The War, the Book and the Movie: Anthony Swofford By David D'Arcy November 8, 2005 - 2:40 AM PST "The look, the feel, the sound, the training, the desert." Jarhead is all over the media, in the way that the war in Iraq is not. But the war in Iraq has been displaced in American news by a Bush crony withdrawing her name from consideration for the Supreme Court, and yet another Bush crony (even more of a Cheney crony, my purist friends would say) being indicted for lying to a grand jury. I guess lying to America about Weapons of Mass Destruction is a lower-grade offense. (Could we call it a lower than weapons-grade offense?) Anyway, entertainment news needs something more cataclysmic to be displaced, so the preview attention for Jarhead was non-stop. After all, we are talking about a film with Jake Gyllenhaal, the actor who is fighting against the curse of over-exposure, hoping not to become this year's Jude Law. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's lost count of how many films have been made about boy recruits hardened into killers. No realist expects too much from this kind of story. It's been done far too many times, and no one will confuse a Hollywood war movie with a work of the imagination. It's a bit different in Jarhead, in part because the director, Sam Mendes, has a gift for drawing performances out of actors like Gyllenhall, Jamie Foxx, Chris Cooper and Peter Sarsgaard - you forgive him for the staginess when it works - and because the dialogue of Jarhead, the war memoir by Anthony Swofford, jumps off the page. It hurls itself in explosions of profanity. If the conventional wisdom is that cinema is images moving at 24 frames a second on an exterior surface, and a novel is a written text that challenges the reader to create images in his head, then the experience you have when reading Jarhead is something in between. It's a long set of extended declamations, more of a spoken book, in your experience of it, than a written one. It's curious, but the narrator, Swofford, also vomits frequently. It's logical. He's really hurling. Mendes and the screenwriter Bill Broyles (a Vietnam vet who was editor of Newsweek at 35 before he started writing screenplays and television) had to wrest the book away from Swofford's single voice to make the movie more of an ensemble performance than it would have been if they had been more faithful to the memoir. Who knows why? Maybe they thought the audience would find esprit de corps more plausible than lonely fear. It's a coincidence that Jarhead was released soon after the US military death toll in Iraq passed 2000. It's not a coincidence that support for the war will decline if this film reaches the same audience that joins the Marines, even if the war on the screen is a war from 15 years ago. Jarhead on screen is indeed reaching an audience, even if the film lacks much of a story. Swofford enters the Marines, undergoes the pro forma proto-sexual humiliation from his peers, bonds with the boys, and ships out to guard Saudi oil fields. Did you forget why you pay taxes? War, as he experiences it, is waiting while training as a sniper, until Swofford's unit stumbles on a column of dead Iraqis who were slaughtered when they tried to flee north. There was nothing left to shoot for this sniper who longed to kill, nothing but an empty landscape that was either burning with Arabian sun or drenched by a petroleum rain after Saddam set the oil fields on fire. When the Marines ship home and leave the Corps, we see them stacking cans at Safeway, or working the most ordinary jobs. Waiting again? It does make you wonder about that oft-repeated saying, "Support Our Troops." Jarhead the film won't become a classic. It will remind you that teenagers die in our wars. Like most teenagers, those you'll see on the screen can be callous and dumb, and they certainly lack judgment. Then think for a second about the teenager in the White House. His Vietnam saga (which which still don't know all about) could be called "Full Dinner Jacket." I spoke to Tony Swofford after a screening of Jarhead at the Tribeca Cinema in Manhattan. Is Jarhead a realistic film? I think so. Obviously, in the script and the movie there are some compressions, there are some amalgamations of characters, but the look, the feel, the sound, the training, the desert, the feeling of being a Marine, for me rings very realistically. It's a film, but as far as a film goes, as a narrative, trying to capture that space, especially the emotional psychological center, I think it succeeds quite well. Did you have any role in the film at all? I didn't have any official or contractual role, but everyone was concerned with me being pleased the with end result, and with feeling that it was an honest adaptation. Bill Broyles, who wrote the script, sent me drafts very early. He wanted my thoughts on them. If he had me saying something, or if he had someone else saying something he wouldn't have said, he wanted to know. Did you find yourself correcting anything in particular? There were minor things over the course of the script. Bill's script changed radically. Sam Mendes was attached after the first draft, which was really conventional - three acts, young Swofford, Marine Corps Swofford, post-Marine Corps Swofford. From that draft to the shooting draft, which I imagine was the tenth or eleventh draft, the structure of the film changed, and they just focused on the desert. They used montages for brief sketches of the past, which are very shorthand and don't really capture the essence of the family life. I think the end montage is a lot more effective in terms of my post-Marine Corps life in the brief moments that it has. Speaking of your post-Marine Corps life, this was published in 2003. When did you get out of the Marine Corps? I got out of the Marine Corps in November of 1992, and I started writing the book in May of 2001, a few months beyond ten years after the end of the First Gulf War, which loosened some psychological debris. I'd been writing for a few years. I'd just finished a graduate writing program in fiction, and I really didn't want to write my own story. There was a period when I really avoided that part of my biography. I was ashamed of being a Marine and didn't really want it to be part of my life. I was trying to live differently. I was trying to live better, but as a writer, I kept bumping up against the subject. As a writer, I call myself a reluctant memoirist because I had no intention of writing autobiography, but in order to write the most vivid and compelling book about this time in my life, I was going to tell my own story. So what about the idea, "write about what you know"? Before you actually decided to write Jarhead, what were you trying to write? I don't really know what I was trying to write. Prep school stories... Well the Marines are a different kind of prep school. Yeah, prep school with bad haircuts and grenades. I was writing short fiction about family life and love affairs, things that mattered and stories that I would stand by. I wrote a few hundred pages of a novel that I was calling a Gulf War novel, but I didn't touch my autobiography. Around page 200, I created a character named Swofford, and I was going to get very, very post-modern and have character Swofford talk to author Swofford. But plenty of people have done that already, so eventually, I junked that book and started writing this. What struck me, having seen the film after reading the book, is just how interior the book is. In the film, you're dealing with images and surface. And, to make it work as a film, I assume, it was turned into an ensemble perception of things, as opposed to something coming just from you. You get a better view of the characters around me. For instance, Jamie Foxx's character is really a combination of three characters, and there was an early draft where there are three distinct three senior sergeants in the script, which left you wondering, "Who's this guy and who's this guy?" I should say that Jamie's character is a kind of sentimental portrait of the life of a Marine. next >>> Index "The look, the feel, the sound, the training, the desert." "Military culture is peppered with the language of those films." back to past articles

David D'Arcy Besides reviewing art and film for National Public Radio, David D'Arcy has also written for the Art Newspaper, the Economist and other publications. February 6, 2007. Mark Savage & the D.I.Y. Aesthetic by Jeffrey M. Anderson February 3, 2007. Seeing the Humor in Sexual Identity by Michael Guillen January 29, 2007. Smokin' Aces with Joe Carnahan and Jeremy Piven by Sean Axmaker January 26, 2007. Include Me Out: Interview with Farley Granger by Jonathan Marlow January 25, 2007. Grindhouse: Chapter Four - The 1960's by Eddie Muller January 19, 2007. Charles Mudede: Zoo Story by Andy Spletzer January 19, 2007. Mark Becker: Merging the Personal and the Political by Sara Schieron January 19, 2007. Micha X. Peled: The Lives of the Sweatshop Youth by Hannah Eaves January 16, 2007. Djinn: A Taxi Driver Dreams of Perth by Jeffrey M. Anderson January 12, 2007. Clint Eastwood: Flags and Letters From the "Good War" by Jeff Shannon view past articles