“Come Back to the Humvee Ag’in Will Honey,” or a few comments about the sexual politics of Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker

"The Hurt Locker" won the Oscar in 2010 for best director, and that director was Kathryn Bigelow, the first woman ever to win an Oscar for director. A threshold had been crossed; while Hollywood traded in the image of woman, women rarely directed that trade, and if they did, they were hardly recognized. With Bigelow winning the Oscar for directing, it seemed a certain recognition had been made that things need to change. And they do. Curiously, however, the film that won her the Oscar, "The Hurt Locker," is an intensely gendered film, but one that makes sure that women (and Blacks) absolutely know, understand, and accept their place, apparently right back where it should be: beneath the dominate white male. Of biological women in the film, we see few. One, in fact, who dimly appears in the margins. The womanly role, however, is clearly there, and will be assumed by an Afro-American male -- who will become the “bitch” of a macho cool White guy. In one sense, however, what Bigelow does is simply rearticulate what Leslie Fiedler had noted back in the late 1940s: that the true American love story was not that between male and female, but between a White man, and his dark-skinned (Black or Red) male “lover.” This article, with dismay, points out and explains how this develops in Bigelow’s film.