the end of both The Hurt Locker and District 9 the filmmakers fall into this tradition. The nuanced, confused, sweaty and vulnerable protagonist we get to know struggles through the realities of conflict and existential trauma just up to the 75 yard line. Then someone hands him the magic submachine gun time portal magic invulnerability device and he goes back to chopping off dragon’s heads and running toward the end zone without fear.

Perhaps many of us cannot let go of this need for a superhero element in war films and satires because we need to believe that when the going gets tough someone else will swoop down and swiftly save us from the horrors of history.

When I decided to take in these two films, I was coming down from another year of working in war zones, so I figured it would be pure popcorn. But when I showed up to see The Hurt Locker in a small town theater, I found two young military types, likely US war veterans, sitting behind me.

Their presence, their eyes over my shoulder, and their soft whispering during the most intense scenes really aggravated me. But I dug in, allowing that to bring back memories of my own brief time in Iraq and few years in the military. I couldn’t help but imagine these kids sitting by me as potential casualties up on the screen.

Kathryn Bigelow’s Iraq war film, The Hurt Locker, written by Mark Boal, is not so much about Iraq as it is about how a human—through a series of traumas—evolves into a creature that can no longer live in a world without trauma, a veritable noir superhero.

Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner) arrives as the new head of an explosives disposal unit after his predecessor has an untimely change of post. Immediately, his fellow team members are shocked and upset by James’ willingness to dive into extremely dangerous work with abandon.

With well-crafted scenes shot of the blast wall canyons of Baghdad, the film’s setting feels very much like the real Iraq. The most revealing scene has the trio finding themselves trapped in a desert waddi defending from gunfire. A three-sixty glance and there is nothing clarifying where it is coming from and how they will escape.

By the climax, James evolves as an impenetrable near-martyr, the kind of guy we all kind of know in the real world. He never says Happy Birthday, never shows up to his kid’s PTA meetings, he’s behind on his rent, disappears for long periods of time, but he is exactly who you can depend on to save your life.

When I watched South African Director Neill Blomkamp’s District 9, written by Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell, I was in an entirely different atmosphere. The theater on Union Square in New York was swarmed with all kinds of people. The film was new, so the line went out to Broadway. By the time I sat down I was on the balcony looking over people’s heads. That said, a shout out goes to the filmmakers because that mob shut right up when the flick started. None of us had seen anything like it.

When all is reflected upon in the coming years, I would not be surprised if District 9 became known as the flagship for a new sub-genre of science fiction. Let’s call it Science meta-fiction.

Like Ridley Scott’s futuristic realism with the smelly streets of Blade Runner and drooling extraterrestrials in Alien, Blomkamp, with help from Peter Jackson of Lord of the Rings fame, has crafted a new kind of creature known by the derogatory term “prawns.” Though digital, they are lifelike, with wiggly flesh and emotive faces. One can easily imagine them both scaring the shit out of someone in a dark alley or making friends with one’s seven-year-old.

What’s special in story craft here is the presentation of the creepy prawns as more-or-less innocent and in many ways victimized by humans. Not only is the protagonism turned upside down, but the story of the prawns’ struggle for survival on human earth is lined up well as a multi-purpose metaphor for apartheid South Africa, divider-wall Israel, or a Sudanese refugee camp.

Those viewers who have actually worked in UN displacement camps will feel sickened with familiarity when the camera reveals how the prawns are quarantined. It is not fully clarified, but well implied that the aliens are the under-class of a distant planet, arriving to earth as refugees.

At the heart of this story, however, is not a xenological study of interplanetary displacement. It’s really the beginning of a hero epic in which a man faces extremely painful choices about how to survive and whom to save.

Human official, Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley), is given the daunting task of preparing the prawns to be relocated to a camp farther outside the human settlements, so as to deepen the gulf between the two communities for the benefit of prawn-hating humans. But Wikus, with us along for the ride, finds himself forced to consider the aliens' point of view when threated by his human counterparts in the same way they are.

The Hurt Locker and District 9 are films any self-respecting movie watcher, existential humanitarian, soldier or war film enthusiast must add to their online viewing queue. Theater with surround-sound would be ideal. Despite their subtle flaws, the films are tremendous, heart-pounding rides. And they may be the kinds of pictures future filmmakers look back to as harbingers of a new movement.

END