Full Metal Jacket

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Vietnam - Full Metal Jacket

  • What is the attitude of the director of the film Full Metal Jacket (Stanley Kubrick) to the war in Vietnam?
  • From your studies of this topic would you agree with his interpretation?

                                                                             Stanley Kubrick explores the behaviour of men in battle. This movie focuses on the training of a battalion of men from the U.S. Marine Corp., and shows their involvement in the army, from the moment they arrive at the training centre, on Parris Island, through their dehumanizing training programme, all the way to the turning point of the Vietnam War, which was when the climactic battle of the TET Offensive took place. It is the Vietnam War portrayed as World War Two, cocky and               trigger-happy.

The attitude of the director in this film is that of a mocking individual. Stanley Kubrick seems to perceive the Vietnam War as a joke, especially in his movie. Firstly the main character is Private Joker, whose name is mockery enough, but he is seen sporting, throughout the movie, a badge with a peace symbol, and a helmet with “born to kill” written across the front of it. Apparently he is expressing the “diversity of man”, but for a lot of people, it can be interpreted as a ridicule of the war in Vietnam. Private Joker is not a part of a combat squad in this movie, his job is as a military journalist, and so for him to be wearing a peace symbol, and a helmet with the slogan “born to kill” on it, is rather irrelevant, and perhaps describes the way Stanley Kubrick felt about the War, that nobody was on top of anything, and that the troops did not know what to think of their situation, on whether it was right to kill or not. Also there is a brief reference to the political situation in America at the time.

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One major thing that made it look like Kubrick was mocking the Vietnam War was the part in the movie when Private Joker, writing for “Stars and Stripes” (a military newspaper) as a military journalist, writes in one of his articles, a fake body count, solely for the purpose of building morale, within the American troops. Using that example, it would seem that Kubrick is taking a swing at the military’s heavy ad-campaign to sell the war, during the TET Offensive.

Stanley Kubrick felt that the Americans were using troops that may well have been too young, and some of ...

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