Steve the Owl's Blog

This blog post will conclude my five-part series on Citizen Kane, the greatest movie ever made, with a look at the man behind the movie, and what led him to such greatness: both the positives and the negatives. (A lot of the information from this blog comes from the documentary The Battle Over Citizen Kane.)

Early Success

Orson Welles was born in 1915 in Wisconsin. His family life was filled with turmoil, with his mother dying when he was nine, and his often-absent father dying six years later. Young Orson would respond to this grief by throwing himself into the world of art. Later in life, he described himself at this point as “Spoiled in a different way. When I would play, people said they never heard such playing. When I would paint, they said they never saw such painting. When I would write, they said that they never read such writing.” There is no question that Orson Welles was extremely talented in many fields, including, but not limited to, acting, writing, directing, magic, oratory, voiceover work, political activism, and public relations. He was a man of large appetite in nearly every sense of the word, and he put a lot of that energy into his art.

A Visionary on the Stage

These skills came together for Orson Welles in 1936. As part of the Works Progress Administration, a Depression-era jobs program, Welles was hired by the Federal Theatre Project, which was designed to find work for unemployed actors. Welles went to New York, and he hired actors to perform the works of Shakespeare radically re-imagined. His first effort was to move Macbeth to Haiti, in a play that became known as Voodoo Macbeth. This is where his penchant for risk-taking appears. While most directors are content with showing Shakespeare in its classical setting, others try to make the play work in different surroundings to make the play more relevant. Sometimes, this works better than others, but when it works, it can be an amazing sight to see.

Not only was Welles taking a risk by moving his play to Haiti, but he was also taking a risk by his choices in actors. One of the actors acknowledged that the literacy of most of the actors (himself included) made performing Macbeth very difficult to learn, regardless of the setting. However, the anticipation in New York could not have been greater, and all of the movers and shakers and opinion-makers made the trip to Harlem to witness this play and the vision of its 20-year-old director, and it was met with wild acclaim.

Then, in 1937, Welles turned to his next project, a re-imagining of Julius Caesar, this time set in Nazi Germany with lights as the only set decoration. Welles furiously wrote and re-wrote the version of the script that would appear on the stage. However, the first night, everyone was shocked to learn that there was absolutely no curtain call. Worried that this play would fail, Welles then re-inserted a scene with the murder of a minor character. When the play was performed with this scene, the scene would always get a standing ovation of about three minutes. In the words of the man who played the assassinated character, “Everyone surrounded me in this menacing way, and then the lights died, and the organ hit all of the bass notes, signifying that my character was dead, and it stopped the show. To use an old showbiz expression, it literally stopped the show.” This performance of Julius Caesar is often mentioned as the most important staging of Shakespeare in the history of the American stage.

A New Medium

Welles’ relationship with the Federal Theatre Project ended after Julius Ceasar, and Orson Welles formed the Mercury Theater. However, in order to fund his plays, Orson began to work in radio, often performing at both CBS and NBC. His schedule was so frantic that he found a loophole in city law, and hired ambulances to rush him from one studio to the next. (New York has since made a law that only sick people can hire ambulances.) By the fall of 1938, he landed a series with CBS, The Mercury Playhouse. Similar to his work on the stage, he arranged classical works of literature and drama.

His most famous radio effort came October 30, 1938. His show ran Sunday evenings against the much more popular Edgar Bergen/Charlie McCarthy Hour. He decided to stage War of the Worlds, based on the H.G. Wells novel written at the turn of the century. However, he decided to do so through his understanding of the medium: Rather than re-enact the story as a straight drama, Welles knew that Edgar Bergen often took his first commercial break at 12 minutes past the hour. People were known to flip the dial (thus demonstrating that channel surfing predates TV), and this was when the first news bulletin interrupted the music being played at CBS. The news bulletins told the story of a Martian invasion, which led to widespread panic. Welles, despite warnings from CBS top brass, refused to interrupt the show and tell people that it was fake.

Risk and Reward

There was public outcry, and people thought Welles was finished. He apologized for the scare while admitting that he was surprised that a book that had been around for 40 years would cause such a panic. However, the play was a hit, and Welles got a sponsor, and a year later, he got a contract to Hollywood, with his first movie being the greatest ever made. A movie that is so great that, on another message board when someone called American Beauty the greatest movie ever made by a first-time director, and I gently pointed out that Citizen Kane was Welles’ first movie, and he said that it was a movie that was so good that he forgot it was Welles’ first.

I am not suggesting that it is necessary to go to such great lengths, but this shows the power of taking chances. While you may not always be successful, you will learn what works and what doesn’t work, and your work will be greatly rewarded. So, what chances are you going to take today?

Welcome back to my blog. It has been a crazy week as I started my most recent semester at Temple University in my Ph.D. program. Now that I have some time off, I thought I would come back to the blog, and continue my series on Citizen Kane. As you have realized by now, I cannot find enough nice things to say about this movie. However, almost as compelling as the movie itself is the story behind the movie. If you have never seen the movie The Battle Over Citizen Kane, initially presented as a PBS documentary for American Experience, it is a fascinating tale in its own right. One of the things that makes the story so compelling is the behind the scenes battle between Orson Welles, the movie’s auteur, and William Randolph Hearst, the primary inspiration for the movie. The narrator says that “each man was a genius in his own right, and the battle would ultimately destroy them both.”

An Unwilling Subject

In 1939, 24-year-old Orson Welles was given the greatest contract ever given to someone who had never directed a movie: a two-picture deal with RKO Radio Pictures giving him complete artistic control, including what every director truly desires: absolute control over the final cut. Welles made his name as a theater and radio director in New York, and the event that probably gave him his greatest notoriety with the general public was his radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’ (no relation) classic novel The War of the Worlds.

He did not want to go to Hollywood just to make blockbusters; he wanted to make truly great art. His first idea was to make an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s novel The Heart of Darkness, only he wanted the camera to represent one of the leading actors. However, the concept faltered, and he was left without a movie. He attempted another remake, but there were issues with the rights, and ultimately, Welles decided that he should make a movie based on an original concept that he could get behind.

Finally, he had his break: Herman Mankiewicz, a friend of Kane’s who used to visit San Simeon, Hearst’s massive estate, had a falling out, and he decided to tell Welles some of his ideas for a story based on Hearst. Originally, the idea was a sort of docu-drama, but Welles and Mankiewicz, agreed to fictionalize the story, and draw examples from several tycoons and some events from Welles’ own life.

However, Hearst ultimately found out about the movie, and he did everything in his power to kill it. Threatening to use 15 years of Hollywood gossip he suppressed at the request of the major studios, as well as playing on the anti-Semitism of the day, Hearst’s pressure ultimately led to Louis B. Mayer offering RKO $800,000 (the cost of the movie) to buy the negatives with the intent of burning them. He also tried to put pressure on Orson Welles by questioning his sexual orientation, his relationship with actress Dolores Del Rio, who was not yet divorced when the relationship began, questioning Welles’ patriotism (He failed his Army draft physical due to a heart murmur, but he was only 25 at the time, so he was vulnerable on this front.), and red-baiting, ultimately leading to an FBI file.

Welles Fights Back

However, Welles and everyone involved with the movie knew that they had something great. Welles was convinced that the audiences would love the movie if only they had a chance to see it. So, he countered with an offer of $1 million to buy the film to distribute it himself, and the threat of a lawsuit if RKO ever did sell the negatives. He then pled his case on the grounds of free speech.

Ultimately, I don’t think I need to tell you the end result. Welles won his argument and the film was released on May 1, 1941, five days before his twenty-sixth birthday. However, orders came from on high that no Hearst newspaper would ever accept advertisements for Citizen Kane, no Hearst newspaper would ever review Citizen Kane, and pressure was put on the movie theaters not to show any RKO movies because of their association with the movie. Ultimately, the movie had a decent box office run, earning $650,000 in its initial release (still the sixth-highest of the year) due in part to the problems with distribution.

However, it had won numerous critics’ awards, and the reviews were overwhelmingly positive (it is one of the few movies to earn a 100% rating from the website Rotten Tomatoes), so Welles hoped for vindication at Oscar time. The movie was nominated for nine Academy Awards (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Actor, Best Cinematography, Best Editing, Best Music, Best Sound, and Best Art Direction), and Welles was nominated for four Oscars (sharing the nomination for Best Original Screenplay with Mankiewicz). Unfortunately, there was only one win, for Best Original Screenplay. The movie was quietly retired to RKO’s vault and largely forgotten.

Greatness Cannot Be Denied

However, in 1956, several events collided to gave Citizen Kane its due place in cinematic history. That year, RKO decided to release its video vault to television, and the movie found a receptive audience. Also, European filmmakers, most notably from the French New Wave, sighted the movie as a tremendous influence. Ultimately, critics started to remember the movie, and in 1962, when the British magazine Sight & Sound made its decennial list of the greatest movies of all time, Citizen Kane was named #1, a spot that it has held in each successive listing. It has been at or near the top of virtually every list of great movies. While Welles himself never enjoyed that level of success again, in part because he never won the creative control that he needed, Citizen Kane stands for all time as a monument to great cinema.

Welcome to the third part of my series on the lessons of Citizen Kane. Today, I will talk about one of the key lessons in terms of personal development from this movie. While this is a movie that has a generally downward progression, there is still a key lesson that can be learned.

Declaration of Principles

One of the key elements of foreshadowing early in the movie comes just after Charles Foster Kane takes control of the New York Daily Inquirer. In the movie, it is a struggling daily paper that Kane’s guardian and executor of his fortune foreclosed. Kane decides that he wants to try to run the newspaper, and he brings his best friend, Jedediah Leland (Joseph Cotten), who comes with Kane to work as a dramatic critic. Early in the movie, Kane is looking for something to make his paper unique, and he finally comes up with his answer: My Declaration of Principles. In the scene, he promises to give the news accurately and fairly, and to be a champion for the working man.

Jed Leland, however, warned Kane that he shouldn’t make promises unless he intends to keep them. Kane assures him that these would be kept. Leland serves as a moral compass, and he is my favorite character in the movie. At one point, Kane has a party celebrating the Inquirer‘s ranking as the highest-circulated paper in New York and buying all of the staff of the New York Chronicle. In the middle of the party, Kane is celebrating, and Leland is clearly worried. When Mr. Bernstein asks why, Leland explains that it is because he wonders whether or not Kane is keeping his principles, and whether or not the Chronicle reporters are really dedicated to the policies of Kane, or whether they will change him without him even knowing it.

The Hard Lessons of Principles

(NOTE: This part of the post contains spoilers. If you want to avoid them, please scroll to the end of the post.)

The next major point in the relationship between Kane and Leland comes 18 years later in 1916, when Charles Foster Kane ran for governor against entrenched political boss Jim W. Gettys. Leland is the first character to give a speech for the Kane campaign, calling him “that fighting liberal” and the man to clean up after the corruption of the Gettys Administration. By the end of the campaign, Kane is the heavy favorite. However, Leland seems to hold back his enthusiasm at the beginning of the speech, only giving in to the thrill of the crowd later.

While Kane is the heavy favorite, Gettys is not licked yet. Instead, he knows that Kane has been visiting a young girl, and whether there was an inappropriate relationship or not (which is somewhat vague in the movie), it certainly looked bad, and a story is planted about them. After the election, Leland tells him that he talks about the people as if he owns them, and he says that he wants to move to Chicago because he doesn’t want to be there after the election.

Then, when Kane is with his second wife, she premieres the Chicago Opera House. The rest of the reporters for the Chicago Inquirer give her positive reviews, but Leland is passed out in the back room. Kane and Mr. Bernstein walk in, and they see that he has started to write a bad review. Kane finishes the review Leland wanted to write, and fired him.

In another flashback, we find out that Leland was given a $25,000 severance check (Keep in mind that this part of the story took place in the 1920′s, so this was a substantial amount of money.), which Leland delivers to him ripped up with the Declaration of Principles. Kane tears up the Declaration of Principles.

The Lesson

This part of the movie shows the beginning of the deterioration of Kane’s life. However, the real point to me is what that moment says about Jed Leland, and about people in real life. Leland did the right thing. He went into the newspaper business as something that is described early in the movie as somewhat of a “college boy prank.” However, Leland is really an idealist at heart with unshakeable principles.

His true loyalty to the movie isn’t to Charles Foster Kane, or to himself, but to principles. While there, he is the one who always worries when principles are at risk, and he is willing to sacrifice in order to maintain his principles when they are challenged. When he is shown later in the movie, he is someone of a genial temperament who is at piece with the decisions he made in his life. So, no matter what it is that you want to do in life, never forget your own Declaration of Principles, but remember to hold to them like Jed Leland, not Charles Foster Kane.

I am an admitted film geek. I didn’t watch movies very much when I was younger, preferring the nature of TV. While I still love TV, I have definitely found that I can devour movies and TV box sets through the power of DVD.

How It Started

I am someone who has never been quick to adopt new technology. (For example, I bought cassettes as recently as 2002, and I always seemed to get a new video game console about a year before the newer model came out.) Perhaps part of this is the idea of never knowing which one will catch on. After all, BetaMax and LaserDisc were both considered to be technically superior to VHS, but neither was able to knock VHS off the top of the movie heap. That, and I just never saw the point of paying a premium price when what I currently have is just as good.

However, my jump from VHS to DVD actually came in 2003. I had just gotten activated and my college career was on hold until my tour of duty in Iraq was done. I had paid $20 in raffle tickets for a drawing for a DVD player at school. To my great surprise, I was the big winner. However, I could not use the DVD player until I got home, so I let my parents use it until then.

When we were overseas, we were able to get fairly decent access to technology considering our circumstances, and every tent had at least one DVD player in it. While I personally did not see the need to buy another one to add to the pile, I always told the people who had the DVD players there that they would be free to use any DVD’s I bought from the PX.

A Change in Perspective

In the desert, you have nothing but time on your hands. I used this time to finish reading a lot of books, but my speed reading abilities meant that I would go through books pretty quickly, and I would always have to go to the PX or wait for books my parents mailed me from so I could get more. (In time, I unlearned speed reading, but not deliberately, so I relearned this skill after I returned from Iraq and resumed academics.)

Because we had nothing but time on our hands, we would often watch the deleted scenes. Then, there were other times when I would find myself watching all kinds of DVD extras, such as commentaries, making-of documentaries, and other features that any DVD lover knows by heart.

The realization of the change in shift came to me in November. One of the movies that I saw in the PX that day was the DVD for the director’s cut of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. I am not a big Trekkie (I don’t say this to insult Trekkies, just to be descriptive.), as I have only seen two or three of the movies, and about half a dozen episodes (all versions combined). When I first saw this movie a year and a half before, the big things that I remembered about the movie at the time were the slow pace and Lt. Ilia. Normally, this would be enough to steer me away, but I noticed that the movie had hours and hours of special features. Because of this, I was more appreciative of the pace and bought the movie.

The Value of Special Features

I don’t have a desire to be a film director, but I have found the features very fascinating, and some of the best have taught me a lot about the art and skill of making movies. Sometimes, I miss the metaphor, or something in the background, and it is interesting to learn about everything that went into the effort and onto the screen. While I don’t go to the theater much (the last movie I saw in the theater was Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix), I have found that the special features are one of the things that I look forward to the most when I buy a DVD, whether of a movie, or a TV box set.

In your business, what are your unlikely sources of education? I would love to hear from you. If you enjoyed this, please share it with your friends.

I love movies. One of the things that is so great about movies, and a lot of great art, is the way that it so eloquently describes our conditions and our dreams. I have seen a lot of movies in many genres. One of those genres that I have thought about recently is the romantic comedy. Some versions of romantic comedies are geared towards a heavily female audience, and they get the sometimes undeserved label of “chick flick.”

The Need for Competition

My favorite romantic comedy of all time has to be The Baxter. It was released in 2005 starring Michael Showalter in a movie that examines what happens to the other guy in romantic comedies. In this movie, the other guy is referred to as a “baxter,” the man who is destined to be dumped. This got me thinking: how many romantic comedies that I have seen have the other person who is destined to be dumped because the leading lady is already in a relationship at the beginning of the movie? In Bridget Jones’s Diary, it is a battle between Daniel Cleaver and Mark Darcy; in You’ve Got Mail, it’s Joe Fox vs. the Greg Kinnear character. In The Baxter, there are actually multiple competing love interests going on involving people who must get hurt. However, this movie is a satire of the genre. I realize that there are times that there are multiple people who love the same person, which means that someone’s feelings will get hurt. However, there are also plenty of relationships that start between people who happen to be single when they meet.

The End… Or The Beginning?

At the end of Bridget Jones’s Diary, the words “The End” are crossed out and replaced by “The Beginning.” However, how many romantic comedies end things right there when the couple have found each other? With the prevalence of divorce, I wonder how many people decided that the reason why they couldn’t be in the relationship any more is because the “new relationship excitement” is gone, and they become junkies for that feeling. However, here is the problem with that line of thought: real life is often what happens after we lose that initial excitement and decide to commit to a lifetime.

Why This Happens

I don’t think that romantic comedies are doing this with a goal of sabotaging the institution of marriage. I think that they are trying to present a storybook fantasy, and they skip over just what “and they all lived happily ever after” really means. So, why do they end there? Because, from a cinematic point of view, the interesting part is the chase. There are some movies and TV shows that illustrate the difficulty of this thinking, although it seems more prevalent in TV where the artists get years to develop a character, as opposed to a few hours.

So, if you are looking for that fairy tale moment, never forget that these movies are meant to convey a fantasy. There is nothing wrong with fantasy at all, but we have to be able to tell the difference between the two, and decide every day to make the commitment to make our marriages work.

One of the greatest movies of the last 20 years is The Matrix, the sci-fi/action thriller styarring Keanu Reeves and Laurence Fishburne as humans leading the struggle agaisnt Aritifical Intelligence gone haywire. I think that the reason for this movie’s success is because it is a movie that did not want to be a silly action movie that was just like everything else out there. There are deep and powerful questions about philosophy, theology, and the nature of truth in this tale of a fake world that enslaves humanity.

A Quick Disclaimer

I am not arguing that capitalism is an evil system. Capitalism by itself is neither good nor evil, but a tool that can be used for either one. I am not a utopian at all, and I consider myself to be a Keynsian in part because I believe that John Maynard Keynes made the best effort to be practical in his theories.

Are We Slaves?

The key theme to The Matrix is that we live in a fantasy world that enslaves us. One of the goals of network marketing is to give us time freedom so we can do the things we want to do. When we think of the path most of us take, we come out of college tens of thousands of dollars in debt, buy a house with a 30-year mortgage, and spend, spend, spend to the point where almost all of our money goes to lenders before all is done. In that sense, I think that the idea of building a business to free ourselves from our financial traps is definitely an appealing one.

Where the Analogy Doesn’t Hold

In the movie, humans worried about the impact of artificial intelligence, and they tried to hide the sun in order to disable the solar-powered Sentients. However, they found out that humans emitted all of the bioelectricity and heat that they needed. At this point, they decided to grow humans and keep them in a virtual reality fantasy (The Matrix), killing them and using them for their energy when they die in the Matrix. In one sense, I think that we are distracted by too much entertainment and oblivious to the truth of our economic picture.

However, I think that there is the ultimate fact that a lot of people who start their own business are not doing so with the thought of breaking away from the working world. Personally, I love teaching, and as much as I enjoy the business, it is not the same thing as teaching about early church history, and I want to continue to do my job, but have the ability to choose the job where I want to work, not the one where I have to. Then again, if everyone left the workforce to open their own business, we wouldn’t have anyone to do the things that makes society go, so I think that it is better that some people decide that they want to keep their day job and run their business because they love both, and that is the real promise of network and Internet marketing

One of the things that has fascinated me the most about questions of faith is the group of people who have tried to profit off of the subculture of that faith. When I discuss the “Christian subculture,” I do not mean this as a commentary on whether or not Christianity is an assumed belief in America, or whether or not people who buy movies and shop at businesses explicitly labeled as “Christian” is a sign of sincerity of belief, simply examining the question of those who make a subculture around Christianity.

Christian Subculture Gone Mainstream?

Part of the reason for the rise of Christian subculture was the mainstream success of two major Hollywood movies in the middle of the last decade: The Passion of the Christ (2004) and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (2005). With the success of these movies, there were efforts to find other movies that would cash in on this market that they felt had been underserved.

Because of this, there have been several movies with Christian themes with a much wider release than the typical release for such boutique studios as Cloud Ten Pictures. These movies include The Second Chance (2006) and Fireproof (2008). These are two movies that seem to approach the Christian subculture in a very different way.

Perhaps the movie that seems to fall into the biggest stereotypes regarding “Christian stereotypes” is Fireproof. It stars Kirk Cameron, who may be best known for his days as a teen actor on Growing Pains who started doing more and more movies with religious themes in the late 1990′s. This movie follows a firefighter captain (Caleb Holt) whose marriage is slipping away. On his father’s advice, Caleb decides to follow “The Love Dare,” a 40-day challenge to save his marriage. Midway through the movie, Caleb has a born-again moment where he converts to Christianity, and he continues with The Love Dare, despite the fact that it does not seem to work.

The Second Chance stars Michael W. Smith, a gospel musician in his first acting role, as Ethan Jenkins, the son of a pastor of an affluent suburban church that partners with an inner-city church. Because the board of trustees does not like his brash style, so they send him to the inner-city church, Second Chance, on an internship of sorts with the streetwise pastor.

The Key Ingredient

Perhaps the biggest difference between these two movies is the quality. I think that the key difference is that one focused on being a good movie first and foremost while the other wanted to be a good Christian movie first and foremost. The cruel irony is that this approach means that the movie that wanted to be a good movie became the one that presented the message in a better way. The surprising thing is that the musician turned out to be the far better actor. In Fireproof, the scenes where anger is supposed to be convey end up being unintentionally funny. While it may be unfair to Cameron, it is still difficult for me to see Mikey Seaver as an authority figure in some of the scenes where Caleb interacts with the other firefighters. Size may be part of it, but it seems like there is a presence that is missing. Even more vexing is the fact that there are several times where the married couple are supposed to be in tears, but they just can’t pull it off, but somehow the director managed to coax tears out of them in the climactic scene, which only made me wonder why he couldn’t do it with the others.

While Michael W. Smith may not be experienced, he displayed a full range of emotion, and he had an impeccable sense of dramatic timing. The Second Chance is a movie that may make some Christians squirm because of its PG-13 rating (for language, some violence, and drug references), but it is a movie that was much more honest to real life. While you may want the marriage to succeed in Fireproof, you will feel an emotional connection to the characters in The Second Chance as they try to save their church and be a beacon to a troubled community.

The reason why The Ten Commandments (1956) was the highest-grossing movie of the 1950′s and Ben-Hur (1959) won 11 Oscars is not because America was more moral at the time, but because these movies were excellent movies and they were focused on telling a great story. I know that I have seen many “Christian” businesses that were sub-par if not corrupt. This is not necessarily an endorsement of the two major successes I mentioned above (I liked The Chronicles of Narnia, but not The Passion of the Christ, preferring The Gospel of John, which came out the year before.) Businesses like Chick-Fil-A succeed not because they are Christian businesses, but because they are good businesses. This is something that everyone should remember when they consider their faith and their business.

As a veteran, one of the most difficult times of the year is Memorial Day. It is a day when I remember those who died, and there is still a part of me, a little more than six years after I made it home from my war (I was in the WV Army National Guard from 2000-06, and activated for the Iraq War from Feb. 2003-Apr. 2004, with 11 1/2 months of that time in theater.) that wonders why I made it home and thousands of others never will. So, I am usually more reflective on the last Monday in May. This year, I picked up my copy of Jarhead from my shelf, and watched it again.

Hurry Up and Wait

Everyone who has been in the military, regardless of branch of service or location, knows that the common adage in the military is “Hurry up and wait.” This is because of the fact that, well, big battles are relatively rare, and most of the time is spent in a holding pattern of some sorts. (I am reminded of one time when we kept going to a rifle range in Ft. Bragg that was getting postponed, and we ultimately got so bored that we started kicking around a pop bottle that someone found in the back of the truck.) Most military movies that I have seen seem to focus on two things: basic training and combat.

However, what makes Jarhead a truly unique movie is that it is told from the perspective of someone who had a low-key experience in the first Gulf War. While I was Army and not Marines (so grunt would have been the name for me), I know that boredom is a constant companion in war, although when I think of the alternative, I tend not to complain too much.

Relieving the Boredom

While the head knows that boredom is not necessarily a bad thing, it also wants to relieve the boredom. Unlike the first Gulf War, we tended to have a lot more amenities from home, but there was still a question of what to do with your (ample) free time. I do remember some people having contests similar to the scorpion contest in the movie, and I remember the way that so many people were on edge at one point or another in the 351 days we spent in theater. I don’t remember anyone going as far as Swoff did in the movie, but I remember that my weird act of defiance was writing the lyrics to “Bored and Extremely Dangerous” on the wall when we left Tallil (near Nasariyah). I also remember reconsidering my opinion on Star Trek: The Motion Picture and I decided to buy the director’s cut because there were so many special features.

War Experience without Combat

Like a lot of people who go to war, I never saw combat. My platoon did have one firefight, but based on the assigment, we needed to keep one person back to guard the base. Because I was the shortest one, and because there was a lot of overhead lifting, I was told that I would be the sergeant of the guard instead. (I have never been more glad to be 5’5 in all my life.) For people like me, Jarhead is one of the best war movies at explaining the war for those who never see combat. It is not a very action-packed movie, especially by war movie standards, but it was unflinchingly honest in its portrayal of life for those who have to hurry up and wait, ultimately for nothing. It also pointed out that not everyone who goes to war agrees with the cause, but that the real reason for going is one of duty. Lastly, look out for the Vietnam veteran who gets on the bus in one of the most poingant moments of the movie.