Movie Doubles

The Inadequacy of 'Film Theory' in Film Schools
Since 'Apocalypse Now', we've become inured to certain kinds of war movies. If you got to a Film School like the one I went to, you will find routine discussions of how hypocritical Hollywood cinema is because they claim to make anti-war films but end up glorifying violence anyway. At least that is the underlying tenor of most Film Theory classes you end up in. Part of the problem is that the most Film Theory classes are short in discussions of method, and so the theory gets abstracted beyond what you see into discussions about ideological positioning.

If the world was as simple as pigoen-holing ideological positions I'm sure we wouldn't have so many wars in the first place. Clearly, there is something about war and violence which precedes the justifications and positioning that goes on with the ideological pigeon-holing. In the great disconnect between theory and practice, film students struggle to come to terms with a basic fact: You can only shoot objects. So whatever you shoot becomes 'objectified'. It's what happens when you point a camera at anything. If everything is objectified, then it seems, the rest of the discussion is about matter of degree.

All that said, I want to point out one more thing. In 'Bergman on Bergman', there is a passage where the interviewer throws Film Theory jargon at Ingmar, king him if he agreed or disagreed with the position. Ingmar responds, perplexed that the theory constructed by such critics are apropos of the production. He even gets a little agitated and says words to the effect that "That's all very nice, but it just not useful."

In the same book, Bergman points out that the strength of cinema is that it can portray movement, and so therefore it is suited to depicting violence. Once you come to that point, you realise that the Film Theory classes where they try to dissect the ideological orientation of a shot of helicopters in 'Apocalypse Now' is a misguided attempt to place shackles on the joy of viewing cinema. More to the point, they're barking up the wrong tree. Cinema is about conflict. How these conflicts get resolved is an issue of genre, but conflict needs to be in the structure; this is why war lends itself to cinema more than, say, love. Whether a shot glorifies war or not actually inadequate to the central question of why wars are fought and how wars are fought. You can imagine how that went down in a room full of ideologues - they thought I was a fascist.

Anyway, keep in mind, I was having these kinds of arguments in 1990-1991. Around the time of the first Gulf War.

This Is My Rifle - 'Full Metal Jacket' & 'Jarhead'

Stanley Kubrick, having made 'A Clockwork Orange', wanted to make a film about 'the phenomenon of war'. And so he set about making 'Full Metal Jacket'. It makes sense. The first half of 'Full Metal Jacket' is dedicated to illustrating the process used by the US Marines to turn a bunch of young men into combat troops. Famously, the foul-mouthed drill sergeant is played by a real drill sergeant, with real invective and foul-mouthed abuse.

Unfortunately, it was released at a time when everybody with half a story was making a Vietnam War movie that made claims to realism and authenticity. These films ranged from the bombastic Oliver Stone films 'Platoon' and 'Born On The Fourth Of July', to more conventional war-stories like 'Hamburger Hill'. All these films including Kubrick's work laid some kind of claim to its artistic truthfulness; and in all fairness, they all came equipped with technical advisers and people to authenticate the look to events to clothes to music. two decades on, the late 1980s seem like the decade where America won the Vietnam War in Hollywood.

Considering how much Kubrick wanted to make the experience of going to war as direct to the audience, his film was ironically drowned out by the more spectacular presentations of war. If Kubrick had indeed gone out to show that war was not glamorous as 'Apocalypse Now', he had inadvertently joined the chorus of films that ended up glorifying it. It is not insignificant that within three years, America was brazenly sending troops to Kuwait to fight Gulf War I. So much for the warning. It didn't take long before the Gulf War spawned its own generation of war films, and so we got to see pretty much the same thing in 'Jarhead'.

What is interesting is that 'Jarhead' plays out the same training process that takes up the first half of 'Full Metal Jacket', and then sends the troops to a war that is utterly unlike Vietnam. It is a war that is mostly fought on spin through CNN and propaganda; then it is followed by 40 days of an 'Air War'. The marines never come into serious conflict with their foes. The front as such moves so fast, they are unable to participate in the relevant action. So as the War ultimately closes with the ceasefire, the Marines never get to kill in the way they are trained.

Thus 'Jarhead' transposes the problems raised by 'Full Metal Jacket' and manages to fold it in on itself. In 'Full Metal Jacket', all the training leads to a battle with a sniper who turns out to be a 12 year old girl, whom the main character must shoot. The tragedy is not just that he must shoot her, it is that all the training comes to the this horrible, most inglorious moment. It is almost a self-abnegation when Joker shoots the girl. Most significant is that we do not see the close up of the gun or the bullet hitting her. We see his expression as he pulls the trigger.

In 'Jarhead', the moment arrives where the main character finally gets to take a shot, but his order is belayed. Instead, they get to watch the Air Force take out their target in a 'surgical strike'. The moment is equally inglorious, but it is also deeply ironic because it resonates with the same tragedy - except they are now irrelevant. They don't get to do the tragic slaying; they get to watch impotently, from the sidelines.

This doesn't mean Kubrick's film doesn't have a universality any more. It is hardly the case that mobile infantry is made redundant by the Air War. They are the ones bearing the brunt of action in Iraq as we speak. His warning probably is more relevant today than it seemed at the time of the Gulf War. When I reflect upon my experience of *watching* the Gulf War unfold on my TV in 1991, I recall being oddly comforted knowing that Marines who had been brutalised by Drill Instructors were going out there to 'do their jobs'. If anything, by being shown to us by Kubrick how the Marines trained their men, we as a society have come to accept that brutality as a necessity.

And that's the weird thing. When you watch the two films back to back, you begin to see that our very own views of what is acceptable has been forced to shift as a result of these wars in the last 20 years. Panama, Gulf War I, The Balkan Wars, and Gulf War II have all collectively made us accept differing standards to what we had before, and that is perhaps the most frightening thing about these films. Our governments and press, all tacitly accept torture and 'renditions' and other things we never would have countenanced back in 1988. What was once a brutal tragedy to Kubrick is something our press and governments just shrug at today.