“THE HIDDEN HAND”
An in-depth analysis of
Stanley Kubrick’s
FULL METAL JACKET
© by Rob Ager June 2008
2) The Performance of Duty
Although Full Metal Jacket is usually described as having two halves – recruit training followed by Jokers tour of duty – the Vietnam section of the film is itself divided into discernable sections.
We are initially presented with a matter of fact run down of war propaganda practice. Joker sits in on routine editorial meetings for a military publication, in which the chief editor instructs his team to falsify reports in support of the war. The chief tells his team: “Ok, let’s keep it short and sweet”, while a banner above him states “FIRST TO GO LAST TO KNOW – we will defend to the death your right to be disinformed”. As it turns out, Joker’s prediction of a Tet ceasefire offensive is ignored because the chief hasn’t the time to hear of it.
In the 1985 version of the script Joker also meets up with a character named Captain January, who gives even more specific instructions about propaganda reporting than the chief editor. He tells Joker to get pictures of “civilians who have been executed with their hands tied behind their backs, people buried alive, priests with their throats cut, dead babies … don’t photograph any naked bodies unless they’ve been mutilated”.
Once Joker and Rafter hook up with 1st Platoon, the film literally becomes a propaganda presentation of war. Troops are falsely portrayed as macho and fearless. Their antics are backed by rock music and they actually appear to be enjoying their tour of duty. “These are great days we’re livin’ bro’s. We’re jolly green giants with guns.” Joker also narrated in the early section of the film that Marine training was: “An eight week college for the phony tough and the crazy brave”.
The first major battle scene is a gung-ho presentation of firepower and explosions. Marines are gunned down and die almost instantly, while Kubrick’s direction gives almost no attention to blood and guts or the suffering of injuries. Leiutenant Touchdown's death is strange. First he peaks behind him, which makes no sense unless he is looking to see who is watching him. He is directly behind a tank, yet is somehow hit by shrapnel from explosions in front of the tank. We see lens flashes across his back from the explosions. And look at how he falls to the ground. It's as if he has just play acted his own death. If you closely at the soldier who peaks around a corner only to be gunned down by enemy fire from a window, you'll notice that there are no bullet impacts in his body, no blood and he dies instantly.
After Crazy Earl kills two NVA, who also appear to die instantly, a piece of rock music kicks in again. Earl looks back to see if his heroic deed was witnessed by his buddies and, rather than giving a sigh of anxious relief that the battle is over, he smiles gleefully.
The shot now cuts so that we are watching a movie within a movie. Troops lay behind concrete rubble as if avoiding bullets, even though the three-man camera team who are filming them are walking out in the open without being shot at. The sound of tank machine guns and shells fired from turrets are only heard when the tanks are on screen. They appear to be firing on cue for the cameras.
What we’re watching is a parody of all those gung-ho war movies that show battlefields as a wild macho adrenaline ride. “Roll the cameras, this is Vietnam the movie!” The frequent dialogue references to John Wayne support this because Wayne starred in, co-produced and co-directed the Vietnam War propaganda film The Green Berets. The script even features a scene in which one hundred troops are sat in a cinema watching The Green Berets. Despite being a staunch supporter of the war, Wayne discredited himself by not enlisting for a tour of duty, while many other Hollywood stars did enlist. Wayne was also encouraged to run for presidential office due to his pro-war stance.
We next cut to the troops standing around two of their dead buddies, but again they are talking directly to the camera, which swivels back and forth between them, each character delivering his childish lines on cue … acting it up. The two corpses may be drenched in blood, but we never saw them suffer. This is starkly contrasted by the bloody slow deaths of Eightball and Doc Jay.
Then we cut to a sequence of ridiculous interviews, in which soldiers pose for the cameras and gloat over their Vietnam “experiences”. Cowboy has removed his glasses and smooths his hair like a movie star. He comments that “When we were in Hue, it was like a war … there’s the enemy. Kill ‘em.” But in virtually all of the battle scenes of FMJ the NVA troops are nowhere to be seen.
All of these gung-ho lies that the troops tell to the cameras, themselves and each other are reversed in the final section of the film, which begins after the groups encounter with a Vietnamese prostitute.
Cowboy’s claims about fighting the enemy up front are thrown back in his face because Crazy Earl is killed by a slyly placed booby trap, forcing Cowboy to take command of the squad. He then sees his men tortured by enemy sniper fire from an unknown location, but rather than take effective action he issues an order to abandon his dying buddies. So much for his sense of heroics. The slow, agonizing deaths and blood and guts reality expose Cowboy for the coward he is.
This illusion versus reality paradigm operates on many levels in FMJ. Virtually all of the lies and false fronts that make up the bulk of behaviour and dialogue in the film are at some point shown in reverse, with most of these reversals occurring in the sniper battle scene.
There are many more examples of these inverse repetitions of scene elements. As we shall discover through out this analysis, these inverse paradigms often reveal new levels of depth in FMJ’s narrative.