On Screen: Full Metal Jacket

Screenplay by Stanley Kubrick, Michael Herr, and Gustav Hasford

Directed by Stanley Kubrick

Warner Brothers

Stanley Kubrick is the film poet of process, of team effort and team disharmony, of corporate strategy and corporate dissolution, of the urge of the unified many to reach beyond the stars, and of the equally strong urge of the one within the many to break himself and everyone around him into bits. With the exception of Lolita, for which Kubrick had the collaboration of a great novelist, his best films aren’t psychological studies of individuals; he favors cluster-protagonists. Think of Paths of Glory, the story of an entire regiment framed by a corrupt military staff on a charge of cowardice; or The Killing, a heist film in which each of a group of criminals contributes his particular skill to bring off the caper; or Dr. Strangelove, that comedy of mankind immolating itself; or 2001: A Space Odyssey, that epic of humankind taking an evolutionary step forward.

Kubrick also creates individual heroes, but they matter only insofar as they lead or impede the group: Kirk Douglas’s Colonel Dax (in Paths) who defends his regiment’s honor; or the same actor’s Spartacus, a slave leading slaves to freedom; or Kier Dullea’s astronaut (in 2001) who pioneers the way forward for the rest of the human race; or Sterling Hayden’s General Ripper, whose individual madness implements the madness of his political masters. These heroes aren’t spotlighted for their uniqueness but for their prototypicality: they represent either what is best in the group they lead or what is worst in the group they thwart.

Kubrick’s films have a terrible, icy beauty. They propound a vision of Man as an extremely complicated mechanism, a creature who can brilliantly coordinate his efforts with others into patterns carefully designed to achieve a specific goal, but who must eventually, inevitably grind his own gears, keel over and cease. (In 2001, mankind must be saved by some Higher Power who periodically nudges the race up the evolutionary ladder.) Kubrick is a true artist but there is more than a touch of the social scientist manque in his work. I often get the feeling that he is plotting .the destinies of his heroes statistical graphs instead of empathizing with their desires and frustrations.

And once Kubrick had blown up the entire race in Strangelove and plotted its celestial transcendence in 2001, what remained to be imagined? So Kubrick gave up his bird’s eye view. His subsequent three films had individual heroes only, with often less than happy results. A Clockwork Orange is memorable, but it too often sacrifices Anthony Burgess’s tough-minded humanism for punk-rock luridness. Here, Kubrick achieved his best effects not in probing his hero’s mind but in the horrible laboratory scenes in which Alex is conditioned to be “good.” All the scientific apparatuses seemed to touch a sympathetic chord in Dr. Kubrick. Barry Lyndon was a dismal failure in which the director labored to reproduce the candle-lighting in the 18th century chambers, but botched the drama taking place in the glow of those candles. The Shining was a case of an artist stumbling while trying to stoop to conquer. The trashy Stephen King novel was meant to serve as the basis for Kubrick’s meditations on the unquenchability of human evil, but the imagery Kubrick achieved, though often haunting and sometimes really frightening, exploded the story rather than transcended it.

In Full Metal Jacket, Kubrick has created a composite of his old virtues and his recent shortcomings.

Once again, Kubrick is showing us group action and making that action represent a universal biological urge in men to destroy and be destroyed. In the “Dawn of Man” sequence in 2001, the ape-ancestor discovered the first weapon to the triumphant strains of Strauss’s Zarathustra. To kill was to become human. In Jacket, the focus is on a platoon in Vietnam in 1968, and to kill is to remain human, all too human. The title is a military expression referring to the hard metal coating on a bullet’s soft lead center. Loaded in the gun, the bullets are ready to deliver death. But as a drill instructor informs his charges, “Your rifle is only a tool. It is the hard heart that kills.” So, by extension a man who accepts training that turns him into a killer coats his heart in a full metal jacket. And, in this film being part of a group trained to kill makes killing easier for each member.

Once again, a certain individual is positioned by Kubrick vis-a-vis the group. This time it is a soldier nicknamed Joker. Joker is something of an innovation for Kubrick. For instead of simply representing the group at its best or worst, Joker, is both a part of the American fighting force and an ironist who mocks its presence in Vietnam. Simultaneously an insider and an outsider, Joker is ambiguous in a way that none of Kubrick’s other characters are. They had plainly perceived drives; Joker’s motives are buried. In boot camp, he proclaims himself a killer to his D. I. Is he only telling the D. I. what the sergeant want to hear? Is he mocking Marine machismo? Or does he have a real urge to kill? In Vietnam, he prints “Born to Kill” across the front of his helmet and wears a peace button on his lapel. He tells an angrily inquisitive general that the combination represents the contradictory nature of the war itself, and the Jungian duality of man. But is he really acknowledging the duality within himself, or is he merely being a wise guy?

Joker more or less consciously maneuvers himself out of a comfortable Stars and Stripes press job and into participation in a dangerous patrol during the Tet offensive, winding up in circumstances where he must, indeed, kill. This killing is an act neither of cruelty nor of perfunctory obedience but an act of mercy administered to a helpless enemy who, minutes before, had killed Joker’s best friend. Thus, Joker remains true to his nickname. He was “Born to Kill” all right, but the execution he performs is a denial of the gung-ho marine ethos, rather than its vindication. But only chance made the mercy killing possible. If the murderer of his friend had not been mortally wounded and begging for death but merely captured, would Joker have killed him in revenge?

As usual, Kubrick shies away from psychological probing. He never makes incisions into his characters, but prefers instead to let his audience survey the tantalizing, opaque surface of an action. I would hazard that Kubrick regards character analysis as being too easy on the audience: once you know exactly why a character does something, his or her deeds no longer rile you, no longer prod you into puzzling over the sources of action. So Kubrick simply want to let Joker enact his contradictions in vivid situations, allowing his viewers to go home to argue, recall, piece together, analyze, and perhaps return to see the movie a second time. I have no problem with this. But I do have a Kubrick problem.

No dramatist has an obligation to resolve the contradictions within his characters. Such resolution might very well be glib falsification. But all dramatists have the obligation to dramatize, that is, to disclose the problems, motivations, and contradictions of characters gradually, suspensefully, cumulatively. For all his prodigious filmmaking gifts, Stanley Kubrick has never managed to develop the one skill any storyteller must have if characterization is a major component of the story being told: the skill of progressive disclosure. We must never get too familiar with a character before the narrative reaches its conclusion. The character must always be able to startle us in a manner that is true to what we have seen so far of his nature. He must never slap a hand of cards on the table all at once but lay each card down separately. something must be withheld for the revelation which awaits us at the climax of the story.

The problem I have with Joker as a protagonist is not his ambivalence but that his ambivalence is just about completely expressed by the middle of the movie. It doesn’t deepen as the movie progresses, is never severely tested or shattered or fortified or refined by any of the events Joker witnesses or takes part in during the Tet offensive. He runs into old friends, takes photos of atrocities, bargains with prostitutes, makes wisecracks, and observes, observes, observes. Much of what Joker observes is brilliantly staged by Kubrick: a grisly “birthday party” for a corpse, a wanton and casual sniping game conducted from a helicopter, an amusingly jaundiced staff meeting of the reporters of Stars and Stripes. But all these scenes tell us how groups behave under certain hellish circumstances. They tell us nothing of the evolution or stasis or complication of joker’s character. He’s taking it all in, yes, but what’s it all doing to him?

The protagonists of Kubrick’s previous films also didn’t change much in the course of their films. Colonel Dax remained noble, General Ripper remained mad, 2001‘s astronaut just kept exploring. But they were men of action, not introspection; what they did was more important than what they felt. And the stories they figured in were not psychological but sociological, satirical, or visionary. But Kubrick, in Full Metal Jacket, is presumably trying to tell us what war does to the mind of a complex, sensitive man. This is unfamiliar territory to Kubrick. As the movie goes on Joker retreats more and more to the periphery of the action as the entire fighting unit takes center stage. Joker as a protagonist gets lost. This shows that Kubrick has gotten lost too.

Yet the best stuff in Jacket is platoon action, both the boot camp sequence that opens the film and the scary encounter with a sniper that closes it. In these actions. Kubrick is operating at full strength. The boot camp on Parris Island is a sort of laboratory for processing raw recruits into killers. Kubrick, the poet of process, breaks down the operation into sections that each deal with a stage of the training, and each closes on some memorably painful image that fades to a few seconds of black, as if Kubrick were giving both his characters and his audience a break before going on with the ordeal. Kubrick the gallows humorist of Dr. Strangelove portrays the D. I. not as the tough-but-fair disciplinarian that Lou Gosset confected so entertainingly in An Officer and a Gentleman, but as a comic monster, inexaustedly and surrealistically abusive, a terrible-tempered Sergeant Bang who never comes to a simmer, much less cools off. (Lee Ermey miraculously keeps the D. I. at full boil without ever becoming a bore.) And Kubrick the master off-stops and t-stops and the Steadicam brings off countless visual coups, striking in themselves and all serving to keep the action as grueling as possible.

It is Kubrick’s visual wizardry that makes the final ambush in the bombed-out city of Hue so harrowing. The cross-cutting, from the sniper’s point-of-view to the wounded soldiers lying in an open square and then over to onlooking marines safe behind a wall but horrified at not being able to aid their fallen comrade, is quite brilliantly done, conveying better than any other war movie the narcosis of battle.

Matthew Modine as Joker helps the movie immensely by being able, through a quiet certitude of who his character is, to convince the audience that there is more to Joker than just hip wryness and modish disaffection. It’s not Modine’s fault if many in the audience find themselves empathizing more with Joker’s friend, Cowboy, a straight-arrow country boy who unexpectedly finds himself in charge of his platoon when two superiors are killed. As written, ‘”Cowboy’s modest goals are as patent as Joker’s motives are obscure. Played by an actor previously unknown to me, Arliss Howard, Cowboy is as familiar as your neighbor’s child and as strange as any brave man must be (strange to himself as much as to others) who finds himself growing inured to danger but not to the suffering of his comrades. Cowboy’s desperate attempt to get his men to cease fire when he senses that their barrage is simply pinpointing their position for the enemy, is wrenchingly conveyed by Howard. And the moment of Cowboy’s death is the most believable moment of death I have ever seen on screen. I say the moment of death, because countless actors have been moving in countless death scenes. But Howard shows us the light of life leaving Cowboy’s eyes; you see the life in the body shudder to a stop, and you see the passing over from one shore to another. It’s not taking an iota of praise away from Howard’s achievement to guess that the artist on the other side of the camera must have had a great deal to do with it.

Because he achieves moments like this, Kubrick can’t be called a cold artist though his movies have, especially lately, a chilling effect. This chill may stem from the fact that he has so long been a poet of strategy and chaos, of ignorant armies clashing by day and night, that he perhaps no longer knows how to chart the spiritual shifts within individuals who find themselves in the midst of those clashes or who watch them from some vantage point. Perhaps, like the great Russian director Eisenstein, he should concentrate on making movies with groups, classes, entire countries as protagonists.

I make the suggestion tentatively, humbly, for it is arrogance on any critic’s part to try to chart the course an artist must take. What Stanley Kubrick must do, I don’t pretend to know. But until this moviemaker feels more comfortable with the quirky progress of the human heart, he might do better to let his eyes sweep the horizon.

Author

  • Richard Alleva

    At the time he wrote this review, Richard Alleva was a free-lance writer living in Washington D.C. He still works as a film critic for publications such as Commonweal today.

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