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.

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.

FMJ is rich in ‘shit’, it keeps popping up throughout! Being in a real warzone is referred to as being ‘in the shit’. Private Pyle exclaims that he is ‘in a world of shit’ etc. etc. The bathroom where the murder/suicide takes place is called in army parlance the ‘Head’ which further rams home the point that the army fills your head with shit. And when Hartmann storms into the toilet at night to find Private Joker and Pyle in there he shouts ‘What are you animals doing inside my head?!’ A typically Kubrickian pun.

The overall journey of the film seems to be Private Joker’s descent from the unseen ‘real’ world into the symbolic world of shit that war leads you to. This journey entails him having the balance of his inner self, in Jungian terms, torn apart and destroyed leaving only the ‘shadow’. Joker is identified as being an untypical male, his feminine side is strong. His first line in the movie is ‘Is that you John Wayne? Is this me?’, one of his jokey asides that also shows him questioning whether he lives up to the macho image of American culture, literally asking is this who I am. During basic training he quietly rebels and manages to become a mother figure, looking after the pathetic Private Pyle, tucking his shirt in and holding his arm as he walks, with Pyle becoming more and more child-like, sucking his thumb, eating doughnuts etc. The father figure obviously is Hartmann – the domineering, sadistic father who says he is hard but fair (but clearly isn’t). One shot in particular crystalises this idea – Joker, Hartmann and Pyle march down a road looking like a dysfunctional family unit with Dad shouting and Mum keeping quiet but trying to make the crying child hold it together. (Hartmann to Pyle later, with Joker standing by: “What is your major malfunction? Didn’t Mommy and Daddy love you enough when you were a child?!”)

The scene where Joker and the rest of the recruits beat Pyle at night and the scene of Pyles suicide are possibly not literal scenes but rather symbolic. They are both shot with an eerie blue lighting and have the same, sleep-like ambient music playing. In the beating scene, Cowboy even tells Pyle ‘And remember, fat boy, it’s just a bad dream!’. And the murder and suicide takes place in the ‘head’ after all. It could represent the destruction of Joker’s innocence in the suicide of Pyle but also show he still has some way to go to total inhumanity with the murder of Hartmann. It could be said that Pyle is in fact re-born in the second half of the film as Animal Mother who bares a striking resemblance to Pyle and is the cold-blooded killing machine that the destruction of Pyles lighter side would result in. Pyle says ‘I am… in a world… of shit’ and Animal Mother has ‘I am become death’ written on his helmet. Shit and death are equated throughout. Like much of Kubrick’s work, scenes can happen in a literal and symbolic sense at the same time. He often spoke of applying a ‘dream logic’ to his films – identities transfer from one character to another, no line is drawn between reality and fantasy, mirroring and doubling are used frequently, subliminal symbolism is rife.

So the second part of the film details the battle between Jokers feminine side and the military/cultural extreme ideal of manhood. Much of the second half feels like a somewhat cliched war movie but with good reason – the men think that war IS a movie! They’ve been brainwashed from birth with war and western movies, John Wayne horseshit. One marine shouts out in the middle of a battle ‘Start the cameras – it’s Vietnam:The Movie!’. At one point the soldiers sit on rows of cinema seats that are outside a bombed out cinema – the real world is the movie and as they go into the cinema to have sex with the male-fantasy hooker, perhaps we are to read that she is only a hooker in this distorted movie world and that the truth is much darker.

The battles of the second half get progressively realer and more close to home as the realities of war manifest themselves, until, after the death of Cowboy (Jokers symbolic twin), we reach the final showdown with the sniper – who turns out to be a young woman of course. Joker executing her is the final part of his journey to the world of shit, to the destruction of his feminine side, to the shadow self. The very end of the picture has joker and the other marines marching at night surrounded by flames, they look like shadows wandering through a hellscape. But Jokers end voice over narration sounds somewhat upbeat, as if he’s proud to have attained the ‘thousand yard stare’ they speak of – just don’t forget this is all said as they march along singing that ‘Mickey Mouse shit’.

Tags: Full Metal Jacket

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