Memorial Day Special: Best Pop Culture Sergeant [Think Tank]

Eyes front, you maggots!

In this special Memorial Day Weekend Think Tank, Overthinking It takes a moment to honor the fictional sacrifices that fictional soldiers have made to defend our fictional country against its fictional foes.

But these noble heroes could not have made the sacrifices they did without a firm hand to guide them. Someone who was cruel to be kind. Someone who bitched them out like a New Orleans pimp but loved them like a father.

We’re talking about the king of the non-commissioned officers: the sergeant.

This week’s Think Tank: who is the best movie, TV, video game, cartoon, music or comic book sergeant?

Sarge. Beetle Bailey – Stokes

The answer, as usual, comes from the fertile mind of comedy genius Mort Walker, who also brought us the terms “squean,” “grawlix,” and “plewd.” Yes, the greatest pop culture sergeant of all time is Sarge, from Beetle Bailey.  Being a little strapped for time, I will present my argument in list format.  (Ah, bullet points!  The last refuge of the lazy writer.)

• His name is just “Sarge.” Well, technically it’s Orville P. Snorkel, but he goes by Sarge.  And given his actual name, who can blame him?

• He’s an enlisted man’s enlisted man.  Some people see sergeant as a stepping stone on their way to commissioned officer status, but Sarge has been a Sergeant First Class since his introduction in 1951. This makes it possible to calculate his monthly salary.  Considering that he also gets an allowance for room and board, he is doing pretty ok. Adding to his old-school cred, Sarge is one of the very oldest comic strip characters that is still drawn – or at least supervised – by his original creator. Mind you, the strip has changed over the years.  Kind of a lot. (My favorite part here, definitely, is that Killer’s hat has an erection.)

• He is pretty clearly the inspiration for Homer Simpson.  Look at the strangle action in the first panel here.

• He is gay as a day in May.  Obviously, under the current laws, this is not something that a career soldier like Sarge will ever be able to openly confirm.  But the signs are out there.  He’s a confirmed bachelor.   He likes showtunes. He, uh… And if I can indulge in crude stereotyping for a minute – because the showtune thing wasn’t enough, you see – he has a tiny dog that he dresses up in an adorable little outfit.

Come to think of it, Otto is probably the inspiration for Brian from Family Guy.  Hey, Mort Walker really is a comedy genius.

• Finally, he seems to be wearing a chef’s hat for some reason.  Would someone please explain this to me?

Sergeant Zim, Starship Troopers – Fenzel

The noumenal pop culture Sergeant is rough, unrefined and no-nonsense, with the practical experience, tenacity and mental toughness to get the job done, and to force others to shape up or ship out. He is an authority figure by virtue of effectiveness and personality, not by virtue of commission. In coming-of-age stories (I love excuses to use the word Bildungsroman), the sergeant guards the bridge from childhood to adulthood, from passivity to activity, from responding to the world to affecting it, from a universe that nursed and raised you to a universe that is not interested in coddling you — and, more often than not, wants you dead.

No Sergeant more thoroughly pushes this concept to its limit, no actor more distills this archetype, than Clancy Brown — the Kurgan from Highlander — as Sergeant Zim in the underrated Van Dien / Verhoeven schlockfest Starship Troopers.

Everything visceral notion that drives Starship Troopers from its inauspicious beginning to its carnivalesque conclusion is distilled, then exploded. It is extreme melodrama. You don’t just lose your girlfriend — you lose her while facing down a messy death in a war of mutual genocide that killed your family and destroyed your homeland, that you are only in because of her in the first place, via a video message that you watch humiliatingly, in a public place in front of all your friends and coworkers — and you lose it to your cross-town football rival from high school, who glories in rubbing it in your face. (And he doesn’t just get his comeuppance, he gets his brains sucked out in front of your ex by a superintelligent alien insect).

Sergeant Zim doesn’t just test you. First, he snaps the arm of the strongest guy in your platoon. Second, he chokes out a teenage girl with his knee on her throat. He gives kickass speeches that resound with rage and the prospect of death. He puts you through drills and exercises that kill several of your friends, and he makes sure you know damned well that their deaths are your fault. And, in one of my favorite moments in movies, he teaches a lesson (sort of) about interstellar warfare by impaling Gary Busey’s son’s hand with a throwing knife. And who hasn’t dreamed of doing that one of these days?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1HcOVTrLRs

There’s little texture to it — no regret, no contrapasso. This is all for your own good, as you must know — as, in this sort of artistic project, must be true. He is the cruelest of gateways into the cruelest of worlds, and you love him for it. Then, at the end, he comes back and does what no one else can do. Unlike many Sergeants, he gets his own chance to save the day — to prove the validity of his own lessons with his own hands.

Verhoeven is a master of his own breed of contemporary counterpoint to the Platonic form — a messy, meaty symbolic character who at once epitomizes an idea and locates it firmly in the material world, with no hope of Cartesian elevation.

And Sgt. Zim, the product of great acting, great directing, and hilarious and awesome writing, is one of the best examples of this work, and, as far as I’m concerned, the greatest fulfillment of this role in pop culture.

“Bad Attitude” (B.A.) Baracus, The A-Team – Schechner:

We open with a poem – originally written for the Mr. T. Haiku shrine:

“Untitled”
Here is how to tell
Whom I pity: if fool, yes,
If not fool, then no.

-Matthew Belinkie, David Shechner
~Winter, 2004

“The A-Team” is fundamentally an extended metaphor for the generation gap: a group of highly skilled members from an elder time find themselves thrust into a world which relies upon, persecutes, and ultimately cannot understand them.  This tale is essentially fleshed out as a morality play featuring characters which represent the Ancient Greek fundamental elements:  Fire (Hannibal, frequently seen incinerating cigars, semi-frequently using flame-throwers to do so), Water (Face-man, whose physical form–perhaps even moral code–are fluid and ever-changing), Wind (Murdock, a pilot, frequently accused of being full of hot air), Some-helpless-chick-whose-elderly-father-probably-shouldn’t-have-gotten-into-business-with-the-mafia-in-the-first-place (played by some helpless chick whose elderly father probably shouldn’t have gotten into business with the mafia in the first place), and Earth.

Oh, Earth.  It’s physically the strongest of them – actually being built from rocks (and therein, ores from which one can smelt precious metals).

It’s the source of all our nutrients – say, those found in a wholesome glass of milk.  According to the Greeks, it is a low-leaning element, tending downward towards gravity, and away from the air – hence its natural fear of flying.  I’ve always suspected that it deeply respects and loves its momma.  Also, it’s brown – a fact that I will not discuss, as I pride myself on being racially color-blind.

However, an effective morality play dehumanizes its characters, reducing them into nearly abstract, instructive forms, and as such the creators of The A-Team have failed in their portrayal of Earth.  In fact, though I immediately jumped at this character for my favorite all-time pop-culture sergeant, closer inspection really reveals quite the opposite.

A sergeant is a relatively anonymous character – less a figure of true authority (who’s full name-beyond rank-would probably be known, for instance), than a glorified floor foreman, a grunt’s Chief Grunt.  A sergeant get out there and leads by example, in cases where success means being altruistic in the face of danger, and placing abstract notions of squad, country and honor before self.

And the thing is, B.A. is the precise opposite of this selfless, nameless ideal: for one, despite his attachment and support of his squad, he’s the unequivocal star of The A-Team.  Ask yourself: during your childhood, how many times did you beg your parents for a Face-Man action figure?  Moreover, and most importantly, he’s incomprehensibly far from the ideal of the nameless rank-holder, the “Sarge” archetype.  Rather, the sheer power of his cult-generating personal magnitude goes so far as to breaks the fourth wall.

This man was never B.A. Baracus – he was always Mr. T.

That’s right, I’d argue that, since the suspension of disbelief required to think of this man as a character living in The A-Team universe is so insurmountably great, every time Mr. T.-er-B.A. walks into the scene, anything he says or does can be essentially considered nondiagetic.  He has entered a rarified realm inhabited by the likes of William Shatner, Stephen Segal, Cher, and Michael Cerra: he fails to portray a character, because he himself has become so deeply intertwined within it.

After all, how many of you actually recalled B.A.’s military rank, without consultation of this list?  No, no as much as it pains me (emotionally now, and almost certainly physically later) to say any disparaging words towards Mr. T. and his works, I cannot consider Sgt. Baracus to be a great military leader.  At best, he’s the wise-talking shephard who leads a group of talented child gymnasts through an “unknown number of episodes.”  At worst, he’s a gruesome adversary for Rocky Balboa.

Forgive me, T.

Sgt. Slaughter, WWF Wrestling and GI Joe: A Real American Hero – Sheely

The best indicator of Sgt. Slaughter’s superiority over all other pop culture sergeants is his presence in nearly every form of popular media—professional wrestling, cartoons, comic books, movies, toys, video games, television variety shows based on video games, and even rock music.

The fact that this one character has shown up in so many corners of our collective consciousness is largely a testament to the imagination of one man- Professional Wrestler Robert Remus, who created the Slaughter persona in 1980 after a number of failed attempts to launch his career in the 1970s.  Although many of the elements of the Sgt. Slaughter character had entered the popular culture before through film and television throughout the 60s and 70s, Slaughter’s appearance in the WWF was the first iconic portrayal of a Sergeant in the 1980s, cementing the linkage of the military rank to aviator shades, flat brimmed hats, an imposing physical presence, and the apparent ability to communicate only by shouting insults, predating R. Lee Ermey’s profanity-laden performance in Full Metal Jacket by 8 years.

The most fascinating aspect of Sgt. Slaughter (the Wrestler) is the fact that he maintained the title and demeanor of a drill instructor in the ring and in promos, even though he never had a direct link to any branch of the military.  Thus, rather than relying on military discipline and protocol, he had to impose his will on his opponents through levels of brute force that would be extreme even by the standards of the most harsh drill sergeant. Take, for instance, his fireball ambush of Hulk Hogan:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSgfHGgB78I

This aspect of the Sarge as a renegade officer who largely operated separate from any military hierarchy carried over to his appearances in the GI Joe animated series and TV spots. Even though he was responsible for training new GI Joe recruits, most of his active combat involved him single handedly dismantling whole battalions of cobra commandos, rather than serving as a more hands-off commanding officer:

Although the reality is that the cartoon character was based on the toy that was based on the wrestler, that’s never how I wanted to imagine it as a kid.  Instead, I imagined that the two worlds blended together into one narrative whereby Sgt. Slaughter had been kicked out of the GI Joe unit for going rouge, forcing him to use his brute strength and military training make money in hand to hand combat. Although there was little in the GI Joe series or his WWF story arcs to support these flights of fancy, the character itself was strong enough to fuel many hours of epic action figure adventures.

Gunnery Sgt. Hartman, Full Metal Jacket – Perich

Gunny Hartman, as played by R. Lee Ermey, is the best pop culture sergeant for the following reasons:

1) Ermey did not invent the stereotype of the profanity-screaming drill sergeant, belittling his recruits because he knows it’ll turn them into real men. For one thing, the ogre with the heart of gold is not a stereotype. That’s what drill sergeants actually do. They’re responsible for disciplining the members of their unit, and they take that job seriously.

Sgt. Hartman’s difference is that he never appears to care for these men. He makes some noise about wanting to weed out the slackers and produce hardcore Marines, but really that’s just talk. Hartman doesn’t have motivation. He’s an unending torrent of psychological abuse given a human shape. He doesn’t want soldiers – he wants killers.

Sgt. Hartman is the Platonic conception of the drill sergeant, the purifying flame made real.

2) Ermey has the best real-world qualifications as an actual sergeant. He served 14 months in ‘Nam. The man has a Bronze Star and a Gallantry Cross. When Kubrick asked Ermey to produce some instructions on how to portray a drill sergeant, Ermey handed in a video of himself belittling British Royal Marines for 15 minutes straight. Without pausing, stumbling or repeating himself. While people off-camera threw oranges and tennis balls at him. Kubrick hired him for the role of Gunny Hartman on the spot.

(Now there’s some lost footage I’d like to see – Ermey’s audition tape)

3) The dialogue. The grabastic, skull-fucking, numbnutted, finger-banging dialogue. If you’ve seen Full Metal Jacket, then you’re already in awe of the fountain of blistering hate that this man can spew on command. If you haven’t, no IMDB Quotes page can put it into proper context.