Full Metal Jacket S T A N L E Y K U B R I C K U K 1 9 8 7

Full Metal Jacket is Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam movie. Period. It’s no less

idiosyncratic than his other conceptions of pure genre, and as such

exhibits his sensibilities with perhaps greater transparency than his

other films. This is to say that Full Metal Jacket is a menacing,

incendiary picture, so calculated in its brutality that you’re more prone

to endure its depictions of suffering than you are to enjoy it.

I do enjoy it, but – as with most of Kubrick’s films – my enjoyment is

foremost a response to its aesthetics and storytelling: the tracking shots

that comprise the bulk of the film’s notable first third are very much

archetypical; the characterizations – Animal Mother’s brimming

underbite, Gomer Pyle’s empty stare – are so superbly detailed that

much of the mass of identically camouflaged soldiers may be instantly

parsed into specific people. And even if the film’s theme of

dehumanization isn’t initially clear, it’s literally pronounced midway

through when the melange of contradicting slogans on Private Joker’s

helmet is questioned by a superior:

P O G U E C O L O N E L :

You write “Born to Kill” on your helmet and you wear a peace

button. What’s that supposed to be, some kind of sick joke?

P R I V A T E J O K E R :

No, sir.

P O G U E C O L O N E L :

You’d better get your head and your ass wired together, or I will

take a giant shit on you.

P R I V A T E J O K E R :

Yes, sir.

P O G U E C O L O N E L :

Now answer my question or you’ll be standing tall before the

man.

P R I V A T E J O K E R :

I think I was trying to suggest something about the duality of

man, sir.

P O G U E C O L O N E L :

The what?

P R I V A T E J O K E R :

The duality of man. The Jungian thing, sir.

This – the duality of man, or rather how ostensibly good men are

reconditioned into injudicious killers – is only what the film says it’s

about. The film’s opening – a montage of buzz cuts, culminating in a

floor full of hair – succinctly prefaces this idea, and it’s redundantly

hammered on by the drill instructor’s relentless string of profanities.

Within minutes he reduces a roomful of men into identical maggots,

faggots, or some other affront in his infinite barrage of depreciatory

titles.

But Full Metal Jacket is no more about the duality of man than it is

about photography or set design or the economic considerations made

by a colonel as he risks moving his fleet across dangerous terrain. It’s

unlike Kubrick’s other films, which are as distinguished by their

iconography – Alex’s monocle of eyelashes, Jack Torrance’s maniacal

smile – as they are for their surfeit of Kubrickian hallmarks. Full Metal

Jacket’s icons are less imperative, or at least they’re devalued by other

war movies strewn in camouflage, blankets of ammunition, and

destroyed urban locations.

Kubrick distills all the camouflage and chaos into concentrated

cinematic moments, and the film has many noteworthy ones. In

particular, late in the film Animal Mother – the most muscled and

aggressive soldier – charges toward an unseen sniper, rushing past

urban decay and flash fires. He’s armed with a machine gun nearly as

long as he is tall, and strewn in belts of enormous bullets. This is as

pornographic an image as any war movie could possibly possess. It’s also

as emotionally artificial as a videogame on the same topic.

It’s here that the irony of Kubrick’s penultimate film is made explicit.

The idea is how soldiers must be dehumanized into killers, and how the

casualty of this dehumanization is not the enemy, but the soldiers

themselves—they become killers at the expense of their own innate

compassion. But regardless of what’s determining the emotional core of

any scene, the film remains so rapaciously visual that its central message

is obscured. We are to consider how these men are emotionally and

spiritually suppressed, yet we are also excited by their endeavor to

obliterate the enemy.

Given the outcome of the film’s final third, in which a remarkably

skilled sniper is revealed to be a beautiful, seemingly defenseless young

woman, I suspect that this irony may have been a deliberate

manipulation on Kubrick’s part. This revelation elicits guilt because it is

at this moment that the viewer comprehends the extent of a soldier’s

compromise. Nonetheless, the film’s ideas progress on a level that isn’t

precisely parallel to its aesthetics. It is possible to view this final scene

and feel the same troubling hesitance that Private Joker does, as he aims

his pistol at the fatally injured sniper. It is also likely that this hesitance

was just preceded by an anticipatory excitement as Joker and his

colleagues engage in a suspenseful tactical penetration of the sniper’s

hideout.

In the final scene, Joker (who’s been narrating the film

intermittently) professes that he remains “in a world of shit,” recalling

Gomer Pyle’s admission just prior to his suicide in the opening segment.

This disables any sense of accomplishment or resolution. In these

moments the irony at the heart of the film reaches an apex: these are

soldiers fighting a war they do not comprehend the purpose of, and the

ones that survive return home compromised. “But I am alive,” continues

Joker, “and I am not afraid.” The final image finds a mass of identical,

anonymous silhouettes against a hellish, fiery background, marching

forward, deprived of any clear destination.