Something's bothering me about The Hurt Locker.
It has to do with Specialist Eldridge. The kid who, in the first scene, doesn't shoot the butcher with the cell phone.
He spends most of the rest of the film trying to atone for that mistake. He feels guilty. He feels incompetent (until he takes out the sniper in the desert).
His relationship with the camp psychiatrist — focused on how he's certain he will end up dead — leads to another death. Another dose of survivor guilt.
He becomes enamored of James and his adrenaline junkie bravado.
He actually says out loud, without remorse or fear, "He's going to get me killed," as if that were part of James' mission: to help him atone for his failures.
When James orders Eldridge and Sanborn to go renegade and try to get the bomber responsible for the Green Zone blast, Eldridge is all for it. "I could stand to get in some trouble."
But when that episode results in his being shot in the leg, his reaction is anger against James. He ends up the writer's mouthpiece, commenting on James' need for the drug of war.
It isn't consistent with the character I've been watching for the past hour and some.
Boal and Bigelow have gone to great pains to paint a character with a survivor guilt-driven death wish.
He knows he's going to die in Iraq. He welcomes James as the facilitator. He's all for it.
Eldridge spends most of the film wanting to be dead. And then, on the tarmac, about to be air-lifted to safety and survival, he blows up at James, angry that he's been shot in the leg? That it'll be six months before he walks again? I don't buy it.
I thought that scene was all wrong.
Eldridge is disappointed that he's alive and will be alive and is going home with a wound that will heal.
He's angry that he's been spared.
He is angry at James. But his anger should be that he's still alive.
"You missed. You fuck. You didn't kill me."
That should be his last line.
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