Ears, Open. Eyeballs, Click. is a documentary that follows a group of recruits during their experience of United States Marine Corps boot camp.
The title of the documentary comes from when a drill instructor commands a recruit to attention by saying “Ears“, to which the recruit is expected to respond with “Open, sir!” When the drill instructor is calling the recruit to look at him, he will say “Eyeballs” or any other less formal command such as “Look here“, to which the recruit has to respond with “Click“, “Snap” is also a common response.
The director is young filmmaker Canaan Brumley who went to boot camp after graduating high school, at the age of 17. He did it to impress his girlfriend, which he admits is one of the most immature things you can possibly do.
This documentary features no narration, no interviews, and no focus on any particular characters. He shot this documentary from a fly-on-the-wall perspective, capturing events candidly as they occurred.
Ears, Open. Eyeballs, Click. will definitely remind people of the first part of the film Full Metal Jacket, but this boot camp is worse because it is real, and the discomfort that the viewer feels is from real situations that they are watching. You can feel the tension and anxiety of the young recruits, as their commanding officers march around looking for something wrong.
Brumley uses chapter titles to break up Ears, Open. Eyeballs, Click. a bit, and possibly to insert a bit of humor into the documentary. Brumley began shooting the documentary with four cameramen, but they all ended up leaving the project within three weeks, saying that they didn’t think it would work out. So Brumley ended up shooting over eight weeks, the majority of the documentary, on his own.
In the end, Brumley ended up shooting over 100 hours of footage, from which he was able to pick and choose footage for the hour and a half documentary. Brumley allows the viewer to reach his own conclusion regarding the documentary, by avoiding any narration or editorial.
Definitely a raw and real eye-opener of the USMC boot camp process. If you have no idea of how the process is or was, ignorance is no longer an excuse, with Ears, Open. Eyeballs, Click. providing you with an honest look of boot camp.
IMDB | Wikipedia | Interview with Canaan Brumley
Trailer | Canaan Brumley’s homepage
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