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Full Metal Jacket
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2022 Introduction:
On its initial release, Full Metal Jacket unleashed a visceral, rather dismissive and reductive critical reaction in me.
This was because, as I well see in retrospect, it fell on the wrong side of an
evaluative dichotomy of “open” and “closed” cinema that I was toying with at
the time (in my mid-to-late 20s); I was even able to polemically counterpose
it, on the same printed page, with a review of what I presented as the complete
opposite in style and sensibility: Jim McBride’s The Big Easy (1986), which appeared at exactly the same moment in Australian cinemas. I have
retained the somewhat sour review below just as I wrote it in 1987, recognising
that it gives absolutely no indication of how highly I then (as now) rated some
previous Kubrick films – Paths of Glory (1957), Lolita (1962), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Barry Lyndon (1975). And nor was I gifted, back then,
with a clairvoyant vision of what Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
would mean to me 12 years later! Full Metal Jacket has never risen to the top rank of the director’s work in my
estimation, but I would approach it much more sympathetically and
appreciatively today than I did in 1987.
In
the late 1960s, before psychoanalysis became a particularly complex part of
film theory, there was a relatively simple but highly suggestive idea kicking
about concerning the psychic function of popular film; it derives especially
from Thomas Elsaesser’s early work on the psychic
drive structure of the film-viewing experience.
The
idea goes that a film accumulates in the viewer a surplus of aroused emotional and
psychological energy that it channels, works over and discharges in various
ways. Perhaps a fundamentally crude and (in some presentations) overly
masculine model of spectator-response, but one nonetheless capable of careful
inflection at the intercession of either viewer or filmmaker.
One
might well imagine, however, that Stanley Kubrick has devoted his entire filmmaking
career to proving Elsaesser’s basic point. There is no blunter or more forceful
mechanism of energy build-up and discharge in all cinema than that perfected in
films like A Clockwork Orange (1971), The Shining (1980) and Full Metal Jacket (1987).
Full Metal Jacket has two quite
distinct parts, training and combat. In each one, all the fictional and
stylistic elements are put to the sole purpose of getting us to the moment of
dramatic and visceral discharge – those moments mainstream reviewers will be falling
over themselves to call powerful, unsettling and maybe, at a pinch, thought
provoking. But if the film provokes thought, it is not really around the historical
question of the Vietnam War, which is, in its operation, only a pretext for
these Kubrickian effects.
The
training part stays with you longer. It’s a tour
de force of verbal/vocal cinema – a relentless stream of shouted question/answer
interrogations (“Sir-yes-Sir!”) and call/response chants. There is scarcely a
word of normal dialogue exchanged between the soldiers. Kubrick’s point
concerns the brutalisation of human beings through extreme sensory and
affective deprivation – these soldiers are rendered rigid, atomised, eyes fixed
straight ahead, no contact with another person allowed. Something’s gotta give
… and it sure does.
Kubrick’s
strategy – some will construe it as hypocrisy – as a filmmaker is to perfectly reproduce
this sensory deprivation, exactly on the level at which his film works on us as
viewers. Form is function, and meaning, with a vengeance here. His
tunnel-vision economy is tyrannical and his mise
en scène relentlessly square (compositionally) and linear (dramaturgically
– actors utter their lines only when stroboscopically cued by the steely, mobile
camera eye or the metronomic editing). It’s a deliberately tight-ass film; not
even a hint or breath of life gets in.
Accordingly,
this late-period, nihilistic evolution (or devolution) in Kubrick’s style
unerringly appeals to a particular hardcore type of “extreme cinema” patron or artist. I predict that we will see many
brutal homages to Full Metal Jacket,
from film-school-student level upwards, in the decades to come!
Clint
Eastwood’s Heartbreak Ridge (1986) had,
in its own mode, more to say and show about the process of training and men in
war. While Eastwood could (however gingerly) deal with the massively homosexual
implications arising from the dialogue’s forms of verbal obscenity, the second
part of Full Metal Jacket drops the
subject as fast as possible (one is hard pressed to find any dramatic
connection between the two parts whatsoever beyond the dimly, confusedly
conceived narrator figure of Joker/Matthew Modine). What’s left is the Big
Effect – the horror of war turning on a shock of sexual difference – and the
concluding “moral lesson”.
Full Metal Jacket hinges on the
significance of the line uttered at the end of both its parts: “I’m in a world
of shit”. Kubrick definitely has (in Robin Wood’s term, via Norman O. Brown) an excremental vision. A world of shit:
that means brutality, madness, horror … probably also Evil Itself. His film
outdoes even Apocalypse Now (1979/2001) in the reduction
of political history to Gothic metaphysics and existentialist heroics (“Yes, I
am in a world of shit, but I’m alive, and I’m not afraid” – big deal; compare,
on all these points, to Samuel Fuller’s The Big Red One [1980/2004]).
Kubrick’s
most intense engagement with this subject matter happens at the level of making
“Surfer Bird” – accompanying a slow Steadicam view of war atrocities – sound
creepy. Of such effects is a Master Filmmaker made. I am not being entirely
sardonic about this; it does take a very particular mastery of art and craft to
pull off what Kubrick achieves here and in his hardest-line projects.
How
many years did we have to wait for Kubrick to do it to us this
time around? In the dead gloom following the Master’s magnificent discharge, I
found myself thinking that – all in all – I’d rather have it done to me
differently.
MORE Kubrick: A.I.: Artificial Intelligence © Adrian Martin September 1987 |
