When The Hurt Locker won an Oscar for Best Picture, a feeding frenzy of the expected sort kicked into gear: Monday morning brought reports that an Iraq veteran from the unit Hurt Locker screenwriter Mark Boal was embedded with filed suit, claiming the film exploited his story. It’s an unpleasant reminder of what it means to hit the big time in the entertainment industry.
It would be easy, too, to jump into the swirl of gossip and nonsense that suddenly surrounded this film of modest means. The plots are many: the film’s producer sent an out-of-bounds email to members of the Academy knocking an unnamed nominee with a budget of $500 million, a clear reference to Avatar. The celebrity gossip set saw a juicy rivalry to tout in the Avatar versus Hurt Locker matchup, since Kathryn Bigelow and James Cameron used to be married.
All that’s titillating, maybe even fascinating for a few minutes—it’s easy to revel in the metaphorical echoes of Cameron’s bloated Titanic of a movie not persuading the Academy to crown him “king of the world” again.
The lack of another Oscar won’t, of course, stop the sycophantic interviews in which Cameron speaks of a film that unironically employs the most worn-out of worn-out lines—”You’re not in Kansas anymore”—as if it were Citizen Kane, 2001 and Raging Bull rolled into one. Cameron is irretrievably gone into the haze of his own press-fueled myth. Ignoring him doesn’t seem to be an option.
The Hurt Locker has been knocked by some veterans as an inaccurate portrayal of their lives in Iraq; its psychological exploration of war is not unique. On the other hand, its minimalist story and its filmmaking seem aimed at something else—Bigelow didn’t create a pseudo-documentary so much as a piece of art. The film’s multiple-camera technique and emphasis on accidents of place like capturing locals on nearby balconies combine with a keening, hazy soundtrack to create claustrophobia and intense suspense. It’s draining to watch. The film’s victory was a refreshing endorsement of filmmaking as art.
But the triumph of The Hurt Locker resonated for me for another reason. When I woke to the news of the film’s win on NPR the morning after the Oscars, it had a curious effect: I drove to work happy to live in the Valley. Snow gleamed high on the mountains, and the clear light turned the river blue. It was the kind of day when a vast wheel seems to have turned, when everything readies itself for the imminent spring. But beyond such niceties of place, the cultural proclivities of (the few) places like the Valley seemed to have gained a nice pat on the back.
The Hurt Locker is an independent film that started small, with a limited release, and gradually snowballed into making a bigger mark. The Valley didn’t directly have anything to do with that, of course, but it feels good to know that exceptional places like this foster independent artistic effort, substance over style, and distinctive aesthetic over mass appeal. Places devoted to independent film, places like Pleasant Street Theater and Amherst Cinema, can last here. That’s even better than snow on the mountains on a clear day.
I couldn’t help but think, too, of a recent local triumph of art taking on the difficult issues of war in a distinctive way. Amherst artist Matthew Mitchell, the subject of ongoing coverage in the pages of the Advocate for his 100 Faces of War Experience portraits, just got an invitation from Rep. John Olver to display his work in a Congressional office building. Mitchell’s luminous oils are a mobile monument of sorts, an artistic record without explicit endorsement or condemnation of war, focusing on faces of military and civilian Americans who’ve gone to Iraq and/or Afghanistan.
For those of us who often confront the reality that efforts of artistic bent that fly in a place like the Valley don’t have a ready audience everywhere in America, it is satisfying to see that, once in a while, the grand-scale arbiters of taste get one right.