War and Soldiers in Film

War and Soldiers in Film             Film is an astonishing medium for demonstrating ideas.  It allows for stronger emotional connections.  It combines writing, visuals, and music to bring forth emotional responses and thoughts like no other medium can.  War is one of the film industry's favorite topics.  Conflicts throughout history have shaped many people's lives in many ways.  Films have an affinity for depicting the soldier's experience.  While some movies focus on making a film for entertainment, other films strive to demonstrate the truth behind the nature of war and the soldiers who fight it.  One film that reflects this notion is Jarhead, Sam Mendes’ motion picture about the Gulf war.  Another movie that contains these ideas is Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece, Full Metal Jacket.  While a bit different than these films, Rambo also includes concepts that connect to soldiers.  All these films have a standard method of depicting soldiers during war.  More specifically, how being in a war changed the soldiers who fought in them.  The film industry depicts the effects of war on soldiers, such as becoming desensitized, aggressiveness, and PTSD.

            Full Metal Jacket is considered by many to be one of the best war films of all time for a good reason.  It depicts how the military and war transforms ordinary people into creatures of destruction.  Stanley Kubrick split Full Metal Jacket into two distinct parts: training and deployment.  Both have their effects on the individuals who experienced them.

            The movie begins with the Marine’s grueling training.  Veterans have cited Full Metal as having one of the most accurate portrayals of military training.  The Staff Sergeant is shown degrading the trainees beyond belief.  The Staff Sergeant famously says, “You will be a minister of death praying for war. But until that day you are pukes. You are the lowest form of life on Earth. You are not even human fucking beings. You are nothing but unorganized grabastic pieces of amphibian shit! Because I am hard, you will not like me. But the more you hate me, the more you will learn. I am hard but I am fair. There is no racial bigotry here... Here you are all equally worthless.”  Not exactly words of encouragement.  This quote gives an idea of what the trainees must endure for the next few months.  Insult upon insult degrading and dehumanizing them until they begin to believe what the Staff Sergeant is saying.  The whole point of the boot camp is to destroy the individual that is there and to rebuild them into a Marine.  A killing machine.  These eighteen-year-old kids are being molded into monsters.

            The second part of Full Metal Jacket shows the recruits going to war in Vietnam.  Immediately you see that this is entirely different from training.  While training was difficult, it is a very different situation when in comparison to actual war.  The training was a controlled environment. The real conflict has different stakes.  They are risking their lives and taking lives, applying their training.  The training is the first step in how war changes a person.  It orients the person to a mindset that is more likely to be altered.  In short, the war furthers the change that the training started.  The actual war snatches the last bit of innocence remaining in the soldier and entirely turns them into a different person.  The infamous “get some,” scene is the best example of this in the whole movie.  You have a helicopter gunner who has been in the war for longer, killing civilians for fun.  The fresh trainees look on in terror as the gunner slaughters innocents.  One asks how he could do this.  He responds, “easy. You just don’t lead them as much.”  He then continues with a laugh, “ain’t war hell?”  The war has changed this man.  While we don’t know his life story, the audience can assume that he wasn’t gunning down civilians in the United States.  The audience must conclude that war has desensitized this man to suffering, and he finds the horrible things to be a joke.

Picture the faces of the recruits during training.  They are wide-eyed, idealistic rookies that do not fully grasp their situation.  Compare that to the grizzled and tried soldiers at the end of the movie.  They have seen and experienced awful things, and they have mutated into a different person.  They had to stay sane in such a situation.  You cannot remain a sensitive individual, while horrid things occur around you.  It would be a sensory overload.  The solution is to become desensitized to the dreadful.  The way that Stanley Kubrick represented this idea in Full Metal Jacket was the closing scene that had all the Marines singing the Mickey Mouse Club House theme.  In this scene, we have these soldiers who have done terrible things, and they are singing one of the most innocent songs there is.  Stanley Kubrick added this to show how these individuals have lost all their innocence.  The narrator's final words are, “My thoughts drift back to erect nipple wet dreams about Mary Jane Rottencrotch and the Great Homecoming Fuck Fantasy. I am so happy that I am alive, in one piece, and short. I'm in a world of shit . . . Yes. But I am alive.  And I am not afraid.”  These words set a very different tone than the trainee we saw at the beginning of the film.  The training and war have turned these individuals into mostly monsters, desensitized to terrors of the world.

Rambo is another film containing these ideas.  While I admit, much of Rambo is nothing but senseless entertainment, the meaning of the movie is much more significant.  The film begins with Rambo being homeless, wandering from town to town.  While arriving at a new city, the sheriff beleaguers Rambo, who wants him out of his town.  He sees Rambo as a disgrace and bothers him for virtually no purpose.  This aspect of the film is a look into how society treats some of the veterans who gave their all to help their country.

After enduring this abuse for a bit, Rambo finally snaps.  He becomes a fugitive of the law for the sin of existing.  Many dead bodies later, Rambo finds himself cornered in a store.  The law enforcement sends in his former commanding officer to talk with him.  This part is where the most crucial dialogue of the film takes place.  Rambo says, “You just don't turn it off! It wasn't my war! You asked me I didn't ask you! And I did what I had to do to win, for somebody who wouldn't let us win! Then I come back to the world, and I see all those maggots at the airport, protestin' me, spittin', callin' me a baby killer and all kinds of vile crap! Who are they to protest me?! Huh?! Who are they?! Unless they been me and been there and know what the hell they yellin' about!”  This powerful monologue touches upon how war changes soldiers.  However, there is more to this speech than just how these people are changed.  Rambo focuses more on how these changes affect them after the war is over.  He says, “You just don’t turn it off,” in reference to the mindset conflict places you in.  It isn’t a matter of simply going back into civilian mode.  The soldier is now irreversibly changed.  We see the stress that war break this man who can’t even hold a regular job anymore.  Rambo shows the after-effects of the change that happens during wartime.

Jarhead is an excellent example of a film that depicts war changing a person.  Jarhead takes place during operation desert shield and storm, and the film follows a unit of Marine Scout Snipers.  Jarhead focuses on the soldier’s experience.  While it is not enjoyed much by civilian audiences, many veterans have spoken out hailing it as one of the most accurate war movies.  It is not focused on conventionally entertaining an audience.  There are no battles that take place in this movie.  The fact that there are no battles makes it very different than other war films. Jarhead is a perfect example of how Hollywood depicts how soldiers change during times of conflict.

            Jarhead takes place during Desert Shield and Storm, otherwise known as the Gulf war.  It follows a Marine Scout Sniper unit through the events of the conflict.  I would first like to recognize how the gulf war is unique.  Many soldiers saw no to minimal combat during the war.  This situation creates an environment in which the soldiers are mostly waiting for something to happen.  Waiting is present in all wars but is especially prevalent in the Gulf war.  Anticipation in this fashion takes its mental toll and can start to break people.  Throughout Jarhead, we see the Scout Sniper unit slowly mentally fall apart and become scarred from all of the stress.  The Marines arrive at the desert as eager privates wanting to see action. Over time as the frustration builds, the Marines become more and more hostile. 

One of the standout themes of the movie is how soldiers handle being away from home.  In one scene of the film, the audience sees a board dubbed “the wall of shame,” with pictures of all the girlfriends and wives who have cheated on the Marines.  Another scene has a Marine receiving a videotape from his wife; this videotape held footage of her cheating purposely harm him.  His immediate reaction is disbelief, and he exclaims, “I want to go home.”  This part shows how a soldier yearns for home.  However, it is what the other Marines do after he leaves that is significant.  The other Marines proceed to put the videotape back on, saying, “Fucking faggot man, let's watch it again.”  It does not matter that the woman is a fellow Marine’s wife; all that matters is that it provides some sense of sick satisfaction.  The environment of war has desensitized these individuals so much that they lack almost any sense of compassion.

The most impactful portion of this movie is undoubtedly the end.  The Marines return from Iraq to American and are met by cheering crowds.  A Vietnam veteran congratulates the returning Marines on their success and asks if he could sit with the other Marines.  After, the narrator states, “Every war is different…every war is the same.”  This quote is essential to the message that the movie wants to deliver.  While the Gulf war was different from other wars, it was similar in many aspects.  Therefore, the ideas that Jarhead contained can be applied to all wars.

However, it is the final line of the movie that hits the hardest, “A man fires a rifle for many years, and he goes to war. He comes home, and he sees that whatever else he may do with his life like build a house, love a woman, change his son's diaper, but he will always remain a jarhead.  And all the jarheads, killing and dying, they will always be me.  We are still in the Desert.”  These final words are what make Jarhead such a great depiction of a soldier’s struggle.  It dedicates its final thoughts to what happens after the war.  This quote summarizes real life accurately.  While physically, the Marines are home, their minds will never again return to one of a civilian.  War has changed the way soldiers think so substantially that they will never be able to think of themselves as anything else but a soldier.  Jarhead beautifully shows how war changes how a person thinks forever.

            All these films are instances of the film industry depicting the effects that war has on the soldiers who fight them.  While they all illustrate this differently, they all come to the same conclusion: War scars people, making them into shadows of their former selves.  People change in different ways.  Some people cannot leave the past and develop PTSD, while others may become more violent because of their experiences.  Hollywood gets this right for the most part; people suffer from these ailments.  Film has a vital role in society as a medium that reaches all kinds of people.  It can help raise awareness of these issues that are not getting the attention they deserve.  While movies can attempt to capture what it is like to be at war, it will never be able to recreate it perfectly.    With more and more veterans begin to share their stories, it is essential that we, as a society, help them.  With the knowledge that we have gained from these films, it is our responsibility to try and help those who sacrificed so much so we can have comfortable lives. Sources: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfYVF1L8T1Y&t=572s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsvzkOvWAKQ https://sfy.ru/?script=full_metal_jacket https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/full-metal-jacket-1987 https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/jarhead-2005 https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/first-blood-1982 https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/movie_script.php?movie=rambo-first-blood https://www.scripts.com/script/jarhead_11187