Jarhead
“Every war is different. Every war is the same,” says US Marine Tony Swofford (Jake Gyllenhaal), and he’s right. Every war is the same. They all have soldiers and they all have fighting. But Jarhead is a movie about a company of soldiers in a war that didn’t provide good material for a war movie. So director Sam Mendes and screenwriter William Broyles Jr. did something a little different.
Their troubled antihero endures boot camp in the states, and is among the first US soldiers to set foot on Saudi sand in the military buildup leading to Operation Desert Storm. Swofford and his fellow Marines pitch tents and wait for “the suck” to begin. And wait. Back home, girlfriends cheat, the media reports, and wives divorce. And still they wait.
While Jarhead is not your typical war film, it’s not a typical anti-war movie either. Like HBO’s Band of Brothers, Jarhead is a first-hand account of a soldier’s life during wartime, plain and simple. It doesn’t avoid a point of view because Mendes is afraid to make a solid statement; it avoids definitive statements because the soldiers themselves are trained not to have any, and this is their story.
Jarhead will likely disappoint those expecting profound political statements, as well as those wanting to see the next Saving Private Ryan. Jarhead is part of a newer canon of movies that has already begun to erode our preconceived notions of what a war film should be. Where’s the climactic battle scene where the protagonist learns a valuable lesson? For that matter, where’s the battle scene?
As the nature of ground wars drastically change, so change war movies. What was considered anti-war in the 1970s has practically become standard GI indoctrination in the world of Jarhead. At a screening of Copolla’s Apocalypse Now, a room full of bloodthirsty Marines hum the tune of “Ride of the Valkyries” and reenact every moment of the film with feverish intensity. The meaning of the original becomes perverted in the context of the scene. In another, the Marines–the very fingers of the Pentagon–dance around a bonfire chanting Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power,” even though they are the power.
Mendes and company intentionally keep certain things cloudy, such as the point of the war: is it justified or is it evil? That’s not what the movie is about. But other points are clear: any inkling of glory and honor that may have been connected with wars in the past has been snuffed out. The soldiers are the antagonists. Like a pack of starving wild dogs, the Marines turn on each other in the absence of “the suck.” They prey on each others’ weaknesses for the lack of something better to do.
Jarhead is a war movie befitting the war it’s about, but it’s bound to leave people scratching their heads. Perhaps the point of the movie is to get us to ask ourselves “what’s the point?” What’s the point of war? Isn’t there something eerie and unnatural about modern man’s need for petroleum? Jarhead is a tough one to figure out. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. And for the sake of our troops in Iraq right now, we had better try.