The Inspection (Bratton, 2022)
Many years ago I had an interaction with an (it seemed to me) extremely bitter former Christian who had joined the military. He claimed that the military was better than Christianity because once you were in, they didn’t turn on their own. I countered that the organizations that are allowed to exclude people, for whatever reason, were bound to have a greater sense of community for those who make the cut.
I thought about that exchange a couple of times when watching The Inspection, a film that works far better than it has any business doing precisely because it refuses to paint any one point of view as being devoid of some merit or without some contradictions.
The scenario — homeless, gay, Black dude joins the marines and gets outed during boot camp — feels like bits and pieces of other narratives. Certainly, we’ve seen the boot camp bullying in Full Metal Jacket and An Officer and a Gentleman to name only two. But The Inspection smartly takes a broader view. We get just enough of Ellis’s (Jeremy Pope) pre-enrollment life to make us believe this is a hail-mary attempt to avoid poverty, rejection, and an early grave. But we also get the boot camp officers questioning one another. They articulate their understanding of what it means to break men down in order to build them up again, and there is ambiguity about whether Ellis’s mistreatment is simple malice towards homosexuality, an attempt to ensure that he can repress parts of himself (just as every other marine is called to do), or some combination of the two.
That ambiguity in turn lends the ending some shades of grey that are welcome and necessary. Ellis is neither destroyed (in which case the film would just be a lament) nor is he championed by those who previously reviled him (in which case the movie would just be a fantasy). Without giving too much away, I would say there is a measure of acceptance — which makes the military look better than I anticipated. But there is also a clear-eyed line drawn about how far acceptance goes, who is entitled to it, and who has to earn it. Ellis experiences both acceptance and rejection within the military. But he seems only to experience rejection outside the military. Failure to understand the rejection outside of the military and how deep and socially comprehensive it is may make it harder for those of us not in the military to understand how a GLBTQ person might come to legitimately value association in a fraternity where such hatred is endemic but not comprehensive.
Another welcome wrinkle in the conventional story is that the other marines are neither entirely brainwashed (as in Full Metal) nor entirely able to jettison their prejudices. Every year when I attend ROTC commissioning at my university, I am struck by how the speaker reminds the audience that officers swear an oath not to the flag or the country or each other but to the Constitution. Hence, the speaker says, they are tasked with the enormous responsibility of not just knowing when to obey but also when they must disobey. The candidates in the films are not officer candidates, but in today’s modern world — post-Abu Gharib, post-Gitmo Diaries — they seem to know that “just following orders” may not save them in the broader court of public opinion even if not following orders comes with immense risks and at a great price. It is instructive and heartening to see lines being drawn by the most vulnerable that they will not cross. (Thoreau says the greatest form of resistance is non-participation.) Which makes it all the more heartbreaking to see the lines that they are still willing to cross, the hypocrisies they (and we) are still willing to countenance.
Martin Luther King, Jr. famously opined that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. I don’t know if that’s true. At times, I have my hope renewed that it is. At others, I have my heart broken by just how long that arc is, how slow it is to bend, and how much suffering accumulates in the balance.
The Inspection is currently playing at Filmfest 919.
