Jarhead
Jarhead (November 2005)
"I remember about myself a loneliness and poverty of spirit; mental collapse; brief jovial moments after weeks of exhaustion; discomfiting bodily pain; constant ringing in my ears; sleeplessness and drunkenness and desperation; fits of rage and despondency; mutiny of the self; lovers to whom I lied; lovers who lied to me. I remember going in one end and coming out the other. I remember being told I must remember and then for many years forgetting."
Everyone needs to go see this movie. It's based on the book of the same name by Anthony Swofford, a US Marine STA scout sniper during the first Gulf War. It's hard to tell much from the trailer, but based on the casting and the snippets I can recognize, it will be excellent. Better yet, read the book, THEN go see the movie.
The only thing I'm worried about is that it may become too much of a "military" movie, because the book runs even deeper than that. It would take away from the book to say that it is about anything less than what it means to be a man, because there's so much about fear and violence and America and relationships and insecurity that comes through in a lot of Swofford's writing about his family back home in Sacramento.
I read Jarhead for the first time in college, and within 20 minutes of starting it I could tell that it would be one of the best pieces of writing I had ever picked up. That book alone is responsible for a good portion of my desire to write, and it exposed to me how brutally different my life would have been had I followed up on any of the thoughts I had about joining the Marines after high school. To me, with the exception of Hunter S. Thompson and a couple of others, there was always a very bright line between people who lived and people who wrote about it, and Swofford is one of the few guys who managed to live something interesting and important and write about it in a way that is brutally honest and skillful at the same time. It is clearly the definitive book about war for our time, and should be on the recommended reading list for every American male from the ages of 17 to 25.
On an unrelated note, the new Burger King "NFL Films" commercial makes me crack up every time I see it. Clearly, I am a complex man - one full of contradictions. And Chinese food.
"I remember about myself a loneliness and poverty of spirit; mental collapse; brief jovial moments after weeks of exhaustion; discomfiting bodily pain; constant ringing in my ears; sleeplessness and drunkenness and desperation; fits of rage and despondency; mutiny of the self; lovers to whom I lied; lovers who lied to me. I remember going in one end and coming out the other. I remember being told I must remember and then for many years forgetting."
Everyone needs to go see this movie. It's based on the book of the same name by Anthony Swofford, a US Marine STA scout sniper during the first Gulf War. It's hard to tell much from the trailer, but based on the casting and the snippets I can recognize, it will be excellent. Better yet, read the book, THEN go see the movie.
The only thing I'm worried about is that it may become too much of a "military" movie, because the book runs even deeper than that. It would take away from the book to say that it is about anything less than what it means to be a man, because there's so much about fear and violence and America and relationships and insecurity that comes through in a lot of Swofford's writing about his family back home in Sacramento.
I read Jarhead for the first time in college, and within 20 minutes of starting it I could tell that it would be one of the best pieces of writing I had ever picked up. That book alone is responsible for a good portion of my desire to write, and it exposed to me how brutally different my life would have been had I followed up on any of the thoughts I had about joining the Marines after high school. To me, with the exception of Hunter S. Thompson and a couple of others, there was always a very bright line between people who lived and people who wrote about it, and Swofford is one of the few guys who managed to live something interesting and important and write about it in a way that is brutally honest and skillful at the same time. It is clearly the definitive book about war for our time, and should be on the recommended reading list for every American male from the ages of 17 to 25.
On an unrelated note, the new Burger King "NFL Films" commercial makes me crack up every time I see it. Clearly, I am a complex man - one full of contradictions. And Chinese food.
posted by Dan at 9:14 PM
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