Full Metal Jacket

A platoon of dehumanized soldiers experiences Vietnam... if they can make it out of boot camp first

Grade: A+ (96/100)

Director: Stanley Kubrick

Year Released: 1987

The only non-documentary film about Vietnam I had seen before watching Full Metal Jacket was John Wayne's infamous 1968 war propaganda film The Green Berets. There have been countless dramas about the Vietnam War in the 41 years since its conclusion, and though I have seen a very small number of these films (including, as I previously mentioned, Wayne's hopelessly long and cringeworthy attempt to justify the racism, paternalism, and devastation of the USA's involvement in the war), I doubt that any of the films made about Vietnam portray the training camp before the war as more frightening and shocking than the actual war than Full Metal Jacket does. 

Most of the reviews I've read of the film partition it into two rather different movies combined into one: the first movie of the boot camp on Parris Island, South Carolina, and the second movie of the actual Vietnam War. I would generally agree with the partition, but unlike critics such as Roger Ebert and Rita Kempley, I didn't find that problematic or necessarily diminishing of the film as a whole. Instead, I thought the juxtaposition between the boot camp story and the Vietnam story emphasized what I found to be the film's major theme: the dehumanization of soldiers. 

Full Metal Jacket is not an easy movie to watch. What's worse, it's harder to stomach the torturous treatment of young Marine Corps recruits than it is to watch the graduated Marines pillage and kill once they've arrived in Vietnam. I think, for me, this sickening distinction was because I had already heard the war stories, both within Vietnam and elsewhere. The discussion of war is a topic that runs rampant through a vast array of media, plenty of which is taught in public schools. I had to read The Things They Carried and A Farewell to Arms and learn about the Revolutionary War every year, as though the school system was worried I'd forget the route to American independence after a summer off. I had to watch many documentaries about war's effects, took several AP history classes, and watched movies and TV shows and read articles for classes about the very subject matter often jam-packed into our culture's obsession with war. And throughout that exposure to the story of war I found myself wondering what countless others wonder about war: how could someone do it? How could regular people bring themselves to kill and destroy, even if told they have to?

It was really only through seeing Full Metal Jacket that I realized the process of making humans capable of the sort of horrific acts that warfare demands. I felt sick watching R. Lee Ermy as Sergeant Hartman destroy all levels of conscious humanity in the recruits, but I understood. I could not decide, perhaps I cannot currently decide, if I think Ermy's character is evil. It's my instinct to say that he is not, but trying to decide certainly evokes a discussion about what evil really is- whether it's something born within you and fostered, or if it's something that needs to be taught. 

Kubrick's message regarding the training and hardening of US soldiers seems to be that to commit horrific acts, they must be stripped of their humanity, trained to be dehumanized in what The Simpsons parodied as "kill bot factories". Kubrick shows us that the psychological torture has varying effects on each soldier, ultimately depending on how intellectually hardy he is. For the ill-fated and genuinely terrifying Private Pyle, the process of dehumanization comes with the onset of a severe mental breakdown. What's truly scary, especially in today's age of "lone wolf terrorism", is how Private Pyle's descent into madness is truly reminiscent of the dark and twisted journeys of men who have committed heinous acts of terror on American soil; the killers whose environments abused them to the point of seeking a general revenge against a life and society that wronged them. What Full Metal Jacket really made me recognize is the failure of so many American institutions to help its citizens, the failure to provide a better life and to foster the humanity of of its people. More gruesomely, I realized during the scene in which Private Joker, Pyle's only ally, turns against him with the entire group of recruits and beats him while he screams helplessly in his own bed, that Kubrick's film is also a narration on the failure of people to help each other. 

Private Joker's character very much intrigued me. I understand him as a character with a very high emotional threshold and capability for a great deal of pressure. He voluntarily joins the Marine Corps to experience war, telling Sergeant Hartman that he "wants to kill". But it's made clear throughout the movie, particularly in his initial gentleness to Private Pyle and his personality in Vietnam, that he is no natural born killer; instead, he's joined the army to test himself, to see if his intellectual stamina could withstand the military, an institution he recognizes as existing for the purpose of dehumanizing young soldiers. In some ways he succeeds: his miraculous preservation of personality shows that he is by and far the most mentally tough Marine, an obvious foil to Private Pyle, who succumbs to the pressure in what is easily one of the greatest and most frightening film scenes I've ever witnessed. In other ways, Private Joker fails. In Vietnam he's quietly confused by the ability of other soldiers to kill without asking questions. Taking a job on the frontline as a war journalist, it's evident that his intellectual pursuit of warfare is more sophisticated, more romantically Ernest Hemingway, than it is simply "to kill". Famously, Private Joker recognizes "the duality of man" by wearing a helmet branded with the words "BORN TO KILL" while also adorning his uniform with a peace symbol. Again, another test. Unsurprisingly, the war takes its toll on Joker, but even through the deaths of some of his closest buddies, he remains critical of war's power to truly transform an individual's personality and perception of the world. It's not until he is faced with killing a young Vietnamese girl, the assassin of several of his closest friends, a mercy killing done to save her the pain of her other injuries, that he truly realizes the psychological consequences of war. By donning the thousand-yard stare, the viewer can see that the effects of his experience have finally seeped under his thick skin. As the film draws to a close, Private Joker tells the audience that he is no longer scared of war, and that is perhaps the most devastating part of the film: the absolute mark of his loss of feeling, the man whose heroic pursuit of emotional stamina was finally crushed by an act he was "born" to do.

I own the DVD of Full Metal Jacket, but it is also currently available for streaming on Netflix and on Amazon Prime. You can also purchase it, I'm sure, at your local video store.