Dogfight: In Love and War

This same nuanced approach is evident from the start of Dogfight, her second feature. In a pointed narrative choice, Savoca opens the film by introducing us to a gaggle of jarheads. Most prominent among them is Eddie Birdlace (also known as Lance Corporal Birdlace, or “Birdlegs”), played by River Phoenix. He and his three moronic pals have fun chasing “ugly” women for their last stateside get-together before their shipment overseas the next day. The film is clear-eyed about these characters’ narrow and chauvinistic worldview, but it also portrays them with compassion. That an audience can feel sympathy for these men as they burst into town like bulls in a china shop is thanks to Savoca’s sensitive handling of the material—and her understanding of how the horrors of the Vietnam War would go on to brutally damage American manhood.

The film’s lead actors infuse Savoca’s subtle observations about American society with tenderness and conviction. Taylor had only recently begun her career with a 1986 appearance on the Michael Mann–produced television series Crime Story and memorable roles in Donald Petrie’s Mystic Pizza (1988) and Cameron Crowe’s Say Anything . . . (1989). In Dogfight, she is sensitive and convincing as a moon-eyed young woman who believes earnestly in art’s capacity to change the world (an idealism that many Americans felt in the early sixties, before disillusionment with the war set in later that decade). Even when Rose learns of Birdlace’s deception, her angry rant at him is not self-interested but instead concerned with all the women he and his friends have insulted.

With a severe haircut and a cigarette behind his ear, Phoenix dispenses with the rock-and-roll tresses he wore as a gay hustler in the film that defined his image, Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho, released the same year. He embodies Birdlace with an easy, swaggering charisma that barely conceals the prickly anger beneath the surface. In the dinner scene, he puffs out his chest and sets his eyes sharply on the maître d’ with an almost childlike contempt. In real life, Phoenix’s personality was much more aligned with Rose’s empathetic nature than with the abrasiveness of his own character. As Taylor later recalled in an interview, Birdlace “was actually a hard part for him, because it was so radically different from who
he was. He was such a hippie, and here he was playing this marine. It actually caused him a lot of discomfort.” (The role is also particularly bittersweet in light of the young actor’s tragic death two years after the film’s release.)

Taylor and Phoenix share a gentle rapport, though at first they look awkwardly paired. She moves cautiously and slowly, while he is all motion, energy, and bravado; his reed-thin frame and blond hair clash with her mousy but solid demeanor. Combined with the classic opposites-attract dynamic at the center of the story, these contrasts create a robust sense of two wildly different young people—one shy while the other is cocksure, one cerebral and socially conscious while the other is cynical and fatalistic. As the film unfolds, the actors reveal emotional layers that show Rose is tougher than she appears and Birdlace is softer than he seems. Each character strives to conform to a gender role that doesn’t completely fit, but their growing affection for each other allows them to transcend these socially enforced limitations.

Working with a screenplay by Bob Comfort, who was inspired largely by his own experiences as a marine, Savoca was intent on bringing her and Comfort’s shared vision of authenticity to the film. She hired decorated Vietnam veteran Dale Dye, Hollywood’s foremost military expert, to facilitate mock boot-camp training for the male actors. Dye—who had also worked in a similar capacity on Platoon (1986), in which he also appears—has had a long career advising directors on battle sequences. Though there is little actual combat in Dogfight, the spirit of camaraderie among the men is a mark of his influence.

Dogfight is primarily set in the twenty-four hours before the assassination of John F. Kennedy, meaning that the main action precedes the Gulf of Tonkin incident and the escalation of U.S. involvement in Vietnam (referred to, at one point in the movie, as “a little country”). If America’s loss of so-called innocence in this period has been a cinematic cliché at least since The Deer Hunter (1978), Dogfight mines this territory while also making abundantly clear that Americans were never really innocent. The film draws a direct line between the men’s callous expressions of machismo and a war that would thrive on their violent tendencies.

Period films depicting the sixties have varying attitudes toward the era, but many reflect on it with nostalgia, evident in their loving presentations of music and fashion. Dogfight, on the other hand, is almost anti-nostalgia. It contains no shots of carhops or girls in bobby socks, and few evocations of the excitement of youth culture. The film presents its period details flatly, and it takes place in a fairly nondescript San Francisco, depicting the city as it was before the Haight-Ashbury scene became a counterculture phenomenon. Whereas other filmmakers have depicted retro dating rituals as amusing, Savoca leaves nothing of this toxic culture unexamined, making the casual misogyny of so many other teen films seem glaring by comparison.

Dogfight offers penetrating insights on many of the restrictive social hierarchies of the decade, a time when the imperative to attract, date, and keep a man was a cudgel to beat women with. There is a real intersectionality in the film’s feminism—just look at the “ugly” women the men seek out for their little competition. One marine cheats at the game by hiring a sex worker as his date; she is so accustomed to abusive men that she’s unfazed by the whole business. Another brings a plus-size Native American woman (Sue 
Morales), a choice that highlights the racism and fatphobia of early-sixties beauty standards. In another scene, misogyny is inflected with homophobia when the men ask a group of single women if they are lesbians.

“How did we get to be such fucking idiots?” Birdlace asks his pals while aboard a bus taking them to be shipped off. In the conversation that follows, his friends acknowledge that they subscribe to what they know is “bullshit” because it makes them “buddies”—an acceptance of the status quo that the film implies would soon enable support for the war. And yet, though the men vary in their level of consciousness of their own conformism, it’s apparent by the end of the movie that no individual’s self-awareness would have stopped the tragedies of the war from occurring.

At the time of its release, Dogfight received a muted reception from critics, some of whom struggled with its tone. But from today’s vantage, the film is decidedly complex and bold in its flouting of genre expectations. As Savoca has noted, Warner Bros. had pigeonholed it as a coming-of-age movie catering to teen audiences, partly based on the reputation that Phoenix had built with films such as Stand by Me (1986) and Running on Empty (1988). But that wasn’t what the director was interested in making or selling. As a result, the studio put little effort into publicizing the film, and it screened in only twenty-four cinemas, grossing just $400,000 domestically.

The film is also hard to pin down because, while it looks back critically on the Vietnam War, it lacks the bombastic tone and gruesome imagery of then-recent films like Platoon and Casualties of War (1989). Too politically conscious to be a romantic comedy and too thoughtful and dialogue-driven to be a traditional war film, Dogfight doesn’t adhere to the conventions of any genre. It is more interested in deconstructing the fraternal misbehavior of its male characters while showing how, even within a dehumanizing social structure, love between men and women can still flourish.

Dogfight may not have been a financial success, but it is nonetheless a significant triumph. After winning acclaim at the Sundance Film Festival with True Love, Savoca achieved the rare feat of getting a studio movie made on her own terms. Dogfight’s feminist sensibility anticipates the bold and principled choices that she and Taylor would go on to make throughout their careers: Savoca continued to explore women’s inner lives in her 1993 film Household Saints (another collaboration with Taylor), while Taylor has become a beloved veteran of independent cinema and has consistently played idiosyncratic characters, including a vampiric philosophy student in Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction (1995) and the radical feminist writer Valerie Solanas in Mary Harron’s I Shot Andy Warhol (1996). It’s hard to imagine a movie like this, with its intimate look at male cruelty and vulnerability, coming out of today’s film industry, which puts a premium on genre output that appeals to the broadest possible audiences. Years later, Dogfight’s greatness stands as a testament to the specificity of Savoca’s uncompromising vision and her commitment to portraying the ambiguities of human relationships.