17 Days to Oscar: My Locker Still Hurts

When I was a student teacher, a frumpy, but well-meaning classroom veteran who worked across the hall passed me every morning with the same greeting:

"Just get through the day!"

New day, same greeting.  

"Just get through the day!"

If I were standing still, he would walk right up and place both of his meaty hands on my shoulders. Punctuating his words with light, but awkward shakes. 

"Just get through the day!"

If I were walking, he would bound beside me. A relentless Baloo to my slightly creeped out Mowgli.

"Just get through the day!"

His words became a mainstay of my student teaching experience. They echoed through the halls. They rang through my planning efforts. They hummed in my head whenever a room was deafened by student confusion. They buzzed in the students' blank stares and weary expressions. They shot me between the eyes when once, during a reading of what I thought was a profound and relevant article about Matthew Shepard, the University of Wyoming student who was tortured and killed in 1998 after "coming out" to friends, a young man rose to his feet, raised one puffy coated arm into the air and exclaimed. "If a (sic) told me he liked me, I'd shoot his ass too."

"Just get through the day!"

I rode that line. Dissected it, and then let it carry me right out of the teaching profession and into corporate America.

"Just get through the day!"

This notion resurfaced as I watched the tenser moments of Kathyrn Bigelow's Best Picture nominated, Iraq War thriller, The Hurt Locker.

Please understand, I am by no means comparing public high school teaching to defusing bombs. Well, actually, now that I look at it on paper, maybe the two do have a bit in common. Today, with a renewed understanding and genuine love of teaching, I realize that defusing potentially explosive situations is a large part of that job. And if done carelessly, people DO get hurt. At the end of tough days, it is easy to feel like a teacher fights an impossibly uphill battle. That the culmination is often as pyrrhic as war itself.

This is not meant to trivialize the heroics of our servicemen. Warzone bomb squads do a breath-taking, staggeringly heroic job. Our gratitude, while endless and pure, could never repay the debt.

The common thread is futility. Locker succeeds most profoundly as a war film during the moments in which the highest tension is punctuated by the deepest feelings of hopelessness. Day after day, Delta Company, the military bomb squad that the  film follows, faces an endless parade of horrifying scenarios. Each day, they draw closer to their goal: the end of their tour. Each day it seems more and more impossible for them to survive their dangerous duties. Each day, the war seems more and more out of control and beyond their reach. Sgt. Sanborn and Spc. Owens, played respectively by Oscar-snubbed actors Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty, just want to survive. They want to go home. Their plans are derailed when their team leader dies during a diffusion and Sgt. James takes over. Played with brillant nuance and believability by Best Actor nominee Jeremy Renner, James has other plans. He is a renegade cowboy whose hero complex puts the entire company in reckless, risky situations.

Sgt. James' appeal is a credit to Renner's performance. He channels Jack Palance's bad boy smile, John Wayne's swagger and rolls them up into a modern, Kid Rock of a soldier. Despite his "devil may care" death wish, James is likable and carries a genuine passion for helping the Iraqi people. This makes his ineffably pig-headed, self-absorbed, disregaridng actions harder to stomach.

As an audience, we share the conflict. Should we follow James and proclaim him a true patriot? Or do we despise his Superman complex and crucify him for his carelessness? In a way, this ethical conflict is the heart of the Iraq War itself. By examining the duality of Sgt. James, we, in turn, assess our own feelings toward this war. Patriots or war mongers? This uncertainty drives The Hurt Locker over action film cliche and into Oscar's realm.

The seminal scene occurs when Spc. Eldridge is being medi-vaced away. The usual war film heroics and thumbs up give way to a gut-wretching display of profanity, insecurity, hopelessness and resentment. Bigelow's brushstroke drips with realism and the futility of war.

Much has been made of the film's opening line: "War is a drug." For many critics, it stands as a testament to the perceived theme of Bigelow's film: that war is about adrenaline. But adrenaline and highs are only one side of addiction, the other side is hopeless and futility, and this is Locker's essence.

So where does it go wrong? I was hampered by the search for a plot. The movie was bomb diffusion after bomb diffusion. Literally, thrill after thrill, I found myself inventing sub-plots. Could it be that the film's plotlessness was calculated? A symbol of a war that is similarly plotless? 

Either way, Renner is amazing, and easily my pick for Best Actor. He infuses ambiguous charms into a transgressive hero. In all other Academy races, Locker falls to the middle of the pack. Remember though that Oscar is a sucker for a story-line like Bigelow vs. Cameron. Read: popular but marginally proftiable indie screen Queen slays Blockbuster Ex-Hubby! Well, I'm biting that, and so will all of America! Bigelow Best Director would be exciting and long overdue homage to female film makers.

But then again, there's that lovable Jason Reitman...you'll just have to read on for that.

For now, "just get through the day."