blue balls

I’ve got Swofford’s book. As I recall it was a grunt’s eye view of Marine life. Which, sure sounded like my military experience during that same era–very boring, with occasional bursts of stupidity, usually fueled by either testosterone, booze, or both.

Did the ad campaign for the movie make it look either anti-war or pro-war? It, like the book just struck me as nihilistic.

Did the ad campaign for the movie make it look either anti-war or pro-war?

Not particularly, I just went into it hoping it would be an anti-war movie. I think pretty much any movie about war can be construed as anti-war implicitly, because, well, it’s about war, and war sucks. But they’re not always explicitly anti-war, leaving it open for viewer interpretation, which I think is what Jarhead has done. Actually, there’s a good bit in Swofford’s book about this:

There is talk that many Vietnam films are antiwar, that the message is war is inhumane and look what happens when you train young American men to fight and kill, they turn their fighting and killing everywhere, they ignore their targets and desecrate the entire country, shooting fully automatic, forgetting they were trained to aim. But actually, Vietnam war films are all pro-war, no matter what the supposed message, what Kubrick or Coppola or Stone intended. Mr. and Mrs. Johnson in Omaha or San Francisco or Manhattan will watch the films and weep and decide once and for all that war is inhumane and terrible, and they will tell their friends at church and their family this, but Corporal Johnson at Camp Pendleton and Sergeant Johnson at Travis Air Force Base and Seaman Johnson at Coronado Naval Station and Spec 4 Johnson at Fort Bragg and Lance Corporal Swofford at Twentynine Palms Marine Corps Base watch the same films and are excited by them, because the magic brutality of the films celebrates the terrible and despicable beauty of their fighting skills. Fight, rape war, pillage, burn. Filmic images of death and carnage are pornography for the military man; with film you are stroking his cock, tickling his balls with the pink feather of history, getting him ready for his real First Fuck. It doesn’t matter how many Mr. and Mrs. Johnsons are antiwar – the actual killers who know how to use the weapons are not.