The Talkies/Kubrick Goes to War

...The movie divides—somewhat before the halfway point—into two sections, each of which is structured in the manner of a short story and, accordingly, builds to its own climax...

...When an officer notices the contradiction and asks him to explain, Joker replies, "I think I was trying to suggest something about the duality of man—the Jungian thing, sir...

...In a way, I suppose it was a tribute to Kubrick's artistry that they wanted more...

...and a thief snatching Rafterman's camera...

...For example, when a squad of Marines, picking its way through the ruins of a Vietnamese city, finds itself being shot at by a sniper, the viewer knows immediately that the sniper will turn out to be either a woman or a child...

...Hence he continually compares killing to sexual intercourse, and likens rifles to male members or to women...

...In sequence after sequence, Kubrick combines graphic realism—and a masterly sense of pacing (within the sequence, at any rate)—with motifs that were already old hat when Kubrick made Paths of Bruce Bawer is The American Spectator's movie reviewer...

...Some of this material is effective, but much of it is familiar, and the fake-documentary style is unsatisfying.first part...

...The more one thinks about it, in fact, the less plausible the whole story of Lawrence and the D.I...

...The second is set in Nam at the time of the Tet offensive...

...So ends the first section of the film...

...begins to seem...

...If the D.I...

...is doing to his soldiers: he's attempting to shock us into paying attention to him, into heeding with awe and humility his view of the world...

...The results of the offensive are devastating...

...On the one hand, the sequence has a very realistic feel...

...But on the night before the platoon is to leave Parris Island, Lawrence—with a frightfully insane look in his eye—picks up Charlene, blasts a huge hole through the D.I.'s midriff, then shoves the gun's barrel in his own mouth and blows off the top of his head...

...There is, to be sure, something of a resolution at the end of the film...

...For Kubrick doesn't show us any side of the man other than his kill-kill-kill persona...

...But in the end it added up to little more than an assortment of memorable images and forgettable platitudes...

...that "these people we wasted here today are the finest human beings in the world.'.' In order to provide a believable context for some of this speechifying, Kubrick shows a number of soldiers being interviewed by TV news reporters...

...Though he is one of the film's major characters, we don't know where he is from, how he became this way, what his personal life consists of (but then, this is more or less true of Joker as well...

...She's praying")—is too familiar, too reminiscent of a hundred other war movies, and not especially good ones, either...

...The first is set entirely on Parris Island...

...On the contrary, if there is anything original about Kubrick's characterization of the D.I., it resides in the emphasis that he places upon the D.I.'s intuitive awareness of this duality, of man's innate capacity to make both love and war...

...The D.I.'s speeches are obsessively sexual...

...This sort of thing happens throughout Full Metal Jacket...

...If I'm gonna [kill] for a word, my word is poontang...

...So uncertainly shaped is the film, in fact, that on the night I saw it, the audience began murmuring with surprise when the closing credits began rolling...

...But since one does not identify with this one-dimensional smart aleck anyway, the crisis that he undergoes—the "lesson," as it were, that he learns—has very little resonance...

...singles out for special abuse...

...We keep Heaven packed with fresh souls...

...And there's an officer who, after a skirmish with the VC, announces in a tone eerily reminiscent of the D.I...

...Every so often we come across a Xerox copy of Lawrence or the D.I...

...congratulates Lawrence for his turnaround...

...He merely has the soldiers talk into the camera, each of them offering a different view of the war...

...Is that it...

...introduces himself to the new men is of course one of the all-time military-movie cliches...

...He taunts his men by calling them women or implying that they are homosexuals or masturbators...

...I wanted to be the first kid on my block with a confirmed kill," says Joker, a smirk on his face...

...Glory in 1958...

...And yet another complains, "We're supposed to be helping these people and they shit on us every chance they get...

...The ironies are invariably heavyhanded and unoriginal: for example, a soldier is killed while waiting for his discharge papers to come through...

...It is a breathtaking fade-out, but it is also decidedly melodramatic, and—in the final analysis—not only dramatically unnecessary but actually harmful to Kubrick's thematic intention, which apparently is, in part, to convince us that we live in "a world of shit...

...says, "Only queers and steers come from Texas...

...it is concerned with the effects of the D.I.'s rhetoric upon platoon number 3092, in particular upon a soldier named Lawrence, whom the D.I...

...THE TALKIES KUBRICK GOES TO WAR N o main title, no establishing shot: at the beginning of Full Metal Jacket Stanley Kubrick takes us straight from a dark screen into the stunningly bright interior of a Marine Corps boot camp barracks on Parris Island, South Carolina, where a steely-eyed drill instructor—seen in frightening closeup—is busy delivering a blistering welcoming address to his newly arrived young charges...

...One soldier explains that "we are here to help the Vietnamese because inside every gook is an American trying to get out...

...He declares that Lee Harvey Oswald and Charles Whitman (of the University of Texas massacre), who were both Marines, "showed what a motivated Marine and his rifle can do...

...It's a huge shit sandwich," Joker's editor tells a meeting of his staff, "and we're all gonna have to take a bite...

...But mostly we're presented with vignettes of various types of American soldiers: the complacent, the thoughtful, the committed, the angry, the jaded...

...When the D.I...

...bears down particularly 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1987 hard on Private Lawrence—a corpulent, simple-minded soldier whom he dubs "Gomer Pyle"—it is because Lawrence seems to be the member of the platoon least likely to turn into an effective killer...

...similarly, when one of those Marines, in the course of inspecting a bombed-out building, happens upon a child's doll, one knows that he will touch the doll, and that it will explode...

...But even this sequence—down to the last moments with the dying sniper ("What's she saying...

...Was any D.I., moreover, ever as thoroughly inhuman as this one...

...And Joker's somber narration (e.g., "The dead only know one thing: it is better to be alive") is often as facile and tired as his jokes...

...In Nam—where he works as a reporter for Stars and Stripes—Joker habitually wears both a peace button and a helmet on which he has scrawled the slogan "BORN TO KILL...

...He's a wimp: he can't get through the obstacle courses, he hides doughnuts in his footlocker...

...it is splendidly photographed and paced...

...the film had, after all, been visually striking, and at times quite gripping...

...He and his photographer sidekick "Rafter-man" are preparing to cover AnnMargret's forthcoming visit to Nam when the Tet Offensive takes place...

...In short, the D.I...

...Joker and Rafterman are sent to cover the fighting, and much of the rest of the movie consists of a sort of filmic equivalent of the article that one might imagine Joker writing...

...He tries to tap not only his soldiers' sex drives, furthermore, but also their religious instincts, telling them that "God has a hard-on for Marines because we kill everything we see...

...inflicts upon them on account of Lawrence's failings—the fat, pathetic isolato develops a pathological attachment to his rifle (which he talks to, and names Charlene), eventually becoming the best shot in the platoon...

...The two sections are bound together not by plot but, principally, by the fact that in bothof them the point-of-view figure—who now and again provides bits of mostly gratuitous narration—is a soldier known as Private Joker (Matthew Modine...

...Joker is finally presented with a situation that he cannot bring himself to joke about, and is forced to become the killer that the facetiously inscribed slogan on his helmet proclaims him to be...

...tries to turn the platoon into a collection of murderers...

...he comes across less as a human being than as a conception of evil in the shape of a man, a symbolically charged Kubrickian variation on a military-movie stereotype.supporting cast having been dispatched through the agency of Charlene...

...We are shown the bodies of a score of Vietnamese civilians murdered by North Vietnamese soldiers, shown a whore plying her wares among the American soldiery ("Sucky sucky...

...For one thing, would a young man who was this fat, this slow-witted, and this psychologically disturbed be admitted into the Marines in the first place...

...tells his men, "You're married to this by Bruce Bawer piece—this weapon of iron and wood...

...asks a soldier where he's from, the answer is Texas, and the D.I...

...Though he is the central character in this film, we don't get to know Joker very well...

...he teaches them to chant: "I don't want no teenage queen...

...One's reaction to this opening sequence—which is succeeded by a number of episodes that further illustrate the D.I.'s tyranny over his men—embodies an interesting contradiction...

...Yet after he has been tormented enough by the D.I.—and by his fellow privates as well, who resent the punishments that the D.I...

...Holding up a rifle, the D.I...

...What Kubrick's doing to us here is essentially equivalent to what the D.I...

...portrayed by Louis Gossett in An Officer and a Gentleman—and indeed, one of Gossett's lines reappears in this film's opening sequence...

...J oker is not the only person in the J movie who is profoundly cognizant of the duality of man...

...We're constantly waiting for a plot to develop, and waiting as well for some indication of how the second part of the movie is supposed to tie in with the THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1987 41...

...We might as well be waiting for Godot...

...The Marine Corps, he informs them, "does not want robots—the Marine Corps wants killers...

...The last sequence in the film—in which a squad of soldiers, Joker among them, is attacked by a lone sniper—is perhaps the strongest...

...We're constantly aware, too, of Kubrick sitting by the camera and pulling the strings...

...on the other, the only reason one knows immediately what's happening here is that one has seen other military movies, and the part where the cold-blooded, insulting boot-camp D.I...

...For it seems to be the D.I.'s goal, during the eight weeks of training at Parris Island, to convert (as fully as possible) his charges' hunger for love into a thirst for blood...

...The D.I...

...with the words, "Kill kill kill, sir...

...Another says, "You think we waste gooks for freedom...

...What is really missing from Full Metal Jacket—for all the grandeur of Kubrick's directorial style, in particular those blatantly symmetrical, eerilyserene shots of barracks and corridors and such—is a strong shaping vision...

...I just want my M-14...

...How many Marines, after all, kill their drill instructors and -then commit suicide...

...He trains his men to answer the question "What do we do for a living, ladies...

...One is frequently reminded, by the way, of the D.I...

...for him to conclude the first section of the film the way he does, however, is to suggest that his film presents an exaggerated, even a romantic, view of its subject...

...T he second section of the film finds Joker in different surroundings and with a different supporting cast (the two main members of the previousuch of the latter section of the film, in fact, is unsatisfying...

...the last thing he says to them at bedtime is "Good night, ladies," and the first thing he says in the morning is "Drop your cocks and grab your socks...

...Kubrick plainly wants it to be assumed that the story he tells of these particular Marines is in some way representative of the military experience...

...all we know, really, is that he is a decent person, a writer, and a wise guy—a rather cocky sort who manifestly fancies himself an intellectual...

...all the while emptying his machine gun into a jungle from a speeding helicopter...

...For instance, there's a soldier who brags about killing women and children, laughs crazily, and screams, "Ain't war hell...

...Joker's typically sardonic response: "Does this mean Ann-Margret's not coming...

...one voice cried out...

...it's a weak device, and Kubrick doesn't bring enough fresh insight to it to justify its employment here...