Damages

Campbell Scott and Lily Tomlin on Damages

The latest season of Damages on FX ended with a 90-minute finale that somehow managed to wrap up all the season’s loose narrative threads and even some of last season’s, for good measure. With rumors that Damages has been losing viewership and might not be renewed, the finale might be the last time we’ll see Glenn Close as Patty Hewes, the wily, steely lawyer who even though this season was working for the good guys, always manages to seem like she’s on the wrong side of the law.

Despite a snarky column in Salon.com not long ago that suggested none of the women acting on Damages can move their foreheads, I don’t think Botox has reduced the power of Close’s acting. She might not be able to disturb her forehead’s preternatural smoothness, but Patty has always been a character whose unruffled demeanor is part of her chilly allure.

Close plays Patty Hewes with her mouth: that straight line her lips form when she’s resolved, that wrinkle that sneaks into her upper lip when she sneers, the way she opens her lips to various extents to indicate other nuances of Hewes’s not very wide range of emotion . . . these small things let Close evoke this ball-busting woman’s tremendous power.

Even her eyes don’t really seem to change from moment to moment, although when she watches those opaque flashbacks that kept popping up this season play out behind the hole she punched in her condo’s wall, she sometimes tears up a bit. But the water never, ever trickles down her face—she’s way too controlled for that.

Patty Hewes is one of my favorite television heroines, not because she’s fun to hate—on the contrary, I like Patty for how horrible she is, for how willing she is to jettison all the pieties about women and all the conventional presumptions about appropriate gender roles. Last season, after she caught her husband (Michael Nouri) cheating on her, she discarded him from her life in a rage-full fury.

But as they shared custody of their old dog (and of course their teenage son, Michael), the couple began to spend relaxed, casual time together again, which lead the man to think perhaps he had another chance with Patty. No such luck. Just as her husband began to feel comfortable in her presence, and entitled to the forgiveness that unfaithful men these days seem to expect, Patty turned her always ready knife and kicked him bleeding back to the curb.

One of the series’ highlights has been that it’s women, not men, who have the only chance of rattling Patty’s proverbial cage. Her relationship with Ellen Parsons (Rose Byrne), her protégé, nemesis, and perhaps daughter-substitute, hinges on their distinctly homoerotic attraction/repulsion for one another. Ellen began the series as ambitious but naïve, and wound up losing her fiancé, David, in the bargain. (He was viciously murdered for convoluted reasons that still aren’t clear, even though the finale revealed who killed him—which we already knew by now.)

David’s murder hardened Ellen and forced her to hone her own killer instincts. With Patty to emulate, she learned at the feet of the master. The two women have taken turns playing cat and mouse in each episode this season, with Ellen’s loyalties never quite clear. Her stint as an assistant district attorney was marred by her own perverse willingness to bend the law for her own gain.

She set Patty and the District Attorney (an always disappointed, cynical Ben Shenkman) against each other, insisting she was scheming for one while appearing to scam the other, and vice versa. Neither of them trusted Ellen, but where the DA found her machinations abhorrent, Patty couldn’t help but admire the monster she created.

The new female lawyer Patty hired this season couldn’t hold a candle to Ellen, even though she was clearly willing to drink the blood Patty spilled around the firm. Patty hired the woman capriciously, and fired her just as impulsively, drifting into a reverie during their last meeting that ended with Patty telling the astonished young woman that it “wasn’t working out,” that she should empty her desk and leave the building. Patty’s mercurial affections kept her staff and her family on edge, wary, watchful, but aware they could never catch her with her guard down.

Pity her son Michael’s girlfriend, Jill, for instance, the significantly older woman who seduces the young man when he’s really just a boy. Jill thinks she can play Patty’s game, and exhorts her for $500,000, pretending she’s willing to be paid off to get out of Michael’s life. When Jill stays, spending the money to buy Michael a Jaguar and the two of them a three-bedroom apartment big enough for their soon-to-arrive baby, Jill gloats that she can play hard ball just like Patty.

Fat chance. By the finale’s end, Patty sends Jill to prison for statutory rape, forcing the woman to relinquish her parental rights to Michael’s child forever. Patty always gets what she wants, even if her son retaliates by trying to kill her with a borrowed car.

This season’s plot followed the Bernie Madoff story’s template, creating a parallel family called the Tobins, whose patriarch runs a Madoff-like Ponzi scheme (it turns out) to protect his ne’er-do-well son, Joe, who’s a drunk and a failure at his father’s business. In characteristically labyrinthine narrative turns, the show led viewers in one direction only to pull us instantly in another, as we tried to fix the blame and responsibility for the corruptions that pollute the Tobin’s lives and that haunt the vulture-like lawyers who circle them ever more tightly.

Patty represented the families whose lives were ruined by the Ponzi scheme, but even on the side of righteousness, Patty’s sleazy methods make her look villainous. Ellen played her own angles in the DA’s office, and Patty’s law partner Tom Shayes (Tate Donovan) was implicated on both sides, since he lost his family’s and his in-laws’ fortunes in the Tobin’s house of cards. Once Louis Tobin’s scheme was revealed, the three principles worked through a series of feints and punches to track down the money they knew the family had stashed away.

The story’s impenetrability makes it difficult to track, but the details hardly matter, since the characters created this season proved fascinating whether or not their motivations and objectives were crystal clear. Impeccably cast (by the Emmy Award-winning casting director Julie Tucker), the Tobin family modeled the peccadilloes of the fabulously wealthy and corrupt. As the dissolute son, Joe, Campbell Scott beautifully played the man’s Oedipal complex and his determination to head his family at all costs, despite his own utter inability to do anything right.

Len Cariou (who starred in Sweeney Todd on Broadway) played Louis Tobin, who ended the season as a hero, even though he took his own life early on to escape his prison sentence. The incomparable Lily Tomlin played the Tobin matriarch, Marilyn, the dyed-red-haired Machiavellian wife and mother who will do anything to maintain the standard of living to which she’s become accustomed. She, too, was prone to the underhanded wheeling and dealing that distinguished her family’s business.

The information she revealed and withheld had much to do with who lived and died this season. In her own final act of volition [spoiler alerts to follow here and below!!], she sat sodden with alcohol and amused herself by watching old family movies, then, without a trace of self-pity, took a taxi to the East River. In the next moment, we saw, in an extreme long shot, her body falling from a high bridge to the water below.

The final agent of the Tobin family’s destruction was their trusted lawyer, Leonard Winstone, played against type by a clenched-jawed Martin Short. Turns out that Lenny, too, had been living a lie; the kid from a bad family in straitened circumstances stole a new identity and passed himself off as a lawyer. Although we never got the details, we learned that he’s spent 30 years conniving and advising the Tobins.

When his weasel of a father turned up to blackmail him, threatening to reveal his fraud, Winstone uses the old man to turn against the Tobins. Through a lucky quirk of fate, in the gory finale, Winstone managed to walk away with his life and a good chunk of the family’s money.

The series’ wrap-up was a bit too pat, as though the producers knew the episode might be the show’s last. Plot points that seemed dense and complex for the last 13 weeks were resolved too obviously, easily, and quickly, which made the last show a bit of an anti-climactic disappointment. Tom Shayes’s death was the only one that lived up to its hype, since we’ve known almost from the first episode that he dies at the end.

In Damages’ typically frenetic flash-forward and -back structure, which made all but the most salient details difficult to absorb and the timeline impossible to track, the detectives investigating Shayes’ murder insinuated variously that Patty, Ellen, and others were to blame.

The season’s best reveal was that Joe murdered Tom for endangering the Tobin family’s future and its fortune. After a day of public drinking from a brown-paper-bagged bottle, Joe showed up at Tom’s house, beat him up, and then drowned the already-bleeding man in his own toilet. The scene’s gruesome camera work and editing focused on Shayes’s feet, kicking and twisting, his shoulders pinned over the toilet’s bowl, his head deep in its well. Scott performed virtuosically as the drunken, out-of-control, utterly inept and misguided Joe, shaking his head vigorously to try to clear it as he methodically disposed of Tom’s body.

But when Joe is brought in to the police station at the end, it’s Patty who interviews him, who revels in forcing him to accept certain truths. She turns off the intercom into the adjacent viewing room while she cajoles Joe to admit his guilt. When Ellen asks how she got him to divulge to his crimes, Patty says cryptically that they talked about confession, implying that she made a connection with the shattered man based on shared spiritual burdens. Many key moments like this were also treated cavalierly, even though they had inspired deep speculation and curiosity throughout the season.

Damages’s last scene took place by the ocean, outside the city, where Patty and Ellen attended Tom’s memorial service. The two women stood together at the end of a long wooden pier, windswept physically and emotionally, staring out into the water, their faces as impassive as ever. Ellen told Patty she wants to ask her a professional question, which got the older woman’s attention. As Patty turned toward her, Ellen said Patty’s achieved everything she ever wanted in her career. The younger woman asked what Patty thinks Ellen’s next move should be; should Ellen come back to work for Patty? Work in another firm? Leave the law altogether?

Patty didn’t answer immediately, and for some reason, the women began to talk about Patty’s first child, a daughter who was stillborn. Ellen knew about the child, but not why she died. Patty said that losing the child, although difficult, enabled her to take a job at a New York law firm, where she was the first woman ever hired, and was able to begin her inexorable climb to the top.

In one last revelation, it turned out that the cryptic flashbacks Patty had all season when she looked through the ragged hole in her apartment’s wall—which were somehow related to David Carradine’s mysterious, brief appearance this season—turned out to be from 1972, when Patty was first pregnant. Her pregnancy had complications, and her doctor ordered her to stay on complete bed rest. But in the flashback, we saw Patty ignoring her doctor’s admonishments and walking—heavily pregnant—down the long lane of a horse farm where, presumably, she rides, and lost the child (who’s perversely named—Julia—given that she arrived stillborn).

Ellen wants to know if it’s worth it, what Patty’s done to realize her brilliant career. When Ellen posed her question, we saw Patty flash to an image of herself, distraught, wiping leaves and dirt from Julia’s gravestone and keening like Medea. When the brief image faded, Patty stood still on the dock, struck mute. Ellen watched her for a moment, then murmured good-bye and walked away. As Ellen left, Patty turned to watch her disappear down the dock.

Although they didn’t meet one another’s gaze in this scene or many others, the two women were profoundly and desperately, wordlessly and knowingly connected, Ellen as the daughter Patty terminated, now enlivened and eroticized by Patty’s own longing.

What a shame, though, that such a vivid three-season portrait of a powerful, compelling, untraditional woman had to end on such a banal, predictable note. Damages proposed that Patty sacrificed her child to pursue a career that she couldn’t, in the end, say was worth it. To damn this fascinating, gender-perverse woman as finally just a “bad mother” ends what was a fun, Grand Guignol series with a conservative, moralizing kicker.

Consigning a woman who’s better at being a lawyer than she is at being a mother to the purgatory of regret and maternal sorrow is a cheap shot, an easy way out for a series that always did seem to be more complicated than it turned out to be. If Damages returns for a fourth season, I hope Patty and Ellen can proceed into their mutually corrupt, ruthless future without worrying about the kids they left behind or never had.

The Feminist Spectator

The Blind Side

Jae Head, Quinton Aaron, and Sandra Bullock in The Blind Side

First to state the obvious: Gabourey Sidibe, the young actor from Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, would have been a better choice for Best Actress at the 2010 Academy Awards. Her transformative performance in a role that showed both toughness and tenderness, that took her character on a journey from abjection to determination, required the young actor to plumb the depths of an experience far from her own.

Sidibe’s performance, directed by Lee Daniels—the openly gay, African American who was only the second man of color ever to be nominated in the Oscars’ Best Director category—is powerful and impressive, as she modulates Precious’s tentative but dogged growth from a girl cocooned in layers of self-protective mistrust to a young woman open to learning, to love, and to survival. Sidibe captures the spark of fortitude and life that fuels a physically and emotionally abused teenager to make her own way, to strive to be more than her circumstances dictate.

As my partner in movie-going and in life Stacy Wolf pointed out, how ironic that Sandra Bullock won Best Actress for a role in an idealized story about white people “saving” an African American teenager, instead of Sidibe, who plays an African American teenager who manages to save herself.

Although Sidibe deserved the award, I’m glad that Sandra Bullock won instead of, say, Meryl Streep, whose vivacious turn as Julia Childs in Julie and Julia was great fun but not as impressive in this competition. Bullock’s achievement comes from the understatement she pulls off in a film whose moral is writ so large she practically bumps her head on it in every scene. In the ham-fisted and formulaic movie The Blind Side, Bullock performs with thoughtfulness and depth last evident when she played a racist housewife in Crash (2005).

Bullock plays Leigh Anne Tuohy, the wealthy Memphis woman who adopts a homeless African American teenager and encourages him to become a football star. Bullock performs Tuohy with an ethical clarity and straightforward, no-nonsense, ameliorating love that wins over even the toughest of toughs (who, in this film, are African American men in the housing projects from which Leigh Anne helps teenager “Big Mike” “escape”).

Michael “Big Mike” Oher, the Baltimore Ravens football player on whose life story the film is based, is played by Quinton Aaron as a taciturn, gentle giant dumbfounded but heartened by Leigh Anne’s insistent substitute mothering. Oher’s own mother, in the story the film chooses to deliver, is an inattentive addict who can’t pay her rent. When Tuohy goes to their apartment to see the woman, wanting her tacit approval for becoming Michael’s guardian, Denise Oher (Adriane Lenox) happens to be home.

Both women are inarticulate with grief that Michael’s mother hasn’t the wherewithal to hold on to her son. Leigh Anne’s Christian sympathy (her cross is insistently apparent around Bullock’s neck throughout the scene) is meant to somehow mask the fact that the Tuohys intend to take control of this poor woman’s flesh and blood. Lenox plays Denise Oher as angry but too befuddled to be proactive about Michael’s future or her own. Her sensitive performance and Bullock’s restraint make the scene halfway bearable.

Given very little to work with, the skillful Lenox ennobles Denise Oher with her own sympathetic dignity (Lenox played another African American kid’s mother in John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt on Broadway in 2005). And because she doesn’t give in to the condescension or moral superiority that could easily overpower the scene, Bullock’s self-possession tempers what might have been a stark showdown between would-be mothers with very different entitlements to and investments in Michael Oher. Instead, Bullock takes Lenox’s hand and sits beside her, the two characters wordless as the scene ends.

Tim McGraw plays Sean, Leigh Anne’s rich husband, who never once objects to his wife’s altruism, and only shakes his head affectionately over her forceful personality and bullying, get-it-done style. Their young son Sean Tuohy, Jr., or “SJ” (Jae Head), appoints himself Michael’s manager and front-man; he’s a talkative little tow-headed guy of perhaps eight or nine.

Much of the film’s calculated humor comes from the Laurel and Hardy, Mutt and Jeff shtick of Michael and SJ’s scenes together, but inevitably, Michael plays the straight man to SJ’s comedy. Director John Lee Hancock allows young Head to so overplay his scenes with Aaron, they become much more about SJ than they are about Michael. Head is used throughout to showcase how young white children are “color-blind”; the fact that he’s befriended Michael (before his family drives by the teenager one night, seeing him alone and cold, walking on empty Memphis streets in the rain) sets in motion SJ’s parents’ decision to become Michael’s guardians.

That’s the film’s point and its problem. The Blind Side isn’t about Michael Oher’s rise from poverty to a notable career as a professional football player. In fact, we rarely get to hear what Michael thinks about any of the decisions his new white family make for him. Even his interior monologue on the football field, replayed in voiceover as he struggles to win a big game for his team, is supplied by Leigh Anne, as Michael simply echoes her instructions to protect his teammates as he does his (new, white) family.

The film uses Oher as an excuse to extol the virtues of the rich white folks who take him into their home and their lives. Michael provides the vehicle for their redemption, the vessel through which they demonstrate their unique ability to rise above racial divisions.

Bullock somehow manages a dignified performance in the middle of this bull, resisting the angelic heroism the script thrusts at her character. Bullock’s Leigh Anne just does what she thinks is right. Her catty, rich, white women friends ask during lunch at a fancy restaurant if Leigh Anne isn’t worried about bringing such a “big strapping black Buck” (not their words, but their implicit meaning) into her house to live under the same roof with her teenage (white white white) daughter. In response, Bullock as Leigh Anne narrows her eyes and says softly, “Shame on you.” She lifts the check from the table, says quietly, “I’ll get this,” and walks out with her spine straight and her head high, as her friends look by turns guilty and defiant.

The film continues in this vein. Bullock keeps her posture firm and the schmaltz in check, acting with subtle, emotional and physical nuances that avoid self-righteous, morally haughty display. No slapstick pratfalls show off her comic timing; no goofy scenes end by revealing the lonely tears of her clown. Hancock’s film objectifies her, including too many shots of boys and men staring approvingly at her lithe, appealing figure as she walks away from them.

These voyeuristic shots imply that Leigh Anne advocates effectively for Michael because she’s a physical knock-out. That’s just sexist. And not at all true-to-life, if the photographs of Leigh Anne Tuohy that ran in various media outlets when the film premiered are any indication of her actual appearance. But Bullock resists her director’s misogyny. She plays Leigh Anne as a woman following her own moral compass, determined to do right by a young man who through no fault of his own, has nothing but the chance she gives him.

That is, at least in this version of Oher’s story. From what I understand of the much more complicated, true story of Michael Oher and Leigh Anne Tuohy, the African American community in Memphis did a lot more to help out than The Blind Side lets on. The film needs Leigh Anne to be its sole heroine, so that white middle-class spectators just like her, to whom the movie is so blatantly pitched, can identify with her pure selflessness.

Mark Harris wrote an incisive column in Entertainment Weekly (February 19, 2010, http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20347725,00.html) about how The Blind Side distorts its source material, the book by Michael Lewis on which it’s based. According to Harris, Lewis’s book offers a more realistic, truthful rendering of the community effort it actually took to move the teenager from homelessness to a football scholarship, detailing how a series of African American and white families rotated caring for Michael. Harris ends his editorial saying,

Too much substance gets swept aside by The Blind Side's feel-good agenda. Lewis' book remains clear-eyed in its view of the kid he calls ''my main character,'' a young man with the one-in-a-million luck to ''swap one life for another'' because he has a pair of multimillionaire benefactors and a skill that can make a lot of money for a lot of people. In the movie, the ''main character'' isn't Michael, but the nice white lady who plucks a winner out of the otherwise apparently worthless population of the projects. What does this alteration accomplish, other than to tell audiences that all you need to change someone's life is a heart (and wallet) of gold, innate bossiness, and a pistol in your purse? It's sad that many of the people moved by The Blind Side haven't seen Precious, a much more challenging story of a poor black teen who also survives shocking adversity to find the road to an identity. The Blind Side is a fable of exceptionalism about a kid who's worth saving because he might become a superstar. Precious is about a kid who's worth saving simply because she's a human being. That's a case that The Blind Side forgets it should be making. But it's in Lewis' book, ripe for discovery by anyone who suspects that this movie has a problematically large blind side of its own.

The Blind Side’s film doesn’t escape the racism of its sanctimoniousness message about “tolerance and acceptance” (which is only ever about white people). But if Bullock had to win—as thin, pretty white women are wont to do in these competitions—I’m inclined to celebrate her selection because at least she also demonstrates that a woman can pull in the biggest box office of the year and still be very good at what she does.

Harris reports that the film is now the highest grossing non-fiction adaptation in the history of the industry. The Blind Side is also apparently the first female-lead movie to make over $200 million. Given that women over 40 (Bullock is 45) are rarely cast in active, strong leading roles, and are never expected to make money, Bullock’s coup is worth an Oscar, even as I rue the racist slant of her material.

An epilogue: Days after the Academy Awards aired, the tabloid press revealed that Bullock’s husband of five years, the motorcycle aficionado and reality TV star Jesse James, had an affair with a woman of ill-repute (her name is linked on various internet sites with Nazi paraphernalia, porn, and prostitution). While I’m the last to invest in “happily ever after” narratives, or what Jennifer Armstrong, in her Entertainment Weekly “PopWatch” piece, “Sandra Bullock’s Marriage Woes: The End of a Fairy Tale?” (March 18, 2010, http://popwatch.ew.com/2010/03/18/sandra-bullocks-marriage-woes-the-end-of-the-fairy-tale/), sentimentally calls the mythic story of the woman with a successful career and a good marriage.

But I do think it’s a shame that so soon after her professional victory, Bullock has to contend with paparazzi needling her about her unfaithful man. Even though this story underlines that some men remain threatened by strong, successful women, Bullock is the one who’ll bear the brunt of the press’s intrusions. She’ll be tarred the “ball-buster,” the powerful broad who “forced” her man to seek out the comforts of what some bloggers have harshly called a “bimbo” with a life much more quotidian than Bullock’s.

Why is it that even successful women rarely have a chance to enjoy their deserved accomplishments before they’re taken down, put back where American popular culture continues to think they belong?

Bullock stays thin to conform to conventional notions of sexiness for white women; she works very hard to create a career for herself with films other than screwball comedies; and she succeeds as she stretches her craft. But when the day is done, she’s still judged according to whether or not she can hold on to a man who by all accounts hasn’t a fraction of Bullock’s talent.

That’s just wrong.

The Feminist Spectator

The Hurt Locker

Jeremy Renner in The Hurt Locker

I didn’t see the Academy Awards extravaganza on tv on Sunday night which, I read in the Times, lasted for three-and-a-half hours. But reading the news the next day, I was delighted by several awards: first, that The Hurt Locker won for Best Picture over Avatar; second, that Kathryn Bigelow won as Best Director for The Hurt Locker, the first and only woman in the history of the Oscars to achieve this distinction; and finally, and perhaps surprisingly, that Sandra Bullock won for The Blind Side. I’ll save Bullock for my next post.

The Hurt Locker is a terrific film, made with a combination of guts and sensitivity that can’t be attributed in any superficial way to the gender of its director. I’ve been reading a lot lately about 1970s lesbian feminist “women’s culture” in the U.S., and its essentialist claims about women’s unique emotional understandings, their pacificism, and their prized connection to nature. I’m finding that these exaggerated claims were usually more tempered than history has made them sound; many1970s feminists were just trying to stake claims for women in a political context in which their social and cultural contributions had been dismissed and ignored.

Carving out separate space and insisting on women’s differences from men seemed, in the 70s, a useful activist strategy, and it promoted a range of cultural production that I’m hoping reconsider. But 1970s cultural feminists would no doubt have disparaged Bigelow’s work in The Hurt Locker, tarring it with the sticky brush of “male identification.”

But in 2010, it's still not surprising that the first woman to receive the Best Director award won it for a film about war. But Bigelow's film addresses not just war’s brutality, but its seductions, the adrenalin rush it can deliver, and the insidious, chaotic way it makes lives meaningful.

Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner, nominated but passed over for Best Actor) spends the war in Iraq wandering the ravaged countryside defusing bombs. He’s part of a three-man team traveling together in an armored vehicle, but he’s the one who puts on the suit that’s meant to protect him from the bombs he proceeds to dismantle by hand.

The puffy, full-body suit and the helmet that encases his head makes James look like an astronaut space-walking across the desert. Bigelow brings her camera close to Renner’s face as he moves laboriously toward bomb sites, so that you can see the sweat slicking his skin and hear him talking to himself and his partners as he trundles awkwardly toward what might very well be his own death.

The nonchalance and defiance with which he confronts his job’s danger make James gripping to watch. He’s also a renegade who makes his own decisions and often refuses to follow the protocol his superior, Sergeant JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), shouts at him through his headset. James is as unpredictable as the bombs he sets out to defuse.

Bigelow brings the film a stunning tension that electrifies each scene. Even when the soldiers aren’t racing over dusty Iraqi streets, past burned out storefronts and shells of apartment buildings toward buried munitions, The Hurt Locker keeps you wary, suspicious, and watching for the unexpected.

The soldiers see peril where the audience’s untrained eyes don’t. For example, as James dons the heavy suit and walks toward the center of a town where a bomb has been discovered, Sanborn surveys the scene with binoculars, and sees an Iraqi man with a cell phone in his hand.

Before we understand what this means, he’s screaming, “He’s got a cell phone, he’s got a cell phone!” The other American soldiers try to find and shoot the man before he can activate the bomb. The most minute, imperceptible actions signal danger; the fact that the audience can’t read these signs makes every moment of the film anxious.

Bigelow nuances our vicarious understanding of how soldiers’ actions can be intensely intimate and personal or completely distanced and removed. In another scene, James, Sanborn, and Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty), their naïve young teammate, are caught by snipers as they cross an abandoned stretch of deserted desert countryside. Leaping out of their Humvee, the three soldiers roll into position against a hillock that offers a vantage point from which they can barely see their assailants off in the distance.

Even with binoculars and telescopic rifle sights, it’s difficult for them to target the men, who occupy an abandoned structure that sits what might be miles away. Bigelow frames our view through James’s binoculars or Sanborn’s rifle sight, but we still can’t really make out what they see. James directs Sanborn’s aim, and as Sanborn squeezes the rifle’s trigger, time attenuates. The bullets seem to travel very slowly over the long distance to their marks.

When the bullets finally reach the anonymous Iraqis, their features blurred by distance, they fall silently. But the relationship between cause (the shooting) and effect (the dying) seems tenuous and surreal. It’s difficult to draw a connection between the American soldiers’ actions and the Iraqi men’s crumpling bodies, making the scene almost phantasmagorical in how Bigelow constructs the relationship between the action and the thing it does. When we see someone shot in a film, they usually buck from the force and instantly fall over dead. Here, we watch the unpredictable but inexorable passage of time between aim and destiny, and these long moments feel disquietingly real.

The sniper scene is also remarkable for how patiently Bigelow waits in the moment. It’s not clear how long James and Sanborn sit in their positions against the low rise, surveying the enemy. The light changes imperceptibly as they watch, barely moving. Sanborn sights through his weapon as flies land in his eyebrows. They talk quietly, not facing one another, keeping their eyes on the horizon.

Long after it seems they’ve killed all the snipers, James and Sanborn wait, searching for movement, determined to outlast anyone who might be calculating their last opportunity to strike. The excruciating but simply constructed scene demonstrates the men’s vulnerability as well as the boredom they endure to protect themselves and to outwit their enemy.

In another unforgettable moment, the team is called to an open town square where a suicide bomber balks and pleads to be spared from the fate he chose. James and Sanborn approach warily, assessing whether the man just intends to trick them into coming closer. Again, Bigelow puts the audience within the soldiers’ emotional turmoil, keeping her camera back with the vehicle as James and Sanborn try to judge the danger, then moving toward the overwrought Iraqi as James puts on the suit and approaches.

We arrive with James to find the man trussed up as a human time bomb. The dynamite strapped against his chest attaches to a clock ticking off the minutes and seconds until it explodes. A metal cage encases the whole apparatus, padlocked against just the kind of second thoughts the would-be suicide bomber now experiences.

Here, unlike in the sniper scene, Bigelow gets intimate with the effects of war. James realizes he can’t defuse the bomb in time, and instead tries to free the man from his death trap. Ripping off his helmet and visor, he insists Sanborn bring him tools, and works mightily to release the Iraqi. But as the seconds tick down, James realizes his attempt is futile; he doesn’t have time to cut through the cage. He looks into the poor man’s eyes, entreating him to understand, in a language he doesn’t speak, James’s sorrow over not being able to save him. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he repeats, knowing his face is the last this hysterical, doomed fellow human being will ever see. Then he runs, with seconds left to save himself.

The dynamite ignites as James hustles away, its force lifting him off the ground and throwing him from the tornado of fire, dust, and body parts it hurls through the air. The ambivalent Iraqi’s death is palpable, as we’re left imagining in vivid detail his body exploding like an overripe piece of fruit dropped from a high table. The moment’s intimacy depicts the flip side of war; looking a soon-to-be-dead man in the eyes and trying to release his body from its fate is a far cry from the remote, clinical rifle work necessary to execute men so far away their humanity is abstracted.

Bigelow’s feel for how war changes register and key is also apparent in how she draws the soldiers’ relationships in The Hurt Locker. Sanborn and James warily paw the ground around one another, knowing they’re forced to trust the other man with their lives. Their situation requires machismo they both know is only fabricated. In one of Mackie’s finest moments—in an excellent performance overlooked by the Academy—Sanborn asks James if he thinks Sanborn would ever be brave enough to put on the suit.

From the timid, embarrassed hopefulness with which he poses the question, Mackie demonstrates that Sanborn isn’t made of the necessary stuff. But James’s generous reassurance that Sanborn, too, could do the work, underlines that the only thing separating the two men is their essential level of regard for their own lives.

The Hurt Locker is paced by titles that count down the days until the men’s unit leaves Iraq, markers that also increase the tension by playing on the audience’s expectation that something will go wrong and they won’t make it out alive. But James and Sanborn do decamp. We soon see James at home, months later, his hair grown longer, domesticated by his girlfriend (Evangeline Lilly). They shop at a supermarket, where the array of colors and the variety of textures contrasts with the rest of the film’s limited visual palette, in which khaki-clad soldiers crawl over dun-colored land bleached by harsh sunlight.

But James rests lightly at home. He smokes and stares out the window, held static by a world that comes at him with slow predictability. Before long, he’s back in uniform, marching out of the belly of a transport plane that delivers him back to Iraq and a war to which he’s clearly addicted. A chilling half-smile plays on his face as he leaves the plane; James is an adrenalin junky anticipating his next fix.

The Hurt Locker is a terrific anti-war film, in part because it never overtly criticizes the conflict's politics. It tallies the war’s effects in human costs, not by counting the dead, but by chronicling in quotidian, disturbing ways what war does to the living.

The Feminist Spectator

Andrew Sullivan

I don’t usually write about speakers in The Feminist Spectator, but last week, listening to self-described gay conservative Catholic Andrew Sullivan deliver an important public lecture here at Princeton, my ire was raised (not to mention my gorge) enough that I feel compelled to share a few thoughts.

I don’t read Sullivan regularly, either on his blog or in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly, where he’s a contributing editor. But I know his book Virtually Normal , which created quite a stir among progressive gay, lesbian, and queer people when it was published in the 1990s. “Gay” and “conservative” were oxymoronic, until Sullivan came to stand for both at once. He’s a provocateur, who enjoys nothing better than riling up his detractors and then standing his ground in the face of their attacks.

I respect polemic and those who thrive on it as much as the next person. But Sullivan’s rhetoric is shot through with the very contradictions his talk, “The Politics of Homosexuality,” purported to underline.

The lecture’s title borrows from Sullivan’s 1993 essay of the same name. He suggested that on the occasion of his talk at Princeton (February 18, 2010), he returned to the essay to see how he has or hasn’t changed his ideas about the issues it advanced. He insisted, from the outset, that he intended to think about these issues, rather than feel his way through them, a binary that already set my teeth on edge. How can we separate thought from feeling, especially when we’re talking about gay and lesbian politics? His emphasis on rationality at the expense of emotion, which was later belied by his own self-performance, implicitly chastised queer people for their righteous feelings about their own disenfranchisement.

Sullivan presented a taxonomy of politics and “homosexuality,” rationally pointing out the contradictions and deficits with each of the four categories he outlined. First, under “prohibitionism,” he addressed religious positions against homosexuality, debating arguments in favor of “natural law” that suggest homosexuality is “unnatural” since “God” made men and women to procreate. He agreed with those who say that the Bible prohibits man from lying down with man, but argued that Biblical literalism, taken to its extreme, would disallow lots of behaviors that the Catholic Church (his point of both affiliation and disidentification) in fact lets pass. He mused, If sex should only be about procreation, how does one explain infertile couples? Should they be prohibited from sexual relations because they can’t reproduce? Sullivan brought this kind of “rational” thought to his arguments throughout the evening.

Sullivan associates “liberationist” gay and lesbian discourse, the taxonomy’s second track, with Michel Foucault, whose ideas he proceeded to misread. In Sullivan’s interpretation of Foucault, gender and sexuality are “all in our heads.” Well, not exactly. Foucault and the school of “social constructionist” theories of gender and sexuality he in some ways originated, believe that sexuality is constructed by history and language. While men, for example, might have had sex with one another throughout history, they’re only called “homosexual” when culture decides to name these acts as such, bringing into being a stigmatized identity where there wasn’t one before.

Sullivan argues that we fall in love with people, not constructs. Of course we do! The constructs are the boxes of binary gender and sexuality that value “homosexual” very differently from “heterosexual,” which remains the dominant, powerful member of the pair. Sullivan ’s antipathy for “the deconstructionists” like Foucault and his “Ivy League” adherents was palpable, and he used his naïve reading of Foucault to generate audience support. He also proposed that “liberationist” gays, lesbians, and queers revel in their own outsiderness, that they’re determined to break down social institutions like marriage, instead of agitating to be part of them. He finds a deep contradiction in what he sees as liberationists’ construction of their own prison of difference and their insistence that dominant culture give them the key to social freedom.

“Conservatives,” the third in Sullivan’s taxonomy, he examined less generously than I expected. His disaffection from the Republican party is clear—he said that no gay conservatives remain in what’s essentially become a fundamentalist club. Clarifying that his own conservatism is based in a desire for as little government interference as possible, he described fundamentalist conservatives as those who want to go back to “the way things were” (whatever that is). Sullivan’s railing against the fundamentalist right’s contradictions was at least refreshing.

But his most over-the-top declarations came toward the end of his talk, when he described “liberalism,” the four aspect of his taxonomy. In liberalism, he suggested, minority groups are seen as vulnerable classes who need state protections Sullivan deplores, from anti-discrimination laws, to anti-hate crime legislation, to affirmative action. Considering gays and lesbians—and people of color—as a “victimized class” is offensive to Sullivan, whose politics of outrageous privilege implies that all one need do to empower ourselves is to “stare hate in the face,” to “spit in the face of prejudice.” Why should we be frightened, Sullivan asked. “Bring it on,” he announced repeatedly, with increasing vehemence. Liberalism infantilizes gay people by turning them into victims who deserve special rights. Not for Sullivan—no special accommodations does he need.

In his retreaded defense of the first amendment, Sullivan said he believes in the Klan’s right to demonstrate just as much as the right of drag queens to make a spectacle, as though neo-Nazi hate speech is on par with the pleasurable rhapsodies of radical faeries.

Sullivan looks forward to the day when there is no gay and lesbian rights movement, to the day when we can all be human together. I, too, anticipate that day. But what Sullivan leaves begging is what in the world we’re supposed to do until that utopian moment. Responding to a follow-up question, he remarked that he's worried by the virulent fundamentalism infecting regimes around the globe.

How, then, is anyone supposed to stand up to such hatred, to the threat of execution, for example, used against gay people in Uganda and Iran? Just by “spitting in the face” of this hatred and saying, “Back off”? Who in the world could do that without risking limb, life, or livelihood? If push literally came to shove, would the rather small-statured Sullivan be quite so brave, confronted by large men wielding baseball bats and intent on a bit of gay-bashing?

After systematically picking apart everyone else’s arguments, Sullivan couldn’t see the holes in his own. As a man sitting behind me said as we rose to leave, pity the poor Iranian lesbian, for only one example, who’s supposed to spit in the face of hate.

And what of the young man or woman or trans teen in the U.S., whose religious parents want to “cure” the disease of his sexuality by putting her in the hands of reparative therapists, who’ve emotionally and psychologically damaged incalculable numbers of gay men and lesbians? How is a 16-year-old supposed to say, “Bring it on” and spit in the face of her parents’ hate?

Sullivan speaks as and mostly for gay men. The sexism in some of his remarks was astonishing. Men's sexuality, he said, is more active than women's, and gay men have no "feminine" influence to control their drives. He trotted out old jokes, like the one about what lesbians do on their second date (rent a U-Haul; what do gay men do? What second date?). Speaking to a large public audience comprised of Princeton students, faculty, and community people, another LGBT speaker might have done much more to elevate the local discourse about sexuality.

Sullivan’s determination to see gay and lesbian and trans people as self-empowered makes him foolishly blind to the practices of hatred that make us very vulnerable indeed, to the vagaries of public opinion and to the practices of malice that many of us are unlucky enough to face, sometimes on a regular basis.

How privileged of Sullivan to think that he can stop speeding bullets with his bare hands. But the language of exceptionalism and individualism—also employed by commentators like Camille Paglia and Christina Hoff Sommers—does not an effective political movement make.

But then again, Sullivan isn’t describing a political movement for anyone but himself. In his party of one, he wins every time.

The Feminist Spectator