By PAYTON McCARTY-SIMAS
THE JACKET confused most critics when it came out twenty years ago. This perplexity wasn’t just due to the intricate-yet-loosely-threaded plotlines, rapid-fire time-jumps, fractal jump-cuts and mystical, associative narrative arcs that define this hyper-subjective tale, though. THE JACKET confused critics on the level of genre. Even a cursory look at contemporaneous reviews reveals that this moody, arty, pulpy, messy movie helmed by queer experimental filmmaker and Derek Jarman collaborator John Maybury vexed almost everyone who tried to describe it – but we have to go deeper. Unpacking the way these critics tried to puzzle it out can tell us something about a particular kind of movie that was popular at the time, a “genre-less” and yet hyper-generic, vague and yet super recognizable once you’re looking, “I know it when I see it,” hybrid kind of post-9/11 film with a particular set of elements. This kind of movie cropped up time and time again throughout the 2000s (roughly 2004-2009), and over a two-week stint of post-Christmas malaise, my fiancé and I tried to watch them all. By the end of this jittery, nu-metal-fueled binge of paranoid, twisty, metaphysical/sci-fi/conspiracy thrillers in the M. Night Shyamalan vein, we had the formula down cold.
These movies are weirdly addictive. As you’ll soon find out in this two-part essay (should you choose to read further and be brought into the twisted psychology of this canon), talking about it makes you sound as crazy as an unreliable narrator in one of these movies (think Jim Carrey’s character finding the book that holds the secrets of numerology in The Number 23 or the “symbologist” played by Tom Hanks in The Da Vinci Code). They make you want to point at the screen, wave your hands like a crazy person and, when the twist is revealed, yell, “BWAAAA!! It’s all connected!!” We’ve been calling this fake (or is it all too real?) subgenre the “Bwaaaa!!” movie, and to understand it, we’re going to time travel back to the 2000s, down the long dark corridors of genre theory and through the eerie halls of critical consensus. To do that, though, first we need to put on THE JACKET.
Tied Up in Knots: THE JACKET
Before we can understand why THE JACKET was so confusing to critics – and whether it’s a Bwaaaa!! movie, or whether that’s even a useful (fake) neologism in Part 2– we need to understand what it’s about and what it’s trying to do on a thematic level. In a nutshell, Maybury’s Hollywood debut is a trippy, paranoid, nonlinear anti-war tale, loosely based on Jack London’s 1915 novel The Star Rover, about a “benevolently” disaffected veteran of the Gulf War who may or may not be dead. Strap in.
We begin with dissociated shots of the newly digitized war machine at work: the opening credits roll over the snowy green of drone targeting screens as melancholy (emo?) piano music plays under a cacophony of inchoate orders and gunfire. We watch as civilians are blown to pieces from on high in a rapid montage featuring jarringly edited footage of the first President Bush: Iraq 1991. Flashes of normal color begin to appear on the ground. We’re introduced to Jack Starks (Adrien Brody – the only character who can see clearly, these visuals tell us) when he yells to his superior that there’s a seemingly unarmed woman and a young boy amidst the Iraqi combatants. “That’s not our problem,” the man calls. “None of this is our problem,” Jack mutters, setting him apart morally from the American military project. He approaches the boy with a smile, not drawing his weapon; the boy pulls out a pistol and shoots him in the head. (For the record, according to a 2008 scholarly article on this film by Mark Straw, there were no recorded instances of a child killing a soldier during the Gulf War and this feels as racist as you think it does, though it’s clearly trying to be sympathetic.) “I was 27 years old the first time I died,” Jack tells us in a hard-boiled voiceover. A bloom of blood fills the frame, dripping over the corner of his eye into an embryonic shape that seems to be a direct reference to Nicolas Roeg’s classic metaphysical horror film Don’t Look Now – not so unlikely a reference for a British avant-gardist adapting Jack London, whose title is a play on Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (as is the child soldier detail), and who prominently features audio of Noam Chomsky, even in a film also clearly steeped in several highly commercial genres. This allusion tells us the journey to come will be existentially spiritual, haunting, and, ultimately for its protagonist, grimly revelatory.
Maybury brings his critique stateside next; war may be senseless and cruel, but Jack fares no better at home. After a year of cognitive therapy, he’s dumped back in his native snowy Vermont with seemingly no resources, cut loose to drift. As his first failed act of benevolence in Iraq shows, he’s immediately framed as a martyr, a neglected veteran whose attempt at conscience haunts an American collective unconscious that lacked one when it got into the Gulf War to kick the anti-war sentiment known colloquially as “Vietnam Syndrome.” On the road, Jack helps a young girl named Jackie (Laura Marano) and her blackout mother, Jane (Kelly Lynch), before he’s picked up by a notably Southern-fried motorist who cavalierly shoots a cop and merrily frames Jack for it. Jack’s memory is a little faulty, so he’s put on trial for murder, studied and labeled with references to “Gulf War Syndrome” (more on this in Part 2). Like the opening scene’s critique of apathetic soldiers and the impersonal nature of digital warfare, this loosely allegorical restaging of the Bush administration senselessly throwing soldiers under the bus (here the southerner tearing through the peaceful Scottish – er, Vermont – landscape could be read as a Freedom Fries type or even W. himself, who was preparing to invade Iraq for the second time during the film’s development), frames Jack as a benevolent figure, a paranoid-yet-omniscient conduit for America’s psychic war wounds.
This is where the plot really begins. The rest of the film follows Jack’s journey back from the dead, or put another way, perhaps his journey back to the death he has already experienced. After his whirlwind acquittal by reason of insanity, Jack is remitted to a grim mental institution that, to quote Roger Ebert, would make “Edgar Allan Poe … raise his eyebrows.” In just under fourteen minutes of screentime (that’s right, all of that plot happens in the first fifteen minutes!), Jack is shot full of psychotropic drugs by an evil psychiatrist, Dr. Becker (the famously anti-war music legend Kris Kristofferson), strapped into a bloody, army-tan straightjacket and shoved into a morgue drawer to stew as a kind of behavior modification therapy/torture that Maybury described in an interview with The Advocate as an allegory for present-tense abuses from Abu Ghraib to Guantánamo. Jack quickly realizes that this process allows him to time travel to 2007 where he meets grown-up Jackie, a chain-smoking, lip biting, sexily broken alcoholic (a very game Keira Knightley in a part Entertainment Weekly accurately described as “wearing black nail polish … that’s all you need to know about her character”), who tells him he died on New Years Day, 1993, a week after he first put on the jacket.
Beyond being several layers deep in metaphor already, over the course of the film, Jack has a lot of complex plotting to untangle: he investigates his own death and tries to stop it; he falls in love with Jackie in 2007 while also very Oedipally trying to set her alcoholic single mom straight in 1992 to improve her future; he aids a different psychiatrist, Dr. Lorensen (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who’s trying to help another single mother by treating her son, a little boy named Babak, who’s played by Angelo Andreou who also plays the child soldier who shot Jack in the first place. (For those wondering, he does not, as several reviews correctly pointed out at the time, try to acquit himself of the hitchhiker’s murder.)
These overlapping missions and doublings do a lot of metaphorical work, too. Not only does Jack embody benevolent, paternalistic masculine authority in the broken homes of these feminine figures whose lives have seemingly gone off track without it, he also makes spiritual and psychic amends for the harms done in the Gulf War, which is presented as perverse and senseless. In the end, after saving both children and avenging himself upon the doctor that tormented him (“We haunt you,” he says of the patients Becker has killed trying to fix), he returns to the institution on New Years Day, 1993, slips in the parking lot and cracks his head open. Christlike, he gets back into the jacket to see Jackie one final time. This sober, contented version of her doesn’t recognize him, and he dies for the second time, this time peacefully. The war machine will be haunted; America’s conscience has been cleared.
If all of this sounds confusing and dense – though “heady” and “layered” are equally appropriate – it is! Jack jumps forward and backward in time faster than you can say “medical malpractice,” but at the same time, the narrative is slow, dreamily reflective and bittersweetly melancholy. The subjectivity is tinged by his disoriented mental state as well as the time travel, so we mostly drift through subplots, one about another criminal patient of the Cuckoo’s Nest variety (Daniel Craig) who lost his mind after his wife left him, scenes of Dr. Lorenson fruitlessly treating Babak and scenes of Dr. Becker drinking himself into a rage, before fracturing with flash cuts of war. Even the scenes in 2007 are mostly spent on deep conversations over vodka and cigarettes about childhoods lost rather than clues found. The mise-en-scène is dark and desaturated, blown out in that Finchery ‘90s hangover way that came to define the aesthetics of “torture porn” films like Hostel or Saw. The editing is deliberately jagged and edgy like a Nine Inch Nails music video. The shock reveals (Keira Knightley IS that little girl!!! He dies in a few days!!! He was dead the whole time – or was he????) are at once silly and over-the-top, lend themselves to that stoner-y “Wooooah, man, do you ever just think??” moment, and, at times, actually do make you think rather deeply about life, death and war, as this quasi-manifesto of an essay (not to mention the fevered week leading up to writing it that I spent annoying my friends by saying I was “building my Bwaaaa!!-bliography”) might suggest. THE JACKET is a highly accomplished art film with a Brian Eno score and a goofily of-its-time psychological thriller. In other words, it’s a tonally confounding delight. It’s Bwaaaa!!
But what exactly is Bwaaaa!!? Keep an eye out for Part 2 where I delve deeper into this (fake) subgenre of which THE JACKET is a prime example.
