Sam Mendes' Jarhead (2005), based on Anthony Swofford's memoir, is a war film about a war that did not happen — at least, not for its narrator. Swofford and his fellow Marines train to be killers, deploy to the Saudi desert in 1990, wait through Operation Desert Shield, surge into Kuwait under skies blacked out by burning oil, and never fire their rifles in anger. Air power has done the work. The grunts arrive late to a war that has already finished without them.
The voice-over recurs to a single thesis. Every war is different. Every war is the same. The film's title comes from the slang the Marines use for themselves — heads like jars, ready to be filled. They are filled, and then emptied, and the war the training pointed toward is not the one they get.
There is an Old Testament verse the film could have used as its epigraph and didn't. It is from the most weary book in the canon:
"A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace."
A Verse for Soldiers
The Preacher of Ecclesiastes lists fourteen pairs — born and dying, planting and plucking up, weeping and laughing, mourning and dancing, casting away stones and gathering stones together, embracing and refraining from embracing, and so on. The eighth couplet is war and peace. The verse asserts that both have their hour and that the wise life is one that knows which hour it is in.
Jarhead takes a small but important angle on this. Its Marines have been trained for the time of war and arrive into something more like a time of waiting. There is no recognized season for that. The Preacher does not name it. The film takes its place inside the gap.
What Mendes Films
The desert sequences are filmed almost as still life. Sand, men, sand. A scorpion fight. A masturbation contest. A long letter read aloud from a wife who has decided she will not be there when he comes back. The men train in MOPP suits in 110-degree heat, sweat through them, and are told to drink. The energy of the verse — a time of love, a time of hate — is being held without an outlet. Jake Gyllenhaal's Swofford comes the closest to firing his weapon, lining up an Iraqi officer in his scope and being denied permission to take the shot.
He breaks. He loads his rifle and points it at a comrade. The film is saying, in its own grammar, what the verse says in its: when the assigned season does not come, the man trained for it begins to come apart.
What the Verse Concedes
Ecclesiastes is not a triumphalist book. It does not promise that the time of war will be short or that the time of peace will arrive on schedule. It only promises that all the times are real, and that none can be hurried. The Preacher's word for time — eth — is a heavy word, the kind that suggests both schedule and weight.
The Marines in Jarhead are heavy. They cannot be light because they have been trained to bear the weight of a season they are denied. The verse does not promise rescue. It promises that the seasons are paired. War and peace. The Marines have been given the orientation of one without delivery, and have stayed in their gear long enough to feel the verse's other half coming.
What Comes Home
The film's closing voice-over has Swofford, years later, on a bus, looking at his own face in the window. A man fires a rifle for many years, and he goes to war. And afterwards he turns the rifle in at the armory, and he believes he is no longer a rifle. But no matter what else he might do with his hands — love a woman, build a house, change his son's diaper — his hands remember the rifle.
This is the verse from the inside. The hands have been shaped by a season. They will keep that shape after the season is over. The Preacher would understand.
The Forty Seconds
Read Ecclesiastes 3:8 once. A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace. Forty seconds. The film cannot be condensed faster than this. The men were promised one of those times. They were given another. The verse is the only language that holds both at once.
The desert is the spectacle. The verse is the calendar. The Marines have been kept in a season the calendar did not name.