“THE HIDDEN HAND”
An in-depth analysis of
Stanley Kubrick’s
FULL METAL JACKET
© by Rob Ager June 2008
16) The hidden hand
Rumour has it that the actor Lee Ermey, who played Drill Instructor Hartman, injured one of his hands during production and so he is shown in many of the training scenes with one hand hidden behind his back. It is certainly true that his hand is hidden more often than not, but there are also visually encoded details communicating that hidden hands are part of FMJ’s symbolism.
Here's a dead giveaway. When Hartman enters the toilets and begins screaming at Pyle and Joker, in the lower left of the screen Pyle's left hand can be seen hidden behind his back. It is difficult to see this on a 4:3 tv screen as the edge of the image in which the hand appears is slightly off screen. This cryptic hand metaphor seems to completely disappear from the narrative during the Vietnam section of the story … that is, until Joker discovers the sniper. As he sneaks into the snipers lair - the room with the flag draped over a set of railings – he passes two vertical support columns. At head height, on the first column, is a small poster of a clenched fist. Joker raises from his crouched position so that his head briefly overlaps the poster. He then crouches again as he sneaks to the next column, from where he first sees the sniper. Another copy of the poster is on this column again, but this time part of the image has been torn away so that the fist is missing. When Joker tries to shoot the sniper he moves his head over this second poster and his rifle jams.
A few moments later Rafterman shoots the sniper, and next to him is a column with another copy of the hand poster, but this time we get a closer view of it. Now I’d be willing to put money on it that the hand in these posters is symbolizing Hartman’s hidden hand, thus representing his enduring control of the soldiers minds in the battlefield. He has them psychologically in his grip, hence the posters are at head height. The damaged poster with no fist is probably a message that Joker is not quite psychologically indoctrinated. This is likely a metaphor relating to Hartman’s rifle range speech about hesitation at the moment of truth. Joker’s killer instincts are not “clean and strong” because he didn’t allow the training to completely brainwash him.
There could be yet more to these posters. The gunfire flashes from Rafterman’s M14 flicker across one of them and if we freeze frame and zoom in to the poster when it is lit, there is a design on the sleeve, which looks like a flag of some sort - or possibly three small flags side by side. Unfortunately, the resolution of the standard DVD makes the details difficult to see, so if anyone out there has a HD copy of the film, I’d be most grateful if they could email me a detailed snapshot of this image. Perhaps we can find out a little more about what Hartman has up his sleeve.