[0:00] Oh my god


[0:02] 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, 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. Oorah!
[0:50] The Iraq war was never popular, 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 really sensitive about the whole deal,  
[1:11] like just really snowflake-y, 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, but let’s take 
a moment to appreciate Star Spangled Ice Cream.
[1:34] [midi piano music]
[1:42] The anti-woke Ben & Jerry’s, 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”, 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 ''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. The war. Not the icecream. 
[2:17] And that was just two years 
before Jarhead came out.
[2:20] “I can’t watch. And Neither can you.”
[2:24] Okay, so, there’s these two producers, Philip 
J Roth and Jeffery Beach, and they’re, like,
[2:28] capital-P producers, they’ve each got a 
hundred, 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, 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 
they go out and buy the Jarhead intellectual  
[2:56] property rights specifically to turn it into an oh 
rah respect the troops franchise. 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., adapting a 2003 
memoir of the same name by Anthony Swofford.
[3:21] Swofford served in the Marine corp as a 
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, the military 
culture and mindset, is inherently destructive,  
[3:49] that war can and will destroy the lives of 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? You gotta earn it.”
[4:19] Jarhead basically argues that the Marine Corp 
is a cult, 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, it openly 
lionizes that process, uses that process as  
[4:43] a conscious pressure point, 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, to sell that mindset.
[5:07] “What the fuck are you even doing here?”

“Sir, 
I got lost on the way to college, sir!”
[5:14] “A flashlight was a moonbeam. A pen was 
an ink-stick. A bed was a rack. A wall  
[5:20] was a bulkhead. A shirt wa a blouse. 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. 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. It becomes an 
ancient tradition, an exclusive brotherhood of the  
[6:00] warrior defined by purity rituals that ultimately 
amount to little more than bog standard abuse.
[6:06] “How the fuck are you going to fire your 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 
quite truly return home are also very, very old,  
[6:20] Jarhead leaves that completely unvarnished because 
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”
[6:45] That is wholly absent in Jarhead: there is no 
cause, the damage is in service of nothing,  
[6:51] and the human lives broken by the process 
are simply discarded. Swofford is told,  
[6:55] and tells himself, that without his rifle 
he is nothing, 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, is so invested in the  
[7:10] identity that the Corps imbues him with that 
he 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. But  
[7:25] 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, 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, 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”, a self-deprecating military 
nickname normally deployed with sardonic pride is  
[8:23] treated literally. 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]
[8:52] Now, this is gonna feel off-topic, 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, 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. 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, the 
things that people say and the messages that are  
[9:26] conveyed by the filmic language, 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, it’s also  
[9:44] an attempt to bridge the military-civilian 
divide. Hosted by a group of Special Forces  
[9:48] combat veterans, this 48-hour challenge is a 
condensed interpretation of the US Army’s 24-day  
[9:54] Assessment and Selection. For the participants, 
the event is a chance to test their limits while  
[9:59] paying tribute to those who serve. For the 
Special Force Cadre who lead the event, it’s  
[10:03] an opportunity to honor their roots and connect 
with civilians. Less than 2% of participants  
[10:08] finished the first 18 iterations of the event. 
Will anyone in Class 019 meet “The Standard?"”
[10:14] So, the frame here is that the US Special 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? Something codified,  
[10:34] something measured, something standardized. 
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: 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, a company 
that mostly makes tacticool backpacks that have  
[11:18] a reputation for being extremely durable but 
uncomfortable, 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, all in the same afternoon.
[11:48] By the way a “ruck” is just a hike, 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 full of ammo or canned food or whatever.
[11:59] After this Known portion we move into the Unknown 
portion, which will take up the remaining hour and  
[12:04] 15 minutes of the movie. 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 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, at least to the confessional camera.
[12:53] “We’re basically saying ‘hey, you’re doing 
really well’, 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, 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 
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 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. Right now  
[13:42] 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, 
they can’t have a bunch of people passing.
[14:02] Eventually it’s accidentally revealed that 
all of this is just happening on Jason’s land.
[14:06] Jason McCarthy, the event organizer, 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, and most of this event is just  
[14:18] happening in his back yard, and they haven’t 
bothered to, 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, 
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 
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 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?

Nobody does! 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: 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, very upset about that. 
[16:47] I have no proof of this but I have 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]
[17:01] Jarhead 2: Field of Fire is a 
direct-to-video sequel released  
[17:04] in 2014. 

This is where Philip J. 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, 
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, the only thing that 
isn’t made up is the country of Afghanistan.
[17:51] Though from the sheer number of last names 
in 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, 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, 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, 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 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! 
Who’s that? 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 
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 
are the natural consequence of systemic practices.
[19:24] …That is not Jarhead 2.
[19:26] The garbage pile has no thematic purpose, 
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 of people driven mad for no reason, 
[19:40] victims of a machine, 
[19:42] Jarhead 2 is a troop movie about troops doing 
very budget-conscious heroic troop stuff like  
[19:48] driving through a gravel quarry or standing 
next 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 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. This is direct from Washington,  
[20:17] she’s the president’s guest of honor.”

But don’t worry, they make it a point that the  
[20:20] marines are willing to die for her without knowing 
her identity, because darn it, that’s the mission.
[20:27] "You're willing to die for this chick? 
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 
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 
she’s got a hot face and a banging body! Aaaah”
[20:51] “cringe, there’s no other word for it. 
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]
[21:02] “my leg’s all the way over there bro”
[21:04] “my leg’s all the way over there man!”
[21:08] [Explosion]
[21:10] [Wilhelm scream]
[21:11] The sequel loses the edge 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. 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. 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, it is treated 
as an appreciable response in the circumstances.
[21:54] “Cowboy up, you hear me? 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, 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. Today was a good day.”
[22:30] Jarhead 2 opens in an identical style for 
the first movie, and on the surface it sounds  
[22:35] anti-war. The narration asks what the point is 
in 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? Why is he 
dying? 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? I guess the point 
is responsibility of duty, love of country,  
[23:10] a way of life. Are we on the right side of 
this? 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 the 
military lifestyle are surface level complaints. 
[23:44] Just banal pet peeves that people bond over 
because they all think it’s funny and irritating  
[23:49] that their boss wears really squeaky shoes or is 
always showing off his guitar that he can’t play. 
[23:55] It’s trivial and shallow stuff.
[23:59] “Hot as hell. All this sand. Goat 
everywhere. Ugly chicks. Ugly dudes.”
[24:06] 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, 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 
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]
[25:01] 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 
is that there is no visible penis on screen.
 
[25:30] It seems like at some point in making these 
sequels someone sat down with the job to break  
[25:35] down Jarhead, really juice out the essence of it, 
and they came up with a short list consisting of 
[25:41] Troops
[25:41] Courier font
[25:43] Time of day titles
[25:44] An on-screen penis
[25:46] Jarhead 1 and 2 both had the courage 
to get the wang out, 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 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, 
making muffins with his mother, and having  
[26:27] interesting breakfast conversations with dad, 
because those memories don’t actually exist.
[26:33] Jarhead 2 at least uses the narration to 
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 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.

“I 
was going to be number one,  
[27:01] kick some ass and show ‘em how it’s done.  
Then dust off a bigger fish to fry”]
[27:05] The budget has gotten even smaller: 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 
country referred to only as “the Kingdom”, 
[27:17] though it looks suspiciously like somewhere 
in Eastern Europe, possibly Bulgaria.
[27:23] The embassy gets attacked for reasons, 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 what you want to do that you don’t  
[27:39] see what you need to do, 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]
[27:58] 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 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, a particularly funny 
parallel with Swofford’s reason for joining,  
[28:21] which was, you know, kinda a really 
pivotal moment in that movie.

“Sir,  
[28:27] 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... Gunny Raines.
[28:47] “All you care about is yourself and trying 
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, 
it sure seems like our protagonist's arc  
[29:05] is going to be learning to quell his ego, 
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. 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: The Siege, the ambassador promotes  
[29:31] our protagonist, the new guy, because he likes 
the same initiative the squad took issue with.
[29:37] “He was the only one of you who tried 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 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]
[30:11] Now that I think of it, 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]
[30:30] “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]
[30:57] Jarhead 4, a direct to video movie from 
2019, drops the numbering in favour of box  
[31:02] art that aggressively references video game box 
art.

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 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, 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 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 
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, 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 
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, a movie where 
a starving African child sits at a table  
[34:06] piled high with Chinese goods, flanked by a 
kindly Chinese soldier, and stares straight  
[34:11] into the camera while eating fruit.

Jarhead: 
Law of Return is, rather, a generic troop movie  
[34:17] that could be set basically anywhere that was 
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, 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 a shoot out in the middle of a dirt road.
[34:57] [Gunfire]
[34:58] 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, 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 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, 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, 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 that they just had to “fix” it?
[36:05] “Do you want Jarhead sequels? ‘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? Completely fictional. 
Didn’t happen. We made it up.
[36:22] In fact it’s not even original, 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 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, the thing 
that tipped you off was probably the moment I  
[36:50] said that Roth and Beach have 120 movie credits 
and 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, 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, Messengers 2, Wrong Turn 3, Lake Placid 3,  
[37:23] Lake Placid: The Final Chapter, Sniper: 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, which was quickly and cheaply  
[37:39] produced to siphon off of Zumeckis’ animated 
Beowulf, 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, 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 
it basically only ran the festival circuit because  
[38:06] it’s a dreary Canadian art film, 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, 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 
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 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 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, there 
is no wacky story and no wild scheming.
[40:32] How you get Jarhead sequels is simply that there 
exists a machine to sell movies via physical discs  
[40:38] that relies on making frictionless films that 
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? Hurry up! Fill up water,  
[40:54] fast. Move out, fast. Pack your shit up, fast.”
[41:00] The machine wasn’t built to “fix” Jarhead,  
[41:04] because it doesn’t need to be. 
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, there’s a really,  
[41:17] really good chance that not a single one of 
the sequels was even written to be a sequel, 
[41:22] but was just a preexisting script pulled 
from a massive pile because it checked the  
[41:27] boxes of troops, Middle East, R-Rated, with 
a breakdown estimate under $5 million US. 
[41:33] Hence all the aesthetic similarities to Jarhead 
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 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 in 2027 Paramount Famous Productions and UFO  
[42:34] International release Annihilation 2: Absolution 
starring the artist formerly known as Jojo Siwa  
[42:41] alongside a couple character actors you recognize 
but can’t quite place and the whole thing is a  
[42:45] bottle episode set in a suspiciously Bulgarian 
part of Florida, 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.

This was  
[43:22] originally just a one-off gag about some slop 
I found on YouTube, but the longer I thought  
[43:27] about it the more I realized it’s relevant, 
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 
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 to 
get more and more propaganda that’s going  
[44:08] to reenforce the hegemonic structures of our 
society, 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. That’s just 
how it’s going to work. 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.