Dargis on The Hurt Locker

The Hurt Locker brings out the best in Manohla Dargis, who writes something for the Oscar race (thanks to Rex for the tip):

Put another way, like Peckinpah, Ms. Bigelow is brilliant at both delivering and dissecting male violence, which is why “The Hurt Locker” is at once so pleasurable and disturbing. You thrill to the violence even as you understand its horror, and your horror is doubled because you are thrilled: this is true in “The Wild Bunch” and in “The Hurt Locker.”

Dargis points to Bigelow as the author of the film, visually. It is the rare director who has such control over the lens – surely the cinematographers mostly direct films for inexperienced directors. But Bigelow began her professional life as a painter before moving to film. You can bet that if there is one thing that Bigelow owns, it’s the shot compositions. This has always been true in her work, but it is especially true with this film. Dargis brings up how Bigelow has rescued the use of the zoom lens from being a site gag. Mostly, though, one doesn’t think about the eye behind the camera while watching The Hurt Locker – it is not a show-off piece, though it has thumbprint Bigelow moments — you are too caught up in what’s happening on screen:

Before James does get down to his work, though, there is a shift, about a minute into the scene, from the film’s customary (and classic) detached narrative position — where the camera hovers next to characters and often shows you what they see — to a shot from inside James’s helmet looking out, as if you were seeing the world through his eyes. You see him. Then you see with him. Although this shift to the first person lasts for about six seconds, a standard shot length in contemporary movies, it feels longer because you’re abruptly removed from the visual and aural chaos. For those six seconds you see what James sees through the helmet that frames the world like a camera, and you mainly hear what he hears: his heavy breathing.

Ms. Bigelow uses the first person several times in the film, usually to put us inside James’s helmet and possibly his thinking. But her most canny deployment of this subject position actually takes place during the first scene, when James’s predecessor dies. The opener has several first-person shots from inside this tech’s helmet, but it’s early yet in the story, and you don’t understand the stakes, and anyway the crew is laughing and joking. The men have let down their guard, and so yours is down too, the folly of which is made brutally clear when the bomb explodes, killing the tech and filling his helmet with blood. It’s no wonder that James later wears his helmet in bed: he’s holding fast to his head before it and he explode.