Episode 55: Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket"

In 1987, Stanley Kubrick released Full Metal Jacket, a depressing look at the Vietnam War mostly told through the story of Private Joker, played by Matthew Modine.

"'The film is a comment on the sadism, the cruelty and the malleability of human nature,' says Kuznick. '[Robert] Muller has said, "They take little butter-balls like me and turn them into killing machines. I went from being a good guy to going over to Vietnam, and laughing at seeing women and children being wasted."'" -BBC

Links:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093058/

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1973/07/the-last-days-of-the-president/376281/

https://cinephiliabeyond.org/full-metal-jacket/

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20220623-full-metal-jacket-and-kubrick-the-ultimate-anti-war-films

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Transcript

Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

 Welcome to con-sara-cy theories. Are you ready to ask questions you shouldn't and find information you're not supposed to know? Well, you're in the right place. Here is your host, Sara Causey.

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. In tonight's episode, I will be talking about Stanley Kubrick's film Full Metal Jacket. There's no way for me to talk about the film in its entirety without getting into some spoilers. So if you have not watched this movie and you want to please do so before listening, bookmark this. Save it, come back to it later. In the meantime, let's saddle up and take this very depressing and a bit confusing ride. The film opens with the song, Goodbye, darling, hello. Vietnam. The boys are getting their heads shaved for military enlistment. The drill sergeant gives them a good ass chewing, and after saying he wasn't a racist, he lets loose on a racist tirade. Matthew modine's character makes a wise crack about John Wayne and immediately gets himself in trouble, and he earns the nickname private Joker. Joker says he joined the Corps because he wants to kill the drill sergeant goes around assigning nicknames to the various privates and accusing various men of homosexuality. We see shots of basic training, including that they must sleep with their boom sticks Joker and Pyle. Pyle is played by Vincent D'Onofrio, and he gets the nickname Gomer Pyle because he appears to be less intelligent than the other recruits, and he's also a bit pudgy, so Joker and Pyle are paired together by the drill sergeant, and Pyle seems to improve somewhat under Joker's tutelage, but the drill sergeant catches him with an unlocked Foot Locker, and inside is a contraband jelly donut. The drill sergeant says everyone will be punished for pyle's errors, and he'll have to watch the punishments and feel guilty. Pyle believes everyone hates him. One night, a group gets together and beats Pyle in his bed, even Joker his supposed mentor gets into the assault. There's a mention, by the way, of Lee Harvey Oswald and the murder of President Kennedy and one of the recruits says that Lee Harvey Oswald was inside the book suppository building. Pyle is listening and appears to be in an altered state. On Christmas, the men will be told about how the free world will conquer communism and how God loves the Marines because they kill. Pyle is discovered to be very good with his shooting skills, but not much else. Joker is assigned to military journalism. Pyle makes it into the infantry, yet he seems unhinged on their last night there, Joker finds Pyle alone in the bathroom with his Boomstick. Joker tells him that it will cause trouble if they get caught. Pyle starts to repeat one of their drills loudly, and it stirs everyone away, including the drill sergeant. In the midst of berating Pyle, Pyle shoots him, and then he turns the Boomstick on himself and commits suicide. Joker makes it to Vietnam as a journalist. His colleague rafter man complains that all he does is make photos like a high school girl. He also comments that the Americans are in Vietnam to help them, but he doesn't understand why the Vietnamese don't seem to want their help. Joker's boss encourages him to write false stories of victory and reminds him that the military journalists are they are there to galvanize support for the war. The outside civilian newspapers are asking the questions, why are we here? So it's the military journalists job to show stories of victory. This immediately made me think of a real passage from the Atlantic in 1973 where they were talking about LBJ final months after he had already left office. And one of the things that LBJ says is there should have been better censorship. In fact, here's the quote. Another mistake was not instituting censorship, not to cover up mistakes, but to prevent the other side from knowing what we were going to do next. My God, you can't fight a war by watching it every night on television. Whenever Joker and his boss are having this exchange about, well, it's the military's responsibility, the civilian journalists are already out there asking the questions, and they're not super supportive of why we're here, so it's our job to present the story that we're winning. Well, that's censorship in its own way. Explosions ring out at their base during the Vietnamese New Year, Joker lamented about not seeing battle, but now he has. Joker makes a smart ass remark. To his boss, and he gets another chance to see combat. He's wearing a peace symbol button, and his boss tells him to take it off. And rafter man asks to go with Joker. Joker is on a helicopter with a man who relentlessly murders civilians in rice paddies and laughs about it. Rafter man is sick and tries to avoid puking. Joker is in a helmet that says, born to kill while wearing a peace symbol. He goes to a mass grave where the bodies have been covered in lie. A Colonel confronts him about the contradiction between the Born to kill on the helmet and the peace symbol, and Joker says that he was trying to suggest the Jungian duality of man. The Colonel tells him that all the Vietnamese have an American inside them that just needs to get out. He tracks down cowboy who was another one of the privates that he went through training with, and one of his men wants his picture taken with a dead Vietnamese soldier. It was a very creepy exchange there, the men are caught in a shootout, and raptor man shakes as he tries to take pictures. In a series of interviews, the men fighting in the war really never can come to a consensus about why they are even there. Another ambush occurs, and cowboy is one of the men killed. The sniper turns out to be a young girl. The girl is wounded and asks for a mercy killing. I also noticed I have had in my personal notes, in this particular scene where this teenage girl is dying and asks to be killed out of mercy, there are upside down stars everywhere, like pentagrams, with Kubrick being such an intentional filmmaker, I find it hard to believe that that's just by coincidence. Joker kills her, and the soldiers march off singing the theme song to the Mickey Mouse Club to that particular scene made me think of the one I talk about so often from Dr Strangelove. If we survive this, you'll have to answer to the Coca Cola Company, like this weird reference to Disney and the Mickey Mouse Club right there at the very end, there are various and sundry ways to interpret Full Metal Jacket. It's not the kind of film where you come away with one specific, clear idea, other than for me, it's not a pro war film. I would be hard pressed to watch this movie and come away thinking that Kubrick's overall point is that Vietnam was justified, or itself is justified. It definitely seems to me to be an anti war film. I'm going to go now to cinephilia and beyond. To this article written by Tim peelin run through the Jungian Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket. In this he writes, it's not pro war or anti war. It's just the way things are. Stanley Kubrick said a Full Metal Jacket his 1987 adaptation of Gustav has Ford's novel The short timers has Ford was a combat correspondent with the Marine Corps in Vietnam, and Matthew modine's character Joker, who we follow through basic training and the Battle of way during the 1968 Tet Offensive was shaped by his experiences. Kubrick signed up another ex war correspondent, Michael Herr, the writer of the narration for Apocalypse Now, which is, by the way, another great anti war. What the hell were we doing in Vietnam film to work with him on the script and what her Riley described as one phone call lasting three years with interruptions. The point of the material to Kubrick was how the system breaks down and restructures young men into killing machines, as exemplified by Arlie Hermes, antonymously named Sergeant Hartman. Your boom stick is only a tool. It is a hard heart that kills effectively. The film can be divided into two segments, harsh, brutalizing training in the first and Vietnam in the second. Although strictly the final segment, known as the sniper, makes it three. Modine had recommended an old friend, Vincent D'Onofrio, for the role of gormless Leonard, aka Gomer Pyle after the initial introduction, none of the Marines are referred to by their actual names. The fact that they retain their nicknames or adopt new ones suggests a part of their old identity has been subsumed by the lean, green killing machine. Pyle's ineffectual inability to keep up has him singled out for particular attention. A joker is made to make him shape up. Ironically, Kubrick's task master approach fed resentment between the two actors. The one thing Pyle has going for him is he is an excellent marksman, which will have a tragic outcome once the others make it to Vietnam. Hartman has indoctrinated them so much that they can barely talk in little more than cliches of the phony, tough. The crazy, brave sussing each other out in terms of point scoring and domination. Joker tries to stay out of the shit by being assigned to the forces magazine Stars and Stripes, but the war comes for him anyway, and he will be forever changed by it. Full Metal Jacket. Treats war phenomenologically, as Kubrick explained at the beginning of this piece, it just accepts wars as an unfortunate fact of human nature. Joker pisses off the brass by writing born to kill on his helmet while swearing a peace badge on his uniform, expressing the Jungian thing, the duality of man. Vietnam was such a phony war, Kubrick told Alexander Walker the Evening Standard critic, in terms of the technocrats fine tuning the facts like an ad agency talking of kill ratios and Hamlet pacification and inciting the men to falsify a body count, or at least total up the blood trails on the assumption they'd lead to bodies. Somehow, Joker comes up against this bullshit in his journalistic cushy number, cracking wise to his commander after the news of 10, sir. Does this mean Ann Margaret isn't coming? Jan Harlan Kubrick's brother in law, stated that Kubrick, without explaining it too broadly, wanted to suggest that everyone in the film wore a mask to survive, to get through what war requires them to do. End quote. Now, if we go over to the BBC, they have an interesting article from 2022 titled Full Metal Jack, full metal jacket, and Kubrick, the ultimate anti war films. In this article they write while he's renowned for his subtlety, Kubrick wasn't afraid to be very blatant with his themes when required, such as the case in Full Metal Jacket, when the tyrannical drill instructor, Sergeant Hartman, tells the privates he is training that they have to give their boomsticks women's names and sleep with them. There's even a scene where they march around holding their weapons in one hand and their genitals in the other, all of which raises the question, why was Kubrick so intent on repeatedly showing the link between sex and violence? I think he's saying that the same urge that can turn people into obsessively sexual beings is interconnected to our proclivity towards violence explains kuznek. Ultimately, I think that's what makes Kubrick pessimistic about human beings. Kubrick's cynicism toward humanity is apparent all the way through Full Metal Jacket split into two separate stories the first hour, details the boot camp training of US Marines by Hartman. He is so abusive to private Leonard, who is less intelligent and more overweight than the other trainees, that Hartman is ultimately murdered by him. Full Metal Jacket is about the abuse of young men which has been going on in the military since the start of society. These young men are turned into killing machines, explains Nathan Abrams, Robert Mueller, who was paralyzed from the chest down in Vietnam and subsequently founded the humanitarian organization veterans for America, regularly appears as a guest speaker in cusnix classes. Mueller tells the students that the boot camp Kubrick recreated and Full Metal Jacket is exactly the same as his own experience. The film is a comment on the sadism, the cruelty and the malleability of human nature. Says kuze Nick Mueller has said, they take little butter balls like me and turn them into killing machines. I went from being a good guy to going over to Vietnam and laughing at seeing women and children being wasted. The second half of Full Metal Jacket follows Joker and his platoon to the Vietnam War, where we see the true horrors of the Tet Offensive unfold all as the soldiers become increasingly blase about death. He wants to debunk movie cliches about war in general and about the Vietnam War in particular, says Abrams full metal jacket was in part, Kubrick's response to the increasingly macho action films of the 1980s Kubrick and his fellow screenwriters, Michael Herr and Gustav hasford, wanted to eradicate the action movie stereotype. So when animal mother runs to save a wounded eight ball, bullets are strewn over his shoulders with a bandolier, much like Sylvester Stallone's Rambo or Arnold Schwarzenegger's Commando. That's an image that we take from Vietnam War movies. It's a culturally processed image. Kubrick must have known that it wasn't authentic, but he didn't care, because he was interested in the image of the hyper masculine Vietnam soldier, which he puts into this racist character explains Abrams at the same time though he's the soldier who actually runs in to save eight ball, that just makes the image all the more complex. Kubrick spent most of his career ensuring that every aspect of his films was at the very least original and different, while most other Vietnam films were primarily set in the jungles of the country. Kubrick instead focuses full metal jacket on urban warfare, turning East London into the city of way. The likes of platoon Born on the Fourth of July and Apocalypse Now ended with at least an inkling of hope, reflection or realization. Not so for Kubrick, and particularly not for full metal. Jacket. There's no Hollywood ending. There's no deeper understanding. There's no sense of learning from the experience. Really, it's just a sense of pessimism. Says kuze, Nick end quote. I think that says a lot, right there. There's no deeper understanding, there's no sense of learning. You're not getting an inkling of hope, reflection or realization. I think when we imagine the Vietnam War in particular, we have that sense all these years later of what was the point. Now, of course, you can get into the that's just a conspiracy theory. You know that the point of it was to enrich the military industrial complex and to try to keep a foothold of the Western world in Southeast Asia, but in terms of freeing these people from Communism, like the colonel who says every Vietnamese person actually has an American trapped inside of them, that just needs to be let out. I think there is also a critique of this western world imperialist mentality. We're doing all of these people a favor. I'm thinking again of Bono's character from the 90s. Mr. Mcphisto, I've given you capitalism so now you can all dream of being as wealthy and glamorous as me. We're here to give you a gift, damn it, especially in hearing a Vietnam War veteran himself say this boot camp is exactly like what my boot camp was like. That's harrowing. So is the film about the way that the military takes people from all walks of life and can mold them into killing machines. Is it about the systematic abuse of people? I mean, it could be not only the systematic abuse of the soldiers who are going in, but it could also be the systematic abuse of the victims that are being murdered, such as the innocent civilians that were being killed in rice paddies by a man in a helicopter. They were posing no threat to anybody, and he just thought it was hilarious to murder them. I also think, you know, like when Joker says, I'm here to kill does it also cater to people who want legalized murder, they want to be able to commit murder in a legally sanctioned way, and it's giving them an outlet to do that. Is it about the futility of war period? Is it about the futility of the Vietnam War? Specifically, those are questions that you will have to answer for yourself. I don't have any one firm answer. I do think back to Dave McGowan's book program to kill, which I need to do an episode or a set of episodes about that book, because it is just so disturbing. But I think when you read a book like that, and then you watch a film like full metal jacket, it's not difficult to imagine that exact scenario of somebody enlisting and going through a boot camp like that because they want to commit legal murder. They enjoy killing frightening stuff, disturbing, disturbing film. Stay a little bit crazy and I will see you in the next episode. 

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