acculturation : perspicacity : the monkey box + talkies : firefly + jarhead

i.

I will pay someone, anyone, to deliver the 1st season of Firefly unto me.

That is, unless someone, anyone, would greatly enjoy the spectacle of moi procuring such whilst clothed in two-sizes-too-large flannel jammie pants emblazoned with bowling pins, balls, and shoes, paired with a threadbare white boys' t-shirt.

And, no... I haven't brushed my hair today. Why do you ask?

ii.

It was weeks ago that I caught it, yet Jarhead remains a steady feature of my daily mental wanderings.

The film was a decent adaptation of the book but unfortunately made excessive use of narration to fill us in. Plus, typical of anyone familiar with a precursor text, I was disappointed that certain things were not included while other situations were expanded and fictionalized beyond their origins.

It was gorgeously photographed; I dare use the word 'sumptuous,' considering the number of times I was left without breath by the impact of the director's framing, cinematographically/contextually.

Many reviews lambast the film for its lack of a meaningful statement significant to our present police action conflict in the Middle East, and while I do think that Mendes tried a little too hard to avoid that conversation altogether, the piece itself is not without anything relevant to say. It just happens to not be about this Gulf War so much as War In General Since Vietnam, Valor As An Institutional Farce, and, well... Marines.

Which was what I found the most enjoyable and the most emotionally-affective about both the film and the book: the at-times fly-on-the-wall view into the reality of the Corps. As someone who has known and loved more than a few Marines, this insight alternately fascinated, comforted, and disturbed me.

(Admittedly, perhaps a little more than fetishistically. I think about Jarhead a lot because it was... what word am I looking for? Hmm... oh, yes, there it is: hot. Imagine Jake Gyllenhaal in nothing but a well-placed Santa hat and try not to agree.

And/or, two words: field fuck.

Above all, the lust factor was at its highest during the many, many scenes evincing that homoeroticism and the USMC need not be mutually exclusive.)

My one criticism, which endures depiction in both the text and the film, is this idea that it is somehow immoral to teach a young man how to kill and to then deprive him of the opportunity to put such skill to use.

While Swofford eventually dedicates a chapter to the ceaseless inner conflict between resentment and gratitude born of his one and only opportunity to make a kill (of which he was deprived by an airstrike-happy CO), and frequently revisits and token-dismantles the idea that a Good Marine is one who has killed, he can't help but seem most unhappy about this emotional artifact of his time in the Corps.

Which may or may not be intentional, wherein his antebellum psyche is poised as the most intimate example of his thesis: after all, when it is drilled into you so deeply and for so long that the advent of a particular event will make it all Mean Something and then... it doesn't... and that particular event is not only Important but Important In A Way That We Are All Supposed to Agree Is The Most Important of Things Because We're Talking About the U. S. of Fucking A... well, fuck. What's left?

Which really is rather simplistic, but one can't know that unless one goes to that place of disenchantment, and in the meantime, the boys are all still buying into and signing up for that elusive all-American valor, and the rest of us are still waving our flags and etc., ad nauseum.

Ten Marines were killed on Thursday by a roadside bomb.

This does not end. This will never end.

My next read, War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, promises to be a relevant companion piece.