Welcome to Sam's World (Merrill's Marauders)

There's something compatible about watching a movie from 1962 on a well-used VHS tape. Not one which shows damage from its years of service, but something which wears its years like a construction worker wears his suntan, a proud by-product of work well done. I like them the same way I like trout fishing gear, hardback books wrapped in original dust jackets, red-headed women, wolf-hybrid dogs, station wagons and knives made of German steel that will last a lifetime provided I give them a sharpening from time to time.

Makes me sound like something of a survivalist who follows the Unabomber code, but I draw the line at guns and the somnambulist delusions of those infested with political reasons for owning them. Funny, most of the people I know who own guns never take those proud penis extensions out of the closet. Their reasons for buying firearms is embedded in the need for defending themselves against some phantasmagoric foe bent on violence against them, or their family, or their property. Ordinarily, they never take them out of the closet. Oh, perhaps on an initial practice run, they take the handgun or rifle to a shooting range just after they've made the purchase. They buy a box of cartridges and squeeze off some rounds, generally in the company of a gun-owning veteran from the office, or a son.

Upon returning home with his prize toy, the proud owner sits down with his family and explains the severity of the Glock 9 millimeter's ambition to speed a heavy piece of metal at incredible force through the air searching to locate a bad guy's internal organs, there to bury itself inside until the police arrive and clean-up the affair. The family ascertains the importance of the gun because these mandatory family meetings are convened over very few, yet very important, matters: the death of Grandma Riggs without leaving an inheritance; Katya's pregnancy and removal from high school until the baby is born to be adopted by a "loving couple;" Chester's conversion to Islam; Mom's decision to leave Dad because in 18 years he's never given her an orgasm, though Hildegaard Steele, the children's driving instructor has given Mom multiple orgasms throughout the months since Katya began driving.

Dad explains to his bloodline that for safety sake, he'll keep the semi-automatic pistol in his bedroom closet, meanwhile removing the magazine and safeguarding it in his padlocked footlocker located in the garage; which also holds the family marijuana, mushrooms, extra boxes of 9 millimeter ammo, loan papers, rolling papers, and ownership affidavits for the modern art holdings sprinkled on the walls and corners of the house. In this way Dad hoped to eliminate any impulsive or accidental use of Mr. Glock's percussive namesake. It gives one pause to imagine a scene in which a genuine burglar, or a Danny Trejo-visaged murderer with bandeleros crisscrossing his chest and a sawed-off shotgun in hand, actually breaks and otherwise enters the home. Would Dad try to call "time out" like on the Sherman Oaks schoolyards of his youth meanwhile gathering pieces of his handgun from room to room and with shaky hands attempt to load the magazine with live rounds, then insert it within the grip handle, unlatch the safety and yell "Okay, I'm ready" finally firing resolutely at anything that draws breath, just at the moment our robber sits down in a genuine Bauhaus chair to watch Chester's head explode like a shattered Shoji Hamada fluted pitcher?

Luckily most burglars know that armed robbery carries a stiffer price than murder itself in the United States, where we have a tighter relationship with money and fiscal assets than any other personal object of desire. Thieves understand it's easier to break into a house unarmed when no-one is at home, steal the guy's expensive weapons and sell them on the street. They sell like hotcakes. And it often takes months or years for the owner to even know they've vanished. Wasn't it Mark Twain who wrote a famous short story in which we follow the string of accomplishments earned by the possessor of a British million Pound note? And though the fictional possessor was as impoverished as a pensioner whose investments were overseen by Bernard Madoff, the story enables us to follow the drama inherent in each transfer of illusory wealth and value. The denomination was so unbelievably large that it retained no functional worth, but was tendered all around London simply for its symbolic value. Be nice to see the story of an unloaded Glock 9 millimeter passing from hand to sweaty hand, and the half-life it possesses, the value it imitates. If I weren't so lazy, I might write that story. Tell you what, I'll give the idea to you free--you write it.

Which doesn't get us any closer to my fondness for VHS tapes and the Samuel Fuller movie, Merrill's Marauders. It was a Warner Brothers' movie released in 1962 whose cast was peopled by Warners' television stars of the era. All shot on location in the Philippines. It roughly followed the historical facts of the conflict in Burma during World War II, wherein the U.S. Army fielded a composite fighting force of 2,900 veterans: men who'd already fought for at least 2 years in the Pacific theater, mostly Guadalcanal combatants. They had volunteered for this mission to counter the Japanese push from Northern Burma into China with the implausible mission of joining the German forces once they'd pushed through Russia--lots of bad maps in the movie and graphic arrows comically pushing across the screen in supposed reenactment of huge troop movements.

War movies owe a large amount to homoerotic attractions. In this respect they resemble Samurai movies. It's no surprise that Nagisa Oshima's last film, Taboo, concerned gay lovers in a Samurai school for the Shogun's most advanced sword twirlers. Most war films deal with man love in layers of exceptional context: absence of women; psychological exhaustion; lapses of moral judgement owing to the huge piles of body parts and quagmires of fetid blood that surround them; fear of their own mutilation and death: all these leave a dramatic opening into the primal desires of men, or so an early 1960's American screenplay might intimate. Which is not to say Merrill's Marauder's is a sissy film, hell no. Sam Fuller (he of the chomping cigar and Bronx accent) is a tough guy through and through. His war films are informed by his own experiences in North Africa and Italy which he committed to celluloid history in The Big Red One (1980). Like so many bad war films before, the enemy is portrayed as vile, ignorant fodder for the superior Allied forces. The "Japs" drop like flies, body counts show a ratio of at least 10 to 1--them versus us--in this macho bullet ballet.



If Sam Fuller's movie is judged solely on the reasons for which it was supported at the box office (B movie, tough-guy blood and guts), it would be unremarkable--just another piece of bold font journalism at 24 frames a second. A recruiting tool for the lads about to enter Vietnam. But fortunately, that's not the totality. One is certainly tempted to refer to this Burma campaign movie as largely jingoistic, which it is. Also, I could say it's simplistic and hackneyed in its dialogue, camera movement and editing, but there's more. From out of a genre movie which satisfies all the elements of slick formula, it's rather miraculous that Mr. Fuller was able to grab the stink of real human emotions and portray death as folly. Fuller is a pulp Shakespeare in idea and drama, if not in language. General Merrill, as played by iron-jawed, weepy-eyed Jeff Chandler is a confused tyrant who pays lip service to responsibility for his men's safety, but whose decisions are personal evocations of grandiosity inherent in hierarchical power, in addition to psychotic reiterations of military Bushido. All reason is lost. Even the basic instincts for self-preservation are lost. The only rationale for living at all is one of Zen distillation: "when you have no strength to fight, when you have no ability to think, or even to feed yourself, you place one foot in front of the other." It's simple. No-one has to think any longer. We're beyond morality, beyond humanity, even beyond complaint or emotion at all. We follow orders unequivocally and ignorance is our only desire. Whether our leader is a madman or a saint makes no difference. We're beyond caring. Fuller isn't merely talking about a group of men in Burma, but about our social paradigm. We kill millions of civilians in ovens and prison camps, drop atomic bombs on civilian targets, firebomb cities with no military value, blanket bomb cities from 30,000 feet killing anything that happens to live there, pull gold from the teeth of newly gassed naked grandparents. We mutilate crowds of neighbors with machetes or set them on fire with cans of gasoline. We fire missiles from unmanned drone aircraft into crowded village weddings. We do it gladly. Just don't make us think. We absolve ourselves of all responsibility. We will solely follow orders. In the absence of direct superiors, we follow any authority available, any law no matter how challenged.

I found an eerily similar appraisal in Seijun Suzuki's Story of a Prostitute during a recent viewing. Oddly, as in the case of Samuel Fuller, Mr. Suzuki was a military war veteran. His movie encompassed a scathing look into Japanese atrocities in Manchuria during the late 1930's, examining similar "dog-face" indoctrinations into nationalism and beyond into perversions of moral law by following orders. It isn't the army, the flag, the religion, the political formulations. Fuller and Suzuki's century saw over 100 million humans killed by other humans with scant reason. The problem is inside us. All of us.

Everyone is familiar with Hannah Arendt's phrase "the banality of evil" in reference to the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem and its inquiry into moral responsibility. Fuller (like Arendt), goes beyond a singular man, or a singular nation's crimes. It's not merely a few score of high-ranking military or political personages who require blame and punishment, these criminals merely tapped into the innermost psyche of their people. Therein lies the tragedy. Given a push we are all kapos. We are all complicit and eventually are only too happy to enforce orders. The pain of being human authorizes our relinquishing of indiscriminate care and love. We trade the complexities of love for the simplicity of obedience and its blessed absolution from responsibility.

During one harrowing episode of Merrill's Marauders, a soldier who is the mule wrangler for his unit comes to the aid of his exhausted pack-mule by shouldering the heavy supplies himself up a steep mountain pass, finally succumbing to the effort and dying. It's the stuff of Jesus, or Robert Bresson, or Gandhi: sacrifice as love. It's a glowing account in the film's instruction on personal sacrifice in military hardship. He introduces a favorite dramatis persona of war movies, the propitiatory hero. But Fuller shows us that war is beyond esprit de corps, or honor, even foxhole savior love. War thrives and is perpetually generated through sacrifice; be it the Allied grunt soldiers, the officers, the enemy, the civilian's, the animals, the family members at home receiving letters of regret, or the generations who read history as anything more than surreal, chaotic struggles for power at any and all cost. Giving orders is tyranny by those appointed from the elite. Following orders is mind-numbing sacrifice unto death. Welcome to Sam's World.

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