Don't mention the war

If I were a veteran returning from Iraq, one look at the fantasy-fuelled America I'd fought for would make me go all Travis Bickle in minutes ...
Still from The Hurt Locker
Another view ... still from The Hurt Locker

The word from the Toronto film festival was that everyone loved Katherine Bigelow's new Iraq war drama The Hurt Locker, but after the brutal box office trouncing meted out to last year's surge of Iraq-themed movies, few distributors were prepared to shell out the necessary bucks to give it a decent nationwide rollout. It's not even a particularly political movie, by all accounts, but more of an action thriller with bomb disposal teams, which is good news for those of us who believe that Bigelow makes better movies about gung-ho, manly stuff than any 10 of her penis-possessing peers combined. How Summit, the US distribs who picked it up this week, will handle it is anyone's guess.

But it's another sign that the war and its shattering dislocations are being shunted offstage. It's mentioned on the news even less frequently than George Bush or Dick Cheney were at last week's Republican convention in St Paul. Meanwhile the domestic soap opera explodes around mad-fundamentalist- manufactured distraction Governor Sarah Palin (or "Caribou Barbie"), and seriousness just flies out the window. If I were a veteran returning from the war zone minus a few extremities and with nightmares eating at my soul, one look at the sleepwalking, couchbound, fantasy-fuelled America I'd just fought for would make me go all Travis Bickle in five minutes flat.

It's often been said (and often by me) that no real Vietnam-based movies were released until long after the war had ended, but that's only literally true. In fact the Vietnam conflict is front and centre, albeit in a metaphorical fashion, in dozens of genre movies of the period. The (then) extreme violence of Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch was only possible because said violence was sanctioned nightly on the evening news. The moribund western genre briefly revived itself into contemporary relevance by linking Manifest Destiny and the Indian genocide with the Domino Principle and My Lai, giving us movies such as Soldier Blue, Little Big Man and Ulzana's Raid, and one can argue that every movie released until 1980 was in some way a displaced Vietnam movie. I sometimes wonder if the Hostel and Saw movies aren't the debased modern equivalent of that nobler phenomenon. Either way, if you want to make an Iraq or post-9/11 movie today, then taking a literal approach - as the ploddingly tedious and high-minded war movies of last year did - is the worst way to go about it. You're better off looking at it from a skewed angle if you want your movie seen in multiplexes. That, or be the kind of big-shot director who can make what he or she likes (a category that no longer includes Bigelow). Better to be Ridley Scott, now sanctified by left and right alike in the aftermath of Black Hawk Down (which, like Starship Troopers, was weirdly prescient about post-9/11 atmospherics and aesthetics).

Scott's Body of Lies, which teams Ridley the Rightie with Leo DiCaprio the Leftie, seems to style itself less as a War on Terror movie than a throwback to intelligent 1970s thrillers, the better to smuggle in its ideas about torture and counterterrorism in a CIA roiled by factionalism past an audience that's grown wise to political movies that feel like homework (Syriana comes to mind here). Neil Burger's The Lucky Ones is about three Iraq vets home on leave and at large in a country that's now feels foreign to them, but Burger has downplayed any notion that it's purely an "Iraq movie". And the new Shia LaBeouf thriller, Eagle Eye, disguises itself as a North by Northwest popcorn-movie in the style of Three Days of the Condor in order to make a few points about homeworky stuff like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and warrantless wiretapping.

All of which tends to suggest that American audiences, distributors and even film-makers are now afraid to look America itself directly in the face. That should worry us all. Perhaps the western is due for a revival.

Today's best video

Latest reviews

Today in pictures