Full Metal Jacket

Are we all fundamentally violent, in a sense we are natural born warriors? Is it ironic to appreciate that our success story on our planet is due to our ability to channel out our aggression, either bringing out our most barbaric moments or turning NBK on others? Do we have the capability to bear the co-existence of good and evil, even when they are locking in an endless struggle in the deepest territories of the psyche? Finally, why is there WAR, to start with, if we have always longed for a peaceful co-existence with each other?!  The brilliant filmmaker, Stanley Kubrick, decided that he would explore all these complex issues in one single masterpiece, which is the topic of a series of articles I will write about in August – Full Metal Jacket (1987)!!

It is great to hear that Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (FMJ hereafter) will receive a re-release in the Film Festival in Hong Kong this month. Based on a short novel ‘The Short Timers’, Kubrick explored the effects of Vietnam War on human psyche, but I have to say there is much more to it. It is noteworthy that the film is very starkly divided into two halves. The first half is about the training of a group of marine recruits in a military camp, and the second half is about these soldiers’ experience in the warzone in Vietnam. For today’s younger audience, FMJ is a film from Kubrick they are more familiar with, and many viewers have likely watched some parts of this film before even if they have no knowledge about Kubrick or his work. Indeed, the first half of the film is probably one of the most iconic and memorable, and, guess what, most entertaining sequences ever from a Kubrick film. The first half of the film has inspired many imitations and parodies in later movies, and I would say many films dealing with similar themes have probably taken inspirations from that too. The success of the first part is very much due to two characters – the Gunnery Sergeant Hartman and an underachiever Leonard Lawrence, most famously known as ‘Gomer Pyle’, a nickname from Hartman. That was the tension between these two iconic characters which drove the narrative of the first half forward, and made this part so memorable. At the second part, some viewers seemed to complain that the narrative became very disjointed and more episodic. To be honest, I would also admit that the second part is less interesting than the more iconic first half, yet I do not agree that the more episodic format of the second half is a short coming. I believe Kubrick adopted this approach because he wanted to contrast that with the first part, as I will elaborate more on the later passages. The more episodic style seemed to signify the random and chaotic nature of war itself, and the apparent aimlessness of the platoon signified the fact that the individualism inherent in any human being could often fit into the main narrative of the war itself – meaning that the soldiers could not quite see or appreciate why they were fighting the war, or they were fighting for, as they were merely instruments for the military industrial complex.

So, FMJ is your typical anti-war flick, right? Well, when I first watched this film in my teenage years, I certainly had this rather shallow point of view. From the dehumanization of military complex to the violence in any war, FMJ did contain a strong anti-war message. Yet the more I think about this film, and the more I understand about psychology, I start to appreciate the complexity of this film. If you have read any of my previous articles about Kubrick’s work, you may expect a statement like ‘Full Metal Jacket is probably the greatest war film in the history of cinema’. Surprise – you will not see this statement here this time. Because if I am really honest and treat FMJ as a hard core war film, it is in no way the best war film ever – films like ‘Apocalypse Now’, ‘The Deer Hunter’, ‘The Thin Red Line’ or even ‘Platoon’ and ‘Saving Private Ryan’ can be considered better war films than FMJ. What makes FMJ special is that it has moved beyond the level of war film – the film is so one-of-a-kind that Kubrick has once again transcended genre categorization.

Let me put it this way. Full Metal Jacket is not merely a war film, that is a film which uses the issue of war as a vehicle to explore fundamental questions about humanity. Indeed, many colleagues close to Kubrick has stated that the motivation behind making FMJ is actually a psychological one – because Kubrick was fascinated with Carl G. Jung’s ideas on psychology, and he wanted to express the idea of ‘The Shadow’ in cinema. Someone, he could see a connection between the Vietnam War and the Jung’s famous ideas – the Duality of Man – and therefore he used the Vietnam War as a topic to express the contradictory dualism inherent in all of us. It is worth comparing FMJ with a film Kubrick made 30 years before that – ‘Paths of Glory’ (1957). In Paths of Glory, Kubrick has made absolutely no confusion about the point he was trying to make – war of any kind and scale is ugly, and it wrecks lives of others. The point of view presented in ‘Paths of Glory’ was very clear, and indeed it was quite a sentimental film which was very different from Kubrick’s usual approach. When we look at Full Metal Jacket, the view point has become far more ambiguous, because Kubrick wants us to consider different perspectives regarding war and the underlying psychology behind that. Kubrick’s approach has matured throughout the 30 years, and what he has been aiming for the last 35 years of his life (since Dr. Strangelove) was an engagement with his audience to discover self-knowledge. Of course, self-knowledge not only entailed the great side of humanity but also his dark and uncharted seas. It is not fair to say that as a pessimism to expose the more painful and ugly moments of humanity, just the opposite, that is how our thinking can evolve and we have a better understanding of ourselves. Thus, I would compare FMJ to Kubrick’s first ever feature film, ‘Fear and Desire’ (1953), as that film was also intensely psychological and used war as a background to explore existential ideas and human personality.

In a nutshell, I guess the question wants us to explore is this – if war is so bad and destructive, given humanity’s intelligence, why is this very idea not replaced? If humanity possesses the intelligence to develop weapons that can target enemy more efficiently and selectively, and can conceive destruction in a far more massive scale, why is this dark side of human nature not wiped out? Throughout history, the story of warriors and conquerors have been celebrated, and they are often hailed as heroes or visionaries, while they certainly did this at the cost of others, no matter what kind of rhetoric they could come up with to justify their actions (that ‘Oh, we are trying to help you because you are less civilized than us’ sort of b.s.). Kubrick was confronting us with this paradox that many of us would find that tremendously challenging to come to terms with. If we are moral and taking a more liberal stance on this issue, and affirming the idea of peace, of course, then why we allow this very destructive activity to continue throughout centuries? In Kubrick’s point of view, the reason is because war is a manifestation of our true nature – our need for violence and aggression. That is nothing wrong or crazy about that, because that is our fundamental nature, just like any animals. What makes humanity different from the other animals is we can instill culture to strive a better balance from our darker attributes. What is more chilling, however, is that how humanity develops the idea of institution to normalize many behaviors that can in no way considered rational. Hence, we have the idea of ‘institutionalized violence’ and war is probably the most exemplary candidate of institutionalized violence.

Indeed, the first part of Full Metal Jacket shows us why the training of new recruits into soldiers are so effective. Because not only the dehumanizing effect has a great impact on the mind of the recruiters, what is often overlooked is that our psychological design is also helping us to transform to become an instrument for the institution. Indeed, it is spectacular and even chilling to see how great the military complex is playing with psychology of the recruiters to achieve a purpose they want – to turn these young and immature teenagers to become efficient killers in combat. The drill instructors are smart in the sense that they can use different tactics to play with the weakness of the recruiters, to influence them to have a self-motivation and drive to transform themselves, to born again hard as mentioned multiple times in the film. When we think about FMJ, there is no point to pass simplistic moral judgement on the film, like saying the drill instructor is a bad guy or so, because that will miss the point Kubrick was trying to make. Every incident, or indeed every character, can be viewed in many different and contradictory angles, and that is why Jung’s idea about the duality of humanity is so essential to the film – humanity is not that black and white, and we often embrace our own shadow if we want to understand ourselves.

In the next article, I will lead you through the first part of the film, about the military training in the camp. Kubrick has taken a clinical approach in this sequence, as he wanted us to serve as observers to this situation, as if we are looking at the action of an assembly line in a factory. The approach we will adopt is going to be very psychological, as I will show how the drill instruction plays with psychological ideas of archetypes, group psychology, intimidation, and the cultural ideas like heterosexuality and masculinity, to build up the military machine of soldiers. Though the sequence has loads of black humor – I am sure anyone will laugh at certain moments – I feel that it is probably one of the most chilling moments in all of Kubrick’s cinema. What makes that so disturbing is the mechanical dehumanization of the sequence makes so much sense to anyone, as this is something not only taking place in the army, but also in any disciplinary institutions. This cold rationalism, developed and perfected by humanity, will certainly send shivers down anyone’s spine - because it just works so well.

(To be continued.)

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by Ed Law

Film Analysis