Full Metal Jacket is one of those great films which simply defy description. Even by Kubrick's standards, this is a highly complex, cerebral and multi-layered film, synthesising his meticulous technical and artistic sensibility with a wide range of compelling and familiar themes.… More
Full Metal Jacket is one of those great films which simply defy description. Even by Kubrick's standards, this is a highly complex, cerebral and multi-layered film, synthesising his meticulous technical and artistic sensibility with a wide range of compelling and familiar themes. It's not an easy watch, being at turns clinical and meandering, ruthless and relaxing. But for those who would give it their full attention, Full Metal Jacket is every bit as rewarding and harrowing as Apocalypse Now, and may even be the greatest film ever made about the Vietnam War.
Coming towards the end of a wave of films about Vietnam, Full Metal Jacket is much less a response to the likes of Rambo and Platoon than it is a refinement of Kubrick's earlier works. War has never been war from his films, whether in the cold war satire Dr. Strangelove, the trenches in Paths of Glory, or the epic cavalry battles in Barry Lyndon. Even 2001 and The Shining, which on the surface have nothing to do with war, touch on related themes such as dehumanisation, the relationship between man and machines, and the repressive nature of society's most treasured values and institutions.
At the centre of Full Metal Jacket is a chilling exploration of the attempts made by governments and armies to turn ordinary men into emotionless killers. The opening forty-five minutes feature some of the most beautifully constructed swathes of profanity outside of a David Mamet film, delivered by ex-drill sergeant R. Lee Ermey in a manner which is truly terrifying. After he punches Private Joker in the stomach, the camera cuts to him shouting in close-up, so that he is directly lecturing to you. Hartman seems incapable of mercy or understanding; he is the perfect machine, aware only of his pre-programmed duty. He is incapable either of disobeying himself or of tolerating disobedience in others, whether intentional (in the case of Joker) or unintentional (Private Pile).
All of what has just been written will reflect one's experience on first viewing. But after watching it a second time, Kubrick's motives become clearer. This is not a realistic depiction of army training in the strictest sense -- although the dialogue was improvised by a former drill sergeant and the period setting is faithful to its source, Full Metal Jacket is not an objective demonstration of the way things are. What it is instead is a blackly comedic and subtly savage argument for the impotence (both literal and metaphorical) of all authority figures. It is a demonstration that perfect machines are not so perfect, and that the seemingly black-and-white world of the military is riddled with inconsistencies and double standards.
Like Dr. Strangelove, there are prominent sexual or Freudian undercurrents throughout the film. Early on, Hartman instructs the grunts to give their rifles a girl's name "because this is the only pussy you people are going to get." The recruits' sexual urges become irrevocably intertwined with their instruction to kill, so that when they are offered a hooker outside a deserted cinema, they treat the act of sex like a battle -- it is a literal 'conquest'. This suggests that violence is an expression of sexual frustration, and therefore that Hartman is the most frustrated of them all.
The impotence of the army's methods is demonstrated in various ways. The most immediate way is that, after getting over the initial shock of the opening scene, we find ourselves perversely laughing both at the recruits and the drill instructor. Hartman and Pile become some kind of twisted double act, with one being up-tight and commanding, the other dopey but ultimately well-meaning. You're still slightly scared of Hartman, because you know from what he is capable of, but you find yourself endlessly rooting for Pile,
The fact that we find ourselves chuckling during these scenes is a hint at the great success of Kubrick's film in terms of characters. Kubrick was often criticised for being more interested in ideas than in people, of taking a God's-eye view at humanity and reducing his characters to puppets. Full Metal Jacket proves this to be nonsense, since our characters are able to maintain their distinctive and individual features even when at their most mechanised and soulless. The Man can berate and break them as much as it likes, but with a couple of notable exceptions, all of them remain human underneath, as shown by their more relaxed and easy-going state when the action moves to the Perfume River.
The powerful and very human message of Full Metal Jacket is this: no matter how much power someone or something is, their hold over individuals is never complete, and never works entirely in the way that was intended. Private Joker survives by learning how the system works and obeying it only when he has to. In a key scene a brutish colonel orders him to remove his peace button; but in the very next scene, Joker is still wearing it and smiling. His nickname is deserved, not just because of his flippancy towards the press office and Animal Mother, but because he 'gets the joke', realising the pointless nature of war.
But of course, being a Kubrick film, there's not a happy ending in all this. The film is prominently about the duality of man ("the Jungian thing", as Joker calls it), and it is therefore fair to assume that Joker and Pile represent the two sides of humanity. The army is portrayed as a paradoxical invention, something designed to protect humans by taking away people's humanity, and hence both Joker and Pile are destined for destruction.
Through a series of shots which resemble Jack Nicholson in The Shining, Pile becomes a perfect machine who kills not because he chooses to but because that is what his training and orders demand of him. He bites the hand that feeds him, turning the gun on himself because there is no-one left to give him orders. Joker's destruction is far more harrowing because he actually has to choose whether to kill or not. In the moment where he has to kill the sniper, we see his mental crash on screen, as he wrestles between his humanity and the possible mercy of killing her. After the shot is fired, he acquires the famed 'thousand-yard stare' of a broken man, over whom the system has won a small but significant victory. At one point Joker remarks that "the dead know only one thing: it is better to be alive", and yet as the film ends we wonder whether that is true.
The performances in Full Metal Jacket are absolutely terrific, with the stand-out being Matthew Modine as Joker. Having starred opposite Nicolas Cage in Alan Parker's Birdy, Modine was no stranger to playing soldiers. This is his finest performance, bringing a true sense of humanity to the character. R. Lee Ermey is very strong as Hartman (as one would expect), Adam Baldwin is brilliant as Animal Mother, and Vincent D'Onofrio is totally engrossing as Pile. In many war films a couple of characters will be deliberately under-written so that we don't get distracted by their deaths; here you identify with everyone, so that every time a kill comes your heart is ripped in two.
Full Metal Jacket is a full-blooded triumph for Kubrick, which is almost on a par with his best film, A Clockwork Orange. It is a heady and intoxicating mix of philosophy and adrenaline which is suitably open-ended and highly thought-provoking. It's the kind of film that will both enthral and bemuse you while you watch it, and then you will still be thinking about it three days later. Like its only true rival Apocalypse Now, if you're not totally focussed when you watch it, you may well find it ponderous and uninvolving. But go in prepared and with an open mind, and you will experience what is possibly the most intelligent and chilling war film ever made. It is, quite simply, awe-inspiring.
