Author: Ivan Kreilkamp

You can contact me at ivan812 AT gmail.com

Oll Korrect! Know Yuse! Oll Wright!

Ivan Kreilkamp3 Comments

Iris asked me what O.K. stands for.  Sarah seemed (initially) to be mildly impressed that I came up with an answer: it’s some kind of 19th-century railway slang derived from Swedish-accented “oll korrect” e.g. All Correct.  As I said it, it sounded it a bit dubious, so I turned to Wikipedia.

Fascinating!  This is a great Wikipedia entry.  It turns out that I was sort of/partly right; the origins of “OK” are hotly debated.  To sum up:

Various etymologies have been proposed for okay, but none have been unanimously agreed upon. Most are generally regarded to be unlikely or anachronistic.

There are five proposed etymologies which have received material academic support since the 1960s. They are:

  1. Greek words “Ola Kala” (όλα καλά) meaning “everything’s good” or “all good”; used by Greek railroad workers in the United States. It is also said that “O.K.” was written on the ships or other places to show that the ships are ready.
  2. Initials of the “comically misspelled” Oll Korrect
  3. Initials of “Old Kinderhook” a nickname for President Martin Van Buren which was a reference to Van Buren’s birthplace Kinderhook, NY.
  4. Choctaw word okeh
  5. Wolof and Bantu word waw-kay or the Mande (aka “Mandinke” or “Mandingo”) phrase o ke

I was especially taken by the discussion of the 1830s “comical misspellings” dialect fad in the U.S.:

A key observation is that, at the time of its first appearance in print, a broader fad existed in the United States of “comical misspellings” and of forming and employing acronyms and initialisms. These were apparently based on direct phonetic representation of (some) people’s colloquial speech patterns. Examples at the time included K.Y. for “know yuse” and N.C. for “’nuff ced.” This fad falls within the historical context, before universal “free” public education in America, where the poorly educated lower-classes of society were often easy entertainment for those who found fun in their non-universal language, epitomized by colloquial words and home-taught or self-deduced phonetic spellings….

“The abbreviation fad began in Boston in the summer of 1838 … OFM, “our first men,” and used expressions like NG, “no go,” GT, “gone to Texas,” and SP, “small potatoes.” Many of the abbreviated expressions were exaggerated misspellings, a stock in trade of the humorists of the day. One predecessor of okay was OW, “oll wright,” and there was also KY, “know yuse,” KG, “know go,” and NS, “nuff said.”

The general fad may have existed in spoken or informal written U.S. English for a decade or more before its appearance in newspapers. OK’s original presentation as “all correct” was later varied with spellings such as “Oll Korrect” or even “Ole Kurreck.” Deliberate word play was associated with the acronym fad and was a yet broader contemporary American fad.

I read quite a bit of this out loud at the breakfast table while my family’s attention slowly drifted away and Iris tried to pretend that she had not asked me the question.

Goal for the summer: to re-introduce S.P., K.Y., K.G., and N.C. to their rightful place in American parlance along with O.K.

Nuff Ced!

Recent movies: Bird & Magic, Redford and Dunaway, etc.

Ivan Kreilkamp5 Comments

Our t.v. died a month or so ago — just stopped working.  Sarah’s dad had bought it for us at Best Buy for $500 in 2002 or so.  It was a 27″ and/but seemed huge — very bulky and room-dominating.  After some research on the Consumer Reports site I bought this 32″ flatscreen for $380 — it showed up in the mail, a lithe rectangle weighing maybe 20% of what our last one did, and basically just needed to be plugged in.

See?  Things may seem pretty messed up in the world, but at least t.v.s have improved.  We can watch the oil plume in brilliantly H.D. flat-screen detail.

Some of the movies we’ve watched recently:

Three Days of the Condor.  We’ve been using Netflix on-demand a bit lately.  Sarah wanted to see some sort of fun/ not too challenging thriller (no subtitles) and this is what we came up with.  She’d seen it years ago but it turned out literally only remembered the romance scenes between Redford and Faye Dunaway in her apartment — which have a somewhat creepy Stockholm Syndrome enjoying-your-abduction element, by the way.  (Redford carjacks Dunaway and makes her take him to her Brooklyn apartment, ties her up, and they sleep together shortly thereafter).  As the plot developed it started feeling more predictable, but I really enjoyed the first half, especially the depiction of 1975 NYC.  The movie has a funny Bovaryism theme with Redford as a C.I.A operative analyzing mystery novels, in a phony publishing-house front, for clues of international espionage.

The movie ends in front of the New York Times building with Redford telling the baddie that he’s given the whole story to the Times and so it should be in the next day’s paper.  The basic faith in the power of the mainstream press as a force for transparency and reform felt very foreign.

Mulholland Drive. I watched this a while ago but just had to mention how much it blew me away.  I’d seen it back when it came out but did not altogether remember how strange, scary, and amazing it is.  It topped some best of the decade lists — somewhat telling, maybe, that the most critically acclaimed film of the 21st century started out as a rejected t.v. network pilot.  (After the pilot was turned down, Lynch went back and added a second hour, which turns the movie into a kind of Mobius strip, folding back on itself.)

The Borrowers.  Am reading the Borrowers series to the girls (we’re into The Borrowers Afield now).  I’m trying to work out an argument that it’s an allegory of the mid-20th-century British welfare state.  Fascinating on class, with this miniature family of working-class Cockney types living in the floorboards of the grand house.  Anyway, I picked up the 1973 American t.v. version, a Hallmark Hall of Fame t.v. special, at the library.  I just watched a bit of this with the girls while reading the paper, but it seemed kind of creepy/spooky to me — the music reminded me of Rosemary’s Baby.

Very excited to learn, btw, that a Studio Ghibli anime version of the Borrowers is due out later this year!!

Step-Brothers.  Part of the Judd Apatow empire (he produced), with Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly as the 40 year old children of newlyweds Richard Jenkins and Mary Steenburgen (both excellent).  This movie is surprisingly funny, possibly underrated.  It’s kind of one-joke but a good joke: Ferrell and Reilly both act exactly like 4th grade boys; you get the feeling they did some real research for these roles.  A sequel to the 40-Year-old Virgin in spirit — more male arrested development.  (Btw, I just checked and Steenburgen is 56 years old, which makes her kind of a stretch as a 40 y.o. Will Ferrell’s mother.)

Magic & Bird: A Courtship of Rivals (HBO).  Loved this!  I was an avid Celtics fan in the 80s — went to a couple games every year in the years when the Celtics never, ever lost at home.  Bird was a poor working-class kid living next to the railroad tracks in a small nowhere town in Southern Indiana.  I’d forgotten that he actually enrolled at I.U. — left after a month or two, alienated and freaked out — went back home to French Lick to work in a grocery store.  His dad committed suicide soon after.  Larry obviously was/is a pretty weird individual.  Very private, prickly and socially awkward, the Hick from French Lick for real, unbelievably gifted and competitive.  Magic grew up in Lansing MI — incredible smile and charisma, a star from a young age.  He radiates happiness & pleasure in life whereas Bird seems to be trying to hold everything at arms’ length away from him.  When they met for the NCAA finals, Magic tried to seek him out to say hello and Bird totally snubbed him, refused to shake his hand.  “I probably did snub him,” Bird says now.  “I’m not into that lovey-dovey stuff.  I was there to win” (something like that).

The movie makes a good case that they became doppelgangers, rivals and enemies and eventually friends.   Bird says that the day he heard about Magic’ H.I.V. diagnosis was the worst day since his father’s suicide.  There’s an eerie shot of Bird playing the next day — he does a behind-the-back pass that the movie suggests was a secret homage to Magic.

The racial politics of the rivalry are complex and sad.  Bird does seem genuinely race-blind.  But as a Celtics player in racist Boston and the Great White Hope of the NBA trying to attract white fans, he’s enlisted in a racial drama not of his own making.  Cedric Maxwell comments of black basketball fans in Boston who’d root for L.A. — it was very hard to be a black Celtics fan in those days.

Bird mowed his own suburban Boston lawn every weekend: fans showed up to watch (he ignores them).  He eventually messes up his back installing his mother’s driveway in Indiana and suffers through in the final years of his career in agony.  Now he’s President of Basketball Operations for the Indiana Pacers and an NBA elder statesmen; I kind of enjoyed the recent ad in which he steals LeBron and Dwight Howard’s hamburgers and they have no idea who he is (extending the longtime meme of Bird as a white star in a black man’s game).  [*btw how can professional athletes live with themselves for promoting McDonalds???]

It’s been nice to see Magic’s halftime commentary during the NBA playoffs this month — good to see his enormous smile and that he seems to be doing well.

We Live in Public. Interesting documentary about a semi-forgotten internet pioneer of the 1990s, Josh Harris, who became a symbol of the excesses of the tech bubble of the era.  His hubris culminated in a couple of different Truman Show-esque experiments in living under total surveillance — first with dozens of volunteers in a giant loft in NYC, then just with his girlfriend.  He eventually loses everything and more or less disappears.  I found him to be a very creepy guy and was somewhat under-impressed by his supposed prescient innovations (as Sarah commented, what’s here that Philip K. Dick didn’t come up with years ago?) but it’s an compelling movie.

Food Inc. Finally got around to watching this last night (again, Netflix on demand).  Excellent doc.  Very well done, turns the rise of industrial food into a kind of thriller/horror movie with scary music.  Most infuriating part involves Monsanto’s copyrighted soybeans.  The beans are copyrighted intellectual property of Monsanto; our corrupt government, entirely in the pocket of Big Food, allows the transnational behemoth to behave like Disney with Mickey Mouse — no farmer is too small to be sued for doing what farmers have done for thousands of years with their crops.  If you are still in the habit of eating industrial meat regularly, watch this movie (although it does not rely much on total gross-out images of slaughterhouses and the like; it’s more about building a sustained argument).  [Btw this 2009 NYT article about “pink slime” in hamburger meat is what convinced me to never, ever eat another McDonald’s burger.]

M.I.A. and Ginger Insurgency

Ivan Kreilkamp2 Comments

Intense new video (almost a mini-movie) for the new M.I.A. song “Born Free.”  (Caveat: nudity and a lot of violence.)

Spoiler alert: it’s sort of derivative of “District 9” with grittier/ more violent depictions of brutal (and multiracial) U.S. troops terrorizing, beating, arresting, & assassinating innocent civilians… who turn out to have been singled out because they have red hair.  So, it’s a clever and somewhat absurdist re-imagining of racism as directed at red-heads, and an indigenous insurgency (a la the Tamil Tigers) led by outlaw gingers… until you realize/remember/learn that prejudice against “Gingers” is a apparently a real phenomenon in the U.K.

E.g. this blog Gingerism, “documenting the existence of gingerism in mainstream society;”

This British comedian Catherine Tate’s show’s episode about a victim of prejudice and abuse being offered refuge at a shelter for Gingers:

“I am what I am!… The people in the village spit at me, the children throw dog matter in the letter box, and you’re telling me to accept myself!  It’s just not fair!”

“I know, Sandra; but at the end of the day there will always be those who can’t bring themselves to accept people who are…”

“You can’t say it.”

“… Ginger.”

OK, I guess this is a much more widespread meme than I realized:

In modern-day UK, the words “ginger” or “ginga” are sometimes derogatorily used to describe red-headed people (“ginger” is not often considered insulting; the abbreviation “ginge” is much more commonly used derogatorily), with terms such as “gingerphobia” (fear of redheads) or “gingerism” (prejudice against redheads) used by the media. Some have speculated that the dislike of red-hair may derive from the historical English sentiment that people of Irish or Celtic background, with a greater prevalence of red hair, were ethnically inferior. Redheads are also sometimes referred to disparagingly as “carrot tops” and “carrot heads”. “Gingerism” has been compared to racism, although this is widely disputed, and bodies such as the UK Commission for Racial Equality do not monitor cases of discrimination and hate crimes against redheads. A UK woman recently won an award from a tribunal after being sexually harassed and receiving abuse because of her red hair; a family in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, was forced to move twice after being targeted for abuse and hate crime on account of their red hair; and in 2003, a 20 year old was stabbed in the back for “being ginger”. In May 2009, a British schoolboy committed suicide after being bullied for having red hair. The British singer Mick Hucknall, who believes that he has repeatedly faced prejudice or been described as ugly on account of his hair colour, argues that Gingerism should be described as a form of racism. This prejudice has been satirised on a number of TV shows. The British comedian Catherine Tate (herself a redhead) appeared as a red haired character in a running sketch of her series The Catherine Tate Show. The sketch saw fictional character Sandra Kemp, who was forced to seek solace in a refuge for ginger people because they had been ostracised from society. The British comedy Bo’ Selecta! (starring redhead Leigh Francis) featured a spoof documentary which involved a caricature of Mick Hucknall presenting a show in which celebrities (played by themselves) dyed their hair red for a day and went about daily life being insulted by people. The pejorative use of the word “ginger” and related discrimination was used to illustrate a point about racism and prejudice in the “Ginger Kids”, “Le Petit Tourette” and “Fatbeard” episodes of South Park.

As a member of a family full of red-heads, I deplore this senseless bias!

Drive-by Truckers The Big To-Do

Ivan KreilkampLeave a comment

Re: the newish Drive-by Truckers album The Big To-Do.  I get the sense that the Drive-by Truckers are slightly underestimated or perhaps ghettoized, ignored by listeners who presume they’re too Southern rock/country for their tastes.  For my money the Drive-by Truckers are probably the best rock band over the past decade, or at least have produced the most consistently excellent music.  Maybe living in Southern Indiana has slightly conditioned me to ‘get’ them in a way I might not have as much in Boston or wherever.  They definitely articulate a working-class Southern perspective that feels pretty authentic here.  E.g., from Brighter than Creation’s Dark, “You and Your Crystal Meth”:

I ain’t exactly a no-drug guy, Don’t dig the way that you get high
Hope your kids don’t see you throwing up, Hope they ain’t there if the house blows up
Hope you ain’t murdered in your sleep, Up all night with that cranked out creep
You ain’t eaten and you ain’t slept; You and your crystal meth
Indiana and Alabama, Oklahoma and Arizona.
Texas, Florida, Ohio, Small town America, right next door
Blood soaked your pillow red; You and your crystal meth

My favorite DBT songs are a bit less bleak than that one, though: “Heathens,” “Marry Me,” “Dead, Drunk, and Naked”(! one of their mythologizing tracks from the concept album Southern Rock Opera) and “Two Daughters and a Beautiful Wife,” about a guy who dies and realizes, up in heaven or wherever he is, that of all the little memories that replay in his mind, the ones he most remembers are: “Laying round in bed on a Saturday morning/ Two daughters and a wife/ Two daughters and a beautiful wife,” and he ends up thinking, maybe that’s what heaven will turn out to be.  “Heathens” is maybe my all-time favorite: “We were heathens in their eyes at the time, I guess I am just a heathen still.”

Anyway, the new one’s good too, more sometimes-joyful songs about death, diminished expectations, alienated labor, family, and self-medication, as ever very well-suited to our recessionary times: “The Fourth Night of my Drinking,” “Daddy Learned to Fly” (that one’s a real weepie, told from the POV of a kid who doesn’t understand his father has died, shades of “We Are Seven”), “This Fucking Job.”

Here they are performing “Daddy Learned to Fly” in Baltimore:

Midwestern Smurfers

Ivan Kreilkamp1 Comment

Always good to see the excellent P.R. for Indiana in the NYT:

With Cars as Meth Labs, Evidence Litters Roads

ELKHART, Ind. — The toxic garbage, often in clumps, blends in easily with the more mundane litter along rural roads and highways here: used plastic water bottles, old tubing, dirty gloves, empty packs of medicine. But it is a nuisance with truly explosive potential, and evidence of something more than simply a disregard for keeping the streets clean…

Law enforcement officials in several states say that addicts and dealers have become expert at making methamphetamine on the move, often in their cars, and they discard their garbage and chemical byproducts as they go, in an effort to destroy evidence and evade the police.

Wow, cooking meth in a moving car!   SO much worse than texting!

A friend (let’s just say that the frogs think of him as Dr. Moreau) comments, “You need to get with it: community gardens are so ’00s.  Mobile meth chefs and their smurfer guests are at the locavore cutting edge.”

Willy Streeter Community Garden

Ivan KreilkampLeave a comment

Sarah took the plunge and joined in on a community garden plot.  Or rather, 4 plots, I believe, as part of a team of five people.  Here she is planting some onions.

It’s great — the Willy Streeter Community Garden, a former pig-farm (apparently) a little more than a half mile from our house, very convenient, right near the Y and a playground.  Should be a good spring-summer family activity.  For various reasons the home garden thing hadn’t been working as well as we hoped for vegetables, there were some light/shade issues.  But now that we’ve started, it seems to make so much sense to do it more communally.  Everything’s nicely set up at the community space, with the land tilled, manure available, and a hose right there.  Our friend Leah is an artist whose work involves plants, gardens and seeds — I’ve seen her described as an enviro-sculptor — and one perk of having her part of the group is that she has a big backlog of nice organic seeds.  When I was there helping out a bit on Sunday, we were planting onions and leeks and parsley.

A decade ago we lived in Hyde Park, Chicago for two years and we have friends who’ve been heavily involved in the community garden there.  We enjoyed a lot of pesto from basil planted in that garden — Anthony and Kirsten used to bring home big laundry baskets of it and have basil-making parties.  Unfortunately, the garden is being razed by U. Chicago — a sad story [this is the Chicago Reader article about it].

Patti Smith vs. Terry Castle

Ivan Kreilkamp6 Comments

I recently read two really good memoirs, Terry Castle’s The Professor and Patti Smith’s Just Kids.  They would seem to have little in common.  On the one hand, the eminent professor of 18th-century British literature and lesbian writing at Stanford; on the other, the “godmother of punk” reflecting on her salad days in the late 60s and 70s.  (That’s her with Robert Mapplethorpe on West 23rd street in the early 70s.) But in fact they do share a few qualities– both are portraits of the artist as a young bookworm; both came from lower middle class families (Smith’s a bit scrappier/ more working-class than Castle’s) and latched on to literature/art as a vocation.  Both books are about passionate love attachments: Smith’s with Mapplethorpe, who was her lover/comrade for the crucial early years in NYC; Castle’s with her unnamed professor at grad school, the affair with whom scarred her for years.

Just Kids feels as if it may have been partly inspired by Dylan’s Chronicles Part 1.  It’s not as great as that, but then Chronicles was a somewhat astonishing book; Smith’s is more conventional, but is really lovely in a lot of ways, and it’s a lot of fun to follow her through her time with Mapplethorpe in the Chelsea Hotel, hanging out with Harry Smith, trying to break into the inner circle at Max’s Kansas City, living for art and poetry, making collages out of stuff they find on the street, dead broke, so broke they’d go to a museum with enough money for one admission, and then one of them would look at the art and come out to tell the other one about it.  Smith was a working-class South Jersey kid with no cultural or other capital, enraptured by Arthur Rimbaud and Diego Rivera.  That song “Piss Factory” is completely real — at age 16 she worked in a factory inspecting handlebars for tricycles.  She felt her only practical option was to become a schoolteacher, but she dropped out of junior college, moved to the city and met Mapplethorpe.  Everyone assumed she was on drugs but she didn’t even drink, lived almost completely for art.  I went back and listened to probably my favorite song of hers, “Free Money;” her account here of her years scraping by with barely enough to eat made it resonate in new ways for me (I’m sure it’s about him):

Every night before I go to sleep
Find a ticket, win a lottery,
Scoop the pearls up from the sea
Cash them in and buy you all the things you need.

Every night before I rest my head
See those dollar bills go swirling ’round my bed.
I know they’re stolen, but I don’t feel bad.
I take that money, buy you things you never had.

Kind of like Dylan’s Chronicles, this comes to an end just about when she’s about to really make it.  Just Kids obviously has the more world-historical story to tell, but to tell the truth, I probably liked The Professor better; I’m a sucker for academic novels and the long memoir part of it resembles that genre, but really raw, witty & hilarious, and also very moving sometimes.  She’s a fabulous stylist and truly funny.  (If you want a fuller review here’s a rave from TNR.)  I’d always remembered her essay about Susan Sontag in the LRB; this is in the book too, and in this context it seems like the lighter, less consequential twin of the more traumatic memoir about the grad school affair, both about Castle looking for intellectual and erotic attention & validation from a glamorous older lesbian woman.

I guess all memoirs are tales of survival, to some degree, saying to the world, “well, I made it this far.” A favorite line from The Professor: “Here indeed was a mystery worth plumbing: I was fat; I was mean; but I was alive.”

Snow (day) candles

Ivan Kreilkamp1 Comment

Our school district closes school at the drop of a hat… or a snowflake.  Last week we had a “rain day.”  To be fair, the predictions were for serious snow, but it was just rain that sometimes got a bit flake-y, with zero accumulation.  Now we actually do have a few inches, so natch, no school for two days.

I was teaching yesterday so Sarah was on duty.  It was apparently a very crafty day.  Among other things, the gals made these Snow Candles.  You melt craft-store paraffin on the double boiler, then pour the wax in an indentation in the snow.  Add some colored crayons, and a wick attached to a chopstick (I think).  Anyway, they’re pretty cool!

Valentines

Ivan Kreilkamp5 Comments

Today’s project was making valentines for school (classmates and teachers).  I gave them a big pep talk about how much better homemade ones are — they seemed to buy it.

Target was predictably disappointing.  There’s a whole section of the store now dedicated to Valentine’s Day stuff, but no colored construction paper to be found anywhere.  It’s as if they’re actively hostile to the idea of someone making their own.  We bought some overpriced glitter and went to Dollar Tree, which had good paper for $1 a package, also various stickers and other decorations.  (There are girl stickers — hearts, unicorns — and boy stickers, cars and trucks; I made only the most half-hearted, because so obviously doomed, effort to question this opposition.)

They spent much of the afternoon creating these.

Pretty great, I think.  We also spent some of this weekend painting their bedroom pink, so all in all the household has become significantly more girly.  Out tonight someone observed that I had a single shiny glitter on my left cheek.

Oh, by the way, as we were walking into Target Iris told me that from a nature documentary they watched with mommy they learned about how you shouldn’t leave lights on when you don’t need them: “because if you leave a light on for too long, it makes it easier for the polar bears to catch the penguins.”

Avatar vs the Hurt Locker

Ivan Kreilkamp3 Comments

We watched the DVD of the Hurt Locker last night and I think it gave me nightmares. Or at least, I found myself awake at 5:30 a.m. and had some images from it running through my head, especially the moment when the well-meaning army doctor gets exploded to bits.  I could easily see myself as that guy.

Last week I guess it was a bit of a surprise when Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker beat out her ex-husband James Cameron’s Avatar for best picture award from the Directors Guild of America.  Perhaps many others have made this point, but I noticed some strong similarities between the two movies.  Both feature a bad-ass working-class white guy protagonist, who in a wartime situation is the one chosen to enter into enemy territory on a kind of reconnaissance mission — Avatar‘s Jake Sully to ‘go native’ among the Na’vi on the planet Pandora in order to figure out how to persuade them to relocate, The Hurt Locker‘s William James to go into Baghdad’s most dangerous neighborhoods to defuse Improvised Explosive Devices.

One major difference could be summed up as the two movies’ implicit attitude towards the mediation of warfare.  In  Avatar, the mission is entirely technologically mediated: paraplegic Jake Sully enters his avatar suit, takes control of a 9-foot tall native body, and virtually enters an alien world.  I thought Caleb Crain’s critique was pretty accurate, although it didn’t bother me as much as it did him:

The audacity of Cameron’s movie is to make believe that the artificial world of computer-generated graphics offers a truer realm of nature than our own. The compromised, damaged world we live in—the one with wars, wounds, and price-benefit calculations—can and should be abandoned.

That is, the movie completely endorses the ‘avatar’ effect of abandoning one’s reality for a mediation. As Crain points out, the movie tempts you with the promise, which is partially enacted by the experience of watching the movie itself, of giving up on our damaged world and succumbing entirely to the virtual, imaginary, still-pure fantasy of Pandora.

What struck me about The Hurt Locker is that it can be read as an overt critique of just this kind of embrace of the mediation and virtualization of warfare (and perhaps of experience more generally).  When James shows up as the new head of the bomb dispersal team, we’ve already seen the team in action with their previous leader, who was killed in an operation gone wrong.  As part of what appears to have been standard procedure, they first approached a potential bomb via a little robot on wheels; some of the first images of the film are in fact broadcast from the camera of that robot, zooming along the Baghdad street like a strange little child’s toy.  The robot approaches the bomb, checks it out, and does much of the work of defusing it before the human being has to take over at the end.

The bomb disposal team could thus be seen as part of the logic of the U.S.’s deployment of Predator drones to commit targeted assassinations, as elements of a form of warfare that is systematically mediated in order to ensure that as many of the most dangerous and vulnerable actions as possible are performed virtually, without putting U.S. soldiers in harm’s way. Bigelow implies that the entire war strategy is continuous with the X-Box video games she shows the soldiers playing at one point. Not that the soldiers aren’t in fact in continual grave danger, but that the logic of the war is to employ virtual strategies whenever feasible.  By beginning the movie from the bomb-robot P.O.V., Bigelow even links our own experience of the film with this kind of mediation: we, like the soldiers, are watching the robot’s film as it (not we) approach the bomb.

When Jeremy Renner’s William James joins the squad, his disconcerting innovation is to do away almost entirely with the layers of mediation separating him from the bomb.  He ditches the robot, takes his helmet and even suit off whenever possible, and just heads straight to the bomb, where he sets to dismantling it with his pliers like some garage hobbyist tinkering with a faulty motor.  It’s virtually suicidal — “you know what they call them, suicide bombers,” he comments at one point, underlining his own tendency to mimic and put himself literally in the same space as the Iraqi insurgency.  What it is to be “suicidal” is to shed the virtual armor and to put your own body at risk.

The movie makes clear that James’ approach is both heroic and completely self-destructive, and compromised by an obviously compulsive search for an adrenaline rush.  But Bigelow also depicts James, with ambivalent admiration, as offering a wholescale rejection of the U.S. army’s mediation of combat.  He’s the precise opposite of Avatar’s Jake Sully, who becomes a hero precisely by embracing his own virtualization.

Whether this has anything at all to do with Bigelow’s divorce from Cameron, I have no idea!  But the (relatively) low-budget Hurt Locker can definitely be read as an implicit rebuke to Cameron’s mega-budget fantasia.  (Which, by the way, I did also enjoy; even if it’s ideologically creepy, it is an amazing spectacle).