The Hurt Locker

2010_1_24 The Hurt Locker
I continue to work on BRIDGE, off and on, whenever I can put in an hour or two. I am up to page 119. But I thought I’d write in the journal for a while, just for relief. The section I was reworking while reading it was that 1971 visit with Fred Spratt at his new abode in the Saratoga hills in the Bay Area. We met his new wife; Sharon was her name I think. I call her something else in BRIDGE. He married her after Pat Spratt had divorced him to marry the PE Coach who had become her paramour while she was still married to Fred. I believe it was Geoff Bowman who first told me the story about her affair with the high school coach; that would have been a crushing blow to Fred, to lose out to a jock. Boy, now when I reread that section of the book, the ridicule is pretty heavy. The satire really reflects my deep annoyance with Fred over his comments toward Sue and our relationship, and what I felt was his ‘Good Lifer’ stance toward teaching and Art. The bottom line is I felt duped by his slick words; because when all was said and done he was an Art Salesman and Big Ego and not much of an artist himself, not all what he was cracked up to be. I really attacked his class pretensions, the big house in the rich suburbs, the wine cellar, the fancy lunch, the pose of refinement; and he in turn thought my moving to Tucson was on a par with moving to the far edge of the world, as far away from the Art Scene as possible. It was not a career move and indeed it wasn’t and it wasn’t intended to be. At the time I could not have cared less. I was being carried by a wave of disgust about Academics that most of my middle class friends have never understood, just how deeply swindled I felt by the whole professional Art gambit. In 1971 saw it as equivalent to Nero fiddling while Rome burned. Fred supported the Vietnam War—“we have to draw the line somewhere”—and his promotion of significant art as “Technological Icons for an Affluent Age” was to me counterrevolutionary in the extreme and not what was called for considering the Ruling Class and its greedy objectives. In my eyes Fred was the phony Boy Scout in Charge. The man I had held in high esteem had feet of clay.
Finally saw “The Hurt Locker,” a title I still don’t understand but which must have some reference to the bomb dismantling trade. It is a solidly made and impressive film made, somewhat surprisingly, by a woman director, Kathryn Bigelow. She showed such a good grasp of the male psyche in a war context, she must have a male component of some stature in her inner make up, just as I have a strong Anima in mine. She’s been more of less a B-Director up till “The Hurt Locker,” which definitely will elevate her status in Hollywood, especially since the film is collecting quite a few awards, and an Oscar nomination is almost a certainty. Her best known film before this was the cult classic “Near Dark,” an off-beat horror film, which I have never seen. (I abhor horror films.) The lead actor in “The Hurt Locker” is Jeremy Renner who plays Staff Sgt. William James, the bomb expert who has dismantled over 875 IEDs in Iraq, operating in 2004 and probably later. The character must be based on a real person, or perhaps he is a composite picture of a type. In any case, James is built for the job. He has no fear; he even seems carefree as he goes about his potentially dangerous job. The movie opens with his predecessor on the bomb squad being killed by a blast set off by a passer-by using his cell phone at the wrong moment. But his death doesn’t put James of at all. He has a job to do and he does it and tries not to think too much about it in between the tasks he is given. This attitude of not worrying or thinking too much is the key to his success at his job. This is not to say he is calloused, because he is not. A young boy he knew was killed and abused—a bomb was hidden in the stomach of his corpse—and it upset him greatly and he made a point of removing the bomb. And Bigelow had the good sense to have him survive his tour of duty, go home and spend some time with his wife and baby, being as far as we can tell a normal dad and husband. But the film does end with him going back for another tour of duty. He accepts going too.
There are three scenes with cameo appearances by better known actors. Guy Pierce plays the predecessor who gets killed by the premature setting off a powerful IED. Even with protective gear on the blast killed him. He was equally expert at his trade but lot less lucky.
David Morse shows up as a Colonel who rushes up to James after watching his derring-do; he calls him a “wild man,” and it’s meant as a compliment. He congratulates the soldier who takes it all in stride.
The scene with Ralph Fiennes is interesting. The bomb squad, which is composed of three guys, encounters 5 guys dressed as Iraqi civilians. At first they squad is suspicious, but then it becomes clear they are Americans, contract mercenaries, probably with Blackwater. They are all suddenly thrown into a fire fight with some insurgents at a good distance from them but who are as good a shot from long distance as they are. I liked how Bigelow handled the scene, realistically and not in way that evoke the heroism of John Wayne. Once again James proves a cool customer under fire. He is nothing, if not a survivor.
Sue and I finished watching the last two episodes of the Third Season of “The Tudors” this weekend; it was 8 episodes in all, ending with the execution of Thomas Cromwell in July 1540.
The earlier episodes dealt with the “Pilgrimage of Grace,” which was the reaction—revolt—of the Catholic people of Northern England to the imposition of Protestant religion and rule by the autocratic Henry VIII. They banded together to the tune of 30,000 souls ready to die for their faith and fair treatment. They took over a few cities and were demanding they be listened to by the king. Henry was outraged at their impertinence; to him they were scoundrels, heretics, and traitors who had the temerity to challenge their sovereign. This was easy for Henry to say from his snug apartments in London; he had no hands on knowledge of the lives of the agrarian peoples of the North. Typically, he worked through his agents and ministers, Thomas Cromwell in particular. In the end he took the most violent way out hanging all the leaders as traitors and slaughtering many hundreds as deterrence for any more rebellion. There are numerous tough scenes of cruelty and barbaric treatment of human beings; they are not pleasant to watch. Even The Earl of Suffolk, his good friend Charles, who has always done whatever the king has asked, had to cringe at the orders he is given.
Henry is typically self-absorbed, touchy, blind to how self-serving some of his cronies are, and preoccupied with sex. Cromwell persuades the King to marry Anne of Cleves for political reasons; it would align the Protestant League with Henry who may need help against his enemies on the continent. But Anne is not attractive to him—they both complain the other smells bad—and Henry never consummates the marriage, eventually having it annulled. Very horny his cronies set him up with a hot little number, Katherine Howard, only 17 but with plenty of sexual experience already. I checked on this by reading some Tudor history and it is apparently true. Where Anne of Cleves was a virgin and uptight, Katherine was bold, experienced, and alluring, desirous to romp with the king.
But Cromwell’s mismanagement of the Anne of Cleves affair allows his enemies at court to undermine the King’s confidence in Cromwell and he is brought down by a conspiracy led by the Earl of Sufflok and the brother of Mary, Henry’s older daughter. He is seized and thrown in the Tower and executed in a particularly brutal fashion. A couple of Cromwell’s worst enemies got the executioner drunk the night before he had to wield the ax and the next day he could not hit the target with any accuracy and one of the honor guards had to step in and complete the job. As one witness wrote of the execution,” (He) so patiently suffered the stroke of the ax, by a ragged and butcherly miser, which very ungoodly performed the office.” I like the use of “ungoodly.” What a strange way to put it. A recent novel by the English novelist, Hillary Mantel, called WOLF HALL, attempts to rehabilitate the reputation of Thomas Cromwell who she claims was not the bad egg that many historians have made him out to be. She feels that Cromwell, who was the son of a blacksmith, had served the King well for almost ten years. He certainly was very intelligent and took care of policy and politics better than the King who was merely, as George Bush called himself, “the Decider.” He was also a better Protestant than his sovereign who, according to the Articles of the Church of England, had not separated himself from Catholic Dogma to the degree he thought he had. Proof of that is the current effort of Pope Benedict to persuade Anglicans to come back in the fold of the Roman Church where they belong.