Full Metal Jacket

The first time I was ever exposed to Full Metal Jacket was when I was 17. I had just arrived at Boy Scout Camp that summer, and one of the people in my troop had brought along a cassette of something he'd taped off of TV. After listening to it, I thought it was the funniest thing I'd ever heard, and it became a sort of running joke in our troop. What was on the cassette was the entire first scene of Full Metal Jacket, with the drill sergeant introducing himself to the troops and essentially beginning the process of their dehumanization.

It wasn't until close to a year later that I finally got around to seeing the movie for the first time—and seeing for real the entire scene that I'd heard only on audio beforehand. Let me say this now: casting R. Lee Ermey as Gunnery Sergeant Hartman was a stroke of brilliance, for in real life, he actually had been a drill sergeant, and I've read that nearly all of his dialogue was improvised. But it's almost common sense, though, to cast a former drill sergeant in the role. Either way, director Stanley Kubrick made a superb casting choice with Ermey, for he cemented his legacy in the first scene alone—which, I might add, was filmed brilliantly: in one long, almost continuous tracking shot that doesn't stop until Sergeant Hartman first addresses Private Snowball.

After this, we start to see life at boot camp through the eyes of Private Joker, so nicknamed because of his (failed) attempt at being a comedian with Sergeant Hartman in the opening scene. His voiceover subtly indicates that this is going to be an anti-war movie, too, for he refers to the recruits as "the phony tough, and the crazy brave". Private Joker (played by Matthew Modine) seems to take boot camp only somewhat seriously, and his jokes aside, he somehow manages not to draw serious attention to himself—unlike Private Leonard Lawrence (played by Vincent D'Onofrio), an overweight simpleton who can't really handle boot camp, or even do anything right. In the first scene, he earned the nickname Gomer Pyle, and he begins to bring down the morale of the whole corps with his inability to cope . . . which earns the wrath of Sergeant Hartman and the other recruits.

You know, I have to say this: it's damn near impossible not to laugh at Sergeant Hartman's constant browbeating of his recruits. His brutality is almost an invitation to laughter! Take, for example, Private Joker going toe-to-toe with the Sergeant Hartman when he admits to being an atheist; for Sergeant Hartman believes in the Virgin Mary. The dialogue alone is priceless.



However, despite humorous brutality, there's also drop-dead serious brutality that goes on. Take, for example, the nighttime pummeling of Private Pyle in his bunk. That scene still gives me the shivers, and the dull thud of each soap bar hitting his body makes me cringe. The final boot camp scene, with the showdown in the head between Private Joker, Private Pyle, and Sergeant Hartman, is another scene of drop-dead seriousness (no pun intended). And despite the number of times I've seen Full Metal Jacket in the last 11 years, I still get goosebumps leading up to that final scene in the head. The look of pure insanity on Private Pyle's face is downright terrifying, the fear exhibited by Private Joker palpable—but somehow Sergeant Hartman still steals the show with his "What is your major malfunction?" valediction.

At this point in the film, we move almost immediately from boot camp into the heart of Vietnam. And this is what strikes everyone that most about Full Metal Jacket: the two-part structure, with act one being boot camp, and act two being Vietnam. Everyone always wants to turn the movie off after boot camp, but I find the Vietnam scenes are very worthwhile, and by neglecting them, you're losing half the magic of the movie. Just take the character of Animal Mother, for instance. Are you really gonna tell me that you didn't love seeing him blast the hell out of everything that gets in his way during the second half of Full Metal Jacket?

Anyway, as I was initially saying, almost immediately after boot camp do we rejoin Joker in Vietnam (with a wonderful Nancy Sinatra opening), where he's now working not as a combat soldier but as a reporter for Stars and Stripes. In this capacity, he and his cameraman Rafterman essentially get to travel all over the country at will, and only going into combat when needed. But as we can see already, Joker is pretty bored there in Vietnam. The reporting work is good, but he almost feels like he needs something more . . . which he gets when his base gets attacked during the Tet Offensive. With the turning point of the war at hand, Joker and Rafterman must now upgrade into full-blown combatants, and to Joker's good fortune, he stumbles across Cowboy, one of the recruits he knew from boot camp. With that, Joker and Rafterman tag along with Cowboy's platoon, filled with such unforgettable characters as Doc Jay, Eight Ball, T.H.E. Rock, Crazy Earl—and last but not least, Animal Mother, the gun-crazed warrior who's only inches away from a Section 8, played to scene-stealing perfection by Adam Baldwin.

As their platoon gradually makes their way across Vietnam, they encounter plenty of odd scenarios, like a ditch filled with dozens of dead NVA soldiers, booby-trapped dolls, teenage snipers, soldiers shooting machine guns out of low-flying helicopters, cameramen filming "Vietnam: The Movie", and even interviews about their feelings on the war. During the Vietnam sequences, it became far more apparent that Full Metal Jacket was making an anti-war statement. The interviews alone paint a portrait of uncertainty about the war, asking very hard-hitting questions about why they're there and what their purpose is.

But political statements aside, Full Metal Jacket is still very much about the characters, Joker in particular. In the final analysis, Vietnam almost seems to symbolize his coming of age—or at least his realization that the war isn't a joke anymore. His turning point was twofold: when Cowboy dies in his arms, and when Joker himself kills the sniper. Cowboy's death served as the catalyst, when the "joke" of Vietnam suddenly ended. Up until then, Vietnam was a joke, but when he made his first confirmed kill with the sniper, Joker crossed a line that can never be crossed back over. In killing the sniper, he could not undo what he's just learned—that life giveth, and life taketh away, most times when we don't expect or even want it to. His closing lines in the film could symbolize his understanding of this, when his voiceover, over the strains of the Mickey Mouse Club song, declares, "We are in a world of shit, yes. But I am alive, and I am not afraid."

Sometimes I think Full Metal Jacket has gotten lost in the shuffle of Vietnam movies, often being eclipsed by bigger and more ambitious films like Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, or Platoon (of those three, I think Apocalypse Now is the only one I liked). But I have to say, Full Metal Jacket is undoubtedly my favorite Vietnam movie. The acting, the story, it all works perfectly for me. And I have to say this. At the Oscars that year, after its release, I think Full Metal Jacket was only up for a screenplay award (it didn't win), but to this day I am still shocked that the Academy completely overlooked the acting, because you had three—not one but three!—possibles for Best Supporting Actor: Adam Baldwin as Animal Mother, Lee Ermey as Sergeant Hartman, and Vincent D'Onofrio as Private Pyle. Not only that, the camerawork was pretty good, too, offering us such unforgettable scenes as the exercise yard silhouetted against the orange sky and the setting sun, or the lush landscape of the war-torn Vietnam.

Full Metal Jacket was based on a book called The Short-Timers, which I think has been out of print for many years now. It's a shame, because I'd love to read it! But until then, I can only rely on Stanley Kubrick's realization of the story. And I have to say this, too: the films of Stanley Kubrick may have been controversial (A Clockwork Orange) and misunderstood (2001), but Full Metal Jacket was a well-earned masterpiece, with a terrific story aided by equally terrific acting. 9 out of 10.