Two Horrors for Tonight

Plenty of people comment on the movies they’ve seen. This is about 1½ movies that I have not seen.

Movie #1: just what we need, another adolescent fantasy using the Holocaust as a prop. Great opportunity to film and peddle more images of people getting their limbs blown off and their faces smashed in and and permit audiences to cheer their death-worship because authentic bad guys are the ones getting it in the neck (and innards).

I refer, of course, to the lexicographically challenged Inglourious Basterds. However, the Academy already committed that crime against humanity by giving the unspeakably loathesome Roberto Benigni a Best Picture award in 1999 for using a Nazi concentration camp to remind us that Life Is Beautiful, thus contradicting Adorno’s famous remark by demonstrating that poetry, albeit unutterably bad poety, remains possible after Auschwitz.

Movie #2: Too bad there is no award for Single Most Offensive Film Image of the Year because Kathryn Bigelow would face competition only from Saw VI. The great froth generated by her film, The Hurt Locker, must have an explanation, and I hope to return to earth in a new incarnation so that I can grasp it because my current mental faculties are inadequate for the task.

Unlike ‘Basterds’, I was tempted by this film and sat through half of it despite being bored silly by the parade of every war-movie cliché portrayed since the invention of celluloid.

However, I would have stayed to the end had Bigelow not engineered a three-hanky portrait of Our Brave G.I.s carrying the dead body of a teenage Iraqi kid through the rubble to show the really decent side of the people who just managed to cause the deaths of several hundred thousand Iraqis and the exile of additional millions. This was after the Iraqi populace is shown throughout the first half as threatening, shadowy, hostile and just impossibly unwilling to gaze benignly on well-meaning American guys with automatic weapons.

You invade a country, slaughter its people left and right, dismantle the state and leave them in chaos, ship in Republican college graduates to tell them how to run their lives, make a hash of it all and prepare to leave when the oil remains frustratingly out of reach. But meanwhile, your filmmakers, who naturally portray the fight from the perspective of the conquering soldiers, are incapable of showing one of the millions of Iraqis whose lives you have ruined grieving for the loss of a child. No, that sympathetic task has to be assigned to an American from Nebraska with an ammo belt.

The Hurt Locker is racist, triumphalist war-mongering.