Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Jarhead
2005 · Sam Mendes · Jarhead on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice how small the Marines are in the wide desert shots. (camera)
Deakins overexposes the sand until it runs into the sky and leaves the men as isolated forms inside it. The framing is precise and often symmetrical, and there is nothing in the expanse for anyone to act on.
Payoff: The landscape absorbs people rather than offering them anything to do, which is the exact condition the film is describing. In the reading: any-space-whatever (espace quelconque). A space that has stopped being a setting for action and become a field of feeling is what the reading calls an any-space-whatever.
Notice how much of the running time is spent waiting. (cutting)
Murch cuts against momentum. Long stretches of drift, drills and repetition, then an incident erupts and the film settles back into the same frustration instead of building on it. Nothing accumulates toward a battle.
Payoff: The rhythm reproduces the soldier's actual experience, where the days do not add up to anything and the training has nowhere to go. In the reading: dead time (temps mort). Stretches held open because advancing is precisely what is denied are what the reading calls dead time.
Listen for songs that could not have existed in 1991. (sound)
The needle drops are deliberately out of period, and Newman's score stays spare, percussive and ambient rather than rising toward anything heroic. The music keeps commenting on the men's borrowed pictures of combat.
Payoff: The anachronism folds the Gulf War into the war that was running when the film was made, without a line of dialogue about it.
Watch how close together the bodies are in every camp. (staging)
Mendes came out of the theater and stages the film as tableaux. Shaved heads, identical uniforms, men packed into barracks and tents with nothing to do but watch each other. The horseplay is intimate and aggressive at once.
Payoff: The Corps is shown as a total environment that shapes what these men want, which is what the film is actually studying.
Watch Gyllenhaal's face change as the deployment drags on. (performance)
Swoff starts wry and watchful and comes apart slowly under sun, jealousy and unspent training. Sarsgaard plays a Marine whose whole identity is staked on a war he is not being allowed to fight.
Payoff: The distress here comes from readiness with no outlet rather than from anything anyone has seen or done.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch what the Marines do with their hands while they wait. Everything this film knows is in that waiting.