Watched Jarhead last night… It begins with the usual ‘grunt’ camaraderie and training obligatory in all depictions of the US military… but then continues into deployment in Kuwait during the First Gulf War where bleached out days and nights lit by burning oil fields seem like a computer game. I suspect this is deliberate. What is shows brilliantly – and quite possibly accurately – is how America has managed to extend the experience and envelope of the consumer society to the very front line of the battlefield… At no point do you feel that any of these ‘citizen’ soldiers even touch the reality of where they are or who they’re fighting… even when they walk amidst the carnage of the flight to Bagdad with its carbonized corpses of children in school buses…