Yapım :2005 Ülke : Amerika Tür : Drama Süre : 123 dakika IMDB Puan : 7.3/10 IMDB ID: tt0418763
Oyuncular Jake Gyllenhaal - Swoff Scott MacDonald - D.I. Fitch Lo Ming - Bored Gunny (as Ming Lo) Kevin Foster - Branded Marine Peter Sarsgaard - Troy Damion Poitier - Poitier Riad Galayini - Nurse Craig Coyne - Young Mr. Swofford Katherine Randolph - Young Mrs. Swofford Rini Bell - Swoff's Sister
Bilgi :Anthony Swofford is a decorated Gulf War I vet with a gentle soul and a lot of buzz, thanks to a stay at the University of Iowa's Writers Workshop and felicitous timing in the release of his first book.
"Jarhead" is a grimly candid memoir of boot camp, the desert and an abbreviated military conflict, the legacy of which underscores the book's relevancy. Like the recent Iraq war, the war Swofford fought was sanitized for our reading pleasure. "Jarhead" proffers 260 pages of dirt, profanity, lewdness, shame, death and depravity to rectify the picture.
Reading "Jarhead" as some 600 journalists recounted Operation Iraqi Freedom live and on-camera was a strange exercise. As a denunciation of the futility of war and the brevity of victory, the book is a self-fulfilling prophecy. As the story of one man's realization that his sacrifice will be forgotten and rendered irrelevant, Swofford's lament was borne out by the gung-ho reporting and unprecedented technology that filled the news every night. The way the embeds told it, it was as though we never really went to war before.
The odd thing about riding with the tanks and keeping couch-sentry over a corner in central Baghdad for nights on end, was that while it brought us closer to war, it didn't necessarily bring us closer to the troops. The ubiquitous media at times completely bumped the fighters from the battlefield. When Paula Zahn declared she just didn't know when those guys slept because they were doing such a relentless job, she was talking about her colleagues on the front lines, not the enlisted men.
In a March 30 New York Times magazine article, Swofford wrote a fairly patronizing opinion of the Pentagon's embedding program. Putting the reporters in flak jackets won't protect them from spin, he asserted. Marines, he argues, are drilled as hard in media relations as in military maneuvers. They handle reporters as precisely as their M-16s. Fox News wants, and gets the All Americans, the Jessica Lynches, while the reality that resembles Full Metal Jacket is reserved for Hollywood.
Maybe. But in an early scene in "Jarhead," a commander orders his battalion to play football in the blazing heat in their full hermetically-sealed chemical protective gear, for the benefit of a couple of journalists bussed to the base for the day. The game eventually turns into an impromptu "field fuck" in which heat-addled marines target one of their peers, and in a fraternal display of anxiety and adrenaline, start "acting the way we've been trained to kill, violently and with no remorse."
One would assume that because exhibits of outsized virility, pugnacity and sexuality are not unusual among the "grunts," that the embeds would get a pretty good dose of it before we get out of the Gulf again. The question is, will they be able to translate it without sounding like a white grad-student teaching Sociology 302: Street Argot of the 'Hood?
Writing about the regressed state of nature found in the rear-rear of a Marine Corps battalion in the Saudi desert doesn't invite refined prose. On the contrary, the story would be unintelligible without profanity, lewdness and a barrage of jargon. It's safe to say that the word "fuck," or some grammatical derivation of it, is one of the most commonly used words in "Jarhead," along with standard pronouns and articles. And yet, it's a beautifully written book.
Extricating himself from the show, close to hyperventilating, Swofford segues into a vivid childhood memory of a tattoo parlor on an American base in Japan. It is one of the most elegant passages in the book.
This is Swofford's m.o. — he reveals the "Jarhead" under his own true colors, and he does it as smoothly as the steam iron his mother used to press the Eagle, Globe and Anchor onto a white T-shirt when he was 14.
This time next year, expect at least two dozen memoirs by the men and women who cut their journalistic teeth on a Humvee with the same guys Swofford came of age with. Trained reporters, they will rely heavily on concise historical and political briefing, undeveloped characters, chronology, analysis, and gravitas. They might gun for the gritty authenticity of "Jarhead" dialogue, but will probably fail on that front. Gulf II memoirs will be written by the play-by-play guys, not by the players. And that means "Jarhead" is an endangered species, even as it arises as the first of its sort.
