|
Article Excerpt
If this article were a film like the ones it examines, it would have a theme song: "If I can make it here, I can make it anywhere." Its setting would not be New York, but Marine boot camp. Parris Island to be exact. In the heart of the myth of masculinity. It would star John Wayne as Sgt. John Stryker, the hard-as-nails drill instructor, and a cast of raw recruits: the joker, the intellectual, the screw-up, the peacenik. Boys who will eventually be transformed into Men and Marines--capital M's both. Or at least that's how the romance would play out.
Film, however, as it represents the social realty (some might say agenda) of its time is not static. Though the premise often remains the same, the paradigm shifts as the definition of American manhood transforms with the times. Four films in which the Marine D.I.-recruit relationship remains central chronicles that shifting definition against the backdrop of World War II, the Korean conflict, and Vietnam, respectively. Why this premise? Because even acknowledging critic Jeffrey Suzik's contention that political, economic, and social forces drive how society understands concepts like masculinity and femininity, the premise itself suggests a quintessence (Suzik 153). As Mark Simpson argues in "Don't Die on Me, Buddy," "[i]n a sense, the war/military film is hardly every about anything other than what it means to be a man and how to become one (qtd. in Rambuss 116). Like Full Metal Jacket, the other three films under consideration--Sands of Iwo Jima, The D.I., and Tribes--are about "the process of making men into Marines--as well as, apparently, making men into men" (Rambuss 105). That is, becoming a man and a Marine are simultaneous acts. Though historically and culturally military service initiates one into the cult of masculinity (Creveld 2), the US. Marine becomes the apotheosis of the ideal. Marines, to cite Joker in Full Metal Jacket, are indestructible men, men without fear. Or, less romantically, walking hyperboles of a cultural epitome. (1)
Iconographically, at least, John Wayne remains the great American warrior. Tellingly, though he never actually served in the military, Wayne received the gold medal from the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the "Iron Mike" Award from the Marines. Gen. Douglas Macarthur thought he was the model American soldier (Wills 12). Without firing a real shot in a real war, Wayne epitomizes the norm in American mythology. Psychotherapist Robert Hopcke notes: "If any modern development could be credited for nearly single-handedly carrying forward the archetypal contents of the collective unconscious into modern consciousness, it would be the movies and movie stars who populate the mythic universe of film" (qtd In Doty 47). In his biography of Wayne, Garry Wills argues that Wayne "became the pattern of manly American virtue" (30). Moreover, his portrayal of Sgt. Stryker in the 1949 film Sands of Iwo Jima made Wayne an authority figure, a position he would maintain the rest of his life (Will 156). He became the touchstone against which manhood was measured.
Paradoxically, Wayne also became the paradigm to be transcended. In Sands of Iwo Jima, Wayne plays a sergeant who must train a group of green replacements for combat. It is set in the months just before the Marines face the task of taking Japanese islands one by one. Stryker represents the quintessential Marine--a guy, as one of his men says, who "didn't write the manual but you can bet he can recite it--and backwards." In inimitable Wayne style, Stryker tells his men, "And if you do something I don't like, I'm gonna jump. And when...
|
