Kathryn Bigelow’s film THE HURT LOCKER is an explosive device buried deep in a somnolent country. Marketed as an action movie (“As tense and compelling an action drama as you are likely to see all year,” claims critic Eric Snider in his review on films.com), this intense on-screen portrait of a three-man Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit in Iraq is actually a subtle critique of a deadening and unendurably trivial stateside culture, and it raises some questions we need to be asking ourselves.

The film begins with this quote from the book WAR IS A FORCE THAT GIVES US MEANING by former NEW YORK TIMES war correspondent Christopher Hedges: “The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug.” In this sense, the film is about an addict, Sergeant William James, who gets his “meaning and purpose” fix by dismantling explosive devices at great risk to himself and the other two members of his unit. The almost unbearably tense dismantling scenes stand in stark contrast to the scene that struck me most in the film: a long, slow shot of one of those seemingly endless supermarket aisles of sugary cereals, where James, now back in the United States following the end of his tour of duty, has been sent by his wife on a quest for breakfast food. As the Muzak score drones on and the camera pans the long, symmetrical rows of cereal, the viewer realizes that the United States, with all its consumer options, has nothing of meaning to offer James. The end of the movie comes as no surprise, though I won’t give it away here.

James is a war addict, yes, but the roots of this addiction (and I would say all addictions) lie in a sick and addicted culture that can offer us no higher source of meaning than more or less discerning consumption of nutrition-less products and the amassing of enough wealth to consume even more of them and that inculcates a whole set of mores and behaviors that keep us serving its perpetuation. (Of course, it is this addictive consumption and seeking after wealth that led us into Iraq in the first place.) When the alternative is this kind of soul deadness, is it any wonder that young people like James choose to risk physical death instead? How much more understandable is it when this choice is made by young people of color, whose civilian options (and thus their potential to access whatever meager satisfaction the consumer culture has to offer) is so drastically limited, and indeed whose only hope of accessing that satisfaction is through the college education promised by military recruiters?

Watching this film, I found myself reflecting on Walter Brueggeman’s characterization of the consciousness that accompanies imperialism, which he calls “royal consciousness,” a pervasive mood of world-weariness, satiation, boredom, absence of hope, and vanity. A central feature of this kind of imperial consciousness is that it presumes that nothing will ever change substantially, that the way things are now is more or less the way things will always be. (The tepid campaigning of the religious left for a public health care option suffers from this assumption: we have to go for what is “realistic” at this time. In other words, real transformative change is impossible. TIKKUN editor Dave Belden writes brilliantly about this here.) Brueggeman locates this consciousness most clearly in the book of Ecclesiasties in the Hebrew scriptures. In the face of all the seemingly incredible prosperity of Israel under Solomon, the writer drones, “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.” This consciousness breeds a kind of low-level depression in the population–a kind of lethargy–that makes it very difficult to inspire hope or mobilize anyone for real change. Having attempted to organize nationally for the unabashedly “unrealistic” Network of Spiritual Progressives, I am more than passing familiar with this difficulty.

The antidote to this malaise, according to the Hebrew scriptures, is testimony about a shocking God who operates in a way entirely free of the rules and assumptions of imperial consciousness, who is not bound by what is realistic within an imperial framework, who does not subscribe to the permanence of current social relations, and who in his radical freedom shows the petty gods of the regime (money, status, power) to be false gods. (Brueggeman describes the freeing of the slaves from Egypt as the work of this free God.)

If Sergeant James finds meaning and purpose by serving the gods of domination and violence by fighting in Iraq, I find myself wondering whether it might be possible to find equal meaning and purpose by serving Brueggeman’s surprising, free God who always stands in solidarity with oppressed and suffering people. Rev. Lynice Pinkard of First Congregational Church of Oakland calls service to this God “dissident discipleship,” the daring minute-to-minute decision to follow a God who turned the dominant consciousness of first-century Palestine upside down in the person of Jesus of Nazareth by standing with the meek, the poor, the sick, and the outcast. Dissident disciples strive to live by an alternative consciousness and to resist the attempts of the dominant consciousness to colonize their minds and lives. This consciousness invariably leads them into taking dangerous stands for the flourishing of life, coming up against the forces of deathliness in contemporary culture. (This consciousness appears in distorted form, of course, in suicide bombers and shooters of abortion providers; in order to avoid these extremes, we need to be perfectly clear about what this loving God really stands for, namely nonviolence, foregiveness, and life above all.) To me, this mission seems every bit as daring, difficult, and rewarding as the mission of the Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit in the film. How can we open up this option to more and more people in this country?