Perhaps that rightwing campaign was instigated after someone happened to read Bigelow's 2008 remarks about the movie, published in the Internet Movie Data Base: (www.imdb.com/name/nm0000941/bio)
"Perhaps just because I just came off The Hurt Locker and I'm thinking of the war and I think it's a deplorable situation. It's a great medium in which to speak about that," Bigelow said."This is a war that cannot be won. Why are we sending troops over there?Well, the only medium I have, the only opportunity I have, is to use film. There will always be issues I care about." (emphasis supplied)
As suggested above, it seems clear to me that Bigelow wanted to show the reality of what U.S. troops face in Iraq, which she has done brilliantly, and her Best Director Oscar is well-earned. But she didn't want to bring overt politics into the movie. Now that the film is on the fast-track to financial mass-success, she's got to try to wrap the film in pro-military trappings to balance out her earlier questioning of the reasons for the war.
True, "The Hurt Locker" should have been made and released many years ago, long before the U.S. had started its slow withdrawal from active combat and maybe even from the country next year. But what makes the film so powerful is that what appears on the screen is of universal application to all wars and to all troops, of whatever nation, facing an enemy in deadly combat.
Certainly, the film can easily refer to U.S. behavior in Afghanistan, yet another misadventure in which American lives will be lost for a war that cannot be won.
ART VS. THE ARTIST
There is a larger issue, one I can only touch on briefly here: How should liberals/progressives react to brilliant works by artists who do not share their politics, indeed may be antagonistic to their politics? Is it OK to laud the work of art as art but to denounce the artist's underlying point of view?
Leni Riefenstahl's two films "Olympia" and "The Triumph of the Will," for example, in the 1930s and '40s, clearly were fascist propaganda films, the impact of which was to glorify the Nazi campaign to take over Europe. It's easy to dismiss those films on that ground, but one can't dismiss them aesthetically. They are brilliant works of art.
It's a generalization but I think based on some truth: Artists, in the main, being those who raise questions and push conventional envelopes, tend to congregate on the more liberal end of the spectrum.
But there are a goodly number of great artists on the right, many of them anti-Semitic or racist or colonialist in mentality. Does one dismiss or boycott or condemn their exceptional, exciting work because in their private life, the artists are biased and bigoted?
Is it possible, or even desirable, to separate the art from the artist?
Let's deal with that ticklish conundrum at another time. (Or you can get the discussion started by contacting me: >>
crisispapers@hotmail.com<i>Bernard Weiner for nearly two decades reviewed films and plays for the San Francisco Chronicle. A Ph.D. in government & international relations, he has taught at universities in California and Washington and currently serves as co-editor of The Crisis Papers (www.crisispapers.org).</i>
Copyright 2010 by Bernard Weiner.
First published by The Crisis Papers 3/8/02.
www.crisispapers.org/essays10w/hurtlocker.htm
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