War is Hell. After a succession of movies that sprang out of the savagery of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan and Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, there’s no question, it’s something we should all know by now – however, in 2005, American Beauty director Sam Mendes gave us an alternate view. Yes, war is hell, but so is boredom and with Jarhead, the director proved that both can be a fairly damaging combination.
When war erupted in the Gulf after Iraq invaded Kuwait in the August of 1990, we saw a new form of warfare that started to rely more and more on airstrikes and drones and less on actual boots on the ground. However, that meant that we had waves of soldiers getting trained and riled up about going into battle only for some of them to see virtually no action whatsoever. While constant war can have a devastating effect on the human psyche, what effect can inaction have on young men trained to kill?
In 1989, Anthony Swofford attends United States Marine Corps recruit training and instantly regrets it as he struggles with the constant abuse and alpha male behavior of his peers. However, resorting to chugging laxatives to feign illness and avoid his responsibilities, he’s approached by Staff Sergeant Sykes who claims he sees potential in this man who jokes he enlisted because his “got lost on the way to college” and offers him a place on his Scout Sniper course. After some gruelling training, Swofford manages to be one of the eight passing Marines along with his roommate Corporal Alan Troy, who becomes his spotter and it seems that Anthony has finally made peace with his decision to join the military.
Of course, it’s at that point that the Gulf War erupts and before you know it, Swofford and his unit find themselves deployed to Saudi Arabia as part of Operation Desert Shield and while the soldiers are utterly pumped that they’re heading abroad to save the world and “get some”, reality proves to be a whole lot more uneventful. Unsurprisingly, when you wind up a group of young men and teach them to be killers, they prove to be confused and frustrated that they spending virtually no time in the field of battle. Frustration soon turns to boredom and boredom eventually turns to anger and paranoia as the urge to kill simply won’t abate.
Add to this the monotony of endless drills, the fact that Swofford become convinced that his girlfriend back home is cheating on him and soon the cracks begin to show, but while the pressure mounts, different colleagues handle it in different ways – some healthier than others. But soon the call comes out to for them to head out to be part of Operation Dessert Storm and the promise of longed-for combat finally seems at hand; but in war, nothing is guaranteed.
There are quite a few ways to to look a Jarhead. One is that it’s something of an inverse of Full Metal Jacket that sees a similar start as Jake Gyllenhaal’s directionless grunt suffer the similar sort of indignities reserved for the likes of privates Joker and Pyle as the attempt to weather the dehumanising training period only to eventually encounter far more vivid horrors in the front row in the theatre of war. However, while Matthew Modine’s character finds that he has to “earn” his right to kill on the battlefield, the players in Mendes show are desperate for it, only to be denied it to the point of distraction. It’s a strange thing to see people root and yearn for in a movie but it expertly show just how much of an odd conflict the Gulf War really was – after all, to a rational person in the real world, killing someone is that last thing you’d want to do, but Mendes mischievously gives us the most ironic of premises. What happens to the human mind when you train it to do a horrible thing without question, and then deny it the exact thing you’ve programmed it to do? It’s a fascinating conundrum and Jarhead is fairly unique by being a war film with practically no war to speak of.
In some ways, it helped spiritually pave the way for Kathryn Bigalow’s The Hurt Locker which also examines the human mind being unable to switch off the need for war that arises from being trained to embrace it – but while Jeremy’s Renner’s experiences were both figuratively and literally explosive, Gyllenhaal and the gang writhe in inaction. So what do a bunch of red blooded killing machines do when left to distraction? Well, they sure masturbate a lot, that’s for damn certain, but while Gyllenhaal slowly and expertly goes into a slow meltdown, his peers handle things in other ways. Peter Sarsgaard’s Troy loves the life, but also fashions a desperate need to put his tools to practical use when he finds his military career in jeopardy; Lucas Black’s Kruger rankles at the obvious attempted cash grab of oil and Jamie Fox’s Staff Sergeant lifer just seems to handle things as they go – but all do sterling work putting across how bizarrely stressful their unstressful tour is going.
After numerous scenes of multiple trained killers desperately trying to keep their spirits up, it the scenes at the near the end of the film that really slam home truly how strange modern warfare has become when Swofford and Troy finally get a mission to assassinate a high ranking member of the Iraqi Republican Guard. After lining up the man in their sights for a peach of a shot, they find the very moment that could give them purpose taken away from them when, at the last second, their superiors change their mind and use an air strike instead. By this point we find ourselves almost hoping these young men get their wish and finally get to be of “use” and while killing a single man who is about to be vaporised by a missile is gmgardly going to change anything, the fact that Mendes has us caught in such a moral muddle proves how mired in greys everything is.
However, while Mendes unsurprisingly embraces his themes wholeheartedly (his deconstructing of hyper-masculinity from American Beauty is still very much present and correct), cinematographer Roger Deakins has his back visually as he teases out the terrible beauty of the bleached landscape and the desolation of the desert. Even more stunning are the scenes where the unit have to operate in the shadow of vast plumes of flame erupting from the ground due to the oil fields being set alight and it’s a perfectly beautiful and terrible sight.
While I’d personally suggest that Jarhead probably isn’t your best go to film if you want a more contemporary war film (is it technically a war film if there’s actually no war in it), it’s these exact points that make it so important in the face of countless, low budget, DTV action movies that portray their leads as flawless, death dealing super men – something that ironically befell Jarhead itself at it somehow bizarrely managed to obtain several, tone deaf, gung-ho sequels. Anyway, if you like your (anti) war films thought provoking, loaded with great performances, visually striking and piled with questions with no easy answers, Jarhead is full to the brim.
They call war “the suck” – but the film certainly doesn’t.
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