Grok My Enthusiasm (21)

By: Gordon Dahlquist
June 1, 2016

One in a weekly series of enthusiastic posts contributed by HILOBROW friends and regulars.

The usual take on Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket is that the first section, set in Marine Corps basic training at Parris Island, is brilliant, and what follows, during the Tet Offensive in Da Nang and Hue City, is a rambling anticlimax. I’ll just say it: this verdict is an esthetic replication of the grand error Full Metal Jacket dramatizes so well, the disconnect between our sheltered assumptions and what happens to them when we enter the uncontrolled world.

The film was Kubrick’s first in seven years, after The Shining (at its release, too, seen as a disappointment), and only his third in almost 20 years. The news that Kubrick would be “taking on Vietnam” — even as Strangelove took on the Cold War — raised expectations high. The film that arrived was of course particular and contrary, as if deliberately pitched to dissatisfy (this exact cycle would repeat for his final — and I would argue, unfinished — film Eyes Wide Shut). The country vastly preferred Platoon, with its Good and Bad and Innocent made clear.

The first part of FMJ, at Parris Island, is indeed brilliant. Most astonishing, perhaps, is how formal, even abstract the filmmaking becomes: the first exchange resembling human dialogue comes, whispered, perhaps 25 minutes into the film — almost everything else, from the start until the final scene of this section (another Kubrick bathroom!), is either the strident declamation of R. Lee Ermey, as Sgt. Hartman, or the by-rote call and response of his various charges. Even when the soldiers are alone, they still — wearily — parrot and posture. The framing is iconic and clear, image after image imprinting directly on one’s nervous system (I think especially of Joker’s “war face” or when he clamps his ears to block out Pyle’s weeping). What’s slippery though is what we’re exactly seeing. Overtly, we witness a brutal process of turning young men into killers, and see the cost to those who can’t fit in. Yet with regard to the rest of the film — with regard to the actual meat of American history — Pyle’s failure is a sidebar. The rest of these men emerge system-perfect, heads sorted and bodies fit, for war.

However, in Vietnam nothing aligns: these men aren’t unprepared, they’re mis-prepared. The second half of Full Metal Jacket is a litany of war movie scenes and ideas, without a single one playing out to anyone’s hope or edification. These marines are both too self-conscious and too sheltered. The insulation of satire — what from the film trailer hinted at Strangelove — is acrid and stiff. The self-mythification, the he-man rituals, are the gestures of scared boys in the dark. The reflexive consumption — cameras, cartons of cigarettes, liquor, prostitutes — is a desperate lifeline to an exceptionalism that no longer applies. The final third of the film, where the squad is shredded by an unseen sniper, ends with a confrontation of different stakes that American films rarely entertain. This is because Full Metal Jacket isn’t a film about Vietnam. It’s a film about what Americans (still) don’t understand.

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Grok My Enthusiasm (21)

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