This Is How You Get JARHEAD Sequels

0:00 Oh my god If you are discussing the ending of the movie without discussing

0:06 these scenes and how they inform the meaning of the final shots

0:11 you aren’t actually discussing the ending of the movie,

0:14 you’re writing fanfiction.

0:15 This is how you get Jarhead sequels.

0:17 Do you want Jarhead sequels?

0:19 [gliching] ‘Cus this is how you get Jarhead sequels.

0:25 [High energy stock music]

0:32 This makes me cringe, it’s embarrassing

0:39 Hey, that’s kinda messed up, right?

0:46 Love being a marine.

0:49 Oorah!

0:50 The Iraq war was never popular,

0:53 or rather it was always a deeply polarized endeavour.

0:56 It was transparently an illegitimate conflict rooted in corporate interests,

1:00 Evangelical Millennialism, and just general warmongering.

1:04 The sort of thing that’d never happen today.

1:06 As an illegitimate conflict the supporters were

1:09 really sensitive about the whole deal,

1:11 like just really snowflake-y,

1:12 if you said anything bad about it they’d have a meltdown,

1:16 which made support of it a mandatory social performance.

1:19 Everybody remembers Freedom Fries,

1:23 but let’s take a moment to appreciate Star Spangled Ice Cream.

1:34 [midi piano music] The anti-woke Ben& Jerry’s,

1:44 Star Spangled Ice Cream charged a patriotic

1:47 $76 for four quarts of flavours like “Iraqi Road”,

1:51 “Fightin’ Marine Tough Cookies& Cream”, “Navy Battle Chip”,

1:54 and “I Hate The French Vanilla”.

1:57 "Among a dozen randomly selected taste testers assembled by this reporter,

2:01 one called the taste ''undistinguished,'' another

2:03 ''cheap— like the little cups of

2:05 ice cream in elementary school, the kind with wooden paddles.''

2:09 Famously, the band formerly known as The Dixie Chicks had their career basically

2:13 ended as a result of speaking out against it.

2:16 The war.

2:16 Not the icecream.

2:17 And that was just two years before Jarhead came out.

2:20 “I can’t watch.

2:22 And Neither can you.”

2:24 Okay, so, there’s these two producers,

2:26 Philip J Roth and Jeffery Beach, and they’re, like,

2:28 capital-P producers, they’ve each got a hundred,

2:31 hundred and twenty producer credits,

2:33 they’ve made a lot of movies, and as the story goes they’re sitting

2:37 there in 2005 watching Jarhead, and they get super offended.

2:42 So, like, how it depicts the marine corp,

2:45 how it used George Bush’s Operation Desert Storm

2:47 as a setting to comment on George W Bush’s Iraq War, all that stuff.

2:52 They get so offended that a couple years later

2:54 they go out and buy the Jarhead intellectual

2:56 property rights specifically to turn it into

3:00 an oh rah respect the troops franchise.

3:03 To fix Jarhead.

3:04 Now, before we can talk about a Jarhead sequel we need to

3:07 ask ourselves a question: What is a ‘Jarhead’?

3:11 Jarhead is a 2005 film starring Jake Gyllenhaal, directed by Sam Mendes and

3:15 written by William Broyles Jr.,

3:17 adapting a 2003 memoir of the same name by Anthony Swofford.

3:21 Swofford served in the Marine corp as a

3:23 Scout Sniper during the Persian Gulf War,

3:25 and his memoir focuses heavily on the particular dissonance of that war,

3:29 the way that the Soldier Mentality was drilled into them over, and over,

3:34 and over, and yet the reality of their daily life was tedium.

3:39 Jarhead the movie takes this strand and really pulls on it: a central focus of

3:44 the movie is that the Marine Corp,

3:46 the military culture and mindset, is inherently destructive,

3:49 that war can and will destroy the lives of

3:52 its participants even if they never see combat.

3:55 It is, in effect, pointing at the way that the military machine takes young

3:59 men and trains them to be killers, cultures them to crave combat,

4:03 makes killing a virtue, and goes “hey, that’s kinda messed up, right?

4:08 Like, that’s probably going to do some irreversible damage that they’re going

4:12 to bring home with them regardless of anything else that happens.”

4:17 “You want a brand?

4:18 You gotta earn it.”

4:19 Jarhead basically argues that the Marine Corp is a cult,

4:22 that it uses intense peer pressure,

4:24 acute stress, repetition, vocabulary control, and isolation as indoctrination

4:29 techniques straight out of the playbook of any high-control group.

4:33 “This is my rifle” [In unison] “This is my rifle”

4:37 In fact not only does it do this,

4:39 it openly lionizes that process, uses that process as

4:43 a conscious pressure point,

4:44 tells recruits that they need to be broken down and rebuilt,

4:48 and places a tremendous amount of shame on the inability to endure that process.

4:54 Not only that, it is able to do so by leveraging decades and decades of pop

4:58 culture to instill the submission to that process as a virtue,

5:04 to sell that mindset.

5:07 “What the fuck are you even doing here?” “Sir,

5:10 I got lost on the way to college, sir!”

5:14 “A flashlight was a moonbeam.

5:16 A pen was an ink-stick.

5:18 A bed was a rack.

5:19 A wall was a bulkhead.

5:21 A shirt wa a blouse.

5:23 A tie was still a tie and a belt a belt, but many other

5:28 things would never be the same.” “That’s Vietnam music, man.

5:32 Can’t we get our own fucking music?”

5:35 Now, this isn’t unique to the US military,

5:37 it’s almost certainly as old as professional soldiers themselves.

5:41 And there’s a certain logic to it in part:

5:44 deployment and combat are prolonged high-stress environments, so the number

5:49 one factor a military wants to filter for is the ability to endure stress.

5:54 But that logic becomes mythologised.

5:56 It becomes an ancient tradition, an exclusive brotherhood of the

6:00 warrior defined by purity rituals that ultimately amount

6:03 to little more than bog standard abuse.

6:06 “How the fuck are you going to fire your

6:08 rifle when grenades are going off in your face?!”

6:11 This process irrevocably damages the characters,

6:14 and while stories about soldiers who can never

6:17 quite truly return home are also very,

6:20 very old, Jarhead leaves that completely unvarnished because

6:24 the entire exercise was entirely pointless.

6:27 See, the standard narrative for a Hero’s Journey war story about

6:31 soldiers who are left changed forever is that that damage is simply a cost

6:35 that was paid for something noble and righteous and philosophical.

6:41 “Earn this” That is wholly absent in Jarhead:

6:47 there is no cause, the damage is in service of nothing,

6:51 and the human lives broken by the process are simply discarded.

6:54 Swofford is told, and tells himself, that without his rifle he is nothing,

7:00 but at the end of it all

7:03 “I never shot my rifle”

7:05 Troy, who is about to be discharged for an undisclosed criminal record,

7:09 is so invested in the

7:10 identity that the Corps imbues him with that he

7:13 weeps with joy as the squad brands him.

7:16 Even if the institution kicks him out, Troy will always be a Jarhead.

7:21 It’s, in part, their attempt at giving him belonging.

7:25 But the damage is already done and he takes his own life anyway.

7:29 When the boys return home from Kuwait, a Vietnam veteran jumps on their bus to

7:33 congratulate them and commiserate, but it just makes everyone uncomfortable:

7:37 he’s a pathetic figure, damaged in ways that will never be fixed,

7:40 still clinging to the mythology of a Corps that has clearly done him

7:44 no good over a decade after it tossed him aside,

7:48 and the boys see in him their future.

7:50 It all ends with the affirmation that Swofford will in some way or

7:51 another always belong to the Corps, always be a Jarhead,

7:51 “And he sees that whatever else he might do with his life,

7:57 build a house, love a woman,

8:00 change his son’s diaper, he will always remain a jarhead.”

8:09 But this is in no way a celebration of the

8:12 esprit de corps of belonging to a brotherhood of soldiers.

8:15 It’s bleak, it’s cynical.

8:17 The label “jarhead”,

8:18 a self-deprecating military nickname normally deployed with sardonic pride is

8:23 treated literally.

8:23 The Marines have hollowed him out, rebuilt him, and left nothing else inside.

8:29 Jarhead, as it turns out, pretty good movie, lot of complicated themes

8:33 You could see how someone who really deeply absorbed the Marines into their

8:37 identity might take offense to that, or even just someone really invested

8:41 in the myth of it all, especially in a post-9/11 War on Terror environment.

8:51 [indistinct yelling] Now, this is gonna feel off-topic,

8:53 but I’ve wanted to talk about The Standard for years,

8:56 and now is as good a time as any.

8:57 I want you to understand that we aren’t making up a guy here,

9:02 and that there is a certain

9:04 kind of dude, the tactical operator, who sees himself in a certain way.

9:10 The Standard is a 2020 documentary directed by Phil Wall and produced

9:14 by GORUCK Media.

9:14 You probably haven’t seen it, and that’s okay- it isn’t very good.

9:19 It’s a really good example of a counter-documentary,

9:21 one where the clear intent of the piece,

9:23 the things that people say and the messages that are

9:26 conveyed by the filmic language,

9:27 are completely at odds with the things that are actually shown.

9:31 The Standard is ostensibly about the most hardcore of hardcore military

9:35 tactical badassery training: US Special Forces.

9:39 “GORUCK SELECTION is not only the toughest endurance event on the planet,

9:43 it’s also an attempt to bridge the military-civilian divide.

9:46 Hosted by a group of Special Forces

9:48 combat veterans,

9:49 this 48-hour challenge is a condensed interpretation of the US Army’s 24-day

9:54 Assessment and Selection.

9:55 For the participants, the event is a chance to test their limits while

9:59 paying tribute to those who serve.

10:00 For the Special Force Cadre who lead the event, it’s

10:03 an opportunity to honor their roots and connect with civilians.

10:07 Less than 2% of participants

10:08 finished the first 18 iterations of the event.

10:11 Will anyone in Class 019 meet “The Standard?"”

10:14 So, the frame here is that the US Special

10:17 Forces has a standard that applicants are expected

10:19 to perform to in order to be selected for placement in a Special Forces unit,

10:23 and the GORUCK Selection is an endurance event meant to mimic this process.

10:28 Now, the word “standard” calls to mind something, like, official, right?

10:33 Something codified, something measured, something standardized.

10:36 So the setup is like “this is the actual bar

10:40 that special forces need to meet.” It’s right up there in the pitch:

10:44 will anyone meet The Standard.

10:46 But then you watch the actual documentary.

11:10 First off, just to get it out of the way because of how obvious it is,

11:13 The Standard is just an ad for GORUCK,

11:15 a company that mostly makes tacticool backpacks that have

11:18 a reputation for being extremely durable but uncomfortable,

11:22 poorly laid out, and heavy.

11:24 The movie is broken into two parts, the Known and the Unknown.

11:29 The Known portion is the first twenty-ish minutes of the doc,

11:32 and it’s explicitly the US Army Physical Fitness Standard Exam:

11:36 participants must be able to do fifty-five pushups in two minutes,

11:40 sixty-five sit ups in two minutes, run 5 miles in 40 minutes or less,

11:44 and complete a 12 mile ruck in three and a half hours,

11:47 all in the same afternoon.

11:48 By the way a “ruck” is just a hike,

11:50 but you’ve got a full kit on or in this case a GORUCK rucksack

11:54 mostly full of GORUCK slab weights to simulate being

11:57 full of ammo or canned food or whatever.

11:59 After this Known portion we move into the Unknown portion,

12:02 which will take up the remaining hour and

12:04 15 minutes of the movie.

12:06 The Unknown portion is, unlike the Known portion, just vibes.

12:10 Rancid vibes, but still vibes.

12:13 It becomes pretty obvious pretty quickly that everything the organizers

12:17 are having the participants do is just kinda improvisational.

12:21 There’s a schedule of sorts, and a lot of the stuff has technically

12:24 been planned ahead of time, but that planning isn’t exactly systematized.

12:29 They come up with an activity and then just make

12:32 everyone do it for an hour or so before moving on.

12:36 There’s no numbers, there’s no goal,

12:38 and additional goals are added and removed based

12:40 purely on whether or not the cadre,

12:42 that’s the term for the ex-special-forces dudes yelling at everyone,

12:46 whether or not they like you.

12:48 And they’re actually pretty transparent about that,

12:51 at least to the confessional camera.

12:53 “We’re basically saying ‘hey, you’re doing really well’,

12:55 we’ll build his ego up, you know,

12:57 because we’re looking to create distance between two-eight and six-two,

13:02 that’s the, that’s the methodology.

13:04 So, the creation of distance,

13:05 it’s the same reason why a lion picks on the slow zebra,

13:09 why pick on the fast one?”

13:11 This is what I mean about it being a counter-documentary:

13:14 they really want you to think that this is some

13:16 actual standard that soldiers need to live up to,

13:18 that there’s something quantifiable in all this,

13:22 but then the truth is they’re just winging it.

13:24 They’re trying to stress everyone out,

13:26 but they do so based on convenience and bias,

13:29 and the amount of abuse you’re subjected to relies

13:32 heavily on if they like you or not.

13:34 “You still have a place to find comfort because

13:37 that candidate over there is getting a lot of attention.”

13:39 “This event is about fucking winning.

13:42 Right now you’re getting special attention because you are fucking losing.”

13:46 They pick on contestants that they don’t vibe with,

13:48 the highest performers get easier tasks and longer breaks,

13:51 and they make things harder on the fly purely because

13:54 there’s too many people left in the competition.

13:56 They’re an elite, exclusive event, after all,

13:59 they can’t have a bunch of people passing.

14:02 Eventually it’s accidentally revealed that all of

14:04 this is just happening on Jason’s land.

14:06 Jason McCarthy, the event organizer,

14:08 is a former Special Forces soldier with the US Army, serving

14:12 from 2003 to 2008, and he’s also the founder and CEO of GORUCK,

14:16 and most of this event is just

14:18 happening in his back yard, and they haven’t bothered to,

14:23 like, set anything up for this.

14:25 If I say “military fitness endurance event” you

14:28 maybe conjure in your mind the image of army obstacle courses, right?

14:33 The climbing walls, the ropes, the mud pits,

14:35 all that stuff, but there’s none of that here.

14:38 No one’s timing anything, no one’s keeping notes.

14:41 There’s a whole bit where they just kinda mess

14:43 around with some logs that happened to be nearby.

14:46 Like, they’re not doing log drills, because those are a teamwork exercise

14:51 and this is 100% anti-teamwork hyper-isolationist.

14:57 “we’re looking to create distance between two-eight and six-two”

15:00 So, yeah, this isn’t a log drill, this is just pushing around a log.

15:05 There’s a clip of the winner of a previous event where there’s

15:08 this whole sort of ceremony at the finish line,

15:11 so they’re standing in front of this giant American flag and his

15:15 family is behind him with congratulatory signs,

15:17 but the whole time someone’s standing just off

15:20 camera spraying him with a garden hose,

15:22 because this is just something someone made up on the fly.

15:25 At one point they just have them move a bunch of paving

15:27 stones for Jason’s gazebo from one spot to another.

15:31 And the fact that the cadre, you know, they’re in pretty good shape,

15:34 they all seem like dudes who hit the gym as a hobby,

15:37 but none of them have ever actually completed their own course,

15:41 and frankly most of them wouldn’t.

15:44 “I don’t want to show up for this, do you?

15:47 Nobody does!

15:48 Nobody wants to… Blain,

15:50 Blain saw the POI, he goes ‘nope, no thanks, I’m good.’”

15:54 There’s kinda two things happening here at the same time:

15:57 one is the admission that to

15:58 what degree this does resemble actual military behaviour and conditioning,

16:02 that behaviour and conditioning is cult initiation stuff,

16:06 “Dominate the man in front of you”

16:08 and second, the cultural mythology of all that as a good thing.

16:14 Having this reedy dork yell at you for two days is good

16:18 because it gives you a taste of the warrior spirit that he totally has.

16:23 “I don’t want to show up for this, do you?”

16:25 Frankly all of the cadre look like awful people who would be

16:28 an absolute nightmare to have any kind of personal relationship with,

16:31 people who have absorbed exactly the kind of damage Jarhead is talking about.

16:36 “Trample the weak, hurdle the dead, let’s go” “Start winning!”

16:42 And you can easily imagine how someone like Jason would be very,

16:45 very upset about that.

16:47 I have no proof of this but I have

16:49 to imagine Jason doesn’t like Jarhead much at all.

16:52 Jason is probably more of a Jarhead 2 kinda guy.

16:58 [gunfire] Jarhead 2: Field of Fire is a direct-to-video sequel released

17:04 in 2014.

17:04 This is where Philip J.

17:06 Roth and Jeffery Beach come into the picture.

17:08 These guys have, no joke, over 100 movie credits as producers,

17:12 these guys are regularly producing anywhere from three to seven movies per year,

17:18 mostly via Roth’s production company UFO International.

17:22 While it lifts some aesthetic elements from Jarhead,

17:24 like a framing voice over, a few parallel lines,

17:27 and the general style and vibe of title cards,

17:31 it is otherwise different in every way.

17:34 There are no returning characters and the story is wholly fictional.

17:37 Like, as a reminder, Jarhead is based on Anthony Swofford’s memoir,

17:41 and Jake Gyllenhaal was playing Swofford, a real person.

17:45 There’s none of that here,

17:47 the only thing that isn’t made up is the country of Afghanistan.

17:51 Though from the sheer number of last names in

17:53 the credits ending with a ‘V’ I’m going

17:54 to assume this was shot somewhere in eastern Europe like Bulgaria.

17:58 The movie follows supply marines,

18:00 who run essential supplies through contested territory.

18:03 And there is a really interesting Jarhead-esque movie in that premise.

18:08 Supply marines have a job that is both extremely dangerous,

18:12 and extremely dreary.

18:13 Like, early in the movie, the team is driving through a gravel quarry,

18:16 when they spot some garbage on the road which could be concealing an explosive.

18:20 So they stop and phone it in,

18:21 and are instructed to wait for the bomb squad to arrive,

18:23 and the team has to sit there for hours,

18:26 waiting for the experts to investigate this pile of trash.

18:28 The marines are, simultaneously, vulnerable, but also incredibly bored.

18:33 There is a tension between the mundane

18:36 and life-threatening elements of their job.

18:38 And while having bomb specialists investigate isolated trash piles in

18:41 the middle of the desert is arguably an example of reasonable suspicion,

18:45 there are numerous examples of the marines demonstrating unreasonable

18:49 suspicion- typically rooted in racism.

18:51 “We’ve got movement at 12-o’clock!” “Donkey!

18:54 Who’s that?

18:55 That your boy?!” “He’s just

18:58 carrying water to his village!” “I don’t care about his village.”

19:02 So this could have been a movie about paranoia inherent to Bush’s war on terror.

19:07 A movie about soldiers who are taught to treat

19:10 every aspect of the Muslim world with suspicion,

19:12 and are then dropped into the middle of it.

19:14 A movie that confronts Western war crimes in the Middle East,

19:18 and explores the ways in which those atrocities

19:21 are the natural consequence of systemic practices.

19:24 …That is not Jarhead 2.

19:26 The garbage pile has no thematic purpose,

19:29 it’s just that parked vehicles and people

19:31 standing around waiting is a really inexpensive way to fill runtime.

19:36 Where Jarhead was a simmering character portrait

19:38 of people driven mad for no reason,

19:40 victims of a machine,

19:42 Jarhead 2 is a troop movie about troops

19:45 doing very budget-conscious heroic troop stuff like

19:48 driving through a gravel quarry or standing next

19:50 to their humvees in a gravel quarry,

19:52 or diffusing bombs in a gravel quarry.

19:55 It starts with a big ensemble of characters,

19:57 but most of them are killed off about 1/3rd of the way through the film,

20:00 and the bulk of the movie is the significantly reduced cast doing

20:04 a ripped-from-the-headlines type story of escorting

20:07 a Malala Yousafzai proxy to safety.

20:09 “She’s a keynote speaker at the United Nations summit on human rights,

20:13 she’s scheduled to be in New York in 36 hours.

20:16 This is direct from Washington,

20:17 she’s the president’s guest of honor.” But don’t worry,

20:19 they make it a point that the

20:20 marines are willing to die for her without knowing her identity,

20:25 because darn it, that’s the mission.

20:27 "You're willing to die for this chick?

20:30 We don't know anything about her."

20:33 Anyway, there’s a bunch of gun fights, and a One Of The Good Ones translator,

20:36 and a female marine who is in every way shape and

20:40 form Just One of the Boys because she’s a lesbian.

20:43 “if I weren’t married and you weren’t so obviously a lesbian”

20:47 “I don’t care what she looks like as long as

20:49 she’s got a hot face and a banging body!

20:51 Aaaah” “cringe, there’s no other word for it.

20:53 This makes me cringe, it’s embarrassing.”

20:55 There are several moments throughout the movie that

20:57 could be straight out of an Asylum production.

21:00 [Explosion] “my leg’s all the way over there bro”

21:04 “my leg’s all the way over there man!”

21:08 [Explosion] [Wilhelm scream] The sequel loses the edge

21:12 of the first movie in a way that

21:14 is both hard to describe but extremely palpable.

21:17 In the first movie, the character of Fowler comes across a dead Iraqi soldier,

21:22 which he names Ahab the A-rab and objectifies just out of frame.

21:27 His behaviour is depraved,

21:28 and it’s explicitly said that his behaviour is unacceptable.

21:32 “The Army may pull this type of shit,

21:33 but the Marines don’t.

21:35 When we get back Fowler will be passing out shit paper.”

21:39 Here in Jarhead 2, a character executes a wounded

21:42 Taliban fighter in a vengeance killing that violates the Geneva convention.

21:46 While it’s not depicted positively,

21:48 it is treated as an appreciable response in the circumstances.

21:54 “Cowboy up, you hear me?

21:55 Get back in the game, let’s go.”

21:58 While the marines in Jarhead 1 are trained to yearn to kill and infused

22:02 with a bloodlust that drives them mad, with Troy literally kicking and screaming

22:07 on the ground for the opportunity to end a human life,

22:11 our protagonist here needs

22:12 to get your standard issue “it’s them or you” lecture about the need to kill.

22:17 “Before yesterday, I never even fired my weapon at anybody.”

22:24 “They died today, and we lived.

22:27 Today was a good day.”

22:30 Jarhead 2 opens in an identical style for the first movie,

22:33 and on the surface it sounds

22:35 anti-war.

22:35 The narration asks what the point is in

22:38 soldiers fighting and dying in the desert?

22:41 “He will go to the desert and fight and die.

22:46 Why is he fighting?

22:48 Why is he dying?

22:50 What’s the fucking point?”

22:55 But at the end of the movie,

22:56 the narration answers that question with just… the most cliche junk possible.

23:02 “So what’s the fucking point?

23:04 I guess the point is responsibility of duty, love of country,

23:10 a way of life.

23:12 Are we on the right side of this?

23:16 These aren’t our questions to ask.”

23:18 Even the first movie’s use of “always being a Jarhead” as a symbol of trauma

23:23 gets reframed to mean “mourning the heroic sacrifices of our brothers.”

23:29 “And the marines who killed and bled and died, will always be Jarheads.”

23:34 Jarhead 2 pays lip service to the anti-war messaging of the first movie,

23:37 but its criticism of the military and

23:41 the military lifestyle are surface level complaints.

23:44 Just banal pet peeves that people bond over

23:46 because they all think it’s funny and irritating

23:49 that their boss wears really squeaky shoes or is

23:52 always showing off his guitar that he can’t play.

23:55 It’s trivial and shallow stuff.

23:59 “Hot as hell.

24:00 All this sand.

24:02 Goat everywhere.

24:04 Ugly chicks.

24:05 Ugly dudes.” So while Jarhead 2 is not hardline propaganda,

24:10 it does invert essentially every message from the first film.

24:13 Its ultimate point is that the hardship and sacrifice are worth it- that there

24:17 is a greater good to be served and it is honourable to do so.

24:21 In other words, it’s an entirely generic contemporary war film.

24:25 “Alright Marines,

24:26 six militants have just stormed this raggedy-ass old embassy behind me.”

24:31 Jarhead 3: The Siege is a 2016 direct-to-video sequel to nothing.

24:36 This isn’t a sequel, at this point we can

24:38 officially consider Jarhead to be an anthology franchise.

24:41 If Jarhead 1 was about men going mad in a desert for no reason,

24:45 and Jarhead 2 was about soldiers doing

24:47 cost-effective soldier stuff in a gravel quarry,

24:50 Jarhead 3 is about a cowboy who blows up the bad guy by shooting a propane tank.

25:00 [Explosion] It’s very telling that in my note taking for the

25:04 Jarhead movies each installment’s notes got shorter and shorter.

25:08 One might instinctively attribute that to simply getting tired,

25:11 and I’ll admit I didn’t control for that, this isn’t terribly scientific,

25:16 but where Jarhead has several pages of notes and observations,

25:20 and we managed to squeeze some juice out of what Jarhead 2 wasn’t,

25:24 the most prominent note I made on Jarhead 3

25:27 is that there is no visible penis on screen.

25:30 It seems like at some point in making these

25:33 sequels someone sat down with the job to break

25:35 down Jarhead, really juice out the essence of it,

25:38 and they came up with a short list consisting of

25:41 Troops Courier font Time of day titles

25:44 An on-screen penis Jarhead 1 and 2 both had the courage to get the wang out,

25:49 but in this,

25:50 the third installment, they’ve all but completely winnowed away the original

25:53 Jarhead, all that’s left behind is a voice over and some title cards.

25:58 Jarhead has this really compelling voice over,

26:00 it’s one of the defining bits of the movie, because it lets

26:03 you inside Swofford's head where he can

26:06 say things that are embarrassing or shameful,

26:09 admit to feeling and thinking terrible things,

26:12 and because we’re in Swofford’s mind, in his memories,

26:15 Mendes uses this to create really compelling little bits and contrasts,

26:19 like when the camera pulls back and closes the door on a number of memories,

26:23 like visiting his sister in the hospital,

26:25 making muffins with his mother, and having

26:27 interesting breakfast conversations with dad,

26:30 because those memories don’t actually exist.

26:33 Jarhead 2 at least uses the narration to

26:37 bookend the movie and monologue about “hope.”

26:39 “And if we’re lucky, somewhere in all the fighting and dying, we discover hope.”

26:45 Jarhead 3: The Siege retains this voice over for

26:49 no real purpose beyond some vestigial brand

26:52 identity and is ultimately a fully sincere embrace of military propaganda.

26:57 It’s also pretty stupid.

26:58 “I was going to be number one,

27:01 kick some ass and show ‘em how it’s done.

27:03 Then dust off a bigger fish to fry”]

27:05 The budget has gotten even smaller:

27:07 this is more or less a bottle movie where all

27:09 the events take place inside one small building,

27:12 a US embassy in an unspecified middle eastern

27:15 country referred to only as “the Kingdom”,

27:17 though it looks suspiciously like somewhere in Eastern Europe,

27:22 possibly Bulgaria.

27:23 The embassy gets attacked for reasons,

27:25 and then the marines shoot everyone and win.

27:27 And then the voice over comes in, in the same place where the original was

27:31 like “I’ll always be a ‘jarhead’ (derogatory)" this one is like

27:35 “sometimes you get so caught up in thinking about

27:37 what you want to do that you don’t

27:39 see what you need to do,

27:41 which is take a career promotion within the US Marine Corp.”

27:44 “Convincing ourselves of what we want to do, what we have to do,

27:49 that sometimes we don’t see what we’re meant to do.” “Staff Sergeant Albright.”

27:58 [Explosion] Whatever shallow resistance was still present in

28:01 Jarhead 2 is here fully replaced with an overt love of the Corps.

28:05 That’s the message of Jarhead 3: the Marine Corps is dope and cool

28:08 and the only reason to not join is

28:11 because you’re okay with being a second-rate loser.

28:13 “I joined the Marines to be the best.”

28:16 This is, to me,

28:18 a particularly funny parallel with Swofford’s reason for joining,

28:21 which was, you know, kinda a really pivotal moment in that movie.

28:26 “Sir, I got lost on the way to college, sir!”]

28:30 Most reviews about this movie complain about

28:32 the fact that b-movie big guy Scott Adkins doesn’t get a fight scene,

28:36 which is a true fact about this movie,

28:39 and you might find that interesting, so there you go.

28:42 He plays this guy who is named...

28:46 Gunny Raines.

28:47 “All you care about is yourself and trying

28:49 to be some kind of goddamn rock star!”

28:51 ‘Gunny’ is the Marine Corps nickname for a gunnery sergeant,

28:54 I do know that, but I’m allowed to find it funny.

28:58 Didn’t you hear?

28:59 Comedy is legal again.

29:01 But with the whole “being the best” thing,

29:03 it sure seems like our protagonist's arc

29:05 is going to be learning to quell his ego,

29:07 learn some patience and be part of a team.

29:10 Throughout the whole movie,

29:11 his squadmates mockingly refer to him as a ‘cowboy’ because of his recklessness.

29:16 “You don’t always have to be first,

29:18 Albright.

29:18 Sometimes being a good marine means coming in last.”

29:24 But it swings the complete opposite.

29:26 When Gunny Raines dies, spoiler alert for Jarhead 3:

29:29 The Siege, the ambassador promotes

29:31 our protagonist, the new guy,

29:33 because he likes the same initiative the squad took issue with.

29:37 “He was the only one of you who tried

29:39 to do anything to stop this from happening.”

29:42 And so our protagonist spends the rest of the movie taking orders from no one,

29:46 being the first man in, being the best, and at the end of the

29:49 movie the Major says “hell of a job” and our hero gets Gunny’s old job.

29:53 Like Corporal Albright himself, the movie’s politics are too eager.

29:57 It loves the Marine Corps so much that it

30:00 shoots past propaganda and into the realm of fantasy.

30:03 Again, the villain of the movie is a super terrorist

30:05 who Albright explodes by shooting a propane tank.

30:10 [Explosion] Now that I think of it,

30:13 the movie goes out of its way to tell us that the team

30:15 are “security guards” who’ve “never seen combat”,

30:19 but man, they’re out here racking up kill counts we only see in video games.

30:27 [Gunfire] “I never shot my rifle.”

30:33 Otherwise this movie is boring and stupid and nothing of any note really

30:37 happens except the hot data analysis lady who looks kinda like Dee from

30:41 It’s Always Sunny is actually CIA so she’s secretly really good with a gun.

30:47 “Not gonna lie, man, that’s hot.”

30:49 Anyway, semper fi, I guess.

30:57 [Indistinct yelling] Jarhead 4, a direct to video movie from 2019,

31:00 drops the numbering in favour of box

31:02 art that aggressively references video game box art.

31:04 The movie is about a US-born fighter pilot

31:07 named Ronan who is the son of a senator and an Israeli citizen by Law of Return.

31:12 He lives in a massive house with a huge pool and a hot wife,

31:15 but then he goes off on a mission of some description in Assyrian airspace where

31:20 he’s shot down by an Iranian controlled Shiite militia

31:23 headed by a man known only as The Ghost.

31:26 Now, it might seem like the field of sunflowers that he crash lands

31:29 in is an odd choice, not really evocative of Syria, but fun fact:

31:33 due to their tolerance for heat and general pest resistance,

31:36 sunflowers are a popular crop for vegetable oil production globally,

31:40 from Syria to Bulgaria.

31:41 So, you know, props to the movie for not just playing to Western

31:44 stereotypes about what Syria looks like by setting

31:47 the whole thing in a gravel quarry.

31:49 Most of the movie follows an international special forces

31:52 squad who were in Israel as part of a training program and are sent to invade

31:56 Syria to rescue Ronan mostly because they happen to be pretty close by.

32:01 And so a member of that squad, Torres,

32:03 shares protagonist duties and is actually who we start the movie with.

32:07 That’s a pretty loaded setup, but this movie,

32:11 more than even the previous two, is basically a Call of Duty campaign.

32:15 It’s not a very coherently told story, mostly just a lot of scenes

32:19 populated with a roster of unmemorable characters who do soldier things.

32:24 At this point the only vestige of Jarhead that

32:27 remains is the use of Courier as a typeface.

32:30 Funny enough the movie is pretty inaccurate with the military stuff:

32:34 dress codes are all over the place, unbelievable things happen,

32:38 chain of command doesn’t really seem to exist,

32:41 but spiritually this is absolutely reverential to

32:45 the nebulous concept of the Warrior and the modern military aesthetic.

32:50 If we’re looking at all the stuff that Jason and his pals were yelling

32:54 at the civilians to make them feel like soldiers,

32:57 all the stuff about grabbing victory and picking on the

33:00 weakest zebra because you want to know that the guy beside you is a survivor,

33:04 this is easily the most in line with that way of thinking.

33:10 “I like hair on my balls”

33:11 Despite the movie's emphasis on Israel,

33:13 and the villain being a militant anti-Zionist,

33:16 the film doesn’t even have the courtesy to give us any incendiary politics.

33:20 It’s just the usual lines about Israel’s right to defend itself.

33:24 America and Israel have a very complicated relationship, deeply

33:28 entwined with politics, military, and money,

33:31 and there’s a whole philosophical angle where Jewish Zionists are trying to do a

33:35 Leibensraum and Christian Zionists are trying to do the End of Evangelion and

33:39 manufacture prophecy that they believe will herald the return of Jesus Christ,

33:42 and Jarhead 4 is part of that soft power system

33:46 that has led to and enabled an ongoing genocide,

33:49 but it is not a particularly significant part in any way.

33:54 As propaganda it is tepid and insubstantial:

33:57 we’ve already spent more effort explaining it than the movie spent doing it.

34:01 This isn’t Wolf Warrior 2,

34:03 a movie where a starving African child sits at a table

34:06 piled high with Chinese goods,

34:08 flanked by a kindly Chinese soldier, and stares straight

34:11 into the camera while eating fruit.

34:13 Jarhead: Law of Return is, rather, a generic troop movie

34:17 that could be set basically anywhere that was

34:19 willing to toss the production some tax credits.

34:22 Jarhead 3 at least pretended to have an arc for its protagonist,

34:25 but the characters in Jarhead 4 are entirely static.

34:29 Nothing is learned, nobody changes and nothing is even really gained.

34:33 Jarhead 4 has ostensibly the exact same climax as Jarhead 2,

34:37 with a mission to rescue a hostage,

34:39 but while Jarhead 2 ratcheted up the stakes by putting their

34:42 Malala Yousafzai proxy in the enemy stronghold,

34:46 Jarhead 4 has them intercept the convey so we can have

34:48 a shoot out in the middle of a dirt road.

34:57 [Gunfire] So “the good guys” win the gunfight,

35:00 find the hostage and the movie tries to convince us its over.

35:04 But we know it isn’t over, because The Ghost hasn’t been dealt with.

35:07 So you know something is coming,

35:09 but what you probably weren’t expecting was for The

35:11 Ghost to snipe Torres dead and then walk away, never to be seen again.

35:16 And here’s the final word on that.

35:20 “What the fuck just happened?”

35:23 Same same.

35:24 And then the credits then roll to a

35:26 sad cover of “When Johnny Comes Marching Home”,

35:27 so I guess this was a movie about sacrifice or something.

35:41 [minor key,

35:41 downtempo singing] “we’ll give them a heart welcome then, hurrah, hurrah”

35:41 So there’s a pretty clear divide here,

35:43 with Jarhead in one column and the other three movies in the other.

35:47 It’s not just a shift in budget,

35:49 but a seeming wholesale flip of the underlying philosophy,

35:52 from derogatory Jarhead to proud Jarhead.

35:56 So, who are the guys who did this?

35:58 Who was so offended by Jake Gyllenhaal’s performance

36:01 that they just had to “fix” it?

36:05 “Do you want Jarhead sequels?

36:07 ‘Cus this is how you get Jarhead sequels.”

36:10 Okay, so, I lied to you, but maybe you already figured that out.

36:15 The whole story about a couple producers seeing Jarhead and getting bent out of

36:18 shape?

36:19 Completely fictional.

36:19 Didn’t happen.

36:20 We made it up.

36:22 In fact it’s not even original,

36:23 it’s a folk story recycled from the 80s to try and explain

36:26 how Rambo went from PTSD-addled drifter coming into lethal conflict with NIMBYs

36:32 to re-litigating Vietnam into an American victory

36:35 and running guns for the Mujahideen.

36:38 It’s also not true with Rambo, it’s a story that’s literally never been true.

36:43 So, what’s the actual story here?

36:45 If you figured out it was a fib,

36:47 the thing that tipped you off was probably the moment I

36:50 said that Roth and Beach have 120 movie credits and

36:53 were making as many as seven movies a year,

36:56 because that’s a number so absurd that it means one of two things:

36:59 either these guys are fake and I made them up too,

37:02 or these are not the kind of guys

37:04 who care at all about what Jarhead did or didn’t say, only what sells.

37:10 If you scrutinize the movies from their filmography the

37:12 pattern becomes very obvious almost instantly.

37:16 Python 2, Lake Placid 2, Boogyman 3, The Grudge 3,

37:20 Messengers 2, Wrong Turn 3, Lake Placid 3,

37:23 Lake Placid: The Final Chapter, Sniper:

37:26 Legacy, Sniper: Ghost Shooter, Doom: Annihilation.

37:29 Oh, but it’s not just sequels, it’s also knockoffs, like Python, Falcon Down,

37:34 Post Impact, and the absolutely inexplicable Grendel,

37:37 which was quickly and cheaply

37:39 produced to siphon off of Zumeckis’ animated Beowulf,

37:42 which was itself a massive flop.

37:44 I mean, it’s gotta be that, right?

37:46 The only other nearby option is the 2005 Canadian Icelandic co-production

37:51 Beowulf& Grendel starring Sarh Polley and Gerard Butler,

37:54 which is this really slow

37:55 moving naturalistic re-telling of the myth without the supernatural elements,

37:59 and it only made like $92,000 in theatres because

38:03 it basically only ran the festival circuit because

38:06 it’s a dreary Canadian art film,

38:09 and that’s all this fake ass imposter country can produce.

38:13 Sorry, where were we.

38:15 Right, Post Impact, starring Dean Cain, I actually have that one on DVD,

38:18 from back when Dean Cain was just a sad wash out and not a sad racist wash out.

38:24 These movies, this strata of movie, you already know it and love it,

38:28 just from the generic ass titles,

38:30 but if you’re not familiar I can sum it up in one clip.

38:33 “This is really screwed up, I mean to get killed for seven bucks an hour.

38:37 This was everyone’s first night on this job, this is bullshit.”

38:41 “Looks like everyone’s last night.” “That’s cold, dude.”

38:45 Now, hold on to your asses, ‘cus this next fact is gonna make your asses,

38:49 like, fall off, or something,

38:51 but would you believe me if I told you that

38:54 Philip J Roth just happens to have emigrated to Bulgaria?

38:58 Would it shock you to learn that UFO International has a back lot

39:02 in Bulgaria with a “generic Middle Eastern town” and an “Afghan village

39:06 that nevertheless can easily play as a Medieval or Latin American village”?

39:10 No, no, of course you wouldn’t.

39:13 This is all so mundane that it’s borderline

39:16 offensive that I’d even pretend it’s a surprise.

39:19 The other party in all this is Universal 1440 Entertainment,

39:23 which is just Universal’s direct-to-video arm.

39:26 Universal owns the rights to Jarhead,

39:28 no one ever “bought the rights” just to turn it into pro-military propaganda.

39:32 The hidden hand here is a guy named Glenn Ross, who was the General Manager and

39:37 Executive Vice President of Universal 1440 from

39:41 2005 up until his retirement in 2024.

39:44 Glen’s whole job, which he was evidently quite good

39:47 at given that he held the job for 19 years at, you know, Universal,

39:52 was to find budget conscious

39:55 opportunities amongst Universal’s existing holdings.

39:57 “I mean what we were designed to do is build brands within the studio.

40:01 So if you look at the studio’s IP, intellectual property rights,

40:04 for films that were released theatrically any time in the last 50 years, really,

40:09 and see if there’s anything there that we could do a sequel to or a prequel to”

40:14 The main strategy here, which was viable until shockingly recently,

40:18 was a primary focus on direct media sales, which means DVDs and BluRays

40:22 sold through budget-conscious retailers, which means WalMart.

40:26 To the amazement of absolutely no one,

40:29 there is no wacky story and no wild scheming.

40:32 How you get Jarhead sequels is simply that there

40:35 exists a machine to sell movies via physical discs

40:38 that relies on making frictionless films that

40:41 will appeal to a hypothetical median WalMart

40:44 Shopper in Ohio, and that hypothetical just happens to look a lot like this guy.

40:50 “Why are you still here filling water up?

40:53 Hurry up!

40:53 Fill up water, fast.

40:55 Move out, fast.

40:57 Pack your shit up, fast.”

41:00 The machine wasn’t built to “fix” Jarhead,

41:04 because it doesn’t need to be.

41:06 This is just what the machine does.

41:09 “Grab your fucking shit and go.”

41:12 In talking about the thematic and structural similarities between the movies,

41:16 there’s a really, really good chance that not a single one of

41:19 the sequels was even written to be a sequel,

41:22 but was just a preexisting script pulled from

41:25 a massive pile because it checked the

41:27 boxes of troops, Middle East, R-Rated,

41:29 with a breakdown estimate under $5 million US.

41:33 Hence all the aesthetic similarities to Jarhead

41:36 being extremely superficial things like titles.

41:39 One last factor in all of this, in the 2010s with the rise of the

41:42 Marvel Cinematic Universe and Netflix the mid-budget

41:45 movie all but disappeared as the

41:47 studios went functionally all-in on four-quadrant blockbusters.

41:51 A big part of how you get Jarhead sequels is that

41:54 you just don’t get Jarheads in the first place anymore.

41:58 Outside a smattering of movies from known indie darling directors

42:01 and smaller studios the budgets for movies has aggressively polarized,

42:06 movies are either insanely expensive or extremely low budget.

42:10 This shift happened very quickly, leading to a lot

42:13 more of Universal’s bottom line riding on Glen’s work at 1440,

42:17 leading to Glen pulling out literally anything they’ve

42:21 got that can put something recognizable on a box:

42:24 everything’ gotta be a franchise now, whether it makes sense or not.

42:28 So, yeah, maybe I won’t be terribly surprised if

42:32 in 2027 Paramount Famous Productions and UFO

42:34 International release Annihilation 2:

42:36 Absolution starring the artist formerly known as Jojo Siwa

42:41 alongside a couple character actors you recognize but can’t

42:43 quite place and the whole thing is a

42:45 bottle episode set in a suspiciously Bulgarian part of Florida,

42:49 or maybe at a “6400 square foot

42:52 arctic facility that is surfaced with concrete to allow easy snow coverage”.

42:57 Just kidding, it’ll be an AI slopfest starring literally no one.

43:05 “Coming this fall.” “A movie literally no one asked for.” “A bunch of AI slop,

43:14 sloshed together for your eyeballs.”

43:18 Okay, okay, we’re not gonna do that, we’re not gonna do that, I’ll spare you.

43:21 This was originally just a one-off gag about some slop I found on YouTube,

43:25 but the longer I thought

43:27 about it the more I realized it’s relevant,

43:30 because we’re talking about machines, right?

43:32 We’re talking about this machine that just, like,

43:35 creates propaganda by virtue of thoughtlessness, right?

43:39 It’s just trying to appeal to a hypothetical audience and so it

43:42 generates this military propaganda as a matter

43:46 of the frictionless path through culture.

43:49 AI’s gonna calcify that.

43:51 It’s just going to endlessly regurgitate what already exists.

43:55 Every movie from here to the heat-death of the

43:58 universe is just going to star the cast of The Force Awakens.

44:03 So the way this is going is we’re going

44:06 to get more and more propaganda that’s going

44:08 to reenforce the hegemonic structures of our society,

44:11 and it’s just going to feed itself.

44:14 All of the stuff that we’ve already made is going to be

44:17 the fuel to make even more of the exactly same stuff.

44:22 That’s just movies now.

44:24 That’s just how it’s going to work.

44:28 Forever.

44:29 So, anyway, I guess that’s a kinda grim, bleak way of looking at things.

44:35 But I dunno, maybe things aren’t so hot right now.

44:39 Maybe a video about propaganda and how it gets thoughtlessly produced

44:46 Maybe it doesn’t need a chipper final note.

44:50 Maybe it should just let the credits roll, and,

44:54 like, if you wanna watch more Folding Ideas here’s… here’s some links.