Reviewed by Tim Wong

INDUCTED headfirst into the Marine Corps by homophobic Drill Instructor Fitch (a Lee Ermey cast-off who clearly recognises Jake Gyllenhaal from elsewhere), Private Anthony Swofford describes in voiceover the ritual degradation of an entry-level marine: hands are known as “dick skinners”, the mouth becomes a “cum receptacle”, and so on. Taking his cue from the military’s notorious backdoor slang, Sam Mendes sets out to make Jarhead as explicitly sexual as possible: penis sizes come under constant scrutiny, masturbation is habitual, and gangbangs are the by-product of boredom and dehydration. Welcome to the suck; or, the world’s first pornographic war movie.


Based on the Gulf War memoirs of Swofford, Jarhead thrusts Gyllenhaal, newly recruited, into Staff Sgt. Sykes’ (Jamie Foxx) elite sniper unit. He trains amongst a platoon of army cutouts: the idiot box (Kruger), the four-eyed greenhorn (Fergus), the family man (Cortez), the immigrant (Escobar). ‘Swoff’ is eventually partnered with the jaded Troy (Peter Sarsgaard); shooter and spotter bond, practice headshots, and are shipped off to Desert Storm. Shit-all happens. Mendes, helming the umpteenth attempt at an anti-war movie, is left with no other option than to expunge the film of the very thing it’s expected to critique. It’s a bold, if not inevitable thesis on a seemingly redundant genre: without action, without killing, the arousal of combat all but evaporates. The outcome is twofold. On the one hand, the film seldom cares to address the Iraqi war, settling for occasional offhand remarks by marines whose oil field/weapon laundering theories are of the grade school-Noam Chomsky variety. On the other, it exposes the fallout from Steven Spielberg’s war benchmark Saving Private Ryan, a film of gruelling meta-realism that inadvertently inspired a grotesque aesthetic movement in combat-oriented war movies (Black Hawk Down, We Were Soldiers), and spawned an ongoing series of gratuitous FPS video games (Medal of Honor, Battlefield 1942).

These sweaty-palmed wargamers who button-bash D-Day scenarios on their desktops are the same band of juvenile, XY chromosomes who’ll bitch about Jarhead’s lack of any apparent action. But note the irony: as disappointed male moviegoers leave the multiplexes, feeling short-changed for having spent $14 on a film that promised guerrilla warfare to the anthem of Kanye West, Mendes is at great pains to illustrate that Swoff, Troy and co. are similarly frustrated, pent-up young men hankering to blow their load. The crux of the film is that they never “get off”, strangled by a litany of cock-teases and sexual anti-climaxes. Swoff beats off to a picture of his girlfriend, but fails to orgasm. Bored marines gather to watch a VHS of The Deer Hunter, where the opening credits are interrupted by a dubbed-in amateur porn movie (its star the spiteful wife of a distraught marine present). A theatrette full of Swoff’s company sport a collective hard-on, struggling to contain their blood-pressure as Apocalypse Now rages to the “Ride of the Valkyries”, only for a PA announcement to cut short the pivotal scene.

In the absence of a climax, Mendes lets us itch in anticipation; he allows the target to stray within our sights, only to leave our trigger finger hanging. There are no coveted “money shots” – in other words, no graphic enactments of death by force – and yet the film is sexually charged, and on the verge of a “wargasm”. Jarhead’s initial boot camp hazing plays out like foreplay, stimulating the marines-in-training until they can no longer hold out for the intercourse of war. Impotent phallic symbolism is rife – guns are pointed but never fired. Most of all, the film is a homoerotic circus (think Beau travail on viagra), asking us to swallow the pack antics of marines who simulate sodomy, flaunt their genitalia, and repetitively wank as a means of passing time. Interestingly, Jarhead opened nationwide in theatres the same day as Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain. Given the option, today’s masculine, heterosexual male would probably choose to see the former rather than the latter. What he doesn’t realise is that Jarhead's sexual orientation isn't so diametrically opposed as the macho war cliché suggests.