"Buddy cop blocking"
Mild spoilers for The Hurt Locker will follow. Although if you haven’t seen it and aren’t planning on seeing it tomorrow, I’m not going to give away anything that will ruin it, and I might help you understand what all the fuss is about.
Is this familiar to anybody?
Sergeant [JT Sanborn] is an [aspiring] family man and sensible veteran [soldier] just trying to make it through the day unscathed. [Staff] Sergeant [William James] is a suicidal loose cannon [bomb defusing specialist] who doesn’t care if he even lives to see the end of the day. Reluctantly thrown together to solve the mysterious [bombing of a street in Iraq], the unlikely duo [encounters] a dangerous ring of [Iraqi insurgents] employing ex-military mercenaries. After a tragic turn of events, the mission becomes personal and the mismatched investigators must learn to trust one another as they wage a two-man war against [ennui, meaningless death and the inhumanity of neocolonial geopolitics].
Oh, I know where I saw this! It was drawn from an IMDB Plot Summary:
Sergeant Roger Murtaugh is an aging family man and sensible veteran police officer just trying to make it through the day unscathed. Sergeant Martin Riggs is a suicidal loose cannon cop who doesn’t care if he even lives to see the end of the day. Reluctantly thrown together to solve the mysterious murder of a banker’s daughter, the unlikely duo uncovers a dangerous ring of drug smugglers employing ex-military mercenaries. After a tragic turn of events, the mission becomes personal and the mismatched investigators must learn to trust one another as they wage a two-man war against a deadly criminal organization.
Look familiar? Unless you’re one of OTI’s valued younger readership, it should. It’s from 1987’s Lethal Weapon, perhaps the definitive “buddy cop” movie of the last forty years, made back when Mel Gibson was the sexiest man alive.
Yeah, the world has turned upside down several times since then. I hear there’s an iPhone app that can measure the rotational velocity. But one thing has held constant – the buddy cop movie is still close to all our hearts. Oh, except now they give it Academy Awards (or maybe they will – check out the Oscars next weekend).
How far does the similarity between The Hurt Locker and Lethal Weapon go? (Farther than you think) What are the differences? And what does this say about how we’ve changed as people since the salad days of Riggs and Murtaugh? Read on…
Let’s start by watching the trailers – partly because they are awesome:
(In case you couldn’t figure it out or YouTube broke the links, the first one, the one with the awesome 80s special effects, isn’t the one up for an Academy Award next weekend.)
"If you weren't so good at your job, I wouldn't work with you, because you are crazy and dangerous and are going to get me killed."
But let’s run it down, shall we? White guy and black guy don’t get along. One is by the book, the other doesn’t follow any rules, but is just so … damn … good … that it doesn’t matter. The crazy guy kind of has a death wish and feels bad about his failure to take care of his family, while the by-the-book guy manages to more successfully compartmentalize his life, despite how disruptive the crazy guy is. Some kid or girl or something is threatened, which tests the buddy cops’ relationship and gives them something to agree on. There is a thoroughly implausible action sequence about once every ten pages.
Key lines to watch for:
- “Get out of my way and let me do my job.”
- “You’re going to get us all killed!”
- “You’re crazy; you know that?”
- “I’m too old for this shit.”
(To my knowledge, Jeremy Renner in The Hurt Locker is the only man every nominated for a Best Actor Oscar in a movie where he actually says “I’m too old for this shit.” It’s in the scene where he’s sitting on the bed smoking. I didn’t believe it either.)
Other key tropes to watch for:
- Ineffective superior officers who are kind of jerks
- Crazy guy smokes to signify to the audience that he doesn’t care about his safety
- Friendships with men taking the place of loose relationships with women and children you rarely see
- Going off-mission in ridiculous, self-destructive ways that no professional department of this sort would ever allow
- Third wheel guy who is little, incompetent and angry but who comes up big at a key moment (This is one of two main points where The Hurt Locker resembles Lethal Weapon 2 more than Lethal Weapon 1, the other of which I’ll get to later)
- “How long does X have until retirement?” (In Lethal Weapon and its ilk, this is a huge matter of discussion to the point of hilarity. In The Hurt Locker, they play it seriously and display it onscreen during the movie.)
It is much to The Hurt Locker’s credit that, until you have that epiphany moment, all these similarities seem invisible. It successfully makes all these cliches that are so common in action movies seem at home in a “serious,” legitimate movie about a recent historical event.
Danny Glover drops a bomb.
The explosions in particular bring this out – action movies have a hugely improbable frequency of explosions. The Hurt Locker is chock full of bombs and explosions. But The Hurt Locker is serious. It’s like watching one of those Learning Channel shows about human evolution and claiming you’re not doing to to be titillated by the scientific photographs of breasts. Except, you know, anybody buys it for a second and they don’t make fun of it on Office Space.
It reminds me a lot of Slumdog Millionaire, which is just a hop, skip and a jump from being a Li’l Rascals movie. There are a bazillion different disposable examples of the genre (band of outcast kids that includes a love triangle have mischievous adventures and grow up together), but which earned major legitimacy across the board and, dare I say it, duped its audience into thinking it was something they had not seen before while at the same time courting them with familiarity.
How do they both do it? The setting. They set their genre films and in places or circumstance that are difficult to portray on film because of cultural norms and precedent. They approach a difficult subject – extreme poverty in India or the American occupation in Iraq, and then they act out a movie in front of that cultural matte painting that is comfortable enough to make this strange place accessible to you.
People love to thrill at the exotic, and the self-same bourgeoisie who would scoff at awarding an Oscar to something like Lethal Weapon let their guard down if they sense the subject matter or movie is “important,” at which point they recognize that this genre of movie has redeeming qualities, that it works for a reason, and that the movie is really good.
To clarify, I’m not saying The Hurt Locker is bad or doesn’t deserve the praise it’s getting – I’m saying that other movies that are similar to it don’t get nearly as much praise because of superficial differences that trigger people’s prejudices. But I guess there’s justice, because the latter are the movies more people love and remember. To paraphrase Matthew 6, “Be not like the tentpoles auto-greenlit and raking it in at the box office, I tell you the truth, they are already repaid.”
So, yeah, The Hurt Locker is just like Lethal Weapon, except it takes out the villain and the comedy and replaces them with harrowing scenes of human suffering from the war in Iraq. Let’s look at what that means.
Harrowing.
Performance artist.
Realism vs. legitimacy
No, this isn’t a discussion of Kissinger and international relations, though if you want to start one of those, hop in on the comments and I’m sure Sheely will oblige you.
One trap with The Hurt Locker is to praise it for being “realistic.” It’s historical fantasy fiction – it doesn’t attempt to portray events that may have conceivably happened in real life. Oh, it has a certain authenticity in its setting and art direction, and it’s representational most of the time rather than presentational – meaning that the performance style is meant to draw a connection to how things might appear in life rather than use a more abstract vocabulary of symbolism. (The scene where the guys wrestle in the barracks is representational – the scene where the spent round falls from the sniper rifle in slow motion and bounces reluctantly, as if repelled from a hostile earth, is presentational. Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, where they travel through history, is representational, Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, where they travel to the afterlife, is presentational.)
From what I’ve learned talking to guys who were over there, it gets certain things right that you don’t usually see these movies get right – the kid selling the DVDs, the soldiers listening to heavy metal and playing first-person shooters, the level of danger, some of the characterizations and some of the bomb setups.
But the role that the squad in The Hurt Locker plays is, at best, cobbled together from a bunch of unrelated units. A quick search of online forums or reviews where military personnel talk about the movie makes it clear pretty quickly, and it makes sense – bomb squad guys don’t go running off on their own to get in gunfights. They don’t engage in sniper duels with commando units. They don’t misbehave to the degree Sgt. James misbehaves and still get to keep their jobs. They shower. (That was one complaint that really struck me: in real life, Jeremy Rennick’s character definitely would have been better washed.) They aren’t some sort of red-wire cutting A-Team that gets to go wherever they want and shoot random people.
This may seem minor relative to the scope of the subject, but I think that sense is misguided. Everything about the movie is realistic, except what the characters do. This is a pretty low bar for realism—although I guess it’s sort of endemic of the War in Iraq; we know everything about it except what the people who are actually there are actually doing on an individual basis. To a degree, we aren’t invited by our media-driven and politically dominated hyper-reality to share their experiences.
But if all it takes to be a “realistic” movie is a “realistic” setting, and it’s not less realistic if the characters do absurd unrealistic things, then Lethal Weapon is just as realistic as The Hurt Locker, because there’s every indication that the Los Angeles they live in is a normal Los Angeles from 1987, and that the only really weird stuff happens to the characters in the movie.
By most accounts I’ve hunted down, The Hurt Locker isn’t as realistic as, say, Black Hawk Down, which also takes a lot of liberties with what happened when but at least arranges events somewhat plausibly, or as Jarhead, both of which do a better job of giving you a sense for what military personnel in specific jobs actually tend to do with their time (i.e., wait around a lot for other people in their huge organization to do stuff — not to go around all cowboy fixing the war themselves).
No, the difference is not realism. The difference I’m talking about here is legitimacy.
There’s another misconception out there — that The Hurt Locker isn’t a political film. The Hurt Locker is a tremendously political film. People’s senses have been dulled by too much Internet flamewar and cable news – being political doesn’t just mean taking a side and making shit up so you can rail at the other side’s cruel plot to destroy the world until you have an aneurism – it means looking to the consequences of what you say, do or portray on a given audience, and making choices based on what is likely to give you advantage with that group.
The board game version of Hostel.
Being diplomatic in what you say is a big part of politics. And being centrist isn’t the same as having no position. The Hurt Locker is a delicate, careful, politically crafted movie. It plays Operation — grabbing as much bone as it can without touching the sides and setting off the red buzzer.
The Hurt Locker avoids the hot-button questions of whether the war in Iraq was justified or not precisely because it is being political. It is negotiating a place of legitimacy between the camps on the war, seeking a tone and a message that is not going to trip anybody’s yelling reflex and drive away half the potential audience for the movie.
So, you have a soldier who admits to the negative consequences of the war on his own humanity and ability to raise a child, and you see the war hurt Iraqi children, but then you see how much the U.S. soldier cares about Iraqi children and in many ways may be their only or best ally. But you also see him totally lost and incapable to doing anything to actually help, dropped in a foreign land as if by a cruel mistake. This movie is deftly political. It takes a whole bunch of stands, but it doesn’t stay on any one stand for too long, and since it doesn’t fall on the axis of rage, people with hair triggers attuned to one side or the other don’t see it taking any stands at all.
For legitimacy, your movie needs:
- A serious subject
- A meaningful message or set of messages
- Baseline quality and production values
- Not to be decried, demonized or marginalized by a major political coalition that serves as gatekeeper for such things
With the fourth being the biggest. Your movie is legitimate if the right people say it’s legitimate. No movie is Oscarworthy a priori.
Legitimate.
So, Dogma isn’t a legitimate movie because it has too many political detractors. It is “just” a Kevin Smith film (that is too sacrilegious for serious consideration). And Lethal Weapon isn’t legitimate because it has detractors – political blocs who require certain things that are arbitrary from the standpoint of moviemaking, but which are important to an individual or group political goal. Raiders of the Lost Ark is a legitimate movie, but Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is not, because important political groups are uncomfortable with some of the things it says.
I should clarify – “politics” doesn’t just mean “electoral politics,” and “political groups” doesn’t just mean “Republicans vs. Democrats,” “Tories vs. Labor,” or “Berlusconi and the Mafia vs. Everybody Else and the Mafia.” As you discover in the working world (if you haven’t already, get ready, younger audience!), there is politics surrounding any resource or exchange of power – a discourse whose metadiscourse is about gaining advantage.
Illegitimate.
People choose to dislike Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom often because they benefit their own agendas by disliking it. But hey, maybe the concern is justified. Its portrayal of Hinduism is racist, or its use of children and heart-yoinking may be inappropriate. Justified or unjustified by our own beliefs (which are of course not all the same) these are still matters of influence and advantage, so they are still political. Politics and legitimacy really know little right or wrong.
Movies aren’t respected for “good” reasons. Just like human beings, they are respected, by and large, for “appropriate” reasons, with “appropriate” being termed by whomever is brokering power at the time.
So, despite being kind of an action movie, The Hurt Locker manages to weave through a complex political maze and arrive at legitimacy. This is something Lethal Weapon doesn’t even try to do.
A serious subject
This is my serious face.
Another way people might want to drive a wedge between The Hurt Locker and Lethal Weapon when confronted with the similarities — although imagining that there are all these people out there who would deem me legitimate enough to even argue with me about it is kind of hilarious — is that The Hurt Locker has a serious subject of international importance, and Lethal Weapon is “just entertainment.”
There are few words in criticism that irk me more than “just entertainment.” It’s “just for having fun.” It just causes people to miss so much about storytelling. If making a classic movie like Lethal Weapon just ain’t no thing and requires no art or technique to be admired, then let’s all do it and become millionaires! And besides, enjoying a movie, “just for entertainment” or no, involves engagement with the same sort of craft and fictive engineering. Good movies and bad movies have much more in common than they have by way of differences. I see little need to dismiss the finer points of comparison so readily. I also think I’ve written this paragraph too many times. Moving on.
Anyway, the potential objection — that Lethal Weapon doesn’t take on a serious subject — makes me chuckle whether or not it’s actually floating out there, because they actually made a Lethal Weapon movie about a serious subject of equal international importance to The Hurt Locker.
Lest we forget, Lethal Weapon 2 (the best Lethal Weapon and the first R rated movie I saw — my friend’s mom said we could rent it “As long as the R rating was for violence, not for sex,” and that made sense at the time) was about apartheid. Specifically, it was about dealing with the obstructive legal legitimacy of the white South African apartheid government while condemning it on moral grounds for its evils and injustice. Of course, Lethal Weapon 2 explores its serious subject through slightly different kinds of scenes, like this one, which is legendary (they’re trying to infiltrate the South African consulate by creating a diversion):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zje1ny0F_js
A lot of the movie builds the narrative around the concept of diplomatic immunity, which stands in for Kissinger-esque legitimacy as a moral problem of the relationships between countries (There I go! Stepping on Sheely’s turf! Take it to the comments, folks!). At any rate, the matter is settled, well, with directness and expediency, if not due process:
Obviously, this is the politics of a much more certain and resolved auteur, who takes a clearer, and perhaps less practical stand on a less morally ambiguous issue. But you can’t blame it for lack of a serious subject … even though you can probably blame it for what it does with that subject. Which, in case YouTube took down the clip, is to shoot it in the head while saying “It’s just been revoked!”
But, holding back from that for a moment – is what Lethal Weapon does with apartheid really so bad? Is the problem with the dishonesty surrounding the War in Iraq the inherent dishonesty of propaganda and its use by leadership, or is it just how it was used this time around? Were that self-same reductionism used in service of a less morally ambiguous purpose – or one on which there was broader enduring consensus – or heck, one that led to quicker success, would it still be such a bad thing?
That’s for a future post, and for the comments. I’m not touching that here. I’m getting too old for that shit.
Filmic craft
I’ll go through this quickly:
Getting crafty.
The script for The Hurt Locker is solid, but it’s nothing spectacular. It’s episodic, and very little holds the episodes together. The characters are written a bit flat and erratic, but that makes sense, because this is an action movie. It has an uneasy relationship with plausibility that betrays that it was written by an embedded journalist – our culture’s fishmonger of hyper-real wartime fantasy passed off as truth. The dialogue is kind of cliché a lot of the time. The framing devices are a bit clunky.
(By the way, I’ve used the term hyper-reality a lot in this post — I’m perhaps abusing the term a bit. It’s a post-modernish word that refers to a case where people live in a fictional world that to themselves is indistinguishable from being real. So, if somebody really feels like their Second Life character is the real them, that’s hyper-reality. I comment fairly frequently on this website and in the podcast that the world that the maelstrom of media and news creates for us around any current event is a hyper-reality — it is refracted through such a thick lens of perspective and reimagining that, while we consider it to be real, it’s actually a fiction. We experience the war in Iraq we are told about and imagine is happening, not the one actually happening, which is so complex, so far away, and so divorced from many of our own experiences that we cannot begin to comprehend what it means in a human sense.)
Lethal Weapon has a very silly script, but it succeeds very well at what it’s trying to do. So, The Hurt Locker has an advantage in writing, but not an insurmountable one.
The Hurt Locker looks really really good. It has very high production values. It employs all sorts of techniques that didn’t even exist in 1987. This is where comparing new movies to old movies is like comparing today’s chessmasters to chessmasters from a hundred years ago – today’s chessmasters have the advantage of working on their predecessors’ shoulders – and of reading all their games. So, The Hurt Locker is miles ahead of Lethal Weapon in most technical categories – but the basic blocking is pretty much the same. The mise en scene for the actors isn’t that much more advanced – it’s everything else that’s advanced.
It also sounds really good. As I’ve mentioned before, the sountrack for Lethal Weapon is totally 80s and really really silly – it’s the chief thing that makes the movie seem “cheaper” than rough contemporaries like Terminator and Die Hard. That and the terrible, terrible ensemble acting. Observe:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUlfNMTc6Xc
The lead acting – and here’s where I have to put my foot down – the lead acting in Lethal Weapon is better than the acting in The Hurt Locker. It’s a slightly different set of techniques, but it’s just as complex, if not moreso, and shows a broader command of the art and a greater capacity for affect (ring up Colley Cibber and call me a Sentimentalist).
Is it fair for Jeremy Renner to win an Oscar for his role, when so many actors have done so much for the “loose cannon” cop/soldier over the years and received little but derision for it? Well, that and lots and lots of money — so again, I guess it’s fine. Laughing, bank, etc.
Nothing against Renner’s performance – it’s great, he’s great. But Mel Gibson was better, even when he was being silly (and often because he was being silly – stepping through the hyperreality and admitting that the situations are absurd is important to understanding how these sorts of characters work). This is the kind of role that makes you marvel at people like Mel Gibson, Tom Cruise, Bruce Willis or Wesley Snipes – there’s a lot not to like about guys like this, but they can act the shit out of action movie characters. And Sgt. James is an action movie character. Renner does a great job, but Gibson does better with sloppier, more challenging material. Old Mel Gibson is just so much fun to watch.
Of course, that’s not entirely fair; their performance styles are really different, and the tone they strike is pretty different most of the time. Mel Gibson probably can’t do what Renner does as well as Renner does it — and a lot of my friends might chastise me for underrating the importance of an actor making subtle but present onscreen choices. But I think it’s important to point out that the comparisons based on film-making and its related crafts are not entirely one-sided here.
And, lest it be forgotten, Danny Glover is an amazing, amazing performer. He’s got to be one of the best overall actors of his generation. Back in 1987, Danny Glover was the same as he is now — one of those rare actors who effortlessly moves between excelling in popcorn action movies, serious films, and the Broadway stage. The same year he played Murtaugh for the first time, he played Nelson Mandela on TV. If there’s any ancillary benefit to this post, let it be the reminder that Danny Glover really is that awesome. That’s probably what this section is all about, actually. An excuse for writing that.
The next section will be more important and more interesting, I promise.
Psychology vs. psycho-pharmacology
This is my crazy face.
This is actually what made me really want to write this post, because the similarities between Lethal Weapon and The Hurt Locker let you draw a really interesting through-line in the last 20 years in public attitudes toward mental illness, and, in turn, toward the larger ideas of biopower that serve as the controlling strategies for a lot of the overriding social order.
Sgt. Riggs (Mel Gibson) and Sgt. James (Jeremy Renner) are, for the purposes of cultural criticism, largely the same character. They are crazy, borderline suicidal virtuosos who, having left behind most of the rest of what’s in their lives, only have their jobs left. Observe this scene from Lethal Weapon:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOqpoie1iuc&NR=1
Now, I won’t belabor the similarities between this and certain scenes in The Hurt Locker – if you’ve seen the movie, you’ll notice them. But I will point out that it acknowledges a pathology. Sgt. Riggs is sick, he has suicidal manic depression. He is obsessed with his job as the only thing in his life that he cares about. Being a supercop is like an illness, it comes from an unhealthy place.
(You can actually tell a lot about a movie by what unhealthiness creates its supercops.)
Throughout the Lethal Weapon movies, Riggs’ craziness is explored in an 80s- and 90s-friendly therapeutic way. By opening up about his feelings, he feels more normal and he starts getting over his problems. He takes control of his life (of course, this is about where a random bad guy kills the girl and he goes out for vengeance, but I digress).
The main point is that Mel Gibson has psychological problems, and he talks about them. Society regains control of him by modeling an idea of mental illness that includes the necessity of him going into therapy of a formal or informal nature – and by acknowledging his own illness and talking about it, he rejoins society and the social order is restored.
Compare this with Jeremy Renner’s mental illness in The Hurt Locker. The epigraph of the movie states that “War is a drug.” Now, I’ve heard it said and seen it written that this is the lesson of the movie – well, if it is, it’s a surface lesson, speaking to an earlier, common ancestor. Jeremy Renner’s character isn’t that different from Mel Gibson’s character, but the pathological metaphor for him is different, reflecting, I think, the different way we look at mental illness now.
See, while Mel Gibson’s character has pent up emotions and needs to talk about his problems to stop being crazy, Jeremy Renner is addicted to war. His problem is chemical. Talking about it doesn’t make it better, he just needs his fix.
Both movies, like all buddy cop movies, are about unmet needs – the “crazy one” is the man with an unmet need, and the “buddy” is the fantasy that helps that man act out his fantasies and get what he needs. As I’ve said before on this site, buddy cop movies are a lot like romantic comedies, they’re fantasies about people trying to fill their unmet needs with relationships (which is one reason why so many romantic relationships in movies are awful and codependent and not good models at all for how to conduct one’s own relationships – because good plotting requires your characters to “need” something from close to the beginning of the movie, which places an unhealthy burden on most movie couples).
Tell me more. This is an interesting subject. Also, sit on my lap.
But in contemporary ideas of biopower and the treatment of mental illness, conventional therapy has been — perhaps unfortunately, and many people would dispute this — discredited as a way of dealing with these problems, displaced by psychoactive medication. 1987, the year Lethal Weapon came out, was also ironically the year the FDA approved the barrier-breaking antidepressant drug Prozac (Fluoxetine) for use in the United States.
And while there is some building backlash against the overuse of Ritalin or other psychoactive drugs that may or may not be abusively foisted on people for the best interests of corporations rather than the individuals themselves (I’m looking in your general direction, Zyprexa), it is a backlash against a status quo in which they are used – and boy are they used.
We live in a world where 5-hour energy shots have replaced truck-stop coffee, where tomatoes are marketed as a cancer-treating medication rather than a food, where bread is labeled as having 0g of trans fat, where sports and entertainment are dominated and obsessed by drugs, drugs drugs.
Saying that War is a Drug is not a new insight – it’s a re-contextualization of an old problem. It places the problems of war within the framework of explanation and control of our drug-obsessed culture. The notion is that because so much of our collective understanding flows through the symbolism and vocabulary of drugs, that by using this vocabulary, we can come to a new understanding about war and the madness that accompanies it.
But it’s us, not the madness, not the violence, that has changed. Riggs had the same thing, and nobody was saying Riggs was on drugs – even though he acts coked out all the time. Look at the previously linked scene with the drug deal – you can tell that the politics and social mores of the time would not have allowed Riggs to actually take the drugs. No, drugs and madness were separate moral centers of gravity – drugs for corruption, madness for self-destruction. For the old school D&D fan – in the 80s, drugs were chaotic evil, madness was chaotic neutral. Whereas now, alignment doesn’t work the same way, and drugs and madness are just in some chic, morose vampire thing or something.
The most interesting differences between the Lethal Weapon series and The Hurt Locker are how the different ways the film as a whole contextualizes the play of the characters and actors tells us how attitudes have changed over time. We can see 20 years in the history of our stock characters go by in an instant.
Riggs’s relationship with his daughter vs. James’s with his son shows you 20 years in changing family dynamics. Sanborn’s relative authority and confidence in dealing with his partner and superiors tell you something about evolving race relations (and how they haven’t evolved). The difference between Leo Getz and Specialist Eldridge raises the dual burning questions of why Joe Pesci is in any movies at all vs. why Joe Pesci isn’t put in every movie ever made. I don’t know which question to ask, let alone the answer.
What points of cultural resonance did you find in the two movies? If you haven’t seen The Hurt Locker, does this make you want to see it more or less? Sound off in the …
.. Ugh …
.. comments!