The Hurt Locker (2008)

FILM DIRECTOR: Kathryn Bigelow
SCRIPT WRITER: Mark Boal
MAIN ACTORS: Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty

The film won 6 Oscars. But what is a hurt locker?

* To HURT = blesser qqn / se faire mal, se blesser

The press pack for Kathyrn Bigelow's film claims "hurt locker" is GI slang for severe injury. But the film's writer, who picked up on the phrase during his time as an embedded journalist with an Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit in 2004, is rather more vague in his definition.

"If a bomb goes off, you're going to be in the hurt locker. That's how they used it in Baghdad," Mark Boal told the New Yorker. "It means slightly different things to different people, but all the definitions point to the same idea. It's somewhere you don't want to be." BBC NEWS Magazine

It is also a poem written by a soldier:

The Hurt Locker

BY BRIAN TURNER

Nothing but hurt left here.

Nothing but bullets and pain

and the bled-out slumping

and all the fucks and goddamns

and Jesus Christs of the wounded.

Nothing left here but the hurt.

Believe it when you see it.

Believe it when a twelve-year-old

rolls a grenade into the room.

Or when a sniper punches a hole

deep into someone’s skull.

Believe it when four men

step from a taxicab in Mosul

to shower the street in brass

and fire. Open the hurt locker

and see what there is of knives

and teeth. Open the hurt locker and learn

how rough men come hunting for souls.

The Hurt Locker_ANSWERS

THE HURT LOCKER_worksheet2