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There’s an element of open eroticism in the DI’s dominating assaults. At Parris Island, South Carolina, a bunch of recruits, their heads shaved, dressed only in skivvies, stand vulnerable before the blows and abuse of their drill instructor. It begins with a stunning 45-minute prologue, a Marine-boot-camp sequence that is perhaps the most outrageous piece of filmmaking in Kubrick’s entire career. Structurally, the movie is bizarre, a failed experiment that makes one aware of how conventional other movies are-and of why those conventions are necessary. Kubrick, Herr, and Gustav Hasford have adapted Hasford’s posturing little novel, The Short-Timers. But can this be true? Can this sentiment be anything but attitude-death-enthralled chic?
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Or rather: The meaning of Vietnam is that it meant nothing. He mounts a gigantic production to demonstrate that in Vietnam death wipes out meaning. To use a phrase of Michael Herr’s (from his classic book of Vietnam War reporting, Dispatches), Kubrick is death-enthralled.
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In Full Metal Jacket, the writer-director seems to be trying for a black comedy of death. No one in his right mind could mistake Kubrick for a humanist. The chill wind whistling around the headstones could be heard throughout 2001, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, and The Shining. From the evidence of Kubrick’s later films, the soul of this hermit-filmmaker has turned cold as a winter graveyard. It’s not a political work, nor is it sympathetic to American or Vietnamese suffering. Plotless, and virtually characterless, Full Metal Jacket is about men drowning (as they keep saying) in “a world of shit.” Then the men get blown up by a booby-trapped doll or picked off by snipers.
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Young Marines make futile, quasi-absurdist remarks (“They took away our freedom and gave it to the gookers” “I wanted to meet interesting, stimulating people from an ancient culture-and kill them”). Death is out in the open, just as it was in World War II, yet it has reclaimed none of its glory. There’s no jungle here, no lush green, no swamp or rice paddy. Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam movie, Full Metal Jacket, is bleakly discomforting and remorseless-a punishing load of despair and incomprehension. In a ruined city, beneath gray skies dimmed by greasy black smoke, men die without reason or sense.