The tell-tale moment in Sam Mendes’s movie version of Anthony
Swofford’s book, Jarhead, comes early on when the young
recruit, “Swoff” (Jake Gyllenhaal), is sitting on the toilet
reading a translation of Albert Camus’s L’Etranger. A
Marine drill sergeant ridicules him for his choice of reading
matter, pronouncing the author’s name as Came-us. Get it?
Swoff is not only the autobiographical presence in this film, he
has also cast himself in the familiar role of the sensitive soul
surrounded by coarse and brutal men who are less intelligent than
he and therefore less able to understand the “reality” behind their
experiences as Marines in the first Gulf War. That word
reality has a power to fascinate writers and journalists
as well as film-makers like no other. Of course, if the
reality of soldiering were readily accessible, there would
be no reason for extra-smart people like Messrs. Swofford and
Mendes to tease it out for us — to write, film, and ratiocinate
their way to the presumptively hidden truth behind a myriad of
illusions.
Just look, for instance, at the scene in Jarhead in
which a stateside journalist is brought in to observe Swoff’s unit,
and the men are carefully instructed in what to say to her — and
what not to say. As a demonstration of their readiness for any
threat, they are instructed to play a game of football — in the
desert at mid-day — in their CBW suits and hoods. The game ends
with their stripping off the suits and engaging in a simulated sex
act as the journalist is hustled away. How naive she was to think
that they were telling her what they really thought! Or that they
were cheerful, clean-living boy scouts who were only too glad to
show her their indifference to hardship. Her fleeting glimpse into
the reality of the men’s lives is extended and prolonged
by the much wiser, much more clued-in film-makers for our benefit.
The result, however, is an extra measure of that vanity of opinion
to which we are all too subject anyway. Those who in their own
conceit are wiser and smarter and more clued-in than other people
are obviously less likely than other people to be persuadable that
their take on reality is a partial one, or in need of any
correction.
That’s why Jarhead — the name alludes to the Marine
haircut — is itself such a naive film. Its own vanity about
knowing certain things about the military life — its violence and
brutality, its coarseness and cynicism, its cruelty and bloodlust,
its enormously powerful but mostly repressed and surreptitious
sexuality — blinds it to the other sorts of reality traditionally
associated with soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines. Things like
patriotism, honor, bravery, nobility, and self-sacrifice. And
that’s all without even getting into the matter of why the armed
forces are deployed in the first place. Swofford and Mendes both
seem to take for granted the typical Hollywood anti-warrior’s
casual assumption that Desert Storm was all a matter of “blood for
oil,” but not to be particularly interested in the fact. “F***
politics!” as Swoff’s best buddy, Allen Troy (Peter Sarsgaard),
puts it. Well, OK. Let politics be f*****, and let us confine
ourselves to the patriotism, honor etc. of the men themselves. If
it would be naive to think that these things are the whole story
about life in the armed forces, the only reality, why is
it not equally naive to believe that they are no part of the story
at all — that, in effect, it is the negative things which are the
whole story?
Well, maybe not quite the whole story. There are a couple of
moments when the picture suggests there might be something positive
about the world it describes. One comes when the tough-talking but
sympathetic Sergeant Siek (Jamie Foxx) briefly steps out of
character and reveals to Swoff that he could have had an easy life
as a partner in his brother’s drywall business in California. Why
doesn’t he take up this opportunity then? “Because I love this
job,” he tells him. “Who else gets a chance to see s*** like this?”
So then, there’s something good about being a Marine. You
get to have adventures. Then, right at the end of the film, Swoff
turns briefly sentimental. His voiceover tells us that, though he
has long been out of the Corps, learning from his college “writing”
courses how to feel even more superior to his fellow Marines, he
also still feels a mysterious sense of solidarity with them. We
guess that’s something else good: the camaraderie.
But the same could have been said about the Wehrmacht
or the hordes of Attila the Hun. There is no honor in being a
member of a criminal gang, at least not for those who are not
members of it themselves. Reduced to its essence, this is all the
movie has to tell us. There is no honor in being a United States
Marine either, even though it is kind of fun sometimes, especially
when you get to shoot people. The scene in which Allen Troy goes
berserk when he and Swoff are deprived of the one and only chance
at a “kill” afforded them by the too-short war tells us all we need
to know about this putative reality of the profession of
arms in our times; it’s a form of displaced sexuality. Those who
are already believers in that reality, and in their own powers of
intellect in penetrating the veil of illusion to get at it, are
this movie’s intended audience. The rest of us, those who continue
to harbor any vestiges of honor and respect for the American
military man, will prefer to skip it.
