Kubrick's Mickey Mouse War

FULL METAL JACKET (1987)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

There are Vietnam films and then there is Stanley Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket." Imagine a war seen as a phenomenon that threatens our world, and the fear of the enemy that make us into killers to fight such a threat. That is Stanley Kubrick's film. "Full Metal Jacket" is not really about Vietnam. It is about war, purely as a strategy, as a game of violent free will where no one is safe from using such violence. This is not coming from the same world of Oliver Stone ("Platoon") or Francis Ford Coppola ("Apocalypse Now"), both of whom made great Vietnam war epics. Kubrick's has a God-like perspective on war, something akin to what the director has attempted before in his canon of great films.

"Full Metal Jacket" begins with a montage of young soldiers getting haircuts to the tune of "Hello, Vietnam." The stripping of self and individuality begins, as well as their own humanity. Their drill sergeant is Gunnery Sergeant Hartman (R. Lee Ermey), a steadfastly serious, strict, impatient man whose measure of importance is turning these young men into Marines, and also into dehumanized killers of war. This is not my interpretation, mind you, since the drill instructor clearly states that these young men are not human beings. What we are in for is a 40-minute look at the arduous, physical demands of basic training on Parris Island. We are talking pull-ups, push-ups, rope-climbing, combat with arms and with sticks, unifying the rifle with sex (since the men won't get any on this course), and spotlessly cleaning latrines so that the Virgin Mary would be proud to take a dump in one. Most of these soldiers are quite adept at what they do, except for the fat, smiling Leonard (Vincent D'Onofrio), nicknamed Private Gomer Pyle, as he endures the most abuse for being so clumsy and inept. Hartman pushes him to the limits but Pyle is unable to do one pull-up or to climb a wooden fence or to run without exhaustion. Whenever Pyle screws up, he is either punished by being forced to thumb-suck or his Corps trainees have to suffer by doing push-ups (particularly when Pyle is found with a donut in his locker!)

If there is one thing Pyle can do, it is to shoot a rifle with the proficiency of a real marksman. When Hartman lectures his soldiers about great marksmen of the past, like Charles Whitman or Lee Harvey Oswald, we feel a chill in our spines - he may as well include Pyle in the same list. All hell eventually turns loose as Pyle loses his smile and jocose nature slowly but surely. He gets extra help from Private Joker (Matthew Modine), but it doesn't help Pyle in the least - he talks to his rifle, his new best friend. The violence in him is ready to explode.

And then, after a horrific climax, Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket" becomes a different movie. It is noticeably a two-act structure that typically climaxes with a brief third act and epilogue. No mention is ever made again of Pyle or Hartman or the rigors of basic training. We begin to see the Vietnam Movie develop. There are conference room chats with journalists (Joker among them) about the state of war and Ann-Margret; brief attacks from the enemy including the Tet Offensive; corpses covered with lime; prostitutes looking for the Vietnam in the American soldiers; generals delivering war jargon ad infinitum; and soldiers keeping their dead "gooks" looking good for the camera while other soldiers emit catchphrases and slogans from John Wayne movies (also one of Joker's tactics). We may have seen all this before, but Kubrick maintains his cool distance as an observer of war where everyone remains passive while the world goes mad. There is a very disturbing sequence, rarely discussed, where a soldier kills several Vietnamese farmers from inside a helicopter while Joker's partner is ready to vomit. This could be construed as an anti-war moment, unlike anything to be seen in Kubrick's "Paths of Glory," but it is more than that - it fits in with the director's associations of the state of dehumanized beings in our world. These soldiers are robot-killing machines - shoot first, ask questions later.

"Full Metal Jacket" climaxes in a setting unlike any Vietnam War movie prior - in the ruins of civilization. It is as if the soldiers have entered Ancient Greece where bullets rip them apart like flypaper. A sniper is hidden in one of the defaced buildings, and Kubrick shows us the sniper's point-of-view by zooming in quickly as if the sniper is zeroing on the intended target. The soldiers die one by one, blown apart to bloody shreds in slow-motion (one is caught in a rabbit boobytrap). The sniper kills quickly without much provocation, while the American soldiers decide to get the sniper. And when Joker confronts the sniper, he is forced to do something he hasn't quite done - to get his first confirmed kill, as he says earlier in a faux interview.

Of all the characters in "Full Metal Jacket," the most humane and the most sympathetic is actually Matthew Modine's tantalizing portrayal of Joker. He is the one we care the most by the end of this War Odyssey, though at first, viewers may be more taken in by the undesirable Pyle (a nice indirect throwback to Timothy Carey's sobbing character in "Paths of Glory"). Modine, a frequently pallid actor, gives his best performance ever as Joker, and shows an acute sense of comic timing as well. When he is joking with Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, his humor gets him in trouble, and we scoff at it at first. But when he is mimicking Bruce Lee, making financial arrangements with a prostitute, joking with his "Stars and Stripes" boss or letting a colonel know he is making a Jungian statement with his peace symbol, Modine embodies the weak kid in Joker, the one who can "talk the talk" but who doesn't have the "thousand-yard stare." He can beat up the helpless Pyle, but he also comforts him and takes care of him, teaching him to handle a rifle and to climb a fence - his sympathy and patience is what Hartman has no time for.

When "Full Metal Jacket" was released, most critics found it was too little and too late, especially after following the coattails of Oliver Stone's powerful "Platoon." But Kubrick's film is not a typical war film - it is an apolitical war film. It shows war in all its guts and glory, a flag-waving debacle where catchphrases, movie quotations, sexual metaphors and dead enemies littering the countryside are all that counts. It is despairing, pathetic and senseless - as long as you have sex and kill the bad guys, you get ahead. It is as sad a commentary on war as I have seen. "Full Metal Jacket" is not better than "Platoon," it is simply more chaotic and jumpy (and, no doubt, one of Spielberg's inspirations for "Saving Private Ryan"). And it is in all the chaos of dehumanized men fighting men that Kubrick finds the roots of why we fight wars, and why we sometimes lose.