“These boots are made for walkin’, and that’s just what they’ll do…”
Turning 35 this year is another Kubrick masterpiece—and one that’s over the years climbed my person rankings of not only his cinematography, but my all-time favorites period. It’s a film about insanity, and war—as if there’s any real distinction, I guess. I’ll even go as far as to challenge the consensus on one particular aspect of it. Graffiti your helmets, grab your jelly doughnuts, it’s Full Metal Jacket.
The plot itself is fairly straightforward as far as Kubrick goes—it’s 1968, Vietnam’s in full swing, and a group of young men are arriving at boot camp to become Marines. Very quickly we get introduced to real drill instructor R. Lee Ermey, who essentially gives birth to about eight hundred thousand pop culture quotes in the span of a matter of minutes. It’s a masterclass in crude metaphor and associated transitive verbs, and for a guy angrily raging at a line of confused looking men, you’re sure as hell not going to forget this kind of screen presence.
The interesting part is, of course, Vincent D’Onofrio as Private ‘Gomer Pyle’, the bullied odd one out in the platoon, and heavily implied to have some sort of mental impairment. Around this time is when the US military, to keep up troop number quotas, greatly reduced its standards in that regard when it came to recruitment and drafting—Forrest Gump was more realistic than you might think in that regard. In an environment where every recruit is forced to be responsible to the rest of the squad, yet at the same time harangued constantly to be broken down and ‘remoulded’…well, it makes the inevitable breakdown that much more visceral and tragic. When Pyle is confronted in a barracks, with D’Onofrio absolutely revelling in a performance of an already esteem-deprived mind now cracked, with Ermey’s characteristic yelling unable to do anything but exacerbate the situation…it’s a Kubrick moment laden with rising anxiety and incoming horror that only he could provide.
That takes us into the second half, set in Vietnam itself—a somewhat contested part of the film, as it now becomes a completely different thing entirely almost, focusing on the real main character of Matthew Modine’s Private Joker. And it’s true that you have to take it by itself—but I actually like it just fine, perhaps slightly better than the first half even. The main reason for me, I suppose, is the utterly deadpan atmosphere permeating it that, again, only Kubrick could pull off—and I think it’s something that as such brings forward the inanity of Vietnam and, indeed, most war in general with that sardonic style. From deranged helicopter gunners, to seeing the Marines, trained so much to be ultimate killers almost literally in love with their rifles now getting swindled on the streets of Saigon and barely even seeing the enemy, to officers unable to fathom the idea of respect for the locals even in interviews…while it’s much more episodic, each segment for me is about as memorable as all of Ermey’s drill rants.
Even the visual atmosphere is something on point for me. Kubrick filmed this in England, and while the perpetually overcast setting doesn’t seem like it’d work for steamy south-east Asia, it does at least lend itself to an oppressive feeling of desolation to the urban ruins most of it is set in.
And that of course brings us to the finale. Most war films have the protagonists usually accomplish something on a tactical level at least—blowing up a bridge, assassinating a commander, all that kind of jazz, just in time for the usual feelings of triumph that go back to the oldest style of propaganda films. Here, ultimately, after getting half the platoon wounded and falling for obvious ploys, all Joker and the rest really end up doing is hesitantly executing a possible child sniper. Marching off into a fiery night, trying to take this as some mark of being reborn men, all of it hits that perfect note of pointlessness and misaimed bravado that surrounded a military culture desperate to find achievement in a venture ill-concieved to begin with.
Full Metal Jacket may not be as consistent as Doctor Strangelove, nor its ending as iconic as 2001, and it’s fair to say it’s a little more disjointed than some of Kubrick’s other works—but it’s something that sticks with me easily as much as them. I can also recommend in a similar vein ‘Jarhead’, which focuses much more intently on the aspect of soldiers trying to lose some kind of battlefield virginity through killing, which is an aspect Kubrick himself almost certainly had in mind here.
And, between Pyle’s breakdown and the presentation on display, the innate insanity of conflict is also a theme he latched onto without compromise. Vietnam would be elongated before long essentially for Richard Nixon’s approval ratings—but, obviously beyond the realm of ideologues it’d be folly to say that the United States is the only one to blunder into conflict bereft of point nor achievement, though of course this war wasn’t the last such one. And let's face it, you've probably already made the joke about the grand nothing learned from such quagmires in the decades to come in your head.
Then, after all, what is the classic definition of insanity?
Comments
Post a Comment