Guest Post: The Hurt Locker’s (Mis)use of Sacred Muslim Symbols

After watching Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker I felt it was necessary to write about what I found to be a careless use of sacred sound design. The Hurt Locker is an Oscar nominated film about a US army bomb disposal unit in Baghdad during the early stages of the US occupation of Iraq in 2004. The film contains various intense scenes encountering IEDs, car bombs, and explosive vests disarmed by the film’s protagonist, a young die hard bomb expert Sergeant First Class William James.