Watched ‘Full Metal Jacket’ again recently and was struck by a few things. I first saw it when I was very young and obviously alot went under the radar. I had thought of the film up until recently to be relatively straight forward and perhaps not as thematically dense as Kubrick’s other work. But on closer examination, it’s every bit as rich and nuanced as 2001 or The Shining. Needless to say, spoilers follow.
Private Pyle
The central image of the film for me had always been that of the previously child-like Private Pyle, at the end of his wits, blowing his head off whilst sitting on the toilet. The idea of sitting down to do the very human thing of going to the toilet but actually blowing your mind out instead, struck a chord and illustrates the main point of the film – that war dehumanises. In fact, it’s not just a by-product of direct combat but a pre-requisite of the war process- the first third of the film details how ordinary young men are dehumanised in basic training so that they are more able to be cold-hearted killers. It begins in the very first shots, as we see the new recruits having their heads shaved. And then they get given new (often insulting) names. This is followed by what amounts to physical and mental torture at the hands of Sgt. Hartmann and culminates, at least for Pyle, with the complete disintegration of humanity to the point where he can’t do the most human of things, expel his abject waste, the ‘shit’, because he’s backed up full of the stuff. Blowing his head off has symbolically replaced going to the toilet, for his head is now full of shit.
But thankfully it was just a garbage truck adorned with a severed mannequin’s head. This got me thinking, however, about just how scary the Child Catcher was (is!) and how most things that scared me as a kid were the supposedly family-friendly things whilst horror films and the like were enjoyable larks to me. Maybe this is due to the fact that every corner shop or newsagent I went into to buy my 10p mixture and packet of Garbage Pail Kids stickers was guaranteed to have a video rack sporting titles such as Driller Killer, The Corpse Grinders, Microwave Massacre and Pinnochio. Ah, the bliss of the unregulated! Most of the Hollywood studios were scared of home video and so didn’t release their big titles on it (The Shining (da na!) being a notable exception) which meant that the early boom of the VHS market was left to enterprising indy labels who put out whatever they could get their mitts on – usually cheap horrors and kids films. Great combo when you’re six.
This is Lonnie Liston Smith playing to a small but appreciative crowd at Glastonbury this year. Great show, never thought I would get to see him play. Been a fan since hearing Daft Punk drop his ‘
