by David Mikics
Kubrick had a severely risk-averse personality, but he loved military history in part because war, like chess, requires the managing of risk. Soldiers become pawns in a great game, parts of a fighting machine rather than individuals. Paths of Glory, Spartacus, and Dr. Strangelove were all about war, and Barry Lyndon contained stunning battle scenes. Full Metal Jacket would be Kubrick’s boldest war movie yet, the one where he fully explored how the military remakes human beings for tactical purposes. Kubrick’s Napoleon screenplay shied away from this subject, downplaying the massive slaughter of the Russian campaign. But Kubrick’s Vietnam movie would deal with the absurdity of a war in which more explosives were dropped than during World War II, where civilians were fair game as long as they were in “free fire zones,” and where abstract bureaucratic talk about kill ratios and pacified hamlets obscured the grim facts of death and devastation.
During the Vietnam War, Kubrick had kept his distance from the peace movement as he did from all other political side-taking. When he was asked in 1968 whether he would be happy if the United States withdrew from Vietnam, he said only, “Sure.”18 The overt craziness of a futile, unexplainable war was what interested him, not some lesson about American imperialism.
In Full Metal Jacket the Marines of the Lusthog Squad are skeptical when interviewed by a camera crew about why they are in Vietnam. Are they fighting for freedom? “If I’m gonna die for a word, the word is poontang,” Animal Mother, the most straight-ahead brutal of them, comments. “Do I think America belongs in Vietnam?” another Marine muses. “I don’t know. I can tell you one thing, I belong in Vietnam.” This is one of the movie’s choicest lines. The Marines feel bizarrely at home, since the chaos and confusion around them has seeped into their souls.
Kubrick decided on twenty-seven-year-old Matthew Modine for Joker, Full Metal Jacket’s main character. He had liked Modine as a Vietnam vet in Alan Parker’s Birdy (1984). Modine had a friend from acting school, Vincent D’Onofrio, who was working as a bouncer, and D’Onofrio, a newcomer to movies, became Private Pyle, the hapless recruit tormented by his drill sergeant. Lee Ermey, a retired Marine drill instructor, was originally hired as a technical adviser on the film but edged his way into the role, which he played with disturbing perfection. As Kubrick put it, “I mean Lee is not as great an actor as, say, the greatest actor in the world but the greatest actor in the world couldn’t be better than Lee in that part.”19
Filming for Full Metal Jacket began at the end of August 1985 and lasted eleven months. The Vietnam scenes, all of the movie after the first twenty-two minutes, were filmed mostly at Beckton, near London, a ruined gasworks scheduled for demolition. “They allowed us to blow up the buildings,” Kubrick told an interviewer. “We had demolition guys in there for a week, laying charges. One Sunday, all the executives from British Gas brought their families down to watch us blow the place up. It was spectacular.”20 Palm trees were imported from North Africa. Kubrick and his crew studied advertisements from Vietnamese magazines and used them to make the Vietnamese murals for the streets of Hue. Meanwhile, the actor-recruits got sharper and sharper; they were starting to become Marines. Marching and running precisely in tandem, drilling with their rifles: all this Ermey taught them, while they trained exhausting hours with him. The actors became a corps.
D’Onofrio and Modine spent hours with Kubrick in his trailer bouncing around ideas. “A lot of the time he would let us block scenes. And we worked on the script, in the trailer—a lot.” D’Onofrio remembered how Kubrick took the two young actors under his wing:
We’d come to his house every Saturday night to see movies, Matthew and I. . . . First we’d have dinner, with Christiane and the girls. There was a lot of drinking. Stanley liked those little Heinekens, the ones that look like grenades. Then he would show a movie. There were two projectors, and Stanley would thread the reels himself. Stanley was very kind. He made us feel free to ask any questions. Anything we wanted to know, he’d tell us. I learned so much from him. He showed us Woody Allen, Spielberg. He loved the Purple Rose of Cairo, Annie Hall, Manhattan, and he loved early Woody Allen. He was a big fan of Spielberg. With Scorsese I only heard him talk about Raging Bull—he was a big boxing fan.21
In Full Metal Jacket Modine is game but somewhat squeamish, and Kubrick draws on his uncertain character, neither rebellious nor gung-ho. Modine was uncomfortable at times during the shoot. A family-values Mormon who had just gotten married, he insisted on inserting a towel between himself and Papillon Soo Soo, who played a prostitute in a sex scene that Kubrick later cut.22 (He retained Soo Soo’s famous deadpan come-on, “Me so horny, me love you long time.”)
Full Metal Jacket’s first sequence, set in the Marine boot camp at Parris Island in South Carolina, is rigid, tunnel-shaped, and full of raw aggression. DI Hartman’s face looms too close over the “maggots,” his recruits. He hollers insults, slamming the men for being “faggots” and “ladies.” Ultrasmooth traveling shots survey the maggots as Hartman berates them furiously, and Kubrick’s abusive camera angles trap them.
This first part of the movie is about producing humans who will fit together perfectly in one greater body, “my beloved Corps” as Hartman calls it. Hartman clearly relishes the role, and in Pyle he finds his perfect victim. Private Pyle, slow and dumb, looks like a bug baby with a jelly donut tummy. Basic training will turn him into a drooling automaton, a Section Eight (eligible for psychiatric discharge).
Kubrick’s calling cadence sequences shine. The Steadicam smoothly eats up the ground as the recruits run and chant, “I don’t know but I been told, / Eskimo pussy is mighty cold.” (Eskimo pussy = death.) The erotic goal of warfare is to blow away someone else, but the soldier’s own death is always in sight too. “If I die in a combat zone, / Box me up and ship me home. / Pin my medals upon my chest, / Tell my Mom I done my best.”
Kubrick was once again meditating on how violence underpins what we are. Full Metal Jacket’s basic training segment, like A Clockwork Orange’s “Singin’ in the Rain,” backs up ruthlessness with musical-comedy moves.23 2001’s Dawn of Man has its own version of basic training, the blanket party when the apes take turns beating a rival’s corpse with bones. In all three films, viciousness retools humanity.
In Full Metal Jacket Kubrick backs up the Marine gospel with a stark-mad theology. Hartman in his Christmas Day sermon delivers a dead-serious parody of religious faith: “God has a hard-on for Marines, because we kill everything we see! He plays His games, we play ours! To show our appreciation for so much power, we keep heaven packed with fresh souls.” The Marine and those he kills are expendable, like the victims of atomic holocaust in Dr. Strangelove, but the Corps is eternal reality. Here is Hartman: “Marines die. That’s what we’re here for. But the Marine Corps lives forever, and that means you live forever.”
Kubrick ends the basic training sequence with a stupendous set piece. In the middle of the night, Joker finds Pyle, now fully psychotic, in the head, the recruits’ bathroom. The head is the one surreal set in Full Metal Jacket, comparable to the vibrantly red bathroom in The Shining, where Jack has his interview with Grady, the Overlook’s old caretaker. Pyle has become a meticulous obsessive about his rifle. As in the case of Norman Bates or Jack Torrance, it’s the careful, anal personality that lets loose crazy destruction. Going mad, always in Kubrick, is about losing control and being controlled and being a control freak. It’s a “major malfunction,” as Hartman puts it.
The night before the bathroom scene, Kubrick told D’Onofrio, “Just make sure it’s big—Lon Chaney big.”24 Coincidentally, D’Onofrio had a few days earlier watched a silent movie with Chaney, and he copies Chaney’s leering face of horror when he glowers at Joker and Hartman. Kubrick wanted Strangelove-style grotesquerie from D’Onofrio, and he got it.
Ermey remembered, “You know it took seven days to light that bathroom.”25 This head glows with a blue surreal light, unlike any bathroom on Parris Island or anywhere else on earth. We have entered dre
am space, Kubrick’s no-man’s-land. Pyle stares us down like Alex at the beginning of Clockwork, but where Alex thrilled with his exuberant malice, Pyle menaces, an idiot face over his inert drooling lump of a hunched body.
“What are you men doing in my head?” Hartman yells when he hears Joker and Pyle in the bathroom. And so they are—in his head, that is—contaminating Hartman’s hard pure devotion to the corps. Both are as usual in their white T-shirts and boxers. Pyle holds his loaded rifle. “What is this Mickey Mouse shit?” Hartman bellows, steel-hard superego to the last until his heart is blown open by his troubled child Pyle. Joker fears he is next, but instead Pyle points the rifle to his open mouth, sitting slackly on the john. He fires, and his brains blow out the back of his head. We are now ready for Vietnam.
Full Metal Jacket has a precise, sonata-like structure: the twenty-minute scene at the end featuring a teenage Vietnamese sniper matches the twenty-minute basic training episode at the beginning.
To elaborate, the movie divides into:
twenty minutes for basic training at Parris Island
two minutes for the bathroom scene
forty-five minutes for Joker and the other Marines in Vietnam, everything before the encounter with the sniper
twenty minutes for the sniper scene
two minutes for the coda, in which the Marines sing the Mickey Mouse song and we hear Joker’s voice-over
Structure is sometimes hard to see in Full Metal Jacket’s drifting, episodic Vietnam section. This is deliberate. Basic training is straitjacket-tight in its form, a regimented, collective insanity. But war means wildness, lack of control. After the deaths of Hartman and Pyle, never mentioned in the rest of the movie, madness becomes routine, rather than fervent and over the top, as in the Parris Island sequence. Everything falls apart, and all you know is this chaos, inside and out. (A joke from writer Phil Klay: “How many Vietnam vets does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” “You wouldn’t know, you weren’t there.”)
The spectacular, dreamlike coordination of Kubrick’s basic training section, with its rows of recruits standing at attention swaddled in their white skivvies, yields to a series of discrete episodes, where no visible plot propels the movie forward. Like the Marines it depicts, the last half of Full Metal Jacket seems a little lost, narrative-wise, but really Kubrick is on top of every smoke-bomb explosion and every tracking shot. Without looking virtuosic or self-consciously beautiful, the sky during the battles glows with precisely planted fires and smoke clouds.
Joker, quizzical as ever, stands at the center of it all, deep in the shit yet not completely of it. Like the narrator Lyutov’s glasses in Isaac Babel’s story “My First Goose,” Joker’s wire-rim glasses stand for a tenderness that is liable to be mocked by tougher men like Animal Mother (Adam Baldwin), whose helmet forthrightly reads, quoting Oppenheimer quoting Krishna, “I Am Become Death.” In Babel, wearing eyeglasses is code for being a Jew, someone weighted by ambivalence, the antithesis of the Cossack’s brute readiness. Animal Mother has the thousand-yard stare, stoned and numb: he looks far beyond you to the unspeakable core of the matter. Joker, by contrast, is still alive to uncertainty. His heart has not yet turned to stone.
Kubrick makes Joker’s ambivalence come to a head in the film’s last scenes. Huddled behind a low wall, the squad is being targeted by a sniper from a group of ruined buildings. One by one the men, as if caught by bad magic, get drawn into the sniper’s trap. The Marines are cursed: this place is their Overlook Hotel.
So begins one of Kubrick’s greatest set pieces, the sniper sequence of Full Metal Jacket. Jay Cocks remarks that this section of the movie, like Sam Fuller’s small-scale Korean War classic The Steel Helmet (1951), “gets its ruthless tension from its simplicity.” Here Kubrick is “very focused and precise and very unadorned,” Cocks continues. Like Peckinpah, he uses slow motion when the sniper picks off the Marines one by one, their blood shooting out like a fountain. The pressure is close to unbearable. “And this from somebody whose idea of a life and death situation was getting on a commercial airline,” Cocks marvels.26 When Cowboy, the squad’s leader, is killed by the sniper, Kubrick stays with a master shot of the Marines clustered around the dying man: no emotion-drenched close-ups here. The masterly Arliss Howard, who plays Cowboy, dies in their arms.
Now comes an utter shock, an even stronger one than Cowboy’s death: the sniper is a teenage girl. She whirls around, spraying bullets like crazy. Meanwhile, Joker fumbles his gun like Jimmy Stewart in Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962).
Then Rafterman (Kevin Howard, playing a gung-ho greenhorn, Joker’s foil) shoots the sniper. Surrounded by the Marines and dying slowly, she begs to be killed. Joker, after hesitating, at last does what she asks.
The best comment on Joker shooting the sniper was written long before Full Metal Jacket, by Herr in Dispatches:
The problem was that you didn’t always know what you were seeing until later, maybe years later, that a lot of it never made it in at all, it just stayed stored there in your eyes. Time and information, rock and roll, life itself, the information isn’t frozen, you are.
Sometimes I didn’t know if an action took a second or an hour or if I dreamed it or what. In war more than in other life you don’t really know what you’re doing most of the time, you’re just behaving, and afterward you can make up any kind of bullshit you want to about it, say you felt good or bad, loved it or hated it, did this or that, the right thing or the wrong thing; still, what happened happened.27
Watch Joker’s eyes just before he shoots, and then just after. As when Dave talks to the murderous HAL in 2001, everything is in that gaze. Joker, tongue in cheek as usual, earlier told a news crew that he wanted to “be the first on his block to get a certified kill.” This is his certified kill, a notch in his belt that also carves a notch in his skull. During basic training Hartman, who is later shot in the heart, rammed home the point that “your rifle is only a tool, it’s a hard heart that kills.” Joker kills from a hard heart and a pitying one too.
The movie’s startling epilogue follows. As fires blaze spectacularly on the dark heath, the wasteland they have helped create, the Marines sing the Mickey Mouse Club theme song. Then we hear Joker’s voice: “I am so happy that I am alive, in one piece and short. I’m in a world of shit. Yes. But I am alive. And I am not afraid.”
Maybe Joker, the wild card, is joking in this final monologue (though he’s never only joking). We can’t tell whether he is actually happy and reconciled in his world of shit. His initiation ritual complete, he achieves what the historian Richard Slotkin called regeneration through violence—or so he tells us. Kubrick said of Hasford’s The Short-Timers, “I love the Homeric honesty when Joker says I never felt so alive.”28 But in the movie an irony suffuses Joker’s claim to aliveness. Joker says he is no longer afraid, and we might wonder whether this resembles Pyle’s lack of fear when he shoots Hartman and himself. For the moment he sounds perfectly sane, unlike Pyle, but then again this is Vietnam, so all bets are off.
Kubrick said that he used the Mickey Mouse Club song because he realized it had only been seven or eight years since these young men had been kids sitting in front of their television sets. Marching through ruined terrain, the Marines seem like boys again, innocents enjoying a rebirth after the cataclysm of the sniper’s attack, thinking now about getting laid instead about getting wasted by bullets. They are cured, all right. Or are they?
Critic Georg Scesslen writes that this ending is “the moment of highest comedy and deepest hopelessness” in the movie. Here is the saddest fact of all, Scesslen adds: “It is forever the free mind that keeps the madness” of the war going.29
Joker stands alone in this ending, as he has all along. Full Metal Jacket differs from the typical war movie: it is about isolation rather than camaraderie. This is Kubrick’s strike against the typical Hollywood war movie, like Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) (the butt of a few derisive yucks in Kubrick’s movie). Kubrick here pr
esages The Thin Red Line (1998), in which Terrence Malick isolates his soldiers inside their own heads, though Kubrick’s casual-seeming grace in Full Metal Jacket contrasts with what Janet Maslin calls Malick’s “innate momentousness”: Mozart, rather than Wagner.
That studied classical quality required much work from Kubrick the perfectionist. The smallest details mattered, as Kubrick scrutinized not just his actors and sets but also the weather, which needed to be precisely suitable for the smoke-bomb explosions. Every sunset, every cloud formation even, had to look just right. This required hours and days of waiting. On Full Metal Jacket Kubrick insisted on taking his time, more so than ever. The Warners quartet of Frank Wells, Ted Ashley, John Calley, and Terry Semel had given him permission to do things his own way, as slowly as he wanted. D’Onofrio recalls Kubrick’s careful method of filmmaking on Full Metal Jacket. At times the actors got fidgety:
He’d just sit up on the crane with his lenses and figure out what he was going to do. He would look at the clouds, the time of day, and figure it all out. So once Stanley is sitting up there on the crane and there are three hundred extras on the ground, all sitting on yellow tires, waiting. No talking. Stanley’s on the crane, about a hundred feet up, and we’ve been sitting there for an hour or so. One of the natives starts to curse him: “Get off the crane.” Terry Needham, a wonderful, great guy [Kubrick’s assistant director], comes over and says to us, “Alright, who said it, listen guys, you’ll never get another chance like this, you’re working with Stanley Kubrick, so watch it. No talking.” Terry goes away, Stanley keeps on working up there, and again someone says, “Get off the fucking crane.” This time Stanley comes down. He clears his throat and he says, “Okay, who said it? Who fucking talked?” And a voice comes from the back: “I am Spartacus.” And another: “I am Spartacus.” Three hundred extras burst out fucking laughing. Stanley too.30