Book vs. Movie: The Men Who Stare At Goats
By Russ Bickerstaff
November 10, 2009
BoxOfficeProphets.com
And in this corner: the Movie. A 112-year-old kid born in France to a guy named Lumiere and raised primarily in Hollywood by his uncle Charlie "the Tramp" Chaplin. This young upstart has quickly made a huge impact on society, rapidly becoming the most financially lucrative form of storytelling in the modern world.
Both square off in the ring again as Box Office Prophets presents another round of Book vs. Movie.
The Men Who Stare At Goats
Cardiff-born British journalist Jon Ronson had been working professionally for a number of years when he'd published his first book Clubbed Class — a work in which he discussed his attempts to fake his way into a high-class lifestyle. Ronson first made an impression on the world stage with Them — his second book in which he wrote about his experiences covering certain extremist groups from the inside. In the book, he relates attempts he'd made to infiltrate the shadowy groups that, according to some theories, rule the world. In 2005, film rights to Them had been purchased by Universal Pictures. By this time, Ronson had finished his third book: The Men Who Stare At Goats. In it, he details his exploration into the bizarre and shadowy end of the U.S. military. The book had a companion TV documentary. Both met with sufficient popularity to warrant the attention of BBC Films and a consortium of other film producers (including George Clooney), who have released a big-budget film inspired by the book.
The Book
In Hawaii, Ronson had met Glenn Wheaton - a U.S. army sergeant who claimed to be a part of a special forces unit called Project Jedi. Jedi was involved in trying to create a team of elite agents who could, among other things, will a goat to die just by staring at it. Further research found Ronson discovering actual accounts from people who were involved with the program — evidently situated out of a disused hospital in Fort Bragg. The rest of the book outlines Ronson's white rabbit-like adventure into a strange, little-known end of the U.S. Military that perhaps has its origins with a now retired US Army Colonel named Jim Channon.
Channon, the book states, had returned from Viet Nam and ended up spending time with founders of the human potential movement in California in the 1960s. Having learned from the movement, he went on to develop a vision for a new U.S. military that he outlined in a 125-page manual. He referred to the new vision as The First Earth Battalion — an idea involving soldiers going into battle playing soothing music and carrying baby lambs, greeting enemy combatants with hugs. If that didn't pacify the enemy combatants, the battalion would attempt to pacify them using non-lethal means.
When Channon submitted this idea to the military, they rejected it. Channon retired some time later, but some of the ideas he pioneered in the manual for the First Earth Battalion live on in Project Jedi and a number of other, far more sinister programs that Ronson delves into with a great deal of style. Ronson tempers the obvious humor inherent in his subject matter with serious tones. What he discusses here ranges from the bizarre to the comical to the truly disturbing. It's all delivered in a subject-by-subject format that passes through the more interesting ends of some of the biggest news stories of the late 1990s/early 2000s.
A paranormal investigator for the US military was involved with a secret remote pseudo-psychic war with Manuel Noriega prior to the US invasion of Panama. US forces had allegedly hired a Russian expert to attempt to broadcast the voice of Charlton Heston-as-god into the heads of the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas in 1993. The strange practice of putting Iraqi prisoners in metal shipping crates and blasting the crates with strobe lights and the theme song from the Barney TV show may have been the product of very sinister motives. And why did a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay have a boombox in his cell casually playing CDs by a Fleetwood Mac cover band and Matchbox Twenty? How was the military's Psyops involved in lurid pictures from Abu Ghraib?
All of these subjects are explored from a respectful distance that neither sensationalizes nor trivializes them. This is dark, conspiracy-related stuff that is written in a way similar to acclaimed author Jerome Clark's exploration of UFOlogy. The best way to cover outrageous claims is with a clear, objective head and like Clark, Ronson uses an exceedingly approachable, down to earth style of prose that lays bare the mystery that makes the subject matter so interesting to begin with. Ronson's exceedingly conversational narrative may not have the dry, journalistic tones found in Clark's work, but it gives the subject matter an overwhelmingly human feel.
Of particular note here is the Eric Olson's search for the truth of his father's death in the midst of the U.S. Government's MK-ULTRA mind control experiments. The official government story is that Olson's father jumped out of a window in New York as a result of government use of LSD with respect to MK-ULTRA. Olson's been obsessed with trying to get to the truth behind the story. Ronson's treatment of the human end of this really brings the fantastic elements of the novel into full, vivid emotional reality. There's a dark side out there and it's difficult to distinguish fact from fantasy in a shadowy world of intelligence and counter intelligence.
The Movie
In principle, the idea behind the film adaptation of the novel should have worked. In a way, it kind of did. The idea of turning a disjointed narrative into single, coherent action/adventure plot is a sound and cautious one. The idea of fusing the dozen or more people who figure prominently in Ronson's novel together into simple Hollywood character types makes clean, economic sense. Having those characters played by some really talented, big name Hollywood actors also makes a lot of sense. Limiting the plot to coverage of only the central issues of the book with only occasional glances at some of the book's other details is very practical. In theory, all of these decisions could've made for a really interesting narrative film adaptation of the book. The film consistently fails to execute any of these ideas in any practical way.
Ewan McGregor adopts a US accent to play Bob Wilton — a fictional US stand-in for John Ronson, who fate forces into an overseas adventure that finds him exploring the stranger side of the US military. The personal end of his story, which bears no resemblance to Ronson's life, adds little to the film. Ronson's identity as a writer is a lot more interesting than the one McGregor is being asked to perform here. Troubled by a serious romantic break-up, Wilton heads out to Iraq in an attempt to cover the government contractors in Iraq. Along the way he stumbles onto Lyn Cassady — a man who turns out to have been an accomplished member of the First Earth Battalion. Evidently, in the movie, the US accepted the idea of creating a group of peaceful warrior monks and kept it top secret. The Hollywood character who succeeds where a real-life Jim Channon failed is Bill Django — thoughtfully played by Jeff Bridges. The fictionalized success of the project allows for a simplified history of paranormal research in the military that makes way for an easy dynamic between Django, his star pupil Cassady, and Casday's rival Larry Hooper, played by Kevin Spacey. This is all well and good — it provides a nice story for audiences to follow that serves as a solid, human perspective on its non-fiction elements. The problem is that the film spends way too much of its time on these things and ends up traveling pretty far away from the jumble of different fascinating elements that make the book so interesting in the first place.
The film does chronicle some elements of the corruption and twisting of Channon's First Earth Battalion dream into something far darker, but with so much going on in the foreground, there isn't enough focus on it to come across all that coherently. We're lost in a story of a fictional Ewan McGregor character trying to find himself and help heroically save the fictional Bob Wilton character from himself. The real-life warping of the dream came across with much more interesting stories than what's illustrated here. The convoluted distortions found in the book are really fascinating and would've been really interesting to follow in rapid-cut voice over narrations that would not have compromised the Hollywood feel of the film at all.
The book follows lines of causality from Channon's dream, to weird remote viewing techniques by military personnel who are honorably discharged and end up on the Art Bell show, ultimately resulting in a mass suicide of the Heaven's Gate cult in 1997. More illustrations of that sort of darkness would've been interesting. While a more disjointed plot would have compromised the standard Hollywood plot structure of the film, correct handling of a less cohesive script that covered more of Ronson's material would've resulted in a film that would've been a beautiful fusion of a traditional Hollywood film with something far more breathtaking than what we end up with here.
The Verdict
While lacking in a central plot, Ronson's book does a brilliant job of weaving together disparate pieces of information into a thoroughly interesting tapestry, which vividly brings across the story of a good idea corrupted by chance and circumstance. The film could have done a faithful adaptation of the spirit of that book with a close approximation of the storytelling style without compromising the standard Hollywood approach to storytelling too much. Screenwriter Peter Straughan and director Grant Heslov instead force the nonfiction elements of the story into a very traditional plot structure that fails to capture the scope of the book so consistently that it hardly seems worth the time and effort put into it. The saddest part about this is the fact that the film had some really great talent that could've done a really good job of bringing a less traditional script to the screen with the kind of Hollywood appeal it would've needed to sell tickets. Instead, we're left with a mess that's not particularly appealing to anyone. It'll probably turn a small profit in the long run, but it's not going to make the kind of money a truly interesting script would've been able to manage with a cast like this.