Zieff: Private Benjamin (1980)

If one thing could be said to characterise 80s comedies as a whole, it was a sense that upward mobility had once again become a viable mode of American picaresque. Obsessed with weird and wacky ways of rising to the top in a new Reagonomic climate, these frequently neoconservative outings were strangely individualistic and militaristic at once, enjoining viewers to discover the self-discipline required to follow their own most personal desires with an audacity that often brought them quite close to the self-help literature that flourished around the same time. Nowhere is that clearer in Private Benjamin, a Goldie Hawn vehicle that in some ways feels like the first true 80s comedy, as well as one of the films that most captures Hawn’s uncanny ability to impart a kind of offbeat absurdity to every utterance while tugging on the heartstrings for all she's worth. Here she plays Judy Benjamin, a cloistered Jewish WASP – at least that’s how the film presents it – who finds herself enlisting for the “new 80s army” after two marriages fail to provide her with any fulfilment. Rocking up at Fort Biloxi in a designer outfit, she quickly learns a new kind of rigour, but also learns to have enough confidence in herself to pursue one-night stands, impulse romances and, eventually, orgasm, all the while exuding a lazy, slightly tipsy complacency that makes it feel as if the film has never left that opening wedding reception. As Benjamin travels around the United States and then to France, drifting between her recruiting officer (Harry Dean Stanton), best friend (Mary Kay Place) and memories of her late(st) husband (Albert Brooks), an odd vision of the US military emerges as the place where the self-explorations and sexual liberations of the 60s Left can still carry on unimpeded, which perhaps makes it something of an object lesson in how the military-industrial complex – the ultimate hippy enemy – contained, commodified and militarised the hippy impulse, but also results in one of the most effective advertisements for the US army ever committed to screen, rivalling Clint Eastwood’s Heartbreak Ridge for sheer small-town cosiness and small-bar conviviality. Unlike Eastwood’s outfit, however, this is very much a post-historical US army, utterly jettisoned from the Vietnam crisis that solidified the hippy movement, let alone its own Cold War backdrop – particularly important once Benjamin arrives in France and is prohibited from dating an ex-communist – which is more or less reduced to a stylistic flourish, an exotic trim around the edges of Camp America. Still, the army does genuinely feel like a viable line of flight at moments as well, only shedding some of its grittier overtones in the name of a utopian workplace that women can fall back upon in lieu of the nuclear family, part of a broader deflection of hippedom into young professionalism that perhaps places the film with comedies like 9 to 5, Working Girl and Big Business more than any army dramas, in a kind of precursor to Runaway Bride that nevertheless anticipates how that film should have ended. And in any case, there’s something about Benjamin’s hippy energy that exceeds the way the army motivates it, just as there’s no film in which Hawn’s own inextricably hippy lexicon and languour feels so powerfully present. For a film that’s all about leaving marriage behind to join the army, then, it’s refreshingly free of any sense that the army is just another husband, which is perhaps what finally gives it such a unique tone – jaunty, but never jingoistic, patriotic but never platitudinous, and feminist without ever falling back upon the feminist apologias that characterise so many so-called liberal dramas from this period.