This was clearly the case with Conrad's novella, and as I watched Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker this past weekend, the connections were relatively easy to make. Just for anyone who hasn't seen the film, it's about an American IED (bomb) squad in Iraq and especially the man who suits up and defuses bombs. Without spoiling the end, it's important to note that he has a sort of addiction to his work with IEDs and battle.
The first, and most obvious connection between the two works is that the main character is seen as imperfect. There's no glorifying here, either in Marlow's horrible situation or in the bomb squad's missions. The Hurt Locker is really one of the only war movies I've ever seen that's not glorified with some overarching message. It's a very raw, personal film and that's the kind of story that Joseph Conrad gives us as well.
On a much deeper level than the plot is the inclusion of postmodern philosophy in both works. We've drawn many postmodern parallels to Heart of Darkness, such as the fragmented view of Kurtz throughout the story. In The Hurt Locker, though, we get a similar, very disconnected perspective on the whole story. Time in the film is almost random, events are spliced together in such a way that we don't understand the whole picture. We never hear orders from a higher official in the military or anyone giving orders to these men. In the same way that Conrad's story is one with a backdrop in the Congo, the Iraq war serves as a foundation for Bigelow's real plot.
Another huge postmodern element in each of these two works is the idea that "everything is a commodity." The implications of this statement are pretty obvious in Heart of Darkness, where all African resources are to Europeans "just another commodity," and human life itself can be pushed out of the way to achieve economic goals. The Hurt Locker, and war itself, work in a similar way: human life is just another tool to reach a goal, to be victorious or to gain something. On the postmodern scale, everything belongs to somebody and that's just what war is about; when everything is owned by somebody, we're simply talking about properties being exchanged between owners. Nothing else matters.
These two awesome works of art will likely remain classics for decades to come, and it's interesting to me that they inform each other even when they were so spread out in time, and about such different topics. It's almost like the connection itself brings about postmodernism- time is nothing but a fragmented staggering of different ideas. It seems that both works picked up on similar ideas, and this is important because we understand a little bit more about the Iraq War now- through Heart of Darkness' morals and through The Hurt Locker's sense of closeness to individual soldiers. War is a very postmodern affair in some ways, and given that we as a country spend time, money, and most importantly human lives on war, it is essential that we explore every aspect of it.
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