6. ‘The Hurt Locker’ and ‘Iron Man’ | Mission Accomplished

0:02One night in January 2002, George W. Bush hosted a movie night sleepover. He'd only been in office for a year But those first 12 months had been tumultuous 9-11, the strikes in Afghanistan And the looming threat of war in Iraq That winter, during a weekend retreat to Camp David Bush invited 20 Republican members of Congress to watch a movie with him It was a film that had recently become a political talking point The 1990s set war movie Black Hawk Down Once that first bullet goes past your head, politics go right out the window. Directed by Ridley Scott and based on a book by journalist Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down was the true story of a disastrous 1993 peacekeeping mission in Mogadishu, Somalia.

0:55Hundreds of Somalis and 18 American soldiers were killed that day. Not long afterward, the U.S. withdrew from Somalia altogether.

1:08Black Hawk Down had been filmed in early 2001 and made with help from the U.S. Defense Department, which supplied helicopters and trained some of the actors on flight simulators. The result was an extremely visceral war movie. At times, you could almost feel the rattle as machine gun fire hit a U.S. Black Hawk helicopter. C-2, this is 6-8, we've been hit Though the mission in Black Hawk Down quickly turns deadly the American soldiers are strong-willed and clear-eyed even when the odds are against them In one of the film's quieter scenes a Delta Force soldier, played by Eric Bana explains how he'll talk about the battle when he gets home He knows the kind of questions he'll get Why do you do it?

1:50Why do you knowingly go into combat? Anyone understand? It's about the men next to you. And that's it. That's all it is.

2:08Black Hawk Down opened in December 2001, just as the country was gearing up for war. Some politicians saw the movie as a celebration of American might and bravery. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld even attended the film's premiere in Washington, D.C. It's easy to see why Black Hawk Down was championed by the Bush administration. Here was a movie about the power of the military, made with the help of the Pentagon, being released at a time when the president was about to enter multiple wars. After seeing Black Hawk Down, Paul Wolfowitz, a Bush administration official who would help lead America into Iraq, called it, quote, a powerful film.

2:46Wolfowitz then added, I think it's good for this time. It reminds people what it's all about. Some also thought Black Hawk Down could be instructive when it came to America's current war. When Ridley Scott was asked by journalist Bobby Y. Gantt what lessons from Somalia in 1993 could be applied to Afghanistan in 2001, the filmmaker's response was characteristically blunt. Don't underestimate the enemy, ever. Black Hawk Down wound up earning more than $100 million in the U.S. alone. The film may have been about a tragic mission, but after 9-11, some moviegoers saw it as a celebration, however downbeat, of American greatness.

3:26The movie gave them a way to make sense of the present by looking at the past.

3:34But Black Hawk Down turned out to be one of the only contemporary war movies released during the Bush years. Audiences can be fickle when it comes to seeing history play out in real time. In the 1940s, after the United States entered World War II, Hollywood raced to produce dozens of films about the conflict. However, in the late 1960s, as tension started to escalate in Vietnam, the big studios all but ignored that war. The same thing would happen again in the 2000s. The decade began with massive demonstrations against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As the years went on, though, those conflicts stayed off the screen.

4:12As politically consequential as the Iraq War was, it wasn't a galvanizing kind of war. It was like an unpopular thing in the background. That's Jamel Bowie, a New York Times opinion columnist and co-host of Unclear and Present Danger, a podcast that covers politically tinged thrillers and war movies from the 1990s. There are all these other scandals. There's Katrina in 2005. There's lots happening on the domestic side that is occupying people's attention. And Iraq is like this drip, drip, drip of an unpopular and destructive thing, but that isn't having like a direct impact on most Americans. The same could be said for the war in Afghanistan.

4:53To many Americans, it eventually faded into the background. I don't think people were uncaring. It's just that in a country still recovering from a massive terrorist attack, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were overwhelming. After all, these were complicated and long-running conflicts. Keeping up with them required a lot of intellectual and emotional energy. And they were playing out on TV 24 hours a day. So there's a good reason Hollywood didn't want to make 2000s war movies during the 2000s. Honestly, who'd want to watch them? It wasn't until the tail end of the Bush administration that a pair of contemporary war films broke through and became must-see events.

5:35The first starred Jeremy Renner as an American who gets his thrills by dismantling bombs in Iraq. It's called The Hurt Locker. There's enough bag in there to send us all to Jesus. I'm gonna die. I'm gonna die comfortable. The second film is about a very different kind of adrenaline junkie. He's a brilliant weapons manufacturer named Tony Stark, played by Robert Downey Jr. After he's kidnapped by terrorists in Afghanistan and sees the damage his weapons can do, Stark reinvents himself as a sort of anti-war hero. And that is why, effective immediately, I am shutting down the weapons manufacturer division.

6:16Tony has another job, too, though you probably know what that is.

6:23The Hurt Locker and Iron Man didn't have much in common. One was a somber, low-budget drama that wound up winning the Oscar for Best Picture. The other was a high-flying superhero adventure, one that launched the most successful cinematic universe of all time. But they both forced moviegoers to look back at the wars that had engulfed the Bush era, and to consider their consequences. After enduring years of devastation, both at home and abroad, could we still find our humanity? Or have we all gotten lost in the machines of war?

7:02From Spotify and the Ringer Podcast Network, I'm Brian Raftree. And this is Mission Accomplished. Episode 6. The Hurt Locker and Iron Man.

7:41Now try the different Tic Tacs from minty fresh to sweet sweet. Tic Tac. Refresh your good vibes. In late 2004, journalist Mark Bull embedded himself with a US Army bomb squad in Baghdad, Iraq. He watched soldiers disarm improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, that were being used around the region. As Boal later told Charlie Rose, this was one of the most dangerous jobs in the military. The soldiers were under threat of being ambushed or hit by sniper fire. Boal realized that, for the people in charge of defusing these bombs, life in Iraq had been reduced to a single goal, which he described as matter-of-factly as possible.

8:26This war is really about finding IEDs before they find you. During his time in Baghdad, Bol kept in touch with a filmmaker he'd worked with in the past, writer-director Catherine Bigelow. She specializes in high-energy dramas about people who are deeply committed to their calling, whether they're cops, robbers, or even vampires. Bigelow's films include Near Dark, which follows a pack of nomadic bloodsuckers as they fight to survive. She also made The Futuristic Strange Days, about a man who hustles other people's memories on the black market. But it's the 1991 hit Point Break that really showcases Bigelow's interest in people who live on the edge.

9:08The movie stars Keanu Reeves as an undercover FBI agent who gets in too deep with a team of bank-robbing surfers. One of the criminals, played by Patrick Swayze, explains that he's guided through life by a breakneck philosophy. If you want the ultimate, he says, you've got to be able to pay the ultimate price.

9:29He then shares a fatalist bit of wisdom. one that's embraced by many of Bigelow's on-screen tough guys. It's not tragic to die doing what you love. Bigelow's fascination with men who go to extremes would help lead her to make The Hurt Locker. She'd started her career as an artist, and in 2009, while talking to The Guardian about The Hurt Locker, she described the film the way an artist would. Combat, Bigelow said, was a canvas upon which to tell a bigger, more profound story. War is a great crucible. You know, it's defining, it's dehumanizing, it's tragic. Boll began working on a script about a team of bomb experts working in Iraq.

10:08The movie's title would be inspired by some slang he'd heard while embedded with the army. A Hurt Locker, Boll was told, was, quote, a dangerous or painful place. The process of putting together The Hurt Locker took years. Finding a studio willing to make the film proved tough. Bigelow's previous movie, an expensive submarine drama called K-19, The Widowmaker, had been a disappointment. And as I mentioned earlier, Hollywood didn't want anything to do with Iraq. In fact, when you look at the handful of war movies released between 2003 and 2008, the first five years of the Iraq War, all of them were commercial failures.

10:47That includes Redacted, a shocking combat drama from Brian De Palma, who directed the Vietnam film Casualties of War. Based on true events, Redacted was about U.S. troops who sexually assault and murder a 14-year-old Iraqi girl. The movie was violent, and to some, deeply upsetting, and not for the reasons you might expect. One man was offended not by the movie's violent content, but by its negative depiction of American soldiers. He protested outside a theater in North Carolina, carrying a sign that said, Support the troops. In a video from his protest, the man's voice is measured. but you can tell how frustrated he is by De Palma's film.

11:28Please don't see this movie, and it looks like not many people are, but understand that this is a bad message to send to America. The backlash against Redacted wasn't especially big. That could be because when the movie was released in 2007, it opened in just 15 theaters in America and was gone after a month.

11:51Other Iraq war movies released during the Bush years didn't do much better. Like the 2008 drama Stop Loss, starring Ryan Felipe and Channing Tatum. They play soldiers who come home from Iraq feeling angry and distraught. When Felipe's character is told he has to return to the Middle East to keep fighting, he can't hide his rage. He even lashes out at America's commander-in-chief, who remains unnamed. With all due respect, sir, fuck the president. That comment doesn't sit well with his commanding officer, who's played by Timothy Oliphant. Fuck the president. Yes, sir. He's not over there fighting this war.

12:27He's not there seeing his buddies burned alive in Humvees. Stoploss was co-produced by MTV Films and aimed at young moviegoers, but it struggled to find an audience. So did another war drama from around the same time, In the Valley of Elah, which was based on an article by Bull, and which told the story of a young American who's murdered after returning home from Iraq. In the Valley of Elah mostly takes place in America. But to moviegoers, that didn't really matter. By the end of the Bush years, they wanted nothing to do with what was happening in the Middle East. Most people simply wanted to just move on.

13:05The Iraq War isn't Vietnam, right? And it isn't this sort of epochal unpopular war that does sweep in large numbers of Americans. That's Jamel Bowie again. As he notes, the feeling of detachment from the Iraq War was felt across the country in the 2000s, including in Hollywood. When you start going through these Vietnam War movies, what you have are a bunch of filmmakers who, in one way or another, have some kind of direct experience with this, right? And so that's shaping their decision to make these movies. It's shaping their approach to this film. It's shaping the decision to greenlight these films.

13:42But that wasn't the case for many of the directors coming of age in the 2000s. Like, you don't have writers and filmmakers who necessarily have some connection to the Iraq War. Because studio executives and audiences wanted to stay away from Iraq, Bigelow had to make The Hurt Locker outside of the Hollywood system. After being turned down by several indie studios, she got money from a producer who mortgaged his house. Estimates for the film's budget varied, but The Hurt Locker didn't cost more than$15 million. Not much for a war movie. Bigelow saved money by hiring unknown actors for the leading roles.

14:19One of them was Jeremy Renner. He'd been making a name for himself in indie movies and on TV for years, but he'd never had a mainstream breakout role. Renner would play Staff Sergeant William James, a guy who feels most alive when he's closest to death and who's handled nearly 900 explosives during his time in Iraq. After one especially tense bomb scene, and there are lots of them in the Hurt Locker, Staff Sergeant James meets a colonel, played by David Morse. He treats Renner's character like he's a rock star. What's the best way to go about disarming one of these things? The way you don't die, sir.

14:58That's a good one. I spoke like a wild man That's good But Staff Sergeant James' methods lead to clashes with his fellow soldiers They worry that his actions put them all at risk One of his fellow sergeants, played by Anthony Mackey, finally loses his cool In one scene, Renner is trying to come down after defusing a bomb He sits in his Humvee, unwinding with a cigarette Suddenly, without any warning, Mackey's character storms up and punches him across the face In a movie full of explosions and gunfire, the sound of his fist making contact is one of the most startling things you hear in The Hurt Locker Hey James, here I am Never turn your headset off again The Hurt Locker was shot in Jordan, a Middle Eastern country that shares a border with Iraq Some Iraqi refugees worked as actors in the production, which faced numerous challenges

15:59On the first day of shooting in 2007, locals threw rocks at the crew. And during the Hurt Locker's 44 days of filming, there were multiple death threats. Even when the mood on set was calmer, the heat was raging, with temperatures hitting as high as 120 degrees. The result of all that tension is an urgent and unstable feeling that runs throughout the movie. In every scene of the Hurt Locker, you're aware that something could go wrong at any moment. And when it does, it's never quite in the way you guessed. In The Hurt Locker, it's the audience members that wind up getting punched in the face. The movie drops them into a war they'd spent the last few years tuning out.

16:38I remember just being really taken with how tense and nerve-wracking it was. Jamel Bowie. There's not lots of sort of like, we're going to meet these people and learn about them and then we'll get to a bomb. It's like, no, minute one, there is a bomb. And you're getting a sense of what this entire world that they exist in is.

17:03On the podcast he co-hosts, Unclear and Present Danger, Bowie looks at 1990s movies like Air Force One and Independence Day. He tries to make sense of what those films were saying, intentionally or unintentionally, about the politics of the time. But when he re-watched The Hurt Locker recently, Bowie was struck by how almost apolitical the movie was. Its connection to the Iraq War is more aesthetic than anything else. You could do this movie about Vietnam You could do it about the first Gulf War You could do it about Afghanistan You could make up a war It's a totally fictional war Its concern isn't really the war itself Its concern is the particular psychology of this group of men And the psychology of Renner's character becomes clear in the film's final moments By this point in The Hurt Locker Staff Sergeant William James has returned home to his wife and son You'd think he'd be relieved to be surrounded by family and out of danger.

17:58Away from combat, though, he's adrift. Real life doesn't actually excite him. When he goes to buy cereal at the supermarket, he just stares blankly at the aisles of boxes. Later in The Hurt Locker, he tells his young son that there aren't many things that really matter in life. By the time you get to my age, maybe it's only one or two things. And the thing he loves isn't being a father or being a husband. It's working with those bombs. At the end of the Hurt Locker, he's back in Iraq, walking toward an IED, well aware that, at some point, he might not ever walk back. Bigelow talked about that scene in an interview with 60 Minutes.

18:40It's clear she saw similarities between Renner's bomb expert and Patrick Swayze's bank robber in Point Break. Staff Sergeant James is driven to do what he loves, even if it kills him. You know, that comes at a terrible, terrible price for him, and he knows it. but is incapable of doing anything different.

19:03By the time Bigelow was promoting The Hurt Locker, the movie had been in the can for nearly three years. Her film had taken a long time to get to theaters. It was filmed in 2007, made its debut at festivals around Europe in the fall of 2008, and didn't open wide in the U.S. until the summer of 2009. By then, Barack Obama had been sworn into office, and he'd announced that American troops would soon begin leaving Iraq. The start of a process Obama called, quote, a drawdown. The Hurt Locker would hit theaters just as the war in Iraq was starting to end. And unlike the other films about Iraq, the movie was a success.

19:41Not a blockbuster exactly, but The Hurt Locker did get great reviews and it made nearly$50 million worldwide. I asked Jamel Bowie about this, about why The Hurt Locker broke through when other Iraq war films had simply disappeared. We agreed that it's a fantastic movie, but maybe the Hurt Locker connected with moviegoers because with the Bush years finally over, audiences were willing to try to make sense of them. I think that there was an appetite at the time for maybe trying to metabolize the previous decade. Because you remember in the first Obama year, There's not really a push by the president, by the Democrats, to look back, right?

20:26To say, like, what went wrong? It's very much we're going to look forward. A few months after its release, the Hurt Locker was nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture. The main competition that year was between Bigelow's low-budget war drama and James Cameron's$237 million smash Avatar. Both were about American soldiers in the middle of a troubled military occupation, one imaginary and the other terrifyingly real. And while audiences were way more interested in Avatar, which grossed billions of dollars and launched an expensive new franchise, Oscar voters chose The Hurt Locker.

21:04Mark Boll won Best Original Screenplay, while Bigelow won Best Director, becoming the first woman to do so. And at the end of the night, The Hurt Locker won Best Picture. At the time, Bigelow's victory was the major story coming out of the awards, as it should have been. But looking back now, that Oscar year also feels like a snapshot of a time that was soon going to fade away. When I spoke with Jamel Bowie about that year's Best Picture lineup, we were both kind of floored by how varied the nominees were. It's a really wild list. So you've got The Hurt Locker and Avatar, but you've also got District 9, An Education, Inglourious Bastards, Precious, A Serious Man, The Blind Side, Up and Up in the Air.

21:49It's funny because it's sort of this list is like this is, I mean, at the time, you know, people were complaining about the narrowing space for all kinds of movies at the multiplex. But even here, I mean, you have a big James Cameron blockbuster. You have a big, weepy domestic blockbuster in The Blind Side. You have kind of a quirky... For the record, we both would have voted for A Serious Man that year. My bigger point is that by the end of the 2000s, mainstream Hollywood still embraced all kinds of films, regardless of size, star power, or genre. Romantic dramas, existential comedies, four-quadrant animated films.

22:30they were all part of the average movie-going diet. But a whole new cinematic universe was about to take flight, one that would change Hollywood forever.

22:48So you were one of the lucky ones who graduated from college just a few years before the complete economic meltdown of the 2000s. You know, it's a thrill. It's a thrill and an honor to have lived through that than to be on the other side of it, yeah. I think you know that voice. It's Joanna Robinson, the host of such ringer podcasts as House of R and the Prestige TV podcast. She's an expert on a lot of things, including the pop-cultural movie franchises that exploded in the early 2000s. I talk all the time about the fact that the first Harry Potter film and the first Lord of the Rings film came out mere months after 9-11.

23:24And it is not a coincidence what a stranglehold those stories, which were a very boiled down good versus evil kind of narrative, had on our country that was trying to figure out their way forward in an increasingly morally murky world, I think. And for Robinson, of all the blockbusters of that era, there's one that stands out. Iron Man to me feels like the movie of the Bush era.