From The Hurt Locker to American Sniper: how Hollywood tried to tackle the Iraq war
When The Hurt Locker, perhaps the most significant film about the Iraq war, won best picture, it also made a dubious kind of history, posting the worst box office of any previous winner. It had only made $11m at the time – and then several more millions after the Oscar bump – despite the pleadings of critics who insisted, correctly, that director Kathryn Bigelow and her screenwriter, Mark Boal, had made a studiously apolitical thriller about an army bomb squad that spends its days defusing improvised explosive devices. And what could be more exciting than that? How many hit movies and TV shows have been built around the tick-tickticking of bombs that are about to go off ? Too many to count.
And yet, five years into the war, Americans simply did not want to hear about it. The dramatic events of the invasion were over within a few months: Saddam Hussein’s regime had been toppled, along with his statue in Baghdad’s Firdos Square, and George W Bush had flown on to an aircraft carrier with a “Mission Accomplished” banner, declaring that major combat operations were over. The minor combat operations would continue indefinitely, of course, as the power vacuum was filled by the chaos of a growing insurgency and great spasms of sectarian violence. That’s the Iraq war of The Hurt Locker – a rudderless, perilous, borderline nihilistic endeavor that politicians could not risk their careers to end. It didn’t matter that Bigelow and Boal were not making an explicitly anti-war film, focused on visceral, exciting, on-theground experiences. The backdrop was too much of a bummer.
The cinematic history of the Iraq war has not been entirely written, even 20 years after it started. Most of the major Hollywood films about Vietnam – The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Casualties of War – were produced well after the war, when the urgency of an ongoing conflict could ease into perspective about its costs. Yet there’s reason to be pessimistic about the risk-averse, IP-addicted studios of the 21st century dipping back into a war that it rarely bothered to engage with in the first place. Keep in mind: The Hurt Locker was independently produced and distributed by Summit Entertainment, which made a little money with the Twilight movies before getting gobbled up by Lionsgate.
Much like The Hurt Locker, many of the films that did get made about Iraq kept the focus on individual heroics and traumas, rather than the murkier, decidedly unheroic issues of how we got into this mess in the first place. Of the two most notable exceptions, the first was Oliver Stone’s 2008 biopic W, which folded the Iraq war into the larger story of George W Bush’s life, as he made his improbable rise from a wayward, hard-drinking, mediocre failson to a two-term president eager to settle his father’s scores. Stone had made his reputation on Vietnam films like Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July, which reflected his own disillusionment as a war veteran. But W turned to be more like Stone’s