Jarhead Movie Review
As war movies go, Jarhead is exceptionally anti-climatic, lacking the sense of personal finality, mortality and tension soldiers represented in more epic war films struggle over. The conflict in Jarhead is not born from the imminence of an individual warrior wrestling with the reality of their death or that of their compatriots, but rather how an individual trained to be a soldier responds when thrust into a waiting game where imminent attack is always threatened but never culminates. This movie lacks the intensity of Born on the 4th of July or Platoon; however, Jake Gyllenhaal’s performance is very much on-par with any of the performances from actors within the previous critically-acclaimed war movies.
Hidden within Jarhead’s lack of intensity is a subtle part of the movie itself, the only real political comment nested within the film, a point which can be too easily missed: what happens when the military is used as a political tool where its presence is hoped to be sufficient to dislodge a threat, but actual force is never used? While policy makers enjoy the opportunity to threaten the use of force in order to affect change, the actual deployment of the military into the field and resulting threat of imminence must be closely related. When they are not, as was the case in the first Iraqi war when many military units spent over 200 days waiting in the Saudi desert, the threat of war which hangs over their head begins to break them down, both physically and emotionally. The paradoxical nature of military readiness forces upon the military a constant vigilance at a level it can not sustain without beginning to implode under the weight of its own pent up intensity. The most highly trained parts of the military such as Delta and Seal Team 6 understand this: when they are put on notice of a particular threat they are likely to have to involve themselves in, they can only train to mission-ready levels for a limited period of time. When they go beyond that period of time they begin to incur training injuries that actually take away from their unit cohesiveness, mental acuity and in-field efficacy. Similarly, the marines in Jarhead begin to disregard protocol and frays show up in critical seams binding the garment of their squad together. When finally called to action, the Marines never fire one bullet at an Iraqi. The resulting frustration within the squad is a point of inflection the filmmakers want you to wrestle with: what has happened to their identities such that a reasonable person would be grateful to go an entire lifetime and not be shot at, but these men find not being shot at somehow degrading and frustrating.
Ultimately, Jarhead is the story of what happens to a young man who, upon entering the Marines, takes on the identity they desire. In taking on their identity, he finds his own, an understanding of himself that he did not have upon entering the Marines, and one that he probably needed the Marines to force him to find on his own. This identity is ultimately one severed from the identity the military wanted him to adopt; however, it would only be by adopting their worldview that he could determine once and for all what his was to be. The young Marine is broken down during boot camp, with his identity and that of his rifle merging as we hear him repeatedly chant the famous Marine charge:
This is my rifle.
There are many like it, but this one is MINE.
My rifle is my best friend. It is my life.
I must master it as I must master my life.
My rifle without me is useless. Without my rifle, I am useless.
I must fire my rifle true.
I must shoot straighter than my enemy who is trying to kill me.
I must shoot him before he shoots me. I will…
My rifle and myself know that what counts in war is not the rounds we fire,
the noise of our bursts, nor the smoke we make.
We know it is the hits that count. We will hit…
My rifle is human, even as I, because it is my life.
Thus, I will learn it as a brother.
I will learn its weaknesses, its strengths, its parts, its accessories,
its sights, and its barrel.
I will ever guard it against the ravages of weather and damage.
I will keep my rifle clean and ready, even as I am clean and ready.
We will become part of each other. We will…
Before God I swear this creed.
My rifle and myself are the defenders of my country.
We are the masters of our enemy.
We are the saviors of my life.
So be it, until there is no enemy, but PEACE.
This mantra is an offense to some who believe it is wrong to break a person down to such a point that their very being becomes synonymous with an instrument of death. Perhaps this is an overly simplistic view of the military, suggesting how easily we forget that it is the military’s job to “kill people and break things”, and that many deep and sound thinkers have worn the uniform, and the world has is the better for them having done so. What the filmmakers of Jarhead want is not for you to leave with some profound story about the illicit nature of a war whose motive and agenda they question (this is no Michael Moore mockumentary), nor are they attempting to make a pejorative comment about the military; rather, what they want is for us to see what happens when we find ourselves through an experience that fits us terribly, forcing us to find ourselves in ways we never would have sought out on our own.
The point of Jarhead is not that the first Iraqi war was pointless, and those who would like to portray the movie as an attempt to make a political argument overstate their case. The point of Jarhead is also not to make the military seem full of antiquated “jarheads” lacking the ability to think for themselves. Rather, and at a more complex level, Jarhead is about what happens when an adolescent seeking an identity stumbles into the military and finds himself through the stark contrast between what the military asks of him and what he has to give. That it is set within the first Iraqi war is contemporaneous, but it merely expedites the change taking place within a character many will share a deep empathy with.
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“If anyone can show me, and prove to me, that I am wrong in thought or deed, I will gladly change. I seek the truth, which never yet hurt anybody. It is only persistence in self-delusion and ignorance which does harm.”
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