Full Metal Jacket

Stanley Kubrick directed this latest entry in the canon of Vietnamery, and let me say at the outset (to preempt the inevitable question), with all due respect to Stanley (and I have loved several of his pictures), that “Platoon” is a better picture than this. “Full Metal Jacket” is not a bad picture at all; indeed, it is rather good. But it is a triumph of professionalism rather than inspiration. It is beautifully produced and photgraphed, and cannily directed, and well acted. In short, it is a well-made picture. Its problems have to do with other things, and I think they are emblemized by title of the picture.

What the hell is a full metal Jjacket? We all know now, but did anybody know before? Of course not. The title was chosen for its presumed high impact, because of its sense of imminent violence and mystery, and its military sound. It is of course, part of the military lexieon. But that is the problem. The selection shows a respect for code rather than subhstance, a preference for the vernacular at the expense of meaning. What does this title have to do with the movie at all? Nothing, except that a lot of FMJ's are spent during the course of the picture. (why not use the far better title of the book on which this movie is based: “The Short Timers”). The picture breaks down, again by artifice, into two sections, and it is typical of the picture that they can be summarized as follows: The Training, and The Real Thing. And both sectiocns proceed apace, unrelated except for sharing some of the same characters, and trot out the litany of cliches relating to the experiences. There are no surprises here. Is anyone surprised that the abused recruit goes crazy at the end and (after significantly muttering "full metal jacket), kills the D.I. (played brilliantly by an actor who actually WAS a Marine D.I.)

Is anyone surprised that the recruits are largely inarticulate pawns of the military (brought home in one overlong and excruciatingky self-indulgent sequence of on camera interviews)? Is anyone surprised that some of the soldiers (i.e. Ahimad Mother, played by Adam Baldwin) have taken a different turn and come to relish the fight? Is anyone (lastly and most significantly) surprised that the sniper who systematically ravages this platoen is a young Vietnamese girl? And (really lastly) is anyone really surprised that our young hero (Matthew Modine) shoots the wounded sniper and puts an end to the whole nasty business? (The only really surprising thing is that the other soldiers who withess this seem to be awed by the savagery of act, when in fact any one of them had probably been more brutal at some point, not to mention the fact that the shooting at that moment was probably more an act of mercy than revenge). The answer to all of the above is no. If this picture had been made five years ago, it might have carried more impact (maybe it was started five years ago, and Kubrick’s perfectionism delayed its completion, but now it ragtags along like an unwanted little brother, aping its elders.

Not to be too nasty about this, but the picture is largely a collection of cliches. Now this is interesting because for a long time there were no cliches about Vietnam; they hadn't evolved yet because the cultural corpus had not yet sprung up (it strikes me as self-evident that to develop cliches one must have a body of works about the topics). But over time, and especially with the accelerating accumulation of VietNam-related popular art (bocks and movies), cliches have evolved, and the use of them is not legitimized simply because they are about the big American Tragedy. Come on Stanley. How many more deranged recruits must we endure? How much more wartime viciousness played out to a knowingly counterpointed soundtrack of inane 60's songs? How many more overripe epistolary voiceover narrations? And how many basically decent boys confronted with the big Moral Dilemma: to shoot or not to shoot. Hell that’s easy. In this picture, Modine catches the sniper who just killed two of his buddies with the rifle in her hand, and she tried to kill him!

How about setting up something with some real ethical overtones (i.e. what to do about someone you suspect but cannot prove is an enemy agent, and who, if you guess wrong by letting go, could do severe damage vo your troops?). I was caught quite off guard that this was the big climactic scene of the picture, the one that is supposed to stamp Meaning onto everything that had preceded it. But the truth is that after it was over I didn’t know the characters much better than I had before. “Platoon,” while perhaps not completely successful, at least attempted to reach for something a little deeper. This picture is content to stand on strking vignettes, on stark imagery, and on incongruities. Kubrick works so hand on getting the detalls right--the full metal jackets--that he seems to lose sight of the larger issues. Individual scenes do stand out in this film, and certainly it is technically superb, but the bottom line is that it has no soul.