“THE HIDDEN HAND”
An in-depth analysis of
Stanley Kubrick’s
FULL METAL JACKET
© by Rob Ager June 2008
1) First Impressions
As a straight forward war movie Full Metal Jacket is immensely popular, yet artistically it’s one of Kubrick’s least understood films. There are several reasons for this. The mega box office and critical success of Oliver Stone’s Platoon preceded Full Metal Jacket’s release by almost a full year. Several inferior Vietnam war films were quickly being released in an attempt to cash in on Platoon’s success, and it was under these circumstances that Full Metal Jacket made it’s debut. Fortunately, Kubrick’s film had two obvious things to offer that Platoon lacked. The first was its hilarious dialogue, especially drill instructor Hartman’s rapid-fire insults, and second was its dynamic and varied action set pieces. It also lacked the obvious and well-trodden “horrors of war” emphasis and moral assertions usually associated with acclaimed war films (Platoon pulled this off well, but Apocalypse Now had already been there and back almost twenty years earlier). In fact Full Metal Jacket’s pacing and style are more akin to the highly commercial and entertaining WW2 action film The Dirty Dozen.
Although critics have not openly declared Full Metal Jacket to be a commercial film, they have treated it as such. While praising its technical composition and entertainment value, they have largely neglected to comment on the presence of any deeper meanings or even a lack of them. Any serious film fan knows that Kubrick was a genuine artist and so, based purely upon the director’s reputation, critics knew better than to openly write the film off as merely commercial.
The one aspect of Full Metal Jacket that has brought artistic praise is its no holds barred critique of military brainwashing. Again this was lacking in Oliver Stone’s Platoon and helped distance the two films from each other. The physical and emotional pummeling of the lovable Private Leonard Lawrence into a psychotic and suicidal wreck is thoroughly convincing and packs just as strong an emotional punch as any of Platoon’s themes. If the cadet training section of Full Metal Jacket had itself been fleshed out into a standalone movie then the critics would have applauded loudly and in unison.
Instead Kubrick shifts the story straight into the chaos of the Vietnam war, as if we had finished watching one film and then started another. The film maintains its humour, but drags us through a confusing narrative mess that is very entertaining, but seemingly absent of purpose. Joker’s final dilemma, in which he must find the strength to perform the mercy killing of a female NVA sniper, is strangely unsatisfying. It doesn’t seem to justify the rest of the war zone narrative.
This is not unusual in Kubrick’s work. Many of his films have stirred up controversy and negative emotion, while refusing to offer obvious moral condolence – A Clockwork Orange and Lolita being the most obvious examples. The key factor is that Kubrick didn’t make films to comfort his audience. His intention was to challenge us – to present us with philosophical puzzles and dilemmas. He challenges us to earn narrative condolences by flexing our mental muscles and thinking deeply about the film experience.
This is not to say that Kubrick did not know the answers to the puzzles in his own films. He knew the answers all too well and structured the narratives and aesthetics in accordance. Using complex unconscious symbols the answers were richly encoded into the films themselves. For example, the mysterious monolith of 2001 was a metaphoric cinema screen rotated ninety degrees, through which the films characters could leave the two dimensional confines of the film narrative and enter the three dimensional universe of their audience. In Eyes Wide Shut, the Sommerton mansion orgy was a dream-like repetition of the high society ballroom party at the film’s beginning, but this time stripped of all tinsel wrapped illusions.
These concepts were communicated in the finer details of these films in a way that is extremely difficult to identity consciously. Hence we are compelled to rewatch Kubrick’s work in the hope of unraveling these elusive meanings.
Full Metal Jacket is especially cryptic, even for a Kubrick film. And so in a similar vain to my previous analysis of Clockwork Orange, Eyes Wide Shut, The Shining and 2001: A Space Odyssey, I hope here to demonstrate that both the recruit training and war zone sections of Full Metal Jacket are far more multi-layered and rich in meaning than the vast majority of critics or film fans have ever suspected.
Many of the hidden themes we are about to explore are much more prominent in earlier versions of the screenplay. One of those versions from 1985 will be the script that is referenced in this analysis. In addition I must also add that, due to my limited knowledge of all things military and also my limited research on the Vietnam War, some of the details of this analysis may turn out to be easy to disprove. Feedback from more readers more knowledgeable in these subjects is welcome.