INTRODUCTION Full Metal Jacket is a film famously criticized for its second act, or rather, the odd shift in tone between its Paris Island and Vietnam segments. This article deals with explaining the initially off-putting juxtapositions in Kubrick’s Vietnam War film, and is also an attempt to get you to “read” the imagery in Full Metal Jacket as you would “read” Kubrick’s more overtly symbolic works. But before we run through the film, several points need to be made:

1. Full Metal Jacket is about Colonization in the widest sense of the term- colonization of the Self as well as of territorial frontiers. Once the mind of the individual is successfully conquered, he is then free to move out into the world and colonize territory in the name of ideology. 2. Full Metal Jacket isn’t only an anti war film. It goes one up. It’s an anti "war film" film. It’s deliberately self-reflexive. From Joker's opening line onwards, Kubrick destabilizes those familiar war movie myths and portrays the Vietnam War by way of a narrative that, like the war itself, frustrates expectations and refuses to progress.

3. In interviews, Kubrick explained that he wished to make a film about Jung’s concept of the Shadow. In Jungian psychology, the "Shadow" is a part of the unconscious mind consisting of repressed weaknesses, shortcomings, and instincts. For a marine, this "weakness" is linked to anything deemed to be Infantile (Pyle) or Feminine (Sniper). As such, Full Metal Jacket is concerned with discovering what needs to be conquered in order to create a killing machine, the military destroying everything that opposes masculinity, until the perfect solider is achieved. 4. Kubrick's film is openly critical of "the Jungian thing". There are no archetypes of the unconscious. Such symbols are entirely imaginary. Rather, Kubrick's film portrays the military as constructing such archetypes for the purpose of creating further archetypes. That is, the killer cannot be created unless the Feminine Other is first constructed as a symbolic enemy within the Self, debased and then killed. The irony at the end of the film is that the female sniper is every bit the masculinized killer as the marines. Joker’s killing of the sniper, therefore, like Pyle's earlier suicide, is not merely an act of further "rejecting the feminine", but is itself a suicidal act. 5. The film argues that prostitution (and soldiering) simultaneously serves both to undermine and to reinforce patriarchal constructions of masculinity, femininity, and marriage in society. Prostitution undermines by killing off the real Self through an objectification of the Other and it reinforces by preserving the structures of (including sexual) patriarchal power. In both Eyes Wide Shut and Full Metal Jacket, Kubrick shows that prostitution is always first and foremost an economic transaction, a colonialist act, a negotiation which serves to strengthen the power (and masculine mythology) of the man and the economic viability (and feminine mythology) of the woman (and the power and wealth of the pimp) - hence its instant self-gratificatory seductiveness for all parties. More importantly, when the economics of such a transaction are removed, or replaced with violence, we have what is normally defined as rape. Indeed, though the film’s final killing is often viewed by critics to be an act of “mercy”, Kubrick leaves numerous clues to imply that we are witnessing a symbolic rape. The film’s final act therefore becomes a representation of the marines’ sexual experiences with the hooker in the cinema. Kubrick thus illustrates that prostitution is an act of sexual nihilism for both parties, one which negates the true purpose of marriage/cohabitation while, paradoxically, simultaneously reinforcing marriage's patriarchal prerogatives as an economic institution. 6. While A Clockwork Orange looked at removing a killer's freedom of will in order to create a passive, "normal" human being, Full Metal Jacket looks at removing man's freewill in order to create a cold hard killer. Interestingly, in both A Clockwork Orange and Full Metal Jacket, the subjects of both experiments become loyal slaves to ideology. In this regard, Full Metal Jacket goes beyond the usual “war is hell” message of most war films. To Kubrick, the logical outcome of war is not “dehumanisation” but a suicidal loss of the Self, the doomed marines becoming whores to a larger Mickey Mouse culture. 7. The film is built around contrasting pairs or doubles. This dichotomy permeates every aspect of the film. From the dialogue (sound off like you've got a pair, this is my rifle, this is my gun), to the characters (masculine/feminine, whore/marine, Joker/Pyle, marine/reporter, mother/father), to the marine’s fragmented persona (is this you John Wayne, is this me?), to the music (militaristic vs absurd) and finally to the film's dual structure itself. And it is this narrative structure which has proven to be an obstacle for most audiences. They perceive the film’s narrative dissolution to be an error, rather than a deliberate choice on Kubrick’s part. But upon further examination, such a collapse is the very point of the film. The first half of “Full Metal Jacket” shows the hyper masculinized marines being constructed, and as such the film is precise, militaristic and tightly woven. In contrast, the second half of the film shows this conditioning falling apart, and is thus loose and aimless. This notion of duality is infused in the very language of the film itself. The rest of this article consists of a scene-by-scene breakdown on the film. It is an attempt to merge the writings of Paula-Willoquet Maricondi (Full Metal Jacket: Masculinity in the Making[1997]), Padraig L Henry (Deconstructing Masculinity [2001]), Tony Williams (Narrative Patterns and Mythic Trajectories), Bill Krohn (Corporations [1992]), Thomas Nelson (The Kubrickian Thing), Michael Pursell (FMJ: The Unravelling of Patriarchy), Susan Jeffords and philosophers Slavoj Zizek and Gilles Deleuze, both of whom have written briefly on the film. DECONSTRUCTING MASCULINITY by Jason Francois Padraig Henry ACT ONE: PARIS ISLAND "The substance was single-minded: the old and always serious problem of how you put into a film, the living, behaving presence of what Jung called the Shadow." – Michael Herr "War clearly follows the same movement as capitalism: In the same way as the proportion of constant capital keeps growing, war becomes increasingly a "war of material" in which the human being no longer even represents a variable capital of subjection, but is instead a pure element of machinic enslavement." - Gilles Deleuze 1. The film begins with young soldiers getting their heads shaven. Their identities are being stripped. During this brief primer scene only two marines have sly grins on their faces: Private Pyle, who finds the whole dehumanising process childishly amusing, and Private Joker, who believes that his "jacket" of irony and cynical intelligence will protect him from the military’s thought reform. 2. During this scene, Johnny Wright’s “Hello Vietnam” plays on the soundtrack. The song speaks of “stopping Communism” and “saving freedom”. The marines are thus willing to give up their hair (a symbol of femininity) and their bodies, for what they perceive to be a noble cause. The verses Kubrick chooses, however, lend the song a far more satirical edge. “Kiss me goodbye” sounds more like a joke (these guys will die) than a dutiful farewell. 3. The opening montage ends with a shot of a floor completely covered in hair. This theme will continue over the next 40 minutes, as the military systematically strips these boys of all traces of femininity. 4. Sergeant Hartman introduces himself to the Marines. He is a figure of power, able to command the movements of the camera. Like Buck Turgidson in Dr Strangelove, his name (heart of man) suggests that he is a strong, hyper-masculinized character. Moreover, the recruits stand perfectly symmetrical and identical, suggesting a loss of individuality. They are virtually undistinguishable, identical in hair, clothing and physique. 5. Kubrick once again links Joker with Pyle by having them replace one another in the boot camp line up. When Hartman passes down the corridor for the first time, Joker is to his right, whilst Pyle is two marines away to the left. When Hartman re-approaches, Joker and Pyle have switched positions. This mirroring will take place throughout the film, as Joker symbolically loses his Self in a suicidal act akin to Pyle's. 6. During his introductory speech, Hartman abuses several marines. The first to be mocked is Private Brown, whom he designates Private Snowball (brown turned to white). Hartman thus has the power to reverse the very identities of these young men. 7. While Hartman is across the room, Joker says, “Is this you John Wayne, is this me?” Joker is questioning his identity. Is he John Wayne (a killer) or is he able to maintain his own personal identity? Joker hopes that his intelligence and cynicism can protect him from the military’s indoctrination. Note: John Wayne is famous for playing numerous western and military roles. With films such as “The Green Berets”, “The Sands of Iwo Jima” and “Fort Apache”, Wayne became synonymous with the quintessential iconography of heroic, unflinching Americanism, always willing to fight the enemy, be they Vietnamese dogs or Indian savages. 8. By being aware of his duality (aggression and xenophobia vs altruism and compassion) Joker hopes to resist Hartman’s thought reform. As the film progresses, it becomes clear that it is precisely cadets like Joker, whom the military require. It is precisely Joker’s detachment that allows him to become an efficiently functioning, unknowing slave to ideology. As Kubrick states, the marines do not want one-dimensional robots (Pyle). They want killers who can rationalise their violent actions as compassion. 9. Hartman accuses Private Cowboy of speaking. Joker defends Cowboy by accepting the blame and giving himself up to Hartman. 10. Hartman proceeds to assault Joker. As Joker collapses to his knees, Hartman looks down the camera and addresses the audience directly: “You will not laugh, you will not cry, you will learn by the numbers!” This scene echoes the “Viddy well” scene in “A Clockwork Orange”, where Alex urges his audience to watch his violence carefully. 11. Hartman commands Joker to show him his war face. Joker does as told. Hartman isn’t convinced. As Joker says, “The USMC is a place for the phoney tough and the crazy brave.” Joker is the phoney tough. 12. Hartman then proceeds to re-name his recruits. These nicknames are significant. The film’s protagonist is nicknamed “Joker”, signifying his primary trait as a thinking man. He “thinks” everything is a “big joke”. Joker’s Jungian opposite in Vietnam is nicknamed "Animal Mother", very close to the Jungian concept of the "mother anima". Pyle is named after a homosexual character in a TV show, further implying that this childish man is far more effeminate that the rest of the recruits. 13. Throughout the film, all intellectual characters (Cowboy, Joker) are depicted as wearing glasses. This symbolizes their reliance on “sensation”, “rationality” or “visual sight”. For example, Joker aggravates his editor by insisting on a visual sighting of a "blood trail" before writing a story about "enemy kills". In contrast, Animal Mother relies on his "animal instincts" to make decisions. While the “thinking men” are cautious and prone to life threatening hesitancy, Animal Mother instinctively knows that there is “only one sniper”. 14. We are then subjected to 30 minutes of abuse as Sgt Hartman continually calls into question the marine's sexuality. He calls them ladies, queers, fags, sailors…a single-minded process of masculine purification. Every trace of femininity is then systematically eradicated. “Female” is replaced with “weapon". The whole thing escalates into a pseudo religion where the recruits pray to their rifles, recite chants and make ritual sacrifices so that “the Virgin Mary would be proud to take a dump”. 15. Kubrick draws parallels between religious indoctrination and military indoctrination. Signs throughout the barracks make reference to prayer time and Catholic sermons, the marines are ordered to pray and worship the Virgin Mary, their goal is to be born again and they are constantly told that they are doing God's will. Later, Private Joker is asked whether he believes in the Virgin Mary. Joker says that he does not. He is a freethinker, atheist and cynic. It is his ability to think independently that leads to his promotion. 16. During the first act, Sgt. Hartman brazenly establishes the goals of the boot camp. “You will be a weapon! You will be a minister of death, praying for war!” Here, Hartman all but spells out this theme of religious rebirth. He declares that a kind of evolution will take place on Parris Island, yelling, “Until that day, you are the lowest form of life on Earth! You are not even human fucking beings! You are nothing but unorganized, grab-asstic pieces of amphibian shit!” 17. The word “amphibian” quietly conjures up the notion of evolution, as it classifies these young men as subhuman. They are an inferior species awaiting growth. To foster this growth, the military creates two archetypes, the Child and the Feminine Other, which the cadets must be conditioned to view as obstacles, as pieces of shit which must be flushed out. Once the Child (Pyle) and the Feminine Other (sniper) are destroyed, the marine group is free to evolve further. 18. The blood red floor upon which Hartman walks echoes numerous other red floors in Kubrick's filmography, notably the mansion in Eyes Wide Shut and the red floors of the Overlook Hotel. These are places of power in which human's are mere pawns, doing the bidding of unseen overseers. 19. It is Hartman’s job to destroy any weakness within these recruits, and this “weakness” is constantly associated with femininity, infancy and homosexuality (Pyle himself is named after a gay character in a TV show). Essentially, Hartman seeks to replace all femininity with things linked to violence. Notice the not-too-subtle example of this when Hartman forces the recruits to lie next to their rifles while they sleep. “You will give your rifle a girl’s name! Because this is the only pussy you people are going to get! You’re married to this piece—this weapon of iron and wood—and you will be faithful!” Not only does this replace the feminine with something wholly unfeminine, but it also plays on man’s baser needs. A man must have sex to function. But the film never divides the soldier from sex. It is romance that is replaced with a sexuality that is entirely devoid of love or innocence. Indeed, this is evident when the recruits chant during their morning run: “I don’t want no teenage queen. I just want my M-14!” 20. During a training exercise, Pyle goofs up. He doesn’t recognise his left shoulder from his right shoulder. “You just want to be different!” Hartman accuses him, and slaps Pyle repeatedly. Note that during this scene, Kubrick’s composition is such that it appears as though columns of marines marching in the background enter Hartman’s mouth in the foreground. Hartman consumes men and spits them back out, but Pyle does not respond well to this brutal training. 21. As punishment for his “refusal to learn”, Pyle is made to march with his pants down and his thumb in his mouth. Throughout the film, Pyle will be portrayed as a baby, twice shown sucking his thumb. He’s a child, an infant. On a symbolic level, it is precisely Pyle’s qualities which prevent the military group from progressing. If the group is to evolve into killers, they must first destroy their Infantile Self. Only after the destruction of Pyle, the ridding of their baby fat, can these men progress. 22. The marines are presented with a series of obstacles. Pyle fails them all. After this training montage, the marines are seen running through a lake of mud. Pyle falls and the entire group collapses. They struggle to pick him up. Pyle is becoming a burden to the group. 23. Joker is given responsibility of Pyle. Hartman : Private Joker, do you believe in the Virgin Mary? Joker : Sir, no, sir! Hartman : Well, well, Private Joker, I don't believe I heard you correctly! Joker : Sir, the private said "no, sir," sir! Hartman : You Goddamn communist heathen, you had best sound off that you love the Virgin Mary, or I'm gonna stomp your guts out! Now you DO love the Virgin Mary, don't you?

Joker : Sir, NEGATIVE, sir! Recognising that Joker is outside the system, and is not being swayed by the military’s mind control (which up to this point has been likened to religious indoctrination), Hartman makes a clever choice. Instead of persecuting Joker for not being part of the group, he promotes him. Joker is slowly and unwillingly being made a slave to the very system he mocks. Thus, Joker takes over from Private Snowball and inherits the responsibility of Pyle. 24. Kubrick uses “left to right” compositions to highlight the traditional way in which we process information. This is the method of indoctrination used by Hartman on his boys. Hartman, the symbolic Father, uses a tough, dispassionate, indoctrination approach on Pyle. Private Pyle, however, is unresponsive, and so he is assigned a new teacher, Private Joker. 25. Private Joker symbolises the Mother. He uses compassion, love and intimacy to teach Pyle. Joker’s unorthodox teaching is demonstrated using “right to left” compositions. This notion of “Mother” and “Father” (feminised compassion vs masculinized aggression) is highlighted prior to Pyle’s suicide. “What is your major malfunction, numbnuts?” Hartman screams, with Joker at his side. “Didn’t Mommy and Daddy show you enough attention when you were a child?” Unlike Hartman, Joker teaches Pyle to distinguish between his “left shoulder and right shoulder” in a calm and tolerant manner. Joker is so out of sync with Hartman, that when Joker teaches Pyle to put his gun on his “right shoulder”, we see and hear Hartman in the background teaching the rest of the marines the exact opposite. When tying his shoelaces, Joker also verbally and visually teaches Pyle how to put his “left lace over the right” and the “right lace over the left”. In the next scene, Joker shows Pyle how to put his left leg over the other when climbing the obstacle. This contrasts with an earlier sequence in which Hartman fails to bully Pyle over the obstacle. 26. Under Joker's unorthodox teaching, Pyle seems to progress. Several shots imply that Pyle is shaping up to be a competent marine. He now recognises his left and right and seems to be losing his baby fat. 27. As the marines march, Kubrick dissolves the image and fades into a rifle range. For a brief moment the men are superimposed over the image of rifle targets. The message is clear: these young men are disposable targets, being lined up for potential death. 28. On the rifle range, Hartman says: “Your rifle is only a tool. It is a hard heart that kills. If your killer instincts are not CLEAN and STRONG, you will hesitate at the moment of truth. You will not kill. You will become dead marines. And then you will be in a world of shit!” Later in the film, Joker hesitates at the moment of truth. He fails to kill the sniper because he does not have a “hard heart” and a “clean head”. Joker’s thinking, rational, conscious mind has failed him at the crucial moment. This, rather than a “jammed gun”, is the reason for his impotence. Note: The film is filled with references to “cleaning out the head”. Kubrick links the notion of “flushing out your headgear” and “becoming a killer” to the literal act of cleaning, mopping and polishing the Head (bathroom). 29. Under Joker’s teaching, Pyle seems to progress, but only up to a point. Humans are pleasure-centric animals, and basic human temptation creeps in. Like a dopey baby, Pyle has little personal control, and so his inability to resist food (pleasure), is his downfall. 30. Hartman continually punishes the marine group for their “inability to deal with Pyle”. 31. The marines, motivated by vengeance, pin Pyle to his bed and beat him violently with bars of soap. They want to wash him away. Joker, despite his initial facade of compassion, beats Pyle the hardest. This is the first sign that Joker has some primal killer instinct buried deep within him. 32. The film is filled with references to “washing”, “cleaning” and “flushing”. While such soap hazings do take place in the military, the idea of washing Pyle away and later flushing him out of the head (his toilet suicide) fits in with Kubrick’s theme of masculine purification (“if your killer instinct is not clean you will hesitate!”). Later, Rafterman is told to “flush out his head-gear” when discussing “freedom”. Rafterman’s ideas of a noble and just war are flushed out of his head and replaced with one of sex and vengeance. 33. In both the “beating of Pyle” and the “killing of the sniper” scenes, the marines are motivated solely by revenge. As Animal Mother says at the end of the film, “let’s get some payback!” The notion of “payback” is present in all 3 acts. In the first act, the marines “pay back” Pyle by beating him with soap. In the second act, a marine called Payback teaches Joker about the “thousand yard stare” and “war face”. In the final act, the marines kill the sniper in an attempt to pay her back for their fallen comrades. So throughout the film, Kubrick links the notion of “payback” to the acquisition of the “war face”. Jung says this himself in his writings, believing that the Shadow hides out of sight, only appearing to counter man’s virtues with sudden flashes of anger, fear, vengeance and unwarranted suspicions of the Other. 34. The “beating of Pyle” is shot with the same blue hue as Pyle’s suicide. Pyle’s suicide is a direct result of his “beating”. From here on, Pyle ceases to be an effeminate child and proceeds to bury himself in work. He quickly “shapes up”. He is now a bitter killer. He is a one-dimensional psychopath, lacking any sense of empathy, compassion or attachments to the hive. Note: the marines beat Pyle in a manner which echoes the apes beating one another in “2001” (with femurs), and Alex beating his foes in A Clockwork Orange (with canes and weapons). 35. While storm clouds rumble overhead, Hartman speaks to the men about the Kennedy assassination. Later in the film, the sniper will assume the role of assassin. 36. Though the Marine’s sing happy birthday to Jesus, it’s really Pyle’s birthday. From this moment onwards, Pyle is portrayed as a methodical, competent marine. He has been reborn. The child is now a killer. 37. Like “2001: A Space Odyssey”, “Full Metal Jacket” is filled with “rebirth” motifs. The celebration of birthdays is one such example. At Christmas on Parris Island, Hartman leads the men in a chanting of “happy birthday”. The celebration of a birthday is reminiscent of this notion of rebirth. But further still, by celebrating Christ’s birthday, the marines are, in a sense, celebrating Christ’s eventual resurrection. This resurrection is suggestive of their eventual resurrection into killers. In the second half of the film, the apathetic American soldiers celebrate the birthday of a dead Vietnamese soldier. Here the celebration of a corpse’s birthday seems to be a celebration of death. The irony of celebrating a man’s death day as a birthday is also suggestive of rebirth—signifying the death of the old and birth of the new. Such resurrections after scenes of death take place twice in the film. Firstly, when Pyle kills himself and secondly when Joker kills the sniper. Both deaths represent the death of specific qualities which result in the birth of a new being. Note that in the original screenplay, during the final narration, Joker implicitly says, “It is my birthday”. The implication is that, after killing the sniper, Joker is reborn. Preferring to keep things ambiguous, Kubrick omits this line from the film’s final cut. 38. Kubrick now gives us two scenes dealing with cleaning. In the first, Pyle cleans his rifle. In the second, Joker and Cowboy mop the Head. Both scenes deal with the budding sexuality of the marines. 39. In the first “cleaning scene”, Joker watches as Pyle talks quietly to Charlene, his feminized rifle. Pyle thinks his rifle is beautiful, perfect, smooth and sexy. Creation and destruction, penis and rifle, gun and girlfriend, fighting and fun, become one. Note: Charlene is the effeminate equivalent of the name Charlie, the marine's slang for the Vietnamese enemy. 40. In the second “cleaning scene”, Joker and Cowboy discuss Pyle whilst mopping the Head. Though Joker is concerned about Leonard, Cowboy doesn’t care. JOKER: Leonard talks to his rifle. COWBOY: Yeah. JOKER: I don’t think Leonard can hack it anymore. I think Leonard’s a section 8. COWBOY: That don’t surprise me. JOKER: I want to slip my tubesteak into your sister. What do you take in trade? Note: Joker wears blue slippers, Cowboy wears red slippers, and the walls are all white. Like “The Shining”, the red, blue and white colour scheme highlights the notion of Americana 41. The line "what do you take in trade?" echoes numerous allusions to “trade” and “business” in the second act of the film. Full Metal Jacket explores the analogy between war and prostitution, emphasizing the body and soul selling aspect of the military experience. As such, the middle section of the film (ie the Vietnam war) is framed by episodes of Americans making trades with Vietnamese prostitutes. This formally establishes the film's connection between prostitution and trade, between sex and technology and between soldiers and whores. The prostitutes in Full Metal Jacket symbolize the further, ultimate subjugation of the female-as-feminine to the level of a tradable commodity. They are infertile sex machines. They are

prostitutes of the sex-trade, whereas the soldiers, as infertile killing machines, are prostitutes of the rifle-war-trade, both groups victimised and dehumanised by the one-dimensional collapse and mutilation of their organic identities. 42. Joker’s wish to fuck Cowboy’s sister mirrors a similar scene in Vietnam. The film thus contains dual references to sisters:

Act 1: "I like you, you can come over and fuck my sister." "I want to slip my tubesteak in your sister."

Act 2: "You've been getting any?" - "Only your sister." "Hey, little yellow sister." In the third act, the marines realise their wish and finally rifle-fuck the sniper. 43. These two “cleaning scenes” reinforce the association between sexual power and technological power. While Pyle lusts for his gun, Joker and Cowboy have erections whilst talking about Pyle's rifle. They have bulges in their pants, their phallic mops in their hands and a slit even appears in Joker's shorts when he talks about slipping his tubesteak into Cowboy's sister. 44. Joker and Cowboy are beginning to identify with their guns. Joker has linked this sexual desire to his recollection of Pyle delicately cleaning and talking to his "smooth", "nice", "perfect" and "beautiful" M-14. Joker is now sexually aroused by his recollection of Pyle's intimate relationship with his rifle. Aroused by this erotic, identification with his gun, Joker then asks to fuck Cowboy’s sister. Although these "cleaning the head" scenes foreshadow Pyle being "born again hard" (an erotic, infertile unification with his rifle), they also subtly reveal how the same process is affecting Joker and Cowboy In short, though both Joker and Pyle are now aroused by their weapons, Joker is still able to make the distinction between “sex” (Cowboy’s sister) and “rifle”. Pyle cannot make this distinction. 45. Pyle is on the firing range. He’s an excellent shot. Hartman is impressed. “You are definitely born again hard!”

46. We’re then given the final of 3 marching sequences. In the first marching sequence, Hartman conditions the men to love physical training. In his chants he makes it clear that, rather than sex, it is physical training that is good for you. In the second marching sequence, Hartman conditions the men to love their country and the Corps. In the third sequence, Hartman conditions the men to love their rifles (I don’t want no teenage queen, I just want my M14). 47. The marines run toward camera in slow motion, screaming and yelling like animals. This short scene mirrors an earlier scene in which the marines ran toward camera, tumbled over Pyle and collapsed in a pit of mud. The difference is that Pyle is now a competent marine. The group no longer needs to carry him. They are finally functioning as a unit. They are no longer stuck in the mud.

48. The group has eradiated all traces of the Infantile and Female Other. They are now hyper-masculinized killers. It is now time for… 49. Graduation Day. Hartman stands before the group and says, “Today, you are no longer maggots. Today you are marines. You’re part of a brotherhood. From now on, until the day you die, every marine is your brother!” Kubrick cuts to stock footage of a real marine graduation ceremony when the line “You’re part of a brotherhood” is uttered. 50. Hartman designates roles to his men. While Cowboy and Pyle are assigned to the Infantry, Joker is assigned to Basic Military Journalism. Thus, Joker has successfully resisted Hartman’s indoctrination. He is not John Wayne. He is not a killer. He has feigned obedience and pretended to be part of the group. His aloof cynicism has allowed him to maintain a certain level of detachment. “You’re not a writer,” Hartman yells, “you’re a killer!” Joker responds quickly. “A killer! Yes sir!” Joker has learnt to give Hartman exactly what he wants. But it’s all an act. 51. Interestingly, Joker is told to report for “Basic Military Journalism” at 42-12. While the other Marines are given correct Military Occupational Speciality Numbers (MOS numbers), Joker is given a nonsensical one. Here are genuine MOS numbers: 4300 Basic Combat Correspondent 4313 Broadcast Journalist 4341 Combat Correspondent Perhaps Kubrick is alluding to Danny Torrance, who in “The Shining” was frequently linked to the numbers 42 and 12. One may view Joker as a grown up version of Danny. Danny survived the oppressive history of the Overlook Hotel, joins the military and, because of his experiences, has learnt to treat such institutions with scepticism. Later in the film, before Joker kills the sniper, there is another reference to “The Shining”. He passes a maze in the rubble. Danny thus escapes the Maze in “The Shining”, only to find himself back in the Maze at the end of “Full Metal Jacket”. Like his father, he’s forced to do the murderous duty of the Mickey Mouse Club. Interestingly, Danny also wore a Mickey Mouse sweater in “The Shining”. Or perhaps 42-12 was simply a MOS number during the Vietnam era and has subsequently changed. 52. While the other marines sleep, Joker patrols the barracks. This sequence is shot with the same blue hue (and music) as an earlier sequence in which Pyle was pinned to his bed and beaten with bars of soap. That sequence ended with the line “it’s just a bad dream, fat boy”, while this sequence begins with the line “what are you two animals doing in my Head!?” On a symbolic level, this sequence is all “in the head”. Like a dream, it’s a psychological process which is being demonstrated to us by Kubrick using 3 archetypes: The Father (Hartman), Mother (Joker) and Child (Pyle). The Father, Mother and Child are all in the Self’s Head. For the marine group to develop further, it must kill the Child, murder the Mother and cut all attachments with the Father. But though Hartman and Pyle are killed, Joker survives. He has resisted the military’s process of masculine purification. Thus, this particular group of marines can only be fully integrated into the Mickey Mouse Club (where the Mickey Mouse club is symbolic of military ideology) once Joker himself is destroyed. It now becomes clear that, far from being a film about a hero or one character, the central character in “Full Metal Jacket” is really the “marine group”, of which, Joker is merely representative of the group’s self awareness and intellect. As French philosopher Giles Deleuze states, “Kubrick’s films portray the world as a brain fated to malfunction from both external and internal causes”. Deleuze discusses Kubrick in the second volume of “Cinema” where he divides modern cinema into 2 camps, the cinema of the body and the cinema of the brain. Full Metal Jacket, he concludes, is less about Joker’s personal evolution, than the regression of Joker so that the marine-hive, as a single entity, may further evolve. Author Bill Krohn expands on this, saying: “Kubrick told Newsweek that he wanted to “explode the narrative structure of film” and in Full Metal Jacket the first casualty of this explosion is the conventional notion of a character. For Full Metal Jacket is a film without a hero; its sole protagonist is a group-mind whose formation is shown in the boot camp scenes, most of which portray the process of indoctrination, with little reference to combat training per se.” Krohn goes on to say: “Then, in the second section, we follow scattered pieces of the group-mind as they are set adrift in a world where scene follows scene with no apparent dramatic or thematic necessity, so that even Joker, the protagonist, whose acts and motives were starkly delineated by the constricting circumstances of boot camp, seems to withdraw from us, becoming a cipher as the film unfolds” So from this point onwards, it becomes helpful to view “Full Metal Jacket” as a film in which the central character is the entire “marine hive” of which the “individual marines” are merely representative of the different aspects of this group’s personality. In other words, the central character of “Full Metal Jacket” is the MARINE GROUP and the mouthpiece of this group’s intellect is Joker. Note that the film begins and ends with groups of men. When watching the film, what we’re really doing is watching a brain process the military’s indoctrination. ACT 1: The brain is faced with indoctrination and is forced to question’s its identity. Is this you or is this still me? Though the mind is forced to kill its Father and its Child, it retains a sense of personal Self by protecting its intellect and femininity. ACT 2: The brain is thrown into Vietnam, where it tries to reconcile its training in such a chaotic environment. The mind becomes confused and wayward. It’s been trained to kill and fuck the Feminine, but cannot do so until it locates Cowboy, where the notion of “Cowboys” is symbolic of its warrior nature. ACT 3: The brain finds Cowboy. It grows focussed. When Cowboy is killed it grows vengeful. It steps forward and takes on the role of warrior. It has not sacrificed its intellect, it has not killed off its Female Self, rather it has learnt how to balance or reconcile these different archetypes. That is, the intellect (Joker) has also become the Cowboy and the Mother. The killer, the mind, the woman and the child, are all one. The perfect killer is formed. Far from being a one-dimensional killing machine, the perfect “marine” is a multi-faceted individual who retains his personal identity and YET is still able to be a dutiful slave or whore to military ideology. So Pyle does not spare Joker, rather, only Joker has managed to survive the military’s indoctrination process. IE- the intellect has survived boot camp, but the child appears to have not. 53. Joker and Hartman (Mother and Father) confront Pyle in the Head. “What is this Mickey Mouse shit?” Hartman asks Joker. “Why aren’t you stomping Private Pyle’s guts out?” But Joker is transfixed with fear. At this stage in the film, the intellect is still cowardly. 54. Prior to his suicide, Pyle mimics Hartman and speaks the title of the film: “Seven six two millimetre. Full metal jacket.” A full metal jacket bullet does not explode upon impact; instead it penetrates deep into the target. This bullet is normally used for target shooting, one of the few skills that Pyle excels at. So the bullet that causes Pyle’s death is also the vehicle through which he finally begins to succeed in the military. Recognising this irony, author Mario Falsetto says: “The depth of penetration characteristic of the full metal jacket bullet is symbolic of the depth to which the ideology of the Marine Corps has penetrated Pyle.” Because Pyle assimilates Hartman’s teachings so rapidly, without negotiating a space for his own individuality, his identity as a Marine is flawed. His mimicry of Hartman, prior to his suicide, makes this failure apparent. Pyle is unable to separate his own identity from the one dictated to him by his drill instructor. 55. Pyle commits suicide. He shoots Hartman in the heart and himself in the head. Throughout the film, Kubrick hits us with continuous “hearts” and “minds” references. To win control of the marine, you have to win the battle of the heart (compassion) and the battle of the mind (intellect). Later in the film, Joker will wear a peace button on his heart and the words “born to kill” on his head. 56. In the first act, the winning of hearts and minds is symbolised by hard-hearted Hartman getting shot in the heart, followed by Pyle sitting down on his pile and shooting himself in the head in the Head. In the final act, the winning of hearts and minds is symbolised by Rafterman shooting the sniper in the heart and Joker shooting her in the head. When the heart and mind are destroyed, you have total self-destruction. A symbolic suicide or killing of the Self. Out of this destruction comes the birth of a new identity. As we will see, the two reporters in the group (Rafterman and Joker) will then be reborn and assimilated into the marine hive. With this total conversion, the group now becomes part of the Mickey Mouse Club. 57. Pyle is dead. While Joker manages to distance himself from the military’s indoctrination, Pyle suffers from an over-identification with this brutal ideology. Though the military has finally broken Pyle down and removed all infantile and feminine qualities, his masculinized training was so complete that he was "reborn" as a technological tool, a weapon, where all his feminine qualities were externalized onto his gun. Pyle's gun is "smooth" and "beautiful", every action "slick" and "sliding". He fetishizes his weapon because, unlike the other marines, he is still a child. He cannot distinguish between fighting and fun or between sex and gun.

Like Jack Torrance in "The Shining", Pyle was never "mad" to begin with. He was never a "section eight". He was simply "doing his duty" - progressing along the dehumanising arc of becoming an efficient killer. But Pyle had the emotional sensibility of a child, leading to his explosive ejaculation in the Head. By skull fucking his weapon, Pyle hoped to receive total identification with his gun. But such identification is a self-destructive act, as to give one’s self totally to ideology is to remove all sense of individuality. The individual self is replaced completely with the marine self. This is a suicidal act. The military does not want this. They do not want one-dimensional robots. THE MALE ENEMY: CHILD/WOMAN FUN FACT: "For 2 weeks, Full Metal Jacket was shot in black and white with grainy 16mm film stock. Kubrick eventually changed his mind and opted for color." "You will not laugh, you will not cry!" Like Alex in ACO, Hartman directly addresses the audience, preparing them for the ordeal... How can you shoot WOMEN and CHILDREN? SUMMARY OF ACT ONE "In Vietnam it was the culture of capitalism which played the nomadic role. The American soldier was the nomad, and not so much because he wanted to be, but because that is what the technology demanded of him. It is this nomadic movement, this production of the plateau disarticulated from all others that capitalist industry made possible in the skies of Vietnamm, a boundless cushion experienced as if without limits and which produced the sense of a landscape at every point accessible, penetrable, and nonrestricted." - Herman Rapaport Jung theorised that all human beings have a subconscious male and female (anima and animus) component which should be developed. In terms of males, the entire process of unconscious anima development is about the subject opening up to emotionality, and in that way a broader “spirituality”, by creating a new consciousness that includes intuitive processes, creativity, imagination, and sensitivity towards himself and others. Kubrick’s film, however, postulates the opposite. Instead of growth, it deals with killing the anima by creating a false enemy within the Self. Once this enemy is killed, the Self is compromised, freeing the marine to be used and abused by those in power. So Kubrick suggests that to become "born again hard" the male needs to defeat two things: 1. The Infantile Self (Pyle) 2. The Feminine Other (woman/sniper).

Firstly, for the “self” to be won, all ambiguity must be shut down. You must become a one-dimensional identity, completely rejecting the Feminine and the Infantile ("How can you shoot women and children?"). Throughout this forty-minute period the marines are portrayed as infants and school children. They learn to tie their shoes, learn to make their beds, learn to walk, pee, run, climb etc.

But with his baby-fat and his naive innocence, Pyle is different. Kubrick portrays him to be younger than the rest. He’s a wide-eyed baby, twice shown sucking on his thumb, often sitting and staring like a child and in one scene, even waddling with his pants down. The only thing holding this unit down and preventing them from progressing is their attachment to their childish nature, symbolised by Pyle. Angered by their inability to grow further, the marines pin Pyle against his bed and proceed to beat him with bars of soap. They want payback for all the pain he has inflicted upon them. They want to wash his childish nature away (“Are you going to die on me Private Pyle? Do it! Do it now!”). As a result, Pyle slowly malfunctions. His childlike immaturity is still there, but now it is coupled with pure rage and hyper-masculinity. He is reborn a sociopath. Of course only Mother (Joker) notices this. During a scene where both Joker and Cowboy mop the bathroom, Joker informs Cowboy of Pyle's growing insanity, but they quickly brush the topic aside and talk about sex. Ignored by his fellow recruits, Pyle gradually becomes a killing machine. He remembers his commands, is a crack shot on the sniper range, and can assemble his gun faster than any other recruit. The final Paris Island sequence takes place in the bathroom. Here Pyle literally malfunctions in the Head. Sgt Hartman confronts him and bellows: "What is your major malfunction numb nuts? Didn't mommy and daddy give you enough attention as a child?" As we’ve seen, this line itself is symbolic. Mommy and Daddy (Joker and Hartman), who stand side by side like a couple, did not give Pyle enough attention when he was a child. As a result, he has malfunctioned in the Head. While the other marines can separate fighting and fun, love and sex, gun and penis, Pyle receives complete identification with his gun. In giving himself totally to military ideology, Pyle fails to negotiate a space for his own individuality. Pyle eventually kills Sgt Hartman before committing suicide himself. With this simultaneous loss of both Hartman (father) and Pyle (child), the Marine unit is now free to evolve into adolescence. PYLE HAS LEFT HIS WORLD OF SHIT "The standards of manhood promulgated by the military permeate all of society and are broadcast by all its institutions. By revealing the profound analogies between the making of the marine and the making of masculinity, Kubrick unmasks the true meaning of patriarchy and its motivations." – Paula Willoquet Maricondi (Masculinity in the Making) While Kubrick does liken the institutions of the military to a maniacal parent or patriarchal “mother green”, he also portrays these institutions as being part of a larger “world of shit”. As such, the film contains numerous references to shit, dumps, turds, stains, faeces, waste, flushing, toilets, suppositories, people being “wasted” and headgear being “flushed out”. As Christopher Sharrett argues in his article “Full Metal Jacket” (Cineaste, 16 (1987): 64), one of the principal themes of the film is "the fate of men at the hands of other men." Developing this theme even further, Michael Pursell also contends in “Full Metal Jacket: The Unravelling of Patriarchy” (Literature/Film Quarterly 16 (1988): 221) that to be in a "world of shit" is not merely to be in a war, but to be in a "strictly man-made world". Thus, one of the reasons that Kubrick chose to set the Vietnam portion of Full Metal Jacket in the dilapidated city of Hue, was in order to illustrate that war is always manufactured. The wild, untamed, "naturalistic" jungle settings of nearly all other Vietnam movies serve only to mask the real nature of war. Far from being a descent into the jungle of human nature, Kubrick emphasizes the extent to which war is a supremely artificial, man-made construct. Kubrick also demonstrates how the military appropriates whatever else is necessary from the wider culture, in order to achieve its purposes. The film thus links the military to all of society’s major institutions, including the following: 1. Religion: Virgin Mary, Chaplin Charlie, prayers to rifles, group chants, sacrificial rituals, Pyle being "reborn" masculine on Christmas Day so "you can give your heart to Jesus but your ass belongs to the Corps”. Indeed, like the military, religion is a coercive organization which creates “soldiers of God” by appealing to sacrifice, duty and mythology. Hartman’s line- “Marines die, that’s what we’re here for. But the Marine Corp lives on. That means you live on!”- makes it clear that the marines are conditioned to accept their jobs based on the false promise of eternal life. Though they don’t get a Christian heaven, they are given medals and promises of eternal remembrance, destined to “never be forgotten”. 2. Sexuality: the most significant sub-theme, from the sexual fetishisation of the marines' rifles to the marines' "clarified rejection" of all feminine cultural constructs in order to become more "masculine", which becomes Joker's suicidal undoing when he shoots the masculinized female sniper. 3. The media: cinematic and TV representations of war and the idealised western masculine hero. 4. Capitalism/Corporatism/American Imperialism: Kubrick’s first image of Vietnam is one of signs, billboards, product placements and advertisements. American movie posters litter the ruins, advertising John Wayne flicks, the genocidal slaughter of Indians, Red Rivers, Mad Giang posters and Mickey Mouse. 5. Sports: “Jump on the team for the big win”, “batting orders”, “calling the plays”, “Lt Touchdown”, “hard balls”, “golf balls”, “eight ball”, references to “football”, “basketball”, “billiards”, “played a little ball for Notre Dame”. War portrayed as a game, a rites of passage, a journey into manhood, the ultimate form of macho posturing and an extension of traditional masculinization processes, all of which are involved in creating or upholding traditional gender identities. By linking all these ancillary institutions to the military, Kubrick suggests that the G-rated Mickey Mouse culture cannot exist without the darker processes of the brutalisation of the feminine. Once your mind has been colonised with a one-dimensional identity, which denies and repudiates ambiguities, it is easy to pulverise the X-rated culture while embracing the G-rated one. The above cultural, gendered identity dynamics serve to further propel the film's scope into a larger, greater, more comprehensive commentary on American imperialism. Here, war is seen to be the "logical" conclusion of an elaborate patriarchal process that starts with the Mickey Mouse Club, the boy scouts, the high school football team, boot camp…anything that aims to construct masculinity. Thus, Colonisation, of which war and corporate multinational capitalism are just two expressions, involves two stages: 1. Training (The colonisation of the mind/psyche) Of which war is the “logical” conclusion of a complex web of patriarchal processes which start from infancy (Mickey Mouse Club) and progress outwards into the larger society. 2. Combat (Colonisation of territory/geography/other cultures) War and Boot Camp are intrinsically bound up with the rest of American culture. The preservation of the "frontier myth" (hence all of the John Wayne/Cowboy and Indian references in the film), the need for America to always require a frontier, from the Wild West to Nicaragua, from Cuba to Chile, from Korea and Angola to Cambodia and Viet Nam, from Israel to Kuwait and Iraq, is intrinsic to the preservation of a recognizable national identity and the perpetuation of American patriarchy. Without an ever-present frontier the entire apparatus of both the military-industrial complex and the imperatives of corporate capitalism are called into question. As such, the very wording of the Mickey Mouse Club anthem... "Boys and girls from far and near you’re as welcome as can be!" "We play fair and we work hard and we`re in harmony!" "Who is marching coast to coast and far across the sea?" "Come along and sing this song and join our family!" "Who's the leader of this Club that's made for you and me?" ...draws our attention once more to a diverse but ultimately interconnected range of structural and social processes with which the film has been concerned. The "Club" is not just the Marine Corp. Rather, getting with "the programme" requires the participation of all members of society, both male and female. The club has a very specific ideology to perpetuate in which all of America is obliged to actively participate. SCATOLOGY IN KUBRICK’S FULL METAL JACKET Mathew Ryder Full Metal Jacket is awash with scatological references. From the very beginning, the dialogue is sepia-stained; almost immediately, Hartman characterises the recruit's mouths as "filthy sewers", and proceeds to assault the grunts with a colourful flood of gastroenterological invective. The soldiers themselves seem obsessed with the anus and its faecal cargo. The number of repetitions of the words "shit", "ass" and "asshole" are disproportionately high, even by the salty standards of the modern war film. Kubrick employs this hyper-stylised language as a scalpel to dissect the psychopathology underlying the US involvement in the Vietnam War. Satirising America's phobic horror of 'international communism', Kubrick likens the military machine to a maniacal parent fastidiously potty-training his timid children, in the process paradoxically inculcating an unhealthy coprophiliacal obsession. This pathology finds its apotheosis in Sergeant Hartman. For him, shit represents everything that is weak and contemptible in man. Shit is 'slimy' (his favourite pejorative), soft, unorganised and repulsive. He associates the anal canal with degradation and homosexual plunder. His fanatical mission is to create "indestructible men" whose asses are "squared away", who are "born-again hard" and who shoot "straight and true". Prior to this military rebirth, however, all men are mud. He describes them variously as "grab-asstic pieces of amphibian shit", "brown stains on the mattress", "turds", "slimy fuckin' walrus-looking pieces of shit", and so on. He delights in equating the men's physical frailties with excrement ("Five foot nine? I didn't know they stacked shit that high!"), or the anus ("Your ass looks like about a 150 pounds of chewed bubblegum, Private Pyle!"). Hartman is filled with hysterical loathing for dirt and disorder. His fear is fuelled by the certain knowledge that we can never escape: however anally retentive we are about controlling our external environment, our guts will always be filled with shit and filth. For him the ultimate assault would be to "unscrew your head and shit down your neck!" He is obsessed with the bowels and their evacuation. For him, a clean mind and a clean toilet are synonymous; both are tools to flush the tide of impurity from our bodies. "I want you two turds to clean the Head", he barks at Joker and Cowboy. "I want that Head so sanitary and squared away that the Virgin Mary herself would be proud to go in and take a dump". (This linguistic confusion between head and anus is a constant throughout Full Metal Jacket: see a later sequence in which a Strangelovian colonel declares, "You'd better get your head and your ass wired together, or I will take a giant shit on you", and Animal Mother's exhortation to "flush out your headgear, new guy") Hartman praises Joker for his "guts"; ie his ability to process excrement and expel it. After the soldiers have received their training, Joker remarks that they are ready to "eat their own guts", the ultimate short-circuiting of the oral/gastrointestinal cycle. Hartman's idea of heaven is to "PT" the men to the point where that cycle is actually reversed: their "assholes are sucking buttermilk". The entire 'boot camp' sequence is presented as a grotesque parody of childhood toilet training, with a monstrous disciplinarian brutally 're-educating' the quavering troops. Along with hair and identity, the soldiers metaphorically lose their freedom to excrete. "I've got your name, I've got your ass!", Hartman declares. "Your ass belongs to the Corps!" Hartman treats the men like infants, reinforcing the parody. When Pyle fails to perform, he is forced to waddle behind the others, pants round ankles and thumb in mouth. On Christmas day, Hartman makes the privates sing a chorus of "Happy Birthday", and informs them of an upcoming "magic show", an entertainment that seems better suited to a child's party than an army barracks. While most of the men are able to submit to this humiliating re-education, Private Pyle (his 'name' also a haemorrhoidal pun) has neither the physical nor the emotional reserves to survive. He is Hartman's worst nightmare: undisciplined and uneducable, a globular jelly-donut reminder of man's reliance on food (which, for Hartman, is merely pre-digested shit). Pyle is the very antithesis of the military ideal, for he can never be trained to efficiently process and eliminate waste. As the military re-education takes hold of the men's minds, they lose their compassion for Pyle. Kubrick washes the screen in sombre, antiseptic blues for the sequence in which the men punish Pyle for his 'disobedience' by symbolically flagellating him with clean soap and towels.

Pyle's subsequent descent into madness is swift; he begins sexualising his rifle. Its "clean, oiled" action a gastro-intestinal surrogate for his own anal failings. In his final transcendent moments in Hartman's "head" (literally "a world of shit"), Pyle ironically assumes the very role of "minister of death" that Hartman fetishizes. A malfunctioning machine, Pyle nevertheless perfectly harnesses his "killer instincts" - he's a deranged, amoral Oswald firing unerringly from the "book suppository building" - before blowing his brains out in a diarrhoeic spray against the Corps' pristine blue tinted toilet walls. This prologue clarifies the US mission in Vietnam. In the sanitized language of Stars and Stripes magazine, they are there not to 'Search and Destroy" but to "Sweep and Clear". They’ve been psychologically cleansed for the literal purpose of cleaning up shit. Each soldier is a trained coprophage, ready to "take a bite" of the "huge shit sandwich", process the contents without flinching and flush the resultant excreta down the toilet. The grunts yearn to "get out into the Shit" so they can "waste" gooks. They are able to mine their own faeces for "peanuts" and "Tiffany cufflinks". They stoically submit to being shat on by their superiors and their South Vietnamese 'allies'. Much of the action in the latter half of the movie takes place near the sweet smelling "Perfume River", a name that has obvious ironic connotations given Kubrick's stercoraceous theme. The soldiers all do John Wayne impressions, "phoney-tough and crazy-brave" posturing that imitates Gunnery Sergeant Hartman's feculent ranting. (For example, Animal Mother offers to "tear [Joker] a new asshole" when he suspects he's combat-shy.) In the marine’s warped environment, sexual intercourse itself is linked with the anus. Women are systematically associated with excrement ("the best part of you ran down the crack of your mama's ass", "your mama will beat the shit out of me", "the Virgin Mary herself would be proud to go in there and take a dump") and putrefaction ("Mary-Jane Rotten-Crotch"). Hartman himself makes numerous references to anal sex, constantly reminding his boys that “the rifle” is the only “pussy” they will get.

Coprophilia is often characterised by gratification resulting from ingesting faeces or other waste, and Full Metal Jacket contains many such references: "Eat shit and die" (summing up the marine’s life cycle), "Joker's so tough he'd eat the boogers out of a dead man's nose", "It's a huge shit sandwich and we're all gonna have to take a bite", "Only after you eat the peanuts out of my shit." What’s more, coprophiliacs often derive gratification from being shat on: "I will unscrew your head and shit down your neck!", "they shit all over us every chance they get", "get your head and your ass wired together or I will take a giant shit on you", “I want to get out into the shit”, “you’re my favourite turd”, “don’t waste me”. Throughout the film Kubrick also likens coprophiliacal inclinations to American foreign policy (ie cold-war xenophobic isolationism mixing uneasily with the urge to meddle) and a pathology at the heart of its war-machine (ie a conflicted revulsion-attraction gestalt cantering around killing/death). ACT TWO: VIETNAM

"Capitalism decodes and deterritorializes with all its might." - Gilles Deleuze Kubrick’s films always begin with a self-contained primer scene. These scenes brief the audience on the themes that will be explored throughout the film that follows. Because the second act of Full Metal Jacket is essentially another film with another set of themes, Kubrick chooses to highlight this with another self-contained primer sequence. THE SECOND PRIMER SCENE After Pyle’s malfunction, Kubrick fades to Vietnam. Rather than a jungle, we’re thrust into a land of billboards and advertisements. The two most prominent signs sell “Hynos toothpaste” and “photocopying”. As Nancy Sinatra’s “these boots are made for walking” warbles on the soundtrack, a Vietnamese hooker walks into view. We watch her from behind as she ambles up to Joker and Rafterman, sitting alongside a chaotic roundabout. “You got a girlfriend in Vietnam?” she asks. “Not just this minute,” Joker replies. After some bartering, a Vietnamese pickpocket steals Rafterman’s camera. The thief does a little Bruce Lee routine to scare off Joker, but Joker simply mimics the man with a little karate routine of his own. The pickpocket then hops onto a motorcycle and disappears into the traffic. So during this sequence we're shown several important things: a. The re-introduction of the feminine (whore) b. The re-growth of Joker’s hair c. Kubrick's rigid, military camera symbolically stolen d. Chaotic traffic roundabout e. Self-aware actors mimicking or ironically referencing Hollywood "macho" stereotypes f. Music foreshadows sniper showdown g. Soldiers replacing guns with true sex objects (Me so horney!) h. Joker replacing camera with gun i. Giant Photocopy sign symbolising self-referential nature of this act j. Giant Hynos Toothpaste billboards k. A motorcycle Kubrick's first point is that, in the training environment, removing all infantile and feminine traces results in the perfect killing machine. Too perfect, in some respects. But when this conditioned marine reaches a wayward environment like Vietnam, the system collapses. The marine is no longer a masculinized killing machine because his base human instincts resurface. His hair re-grows and he seeks contact with the only collapsed, one-dimensional version of femininity he can relate to. The first lines in Act 2's primer scene are thus symbolically important: "You got a girlfriend in Vietnam?" "Not just this minute." Once the conditioned soldier is placed in a real combat environment, he gradually reverts. He seeks not intimacy with his gun, but real pussy. The sudden introduction of the feminine, personifies this. The notion of a “stolen camera” is symbolic of the film’s sudden shift in tone. Kubrick’s precise military camera of the first act is stolen and replaced with something more wayward and loose. The sterile corridors of Paris Island have been replaced by the messy confusion of circular traffic. This highlights the giant shift in the marine’s psychology. They’re bombarded with stimuli and find the sudden cultural change to be disorienting. Similarly, while the first act is primarily filled with corridor shots (forward/backward motion), the second act is filled with horizontal shots (left/right motion). The marines must teach themselves how to navigate this new environment. More importantly, the removal of the camera teaches us that this act will be about Joker losing his camera and acquiring his gun. In the first act, Joker becomes a reporter rather than a killer. He shoots pictures rather than people. As such, Joker chooses the camera over Hartman’s rifle. But by showing us a camera being stolen, Kubrick informs us that Vietnam will be about Joker losing his camera, picking up his gun and finally developing a war face. Simply put, Joker learns to reconcile the duality of being both a killer and reporter. The notion of Joker mimicking Bruce Lee (the John Wayne of Asia) and pretending to be a macho karate star will continue over the next thirty five minuets. Joker pretends to be a “tough guy” by putting on a false persona. This is his full metal jacket, a protective suit which he wears, allowing him to maintain his identity whilst pretending to be part of the group. Though Joker recognises the artificiality of this “jacket”, the other marines do not. They readily assume their false, one-dimensional cultural macho-identities. Hence all the “photocopy” signs, which let us know that Kubrick’s “war in Vietnam” will be treated as just another “Vietnam the movie”. It’s a self-reflexive copy of a copy. The military machine has given these men cultural identities not far removed from the one-dimensional macho-characterizations of war cinema. Thus, Kubrick doesn’t give us real characters. He gives us abstractions. Self-aware actors trapped in pre-constructed roles. Look at their macho posturing, their stupid notions of manhood (“I want to get out into the shit!”), they can’t talk to one another without puffing out their chests, putting on stale John Wayne accents and spitting out some clichéd characteristic of macho adolescence. They look at the camera, address the audience and grin mischievously. At this stage, their existence as a military product is as artificial as a film cast. The “Hynos toothpaste sign”, which features a giant smiling head, links back to all the acts of “cleaning” and “flushing” which took place in Paris Island. As Hartman says, to be born again hard, a marine’s head must be clean. But here in Vietnam, the head is literally populated with spinning cars. It’s confused, fragmented and chaotic. This confusion, however, does not last. Later in the film, the “Hynos toothpaste Head” will reappear when Joker first ventures into combat. During this scene, the visual composition is such that the marine squad seems to be marching directly into the giant “Hynos Head”. Significantly, it is from this point onwards that Joker picks up his gun and takes his first steps toward embracing combat. In marching into the “Hynos head” and scrubbing it clean, Joker symbolically begins the process of cleaning his own head. Another interesting aspect of this scene is the song, “These boots are made for walking”. This odd song sets the tone for the entire second act. We’re still reeling from the shock of Pyle’s suicide, when we’re greeted by the cheery voice of Nancy Sinatra. The contrast is unsettling. But of course the abruptness of this transition mirrors the marines’ state of psychological and cultural dislocation. The song functions on other levels. Upon first listening, it seems inappropriate as an introduction to Vietnam; temporally distinct and culturally alien. But this is precisely the point. The Americans have come to Vietnam to impose their foreign value system upon it, to “sweep and clear” the faecal detritus of Communism from the streets in order to replace it with movie posters, billboards and product advertisements. It (and other songs in the film) represents a mythic 50’s idyll where Mickey Mouse is president and John Wayne is sheriff. The subjective tracking shot of the Vietnamese prostitute, sauntering down the road, visually literalises the lyrics. We are actually watching her “boots awalking” as she plies her wares. Superimposed on this scene, Sinatra’s lyrics about simple infidelity take on dark new meanings. The whole song becomes a metaphor for the uneasy, mutually contemptuous relationship of parasitic need which existed between the South Vietnamese and their US ‘benefactors’. “You keep saying you’ve got something for me, Something called Love, but confess” Here Kubrick simultaneously jabs at the confusion between love and sex and on another level, hints that the US force in Vietnam was motivated less by philanthropy than by self interest "You've been a-messin' where you shouldn’t have been messin'" This is a pretty succinct description of the entire US involvement in Vietnam. Describing American actions as "messing" humorously inverts their intention to clean up and restore order, and makes a mockery of the philosophy so vigorously espoused by Sergeant Hartman and the Marine Corps. "One of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you" In other words, the ill-treated dog may one day bite the hand that reluctantly feeds it. $10 may buy "every-thin you want" in the short-term, but the price is outright hostility. The theft of Rafterman's camera graphically illustrates this theme. He sanctimoniously declares later: "We're supposed to be helping them, and they shit all over us every chance they get." But as the song demonstrates with brilliant economy, the Americans aren't interested in helping the Vietnamese; they're interested in fucking them. "You keep playing where you shouldn't be playing, And you keep thinking you'll never get burned... But I've just found a brand new pack of matches... And what he knows you ain't had time to learn" The pack of matches is the brewing Vietnamese discontent at American meddling. The last line refers to the destructive potential of that spirit, the extent of which the philandering American troops "ain't had time to learn" yet. “These boots are made for walking, and that's just what they'll do, one of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you.” This very pro-feminist line foreshadows the final sniper showdown. The debased female Other fights back with a vengeance. The very boots that whore themselves out to the Marines, trample all over them in the final act. The song thus acts as a feminist counterpoint to both Hartman’s hyper-masculinized training and the introductory “Hello Vietnam” song. While Hartman conditions his men to “kill kill kill” the Feminine Other, here we learn that the Female Other does not exist and that young sniper is every bit as capable of becoming a hard-hearted soldier. Finally, while the first act portrayed the marines as children, learning to pee and tie their shoes, the second act will portray their growth into adolescence. Like budding young men, the marines are now obsessed with sex, haggling over whores and looking for an easy fuck. During this period Kubrick thus awakens their sexuality. It’s here that the paradoxical duality of female identities are revealed: the female prostitute and female soldier- the only collapsed down and one-dimensional versions of femininity that the masculinized soldier can relate to. So though this primer scene is initially confusing, it serves to briefly spell out the themes and signifiers that Kubrick will explore throughout the next hour. SCENE BY SCENE BREAKDOWN CONTINUTED "Because constructions of masculinity and femininity are being used in American mass culture to repress awareness of other forms of patriarchal dominance, it is methodologically important to maintain a distinction between patriarchy and masculinity. Masculinity is the primary mechanism for the articulation, institutionalization, and maintenance of the gendered system on which patriarchy is based ... It is itself constructed and manipulated by interests other than those defined by gender." - Susan Jeffords 58. Joker stands above a picture of Jesus. Though the film links “religious indoctrination” to “military indoctrination”, Joker is still outside the military and yet to be fully converted. 59. Each act contains references to “praying”. In the first act, the marines pray to their rifles (“You are minister’s of death, praying for war!”). In the second act, Joker and the hooker stand above a picture of Jesus praying. In the third act, the sniper prays for the marines to kill her. The picture of Jesus has a greater significance, which will be explained later. 60. Da Nang Base. Joker and Rafterman walk toward their bunker. Rafterman tells Joker that he wishes to “go out into the shit” and “get some trigger time”. Though Rafterman is itching for combat, Joker is comfortable behind friendly lines. Rafterman complains that a "highschool girl" could do his job. Later, a girl of "highschool" age will slaughter his buddies. 61. During their “trigger time” conversation, a group of soldiers can be seen in the background playing basketball. Later, when Payback mentions “the thousand yard stare”, another marine mentions “rape” and “basketball”. Kubrick will link these semiotic clues later. 62. Rafterman complains that the Vietnamese treat the American’s with scorn despite their helpful intentions. Joker smiles at his friend’s nativity: “You’re thinking too hard, Rafterman. It’s just business.” 63. Joker and Rafterman attend a briefing by Lieutenant Lockhart. Lockhart is the symbolic opposite of Hartman. Like Joker, his “hard heart” is literally “locked”. He chooses to remain safely “in the rear with the gear”. 64. The briefing room features several Mickey Mouse toys. Each act thus includes a reference to Mickey Mouse. ACT1: “What is this Mickey Mouse shit!?” ACT2: Mickey Mouse toys ACT3: Mickey Mouse Club 65. Joker informs Lockhart about a possible attack during the Tet Ceasefire. Lockhart dismisses Joker’s hunches as being fanciful. As the briefing continues, the marines discuss trivial news. Reports are fabricated, truth is distorted and terminology is discussed, all with the intention of falsifying or sanitising the war. Note the sign behind the marines. It reads: “First to go, last to know. We defend to the death your right to be misinformed”. 66. Lockhart tells Joker that they run 2 basic stories: “Grunts who give half their pay to buy gooks toothbrushes and deodorants- winning of hearts and minds. And combat action that results in a kill- Winning the War.” Here Kubrick links the notion of “toothbrushes” and “deodorant” with “hearts and minds”. Later, when the marines siege a ruined city, they sweep and clear a building that features a large Hynos toothpaste poster. Similarly, during the sniper confrontation, toothpaste and deodorant advertisements litter the walls behind the marines. Toothbrushes and deodorant are two products which “clean” and “sanitize” the human body. Full Metal Jacket sees war as a form of physical, geographic and ideological purification. The marine must be psychologically cleaned out before he can sweep and clear “the shit” for the implementation of a more sexy, lean and beautiful ideology. 67. Joker, Rafterman, Payback and the other marines are in their bunks. Kubrick once again uses props to highlight character traits. Joker is writing in a notebook whilst Payback reads a pornographic magazine. Joker’s bed is bracketed by empty cups and books, whilst Payback’s bed is bracketed by beer kegs, pornography and cassettes. Significantly, Payback is the only marine smoking and reading porn. The others read novels or polish their rifles. Smoking, smoke grenades and Cotab cigarette posters will have greater significance as the film progresses. 68. While talking to the other marines, Joker once again puts on his John Wayne persona. He puffs out his chest and pretends to be tough. Payback sees through him, though, and mocks Joker’s posturing. 69. Payback tells the marines about the “thousand yard stare” and then informs Rafterman that he too will one day have it. 70. Stork mentions “rape” and “basketball” immediately after hearing about the “thousand yard stare”. Murder makes him hard. This echoes an earlier juxtaposition in which Cowboy and Joker had “hard ons” whilst thinking about Pyle and his rifle. We see the marine persona developing here. Erections have been replaced with rape. The marines want to actualise their rifle fucking fantasies. NOTE: Stork mentions "five black dudes raping a white chick". Later, the film will end with 5 dudes (one soldier will mysteriously disappear) standing over a "raped" chick (the female sniper) who, in a deleted scene, then has her head cut off with a cutlass and played with like a basketball by Animal Mother. Also notice the subtle "dualism" or "mirroring" echoes in the film. The "black dudes" and "white chick" later become "white dudes" and a "yellow chick". Then there's the fact that Stork, a mythical bird who "brings babies" is talking about rape. The film is filled with these direct contrasts (even its marketing tagline refers to "blowing" and "sucking", opposed actions which also have sexual connotations).

71. NVA troops attack the base. Seconds earlier, the song “Chapel of Love” played on the soundtrack. Full Metal Jacket contains numerous references to rituals of birth, growth and religion. The film treats war as a young man’s ritualistic rites of passage, in which the military attempts to instil a new religion (by the subverting of sexual energy and channelling it into warfare). In this new religion, Marines are holders of a sacred position. They’re “Ministers of death, praying for war.” During the “Chapel of Love” scene, the marines run toward combat, while the following lyrics play: “Goin' to the chapel And we're gonna get ma-a-arried Goin' to the chapel And we're gonna get ma-a-arried Gee, I really love you And we're gonna get ma-a-arried Goin' to the chapel of love” “The Chapel of Love” is combat itself. In this scene, Joker and Rafterman are “going to the chapel”, a place where the two reporters shall finally be married to the guns they so lovingly named in the first act. As Hartman said in boot camp: “You will be married to this piece, this weapon of iron and wood, and you will be faithful!” Joker and Rafterman thus unwillingly take part in another stage of the military’s indoctrination process. Before this scene, Joker is a reporter, comfortable behind enemy lines. In the very next scene he’s happy to trade his camera for a gun and “go into the shit." 72. “Chapel of Love” is another moment in a long line of religious references found throughout the film: "Do you believe in the Virgin Mary?" “You will be born again hard!” “God has a hard on for Marines.” “We keep Heaven packed with fresh souls!" “Chaplin Charlie” "Ready! Pray!" "Marines die, that's what we're here for. The Marine Corp lives on. That means you live on!" “Chapel of love.” "I Am Become Death" (religious text quote). "She's praying." (the sniper) "Today is Christmas! There will be a magic show at 09:30!” (a Kubrick joke, linking Christianity to silly magic tricks) “Chapel of Love” has some further ironies in that it counterpoints the Vietnamese “pagan” cease-fire festivities with a song about a Christian ceremony. The fact that the first combat Kubrick shows us is the Tet Offensive, is also another dualism reference (ie- countrywide war during a nationally recognised ceasefire). 73. Joker runs towards combat. He is about to be married to his M14. He sets himself up in a pillbox, grabs a machine gun and waits for the enemy. “I ain’t ready for this shit,” Joker growls nervously. It is at this moment, when first faced with the possibility of murder, that we first see the “peace button” pinned to Joker’s soft heart. 74. The enemy attacks and Joker fires. But the enemy is distant, faceless, well beyond the thousand-yard stare. Though Joker has relished his brief taste of combat, he is not fully converted. 75. Unlike most war films, Kubrick shoots combat with a sense of dry detachment. His camera is static, distant and very un-involving. The audience gets no sense of thrill or euphoria. We simply watch little Vietnamese men running to their deaths. There is no danger, no pleasure, no aestheticization of combat, none of the orgasmic spectacle that we’ve come to expect from war films. Kubrick seems morally opposed to glorifying violence. As the second act progresses, Kubrick will short-circuit our near pornographic lust for decontextualized violence by subverting the testosterone fuelled conventions of most war films. 76. We’re back in Lockhart’s briefing room. The camera circles the room until Joker’s “Born to Kill” helmet is revealed on the table. In front of the helmet lies Joker’s Polaroid camera. Behind the helmet lies a pile of guns and ammunition. CameraàBorn to KillàGun Kubrick’s camera circles further until a little yellow fan blocks the words “Born to Kill”. Joker has tasted combat, but, as Rafterman articulates at the end of the film, his head is blocked until the “shit hits the fan” and he “turns to the rifle”. 77. Lockhart orders Joker to “go out into the shit”. Joker grins and accepts the offer. 78. Joker and Rafterman take a ride in a helicopter. What’s odd about this sequence is that it begins with a shot of a helicopter’s shadow skimming across the landscape (right to left). Kubrick then cuts to a reverse shot of a completely different helicopter (left to right). He then cuts to a forward shot of the terrain rolling under us. Considering the fact that Full Metal Jacket is about Jung’s Shadow, it seems ironic that Kubrick, for the fourth time in his filmography, would yet again goof up and show the shadow of the camera crew’s helicopter. Is this a reference to the famous helicopter shadow in The Shining? Is it a genuine goof? Why not edit the shot a few seconds earlier so that the shadow doesn’t appear? Perhaps Kubrick just doesn’t care. As he said once in an interview, “realism is a hopelessly ponderous way to proceed.” Anyway, what’s more interesting is the reverse shot itself. The second half of Full Metal Jacket is packed with such dual motions. Our heroes are always travelling in one direction, whilst columns of people, stretchers or vehicles, travel in the opposite direction. These opposing movements are present in virtually all scenes. Consider the Mickey Mouse Chant, which itself features a crowd of marines suddenly switching directions. Kubrick breaks the 180 degree rule, but we don’t notice due to the consistent chanting. This notion of simultaneous dual motions is only abandoned when the marines are focussed on combat. At this moment, their opposing dualities are reconciled and they fixate on violence. 79. The Huey helicopter has become an important symbol in the iconography of the Vietnam War. In terms of technology, they’re the one signifier which immediately distinguishes Vietnam War cinema from the cinema of other conflicts. Full Metal Jacket, however, uses the Sikorsky UH 34D. While this is factually accurate (during the Vietnam War, the marines were the last branch of the service to get new equipment and were, for the most part, still flying the dated UH34 at the time of Tet), audiences were simply not accustomed to seeing anything other than hordes of Hueys in a Vietnam war movie. The near-mythical Huey is not the only piece of iconography to be rejected by Kubrick. He trades the jungles of Oliver Stone’s Platoon for an urban landscape, he trades the psychedelic, drug induced hell of Apocalypse Now, for a more ordered sense of brutality, and rather than populate his film with rock and roll tunes, Kubrick goes for a more idiosyncratic soundtrack. The result is a film which contains few of the visual or audio touchstones of the Vietnam War genre. 80. The helicopter’s door gunner, a psychotic man with a M60, fires wildly at passing civilians. Joker and Rafterman are disgusted by his actions. Joker’s line, “How can you shoot WOMEN and CHILDREN?”, articulates the military’s dehumanisation process, which systematically seeks to remove all traces of the FEMININE and INFANTILE. As the door gunner shows, the callous eradication of both these traits results in a one-dimensional killer akin to the malfunctioned Pyle. 81. Kubrick shoots the door gunner sequence with extreme detachment. Rather than demonise the door gunner, Kubrick seems to keep his distance. The gunner’s last line, “Ain’t war hell?”, has an ironic ring to it. Most war films portray the American forces as being young men trapped in a hellish nightmare which they must dutifully endure. But in Full Metal Jacket, the Marines spend boot camp actively praying for hell. They want to go out into the shit, and when they finally get there, they’re largely insulated from hell, safe in their helicopters or marching behind their tanks. 82. Joker and Rafterman touchdown and, coincidentally, meet Lieutenant Touchdown. Joker informs the Lieutenant that he is looking for Cowboy. Touchdown points him in the right direction. 83. Note again the repeated use of dual motion. Even the helicopter that flies over Joker’s head, as he speaks to the Lieutenant, mimics the earlier helicopter pattern. It travels to the left, then to the right, and then directly ahead. This notion of forward motion, despite conflicting dualities (left/right), is present throughout the film. Joker himself is travelling forward toward a specific fate, despite his attempts to maintain an awareness of some inner duality. In the first act, Hartman went to great lengths to stress the differences between Left and Right. Once in Vietnam, however, Joker’s lefts and rights seem to be conflicted. Only once his left and his right, his head and his heart, have been symbolically joined (forming a fully wired circle), can he be a fully functioning marine. 84. The film contains numerous references to sports. Marines are told to “jump on the team for the big win”, they speak of “batting orders” “calling the plays”, “playing a little ball for Notre Dame”, are told about “hardballs”, “golf balls”, make jokes about basketball, are named Touchdown and Eightball, and wear football helmets whilst beating one another in boot camp. The film is thus preoccupied with “ball games”. Before you can get your balls blown off for your country, you must first master the sports ball. As such, the film treats the military as an X rated extension of traditional masculinization processes, both of which are involved in creating or upholding traditional gender identities. Note: A filmed but omitted scene has Animal Mother cutting off the sniper’s head and playing ball with it. We thus have another linkage between sport, violence and sex. 85. Touchdown informs Joker that the fighting is getting heavier. “Outstanding, sir,” Joker grins, “we taking care of business?” Once again, war is seen to be a purely economic exercise. A business venture. 86. Joker and Rafterman stand before a pit of lime covered corpses. Lieutenant Cleeves, from Hartford Connecticut, informs Joker that the victims were called in for political re-education and then shot. For one to be re-educated and made to embrace a new political ideology, the old ideology must first be eradicated, often by the use of military force. It is here that Joker first mentions “the Jungian thing”. “Re-educating” and “helping” is ironically contrasted with “murder” and “corpses”. 87. Cleeves smiles for Rafterman’s camera. Later, Crazy Earl will similarly pose for Rafterman in front of a Vietnamese corpse. Both scenes imply that the Marines are likewise killing in the name of “political re-education”. 88. An elderly Colonel berates Joker. The Colonel is upset that Joker wears a peace button on his heart and a “born to kill” message on his head. The Colonel wants Joker to wire his compassion to his aggression, to merge these two dual instincts and get his shit together. 89. Joker and Rafterman amble up to a pagoda. Inside are the Lusthog squad. Joker is about to wire his shit together. 90. Joker passes through a circular “moon door” and meets Cowboy. Symbolically, the intellect (Joker) has found the warrior (Cowboy). The intellect and the killer are wired together and the circle is now complete. From this moment onwards, Kubrick will abandon his opposing dual motions and the marines will now all flow in the same direction. The narrative itself will now gradually focus on combat rather than aimless wandering. 91. “Here or there, samey same,” Joker says to Cowboy. At this moment Kubrick cuts to another reverse shot. The implication is that Joker and Cowboy are “samey same”. This was made clear during boot camp, in which Joker and Cowboy were always side-by-side and were the only marines to wear glasses. Thus, Cowboy is the masculinized, fully indoctrinated version of Joker. By “finding Cowboy”, the intellect has symbolically “found” its hard heart. It must now venture out into combat and earn the thousand-yard stare. 92. Joker meets Animal Mother. Pyle and Animal Mother are similar in build and facial structure. While Cowboy is the fully indoctrinated version of Joker, Animal Mother is the fully indoctrinated version of Pyle. We thus realise that the Lusthog Squad is really a reflection of the boot camp squad. Snowball becomes Eightball, Pyle becomes Animal, Joker becomes Cowboy. These are the end products of Hartman’s conditioning. The Marine Group is not completed, however, until Joker (and his double Rafterman) have been completely won over. 93. The song “Wooly Bully” plays when Joker meets Animal Mother. The lyrics in this song echo the confrontation between the two men. It speaks of a “woolly bully”, a bully who is wrapped in soft wool. In other words, the song speaks of someone who pretends to be tough on the inside, but is really soft on the outside. This echoes Joker’s remarks at the start of the film, where he calls the USMC a training camp for the “phoney tough and the crazy brave”. In this scene it is made clear that Joker is the “phoney tough” or “woolly bully”. “Hattie told Mattie About a thing she saw Had two big horns And a woolly jaw” Thus, despite his “big horns”, Joker has a woolly jaw. He has no bite. This scene can thus be read as Animal Mother, the leader of the tribe, sniffing out the newcomer and recognising him as a fraud. Anima Mother: You seen much combat? Joker: I’ve seen a little on TV. Animal Mother: You’re a real comedian. Joker: Well, they call me the Joker. During this confrontation, the song’s lyrics openly taunt Joker, the singer laughing as he mocks Joker’s underlying cowardice… “Wooly bully, woolly bully Wooly bully, woolly bully Wooly bully” Animal Mother, who instantly recognises Joker as a fraud rather than a killer, then steps forward and says… Animal Mother: Well I’ve got a joke for you. I’m going to tear you a new asshole. Joker then immediately puffs out his chest and pretends to be riled up. He puts on his fake war face and assumes his John Wayne persona. Meanwhile, on the soundtrack, the following words sound… “Watch it now, watch it now, Here it comes, here it comes…” Joker then steps up to Animal Mother and says… Joker: Well pilgrim, only after you eat the peanuts outta my shit. The “here it comes” is precisely timed to fit a pause in the dialogue. It anticipates Joker displaying his “woolly jaw” and urges the audience to “watch closely for it”. The other marines fall for this act, but Animal Mother isn’t convinced. Animal Mother: You talk the talk, but do you walk the walk? But of course Joker does not walk the walk. The lines… “Don’t you take no chance Don’t you be L7 Come and learn to dance” …can be interpreted as Animal Mother challenging Joker to not be a square (L7=square) and to “come learn to dance”. In other words, he’s being told to embrace his killer instincts, merge with the Cowboy, complete his circle, wire his shit together, flush out his head gear, and “jump on the team and come in for the big win”. 94. The phrase “I am become death” is written on Animal’s helmet. This is taken from the “Bhagavad-Gita” (song of God), a Hindu scripture. Robert Oppenheimer, perhaps the most guilt stricken of the Los Alamos scientists who invented the atomic bomb, famously quoted part of it on national TV in the late 50s: “I am become death, the shatterer of worlds.” That part of this quote would appear on the helmet of a killing machine like Animal Mother, who is utterly free of guilt, is another ironic dualism reference. But more importantly, we now understand that Animal Mother is already dead (ie his “feminine” side is dead). The “birthday” of the dead NVA soldier reinforces this. Only the “dead” survive the institution of war. Pyle refused to remain a zombie and, in his psychosis, shot himself. Pyle thus becomes death and morphs into Animal Mother. So war is the ultimate instrument of patriarchal natural selection and engendering. Its “survivors” are resurrected or reborn as symbols of society’s manufactured masculine identity. Kubrick is thus arguing that nobody escapes it and everybody- male and female – contributes to it. 95. Crazy Earl tells Rafterman to take a picture of a dead Vietnamese soldier. This echoes an earlier scene in which Lieutenant Hartford had his picture taken in front of dead Vietnamese. The marines see the enemy as their “dead brothers”. 96. Crazy Earl looks down the camera and speaks directly to the audience. When he takes off the NVA’s hat, the word “boo!” is seen on Crazy Earl’s helmet. What’s more, the singer on the soundtrack lets loose a frightened wail. This contrasts with the sound of marines laughing in the background like a canned laughter track. As the second act progresses, “Full Metal Jacket” will increasingly call attention to itself as being “Vietnam the movie”. Rather than strive for realism, Kubrick calls attention to the artificiality of his film. The Vietnam segment itself ends with a documentary sequence and marines walking off into a cinema. 97. Only when he talks about killing NVA gooks, does Crazy Earl cover the American colours on the corpse’s soldier with the palm of his hand; he cannot slaughter his enemy whilst also viewing them as brothers. 98. With the symbolic merging of Joker and Cowboy, we can now jump directly into combat. Whilst the second act of the film has previously been awkward, confusing, wayward and frustrating, with the merger of intellect and warrior, we can now enter the shit. The audience gets excited. 99. The Lusthogs march into a city under the command of Lieutenant Touchdown. Note that the authority figures protecting Joker from the big, bad world, become less and less authoritative as the film progresses. At first we have the stern and menacing Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, then we have the cowardly Lockhart, then we have the friendly Lieutenant Touchdown, then the goofy old Colonel, then we have Crazy Earl, who’s hardly much of an authority figure at all, then we have Cowboy, Joker’s best friend. With the removal of Cowboy, Joker is finally under the command of the anarchic Animal Mother. With no authority lording over him, Joker is now free to kill kill kill! 100. As they march into the city, the troops and tanks are arranged like toy soldiers. 101. Mortar rounds hammer the Lusthogs. Lieutenant Touchdown is killed. As the film unfolds, the command structure will systematically be eliminated, killed off one by one, until Animal Mother takes charge. 102. The marines advance into the city. Most Kubrick films feature a “Star Gate shot” which represents a character symbolically “evolving” or “regressing”. Examples: 2001: A Space Odyssey: Bowman hurtles through a Star Gate and emerges as a new being. The Shining: Jack races through the hedge maze and regresses into a primal ape. While the pseudo-documentary steadicam shot, which follows the marines into the city, isn’t as slick as the one that follows Tom Cruise throughout the Somerton Mansion, it nevertheless conveys a similar evolution. Joker is symbolically cleaning out his head and taking his first steps toward becoming a killer. This “Star Gate shot” is framed so that a giant poster of a smiling head, which advertises Hynos toothpaste, occupies the upper half of the screen. The marines are thus advancing into this Head, with the intention of flushing out its contents. Earlier in the film, Lieutenant Lockhart linked “toothpaste” and “deodorant” to “winning hearts and minds”. Thus, the military is about to clean, to sweep and clear, to flush out and eventually win, Joker’s heart and mind. This notion of “marines marching into a Head” and “flushing it out” echoes the scene in which Pyle sat upon a toilet and shot himself in the head in the Head. Both scenes deal with literal violence, but also symbolic indoctrination. 103. The first time we saw the “Hynos Head”, it was hanging above a traffic roundabout, numerous cars and people darting about in busy circles. The second time we see the “Hynos Head”, we’re confronted with the skeletal remains of burnt cars, an unnatural amount of discarded car tyres, empty streets and dilapidated buildings. If, as Deleuze says, the first scene conveys the idea of a brain, busy and confused, the second scene shows a mind that has been violently pulverised into submission. 104. The marines advance into the Head. Hand Job gets shot by enemy fire. In retaliation, the marines pepper a building with ammunition, firing incessantly at walls and windows. There’s a sense of overkill, of profound uselessness, in this sequence. When the marines finally stop firing, a trickle of Vietnamese soldiers run out like ants. Note: The building is called Leyna, another feminized symbol. 105. Crazy Earl reloads his gun and waits for the Vietnamese to reappear. They scurry across the horizon. Crazy Earl shoots and bags himself 3 or 4 kills. He smiles. 106. Kubrick sexualises Crazy Earl’s kills. Not only does Animal Mother have a cigarette in his helmet and Crazy Earl a smoking pipe in his, but the “kills” take place before a giant “Cotab cigarettes” poster. So what we have here are a gang of men symbolically raping Leyna (the Female Other), and then lighting a smoke after sex. These sexual metaphors, linking violence to intercourse, will be repeated throughout the film. Later, while a Cotab poster looms over his shoulder, Animal Mother will light up a cigarette before fucking the second hooker. Similarly, the marines light up smoke grenades prior to hunting the sniper. Likewise, the Vietnamese pimp offers a hooker to the marines with the line: "Suckee, fuckee, SMOKE CIGARETTE in the pussy, she give you everything you want. Long time." 107. The song “Surfin Bird” kicks in. The song is infections and funs and conveys the euphoria and orgasmic pleasure of getting a “confirmed kill”. Joker and the audience are high on violence. As the song plays, Kubrick then cuts to a column of tanks marching into the city. The pleasure of one man getting a couple kills is expanded to the sheer joy of an entire military killing and dominating with hardware. “A-well-a bird, bird, bird, the bird is the word A-well-a bird, bird, bird, well the bird is the word A-well-a bird, bird, bird, b-bird’s the word.” The lyrics also resemble the sound of helicopter rotors, the staccato beat of the song mimicking the sound of chopper propellers. The cryptic line "the bird is the word" also alludes to the only other "bird reference" in the film, the character of Stork, who's sole purpose in the film was to introduce the linkage between "rape" and "war". Moments later, the repeated lyrics… “Pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa- Pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-ooma-mow-mow Papa-oma-mow-mow” ....convey the sound of gunfire. But this pleasure and militaristic enthusiasm is undermined by framing the sequence with a shot of a medical helicopter evacuating injured soldiers. The joy of combat thus degenerates into the quirky sight of corpses being packed into a chopper. The scene then degenerates further into a shot of a director (who looks like Kubrick from behind) filming troops hiding below a wall as American tanks hammer a city from afar. Thus, with each cut, Kubrick distances us further and further from the orgasmic introduction of the song. To further distance us, the cast then acknowledges that they are actors in “Vietnam the movie” and liken their heroism and actions to that of a “Cowboys and Indians” flick in which the “gooks play the Indians”. What started out as a moment of pleasure degenerates into a critique of films which abuse such pleasures. Kubrick distances us from the joy of violence, until we’re forced to process what we’re seeing as dryly as possible. The orgasmic pleasure of Crazy Earl’s kill, the audience’s joy of finally experiencing combat, is removed, quickly followed in the next scene by a documentary sequence which further short circuits the narrative. The notion of a “director within the film”, “birds”, “helicopters” and “surfing” also serves to deconstruct “Apocalypse Now’s” famous “Ride of the Valkyries” sequence. In Coppola’s film, American muscle is flexed in order to clear a beach for surfing. It’s a fun sequence in which we cheer at the killing of Vietnamese. We get caught up in the cinematic spectacle of American helicopters assaulting a coastal village. But for all its bravura, Coppola’s surfing bird sequence plays more like the Death Star Trench Run. Kubrick’s surfing birds, however, acts as a deconstruction of such war movie clichés, hence why his earlier helicopter sequence is filled with such abrasive, dry detachment: “How can you shoot women and children?” “Easy, you just don’t lead them as much. Ain’t war hell?” The irony is that in Kubrick’s film it is the little figures on the ground who are in hell. While Coppola urges his cast to “don’t look at the camera, just run on by! Don’t look at the camera!”, Kubrick’s stand in director has his cast address the camera directly. The result is complex, calling into question how films see war, how warriors perceive themselves and how audiences themselves interpret the myths of combat, as sold to them through TV etc. 108. The marines look down at the corpse of Hand Job. Rafterman points out that at least Hand Job died for a good cause. Animal Mother mocks Rafterman’s naivety: “Flush out your head gear, new guy. You think we waste gooks for freedom? This is a slaughter. If I’m going to get my balls blown off for a word, my word is poontang!” 109. Hand Job’s death is another symbolic killing. The point here- in military training/colonisation- is that marine recruits are only permitted to have hard-ons w