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-tick-ticking 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-the-ground experiences. The backdrop was too much of a bummer.
