Is it possible to enjoy a movie, and more than that, judge it to be a good movie, when you think there's something wrong with the politics of it? This is one, I would say, that's not for John Rentoul's 'Questions to Which the Answer is No' series. The answer to it is so obviously yes unless you have a cramped imagination. Welcome, once more, to Slavoj Žižek, who's writing on the London Review Blog about The Hurt Locker. As I've already said my piece about the film, I won't repeat my positive assessment. But here's Žižek:
After referring to a couple of Israeli films that I haven't seen and won't therefore comment on - in one of which, according to him, 'most of the action claustrophobically takes place inside a tank' - Žižek judges the focus of such movies as politically disabling and a mark against them:The film largely ignores the debate about the US military intervention in Iraq, and instead focuses on the daily ordeals, on and off duty, of ordinary soldiers forced to deal with danger and destruction.
In its very invisibility, ideology is here, more than ever: we are there, with our boys, identifying with their fear and anguish instead of questioning what they are doing there.
Now, Žižek's judgement of The Hurt Locker is itself open to question. The claim that it shuts any intelligent viewer off from questioning what 'our boys' are doing in Iraq doesn't square with the movie as I, and others, saw it. Furthermore, Žižek allows no mileage to the idea that 'dismantling terrorist networks' might have something to be said for it. These responses of his, however, are predictable. They are no matter for surprise.
What is more revealing is the assumption that a film set in Iraq that 'largely ignores the debate about the US military intervention' must be defective. Why must it? What if The Hurt Locker is (though I dispute that it is) too narrowly, exclusively, focused - on the mind and the job of a man who is a member of a bomb-disposal unit? Must that necessarily detract from its quality? This last question does belong in John Rentoul's 'Questions to Which the Answer is No' series. To think about movies in this way is truly cramped, the product of an illiberal imagination. If the thing doesn't include your orthodoxy, there must be something wrong with it.
I am put in mind of a movie I liked so much when I first saw it that I went back to the cinema the next night with a friend, in order to 'show' it to him, and then we both went back again the night after that so that he could get a second look and I a third. It's one of the great pictures of the 1950s: Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront. Subsequently I read a number of put-downs of On the Waterfront from French film critics of the left, who pronounced it to be anti-trade-unionist and an apologia by Kazan for his having given testimony and named names before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Did I amend my rating of this great movie? Strangely, no, I never have.