Full Metal Jacket (1987)
From the sounds of Johnnie Wright’s “Hello Vietnam” a page seems to be changing for Stanley Kubrick. Gone are the sinister synth sounds of Wendy Carlos or well known classical compositions, in it’s place is a timely pop song, albeit an ironic one. We instantly know two things, these men getting their heads shaved are going in for basic training, and the song on the soundtrack is letting us know where these recruits will be going upon graduation, if they graduate at all. We’re not aware at the time but these people getting their heads shaved will make up the main characters for the next 60 minutes or so, and in one case the entire film. Thanks to the music and the displaced looks on everyone’s face (Vincent D’Onofrio is priceless in this opening scene) we start off with a bit of a bang, but oh what follows next.
After hearing a pop song and a near montage of heads shaved, it scarcely seems like a Kubrick film. The next scene however helps to change that. We meet Gunnery Sgt. Hartman played by real life marine and former drill instructor Lee Ermey. He introduces the men to the hell they will face for the next several weeks (boot camp was shortened from 12 weeks to 8 during the war). As that great wide angle image and steadicam roams around the barracks while the Senior Drill Instructor provides enough quotable dialogue and highlights to last the entire film. Drawing from his own experience Ermey apparently ad-libbed most of that dialogue, which makes the reactions of the recruits all the more believable. It’s hard for us not to laugh at what he’s saying, but after choking out Leonard Lawrence (D’Onofrio) who he renames “Pyle” we see for the first time this is no comedy.
The fact that Ermey has made a career of playing military men and even supplying the voice of Sarge in the Toy Story films says something of the impression he made here. Truth be told though this wasn’t his first film, and not even his first time playing a drill instructor. He first appeared as Staff Sgt. Loyce in The Boys in Company “C” back in 1978. He was retired from the service for medical reasons in 1972 with the rank of E-6 (Staff Sgt.), although in May of 2002 the USMC gave him an honorary post service promotion to E-7 which is the rank he has in Full Metal Jacket. I suppose it’s yet another testimony to this film. He was originally hired as the film’s technical advisor, but asked Kubrick to audition for the role of the Senior Drill Instructor. After being turned down, he made a tape of himself insulting marines while being pelted with fruit and he went on for 15 minutes without repeating himself or flinching, afterwards Kubrick knew he had his Hartman.
Truth be told though there is no film in the world that marines love more than Full Metal Jacket. Mark my words there probably isn’t a marine out there who hasn’t seen this film within one month of completing basic training, in fact it’s unofficially considered part of basic training. With the exception of the beatings (which had long since been outlawed), this is still as accurate a depiction of life in boot camp as there has been on film. Nearly every former marine can relate to Gunny Hartman, and nearly every DI has probably taken some inspiration from him. I would say however that it is a common practice to stop the film after the first half concludes.
The nicknames handed out during this opening sequence “Cowboy, Snowball, Joker, Pyle” are all archetypes. These are types of recruits and nearly every platoon has someone to fill these roles. Matthew Modine takes to the Joker role quite well, one of the only people in this film whose penchant for speaking the truth gets him into all levels of hot water. The story has it Anthony Michael Hall was Kubrick’s first choice but negotiations fell through. Pyle is the punching bag of the platoon, the one guy that always makes life harder for everyone else. Someone who just can’t seem to get anything right. He’s overweight and has no common sense whatsoever, to the point where we even wonder whether or not he might not be mentally retarded. There are always a few people who snap or “can’t hack it” and he clearly is one of them. In today’s Marine Corps he would have been shipped to PCP (Physical Conditioning Platoon) probably immediately where he would have stayed until he could at least do two pull ups, but this is Vietnam and they needed bodies. There is a brief ray of hope for Pyle because he excels in arguably the most important thing for a marine, the rifle range. Marines have always set higher standards for their shooting ability and before these marines get to fire Hartman tells them about Charles Whitman and Lee Harvey Oswald and praises these men for their marksmanship they learned in the USMC.
Slowly but surely Kubrick begins to build to something with Pyle. Rather than show him as a constant boob and our comic relief we see his actions directly affect his platoon. Everyone else starts to get punished for his screw-ups. It is only after he makes the idiotic mistake of leaving his foot locker unlocked does the Senior Drill Instructor find the jelly donut he took from the mess hall. This is when the film really starts to change from a bit of comedy to a much more serious picture. He had hinted earlier during the choking scene, but here we see Pyle in tears watching his platoon paying for his screw up. I don’t care who you are, but its hard not to feel something here. Shortly after that we see it happen again (for a different unexplained mistake) and then at night Pyle is the victim of a blanket party, something that believe me is a last resort for fellow recruits. There is a clear break in his psyche. Although after this we see him excel at the rifle range, there’s clearly something that snapped in him, most likely after Joker (his one remaining friend) takes the last swing at him and even takes a few more for good measure.
Pyle is talking to his rifle and although in the eyes of Hartman he might be finally be “squared away”, there clearly is something amiss. It is the policy of the Marine Corps to turn men into killers, but this dehumanization doesn’t always have a positive effect. This level of conditioning might help the more normally adjusted recruits, but for Pyle his alienation is starting to crack. On the last night on Paris Island he is up after hours. Joker finds him in the head while on fire watch. Pyle is sitting with his rifle as he’s loading a magazine. He officially “snaps” killing Hartman who mistakenly tries his tough DI approach to talk him down, and then blowing his own brains out. This is something of a self contained movie coming to an end and you may wonder if Kubrick can top it in the second half, and the answer is no.
I’ll refrain from being a dork and pointing out the problems with Pyle killing himself, however the point is clear, and what are films without a little suspension of disbelief. Feel free to email me if you want to hear factual reasons why this couldn’t happen, or at least couldn’t happen the way it did in the film. The second half of the film opens similar to the first, because we hear a pop song, this time Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’” as a Vietnamese hooker walks up to Joker and his buddy Rafter Man (Kevyn Major Howard). There is a humorous exchange as they barter prices before agreeing on $10 for “Everytin’ you want”. If this sounds familiar it’s because it’s sampled in 2 Live Crew’s “Me So Horny”.
These two work for Stars and Stripes, Joker the journalist and Rafter Man the combat photographer. In an ongoing joke every time they introduce themselves nearly every soldier and officer perks up, making sure they get their names straight, and everyone saying “They’ll make you famous”. When Joker and Rafter Man are sent to Phu Bai, Joker gets wind that Cowboy’s unit is close by. They meet up and after a reunion they tag along with his outfit. After the squad leader is killed, Cowboy takes command. During a patrol they get lost amongst rubble where they run into a sniper whose cutting them down from a distance. The rest of the film is concerned with capturing the sniper and it isn’t until Joker is face to face with her that he finally learns about killing. Training has made him into a machine that kills, but war is always killing from a distance, the way the sniper kills Cowboy, as well as wounding and killing several other members of the patrol. Even when Rafter Man shoots the sniper, it is from a distance.
With Animal Mother (Adam Baldwin) in charge he would rather leave the dying sniper lying in her own blood after what she did to their patrol, and it‘s not hard to see it his way here. There is no humanity on his part, there isn’t even a recognition of the Vietnamese as real people. His character is revealed earlier as being a little off his rocker (perhaps a hardened version of what Pyle could have become), and after going first with a Vietnamese hooker he (jokingly we hope) tells the black soldier he took her from “All niggers must hang”. It can’t seem too surprising then that he would want this “gook” to sit there and suffer after she’s begging for death. Even as it is a mercy killing Joker can barely bring himself to finish the job. It’s one thing to shoot at someone whose shooting at you, but to shoot someone point blank is something else entirely and we are confronted with the long thought lost “human element” of killing. Joker finishes the job where the squad congratulates him with the phrase “Hard core man, fucking hard core.” It’s clear from the look on Joker’s face that things won’t be the same. He does however say one bit of wisdom:
“The dead only know one thing, it is better to be alive.”
The script was written by Kubrick along with Michael Herr and Gustav Hasford whose novel The Short-Timers is what the film was based on. Kubrick for very practical reasons changed the title to Full Metal Jacket after supposedly seeing the phrase in a gun catalog. The men scarcely met up, instead doing most of their work over the phone, and after one face to face meeting with Hasford he was no longer used on the project. The film doesn’t look like any other Vietnam film for two main reasons. One is Stanley Kubrick made it which inevitably will give it a different look. This was his first time working with Douglas Milsome as cinematographer who did an admirable job, but nowhere near as exceptional as John Alcott who had shot Kubrick’s previous four features but suffered a heart attack in July of 1986. The other reason the film might not look like any other Vietnam film is because it wasn’t shot in Vietnam. In fact it wasn’t even shot at a place that looked like Vietnam, it was shot in England and I think this was a bad choice for Kubrick. We never really feel we’re “in the shit” so to speak because we’re in merry old England. Although after the last several decades of self imposed exile, you can’t be too surprised Kubrick had no intention of leaving his adopted homeland even for authenticities’ sake.
Overall though the film is still a success. It’s not an anti-war film in any traditional sense, more a psychological examination of the theory of killing vs. the practice. Half the film divided into essentially the theory when everyone is being trained to kill. The second half takes us there but even in this segment we feel isolated from killing until very late in the second half. When the VC attack Joker’s base they are in bunkers with machine guns shooting at the enemy, and it’s at night. There is no face to face encounter, they are again killing at a distance, and killing the “enemy” not a person, there is no face to these VC. When we see Cowboy shot in slow motion the death starts to hit us. He used slow motion earlier when Hartman was shot, and this tactic makes these deaths stick in our mind, just as the sniper turns in slow motion to confront Joker right before she is shot down. Only then does death really get a face, and not surprisingly that face is a woman.
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