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The Hurt Locker
Why Now? The Hurt Locker
Thu, 17 Sep 2009
The everyday lot of a US Army bomb disposal expert in Iraq is subject matter tailor-made for suspense, but how does writer Mark Boal turn The Hurt Locker into a portrait of masculinity which has much wider resonance that the specifics of this particular conflict? Our reviewer Trevor Johnston ventures into the theatre of war.
Danger: spoilers ahead from the very first paragraph!
It’s gripping right from the opening scene. There’s a bomb under some plastic sheeting by the roadside somewhere in Iraq, and a three-man US Army EOD crew (that’s Explosive Ordinance Disposal, by the way) have to detonate it without blowing themselves sky-high in the process. This requires teamwork, and after the initial option of the remote-controlled robot falls by the wayside, Sgt Thompson (Guy Pearce) dons a massive protective suit and helmet to investigate further, while Sgt Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) keeps in radio contact over the headset, and Specialist Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) provides technical back-up while scanning the evacuated street for any new threat. If the audience has come to the film not knowing how modern bomb disposal works, they do now. These are professionals. And still it all goes kaboom!
The shock is not just that the protective suit offers scant protection in the face of an on-coming blast, but that writer Mark Boal and director Kathryn Bigelow just killed Guy Pearce, whom we’d sort of assumed would be a major character in the movie. So, it’s serious then. The stakes are set – even a highly together team can encounter mortality at any moment. We know exactly what’s waiting for the film’s central character when Sgt James (Jeremy Renner) arrives to take over from Thompson, and we wonder whether he’ll be as good a leader as his predecessor. Sure, it’s unconventional to throw in a major sequence before the protagonist enters the fray, but in this instance the writer has to introduce us to an environment where the pursuit of one’s job carries the risk of death, and the most effective way of doing that is…kaboom!
However, those whose fiendish minds click through potential screenwriting problems as they watch (yes, dear reader, that’s you), will have already twigged that there’s an instant conundrum here: once you set up a central character who’s a bomb disposal expert he can’t be killed because he’s the movie, therefore, theoretically, you’ve just sabotaged your chances of suspense. And anyway, doesn’t the EOD sergeant’s job entail a succession of essentially discrete encounters with various explosive devices? How then can you shape a sustained dramatic through-line from something so seemingly episodic?
Well…you need to be as clever as screenwriter Mark Boal, to realise that this is not just a story about bombs.
All for one, one for all?
It’s obvious from the moment we meet Sgt James, that he’s a very different individual from the departed Thompson. When Sanborn goes to welcome him, there’s a sense of a man who doesn’t want his personal space invaded, immediately causing us to wonder if he’s going to cut it as a team player. We can only make this judgment however, because we’ve seen ill-fated Thompson’s close co-ordination with his two cohorts in the opening scene, so precedent is a significant storytelling tool here. Moreover, the hint that all might not go well between James and the others will then provide an ongoing character conflict, helping to counter the episodic nature of events by stringing them along a thread of continuity. Each incident the EOD trio faces isn’t just about defusing the device and staying alive, it’s also an opportunity to develop and intensify the character relationships by expressing individual identity through action. That’s key in a story about men in battle – these guys aren’t going to sit around talking about their existential crises, yet the raison d’être of a script like this is to get inside their heads to examine whether the way they think and behave in this extreme environment has something to tell us about men in general.
Jeremy Renner as The Hurt Locker's Sgt James
(i) The initial test
First up for James and company is an IED (Improvised Explosive Device, the so-called ‘insurgents’ favourite) in the middle of a suburban street. As the regular army cower in a doorway, James sets to work. Not for him the safety-first deployment of the remote-control robot, instead he’s straight in with the armoured suit without so much as a discussion. It’s clear that he’s going to deal with the bombs his own way, which leaves Sanborn seething at the lack of communication via their headsets. It’s Sanborn’s role to keep James safe, and he can’t do that if the maverick sergeant simply ignores him. James wants to stay alive, but what he needs, surely, is to develop a stronger professional and personal connection with his comrades. This tension will be worked through in the course of the incidents which follow.
(ii) The conflict intensifies
On the next operation, James again takes huge risks in defusing a car bomb outside an embassy, and this time gets so weary of Sanborn calling him out of there, he takes his headphones off entirely – and gets a punch from Sanborn afterwards. This is individual action vs group responsibility, while their comrade Eldridge – a bystander in James and Sanborn’s particular stand-off – continues to obsess that each day will be his last.
(iii) Together at last
A firefight in the desert however, shows a different side to James, who patiently assists Sanborn, spotter to his sniper, as they eliminate the enemy who’ve been picking off the soldiers and a group of mercenaries from a vantage point in the distance. James also takes care to support an increasingly nervy Eldridge, displaying genuine leadership qualities – on his terms, of course. Having established the antipathy between James and Sanborn in the earlier sequence, this variation gives the audience time to consider whether we might be wrong about James, keeping us involved on the level of character while the repeated suspense scenarios draw an almost instinctive concern for the men’s survival.
(iv) Close, but not too close
Since escaping the firefight above has seemingly marked a new level of collaboration, the trio unwind back at base. The drink flows, confidences are shared, and we learn that seemingly responsible Sanborn isn’t ready for fatherhood while maverick James already has a son. These are important questions, which the film’s main subplot (more on this below) highlights to an even greater degree. The bonding seems to be going well, until it demands a manly display of physicality, but instead of following agreed procedure, James asserts his macho superiority over Sanborn with a surprise move, souring any suggestion of reconciliation between them. Again, the writing keeps us guessing.
(v) Fracture
The conflict between individual action and group responsibility comes to a head when James decides, off his own bat, to order the others into the dangerous backstreets to pursue whoever it was had detonated a car bomb which has created carnage. This is not their job, but maverick James has decided for them, which is to leave Eldridge’s leg riddled with bullets (and several dead Iraqis). Later, as an air ambulance ships him out, Eldridge takes James to task for needlessly causing his injuries, and James has no answer. What makes this guy tick? We’re no nearer an answer, but the questions are building.
(vi) Duel
With Eldridge out of the way, it’s down to Sanborn and James. A confrontation with a suicide bomber, where James’s near-foolhardy courage almost gets him killed provides a suitably intense action finale in a film not short on nail-chewing set-pieces. With the end of their tour looming, now’s the time for Sanborn to try and pierce James’s shell, as they drive back to base. Sanborn isn’t ready to die before he’s left a son in the world, so how does James do it? How does he face death and merely roll the dice? At this point, frustratingly for Sanborn and indeed the audience, James stonewalls again. Is the film going to leave us without getting behind the cliché of the strong, silent type? Wanting to know, ramps up the tension even more. Yet to understand what’s about to unfold, we need to take the subplot into account, since it’s a crucial part of the overall picture.
From here to paternity
Guy Pearce takes a long walk - The Hurt Locker
As has already been intimated, it’s about more than bombs. In the drunken bonding scene, the reveal is that James keeps a photo of his son under his bed…as well as components from the bombs he’s defused. They may not seem related, but actually we can read both as expressions of the way in which a man may cheat death, by proving his mastery over a device which was designed to kill him, or by leaving a child behind to perpetuate his identity after his own demise. In that same scene, Sanborn confesses his trepidation over his girlfriend’s plans to start a family, but the truth, as we later discover, is that he’s terrified he’ll be killed in action before he fathers a son. Which of course, is in direct opposition to James’s gung-ho attitude to his own mortality when he should be thinking about his baby boy back home. Character is relative, remember, and so each of these positions illuminates the other, flagging up a wider question as to why men make wars which endanger the future when they could be making babies which sustain the future?
However, since James’s little boy is thousands of miles away in the US, there would seem to be a limit as to how far the script can run with these ideas. Until that is, Mark Boal’s script astutely comes up with the device of providing a surrogate son for James in the field and developing the film’s major subplot around him. At first, we think James’s interest in a local lad who sells pirate DVDs outside the base – whom he dubs ‘Beckham’ because he likes soccer – is just a bit of character portraiture there to show James’s lighter side. However, when a later mission involves a search of an enemy bomb factory, he’s convinced that a dead body which has had explosives sewn inside to act as a booby trap is the very same child. The easy option would be simply to explode the device, but instead he risks his own life by defusing it and thus choosing not to defile the boy’s body any further. Metaphorically however, this a crucial moment, for having just seen his surrogate son’s horribly mutilated corpse, it flags up the inevitability that he will not always be able to be there to protect his own son from whatever vicissitudes life has to throw at him. His son’s life is thus beyond his control, which is anathema to a man whose daily existence plays out a repeated scenario of control over his own mortality, a self-sustaining adrenaline rush of mastery. Hold that thought: it’s the key to the film’s climactic point of self-realisation.
And it also helps fill in how the three major characters represent different attitudes to life, as visualised through their actions in combat.
Eldridge – By worrying constantly that he’s about to be killed, he’s certainly not ready for fatherhood, and instead represents the fearfulness of an abandoned child,
Sanborn – His desire to keep James safe can be seen as an enactment of his willingness to take on the responsibilities of fatherhood, though it takes the repeated anxiety of seeing James almost kill himself to get him to realise this.
James – As highlighted by the ‘Beckham’ subplot, his determination to enact his mastery over sundry explosive devices is ironically a gesture of denial against the recognition that he won’t always be there to protect his own son. It’s the anguish of fatherhood responsibility, twisted and amplified.
Bringing it all together
Sanborn’s moment of self-realisation that he wants a son occurs when driving back from the terrifying encounter with the suicide bomber which almost gets them both killed. His confession is clearly intended to get James to share, but it doesn’t generate a response. That’s because Boal’s script very smartly keeps James’s moment of self-realisation for the only context which could draw together the film’s twin strands of bomb disposal and fatherhood – at home in America with his small son.
The sappy, saccharine move here would be for James to look at the angelic little lad and realise that he’s gotten it all wrong, that he should be at home building a new life for the family. That’s not what happens, of course. Instead, James’s moment of self-realisation is to weigh everything up and decide that the only thing that interests him anymore, having felt completely detached from normal consumer society and family life in the wake of his combat experiences, is to take refuge in the rush of playing out his control over mortality. So, while all rational and compassionate thought suggests the opposite, the decision which translates his self-realisation into action is to get back for another tour of duty in Iraq. Cue audience with heart in mouth, and end of story.
...and the winner is The Hurt LockerHints and tips
• The world of work can supply the writer with a readymade basis for a story, but it’s really only worth looking at if you can use the characters’ jobs in a way that encapsulates their outlook on life, since a great storyteller always tries to get beneath the surface to explore deeper questions of morality etc.
• Precedent is very important when setting up such a story, since the process that the characters go through can be fascinating in and of itself, yet also suggest areas of conflict which the writer will be able to develop. Work is often, by its very nature, a repetitive thing, so it’s important to thread in continuity (through a sustained character conflict, for instance) in other areas of the drama.
• Think about how you can represent what’s really going on in a character’s head by playing out their concerns in displaced or metaphoric form. Finding a surrogate child in the story for someone isolated from their own son is not necessarily an original device, for instance, but it’s still potentially dramatically effective.
• Self-realisation in itself is not enough. Action (or at the very least the intention of action) is required to show what the character has learned in the course of their journey, thus answering the key questions about them which the writer has set up earlier on If you’re going to ask the question, you have to give the audience the answer.
©Trevor Johnston/The Script Factory 2009
If you'd like to discuss this review with Trevor Johnston you can email him at info@scriptfactory.co.uk - and to read other reviews by Trevor click here.