Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Robert in Toronto.
I thought The Hurt Locker was one of the best movies of the year, so I was particularly interested to read Alisa at PostBourgie on critiques of the movie that have come from within the military. Those critiques seem to come down to a couple of arguments, first that the team that's at the center of the movie would work in greater conjunction with other troops, that the main character's run through Baghdad is suicidal and wouldn't actually happen, and that it's not true to the emotional experiences of soldiers in war, or that factual operational inaccuracies make it impossible for servicemembers to enjoy the film. I can't speak to the first or the third point, though I do think it's plausible that William James, the main character acted so beautifully by Jeremy Renner, is suicidal at a certain point in the movie, perhaps even for all of it.
But what I really want to get at is a distinction Alisa makes in the post that intrigues me. She writes:
Is The Hurt Locker meant to be an action movie or a war movie?If it supposed to be an action movie is most certainly does its job and is quite enjoyable on that level. You’re on the edge of your seat. People get shot. Things blow up. Viewed like that factual inaccuracies need not matter that much – the main aim is to try to create a certain feel and reaction in the audience. However, if it’s meant to be a war movie then the inaccuracies do matter because it’s an attempt at recreating the actual lived experience of the estimated 2 million individuals who have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001. In my mind The Hurt Locker hints at wanting to be viewed as a war movie with the preface “War is a drug.” but the events the follow in the movie speak more to the individual experiences of Sergeant James rather than the collective feelings of soldiers.
When it comes to nonfiction, I brook no tolerance for authors who use composites, elide facts, or who make things up to get at something that's supposed to be "emotionally true." I tend to think that if your material isn't powerful enough to stand up without enhancement, you should write fiction and label it as such, instead of trying to co-opt the power that truth gives a narrative.
But The Hurt Locker falls into an interesting space. It's clearly fiction, but it is also fiction that aims to get at the truth of an extraordinarily difficult, fraught set of experiences that certainly don't have the same emotional impact for everyone who goes through them. It's a much more specific project than a movie like Dear John, which while it uses the framework of military service, is aimed quite generally at romantics everywhere. Under those circumstances, what are its obligations to be factual? How do those obligations interact with the film's resources, and with narrative necessity? Do those obligations conflict with the desire to make a movie that's comprehensible to a mass audience? I don't necessarily have the answers to these questions, but I think they're worth pondering. Factual accuracy and truth have greater claims on some artistic projects than on others.