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Chapter 7: Bodies, Weapons
- Rutgers University Press
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114 Before “Don’t ask, don’t tell” became a widely known statement in the 1990s, another expression related to the military had already attained recognition, in part because of its use in films and in fiction.This one,in the form of a chant,pertains to the obvious connections between weapons and conceptions about masculinity and male sexuality: “This is my rifle, this is my gun; this is for fighting, this is for fun.” Since referring to the chant has become a critical commonplace in discussions of the war film,I hope the following commentary will lead to some new insights about the relationship. Five of the works examined here deal with the Vietnam War: The Boys in Company C (Sidney J. Furie, 1978), Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979), Platoon (Oliver Stone, 1986), Full Metal Jacket (Stanley Kubrick, 1987), and Casualties of War (Brian De Palma, 1989). Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998) is about World War II, and Jarhead (Sam Mendes, 2005) concerns the Gulf War. The major link connecting all of these is how at certain key moments weapons are consciously foregrounded as objects of narrative attention specifically connected to the male body and sexuality. In fact, all these films revisit the clichéd connection of weapons and genitals in most striking ways. The Boys in Company C The Boys in Company C follows a group of young recruits from their induction, training, and immersion in war. R. Lee Ermey makes his first appearance in a film as Staff Sergeant Loyce. The moral focus of the film is on the incompetence of the military leadership, with the exception of Lieutenant Archer (James Whitmore Jr.), and the insanity of the Vietnam War. Not much in the film centers directly on sexual issues. Early in the film, a recruit pretends to be gay to avoid being inducted, a comic scene played for laughs in a way that had been presented earlier in Alice’s Restaurant (Arthur Penn, 1969) and would be repeated a year later in Hair Bodies, Weapons c h a p t e r s e v e n bodies, weapons 115 (Milos Forman, 1979). Once they arrive in Vietnam, all the recruits have to undergo a test for venereal diseases. One recruit, Billy Ray Pike (Andrew Stevens), finds out his girlfriend is pregnant. Some recruits hang out in a club looking for women to pick up. The most sexualized moment in the film comes as Tyrone Washington (Stan Shaw) and the other soldiers are bathing at a pond on a sunny hillside. The scene begins with shots of large artillery howitzers firing shells from on top of a hill, then opens up to show a number of naked men sitting around the water, celebrating the shelling from behind them and commenting on the relative success of shells as they land and burst on the hills in front of them. They also cheer on the U.S. planes overhead dropping bombs and strafing. The scene both compresses and expands the logic of the rifle/gun chant. On the one hand, the men are naked, without any weapons in their own hands. On the other, they are metonymically linked to the large howitzers. And they are, in fact, having fun as, naked, they watch the destruction. In a curious way, Furie has established the mise-en-scène like the interior of a movie theater: the action (the firing of the guns) proceeds from behind the men, who can watch the effects of the firing in front of them. They are physically between the source of death and its effects, exulting. What binds the men at this point in the narrative is a temporary escape from direct interaction with their hopelessly incompetent commander and a chance to The Boys in Company C. Exulting in the destruction. © Golden Harvest Company Ltd./ Good Times Films S.A., 1978. [44.222.212.138] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 19:32 GMT) armed forces 116 watch destruction as pure spectacle. It’s simultaneously sexual (the naked male bodies linked to large guns spewing forth destruction) and nonsexual (cheering from men whose attention is on the effects of the weapons and not on their own bodies). The men in this scene are very different from those naked soldiers pictured at play in the“true towel”advertisements discussed in chapter 3. Those men were momentarily free of the weapons of war. Here, though, the men’s nakedness in the...