( four frames in sequence from “The Hurt Locker” by Kathryn Bigelow)
“oh KB you’re so…”
Her images of the exploding bomb man.
A forbidden telesma for a beginning of the 21st Century.
The action, described over and over in the news, one we are numb from repetition. KB fulfills our collective desire and need for seeing the unseeable. Our belief of experience as an act of congress. All of us sitting in the dark.
Almost all suicide bombers make the news.
Yet we never see them. The world wide verbal announcement is the logical end result of an unseen event. On occasion an unexploded vest is found strapped to some dolt or sad child.
Or occasionally the media filters don’t work; and lo, there is a glimpse of final carnage and gore; the after without before.
Thank You, Kathryn Bigelow brings us the image of the moment. Four frames of the unwatchable–the unseen. That which film was made for.
Almost all muti-million dollar films make the news.
In doing it she acts out the truth of the act of filmmaking; the desire to see into the darkness of the human animal and to visualize the experience of death.
Here she (our hero, KB) reaches into our darkness with a 200 frame per second video camera in the glare of High Noon. Giving us only three frames of the obliteration of the body of a man chained to a bomb before it is over taken with the replacement footage of the explosion. 0.09 of a second stretched out into 0.125 of a second: a precise smearing of time of a very unseeable event. The precision is important, the replication of the moment of violence has cost thousands of dollars, days of work of many people. The human eye and brain can not see something that fast, we can only see the before and the after, but our brain smears reality and tells us we saw the cause and the moment. We didn’t, we couldn’t; the film or better yet the act of making film brings forth the image of the perceived and grants some false memory of the invisible.
In this story a man who against his will has become a man strapped to a bomb, KB has made him a sympathetic character, his explosion is not filled with hate or the willful desire to kill and destroy that comes with the average representation of the “Anonymous Suicide Bomber”. No, we are told in a panicked enumerated countdown, the clock tics, he is a “family man”, tock, a dupe, tic, an innocent. The explosion only kills the hapless man. Causing the main protagonist to experience a hackneyed visual epiphany of a kite floating in the sky. It is a trite message. There is no understanding of where the bomb came from, it is a bomb with out backstory. But the better story is the bomb. It is the story of success, the mix of chemical and electronic and the hard work of creation and planning. KB only gives us the motive of the chemical reaction, not the men who made it.
She is reminding us to glory in the power of the bomb.
The power of the reactionary explosive moment.
In a broader context Kubrick is unclear–”…or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb”. It seems it is his statement or his own assessment of the film-watching public. More likely it is the filmmakers’ bloodlust he is speaking of, agreeing with Bruce Conner. KB has learned well; Kubrick was wry in his assessment, Walter Hill would be proud, and Joel Silver would have asked for more architectural glass to shatter from the blast. We do love the bomb.
It is the moment of death that becomes the hero. The bomb: the motivating character and the expanding flower of shrapnel and dust the epiphanic conclusion.
The slowly arching movie returns and re-envelopes this tiny four frame film. We are told, in the context of the narrative, this moment is a failure. But our adrenaline craving bodies tell us something else. We have seen a perfect movie, everything we need; we will wait for the next one.
KB you really are so…
Reference:
Telesma: Telesma is a general term for the physical components of magical foci, as defined by the focus formula.