With "Jarhead" set to open in theaters Friday, Anthony Swofford, author of and main character in the novel upon which the film is based, talked to the Daily Wednesday to answer questions about the memoir's transition from literature to film. The film stars Jake Gyllenhaal (as Swofford) and Jamie Foxx, and is directed by "American Beauty's" Sam Mendes. The story chronicles Swofford's psychological journey before, during and after his time as a Marine the first Gulf War.
Question: What did you think of the film?
Anthony Swofford: I love the film; I think it's a really smart and artful adaptation of my work and also of my life. Sam's [the director's] filmmakerly poetics have been put to work on my own writerly poetics and my rendering of the story to really great effect, I think.
Q: Do you feel like it ["Jarhead"] stayed true to what really happened?
AS: Yeah, I really do. The most wrathful departure is structural. You know, my book is structured quite differently; there are four different narrative tiles - as I call them - that I work with throughout the book. And, for movie making reasons, they decided to focus on just the time at war, and that was the right decision...
Q: So what did you think about the way the [main character, Swoff's] flashbacks were handled, because they were very brief.
AS: I thought it was a pretty effective shorthand. There was a time when there was more of my past in the film and it probably gave a clearer view of why I joined the Marine Corps. But I do think they were effective.
Q: Could you talk about the limitations of both literature and film [in] representing what is typically referred to as the 'war genre'?
AS: You know, the bombs are never gonna go off in your hand when you're reading the book, and I don't know that there are - short of actually experiencing the thing - limitations, as long as the book is well written and the film is well made. All experience, when put into literature or film, is moved through a memory and then through the art. My art was the art of prose, and for Sam, it's filmmaking. And the most realistic rendering that can possibly be made is, I think, the goal.
Q: What do you hope viewers will take away from the film or readers will take away from the novel?
AS: Many things. You can't talk to every reader or every viewer. I think what the film offers is really vivid representation of how someone who fights in the military is made and how the desire for killing, the desire for warfare is complicated. And there are also long-term effects from that. And, also, we've all seen the lost legs, and the sucking chest wound, and the guy blinded by artillery fire, and I think what "Jarhead" does is it slows down and gets rid of that gruesome stuff and allows readers-slash-viewers to get inside the psychology of the man at war.
Q: Could you talk a little more about the cultural resonance of the war in which you fought? With the history of your family, as with the rest of the men as well, what can be taught from generation to generation?
AS: I didn't listen to the lesson that my father tried to teach me, which was to not join the military and to look at another option. My father saw, as most men who served in Vietnam saw, rather brutal and heinous things, and, wisely, he didn't want his son to see the same things. But I failed to listen to the lesson that could have taught to me. What I've done with "Jarhead" is to simply try and be honest about that version of me, and he's not always an attractive young man; it's sort of a brutal and unforgiving space which he inhabits. That's something that should be taught, but when my father tried to teach me that lesson, it fell on deaf ears.
