A marine insider rejects Jarhead but endorses Full Metal Jacket’s realism

Evidence

What the Corps is not like is Jarhead, he told me. When I met Sami for the first time in 2006, the film version of Jarhead had just been released on video. He told me he was unhappy with the movie, convinced that yet again the marines were being stereotyped as people who have to kill to live. Full Metal Jacket, he volunteered, was a much better film. I had thought that both films shared quite a bit: a grueling basic training that verged on the absurd; a theater of war that was confusing if not ridiculous, at least from an individual soldier’s perspective; a likable and intelligent protagonist who is the straight man to the bizarre reaches of military sociology; sentimental camaraderie. — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 201

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to war-film authenticity debates and the contrast between literary realism and documentary-style realism.