"A House of Dynamite"

Kathryn Bigelow's nuclear war movie is on Netflix.

One of the great scenes in 21st Century cinema is the antepenultimate one in Kathryn Bigelow’s 2009 Iraq war movie, The Hurt Locker, when the bomb disposal technician, newly home from the Army, is asked by his wife to pick out his favorite breakfast cereal:

It occurs to Jeremy Renner’s character that he doesn’t want to deal with choosing his favorite breakfast cereal. In fact, he doesn’t want to do anything except the one thing he’s really good at: dismantling improvised explosive devices.

Ever since 1991’s Point Break with Patrick Swayze and Keanu Reeves as surfing bankrobbers, Bigelow’s films tend to sympathetically explore the crazy stuff that men do. As I wrote in 2013:

Kathryn Bigelow … has always been the film nerd’s dream date: attractive, classy, artistically ambitious, feminine, and fascinated by men who like blowing up stuff.

The favorite gal of the Boys Club of Tough Guy Directors ever since Walter Hill (The Warriors) mentored her three decades ago, she was briefly married around 1990 to the King of the World, James Cameron. So it wasn’t terribly surprising that she broke through three years ago to become the first woman to win the Best Director Oscar with her Iraq War movie The Hurt Locker, beating her ex-husband and his Avatar.

I suspect she got her theme from her ex-husband James Cameron. He made the most popular movie of his era, Titanic, by combining the biggest machine in the history of movies (a set so vast that when I accidentally spotted it while driving around Baja California depressed, days after being diagnosed with cancer in 1996, it gave me hope and confidence: “If Cameron can build that, then I ought to be able to beat cancer” was my thinking) with the girliest screenplay imaginable.

Bigelow’s new Netflix movie, A House of Dynamite, features a character with that most insanely masculine job: the military officer who follows the President around with the nuclear football containing the codes for fighting World War III handcuffed to his wrist. Think about it: year after year, you do nothing except sit on a couch outside the Oval Office. But if the day ever comes when the President needs to kill a billion people, then you are The Man.

I suspect that most men have thought about what it would be like to have this job (Cameron definitely has), but that few women have.

Since The Hurt Locker, Bigelow has specialized in films about working for the national security apparatus, such as Zero Dark Thirty’s hunt for Osama bin Laden. In A House of Dynamite, when a ballistic missile is suddenly launched toward the U.S. from an undetected submarine or ship in the Pacific, the national security state swings into action following its long-established protocols.

Paywall here.