The Hurt Locker

0:00:03.9 Natalie Dowzicky: Welcome to Pop & Locke. I’m Natalie Dowzicky.

0:00:05.2 Landy Ayres: And I’m Landry Ayres.

0:00:08.3 Natalie Dowzicky: Kathryn Bigelow’s 2008 Academy Award-​winning film, The Hurt Locker, follows an explosive ordnance disposal team in Iraq. It is a deeply personal film, as we vividly witness the stress of combat. Here to discuss whether or not this film is an accurate depiction of war is Cato Institute’s Director of Defense Policy Studies, Eric Gomez…

0:00:27.6 Eric Gomez: Hello.

0:00:28.4 Natalie Dowzicky: And Emma Ashford, a former Catoite and current resident senior fellow with the New American Engagement Initiative in the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security at the Atlantic Council.

0:00:37.1 Emma Ashford: Hey, everybody.

0:00:38.8 Landy Ayres: So a lot of veterans, after watching this movie specifically cited that while it is a great movie, and it is still generally considered to be one of the finest war movies ever made specifically for this war, they criticized its accuracy and said specifically these types of units and the chaos that ensues and the sort of wild card hot shot character that Jeremy Renner plays would just never, ever happen in a real unit. So why do you think it’s still considered one of the best war films ever made, specifically by veterans, even though they criticize the verisimilitude of it?

0:01:31.6 Emma Ashford: So I guess I’ll start here. Neither myself nor I believe Eric has ever actually been to war, so you should take our responses here with a grain of salt, but from speaking to those people who have been and sort of reading some interviews of this movie, the impression that I came away with is that veterans don’t think that any sort of individual scene of the movie is necessarily inaccurate or entirely implausible, except maybe the bit where Jeremy Renner jumps the fence and goes walkabout in Baghdad, which does seem a little Jason Bourne-​like. But that when you string all of these very high adrenaline moments together, you end up with this really distorted picture of just sort of how terrifying war is on a daily basis, that this movie basically skips the parts of being deployed to somewhere like Iraq and Afghanistan that are boredom, right.

0:02:32.2 Emma Ashford: So, in a year’s deployment, maybe one of the vignettes in this movie might be accurate, but they wouldn’t happen every day, and that is sort of what I’ve taken away from my conversations about this movie with people that have actually been to Iraq and Afghanistan is that it just, it amps up to make it a better movie, but it’s not entirely accurate as a result.

0:02:53.5 Eric Gomez: I also wonder… I agree with what Emma said in terms of, it shows… That’s just good film-​making, though, right, a movie about… That’s like hours of just boredom punctuated by terror probably doesn’t make for a good popcorn, something you eat popcorn to, even if it is more realistic. In terms of the realism too, one thing I thought about while watching this is that this seems like a movie that you can really only make about Iraq. I know EOD units have been involved in a lot of wars that the United States have fought in, but for the time period that it was examining, which was 2004, Iraq pre-​surge, IEDs were a really, really big problem, in Afghanistan too, but I think much more so in Iraq, in terms of it was probably one of the leading causes of death and injury for American troops in the country, and that’s a very… That’s a pretty different way of combat or a different way of war than even ’91 Gulf War or Vietnam War, or something that’s a little bit more firefight-​focused. This really was… The movie, I think, does a good job of highlighting that aspect of the Iraq war, which was a very important part of it.

0:04:29.4 Natalie Dowzicky: I’m also kind of curious, since we’re talking about the landscape and timing of the movie’s depiction, how many teams like this were in Iraq at one time? Are these… These groups of teams are typical per unit, so I’m kind of curious like how many Jeremy Renners were out there, right. ‘Cause I think from the movie, we get a very personal connection to quite a few soldiers in their unit, but we don’t necessarily see them interacting too much with any, like the larger macro picture of the Iraq War.

0:05:06.8 Emma Ashford: So off the top of my head, I don’t have exact numbers of sort of bomb disposal, but hundreds, probably thousands, depending on the time period of the war that we’re talking about. So Iraq and Afghanistan look quite different in terms of troop numbers, Afghanistan, even once we get to the surge in the late 2000s, is much less than Iraq, just because it’s a less populous country, smaller country, and because some of these issues. IEDs were a thing in Afghanistan, but as Eric notes, it wasn’t as prevalent or as problematic. So in Afghanistan, we’re talking tens of thousands of troops. In Iraq, particularly by the time we get to the peak of the surge, we have close to, depending on how you count it, close to 100,000 or more troops, certainly more if you include the troops on bases in the region that are supporting it, you can get up to 200, 300,000.

0:06:03.0 Emma Ashford: So this is very widespread. So this film dials down on basically the lives of three central characters, I guess I would say, there’s a lot of incidental people that come and go, but it’s basically three guys on this bomb disposal team, and as sort of as your question really gets at, this team structure would be replicated hundreds of times over and over in any discrete period of time, and many of these men rotated back to Iraq and Afghanistan multiple times over the course of the war.

0:06:34.3 Eric Gomez: To sort of illustrate how dangerous the IEDs were to the United States’ troop presence, the movie was set in ’04, and that is before MRAPs get introduced, those are mine-​resistant, ambush protected, I think, I don’t always remember the full acronym…

0:06:52.2 Emma Ashford: Mine-​Resistant Ambush Protective vehicles.

0:06:54.5 Eric Gomez: Ambush protective, yes, okay. So the problem was that the trucks that the United States gets sent in to, right, the Humvee. If you know what a Hummer looks like, you have a pretty good idea what a Humvee looks like, those things got just totally shredded apart by IEDs, they were not resistant to driving over an explosive and a lot of American…

0:07:17.5 Emma Ashford: They were weak on the bottom in particular.

0:07:19.2 Natalie Dowzicky: Interesting.

0:07:21.1 Landy Ayres: Yes. And so that’s part of why this, when you’re doing a lot of these sort of patrols in urban areas where it’s easy to hide old artillery shells in trash or rubble or rubbish or whatever, it’s really easy to destroy one Humvee at a time, if they drive through where these IEDS are. And it got to the point where the United States had to create a new government, not quite an agency, but an organization, just to deal with this problem, called the Joint Improvised Threat Defeat Organization, which was founded in 2006 solely to deal with IEDs, pretty much. And it’s now under the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. The Defense Threat Reduction Agency usually handles weapons of mass destruction, it is the DOD agency that works with nuclear weapons, chemical and biological, and IEDs.

0:08:21.1 Eric Gomez: So it was a very big problem until MRAPs came in, and MRAPs, one of the big things of why they’re resistant to IEDs is the shape of them underneath is such that the force of a blast isn’t just hitting squarely against the bottom of the vehicle, but is somewhat more dispersed or channeled. So yeah, this was a really big problem. And that’s why my earlier comment like this, if you’re talking about what movie can you make that is very unique to the Iraq experience, I think The Hurt Locker more than any other movie about the Iraq war that I’ve seen nails that, because of the problem of IEDs and how they were such a big menace to US troops. I think it did a great job of narrowing in on that aspect of the conflict and showing the tension and the stakes of trying to do… Trying to defeat them.

0:09:20.5 Landy Ayres: And the movie really plays with… It really plays with tension and stakes throughout, it is not super indulgent in its violence. There’s a lot of further discussion you could make about when it does indulge in violence and to what ends, whose deaths and the violence it is being inflicted upon. Does it indulge in certain emotional valences is I think what you could talk about, about what it’s saying about war and conflict and things like that. But it also, the movie sort of eschews a lot of these standard tropes that we see in a lot of previous war films, and specifically with, I think particularly Vietnam, and since then, a lot of, as film as a medium has sort of come into its own during these types of conflict, you’re getting a more post-​modern, a nuanced look at what it means to go into armed conflict at this level, and so you don’t necessarily get pro or anti-​war.

0:10:40.2 Landy Ayres: One of the things that it eschews in particular is a classic dramatic structure. It takes place in much more of a vignette structure, like Emma had mentioned before. What does that structure do for the movie, what is it trying to say about what these characters are going through, because to me, it reads almost as a rejection of heroic narratives. You don’t get this Joseph Campbellian hero of a thousand faces going out to war, undergoing trials, fighting back all of these terrible monsters and things like that, only to return back home to America and make your country better, you don’t get this full cycle, hero’s journey. It is a series of elaborate, tense, ultimately, I would say, anti-​climactic set pieces that are connected and flow into one another, but really there is very jagged and not classic dramatic structures to any of these acts going on. What does that do to the movie?

0:11:53.6 Emma Ashford: You know, there’s something really… The anti-​climactic comment just made me think there’s something really interesting about setting bomb techs as the core characters in your movie, because almost by definition, if they’re going to survive, it cannot be climactic, it’s always going to be this, they cut the wire and suddenly everything’s okay, and there’s times in the movie where they succeed in that, and then there’s times in the movie, particularly in the opening sequence, where they really don’t succeed. But sort of back to your question, I guess, about the unconnected nature of the film, I mean, it really doesn’t have a plot, there is no plot to this movie, none at all. And in so far as it reminds me of anything, it reminds me slightly of Groundhog Day, right? It’s just, it’s not exactly the same thing over and over, but it’s very similar, it’s just, oh, another day, another incident.

0:12:48.5 Emma Ashford: And really the only sort of overarching element is that you see the days counting down, what’s left on their deployment, and one of the specialists is keeping track of that. And at the time, this movie, Kathryn Bigelow was sort of hailed for producing a movie about the war on terror that was apolitical, that wasn’t trying to make the point that war is bad, and that’s a product of its era, of the mid-​2000s, of patriotism was supporting the war kind of an era. But in retrospect, watching this movie with these disconnected narrative scenes, maybe I’m just reading my own opinions into this, but it seems to me as if it’s a metaphor for the entire war on terror, right, it’s just another day. Same thing, why are we doing it? The movie doesn’t clarify that, the characters don’t seem to know. No one really seems to care. And that is, I think, very emblematic of where the war on terror has sort of come to in the last 20 years.

0:13:53.8 Eric Gomez: In addition to that, I have several sort of micro and macro points. In terms of micro points, I think that the way it’s structured, it might just be, again, very immersive for putting you in the shoes of the bomb team. I found a great article or a great review in Vanity Fair that talked about the movie with Iraqi EOD guys and then sort of got their sense of like as an Iraqi EOD person, how do you feel about the movie? And this one quote I have saved, “For Ahmed and Rashid, the need for that kind of unwavering focus seems strangely divorced from or marked by an indifference to the broader conflict. The men regard themselves as technicians tasked with making bombs safe, and in their tunnel vision people and politics are relegated to the periphery. The terrorists and insurgents who make the bombs are not important to the task. The men say they have little interest in the identity or motives of the men who created the weapons, preferring to leave such questions for the intelligence unit.”

0:14:57.2 Eric Gomez: And I think that speaks to what Emma said about the sort of apolitical nature of the movie, where if this is about immersing yourself in an experience that’s very unique to Iraq, that of the counter-​IED, explosive ordinance disposal guys, then yeah, probably most of them, if the Iraqi experience is to be believed, they aren’t thinking about those broader political questions in the moment of diffusing, but I wonder… And I think in that regard, I think this movie is both a successful and unsuccessful war movie. It’s successful in the sense that I think it does a great job showing this slice of life of soldiers in Iraq and really putting the audience in the shoes of what they go through, but I think it fails because it never really gets into those broader questions.

0:15:55.9 Eric Gomez: The only real moment that it does is when, early on in the movie, when Sergeant James is walking towards his first bomb to dispose, and then there’s a cab that runs a check point and the driver pulls right up at him and Sergeant James pulls out a pistol, and shoots out the windshield and then shoots at the ground, and then puts the gun to the cab driver’s head and tells him to back up ’cause he doesn’t know if there’s a bomb in the car. And the guy does, and while he’s just glaring down, Sergeant James, and then he gets instantly yanked out of the car by a bunch of US troops and handcuffed, and Sergeant James quips that, “Well, if he wasn’t an insurgent, he sure as hell is now.”

0:16:39.2 Eric Gomez: And I thought that was about the only political commentary on the war of is the action of being in Iraq and doing that and treating Iraqis that way who might be confused or don’t understand English and therefore can’t really respond to warnings, does that create more problems in the long run for the United States in the global war on terror. But besides that it doesn’t really… Like Emma said, it doesn’t really touch on the bigger political issues. So I wondered after watching the movie like is this a movie you can make now, right? Like you could make it in ’09, but now that you’ve added 11 more years or whatever on to the forever wars and the US presence in the Middle East, I think most American audiences would just be like, you know, oh, we want to deal with the broader implications of this and we don’t want to… We’re kind of tired of it.

0:17:39.0 Landy Ayres: I wonder, I mean, yeah, you could make it in ’09, you could make it today. It would be very, very different. I think you could make an argument, and I read into this only really having… After having just watched it again, I did not get this the first time. You could make an argument that I think… What is his name? The doctor, Lieutenant Colonel John Cambridge, that he is one of the only people… There’s really only a handful of people from outside this unit that we get these people interacting with, and he’s one of them and he’s at this base with them, and he knows particularly Eldridge very, very well and is sort of counseling him after the death of the Guy Pearce character from the very, very beginning, but he’s constantly kind of trying to fix Eldridge for, and he treats him like a commodity, he is a tool, and so there is… I think there is a very overt, to me, political message about what this person who has essentially been put there by the state to sort of be eyes and ears and also say, hey, fix up these guys so that they can get back out there as soon as they can.

0:19:07.4 Landy Ayres: At least, that’s what it read like to me. Specifically, ’cause you could also make the argument that a lot of the people that are in positions like that specifically like military chaplains or people who are psychiatrists, they’re in it for the right reasons. I don’t want to paint it like anything like that, but he specifically says at one point to his character, he’s like, “Going to war is a once in a lifetime experience. It could be fun,” and I was like, oof, like what an out of touch, strange thing to say to this very, very young, impressionable, obviously traumatized young man that is going through all of this, and then we don’t see him any other times throughout the movie, except for when he’s talking to Eldridge and trying to encourage him to get back out there.

0:19:56.5 Landy Ayres: And then when he’s talking to the people out on the street about the rocks in the cart, and he very much plays it, he’s like the out-​of-​touch like PR guy or like guy from from up the chain who came down and it’s like, I’m here to get some boots on the ground and see, see what the people who are doing the hard work are doing every day, and he’s trying to be very diplomatic and talk to these people, and because this, what, set in 2004, he’s winning hearts and minds at that point during this part of the campaign, and he immediately gets blown up. And whereas Jeremy Renner and Anthony Mackie and all of them who are the ones going around every day getting into these high stake scenarios are the ones who are sort of in touch with the realities of war, so while it may not make a specifically political message about the Iraq War specifically, it does make one I think overtly about what that type of conflict means generally. But by focusing on the EOD teams, you could make the argument that that itself focuses on the Iraq War.

0:21:11.9 Emma Ashford: So let me just jump in on… So I was very struck by the arc of Colonel Cambridge, who, as you say, is this… They make a joke of it, Yale. I don’t know that he’s actually Yale educated, but he’s clearly went to college, joined the military, he’s over in the Middle East, as you say, winning hearts and minds, bringing freedom, bringing democracy, and he’s trying to counsel the young specialist who’s, again, clearly working class, clearly joined up very early, and the specialist Eldridge is terrified of dying, he thinks he’s gonna die, and Cambridge isn’t scared of dying, and I just find it so fascinating that Cambridge is the one that then the minute he’s sort of outside the fence, he’s the one that ends up dying, the thing that he wasn’t scared of, because he thought he was just there to win hearts and minds. And so I found him really interesting.

0:22:06.0 Emma Ashford: But the other command that we see, the other colonel who comes in, who congratulates Jeremy Renner’s character on diffusing a bomb, and he’s problematic in other ways, right…

0:22:19.0 Landy Ayres: So weird, so ugh, just kind of gross.

0:22:23.9 Emma Ashford: Very macho, yeah, macho, hopped up on his own adrenaline mythos, congratulating this character for taking actions that put all his teammates in danger, and I just, I find it really interesting that those two characters, those are the representations of commands that we see, Wild Bill Hickok on the one side, trying to get everybody killed and hearts and minds, college educated on the other. And I feel like that might almost be one of the more accurate parts about the film, that the command was somewhat disassociated from the lower ranks.

0:23:00.2 Landy Ayres: Yeah, especially because that second one in particular, he’s like a wannabe wild card. Like he kept talking to him, he’s like, “You’re a wild card, you’re a wild guy,” or whatever, but he’s asking him all these questions, he’s like, “How many bombs have you defused?” And he’s like fan… He’s like fanning over Jeremy Renner’s character, but it’s so hopped up in macho and masculine, and he’s in… Like the way it’s shot, he’s looking down at Jeremy Renner and he’s got his helmet on. And there is a tension in the scene because Jeremy Renner has just done something reckless and he’s leaned back and he’s all casual and he’s smoking a cigarette, he’s not prepared.

0:23:42.6 Landy Ayres: I kept expecting that tension in the scene to break and for this commanding officer to maybe discipline him, and that he was kind of like trying to fake Jeremy Renner’s character out and get him to let down his guard and then be like, “Never do that again.” It very much reads like that, and it’s just… There’s that sort of flip and trying to trick him into getting comfortable. I’ve seen people do that in positions of power before now, and I was expecting it, but the fact that he doesn’t reflects what you were talking about, Emma, that disconnection going on right there, because he doesn’t really know what’s going on, he’s asking questions, he’s living vicariously through this bomb disposal person, because he views what he does as the ultimate sort of adrenaline thrill, getting that close to death, but defying it over and over again.

0:24:35.7 Eric Gomez: My observation on the therapist, colonel therapist character, was far… This might be darker, but when he’s like, “Oh, going to war is a once in a lifetime experience,” my first thought was, well, not for the guys that we keep sending back to Iraq and Afghanistan, it isn’t. In ’04, yeah, but by now, some people are on third, fourth, fifth deployments to these same places. And so I kind of darkly chuckled at that and just said out loud like, “Oh, not so much anymore.” Like…

0:25:11.7 Landy Ayres: Well, if you know the end of the movie, it’s like darkly ironic already because he immediately goes back.

0:25:19.3 Eric Gomez: Right.

0:25:19.4 Natalie Dowzicky: I was just gonna say in terms of personalities, for the variety of characters that are in the movie, they did a really good job of juxtaposing a bunch of different personalities. When I was first watching it, I was thinking to myself that… And I saw this in a lot of the critical reviews too, that people were saying that Jeremy Renner’s character, Staff Sergeant William James, was far too… Like an adrenaline junkie, and no one would take the risk, like in real life, no one would take those risks, and like we had said before, this is a movie, so it’s some sense… Whoah. Some exaggeration or sensationalization is gonna happen, but then I was reading, then I watched it again and I was thinking to myself, I was like, well, maybe someone in this specific role might need to be a little bit less fearful and maybe edging on more, not reckless, but has the confidence be in these potentially compromising situations and not totally freak out, like be able to stay like calm and collected and all that kind of stuff.

0:26:32.3 Natalie Dowzicky: That kind of requires a little bit of an adrenaline junkie personality, and that’s why I thought it was interesting that a lot of the reviews were like, oh, this type of personality would never be on a team like this or never take these types of actions. I think they’re just hyping up the adrenaline junkie personality to make it obviously clear that he’s this way, but I do think in real life that someone in his position is going to have at least a higher threshold for fearful situations they can stay calm in, which is gonna require a little bit of that adrenaline junkie attitude.

0:27:01.7 Emma Ashford: The movie opens with that quote, right, right up front there’s something like, “War is a drug.”

0:27:09.4 Natalie Dowzicky: “The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug.”

0:27:14.3 Emma Ashford: Yep, so… And obviously, we see that with the Jeremy Renner, with Will James’s character, that he ends up going back, ’cause he can’t give up that adrenaline rush, but that’s such a classic, not just war movies, but war books, going back hundreds of years, the notion that some people go, some men, it’s almost all men in these books, that they go to war and they react differently, and that even the people who are most gung-​ho when they sign up, they get to the battlefield and maybe they… It turns out that they’re quite afraid when they get there, and then others aren’t, and then some become basically sort of addicted to it and to going back over and over.

0:27:57.4 Emma Ashford: And so I think you’re absolutely right. I think the character is just massively exaggerated and the sort of the ridiculous things he does, like pulling off all his protective gear at one point, I mean, that’s Hollywoodized. But the underlying sort of character trait of he’s looking for bigger and bigger thrills, I think that’s quite realistic, quite consistent with how we have understood war in fiction for a long time.

0:28:27.8 Natalie Dowzicky: The film obviously won a ton of Academy Awards, won Best Picture, Best Directing, best Film Editing, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing, all… Basically ran the gamut at the Academy Awards. And I was curious what you guys thought of the more so like the aesthetic in like filmography of the movie and the visualizations and what you thought how the movie was filmed added to the whole experience of watching it.

0:28:55.6 Eric Gomez: I liked that a lot. I thought the cinematography was great, the sound of the fire aircraft going overhead, you never see them, they never actually do anything, but in a lot of the scenes, especially when they’re in the urban areas, every few minutes, you just hear this shooooh sound, and I thought that was very immersive of like… Yeah, if you’re in an active combat zone, you’re probably hearing that a lot, and it’s just part of the background noise. And I kept on thinking… When I first saw the movie way back when I was an undergrad, and I re-​watched it a couple of times for this, but I remember thinking when I first saw it all those years ago, what are the planes for? My brain kept on going, they wouldn’t have put that in there if it wasn’t important, but it’s not, it’s just part of the sounds of military operations. And it’s like, oh, okay, I thought that did a good job of putting you in it. I liked that there wasn’t too much of a soundtrack, there was some, but it was very instrumental.

0:30:05.7 Landy Ayres: Is there any actual score in the movie or is it all… I don’t know if this is the case. I don’t know if there is a score or if it’s all diagetic, like it’s from sources in the movie. I don’t know.

0:30:20.9 Emma Ashford: If it is natural, it’s natural, there’s a lot of the scenes where they’re disarming bombs, there’s a sort of high-​pitched overtone…

0:30:28.2 Landy Ayres: Well, right, ’cause there’s that tinnitus type of thing that I think they’re trying to emulate, but I guess so, I guess you can consider that a score, yeah, that makes sense. It does function a lot like music, yeah.

0:30:40.5 Emma Ashford: That reminded me of Dunkirk, actually, on the top of the sort of other war movies. Dunkirk has a lot of… For those who’ve seen it, it has a lot of sort of score elements that are basically kind of natural sounds that just build tension, and so it felt a little like that. Obviously, the shaky cam, I think a lot of people talked at the time about how that gave realism in war. I mean, perhaps it does, I think in this day and age, it can feel a little Blair Witch Project, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a better film because it does the shaky cam thing. But I think the fact that it’s sort of getting right down there with them… Again, when you combine that with the vignette style of the film, it does give you this feeling of actually being embedded with the team, rather than watching them from a distance, which is good.

0:31:32.5 Landy Ayres: Yeah, it has a very documentary cinéma vérité kind of style, where it’s like you’re seeing things as they unfold, not posed for a camera, except for the few instances where you get these crazy super stylized explosions, like the first time that we see one with Guy Pearce or when he finds the six strings or when they shoot the last bullet and that slow motion shot of the shell casing falls onto the sand and it’s covered in blood in that terrifying scene where Eldridge is having to clean the blood off of the magazine, it’s just… It’s really, it’s really, really something. That type of quick cuts and multi-​cameras and sort of viewing things to me made it feel like it was, you are part of a unit, like there are all these… So much of the movie and the tension is derived from them trying to get point of view and have line of sight and get cover from certain things and position, and sort of understanding the space that they are in where blast and shrapnel are going to occur, where bullets are coming from, how to get cover, how to cover each other.

0:32:52.0 Landy Ayres: And so getting all of these shots from various instances, getting shots in the windows, long establishing things, it I think kind of tries to replicate the sort of weird… All of the different stimuli that these people have to take in in these ultra high stress moments.

0:33:15.8 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah, I think I really appreciated the intentionality behind it, so even though I’m not typically a shaky camera fan, I don’t necessarily… That’s not something I enjoy watching necessarily. I think like every element, visual elements used served a purpose, which I think is again why this movie got, won so many awards, and I think… So one review I was saying, it was like, or one review I was reading was saying something along the lines, how it was a near perfect movie, which has to be like… I can’t imagine movie reviewers say that often, if ever. I don’t think it’s necessarily perfect, but I do think the intentionality behind both the sound and the visual elements and the way they filmed the movie is really cool, and like Dunkirk kind of reminds me of that too, honestly, now that you’re saying that.

0:34:06.8 Landy Ayres: One thing that I just remembered that I thought was an interesting choice was at the very, very beginning, when you’re getting the bomb disposal robot, who we don’t use any other point in the movie, it’s like they talk about how he’s like, no, I’ll go down in the suit, and it’s like, what? It’s setting up that they always send in the robot first and then if they can’t do it, then the person goes in. We never see the robot for the rest of the movie. Jeremy Renner’s like, we invested a lot of money into this technology, I’m sure. And we’re not gonna use it. Fine.

0:34:44.5 Landy Ayres: But when we do get it, in the very beginning, you get the shot from the robot and then all of the shots of the streets in Iraq, and the sort of sand-​blasted landscape and it rolling along, and I don’t know if it would have had the same effect, strictly because of timing, and I don’t know exactly when we were getting pictures from space and what they looked like, but to me, that shot looks like the stuff that we were getting a few years ago from the Mars rovers, and so it gives the film… It establishes early on that this is an otherworldly place, it is like a foreign place, it is out of this world, it is… We’re in a dangerous, hostile territory, and you get these shots and then empty streets, and there’s tension in the air and that sort of high ringing sound.

0:35:43.4 Landy Ayres: But it doesn’t really use the cardinal sin of a lot of movies set in places other than America, there is not a really heavy mustard yellow filter over everything, which is really, really nice.

0:35:56.7 Natalie Dowzicky: Oh, yeah, mustardizing.

0:36:00.6 Eric Gomez: It’s not like, hey, we’re in Mexico, so everything is yellow and brown. There’s a little bit of that, but I think most of it is pretty good with the sort of color grading of the film.

0:36:10.3 Emma Ashford: It’s pretty accurate. I believe they filmed in Amman in Jordan, which is right next door, but topologically, it’s quite accurate, and they sort of dirtied up the streets and stuff to make it look a little more like Iraq at the time. The other… Sort of in terms of place and setting, the other thing that I found really interesting is the movie’s portrayal of Iraqis. They basically just… They’re just supporting characters, like if this was a video game, those would be the NPCs, non-​player characters, maybe they have half a line of dialogue, it’s probably in Arabic anyway, nobody on this team seems to speak any Arabic, the only person we ever see even trying is the doctor, Colonel Cambridge, and then there’s an interpreter at one point, but from the rest of that, these people, the team on the ground, they don’t understand the Iraqis, the Iraqis don’t understand them, and the reaction that we mostly see from the Iraqis is sort of some combination of just bafflement, resentment.

0:37:13.8 Emma Ashford: There’s this kid that tries to sell Jeremy Renner’s character, tries to sell him porno DVDs, and they have this little interaction over football, but that’s about as close as we ever get to an Iraqi character being a real human being. They’re mostly props, and I sort of feel like that may have been an intentional choice, and I don’t much like it as an intentional choice, because what it’s done is sort of given you… Kind of as Landry was saying, it’s just this, it’s this alien planet, this team has been dropped here, there’s these aliens and they just have to deal with it, and that was how it felt watching the movie.

0:37:51.6 Natalie Dowzicky: This is a kind of a general question, what if… That’s obviously not an accurate depiction of what happened in Iraq in terms of the relationship between the Iraqis and American soldiers. What was that relationship like in general? In terms of like…

0:38:10.0 Emma Ashford: I wouldn’t say it was inaccurate, entirely inaccurate.

0:38:13.1 Eric Gomez: I was gonna say, it felt more accurate.

0:38:15.6 Natalie Dowzicky: I was just curious, yeah.

0:38:18.4 Eric Gomez: I don’t know, this is one of the big problems, I think, with nation-​building at the end of a gun in general, where a lot of the Iraqis in the film, and I imagine a lot in real life are just like, okay, there are new people with guns, most of whom don’t speak my language or understand me, and I’m just trying to navigate day-​to-​day life while this foreign military is all up in my business. And a lot of the Iraqis who are watching the scenes where the bomb disposal’s going on and the soldiers are very tense and paranoid, ’cause any one of them could have a cell phone to detonate the thing and kill someone, a lot of them presumably aren’t insurgents, they’re just like, yeah, something curious is going on.

0:39:07.7 Eric Gomez: They probably want to see what the hell’s happening too, but a lot of the US troops are trying to point their rifles in every way possible to keep an eye on them ’cause they don’t know what their intentions are. And yeah, I think that’s really indicative of… And like Emma said at the outset, I’m not a combat veteran. And so, I don’t know, I don’t know what it’s like. I imagine from reading accounts of people who have been over there, that that sounds kind of correct. It’s very difficult to sort of try and convince people over there that you’re there to help when there’s a communication barrier, and also it’s like you’re in a military uniform with a gun. Even if the intentions are good, so much can get lost in the confusion and just the friction of life that way.

0:40:07.9 Eric Gomez: So I think that it was kind of accurate, especially if it’s set in ’04, that’s probably a year or so after Saddam is deposed, so the government is still shaky, the security forces are still being reconstituted after de-​Ba’athification, so a lot of uncertainty was in the air.

0:40:31.1 Emma Ashford: You know, just to bring it back to something we talked a little bit about earlier, just because sort of Eric mentioning the time context, one thing that I really didn’t like about the movie is this issue that we talked about earlier about that it was hailed as being apolitical, that it just sort of showed war down in the trenches without getting into any of these issues, without getting into the context. But the thing is, the context is still there, and I feel like one of the jobs of a good filmmaker is to convey some of these experiences to people who don’t have them themselves.

0:41:12.7 Emma Ashford: And so I think this film does a really good job of conveying the terror that perhaps American soldiers felt being among these strange people in a strange land and not really knowing why they were there, I think it conveys that very well, but it does nothing to talk about the broader political dynamics, and it doesn’t educate the viewer at all in sort of what the implications of these things are. I mean, so Eric already laid out some of the context for IEDs and why those were so important, but if you zoom out even another level from that, a lot of those IEDs came in from it Iran and were supplied by the Iranian government.

0:41:53.7 Emma Ashford: And it’s one reason why there are still so many people, particularly in the US military, who are opposed to sort of opening diplomatic negotiations with Iran, because there’s that impression that it killed, the true impression, that it killed so many soldiers during this period. And so that is the kind of context that just is entirely lacking from this movie, the broader context of the Iraqi political moment. So as Eric says, 2004, this is after Saddam has been deposed, but it’s before we really have anything approaching a functioning Iraqi government, even mildly functioning. This is basically imperial period, when we’ve got Paul Bremer in there and we’re just running the place as a military dictatorship, basically.

0:42:35.0 Emma Ashford: But again, none of that is in the film, you wouldn’t know that from watching this, this could be set at any point during the 15 years that the US military was in Iraq. And so I just think that by leaving out so much of that context, I think the director really did a disservice here. This is a war film about war as a phenomenon that’s just completely disaggregated from political, the underlying political causes that actually are the reason we might have the war.

0:43:04.9 Eric Gomez: There’s only really two moments, and I think I mentioned one of them before, where the guy in the car, or in the cab gets pulled out by American soldiers and arrested for driving in the wrong place at the wrong time. And that and mean mugging Sergeant James, and him saying if he wasn’t an insurgent before he is now, so that’s like a quip about, are the things that we’re doing actually making the problem worse for ourselves by having these sort of interactions that go poorly. And then people are like, hey, maybe the insurgents are right about something.

0:43:41.1 Eric Gomez: The other quip was very early in the movie when specialist Eldridge is, they’re driving around the base and there’s a bunch of tanks, and he’s like, well, good thing we have all these tanks here in case the Russians show up and we need to have a tank battle. Which I thought… Me being defense equipment nerd was like, oh, yeah, it’s kind of a good point. It’s like we’ve built the military to respond to one set of ideas and contingencies, and then we’re just plugging it into places like Iraq and Afghanistan and hoping it can do the job. And it really is like, yeah, we smashed the Iraqi military pretty easily, and then wind up in this quagmire for a decade plus trying to do nation building and counter-​insurgency. We’re not really that good at it.

0:44:28.6 Eric Gomez: So those were like the two moments in the film… Oh, that and the war, this is a once in a lifetime experience, then knowing that so many people just keep going back and back and back, either by choice or just… That’s their orders to do so as the GWOT dragged on. But those were really the only moments that you get that kind of broader political questioning or something in the movie and, yeah, I’m with Emma on this one of like, came away feeling somewhat dissatisfied, where it’s like, I was like, you know they’re there, you’re winking at it, but you’re not really telling it.

0:45:12.7 Eric Gomez: And I think maybe at the time people were like, oh, that’s a good thing, ’cause politics, politics is too much in our day-​to-​day life. Well, you’re gonna hate 2020, 2021.

0:45:23.0 Emma Ashford: This won an Oscar for that. This won an Oscar for what they said was its honest portrayal of war, but it left out all of the reasons surrounding the war, and so that’s why, I’ll be honest, I’m not a fan of the movie. It’s a beautiful movie, it’s wonderfully made. I didn’t like it.

0:45:40.2 Eric Gomez: And I think that that comment, Emma, about it’s an honest portrayal and it leaves out this political context, I think that’s part of the problem with… I think what that comment gets right is like, yeah, that is how most Americans think about this stuff, and I think it’s how most leaders think about this stuff, and it’s just… It’s the violence divorced from clear sense of purpose, a clear sense of what are you in Iraq to do after Saddam is gone, what are you in Afghanistan to do after you deposed the Taliban, which we’re dealing with right now in the news with the Taliban sort of resurging and capturing so many parts of Afghanistan as soon as the US says it’s leaving.

0:46:27.2 Eric Gomez: And I think that most people in even in the policy-​making world either don’t grapple with those questions seriously or at all, like what is the bigger point here? And don’t just tell me, oh, to like… I think with Afghanistan, for example, the narrative seems to be, well, yeah, if we stayed longer then they wouldn’t be doing this, it’s like, well, we’ve already been there for 20 years, and we spent a lot of time and money training the Afghan national army and propping up their government, and if they can’t effectively resist on their own, what’s the point? Do we have to stay there another 20 years or another… What’s the end game here? And I think that’s been the big overarching question of the global war on terror, including Iraq.

0:47:21.4 Natalie Dowzicky: I also think it’s like lack of more broader context, it’s kind of a little bit of a disservice to a general audience to like… You both obviously watched the film, like having a knowledgeable background of the overall context of 2004 specifically in Iraq, and I think… I definitely think this film did a good job of showing the general public in terms of the variety of roles that soldiers played in Iraq and specifically, especially EOD teams in general. I’m sure most people who saw this film didn’t even know we had teams like that. But I think it’s a disservice ’cause you would walk away from the movie thinking about like, oh, honest depiction of war. And I guarantee a lot of people walked away and had no idea what the larger context was, or the variety of other actors at play, which could have… I wouldn’t say I wanted a heavy hand of political messaging in it, ’cause that never does well for a film, but just context would have been… Would have been nicer, ’cause even I looked up some stuff to make sure I was thinking correctly about what the setting overall was for the whole film.

0:48:34.4 Emma Ashford: I’m not sure that the average person without some knowledge could have picked out that it was in Afghanistan, that it was in Iraq, not in Afghanistan.

0:48:42.6 Natalie Dowzicky: Oh, yeah, I agree with that.

0:48:44.2 Landy Ayres: Well, I think there are war movies that are good that don’t… I don’t know, they don’t quite hit you over the head with the political thing, but you can get it, right. And I don’t know. Apocalypse Now is kind of that way. I think, I don’t know, when I think of that movie, I don’t think it’s… It’s a lot more of a moral message or a… I don’t know, I never got the sense watching Apocalypse Now that anti-​war, anti-​war, anti-​war type thing, it’s just like… But you come away from it feeling icky about what’s happening, and it’s not… You don’t have a character who’s like the DOD bureaucrat being like, well, we’ve got to do this shady stuff.

0:49:32.3 Landy Ayres: So I think it is possible to kind of get at political questions without being too hit you over the head with it. And I think that was one of the critiques I saw of other Iraq war movies that they kind of bash over the head, like other ones that aren’t The Hurt Locker kind of hit you over the head with like a Iraq war bad, Iraq war bad message. And I think that kind of turns people off to the movies, but I don’t know, there’s a way to do that, that isn’t so overt, but gets you to think and I don’t know, I don’t think this movie did it.

0:50:07.9 Natalie Dowzicky: There’s a way to do it subtly without completely leaving it out.

0:50:11.3 Landy Ayres: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

0:50:16.4 Landy Ayres: And now for the time in the show where we get to share all of the other things that we’ve been enjoying with our time at home. This is Locked In. So Eric, Emma, what else have you been enjoying as of late?

0:50:27.7 Eric Gomez: I recently got into watching The Americans, which is late Cold War spy show on FX/​Amazon Video. I know like co-​work… I bet Emma remembers this, but there was a time where Chris Preble, who’s been on the show before, and at least one or two of our other co-​workers in the Defense and Foreign Policy Department at Cato were raving about it on a weekly basis, and I wasn’t watching it at the time, so I had no clue, and now I’m totally enamored with it. Great show. The whole first season is about missile defense technology and fears about the Star Wars program and the Soviet worried about it, and I’m a huge missile defence nerd, so I really appreciated that. I highly recommend that.

0:51:20.2 Emma Ashford: So I also highly recommend The Americans, it’s a little amped up, but it’s actually one of the more accurate spy shows that’s ever been made. So highly recommend that. I was thinking like, as I was watching The Hurt Locker again, I was thinking, why do I know most of these terms? And I remembered, it’s because I watched way too much MythBusters years ago. So if you watched The Hurt Locker and you want to know what det cord is, or what C4 is, or how big an explosion a certain amount of material might make, go and watch MythBusters, because it’s a lot of fun. They blow up a lot of things and they do it in a really fun way where nobody gets hurt.

0:51:58.7 Landy Ayres: Well, when they did the slow motion shot of the shell casing falling on the ground, I thought it was a MythBusters shot, it looks exactly like something they would do.

0:52:09.0 Eric Gomez: Yes, I think I know the shot you’re talking, like the MythBusters shot you’re talking about, yeah.

0:52:13.0 Landy Ayres: Yeah, they use the high-​speed camera on that one, and then… But they don’t show the bullet hitting the giant blob of jelly and going blub, blub, blub, blub.

0:52:22.9 Emma Ashford: So just a way to enjoy explosions and clear your palate after The Hurt Locker, perhaps. And then the other thing I’ve been enjoying is I’ve been working my way through these books, the Murderbot series by Martha Wells, and they are…

0:52:36.4 Landy Ayres: Did you say Murderbots?

0:52:39.5 Emma Ashford: I did say Murderbots.

0:52:41.1 Landy Ayres: Okay, I’m here for it.

0:52:42.8 Emma Ashford: So they’re a book told from the point of view of an autonomous security robot… Well, I think it’s like an android. He has nicknamed himself Murderbot and hacked his own programming and he went rogue, but all he really wants to do is sit around and watch his favorite soap operas, and the humans keep asking him to show up to work and kill people. These are just really funny, really good sci-​fi set in this like corporatist future where… So he’s owned by a company and the companies own planets, and so anyway, a really good read, highly recommend it if you enjoy good sci-​fi.

0:53:23.9 Natalie Dowzicky: I had to put that on my list.

0:53:25.3 Eric Gomez: Yeah, I’m entering that in my library right now.

0:53:27.2 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah. For me, I just got back from a trip, so when I was flying, I watched the Outer Banks, which is a good show, it’s just like a Netflix show. They’re kind of like treasure hunters almost, no. And then I started reading The Rosie Project, which is really, really good. It’s a shorter book, but it’s about a man who is autistic, but he works in gene editing and does gene editing research, and he meets a woman who is looking for her father, and it’s like going through the story of how he’s helping her find him, but it’s really interesting, ’cause it’s told from his point of view, and he’s trying to learn like the proper social cues and that kind of stuff to go and help her find her father. It’s good, it’s a quick read, and I’m hoping to finish that one up soon, because after that I’m gonna read the 2034 book, I’ve had it sitting on my desk for a while now, that’s the one by Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James… I can’t pronounce his last name. Stavridris?

0:54:40.1 Emma Ashford: Stavidris.

0:54:41.5 Natalie Dowzicky: Stavidris.

0:54:42.5 Emma Ashford: Yes, I just finished that. It’s really good.

0:54:43.9 Natalie Dowzicky: Is it good? Okay, perfect. So I’ve had it sitting on my desk for a while, so I’m finally gonna crack that one open next.

0:54:49.6 Eric Gomez: Let me know how… I don’t know, I’ve got… I don’t really like Stavridis, I don’t think he’s a particularly smart foreign policy commentator, so…

0:54:58.2 Emma Ashford: I was very surprised by the book, I enjoyed it. It started like a Washington fantasy, right, like the Chinese do something nefarious in the South China Sea and la la la, and then it actually goes off in a really unexpected direction, and the Americans don’t come out well, necessarily, at the end of it, so I actually enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would.

0:55:20.1 Eric Gomez: Right. Give him a chance then.

0:55:25.8 Landy Ayres: I’m on Ted Lasso, season 2, on Apple TV, I can’t get enough. As soon as it’s over, I get sad, and I wait until the next Friday, and then I’m happy for a half hour, and then I get sad for another week. Ted Lasso’s so good. It’s a bright light in a dark world.

0:55:47.3 Eric Gomez: I really want to see that, but Apple TV is the one streaming service I don’t have yet, and at this point, it’s just like, just get cable.

0:55:56.0 Landy Ayres: I got it on my mom’s account. Thanks, Mom.

0:56:02.9 Eric Gomez: Yeah, I’ve been listening to this podcast called The Water Margin podcast, and The Water Margin is this ancient Chinese work of literature. It’s up there with The Romance of the Three Kingdoms in terms of classic pieces of Chinese writing, and it’s basically this story about a set of bandits with very colorful back stories and just their travels and adventures through ancient China. It’s sort of like, what if ancient Chinese Dungeons and Dragons, and it’s just like these guys being quote-​unquote men of honor, which mostly means screwing the government as much as they can and killing people who they want to, and then it turns out that some of them are bad after the fact that they killed them, but it’s a podcast, it’s called Water Margin, which is the name in Chinese is like bandits of the swamp, that’s what… But it literally means water margin.

0:57:06.3 Eric Gomez: It’s very good, it’s… The narrator for the podcast does a very good job of being like, okay, so we’re about to hear something that’s really not great for modern ears, but that’s just how it was back then, so don’t be mad at me. He does a very good job with his delivery.

0:57:26.6 Landy Ayres: Thanks for listening. As always, the best way to get more Pop & Locke content is to follow us on Twitter. You can find us at the handle @popnlockepod, that’s pop, the letter N, locke with an E like the philosopher, pod. Make sure to follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen as well. We look forward to unraveling your favorite show or movie next time.

0:57:51.4 Landy Ayres: Pop & Locke is produced by me, Landry Ayres, and is co-​hosted by Natalie Dowzicky. We are a project of lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org. To learn more, visit us on the web at www​.lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.