“A Different Kind of War Film: The Ethos of the Individual Soldier in The Hurt Locker”

by Mikal Lambdin | Xchanges 11.2

Introduction

Of all the controversies that film attempts to depict, war is one of the most difficult and dangerous. How can directors in Hollywood ever truly understand what it’s like to be a soldier, regardless of the cause, and should they even try? How are the evils (death, loss, pain, cruelty) juxtaposed with the good (courage, loyalty, and something worth fighting for) without resulting in offensive oversimplification? And, perhaps most problematic, how do filmmakers avoid a seemingly unavoidable bias that could potentially alienate half of their audience? In light of these complexities, most filmmakers approach war movies with more than a little trepidation, and well they should: war films do poorly at the box office, rarely win awards, and are more likely to ruin careers than make them, which begs the question, are they ever worth it (Rico)?

Faced with these difficulties, many war films make what effort they can to represent the basic realities of dense concepts like war and soldier within their two hour time slot. Classics like The Thin Red Line, Saving Private Ryan, and We Were Soldiers all attempt to answer, more or less, the same two questions: What is war really like? and What are soldiers really like? Yet by focusing on the agreed-upon basics of war and soldiers, these films send messages that are equally basic: War is violent. Soldiers are loyal. Soldiers are heroes. As a result, these concepts, especially the idea of being a soldier, have slowly turned into clichés. The message is now All soldiers are loyal. All soldiers are heroes.

In 2010, Kathryn Bigelow’s war drama The Hurt Locker won six Academy Awards and was nominated for three more. It beat Avatar, the highest grossing film of all time, for Best Picture, and it made history when Bigelow became the first woman to win an Academy Award for Best Director (Bilington). Yet The Hurt Locker was not just another in a chain of war films that successfully represented the fundamental realities of war. In fact, it was The Hurt Locker‘s departure from this approach that made it noteworthy: it did not try to capture the all-encompassing reality of war. Instead of creating war’s perfect landscape and crafting everything else to fit that landscape, The Hurt Locker started with its characters — one character in particular. Rather than offering a picture of all soldiers, it offered a picture of one soldier.

In this paper, I will look more closely at the character of James, analyzing the rhetorical moves made to establish his ethos as a single, honest entity rather than a comprehensive symbol of war. My analysis will focus on three rhetorical hallmarks of James’s character — his anonymity, his detachment, and his vulnerability. Many details about James’s past and current identity are simply left out, which works to create an essence of believability. Perhaps most obvious is James’s detachment from the world around him — both the life-or-death nature of his surroundings, and the family that he has left behind. This detachment is constituted by his addiction to war, his most distinctive quality. Finally, James’s momentary vulnerability adds a layer of nuance and relatability to his character.