O wad some Power the gift tae gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
An foolish notion.
From Robert Burns, To a Louse
The course Burns commends has, of late, become unfashionable. Instead of observing others unlike ourselves and reporting back, we have been enjoined to comment on things within our ken and to leave others alone. Sometimes those who wish to comment on others–on those unlike themselves–are even chased away with sticks. Whole critical industries are devoted to writings from this or that minority group, or this or that victim group, forgetting that the first task of all imaginative literature (in which I include cinema) is to engender empathy in the reader or viewer, to make us imagine people and places at least partly unlike ourselves. It’s even better if the writer can engender readerly empathy for things wholly unlike us or outside our ken. Homer even makes you pity his horses.
This focus on the local and familiar has, of course, diversified literature at the expense of its imaginative depth. Our writers are licorice allsorts, but none of them can make you care about their human characters as much as you care about one of Homer’s horses. We seldom have to dust off our willing suspension of disbelief and ask whether the writer pulled off the high wire act or not, for the simple reason that most writers no longer try walking across Niagara Falls on a length of rope. This, I think, is a loss, and while diversity is nice, it is only nice, and perhaps it is time to reward imaginative power again.
A good opportunity to sample a large imaginative vision is to watch Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, to date the only decent film about the Iraq War. This film succeeds because it honours warriors without expecting that they should be other than what they are. Unlike the preachy failures Redacted and Syriana, Bigelow’s film is painted on a much smaller canvas: a three man bomb-disposal squad in Iraq when the IED war was at its height (2004) and it seemed that the United States was getting nowhere. The Burnsian skill of Bigelow’s film is that she gifts us a woman’s vision of warriors, and does so with extraordinary skill and psychological insight. Some people, unfortunately, find this threatening:
What’s the point of this metaphor? It’s that I’m still coming to grips with how a woman could possibly have dreamed up this spartan American soldier in Iraq, who, while obsessively romancing death as a bomb-squad ace, outdoes the most extreme images of machismo ever produced by mainstream America. While Wayne set the testosterone standard in playing characters who lived to fight, his guys also found time to love women — Ethan’s Martha (Dorothy Jordan) in “The Searchers” and the Ringo Kid’s Dallas (Claire Trevor) in “Stagecoach,” to name two.
When they bonded with young, earnest boys, Wayne’s men became meaningful mentors — Gillom Rogers (Ron Howard) in “The Shootist” couldn’t have grown up without the wit and wisdom of Wayne’s John Bernard Books. But Will, with his Wayne-ian steely gaze, his laconic ease at the portals of death, and his patented hero saunter, loves “just one thing,” as he tells his baby boy before leaving him, maybe forever, to return to the killing fields of Iraq. And it isn’t women or kids.
The same critic goes on to complain about an absence of rom-coms at this year’s Oscars. A woman director, it seems, is to be penalised for seeing men as others see them, for giving us Burns’s gift. It is very sad. This despite the greatest imaginative art being about the ability to get inside other people’s heads, you know, like Tolstoy did to Anna Karenina and Jane Austen did to Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice.
It is also fashionable, these days, to pretend that all soldiers come back from the front damaged beyond repair, unable to become full and fit members of society again. It is similarly fashionable to run down what they do while at the front. In America at least, this quinella no longer puts bums on seats, hence the failure of Redacted and Syriana. The Hurt Locker–apart from its deliberately confined vision–captures the extent to which some men are extraordinarily good at war, and that this skill does not make them bad men or cruel men, just different men from the common run of man (and woman) hood. The line ‘war is a drug’ comes from Chris Hedges, and is featured as part of a larger quotation at the start of the film:
The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug.
Will James (Jeremy Renner) may be crazy brave, even drugged on war, but he is very good at what he does. And he likes it. He is also less good at other things: the scene where this consummate warrior is all but defeated by the Wal-Mart cereal aisle back home is chilling in its intensity and power. He is not, however, a bad father–that is made very clear. He just likes other things more than fatherhood. Quite a lot of men do; ditto with women and motherhood. It may not be fashionable to say this, but it remains true.
James is joined by Sanborn (Anthony Mackie)–a sane and seasoned operator–and Eldridge (Brian Geraghty), the squad’s newbie. Sanborn is initially hostile to James, partly because he thinks he takes too many risks and partly because James’s predecessor in title was popular and well liked, not least of all by Sanborn himself. At one point he and Eldridge seriously consider manufacturing a ‘blue on blue‘ incident, so irritating does Sanborn find his new commander.
This hostility is diverted when the three men encounter a group of British mercenaries hunting down high ranking members of Saddam’s erstwhile government, featured–as you may recall–in the form of a deck of cards. Led by Ralph Fiennes, the Brits have gone Lawrence of Arabia native, and the Americans initially mistake them for insurgents. When this misidentification is overcome, the mixed group finds itself under fire from real insurgents, and there then follows fifteen minutes of the most suspenseful cinema you will ever see. This is broken by unintentional humour that is never forced or contrived: Fiennes’s character coyly reminding Sanborn that, ‘ah, we’re on the same side,’ or a soldier’s rifle jamming because the ammunition cartridge has been soaked with blood (necessitating extensive spit and polish in order to be made serviceable again).
Kathryn Bigelow is being heavily tipped for the Best Director Oscar. If she wins, it will be because she has held a mirror up to an aspect of humanity and made us see things we didn’t notice before. That’s the best, I think, we can expect of the narrative arts: they remind us what real life is like, if we’re willing to be reminded.
