With his a wild mop of blonde hair, aviator Ray-Bans, and intermittent stubble, Canty looks like a handsomer Mitch Hedberg. It’s easier to picture him in the crowd at Bonnaroo than it is to imagine him in the middle of a firefight. His apartment in Downtown Charlottesville is messy, as one would expect for a 24-year-old guy living alone. There’s a flat screen TV, a Playstation, a bike, and framed Star Wars screen prints on the wall. There’s also a living room full of tripods, lights, and mic stands, and a computer in a dark bedroom where an editing program runs practically 24/7.
He presses play and there are his friends—guys who have long hair now, and faces that are hard and haunted—on screen laughing, their hair cut high and tight and their cheeks baby-face full, and pouring beer down each others throats. Then there’s footage of the aftermath, a tiny room filled with sleeping Marines almost buried under empty beer cans. It’s a scene that plays out every weekend at every college in America, except that here, no matter how much they drink, the room will be completely spotless by Monday morning, guaranteed. And there’s an underlying sense that for these 19-year-olds, drinking isn’t about fitting in, it’s about hanging on.
Footage like this is just as important to Canty as combat footage, maybe more so, because he feels like it shows a side of Marine life most people never see, the goofy, human side, just hanging out with your friends and having fun. To most civilians, the Marine Corps is all about fighting, but Marines understand their identity in terms of friendship.
“I feel closer to some of these guys than I do my own brother,” Canty said. “And I understand that he feels closer to the guys that he was in with than his own brother. It’s just this bond that’s been built through being able to depend on each other for your life, but it’s also been built just through literally 24 hours a day, seven days a week of sitting next to this guy, getting mad at him. You can argue and you know you’ll get over it 20 minutes later.”
Despite that bond, Canty noticed that after they got out, the guys from his unit barely spoke to each other beyond the occasional comment on Facebook. He asked his friend Repsher about it, and Rep said that they all believe that everybody else is doing better than they are, and nobody wants to bother the other guys with their personal problems.
So what he wants to do now is hit the road with his best friend Darren Doss to visit as many people as he can, filming the whole time, the idea being that the journey and the process are as much a part of the film as everything else. It’s important that Doss is involved, even though he knows jack shit about making movies, because the movie Canty’s making is about transitions. After he got out of the Marines, Doss spent three years hooked on heroin. He’s clean now, has been for over 130 days, and Canty hopes that working on the movie will give him something to do other than dope.
Interviewing his friends is both really comfortable, and at the same time really weird.
“It feels good for me. I know that I feel like I’m on a very important story, I always say that it’s the only time in my life where I’m doing something that matters. And these guys have thanked me, they’ve texted me afterwards, ‘Thank you.’ There’s always a hug goodbye, ‘Thanks man, I’m glad I saw you.’ I think it’s both helpful and healing, but it’s kind of like this melancholy feeling [as well.] Like yoga, or therapy, or something. It feels good, but you also feel kind of tired.”
Vietnam is often referred to as “The Television War,” coming as it did right when TVs were first spreading into most American homes, but the soldiers in Vietnam were also the first generation to grow up raised on war films. “I keep thinking about all the kids who got wiped out by 17 years of war movies before coming to Vietnam to get wiped out for good,” wrote war correspondent Michael Herr in his mega-classic book Dispatches. “We’d all seen too many movies, stayed too long in Television City, years of media glut had made certain connections difficult.”
What will they say, then, about war in our time, in the age of digital photography and the Internet? Soldiers in Afghanistan have cameras on everything, and YouTube is full of illicit helmet cam footage of combat, and what they call mot videos, “mot” being short for motivational, which mostly feature marines blasting the shit out of God-knows-what to the machine gun rhythms of heavy metal.
Watch a mot vid Canty made in Afghanistan:
One of the first things I wanted to ask Canty was what he thought of every war movie ever made, and right away he told me that Black Hawk Down and Saving Private Ryan were his two favorite movies until he saw Platoon. Platoon, he said, was now his favorite war movie. As a professional journalist, I’m trained to keep my face composed, but for the next 20 minutes I didn’t hear a thing he said as I raged internally. Platoon? Platoon! What about Apocalypse Now, you little twerp!
Exactly seven days later he e-mailed me to say that he’d just watched Apocalypse Now for the first time (He hadn’t even seen it!), and that it was a great movie, a really great movie, but that he still thought Platoon was the most realistic war film. It made me realize we grew up in different generations, with different ideas about war.
The first trailer Canty made for Once a Marine is hard to forget, although that’s mostly because his subject matter is so powerful. He resists the temptation to let his filmmaking overshadow his material. His skill is even more impressive given the fact that, as he puts it, he grew up in the “cultural vacuum” of Louisa. He’s working hard to catch up, however, and so he borrowed a stack of classic documentaries from my collection.