Full Metal Jacket (1987) Director: Stanley Kubrick
“The Marine Corps does not want robots. The Marine Corps wants killers.”
At the height of the Vietnam War, a group of young recruits have their heads shaved as they enter basic training on Paris Island. Here, they face an utterly outrageous, venom-spewing Gunnery Sergeant named Hartman (Lee Ermey). His iconic character creates an utterly ridiculous, vulgar, hilarious caricature of an intense drill instructor (apparently, Ermey ad-libbed approximately half of his lines in these scenes using his own first-hand knowledge as a drill instructor). Hartman governs this little fraternity as if conditioning them for brutality, only masking this process with crude jokes, casual racism, and a child-like ostracization of any recruit who appears to be too effeminate (although none of the recruits are allowed to laugh at any of this absurdity). To top it off, recruits are taught to have an erotic attachment to their rifles, and to become a “weapon” and a “minister of death.”
One recruit, Private J. T. “Joker” Davis (Matthew Modine) manages to earn the respect of Hartman –he is clearly intelligent and has courage (he cracks a John Wayne joke and fearlessly admits that he does not believe in the Virgin Mary). However, a chubby, soft-hearted, child-like recruit named Private Leonard “Gomer Pyle” or simply “Pyle” (Vincent D’Onofrio) seems to ceaselessly fail at every exercise. He is undisciplined because he has trouble learning. At one point, he swipes a jelly donut from the mess hall and is forced stand at attention with the jelly donut in his mouth, while the other recruits are punished for his failures. In response, they tie him down and torture him in his bed –and shortly thereafter, we begin to see Pyle’s mental decline. On the day of graduation, Joker and Hartman find a very disturbed Pyle sitting alone in the bathroom at night with a fully loaded rifle and a “full metal jacket” –he looks like pure evil in the moonlight. Pyle shoots and kills Hartman before promptly killing himself. This troubling scene is an echo of a speech Hartman gave to the recruits, praising the marksmanship of American killers, like Charles Whitman and Lee Harvey Oswald –both of whom were trained in the Marine Corps. Perhaps Stanley Kubrick is suggesting here that there is something inherently dehumanizing, dishonorable –even psychopathic—about training recruits in this manner.
Full Metal Jacket is a bifurcated film, almost as if portraying two separate stories united in one movie. The first half of the movie concerns the batch of recruits (or “maggots”) known as Platoon 3092 in training, whereas the second half of the film shifts to the perspective of Joker. His intellect and snarky, sarcastic demeanor lands him a job as a journalist, though he is quickly jaded by the work because the “Stars and Stripes” are only willing to publish two kinds of propaganda stories –those showing the benevolence of soldiers “winning the hearts and minds,” and those showing a successful American kill. It is a strange duality –altruism and viciousness– not unlike Joker wearing a peace symbol on his lapel, while also sporting a helmet that reads “Born to Kill” (he claims it is to reflect a Jungian “duality of man”, but maybe it is also worn to delineate the “phony tough” from the “crazy brave”).
“We are here to help the Vietnamese because inside every gook is an American trying to get out. It’s a hardball world, son. We’ve got to try to keep our heads until this peace craze blows over.”
However, following the Tet Offensive in 1968, Joker (who continues to amusingly adopt the alter-ego of John Wayne) and his colleague Rafterman are dispatched to meet up with the platoon of one of his fellow recruit-trainees, Cowboy (Arliss Howard). Along the way they meet a soldier who is indiscriminately murdering fleeing Vietnamese farmers, and an open-air grave of Vietnamese civil servants tricked into attending an American re-education seminar before being murdered (some of whom were buried alive), until they finally meet-up with Cowboy’s squad which includes a battle-hardened machine gunner named “Animal Mother” (Adam Baldwin) whose helmet ironically reads “I Welcome Death.” As they enter into direct combat zones, where they fire upon anonymous, faceless enemies, ironically the crude sexual undertones grow stronger (risking death carries an erotic urgency with it). Suddenly, soldiers begin dying and Cowboy is left in charge, but he is clearly not equipped to handle the role, especially when “Doc Jay” and “Eightball” are shot dead by a sniper. Cowboy is upstaged by Animal Mother, only to be killed himself by sniper fire. He tragically dies in Joker’s arms repeating the phrase “I can hack it… I can hack it…”
The squad decides to “get some payback” by infiltrating the sniper’s tower only to find the sniper to be a civilian woman. For the first time, the soldiers see the face of the enemy in an intimate setting. While gasping for air, she begs the soldiers to shoot her, and Joker mercifully decides to honor her wish. Now, he no longer has his ironic sense of detachment. In the end, the soldiers march away while chanting “M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E.” Echoing the thematic connection between sex and war, Joker offers his final journal entry which crassly describes his sexual fantasies alongside his fearlessness in battle and thankfulness to be alive (reminiscent of the “this is my rifle, this is my gun” mantra learned in training). The credits roll over the sound of “Paint it Black” by The Rolling Stones. Indeed, music plays an important role in the film as we move from songs like “Hello Vietnam” by Johnny Wright and “These Boots Are Made For Walkin’” by Nancy Sinatra, to “Surfin’ Bird” by The Trashmen and “Paint it Black” by The Rolling Stones.
“The dead know only one thing: it is better to be alive.”
Full Metal Jacket is less a Hollywood melodrama about the evils of warfare, and more an intense character examination of the duality of dehumanization on the one hand, and hyper-sexualization in combat on the other. Based on Gustav Hasford’s 1979 novel The Short-Timers, Full Metal Jacket was shot entirely in England (where Stanley Kubrick lived at the time). As was typical for Kubrick, his brash style led to endless takes for every scene, and perhaps in some small ways his harsh treatment of the actors echoes the character of Gunnery Sergeant Hartman in the film. For example, Kubrick’s temperament has birthed to many infamous stories, such as preventing Matthew Modine from leaving the set when his wife went into early labor requiring a C-section (Kubrick only relented when Modine threatened to slice his own hand); or another story about Dorian Harewood (who played “Eightball”) renegotiating his fee for the film, leading Kubrick to simply re-write the script and have him killed. Perhaps there is a certain degree of autobiography buried within Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket.
The image of a civilian woman in a war begging to be finished off is indeed one of the most profoundly unforgettable film endings. Most certainly for a film by Stanley Kubrick. Thank you for your review.