Full Metal JacketThe Vietnam War was an unpopular war for many reasons. There are those who regard the events leading up to the war to be of questionable veracity, and that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was the excuse for the United States to push into Southeast Asia in the interests of quashing the communist movement and preventing the "domino effect". The consensus is that America was ill-prepared to confront a guerrilla army fighting a war on their home turf, and furthermore, it was a war without purpose; without that purpose, our "soul" was not in it. But if Full Metal Jacket is any kind of reflection of that spiritual vacuum, it was not because the soul was not there, but that it was snuffed out, a casualty of the process of transforming men into monsters.
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From the very opening scene of Stanley Kubrick's perspective on the Vietnam War, there are casualties--swaths of hair strewn across the battlefield of the barbershop floor, left to lie where they fall. This opening--set to one of many musical selections played with a kind of cynical smirk--is the first to set the tone that the process of boot camp, of making these men into Marines, is one of homogenization, of reducing them to a quantifiable unit, a cog. Although James T. "Joker" Davis (Matthew Modine) explains via narration that "the Marines don't want robots, they want killers", a man becomes a killer because he no longer considers life sacred, because the value of life has been reduced to something disposable, just as what the men in Full Metal Jacket are reduced to through the harrowing eight week training on Parris Island by the quintessential drill sergeant, Gunnery Sergeant Hartman (R. Lee Ermey). Hartman spews a tirade of shocking diction at the men, berates them in the most creative verbal displays ever put to celluloid, and endows them with offensive nicknames which they wear with pride for the rest of the film. And yet one thing stands out among Hartman's decimation of the men...that he is doing this because he understands that war is Hell, and the only things that live in Hell are demons. Hartman psychologically scrubs away the impurities of his soldiers, so that they may be baptized in their own sweat and blood, and born again hard as warriors who will be able to survive in the most hellish of environments. The tragically clear break here in this methodology is with Private Leonard "Gomer Pyle" Lawrence (Vincent D'Onofrio), an overweight and sensitive man who suffers cruelly under Hartman's unrelenting regimen. It is true that not all men can be warriors, and that not all men can learn the same way. Even Hartman recognizes this, and assigns Joker to help guide Pyle. For a while things look up, but it comes to a head when Pyle's continued failure to meet Hartman's expectations--and the bullying nighttime assault by his bunk mates--pushes Pyle beyond the point of no return. Pyle reaches that level, evoking the "thousand-yard stare" prior to even being sent over to war, and it becomes clear that Hartman's method--and the military's, according to the underlying commentary about the soldier process by the film--is too effective at destroying that soul; for a creature without a soul will not hesitate to kill.
Kubrick is no stranger to portraying war with a cynical barb, and yet I've felt that Full Metal Jacket represents his most overt display of this. His selection of contemporary and upbeat music of the period asynchronously juxtaposed alongside gory displays of battle and vice-ridden occupation stands as his most impishly irreverent, a borderline political cartoon. The ne plus ultra of this example is at the denouement of the film, with the Marines striding across the burning rubble of some forgotten Vietnamese city, singing the Mickey Mouse March in harmony. This scene is especially sardonic and even sad, as the armies which march sing a song of childhood, but employed in the obscene fashion of warrior pride. It is as though the men who kill are still children inside, all the more eerie given the revelation of the deadly sniper at the climax of the film. Up to this point, Joker has always come across as competent and capable, but he has been our hero because we suspect that deep down, he's not really one hundred percent deprived of his humanity, his jocular--even flippant--attitude a mask to insulate himself from the horrors of war. Joker is a war correspondent, and has little interest in killing, contrary to the ironic credo marked into his helmet, a clear contradiction which brings him smug satisfaction. There is a point on Parris island--actually several--where the rifle is largely implied to be the soul of a marine, or at least the totemic substitute. When Joker confronts the sniper, his rifle jams, a reflection of his lack of commitment to the corps, but also a testament to the last vestiges of his humanity in this metaphorical ninth circle. For a movie about war, Full Metal Jacket boasts a surprising amount of philosophical undertones (and overtones), and in many cases, the Marines wear their hearts on their sleeves...more accurately, their credos on their helmets. When confronted by a Marine colonel/cheerleader about the anachronism of Joker's peace sign and his "Born to Kill" helmet, he claims that it has something to do with the "duality of man...the 'Jungian thing'", the idea being that "every creative person is a duality or a synthesis of contradictory aptitudes". It is also ironic in light of Hartman's torturous tutelage that Jung is also quoted as saying that, "the healthy man does not torture others - generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers." And yet Joker is not isolated as the only metaphorical anchor; Sergeant "Animal Mother" (Adam Baldwin) wears a quote from the Bhagavad Gita on his helmet, "I am become death", which also recalls Robert Oppenheimer, when questioned about his feelings about the atomic bomb. And ultimately, the understood line from another philosopher--Friedrich Nietzsche--emerges from the black smoke which looms large in the Vietnamese sky, as Joker has pushed beyond the veil, and abandons the last of his inhibitions to join the corps in body and soul: "He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you".
Recommended for: Fans of a surprising mix of irreverence and seriousness in a war movie, with philosophical points of light illuminating the horrors of war, and a cautionary tale of the dangers of dehumanizing a man for the sake of being a more efficient killer.
Kubrick is no stranger to portraying war with a cynical barb, and yet I've felt that Full Metal Jacket represents his most overt display of this. His selection of contemporary and upbeat music of the period asynchronously juxtaposed alongside gory displays of battle and vice-ridden occupation stands as his most impishly irreverent, a borderline political cartoon. The ne plus ultra of this example is at the denouement of the film, with the Marines striding across the burning rubble of some forgotten Vietnamese city, singing the Mickey Mouse March in harmony. This scene is especially sardonic and even sad, as the armies which march sing a song of childhood, but employed in the obscene fashion of warrior pride. It is as though the men who kill are still children inside, all the more eerie given the revelation of the deadly sniper at the climax of the film. Up to this point, Joker has always come across as competent and capable, but he has been our hero because we suspect that deep down, he's not really one hundred percent deprived of his humanity, his jocular--even flippant--attitude a mask to insulate himself from the horrors of war. Joker is a war correspondent, and has little interest in killing, contrary to the ironic credo marked into his helmet, a clear contradiction which brings him smug satisfaction. There is a point on Parris island--actually several--where the rifle is largely implied to be the soul of a marine, or at least the totemic substitute. When Joker confronts the sniper, his rifle jams, a reflection of his lack of commitment to the corps, but also a testament to the last vestiges of his humanity in this metaphorical ninth circle. For a movie about war, Full Metal Jacket boasts a surprising amount of philosophical undertones (and overtones), and in many cases, the Marines wear their hearts on their sleeves...more accurately, their credos on their helmets. When confronted by a Marine colonel/cheerleader about the anachronism of Joker's peace sign and his "Born to Kill" helmet, he claims that it has something to do with the "duality of man...the 'Jungian thing'", the idea being that "every creative person is a duality or a synthesis of contradictory aptitudes". It is also ironic in light of Hartman's torturous tutelage that Jung is also quoted as saying that, "the healthy man does not torture others - generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers." And yet Joker is not isolated as the only metaphorical anchor; Sergeant "Animal Mother" (Adam Baldwin) wears a quote from the Bhagavad Gita on his helmet, "I am become death", which also recalls Robert Oppenheimer, when questioned about his feelings about the atomic bomb. And ultimately, the understood line from another philosopher--Friedrich Nietzsche--emerges from the black smoke which looms large in the Vietnamese sky, as Joker has pushed beyond the veil, and abandons the last of his inhibitions to join the corps in body and soul: "He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you".
Recommended for: Fans of a surprising mix of irreverence and seriousness in a war movie, with philosophical points of light illuminating the horrors of war, and a cautionary tale of the dangers of dehumanizing a man for the sake of being a more efficient killer.