There were sergeants in movies before Louis Gossett Jr. starred in “An Officer and a Gentleman” in 1982 (although in my lifetime, I can’t remember one). There may be a variety of them later. But it’s a project that Gossett took on, and the cinematic role that, more than any other, came to describe it. Gossett, who died on March 29 at the age of 87, was an excellent actor who imposed his presence; just watch his ferocious take on an alien soldier under a mask of beaded makeup in “Enemy Mine.” But in “An Officer and a Gentleman,” Gossett took the exemplary role of a tough Marine sergeant and invested it with such flourish as to make him mythological. He took ownership of the role, infusing the very concept of drill sergeant with a richness, soul and intelligence, and a touch of something that no other actor has ever given him – a mystery of the highest quality.
The mystery was present in the character’s tacit humanity. It doesn’t matter who you have been. Gunnery Sergeant Emil Foley would stop his ass, would tear him apart, would determine what made him tick and be smarter. From the moment he sets his all-knowing eyes on Zack Mayo (Richard Gere), the scruffy, handsome bum who enlisted in the Marines, Foley doesn’t like him, and he has good reason to dislike him. Mayo has a lot of courage, but he is aimless and cannot see himself. This causes him to be completely mistaken for the army, and Foley can almost smell the narcissism. The film is structured as a confrontation between the two that turns into a full-scale psychological conflict. The sergeant mocks Mayo, berates him, discovers that he is making money by doing the other recruits’ chores for them, and, in one memorable sequence, tries to torture him into quitting.
But the way Gossett played him, Foley also represented something greater, an unspoken, monumental quality. To the recruits under his supervision, including Mayo, he was not just a tormentor, a karmic military disciplinarian. He was his higher self. By the end of basic training, he would become who you wanted to be.
Gossett has made him meticulous, with impeccable actions and a beady-eyed scowl that surveys everything, as well as a voice of the purest contempt, including when he relaxes enough that you already know that the sergeant’s abusive courage is his own efficiency. He’s a straight shooter who’s trying to take down his recruits in reality. And he will do this by teaching them something that those who are not in the military very rarely realize: that it is not just a dog-eat-dog world – it is a dog-fight-with-the-death world. His whole character is based on that.
It was immediate traditional efficiency. But if you said that Louis Gossett Jr. was and always will be cinema’s definitive drill sergeant, many would disagree with you, as he obviously has a serious competitor: R. Lee Ermey in “Full Metallic Jacket”. I’m not here to referee a major retrospective showdown between these two immortal performances. Ermey brought a high-quality realism to “Full Metallic Jacket,” because at the time he wasn’t an actor; he was a real Marine sergeant who worked as a guide. No one will ever get over the baroque obscenity of his language, which was born from the jargon he actually used in training camp. But here’s the thing: Ermey’s gunnery sergeant Hartman dominates the 47-minute opening sequence of “Full Metallic Jacket,” and he is then gunned down in what appears to be Kubrick’s deliberately distorted 1960s ideological version of a warmongering punishment. The army sadist got what he deserved.
Ermey’s performance, in its brutalizing approach, is incredible, but Gossett’s performance in “An Officer and a Gentleman” finds a sly connection with the audience that makes it a transcendent piece of acting. His greatest line may also be two words he utters near the end of the film. Mayo, about to say goodbye to the sergeant after graduating as head coach, tries to let him know what he meant to him. “I’ll never forget you, Sergeant,” he says. We predict Foley will ultimately reciprocate the sentiment. Instead, he says as quietly as ever, “I know.” Now that’s fucked up.
Gossett won an Oscar for his performance, becoming the first black actor to win the Oscar for best supporting actor. But even if he didn’t receive that award, part of his achievement in “An Officer and a Gentleman” is that his performance is a sly touchstone in Hollywood’s racial politics. In the two hours and four minutes of “An Officer and a Gentleman,” the fact that Foley is black is rarely mentioned or mentioned. It’s not that the film is set in a post-racial society, but it presents the US military as a form of post-racial semi-world. What matters is courage, willpower, strength of character, all seen without prejudice.
But there is a racial subtext to the film, and it is present in Gossett’s impressive efficiency. After catching Mayo breaking the rules and subjecting him to hours of gymnastics (and a version of waterboarding in a garden hose), Foley tells him, “I’d like your DOR!” As an officer, he wants Mayo to stop sullying his beloved Navy, but part of the power of this moment is that as Gossett does so, Foley can see through all of Mayo’s white privilege. He’s in a unique position to know how far Mayo has fallen from the person he was meant to be.
This notion, however, does not contour Foley as a personality. It’s simply there. And in 1982, the nuance of this seemed revolutionary. “An Officer and a Gentleman” is not a film with a liberal message – it is a karmic army confrontation (and, after all, a romance). Gossett plays Foley as a person who embraced army values as a means of salvation. What makes his performance greater than the razzmatazz of basic training is that it is a vision of spiritual equality. That’s why we will never neglect it.