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.
Once you have seen it
Watch the Marines cheering the helicopter attack in the tent. (staging)
They pack in to scream along with Apocalypse Now as if it were a pep rally. A film made to indict the war is being consumed as recruitment by the men it was about.
Payoff: The war movie turns out to be the machine that builds the appetite, and this war movie refuses to satisfy it. In the reading: consciousness of clichés. Characters who know they are living inside borrowed images are what the reading calls a consciousness of clichés.
Watch the scope in the sniper scene and what follows it. (structure)
Everything in the film has trained toward this one sanctioned shot. The crosshairs settle, the finger is on the trigger, and then somebody else's ordnance takes the target. They ask to fire anyway and are refused.
Payoff: The film's whole architecture pays off in denial, and the breakdown that follows comes from being stopped rather than from what was done.
Look at how the burning wells turn noon into night. (light)
Deakins flips the bleached emptiness into its opposite. Orange flame against tar-black smoke, crude falling on upturned faces, an oil-soaked horse walking out of the dark. The fires were shot practically.
Payoff: The one spectacular thing they reach is an aftermath somebody else caused, beautiful in a way that sits badly against what it is.
Listen for the noise of battle and notice it never arrives. (sound)
The mix gives you desert quiet, the clatter of military hardware, wind, the roar of the fires. The sounds a war film is built to deliver are simply absent from the track for two hours.
Payoff: What you are denied acoustically is the same thing the men are denied, so the withholding happens to you as well.
Carry this in: Watch the trigger that never gets pulled. Everything this film knows is in the held finger.