Media Diet: Double Feature
On Sunday I watched The Hurt Locker, and shortly thereafter In The Loop. Now, while these are both good movies and you should watch them, you should not watch them close together because of the peculiar alchemy they have in combination. Independently, I would say that Hurt Locker is about .6 Requiem For A Dreams (standard measure of movie depressingness), and In The Loop maybe half that. Together, though, they're easily twice as depressing, a bleak look at the tragedy of war.
The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow's most recent work, draws from journalist Mark Boal's experience embedded with US troops in Iraq. It follows Bravo Company, a unit stationed in Baghdad and assigned to explosive ordnance disposal work. Their daily work is disabling or otherwise dealing with IEDs, and Bigelow lets us know very effectively how dangerous the work is. It's interesting to consider how a movie that is on one level about explosions, that lets the camera linger on them almost adoringly, is definitively not an action movie. It is instead about the situation. Solid acting draws us to the characters, and solid cinematography draws us into the pressure that they feel - unrelenting pressure, uncertainty, doubt, guilt, and adrenaline.
There are obvious parallels with Catch-22: a group of men with a very dangerous job who are all somewhat crazy both because one has to be to volunteer for the job and because the job itself makes you crazy. I wouldn't characterize it as an anti-war movie, though, in the conventional sense. Instead, it's a movie about the senselessness and madness of any war, not just its particular war. Its sympathy is with everyone trapped in the mad, dangerous, unstable situation, regardless of their nationality. The movie focuses on the three main characters of Bravo Company as the days left in their deployment tick down onscreen, but it shows us glimpses of many people trapped in the situation. After watching it, I found out that it was filmed in Jordan, and that all of the Iraqi characters in the movie were played by Iraqis, many of them already professional actors forced out of the country by the war. On top of that, the filmmakers report that they were more than once shot at whilst filming. These factors definitely contribute to the movie's veracity, which is very strong.
Indeed, the Baghdad that the characters live in is nearly postapocalyptic, full of vanished splendor only seen by inference. The characters see sand, smoke, and danger, a zone of uncertainty. The movie plays with expectations well. This includes its trailer, which displays a good taste rare in Hollywood: it shows you compelling moments of the movie, but reserves the movie's full impact for the full viewing. It's a movie with a lot of impact, and I recommend it with only the above condition: don't watch it too close to In The Loop.
Why is that? In The Loop, directed by Armando Iannucci, is a political comedy. It is more or less The Office times The West Wing (or Yes, Minister, depending on which side of the Atlantic you're on). That is both why it's extremely funny and extremely depressing. It's similar to watching an episode of The Office in which the characters work for Union Carbide in December 1984. In The Loop's bickering bureaucrats are funny and biting and obscene, but watching the two movies together, one can't escape the impression that this pack of venal, short-sighted idiots sent out soldiers to die and to kill, to cleave apart a nation of millions.
While In The Loop aspires to timelessness by being very vague about the potential conflict in the Middle East that its characters are attempting to influence, right now it is unquestionably about the 2002-2003 preparation for war in Iraq. It has falsified intelligence, overconfident religious zealots, and UK-US cooperation leading up to a pivotal presentation before the UN. It may be applicable to other situations, but right now there really isn't much else you could see it as being about. The mid-level functionaries that the movie revolves around squabble and desperately try to enact their personal agendas, engaging in considerable backbiting and manuvering. If you like watching Peter Capaldi cuss people out, or James Gandolfini being amiably crude and insulting, it's great - they're both very funny whilst doing that, and the people scrambling around them are also very amusing. In the background, though, lurks the consequences of the characters' actions, the utter clusterfuck that results, and you want to reach into the film and slap them. You want to tell them that they are personally responsible for the shattered people, the shattered city, and the shattered land shown in The Hurt Locker, which ends with a danger-suited member of Delta Company marching down a street as a text block tells us "Days Left In Delta Company's Deployment: 365."
In further news about my media diet, I found a bit of credit at a local used-book store that I'd forgotten I had. I walked away with Under The Banner Of Heaven, The Assault On Reason, and a random sci-fi novel that I bought on a whim. Dove through about half of Banner today - very grim material, overall, especially on top of slowly making my way through C.J. Pascoe's Dude, You're A Fag (courtesy of rax, cheers). To summarize:
The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow's most recent work, draws from journalist Mark Boal's experience embedded with US troops in Iraq. It follows Bravo Company, a unit stationed in Baghdad and assigned to explosive ordnance disposal work. Their daily work is disabling or otherwise dealing with IEDs, and Bigelow lets us know very effectively how dangerous the work is. It's interesting to consider how a movie that is on one level about explosions, that lets the camera linger on them almost adoringly, is definitively not an action movie. It is instead about the situation. Solid acting draws us to the characters, and solid cinematography draws us into the pressure that they feel - unrelenting pressure, uncertainty, doubt, guilt, and adrenaline.
There are obvious parallels with Catch-22: a group of men with a very dangerous job who are all somewhat crazy both because one has to be to volunteer for the job and because the job itself makes you crazy. I wouldn't characterize it as an anti-war movie, though, in the conventional sense. Instead, it's a movie about the senselessness and madness of any war, not just its particular war. Its sympathy is with everyone trapped in the mad, dangerous, unstable situation, regardless of their nationality. The movie focuses on the three main characters of Bravo Company as the days left in their deployment tick down onscreen, but it shows us glimpses of many people trapped in the situation. After watching it, I found out that it was filmed in Jordan, and that all of the Iraqi characters in the movie were played by Iraqis, many of them already professional actors forced out of the country by the war. On top of that, the filmmakers report that they were more than once shot at whilst filming. These factors definitely contribute to the movie's veracity, which is very strong.
Indeed, the Baghdad that the characters live in is nearly postapocalyptic, full of vanished splendor only seen by inference. The characters see sand, smoke, and danger, a zone of uncertainty. The movie plays with expectations well. This includes its trailer, which displays a good taste rare in Hollywood: it shows you compelling moments of the movie, but reserves the movie's full impact for the full viewing. It's a movie with a lot of impact, and I recommend it with only the above condition: don't watch it too close to In The Loop.
Why is that? In The Loop, directed by Armando Iannucci, is a political comedy. It is more or less The Office times The West Wing (or Yes, Minister, depending on which side of the Atlantic you're on). That is both why it's extremely funny and extremely depressing. It's similar to watching an episode of The Office in which the characters work for Union Carbide in December 1984. In The Loop's bickering bureaucrats are funny and biting and obscene, but watching the two movies together, one can't escape the impression that this pack of venal, short-sighted idiots sent out soldiers to die and to kill, to cleave apart a nation of millions.
While In The Loop aspires to timelessness by being very vague about the potential conflict in the Middle East that its characters are attempting to influence, right now it is unquestionably about the 2002-2003 preparation for war in Iraq. It has falsified intelligence, overconfident religious zealots, and UK-US cooperation leading up to a pivotal presentation before the UN. It may be applicable to other situations, but right now there really isn't much else you could see it as being about. The mid-level functionaries that the movie revolves around squabble and desperately try to enact their personal agendas, engaging in considerable backbiting and manuvering. If you like watching Peter Capaldi cuss people out, or James Gandolfini being amiably crude and insulting, it's great - they're both very funny whilst doing that, and the people scrambling around them are also very amusing. In the background, though, lurks the consequences of the characters' actions, the utter clusterfuck that results, and you want to reach into the film and slap them. You want to tell them that they are personally responsible for the shattered people, the shattered city, and the shattered land shown in The Hurt Locker, which ends with a danger-suited member of Delta Company marching down a street as a text block tells us "Days Left In Delta Company's Deployment: 365."
In further news about my media diet, I found a bit of credit at a local used-book store that I'd forgotten I had. I walked away with Under The Banner Of Heaven, The Assault On Reason, and a random sci-fi novel that I bought on a whim. Dove through about half of Banner today - very grim material, overall, especially on top of slowly making my way through C.J. Pascoe's Dude, You're A Fag (courtesy of rax, cheers). To summarize:
- The Hurt Locker: Grim, bad guys win in that the war is still going on and still grinding up lives for nothing.
- In The Loop: Cynical humor, bad guys win in that they get to start an unjust, evil, illegal war.
- Dude, You're A Fag: Grim, bad guys win in that American culture still programs teenaged boys to be little shits.
- Under The Banner Of Heaven: Grim, bad guys win in that there are still plenty of people in America who follow lunatic authoritarian religious teachings and/or think, in so many words, that women are property and/or think, in so many words, that God made people non-white as a punishment for sin.
- The Assault On Reason: Grim, bad guys win in that Al Gore won the 2000 election and was not made president, plus anti-rational, anti-science types are still all over the place fucking things up for us and for the future.