Men and Women at War: The Hurt Locker and Inglourious Basterds

I like war films. I might as well admit that right off. I find combat represented on the screen compelling to watch, and I don't suppose I'm alone, which is why the war film has been around so long. I saw two interesting war films this summer, very different from one another, but both fascinating in their own ways. Below I've tried to discuss their similarities and differences, and speculate on what the war film might have to say to us all.


MEN AND WOMEN AT WAR

The war film—what is it good for? The human planet seems to live in a perpetual state of aggression, so if war is around constantly it’s no surprise that stories about it follow closely behind. I won’t speculate on whether war is the natural state of the species or learned social behavior, but the war film, as a product of popular culture, is most definitely learned--learned, preserved, and passed down from one generation to the next by the rules of genre. This past summer saw the release of two war films so different from one another in every way that taken together they provide a course of instruction on how flexible those genre rules are, and how rich a field for character development and narrative invention the war film can be.

Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker was released in June to critical acclaim, most of it deserved. An austere character study set in contemporary Iraq, her film focuses on Sgt. William James (Jeremy Renner), leader of an elite bomb disposal squad who likes his job a little too much. James takes over the unit after the well-liked former leader is killed, and he immediately begins to alienate his new crew (Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty) by taking unnecessary risks and acting impulsively instead of doing things by the book. On his first assignment, he rashly removes his protective gear (a concussion suit that makes him look like a deep sea diver), as his two subordinates watch in horror. Though it ultimately serves his purpose--the bulky suit impedes his efforts at disarming a complex car bomb--his actions place not only himself but his teammates at risk, since they do not know how to react to the unorthodox situation he creates. Afterward, they express their displeasure, but James is unimpressed. His entire attitude says, “I do things my way, get used to it.” But how can his men rely on a leader who seems indifferent to danger, theirs as well as his?

This conflict threads its way through Locker, an episodic film held together mainly by Renner’s quiet but forceful characterization of the unpredictable James. As each new threat presents itself, James approaches it in a way that is unexpected and personal, while his confused men try to decide if he knows what he’s doing or he’s crazy. The answer may be a bit of both, although the film gives us only a couple of tantalizing glimpses into James’s psyche. In one of them, he forms a bond with an Iraqi boy who sells bootleg dvds to soldiers. Later, in one of the film’s grisliest sequences, he and his team are called to dismantle a bomb that’s been placed inside the body of a murdered young boy, and James becomes convinced it’s the one he has befriended. Angry and seeking revenge, the normally cool James slips into occupied territory at night to discover the ones responsible. The result of his actions—reckless even by his standards—almost leads to greater tragedy.

Because the film maintains such a restricted focus, its depiction of the war is filtered almost entirely through James’ experience of it; as a consequence, the meaning of what we see depends largely on the emotional impact it has on him. But the detached and enigmatic James is never easy to read, and Renner’s understated performance deliberately keeps the viewer at a distance, guessing at what’s going on behind his squinting eyes. What is clear is that James’ fight is never one about politics or mere survival. For him, unlike the others, the disarming of bombs is a personal challenge that feeds his need for excitement: he’s hooked on the danger, addicted to the feeling of being one false move away from obliteration. Amid the chaos of battle, James pits himself against time and the ingenuity of the saboteurs, and lives for the rush that comes when he overcomes both. The outcome of the combat around him is relevant only insofar as it enables him to play and win this deadly game.

The Hurt Locker is disenchanted about its war, but it’s not exactly an anti-war film. War doesn’t seem to be the problem here; rather, it’s the personality that succumbs to the lure of its violence, the man for whom war is a drug. The reckless devotion to risk-taking is an expression of individuality that threatens the safety of his team, the social unit whose survival depends on each member performing his duty responsibly. Bigelow’s film features many of the horrors of combat, and makes effective use of the aridity and bleakness of the Iraqi war’s setting to comment metaphorically on its purpose, but lurking behind the rubble of the ruined cityscapes and countryside is a somewhat conservative message about military conduct. The war itself is never directly examined.

Every big war is made up of a lot of little wars, and The Hurt Locker takes an unflinching look at a particularly troubling one. The renegade soldier is not a new figure in the war film by any means. One could identify a whole subgenre devoted to his exploits, and certain films have given themselves over entirely to the debate surrounding individual needs vs. group rights in wartime. Because combat involves a social unit under extreme duress, maybe that is the central question of all war films, whether they explicitly address it or not. Films as different as Air Force (1943) and The War Lover (1962) consider it soberly, others like The Dirty Dozen (1967) have guilty fun with it, and still others such as Sylvester Stallone’s cartoonish Rambo films exploit it so irresponsibly they abandon the war film’s moral field of vision altogether. I do not mind violence as self-expression in action movies, but in the context of war I’m troubled by the message such abandonment to unilateral action can send. The Hurt Locker neither condones nor condemns James’ behavior, but clearly observes it with concern: this is why war might exist, it is thinking, because too many men can’t live any other way.

Which brings us to the summer’s other foray into the combat zone, writer-director Quentin Tarantino’s bizarre World War II fantasy, Inglourious Basterds. Tarantino’s films are populated with people who can’t live any other way than through violence—criminals, cops, hitmen/women, martial artists. Now he adds soldiers to their ranks. Basterds is appropriately titled: the film could be the love child of The Dirty Dozen and To Be or Not to Be (1942), Ernst Lubitsch’s famous wartime “Nazi comedy.” If you can imagine such a thing. Fortunately, you don’t have to, because that’s QT’s job, creating films of odd parentage--visually stunning, narratively daring, and frequently exasperating mélanges of differing styles and influences drawn from his favorite movies, genres, pulp novels, comic books, popular music, and maybe even breakfast cereals. His films are eclectic, to say the least. Inglourious Basterds does not break the mold.

But it damn near blows it up. Basterds features a typical Tarantino story filled with multiple plotlines and characters crossing each others’ paths in ways that seem both random and fated. The chaos is carefully orchestrated, however, around two revenge tales taking place in Occupied France. The first concerns the French side of the war. In a grim and moving prologue, a Jewish family is discovered hiding in a farmhouse and brutally executed by SS troops under the command of Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz). The lone survivor is a teenage girl who runs away once the shooting starts. She runs all the way to Paris, where the film finds her a few years later operating a cinema. Now an attractive young woman, Shosanna (Melanie Laurent) catches the eye of a German private (Daniel Bruhl) who shares her interest in films. In fact, he has just finished starring in one himself, a propaganda picture based on his own wartime exploits, which have made him the darling of the Third Reich. The Reich badly needs heroes like him because the war is not going well (it is 1944, shortly after D Day), so the German High Command decides to boost morale with a gala premiere of the film in Paris. The lovestruck private insists it be held in Shosanna’s theater as a way to curry favor with her. Shosanna has so far managed to fend off his advances, and he sees this as the final maneuver in his campaign to get her into bed. It is a very big mistake.

Meanwhile, in another part of Occupied France, a group of Americans is fighting a different, but still very personal, kind of war. Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) is in charge of the “Basterds,” a special unit of Jewish-American soldiers trained to fight commando style behind enemy lines. They have been recruited for this task specifically because of their Jewish heritage: Raine is counting on their desire for revenge against the Nazis to make them ruthless killing machines. Nicknamed the “Apache,” he demands that they not only kill as many Nazi soldiers as they can but scalp them as well. His intent is to create a reputation for his band so fearsome that its very name will strike terror into German soldiers’ hearts. To this end, the Basterds always leave one soldier alive to spread the word of their savagery and seeming invincibility. It's safe to say their strategy works: in addition to killing all his comrades, they carve a swastika into the survivor’s forehead so he will carry the mark of his Nazi past the rest of his life.

These two storylines are eventually brought together by a third: British intelligence learns that the film premiere will be attended by all the top members of the Nazi Party-- Goering, Goebbels, Bormann, even der Fuehrer himself. An opportunity to wipe out the upper echelon of Nazi power in one blow is too valuable to pass up, so they send one of their agents to Germany to lead the Basterds in an assault on the cinema. The choice of agent is wholly indicative of Tarantino’s sly sense of humor and adroit manipulation of the absurd. Lt. Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender) is an erudite gentleman spy, but he’s also a former film critic, and for this reason is considered—by no less than Winston Churchill himself!—the perfect man to lead an attack on a movie theater. Maybe Tarantino has felt so manhandled by critics over the years he imagines they want to destroy the theaters in which his films are showing and assault his audiences. Or maybe he’s mocking the inadequacy of critics to judge the kinds of movies he’s making. Whatever the underlying joke might be, Hicox, though earnest, proves not to be the right man for the job after all. Before their plans are finalized, the Basterds are on their own in the plot to take out Hitler and his inner circle.

But they will get help nonetheless. Unknown to everyone else, Shosanna is planning a reception of her own for the Nazi elite. Consumed by the desire for revenge, she decides to burn the theater down while the audience is engrossed in watching the film. Her plan is to bar the doors from the outside to keep anyone from escaping, then ignite a stack of film reels behind the theater’s screen. The highly combustible nitrate stock will spread the fire quickly, and almost before they know what is happening to them, the Nazi audience will be immolated. But before this happens, her vengeance demands something more. She makes a short film in which she indicts the Nazis for their crimes against her people and her nation, and then informs them of the horrible fate that awaits them at her hands. Splicing this piece of film into the movie’s final reel, it provides the cue for the conflagration to begin. The revenge Shosanna seeks is both historical and personal in nature: seated in the audience alongside Hitler and company is her nemesis, Col. Hans Landa, perpetrator of her family’s murder.

This, then, is the set-up for the cataclysmic and provocative end to Tarantino’s strange and violent daydream about the Second World War. Because Tarantino likes to take risks, the denouement of his film both fulfills our expectations and shocks us by doing so. Set in an Occupied France that could exist only in one of his fever dreams, Basterds provides rather far-fetched Alternative History, taking the “What if?” exploration of its subject to an extreme at once comical and disturbing. But also emotionally fulfilling: the film is, after all, a revenge fantasy for two populations horrifically wronged by the Nazis, Jewish victims of the Holocaust and the conquered French people. These populations come together in Shosanna, the French Jewish girl, who achieves a kind of apotheosis in her final moments, her oversize image staring down from the movie screen engulfed in flames like a fiery Avenging Angel. For the Jews and French who suffered, this is a moment of long overdue, if purely cinematic, triumph.

As war films, The Hurt Locker and Inglourious Basterds are comrades in arms, but stylistically they belong to opposite camps. Locker is a study in understatement, from Renner’s internalized acting to the cinematography’s bland palette of desert tans and grays, and Bigelow’s handheld camera makes frequent forays into the streets to capture the look and feel of the Iraqi conflict with an immediacy that gives the illusion of being unplanned. By contrast, everything in Basterds is designed to show the craft at work. Photographed in rich, vibrant colors to invoke Hollywood’s bygone Technicolor era, each shot is artfully composed and framed for maximum movie effect. The complicated story veers between low black comedy and high melodrama, and the performances follow suit, ranging from the sublimely ridiculous (Pitt, superb as the macabre Raine) to the introspective and tragic (Laurent, unfortunately far too passive as Shosanna). Falling somewhere between these extremes are Fassbender’s elegant but twitty Archie Hicox, and a delightfully droll turn by Diane Kruger as a Marlene Dietrich-like German movie actress who is spying for the Allies. The film belongs, however, to Waltz as the sardonic, manipulative, ultra-polished Col. Landa, the character who bridges the two “halves” of the movie (his encounter with Raine at the doomed premiere leads to the film’s amusing and cynical coda). Landa insinuates himself into every corner of the plot, his presence signifying the fate that links all the players together, and Waltz’s charming, suave portrayal is so convincing it manages to make Landa’s detestable presence welcome.

Despite their considerable differences, the two films do share a core belief: the awareness that our fascination with violence and danger is what makes war addictive and the war film compelling to watch. And herein lies the most interesting contrast of all: whereas Locker views the addiction to violence as a threat to the group, in Basterds it’s what holds it together. The over-indulgence in violent, risk-taking behavior is the bond the Nazi-hunting soldiers share—it gives their band the cohesiveness it needs to carry out its bloody work. Tarantino’s film, like so many of his others, inhabits a mostly absurd world where institutions are faulty and corrupt and human relations destructive--it’s only the violence that makes sense. Basterds revels in its depiction of war as an irresistible opportunity to indulge the urge for destruction--war as the will to chaos. But in this contradictory world, war can also be a purifying agent, like the flames that burn away the evil of Nazi Germany during the film’s climax.

This view of war could have troubling implications, if Tarantino’s film weren’t basically smoke and mirrors. The movie-within-a-movie plot showcases the self-reflexivity Tarantino loves to tease his audiences with. Referencing other films and inventing genre pastiches remind us constantly we are watching a movie, so Tarantino is not seriously advocating war as either beneficial to the human race or a bloody good time. Not even his harshest critics would accuse him of that. But it’s worth taking a moment to consider his portrayal of World War II, which still commands respect as America’s last Good War. So what does it mean that QT has detonated a bomb right in the middle of this perception of it? The savagery and black comedy of his cloak-and-bayonet tale presents an image of the U.S. military that is closer to Dr. Strangelove (1964) than to The Longest Day (1962), Saving Private Ryan (1998), or any number of other serious-minded WWII films. The Basterds’ bloodthirsty behavior, urged on by Raine’s screwy orders, seriously taints their mission, however great the crimes they are avenging. As for the historical villains, Hitler and Goebbels, they are presented as caricatures that would fit right into Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be, and are perhaps just one campy gesture away from Mel Brooks’ The Producers (1968). In other words, this is not your grandfather’s Second World War.

There have been other World War II comedies, of course, but I can think of no other film that so radically alters the way the Allies’ fighting of that war is represented. In addition to the basic formula of Good vs. Evil, Tarantino gives us Crazy vs. Crazier, with your choice of which side is which. The movie cheerfully writes its own history as well, as if to say the version of the war you’ve been taught up to now is irrelevant, a fiction to be revised as easily as this film does it, or eradicated, like the make-believe architecture of a cinema palace consigned to the flames. The fire that purges history of evil can also burn away its most cherished truths.

As must be the case in all war films, the central conflicts of The Hurt Locker and Inglourious Basterds are conflicts on the world stage, and it’s the different ways they conceive of and utilize their wars in developing story and character that accounts for their divergent personalities. Locker collapses its world conflict into the psyche of one soldier, who serves as a microcosm for the relation between war and the human race. Basterds is more concerned with the internal tensions that define genre, and rewrites its particular war’s history in order to stretch the war film’s boundaries. But they meet on the common ground of one truth that can’t be rewritten: war helps define us, and for that reason each new one is, inevitably, a continuation of the last.