nerd’s eye view

Jarhead

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I think this is spoiler free. But I can’t be 100% sure. Don’t read if you’re fearing spoilers.

I didn’t read the book and I didn’t really know that much about Jarhead. In fact, I was under the total misconception that it was about our current war in Iraq, not about the last Desert Storm. So I was a little surprised by that, I guess the previews I’d seen looked so current. Of course, it hasn’t really been that long. There was a Bush in the White House then, there’s one now. The more things change…

Anyhoo. I did see Three Kings and I liked it okay, after all, it had George Clooney in it. Three Kings is way more of a “classic” war movie. I was thinking, “war movie” when I went to see Jarhead. You know, shooting, someone’s buddy dies, some politics, the usual. Nope. No go. There’s a whole other thing going on here.

At the beginning when it’s all boot camp all the time, you see how brutally all the guys treat each other. Okay, I’m a total lefty chick, this isn’t for me, I can’t relate. But I also can’t see how you’d want to be part of that. It’s not glam. Your roomies beat the crap out of you and abuse you and it’s considered part of the process.

Then, when they’re sitting in the desert just waiting for the war to begin, things get all claustrophobic and crazy. Seriously crazy. You totally get how a guy could go completely insane without even firing a shot, without even getting to the front, without even seeing one single enemy. It’s hot, there’s nothing but stupid shit to do, and you sit and sit and sit and sit. Crazy.

The footage when they finally get called to battle is freakin’ amazing. There’s a scene where they’re walking through raining oil that made my skin crawl. There’s another scene where the guys walk over a rise and there’s a highway, a line of cars, completely firebombed. There’s a few shots of limbs, of stray body parts, but everything is charcoal so you can barely associate humanity with what’s left, it’s just sculpture made from burnt wood. The light from the flaming oil fields absolutely evoke some underworld myth, but it’s empty, there’s no one out there, just a vast space filled with a creepy orange glow.

There’s hardly any battle action in this movie. It’s all transition. Wait. Travel. Cross a berm and find more nothing. Wait. It’s exasperating. I almost wanted the shooting to start to break the anticipation, just so there’s something else. If this is a sentiment that the writer wanted to address in the book, well, they got it covered in the movie.

There’s some black humor, but a lot of the stuff that made the audience laugh just made me cringe. I couldn’t take the meanness of it. I had to wonder if it’s what the USMC is really like, if they’re really that brutal to each other. I had a roomie in college who was National Guard (not the same thing, I know) but I couldn’t help but wonder if he’d been involved in that kind of violent hazing when he enlisted. I get that the USMC is making lean mean order following killing machines, but… oh, it’s useless for me to deconstruct that stuff.

My friend was blown away by the footage of the troops unloading in Saudi Arabia. She asked what it takes to get that kind of operation underway. I started wondering about how, if you knew those guys, if they showed you pictures of their families and sweethearts, if you could really just send them off to die. Maybe that’s why Bush didn’t meet with Cindy Sheehan. If you can’t explain it to one son’s mother, how can you explain it to a nation?

It was food for thought, Jarhead was. Plus, Jake Gyllenhaall is owl-eyed and Peter Saarsgaard, well, last night I dreamt he was playing a song for me on my ukulele. And I don’t mean that metaphorically.