Hurt Locker: The Movie

For some reason I was really looking forward to seeing the Oscar Nominated Hurt Locker, even dreaming about it. I knew I was going to get a lot of metaphorical mileage out of this film just from watching the promotions on TV. War is an Addiction is the theme message of the movie, but it is a little more than that if you dig a little deeper. One could say Death in an Addiction, since war is about death and this movie is all about the addiction of being made to feel totally alive by being close to not being alive. The contrast of death in war and death at home is very clear when James, our heroic bomb disposal specialist goes home and feels the death in being normal, cleaning out the gutter, choosing cereal in the grocery store. So he returns to life…..in death.

James wore his bomb shelter as a suit when he went to work. One night drunk he even slept in it, as though it were some kind of oxygen tank he needed to breath through. Combat and cutting the wires to a bomb are meditation, a single minded focus of the mind on the present moment, and if the mind strays into random thought for one moment you are dead. So death is the great guru who keeps one’s mind/body/soul absolutely working as one.

“What’s the best way to disarm a bomb?” the colonel asked James. “Not getting killed,” James said. Perhaps, and just perhaps, one reason our nation fights so many wars is that being in the military, being a hero, is an addiction. We do it so well—the best fighting force man has every had. And why do soldiers have such a difficult time adjusting to our “normal” society when they return? There is death here. We have swept death out of sight. No dead bodies anywhere. No risk anywhere. We have insurance and safe wall against every threat. Let a threat happen anywhere in our social web and we are on it,cleaning it up, finding out what happened, and vowing that it will never happen again. Our mission is to remove death from life……

And what is the result. We are addicted to death. We blow up stuff, we shoot people, we fly plans into buildings, and then there is all the extreme sports that flaunt death, pushing the envelope because our nervous systems require greater and greater hits of death. And our entertainment is a feast on death. Horror, scary death, funny death, mystery death, but safe death. In a culture that fears death, death become the obsession. And war…ah, war….the fast track to death. One gets medals and a parade for just getting close to death.