A House of Dynamite

I went to a matinee screening at Amherst Cinema, where the screens are small but the vibe is good. Maybe 5 other people attending. I left the theater wrung out, emotionally exhausted, in a state of cognitive dissonance.

It seems clear to me that this was Bigelow’s intent (hereafter KB, an affectionate shorthand some of us who worked for her like to use). The tripartite story structure, which is not to be confused with the classic Hollywood 3-act nor, despite its shifts in POVs, with Rashomon, though it gestures toward the latter, is working toward something else altogether. The point is not to show how ambiguity besets differing perspectives or subjectivities, calling into doubt “the truth,” but how the most harrowing event imaginable plays out across a spectrum of experience and within the tight confines of a rigorous professionalism which is tested to the breaking point. It is also an ingenious method for ratcheting up suspense. A more vulgar person than myself might call it tease and denial.

The repetitions build up tension to an unbearable level, then – fade to black. Each break occurs just as the missile is about to hit Chicago. Their effect is, as a friend put it, “devastating.” They give you no solace, no room to hide, absolutely no comfort or closure. It put me in mind of Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty, which was meant to confound the audience’s expectations, to break them out of their complacency. The whole film seems like an extended exercise in that old rhetorical trope aposiopesis — when a narrative is suddenly broken off/disrupted, given no end.

Because it’s Bigelow it is of course expertly crafted. The pacing is superb. The close up work unnerving. The way she holds on the silences in various command centers as the realization sinks in that the missile cannot be stopped.

“This is insanity.” The President says (he’s not wrong) “No, Mr. President, this is reality.” A general replies (neither is he).

Always lauded for her dazzling action sequences, KB does not get enough attention or acclaim for the performances she draws from her cast. The first section places Rebecca Ferguson front and center. It’s a beautiful, restrained performance. There’s an anguished moment where she can barely hold back her tears as she thinks about her young son (whom we saw early on in a typical box-checking domestic scene).

And the little human moments — ballgame chat, lovers in a hurry, a mom on an outing with her son and yes, the hapless SecDef who can't accept the crushing weight of the catastrophe (including, it's suggested, his own personal failures) — all these splinters of humanity were powerfully affecting. Managing such a large number of actors in a coherent and compelling way, in such brief snippets, without slipping into disaster movie cliche, is an incredible accomplishment.

The always excellent Tracy Lett’s general lays out a concise range of scenarios as to the identity of the missile launcher, including one that involves a foreign power blinding one of our spy satellites before launching a missile – a more than plausible and frightening scenario.

Gabriel Basso dominates the second section, where he plays the Deputy NSA Jake Bearington. He’s an earnest Boy Scout type, pretty much the same character he played in “The Night Agent.” He’s a handsome hunk of beefcake but he is also quite good. His is the voice of moderation and de-escalation amid the chorus of brass hats who clamor for more bellicose responses to the maddeningly unidentified enemy. He plays noble frustration beautifully. Indeed, the film excels in its depiction of professionals performing difficult tasks under the most extreme pressure. The film is nothing if not Hawksian in that sense.

The final section brings us at last to Idris Elba’s POTUS—thus far only a voice. He is exhausted, a bit disheveled. Overwhelmed by the awfulness of the moment and the momentousness of the crucial decision he must make, he seems to crumble from within. It’s a wrenching, deeply human performance – he’s caught in an impossible moral crux. This section closes like the others. We don’t see the missile’s impact. POTUS is shuttled off to a bunker. We’re left to imagine the disaster, which is a brilliant move after so much build up. It puts the moral responsibility for imagining such an unthinkable event on the viewer. To have shown the missile strike would have robbed the film of its power, reducing it to just another inane spectacle of mass destruction, no better than an MCU film.

Above all, the film shows just how helpless we are in the face of our own awesome technologies. It’s not just the missiles that evoke horror, but the uselessness of the counter-measures.

One leaves the theater shaken, haunted. The Doomsday Clock is currently set at 89 seconds to midnight. And my students seem never to have heard of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Annals of LA: About Jay Cocks

In 1991 or so I was hired to do research on a film about Joan of Arc. I’d been working for James Cameron at the time, reading scripts. Mostly SF. Or novels like Marge Piercy’s “Woman on the Edge of Time,” which clearly had an influence, shall we say, on “Terminator 2: Judgment Day.”

His wife at the time, Kathryn Bigelow, who’d just come off the now iconic “Point Break;” was going to direct. (Now iconic = early box office pretty low). It was going to be called “Company of Angels” but none of us knew that at the time. At the time it was just the Joan script. Top secret. Eyes only. Sinead O’Connor would play Joan. And maybe Keanu Reeves as Dunois?

But as it turned out, as charismatic as she was, Sinead did not really know how to act. We put this sweet tiny woman astride an enormous Clydesdale on the soundstage at Raleigh Studios (across from Paramount and my beloved Nickodells, now gone). The horse was pure grade mega-fauna – srsly whose idea was it to order this beast? But the horse was cool. I wondered vaguely about the wrangler—who would wield the broom and shovel? For once, not my problem.

The particular scene was the crucible of the script’s and Joan’s psychology. On the eve of battle at Orleans, she confesses to the loyal Dunois that she does not hear God’s voice. That out of desperation and ardor she’s just made it all up. It’s a stark human existential moment – a naked moment, attesting to the deep need to believe. To will destiny into being, rather like Peter O'Toole does in "Lawrence."

But it’s not working. Sinead is unable to deliver the requisite passion the scene demands. After several takes, Keanu improvises -- and mind you, he’s a real sweetheart; he’s just trying to ignite something in Sinead, to make the scene catch fire. He grabs her and shakes her and yells, “what do you mean you don’t hear the Voices?” Underneath the burning klieg lights, on a huge sound stage with a full crew looking on, poor Sinead, under so much pressure, just snapped.

“Get your fucking hands off me or I’ll fucking thromp you!” she explodes – and storms off the set. Everyone just stands there, mouths agape. One of the older pros just says, “I seen this before – one time with Duvall.”

Kathryn wisely counsels patience. She knows more than a little about the care and feeding of actors. Sinead has gone to cool off in her dressing room. After a decent interval has passed someone is sent to check in on her. But Sinead is not in her dressing room. Indeed she appears not to be on the lot at all, having caught a cab, the gate guard tells us.

Her acting coach, a rather fawning guy named Larry, I think, predicts that Sinead is enroute to LAX. K instantly dispatches the two of us to intercept. She’s got a good 15 minutes on us maybe more. But since I know the cabbie will take her via freeway I decide to take the backroad short cuts via La Cienega over Baldwin Hills and drop down to Century Blvd. Every true Angeleno knows these routes and only passes them on to good friends. This is well before Waze and Google Maps and all the rest. A shortcut in LA is genuine cultural capital.

We pull up to the curb at British Air and Larry dashes inside and nabs her just as she’s hauling out her AMEX. Then the three of us sit on the curb in the White Zone (“which is for passenger loading and unloading only”) and Larry and I gently talk her down. “They all hate me,” she wails. “No, no, no -- nobody hates you!” (Actually maybe some of the crew might resent her but fuck them). We gradually throttle her back, ease her down, and get into the cab. I have become it would seem a kind of star whisperer.

The thing about Sinead is she came up from hard times and is now world famous. She’s only 23. She rolls out of bed at KB’s place at ten each morning and downs a Corona and smokes a joint over her scrambled eggs. She’s lonely for someone to talk to, up there in K’s mountain top eyrie. So we end getting high together and I nearly lose my job but then K, in a flash of insight, exclaims – “No, you’re bonding with her – that’s good!”

Sinead’s problem is that, for all her massive charisma, she has no technique to fall back on or draw from. She is pretty much a live conduit for her emotions, like a lot of great singers. And now she’s in Hollywood and in over her head. I don’t blame her at all. She’d just bit off more than she could chew.

She was a champ though – a real trouper. On the way back from LAX, crammed into the narrow cab of a pickup truck I’d commandeered from Ari, one of Jim’s guys, for the rescue op, thigh to thigh, she told me a poem I’d written about Joan made her wet. I nearly drove us off the 405. She was probably just fucking with me but I loved it.

She’d asked Jay to give her five classic films to watch: I don’t recall them all but four of them were “The Red Shoes,” “A Place in the Sun,” “The Searchers,” and “The Third Man” --- all films about characters driven to the very edge.

(So yeah I sat in my office in Warner Hollywood and became obsessed because that is the meaning of research and that ended up becoming my first book of poems ten years later, BURN. Thank you Joe Amato and thank you Charles Alexander. Another story for another time.)

Most folks don’t understand actors or what the art of acting is – about what it is like to live so close to your emotions. To put yr face on the line – to be so luminous and vulnerable and porous. Poets are the antennae of the race sd Pound. Wrong – actors are. They put themselves on the line in ways most of us would have a hard time imagining. As I tell my students, the close up is still the greatest special effect ever invented. Not sure they get it.

In the event, things went south or sideways or some other undesirable direction. Just another day in the office.

But Jay turned out to be, out of all that welter, one of the rare and truly decent human beings I ever met in Hollywood. Or anywhere else for that matter. A genuine class act. (Leslie Whitney and Laurette Hayden at HBO being two others. And of course Jay’s late wife, the amazing actor Verna Bloom, full of North Shore sass. I adored her).

Jay and I bonded over our mutual love of James Agee. Which startled me because in my innocence and arrogance I had already decided that screenwriters were clueless – lightweight epigones. Then I read a few scripts and realized, this shit is hard – it’s pure form. It must be as tightly constructed as a sonnet. It can kill you if you’re not awfully careful.

Over Jay’s desk (location undisclosed) hangs an enormous B&W photo of David Lean. It’s a production still from “Ryan’s Daughter.” Lean and his crew are struggling with a large light array precariously perched on a rocky coastline. He’s wearing a trench coat and the wind is whipping it around and like King Canute he seems to be commanding the elements to stop. The sea – yeah, the Irish Sea – is not hitting its marks. It’s epic. It’s heroic. It’s beautiful. This is how you make movies. You do crazy shit but also you look like David Lean.

It’s 1991 and we’re in a story meeting. Mulholland Drive, 90210, early spring sunlight streaming in, Richard Serra prints on the wall. Originals (KB knew Serra – and Philip Glass – and Mapplethorpe. From her days at the Whitney. There was a stunning BW photo portrait of her by Mapplethorpe that sat on Jim’s desk – I walked by it everyday and little by little I fell in love with it – or her – I could not be sure which).

But everything else is beige. The walls are beige, the couches are beige – I am slowly seeping into a sea of beige. It is inescapable. Even the smog is beige. A beige apocalypse. LA in the early 90s.

Kathryn’s enormous but very sweet German Shepherd Bodhi is lounging about. Bodhi would occasionally go into a barking frenzy and then the next door neighbor, a singer-song writer named Johnny Rivers whose chief claim to fame was having written the lyrics to “Secret Agent Man,” a song (and show) I loved as a boy, would complain. Loud and long. It got to be a regular thing. I was tasked with trying to mollify him. I did not succeed. Jay’s response was to write a hilarious parody of one of his songs. I don’t think KB was amused.

Kathryn and I are interviewing Jay for a bigtime screenwriting gig. We’d just talked to David Peoples (Blade Runner. Unforgiven) – David is great but yeah, no. KB did not dig him. He made a point of telling us that he hates flying so he drove – drove, mind you – to LA from Berkeley. I think this was what sealed his fate. He did not meet K’s threshold of cool. But then I was like, you can write scripts and live in Berkeley? I dropped a lot of acid in Berkeley. Some of it was actually real.

I am so in over my head I have no idea. I have this absurd amount of power. Except it’s not real power. That’s what fucks with yr head. It just looks like real power. And Jay is just so relaxed --- I think to myself this guy doesn’t care if he gets the job. He’s just sitting there with his legs crossed and he honestly does not give a shit. He’s from New York. He tells stories about writing film reviews for TIME. About meeting John Wayne and Kubrick. He is maybe the best raconteur I’ve ever known (the other being Anselm Hollo) – he has the journalist’s eye for the telling, colorful detail but he never goes on too long, never wears out his welcome. He doesn’t take himself or any of the Hollywood glitz seriously. He just seems hugely amused by it all.

Also, Marty is his best friend.

Also, he loves movies.

KB and I had just read the script for “Age of Innocence,” (which was released later that year and subsequently earned Jay an Oscar nom) and we were over the moon about it. Later I asked him about it and he simply sd, with a modesty that I came to know as typical of him and truly unfeigned, “it was all Miss Wharton.” Yeah, sure it was, pal.

(The script is credited to Jay and Marty. But to my eye the only contributions from Marty seemed to consist of inserting directions for camera angles – how to set up or shoot certain scenes. Everyone knows this is the worst kind of amateur mistake in script writing. They’ll storyboard it later anyway and you are who to presume to instruct the director about camera placement? In this case you just happen to be Marty so it’s all jake.

The brief camera instructions are revelatory, though --- Marty, like Hitchcock and Ford, had worked out the visual design well in advance. He’s got the whole freaking movie already storyboarded. He sees it in its totality before a single shot has been taken. You start to learn to see how he sees – will this be a CU? An MCU? A tracking shot? What’s Daniel doing? Where is Winona? Like that).

I realize slowly that I am in high cotton. But only because I have just read Darryl Pickney’s brilliant hugely entertaining memoir of the same title. The chapter on his working for Djuna Barnes is priceless. I, too, am working with genius-level people.

KB leaves the room to "take an important call." From her phalanx of agents -- maybe Ken Stovitz at CAA? Maybe Paula Wagner in her black Armani power suit? Paula Wagner is formidable. I have great respect for her. She really knew her stuff. A great agent is like a great director or producer: a master psychologist. She can work the room. She can command the flow of the conversation, the very pulse of the room, the outcome of the deal. It’s an art form I suppose and even though I sometimes cursed them under my breath I realized they held amazing super powers. (On the other hand Jay had some very funny stories and quip about agents which I shan’t repeat here)>

Then there was that whole phone protocol thing: every call prefaced with a "please hold for a call from X..." Did I do that for KB? Yes, so help me god, I did.

While she is out Jay and I get to talking. He is so nonchalant, and just so cool and down to earth I find it easy to chat with him. Also, he pays me the major compliment – he takes me seriously – he actually wants to hear what I have to say. He is, as Ingrid would later say (her ultimate compliment) “no bullshit.”

Somehow we find ourselves talking about Agee and “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.” I tell him I’ve just read it for another production company but though I love this book as much as anything in American literature I could not figure out how anyone could make a decent movie from it. The rural adventurism has a hook -- sure. But Agee comes off as a fawning creep and the best parts of the book, the stuff everyone loves, are the lyrical passages – “All over Alabama the lamps are out.” Or, “slowly they diminished along the hill path, she, and her daughter and her three sons, in leisured enfilade beneath the light.” You’d have to be a genius to make a good film from this book and anyway hadn’t John Ford already done it in “Grapes of Wrath”?

Later, after the Joan of Arc movie deal fell apart, I left LA, went to grad school, became a scholar of sorts and thought mostly about poetry and not much about screenplays. I moved to Boston. I got back in touch with Jay. We went down to see him in NYC where he graciously received us and then later invited us to come visit him and Verna at their beautiful home in Maine. We ended up honeymooning there and even though the marriage didn’t last I did write some good poems sitting on the deck of their guest home, overlooking a Maine fjord.

Over endless cappuccinos we talked about “The Wild Bunch” and “Random Harvest” and a bunch of other films I’d never seen before. He showered us with DVDs – almost all B/W Hollywood Golden Age classics. I was getting schooled, again.

I suppose at this point I should just state the obvious. If this sounds like a love story, it is.

CODA: Jim Cameron used to live in the house on Mulholland with Kathryn. You can bet he did not care about the beige. There was one personal trace of him remaining and it made me love him – a mimeographed four-paneled cartoon of some astronauts walking on a desert planet. I think it was dated 1965? This was exactly the kind of stuff I did back when I was a boy. I would look at it from time to time and think, “Emerson was so fucking right.”

Zero Dark Thirty

In a certain sense, Kathryn Bigelow is perfectly right when she claims that “depiction is not endorsement,” that torture is “a part of the story we could not ignore.” Unfortunately, it’s not the story she told, but the story about the story she told. There is an urgent desire in Zero Dark Thirty, as Bigelow relates in her recent TIME interview, to tell a neutral story. But as she very well knows, the camera is never neutral. If a tracking shot is a moral judgment, as Godard remarked, then so is a close up; so is every frame of composition. The camera, contra Bazin, can never simply show reality as it is, but is always already an instrument of mediation.

Just as Robert Duncan chastised Denise Levertov (ultimately ending his friendship with her over the Vietnam War) by stating that the task of poetry is not to oppose evil, but imagine it, so Bigelow and her writer/co-producer Mark Boal are asking audiences to take their depiction of torture as part of the moral darkness of the war on terror – a necessary, if regrettable, part of it. Yet Zero Dark Thirty never shows us the personal cost of that darkness as its incurred by the professionals waging that war. Nor does it dwell on what it means for a putative democracy to operate as an empire. It never truly imagines evil. Instead it imagines the bureaucratic response to evil, which is a kind of evil itself -- understood not as a theological category, but in the sense Adorno means by the phrase "radical evil," which he uses to describe the totally administered society whose aim is to eradicate all traces of subjective freedom, right down to the very thoughts one thinks.

The problem, as David Bromwich details at The Huffington Post, is that in ZDT's naïve zeal for an “absolute” adherence to the facts, it erases or represses the enormous moral question that occupies the center of the hunt for Bin Laden, rendering a manhunt into a referendum on metaphysical values. Bigelow stresses how she wanted a “boots-on-the ground” feel to the movie, a kind of bracketing off of the more complex problems raised by how the CIA conducted its investigation in order to focus on the procedure itself. This places an enormous burden on the notion of factuality that is, finally, insupportable. “Boots on the ground” has become a code phrase for some kind of ungainsayable authenticity, perhaps akin to what Walter Benjamin called Erlebnesse—the immediate shock of experience. But since experience only becomes "experience" after its been processed (i.e. after it becomes "Erfahrung") this appeal to the authentic raises some thorny questions about how the authentic is determined. It also masks what those boots are doing on the ground in the first place, namely, carrying out national policy.

Bigelow and Boal’s approach produces an extraordinary sense of immediacy as it compresses the years-long search for Bin Laden into a harrowing and intense movie, but in the process of creating that intensity it also generates an appalling lack of perspective, an ethical vacuum. By refusing to take a position on American foreign policy, (in this, it follows The Hurt Locker, a film that had far less at stake, morally), ZDT’s procedural ethos is not the tribute to professionalism Bigelow and Boal imagine it to be, but a morally empty film that is, by default, complicit with the reckless and arrogant exercise of American geopolitical power.

The thing is – and this is what all the critics have missed – is that Bigelow has never been a filmmaker of ideas. She is concerned above all with moments of intensity and shock. This cinema of adrenaline and extremity (which I’ve addressed more sympathetically in my post on The Hurt Locker) runs through any number of her films, in particular Blue Steel, Point Break, The Hurt Locker and Strange Days. Indeed, this last film, I would argue, is still her most violently disturbing because of how she frames its extreme degree of self-reflexivity. (Its infamous rape scene invites comparison to ZDT’s raid on Bin Laden’s compound for its use of POV composition).

Zero Dark Thirty in other words is immersive cinema: it’s meant to engulf us, to take us completely into its world, the world of espionage and torture and dangerous dirty but necessary work whose participants seemingly never suffer from questions of self-doubt, much less stop to examine their mistakes at the procedural level. Developing a sophisticated moral point of view is simply not its concern. Case in point: the potent scene where Mark Strong tongue-lashes a roomful of cowed agents, including Maya, by screaming about how “we’re spending billions” and getting nowhere. The movie makes no room for a point of view that might question whether those billions were being improperly spent on things like the invasion of Iraq, rather than hunting down Bin Laden. The scene is important because the camera lingers over Maya’s reaction to this tirade: there’s no self-doubt, only a flicker of emotion that signals a resolve to recommit to the quest.

At the risk of mixing personal anecdote with textual analysis I’ll offer what seems to me a telling moment. When Mark Boal visited Amherst College two years ago, fresh off the triumph of The Hurt Locker, he gave an entertaining, if rather rambling, account of how he researched the film. (He also defensively parried smart questions about the film’s troubling politics). His most revealing remark about where his allegiances lay came when, pointedly addressing the faculty seated in the front row, he opined, apropos of no instigation whatsoever, that “the military was not going away, whatever you folks might think.” Plainly we Ivory Tower types lived in some kind of liberal fantasy land for him.

Boal’s macho militarism has made him something of a stooge for realpolitik. It certainly has played into Bigelow’s desire for a cinema of intensity. While this produced powerful results in The Hurt Locker, in ZDT the combination is ethically disastrous. The Hurt Locker was a film about shock that redeemed its depictions of violence by asking us to reflect on shock’s melancholy wages. It was also, like Strange Days, a film heavily invested in cinematic self-reflexivity. But it’s difficult to make the same claims for Zero Dark Thirty because its main character, Maya, is so opaque, almost a cipher, empty of all personal meaning, existing purely in the service of a cause. If there’s an ironic connection to be made between this subject position and that of her ideologically-driven opponents, the film never sees fit to even imply it. This moral vacuity, this utter lack of interiority, is far more troubling than the torture scenes, which merely show what results from such an emptiness.

This makes the final scene of the film difficult to read. It’s here that it wants to redeem everything it's depicted before. As tears slowly roll down Maya’s face, in medium close up, we’re not sure who or what it is she’s crying for: For herself? For her fallen comrades? For the 9/11 dead? From a kind of mortal exhaustion that carries with it a moral hazard? Are they the tears of redemptive release, suppressed for so long and now finally being shed in a moment of real feeling because the battle’s been won? Even her vulnerability poses questions about opacity. It invites us into the enigma of her personal agon. That this moment refuses to yield to a single reading gestures toward a moral complexity it hasn't really earned, though it does move in the direction of justifying the claims Bigelow makes for it.

Bigelow's immersive cinema of intensity makes her essentially a-political. This is her guiding ethos; her politics, inasmuch as she has one, is formalist. But it’s also why she’ll never be a truly great master, ala Ford or Kurosawa. For if intensity is not matched by an attempt to redeem suffering then all it can do is show us how things happen, without ever touching on what meanings we give them. By being so ruthlessly faithful to events, the film has made itself blind to history. Given this, it’s easy to see that ZDT’s raison d’etre is not the vindication of 9/11 or even its avenging heroine, but the extended sequence that is the raid on Abbottabad. This sequence is perhaps the finest thing Bigelow has ever done, absolutely gripping in its pacing and focus, and haunting to watch unfold.

Yet it’s hard not think of the sequence as a case of the tail wagging the dog. And it’s even harder to know how to feel about the murdered women and the dispossessed children in these scenes. It’s here that the film does succeed, I think, in spite of my earlier reservations, in depicting the moral cost of war. The viewer is implicated in the consequences of the raid in a way that the SEALS are not and cannot be. The cutting back and forth between the POV night-vision goggles and the more objective actual-light camera angles, though still highly subjective, enacts this reflexive dynamic. Are the survivors bad people? Innocent? Or simply bystanders? Perhaps this is one reason for Maya’s tears. This may be a generous reading of a troubling film. But I want it to be true.

All of this is difficult for me to write because of my personal connection to Bigelow, whom I worked for in the early 90s. I will always feel a stubborn devotion to her as a person and a deep loyalty to her profound gifts as a filmmaker. My gut on this is that ZDT will eventually come to be seen as a film that told some very real and very unpleasant truths about how the real world really works. God help us all.

On Avatar and The Hurt Locker

As most everyone on the planet knows by now, James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow were briefly married to each other in the early 90s. No match in Hollywood seemed more apt, if judged solely on the basis of devotion to a cinema of harrowing energy. It was during this time that I worked for them both, first at Cameron’s fledgling Lightstorm Entertainment’s bunker-like facility, situated in the industrial wastelands behind Burbank Airport. The joke around the office was that the place could take a direct nuclear hit. This was when Jim was filming T-2 and the office canteen featured a Terminator pinball machine as well as a life-size model of the Terminator itself, a demonically glowering metal skeleton. The industrial bay that took the entire back half of the building was large enough to park a plane inside. Under the direction of Jim’s younger brother, Mike, it was a thriving shop floor, packed with heavy-duty machines that cranked out hi-tech widgets. It was that kind of place: juiced on testosterone and apocalypse.

I later came to work, much more closely, with Bigelow, fresh off the now iconographic Point Break, from the couple’s home, perched on a cliff off Mulholland Drive. During this time they divorced and the huge double-terminated quartz crystal that adorned a table in the living room, a gift from Kathryn to Jim, spoke volubly for me of a potent absence. One day, when things were nearly over, Jim came into my “office,” a converted carriage house stuffed with Kathryn’s books, which included works by Louis Althusser and Robert Bresson, and began reciting the opening quatrains of Lewis Carroll’s “The Walrus and The Carpenter.” It struck me as a kind of oblique elegy, full of heartfelt loss, but tossed off with a boyish shrug of sangfroid.

Years and divergent career paths later, these two incredibly gifted filmmakers have given us an extraordinary pair of movies, each of which, in its own way, demonstrates powerfully the need of art to push violently against its own boundaries. In a perverse way, they’ve made the same movie. Both set their stories in far off lands, among alien cultures, where a brutal colonial war is underway. Both offer critiques of that war and of the allure and dangers of violence. And both are deeply invested in cinema as the medium par excellence for total immersion in the immediate.

Avatar and The Hurt Locker want to overwhelm the viewer, not merely with images of wonder or terror, but with a near-absolute experience of being-there. The formal virtuosity they employ to achieve this effect in both cases is breathtaking. Resistance is futile.

Cameron’s critique of violence is bluntly sentimental. He extols the virtues of primitivism while dazzling us with cinematic shock and awe. But the immense set pieces of destruction that make up the film’s bloated second half bludgeon feeling, rather than quicken it. Bigelow’s critique of violence is more subtle and complex, pervaded by a weird and unsettling ambiguity. For while The Hurt Locker is at pains to show us the brutal human costs of warfare, it also gives us war’s visceral thrill, its disturbing elations.

The estranging effects of violence don’t factor into Avatar. What Cameron has ingeniously created instead is a film about the experience of seeing films. Jake occupies a roughly analogous position to the filmgoer, a prompt for our own experience. Slide into your casket and slip on your trodes; settle in your seat and put on your glasses – and whammo – you’re transported, instantly, to utopia, ecstatic otherwhere. The power of the medium is such that it erases the mediation in order to make one feel the immediate. Film is a prosthetic device that makes us complete.

For Bigelow, immediacy is everything, too. The Hurt Locker opens with a sobering epigraph, from war journalist Chris Hedges: “The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug.” But if war is a drug, then so is film. Both intensely claustrophobic and exhilaratingly expansive, the film plunges us into a closed-in universe where the sound of your own heartbeat is a ticking bomb. Indeed, the entire premise of the film, built around the defusing squad, stands as a rich metaphorical mirror image to the work of the filmmaker, who constructs intricate devices to capture and replicate sensations in order to blow us away. No other film in recent memory, Avatar notwithstanding, demonstrates so powerfully the potentiality of filmmaking itself. Like Avatar, The Hurt Locker is a film about filmmaking. It’s an allegory for not only how we structure representations of experience, but for how those structures are susceptible to estrangement.

Avatar and The Hurt Locker are not the same film. But they are dreaming the same dream. The name of that dream is total cinema and it begins with Wagner’s massive operas. Since then, Western art has striven to immerse us entirely within works of art that are simultaneously hermetic and diaphanous, self-contained and boundless. Avatar and The Hurt Locker, the one lumbering and elephantine, the other manic and termite-like, to use Manny Farber’s shrewd distinction, come achingly close to realizing the old dream of a total work of art.

Yet for all their aggressive modernity, the pleasures that both movies offer are ancient pleasures, little different, for all their bedazzlements, from what Homer achieves in The Iliad with the death scenes of Patroclus or Hector. Avant-garde technology still serves humanist needs.

In her famous essay, “The Iliad, or The Poem of Force,” Simone Weil writes that the true subject of the poem is force and its distorting effects; the way it turns humans into things. Force is an idol which extracts a heavy toll from all who would pray to it. In The Iliad, she asserts, “the human spirit is shown as modified by its relation to force, as swept away, blinded, by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to.” The commitment of both filmmakers to what I would call intensity, rather than force, poses a significant question about the ethical implications of their formal accomplishments. Can we critique something even as we enjoy its representation? And to what extent do we then become complicit in the subject of such a critique?

Avatar’s narrower emotional range forecloses these questions. For all its delights, the movie is finally too much of a wish-fulfillment fantasy, a gameboy wetdream, to return any dividends along these lines. The Hurt Locker, on the other hand, precisely because it does not address the ideological content of its subject head on, is the more serious moral work. It invites us to consider, amid its frenzied mayhem, what it means to submit oneself to force, to risk losing oneself in force’s narcotic rush.

Once, we were viewing a clip from a silent film Kathryn admired as part of the preparation for our own project. In the middle of a particularly anguished scene in which the heroine undergoes an excruciating internal struggle that seems to magnify her face, Kathryn exclaimed, "she's like a force of nature!” I always thought this got to the core of what Bigelow tries to do in nearly every one of her films. This is where she likes her heroes – in extremis, at the very edge, hanging on by their fingernails. Think Jamie Lee Curtis in Blue Steel, Keanu Reeves in Point Break, Ralph Fiennes in Strange Days.

They are not so much redeemed by the violence they unleash as undone by it, left shaken and trembling. Bigelow’s staging of violence in The Hurt Locker is grittier and more morally complicated than the comforting mythic scenarios of Avatar. It makes more stringent demands of both its hero and its audience. And while it trades openly in the electric currency of the immediate, it also asks us to consider the cost of our addiction to immediacy. It’s a movie about shock that asks us to reflect on shock’s melancholy wages. In other words, it’s a movie for grown ups who like some moral doubt mixed in with their sense of wonder.

That’s why, come Oscar night, I’ll be rooting for Kathryn, not Jim.