Each war or conflict acquires its own Hollywood aesthetic. Each aesthetic is susceptible to revision following how subsequent conflicts shaped the remembrance of previous ones: for instance, "Saving Private Ryan" dragged the mechanics of death back into the cold morning light following the hallucinogenic murk of Nam films.
What's always at stake is the "soldier's experience" and our need to understand what we supposedly cannot, to identify with the impossible. This assumed responsibility to identify is the ultimate criterion separating the action thriller from the war film is what haloes films with Oscar potential and what outstrips political commentary.
At the ceremonies this year, attendees were proud of "The Hurt Locker," their "apolitical" war film, and because Hollywood could address contemporary issues without being stereotyped as aloof and ignorant hippies by a better informed media.
It's telling that Herzog's "Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans," with its Guantanamo Bay quips, didn't make the invite list. How can one compare Herzog's meditations on conquest and nature with those of James Cameron?
I love how this year's Oscar's unfolded. One-by-one the awards went to "The Hurt Locker" over Avatar as if the Academy goaded us into overestimating how fatuous the Oscars have become only to change gears at the last moment by rewarding the little guy.
Of course, "The Hurt Locker" really isn't a little guy and needed a big film like Avatar to fool us into believing it was. But P.R. schemes aside, what of the soldier's experience did "The Hurt Locker" address and why did its representation of this experience win an Oscar?
"War is a drug," the tag-line reads, entering the broad concept of war into a language of addictions which has already claimed everything from stock-broking to religious experience. Indeed, the movie is addictive—the trick is in the editing.
All of us bring to a film a set of unconscious assumptions of how narrative should be integrated with shot-types, pacing, etc. If a film doesn't use enough close-ups or contain enough "cuts," it must be art-house. If settings are brightly lit, it must be comedy. Typically, the 21st-century film that tries to mean something violates one or at most two of the stylistic conventions of its genre.
"The Hurt Locker" wins us over with the editing. The camera lingers about four or five seconds longer on most shots, creating an uneasy space where nothing happens but supposedly should. The strength of the move is in this simple procedure.
Outside of the terror gags, most of its moments serve to grippingly reaffirm the stereotype of the junky-soldier in a way that is compelling if not always insightful.
I want to compare the success of "The Hurt Locker's" technical virtuosity in recreating the "experience" of the soldier with another type of war film. Screen-writer Paddy Chayefsky's "The Americanization of Emily", starring James Garner and Julie Andrews, combats the last sacred stronghold of positive-values from which modern-warfare defends itself against cynical peaceniks—the band-of-brothers, the soldier-willing-to-die.
Don't honor the soldiers, Lt. Commander Charles Madison (himself to be martyred in a Navy P.R. coup) argues against the widowed Emily Barham's jingoist devotion.
Chayefsky isn't interested in the emotional experience of voluntary self-sacrifice of brothers-in-arms and refuses outdated interjections of chivalry into his reading of war's infrastructure. In a less obtrusive way, "The Hurt Locker" exposes the weakness of the Spielbergian/ HBO war narrative by questioning (if not slighting) the underlying motivations behind the most sacred of events—the yellow-ribbon martyrdom.
What's at stake in "The Hurt Locker" and "The Americanization of Emily" aren't the lives of soldiers but the lives of human beings who can become addicted to an adrenaline rush, as well as a need to experience love for their friends by getting blown up in front of them ,as opposed to, say, swapping books or going to the movies.