You Can?t Handle the Truth About Aaron Sorkin

Which probably sounds dismissive. But in addition to being eminently watchable?and, more to the point, rewatchable?A Few Good Men is far from empty-headed. In fact, the movie resonates today in ways that have gone mostly uncommented upon (perhaps because, as much as everyone enjoys the movie, no one really takes it very seriously). In the movie?s climactic courtroom showdown, Jack Nicholson?s Colonel Jessup tells Tom Cruise?s Lieutenant Kaffee that he did, in fact, ?order the Code Red,? which is to say he told an inferior officer to tell two Marines to beat up a third, underperforming Marine. (In the course of that beating, the underperforming Marine dies.) Such tactics are necessary, he says, to protect the nation, even in ?peace time.? ?All you did is weaken a country today,? Jessup tells Kaffee, after the latter rather implausibly and very dramatically pries a confession out of him. ?That?s all you did.? Jessup is defending the torture of one of his own men, rather than the torture of the enemy, but the contours of the debate are familiar. And in the real-world debate, of course, the one that started about a decade after A Few Good Men came out (and continues today), Colonel Jessup is winning.

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