Locke and Load

Swofford is the New Orwell?

A loud film in a crowded theater. The audience is all in uniform. Their hair is the same, to a man, and their eyeglasses are the same, for those who wear glasses. They all shout exactly the same way, making cruel and dehumanizing remarks at the enemy on-screen. The music is booming and nationalistic. Some of the attendees are visibly overcome with emotion and fall into a swoon. Clips of friendly fire onscreen bring cheers of encouragement. Clips of enemy fire bring violent jeering.

The film version of 1984?

The new documentary shot inside North Korea?

What if I told you that the production was Jarhead, a combat film with no combat, and that the film the marines were watching was the quintessential anti-war picture Apocalypse Now? Ironic? What, then, if I told you that the thunderous music in question was Richard Wagner’s "Ride of the Valkyries," widely considered, and unfairly, to be brownshirt music? Even more ironic?

Welcome, as the tagline says, to the suck.

The source material for the film is the war journal by the same name, written by Lance Corporal Anthony Swofford, who fought for the U.S. Marines during Operation Desert Storm. Whether the filmmakers used some poetic license for the scene indicated above, or whether they transcribed it literally and faithfully from actual events, this is irrelevant: Jarhead is clearly a 2005 film. In an early fit of expository dialogue, Kruger (Lucas Black) chides his fellow recruits with the facts of the U.S. armament of Saddam Hussein. In another scene, Swofford himself parades poorly-maintained battle equipment in front of his Staff Sargeant and broadcast journalists, therein assuming a macabre delight in his own peril. And for the money shot, Swofford explodes with rage and nearly shoots a fellow enlistee. Think the “dance, motherfucker!” scene from Platoon. Think the Russian roulette scene from The Deer Hunter. Those who lament that war films do not address the sheer boredom and anxiety of these human, all-too-human soliders need no longer lament.

And indeed, that other Vietnam apocalypse film makes a cameo appearance in Jarhead as well. One of the marines receives a letter from his wife, and a tape. The jacket reads The Deer Hunter, but the tape itself is in reality a home movie of the marine’s wife coupling with the neighbor. As his wife signs off, she alludes to some off-screen indiscretion of his, for which the present tape is only cold revenge. She shoots him the finger, one of five, and the audience gets it at once: soldiers at war in some far-off land play Russian roulette in its cruelest, most immediate form when they show up for mail call. The first words of the next letter may just as well be “Dear John.” Or worse than that, “Fuck me, John.”

Fitting, then, with all of these nods to earlier, better war films, that as the skies start to blacken with burning oil, Swofford is soon to hear the opening lines to The Doors’ classic “Break on Through:” “The day destroys the night. Night divides the day.” He tries to write the tune off as anachronistic ("that's Vietnam music, can't we get our own music?"), but this is Jarhead’s finest paradox: the insanity of war is timeless, and of limitless time. All wars are one war, and there is no way to turn this machine off once you have it started. This way it is inevitable that snipers Swofford and Troy (Peter Sarsgaard) are inconsolable when their order to kill an officer of the Republican Guard are overturned, it is inevitable that Fowler (Evan Jones) –- bored and hungry for action -– defiles a blacked Iraqi corpse that he has found in the sand, and it is inevitable that Troy turns up dead after his tour is up. My co-contributor The Man has an interesting take on this theme, that the warrior fire is inextinguishable. I hope he will share it in a future post.

The only problem with all this (aside from the political one) is that –- if all wars are one war -– all war films are also one war film. So as for a single gear in an eternal machine, this one is small, poorly-greased, and much too dependent on the rest.

posted by Immanuel Can't @ 3:37 PM