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| Full Metal Jacket: A Moving Tale of War | |||||||||
| Told in two parts, Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket chronicles a military journalist, Private Joker, from his basic training at Parris Island in South Carolina through his tour of duty in Vietnam. The first part of the film details the lives of the would-be soldiers as the foul-mouthed, tougher-than-nails Gunnery Sergeant Hartman forces them into shape.� The sergeant has an overbearing attitude toward one of his charges, a man the sergeant terms "Gomer Pyle" because of his heft, ineptness, and disrespectfulness. This ultimately leads Pyle to use his gun, fully loaded with live ammo, to shoot and kill the sergeant, then blow his own brains out, as one Private Joker looks on. The next part of the story follows Joker after the military compound where he is stationed is bombed during the Tet Offensive. Joker and his partner are assigned to an expedition up north, where both witness the carnage of war and deaths of their friends. This part culminates in a female Vietnamese sniper being coldly murdered by Joker. The few men remaining in the contingent march off afterwards, singing the theme song to the Mickey Mouse show. | |||||||||
| According to Robert Castle and Stephen Donatelli, Stanley Kubrick "dares the viewer to withstand certain levels of cinematic discomfort, because he knows that if we are even to begin to wonder what war does to human beings, then we had better start by being subjected to a species of the same outrage at the moviehouse" (Castle).� To this end, Kubrick succeeds greatly. He shows how the deaths of thousands of US soldiers affected the men that fought alongside them while keeping the viewer detached from the atrocities and from the characters themselves. One imagines that the soldiers must have had at least some level of detachment to mentally and physically survive the rigors that war forced upon them. | |||||||||
| In fact, the surrealism of the war provides the greatest impact of the movie. In the beginning, the character of Joker is very human, very willing to help the poor, misled Pyle. When Pyle asks Joker if the other guys hate him because they are being punished for his errors, Joker responds that he is not mad, he just wishes that Pyle would try harder. His voice is filled with compassion. When Pyle kills himself, the look on Joker's face is pure anguish. But later, once Joker has crossed over into the craziness of Vietnam, Joker exhibits feelings of indifference and apathy. Upon finding the female Vietnamese sharpshooter in a bombed-out building, he shoots the woman as she is praying and watches her writhe in agony, then marches off to the tune of Mickey Mouse, of all things. In Vietnam, Joker seems to have forgotten pity and kindness in a world where neither matters. He and the others cannot wait to "rotate back to the world," as if Vietnam were some kind of fantasy dreamscape.� The music employed throughout the movie increases the sense of surrealism. The movie "scores the sharply poetic imagery to be found here with the most soulless and banal American popular songs imaginable," (Maslin). | |||||||||
| Full Metal Jacket provides an incredibly realistic portrait of war that almost transcends the Vietnam experience and encompasses all wars. The men are turned into killing machines; "in their eyes we see absolutely nothing: no apprehension, no bravado, not even blind obedience, only the emptiness of clay" (Maslin). With their "war faces" and "thousand yard stares," they are men whom war has turned into ruthless, tortuous robots. And, strangely enough, this seems to be the film's weakness as well. Though the viewer can see the men become ghosts of their former selves, the viewer cannot understand what it is like to be a soldier. The viewer cannot submerge himself into the hell of war just by watching these heartless killers; by divorcing themselves from humanity, the soldiers divorce themselves from the viewers. "When soldiers die, the piercing bullets and gushing blood are reproduced with chilling authenticity, but eliciting shudders is not the same as eliciting pity" (Simon). | |||||||||
| Works Cited | |||||||||
| Kubrick, Stanley, dir. Full Metal Jacket. Perf. Matthew Modine, Adam Baldwin, Vincent D'Onofrio, Lee Ermey. Warner Studios, 1987. | |||||||||
| Castle, Robert and Stephen Donatelli. "Kubrick's Ulterior War," Film Comment. 34 (September 1998): 24. | |||||||||
| Maslin, Janet. "Inside the 'Jacket': All Kubrick," The New York Times. 5 July 1987. | |||||||||
| Simon, John. "Full Metal Jacket (Movie Reviews)," National Review. 39 (14 August 1987): 52. | |||||||||