The good movies of late seem to be war oriented. This should hit close to home, but I realize that I am disturbingly remote from the possibility that a war might be going on somewhere. It is a sensitive point for this area, where we have already lost so many to wars our country is actually in right now. My cousins that went made it back, however, and it is far too easy in the information age to forget about what is currently happening. Back when I used to do registrations in a hospital, I made a thoughtless mistake once of assuming the gentleman that brought a young woman into the ED was her Tricare sponsor. Frayed and horrified, she corrected me. The military sponsor was her deceased husband. In the thick of work, it had completely escaped me that there’s war and folks are dying.

Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds didn’t bring anything closer to home for me. It is a dialog-heavy fantasy peppered with anachronistic movie touches and gratifying ultraviolence. On No Ripcord I wrote:

While the bloodthirsty chaos of the climax may seem disturbing because of just how invigorating it is, it is also undeniably beautiful and gratifying in a very visceral way. Concede these facts and Inglourious Basterds stands as another great movie by Quentin Tarantino.

Inglourious Basterds is wonderful, and it is an irreverent redefinition of the war movie. While more sensitive audience members might be disgusted by the violent celebrations that emerge, it provides an important service in creating genuine Jewish badasses after years of insultingly reverent war and Holocaust monuments to noble suffering. Still, as this is Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds is much more about movies than it is about war, and didn’t scratch too hard at the windows to reality.

Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker redefines war cinema in just about the opposite way. Where Tarantino sets his movie in a WWII occupied France that is as much a product of fantasy that it could be Middle Earth, Bigelow realistically recreates 2004 Baghdad. She discards the conventions of war movies with as much abandon as Tarantino, but pushes in the direction of reality as far as Tarantino leaps in the direction of artifice. Once again from No Ripcord:

The Hurt Locker is a welcome return for Kathryn Bigelow. It is also her best film since her debut masterpiece Near Dark. Just as that movie stripped away all of the ridiculous trappings and cliches of vampire lore to create a gritty, intense classic, The Hurt Locker avoids and subverts the familiar trappings of the war movie in order to create one of the most powerful, personal accounts of the experience.

What remains disturbing is that it took a movie to jerk me back into reality. As I live on the internet and whine about the job market, it escapes me for morbidly long spells the fact that we are at war. It is distressingly easy to do in the information age. Even within this relatively small area in which the military plays such a large role, it is not hard to self-segregate. One might be able to go for months without talking to anyone in the service if they try. This is not something I recommend, but it is seductively easy.