Deny man food and he will find his own. Deny him water and he will seek it. Deny him religion and he'll discover salvation in his mother's basement.
Deny him many things and he will thrive, but deny him purpose and he will drown. Now he has nothing to struggle against.
In Sam Mendes' Jarhead, Marine sniper Jim Swoffer's purpose is to kill and to copulate. War and the Marine Corps offered the promise of both. In the end, they not only deny him the satisfaction of either but leave him with the searing and irremovable knowledge that he never would have had them anyway.
Blame some of it on his timing. Swoffer's war was Operation Desert Storm, and unlike Vietnam or even Grenada, it was a conflict where the speed of the military machine had finally outstripped the pace of a sniper's bullet.
A Marine Sniper is trained to pick out a shot at 1,000 yards and, with his rifle, give the target a new eye socket if ordered. It's a skill acquired through months of dehumanization and subsequent mechanization. It is a great power made totally meaningless by the strength and immediacy of an air-strike. What good is killing one man silently, when a radio call will burn 500 before a rifle's chamber is cleared?
If all this is true, then why did the Marines make Swoffer a Sniper? There might be a philosophical response for that, but the sensible answer is that one over-prepares for war and not every piece of equipment is necessary.
Swoffer is equipment brought to destroy an enemy. That the enemy is Saddam Hussein is unimportant -- it could have been the Mongols. What matters is that there is one. "Without my rifle, I am nothing. Without me, my rifle is nothing," Swoffer repeats. Except in this war, where he and his rifle are neglected and left in the sun to rust, they're both nothing.
Essentially, Jarhead is a picture of boredom and Freudian frustration. The Marines are creatures of muscle, testosterone and ennui, the way the desert is a beast of heat, sand and oil. While waiting for the war to come, they train, hydrate, shoot at imaginary targets, practice self-release over the girlfriends they have left behind, dehydrate and relieve themselves some more. They do everything, except what they're meant to. As Swoffer, Jake Gyllenhaal competently communicates the dissatisfaction and tedium of war.
When the war finally starts, Swoffer and his platoon do nothing but follow the trail of air strikes. Sometimes they're subjected to friendly fire or enemy mortar fire, but they never meet the enemy. They pass by a fleet of cars that were bombed trying to get away, dead bodies charred like black statues. They see the oil wells burning and stare into the beauty of the destruction. A horse walks by, and Swoffer touches it, amazed by the animal's presence.
In the end, Swoffer never points his rifle against the enemy. That he reads Camus' The Stranger early in the film is poignant, but I think Macbeth is also appropriate. Life is just a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing. The formative part of Swoffer's identity was forged in four days and four hours in the desert. It amounted to nothing, even though God knows he endured so much.
War movies glorify conflict by celebrating suffering and sacrifice. Jarhead has both, but it doesn't celebrate them. It mourns.
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