(Anthem Art and Culture), by Gary Morris (Editor), Bert Cardullo (Introduction), Jonathan Rosenbaum (Foreword). London and New York: Anthem Press, 2009.
— David Hudson, IFC.com
I can only assume that Sam Mendes, unless he's a complete pussy, was dying to get his hands on a marketable property that would let him go ape shit on the head of one George W. Bush. And Jarhead, with its over-the-top ravings on such topics as "pink mist" (what a sniper sees through his scope when he blows someone's head off), must have looked like the perfect vehicle for examining that malignant tumor known as the American mind.
Along the way, the guys strip off their shirts and pretend to engage in an orgy of butt-fucking to gross out the media chick, and later we see Swofford (Jake Gyllenhaal) all slicked up as a Christmas chorus boy with Santa's cap covering his cock.5 A Marine dressed as Radar O'Reilly, complete with glasses, wool cap, and scarf (in the Arabian desert?) accidentally sets fire to a case of flares and, well, you had to see it. I mean, it was existential as hell. Yeah, definitely. In fact, it was even absurd.
1. Mendes (right) won, of course, for American Beauty, which I, rather predictably, found to be total crap. You can read my fulminations here.
2. Swofford writes like the creative writing teacher he used to be, at St. Mary's College in sunny Cal. If you want to know what a thirty-something college professor's testicles smell like, read this book.
3. Yeah, I'm guessing here. But if I were an ex-Marine, I would know exactly what kind of movie old Sam would want to make about me. And I wouldn't let him.
4. In this case, the "Dear John" video — a woman sends her Marine what he thinks is his favorite movie. Instead, it's her screwing some guy. Swofford's book has, unsurprisingly, occasioned quite a bit of comment on the Internet. According to what I've read, in his book he passes off a large collection of Marine "urban legends" as happening to "a guy in my unit." Since, in his introduction, he carefully excuses himself from the burden of accuracy ("Thus what follows is neither true nor false but what I know"), I find this easy to believe.
5. To get the party started, Swofford goes to a company clerk to buy a couple of gallons of hooch. The dude is writing a love letter (really a fuck letter) for a captain. "Is this why I studied classics at Dartmouth?" he asks. Generally, I'm opposed to premeditated murder, but I'd gladly put a bullet in the guy who wrote that line. And no jury in the world would convict me.
6. General Lee, or "Marse Robert" as we used to call him back home in the Old Dominion, had a pretty good line about war too: "It is well that war is so horrible. Otherwise, we should grow fond of it." Because it is fun pushing other people around, as long as they can't push back.
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