Stanley Kubrick`s ”Full Metal Jacket” is the only film of this summer, and one of the few English-language films of recent years, that has the power to fascinate. It`s not a movie meant for quick, pleasurable consumption, but neither is it a movie with ”something to say”–the messages it offers up appear to be contradictory, confused, unreadable. The film doesn`t yield its secrets easily. It sits there, instead, like a cold, hard object, as opaque and impenetrable and weirdly commanding as the monolith Kubrick designed for
”2001.”
Intended neither to entertain nor educate, ”Full Metal Jacket” is a deliberately useless film–and uselessness is one concept our utilitarian culture has never been able to assimilate. The film`s power to disturb and provoke comes not from what it says about ”war,” but from its refusal to speak at all. An almost purely formal structure, ”Full Metal Jacket” exists as a system of repetitions and correspondences–echoed phrases, doubled images, inverted statements–that create a frightful symmetry, maddeningly complex and nearly mute.
Ever since he launched himself into the cosmos with ”2001,” Kubrick has attracted a mystic following–he has become a guru, seen by his followers as the possessor of a vast, esoteric spiritual knowledge. But what might make it possible to read so much into Kubrick`s films is the fact that there is, deliberately, so little there. Like so many Technicolor koans, Kubrick`s films since ”2001” have aimed for a suspension of meaning, a studied emptiness.
”Barry Lyndon” went a little further than ”A Clockwork Orange,” and
”The Shining” went a little further still. Only with ”Full Metal Jacket,” though, has Kubrick completely carried out his apparent intentions. It`s a film that, effectively, cancels itself out.
The art of narration consists as much of knowing what to leave out as what to put in. A great storyteller will always leave little pockets of mystery–unilluminated corners of a character, enigmatic actions, meanings that hover just beyond grasp–that serve to engage our imaginations and arouse our interest.
But rarely has any storyteller gone so far in ”leaving out” as Kubrick has done in ”Full Metal Jacket.” The film begins with a stripping away–as the heads of the young Marine recruits are shaved, their hair falls to the floor and is swept off–and proceeds systematically through the series of eliminations that makes up the movie`s first half. In the Parris Island boot camp, the recruits lose their names (on the first day of training, the drill instructor issues them all generic nicknames–a Texan becomes ”Cowboy,” a black soldier becomes ”Snowball”), their gender (from this point on, they are all ”ladies”), and eventually, their individuality (Kubrick concentrates on group shots that emphasize the synchronous movement of the training unit). The world outside of the island camp has been erased: All that exists for the recruits, and for the viewer, is the barracks room, the parade ground and the obstacle course.
The barracks room is the film`s privileged set, an environment as closed and cold as the space ship of ”2001” (it has the same eerie, even, overhead light) or the mountain hotel of ”The Shining” (with which it shares the endless corridors punctuated by square pillars). We never see the outside of this room, or even a view through an exit door–it`s a world unto itself, an island within the island, from which every sign of disorder, of nature, has been purged. It`s a world of hard, sleek surfaces and right angles, two attributes not shared by the doughy, rotund Pvt. Pyle (Vincent D`Onofrio), who is duly driven mad by it. In the terms of Kubrick`s cruel geometry, he is the round peg in the square hole.
But, as Pvt. Joker (Matthew Modine) says in his voice-over narration:
”The Marine Corps does not want robots. The Marine Corps wants killers.”
What has been emptied out must be filled up again, this time with all the rage and resentment that has been produced by the emptying process. The natural target for this rage is the drill instructor, Gunnery Sgt. Hartman (Lee Ermey), but, by blaming Pyle`s incompetence for the extra duty the men must suffer, Hartman is able to transfer their hatred–just as their hatred, later, will be transferred to the enemy. The film`s most terrifying moment, perhaps, is the shot in which the recruits, dressed in white underwear, rush to beat Pyle in his bunk with bars of soap wrapped in white towels, so many spots of light swarming out of the darkness. White, not black or blood red, becomes the color of horror in ”Full Metal Jacket”: the awful white skies that brood over Vietnam, the white tile of the washroom where Pyle finds his revenge.
Hartman is the malignant spirit in the machine: Like the malfunctioning HAL of ”2001” or the phantom bartender of ”The Shining,” he is the voice that lures the protagonists into the dark realm that lies just beyond order and control, into madness and obsession. But where this voice, in Kubrick`s previous films, has always spoken in the soft tones of reasonability and casualness, in ”Full Metal Jacket” it finds a different register. Hartman`s use of language–in his hands, it becomes a kind of poison or disease, killing what it touches–is one of the film`s most original aspects.
Hartman insists on a style of speech so rigid and so ritualized that it all but loses its value as communication. There is no speech below the level of a bellow, every phrase must begin and end with ”Sir!,” obscenities and racial slurs multiply to the point where they no longer shock–they have simply replaced the normal terms. Hartman improvises obscene chants to pace the men on the parade ground; this military cadence becomes the style of every interchange, as the recruits slowly learn that what matters is not what they say, but the pounding beat of how they say it.
The ”sound off,” in which each man in an endless line shouts his meaningless phrase in turn, becomes the dominant form of conversation: Long after the men have left the training camp, the back-and-forth, ping-pong rhythms dominate even their most casual encounters. As the pat phrases, military cliches and passed-along jokes rain down, we hear a language stripped of sense, one that exists as pure rhythm, pure form.
At the same time, Kubrick is working out the film equivalent of this desensitized and desensitizing language, picking up the ping-pong rhythms in his cross-cutting, keeping his actors frozen in place while his camera makes little symmetrical movements around them, photographing faces with wide-angle lenses that turn human beings into cartoons. It is never a camera style in the service of the story, but one that rises to some abstract level above it, transforming drama into formal design.
Only a short strip of black leader separates the training camp scenes from the war sequences, and the blunt transition is placed in such a way as to suggest that ”Vietnam” is somehow a direct product of Pvt. Pyle`s violent loss of control. The second half of ”Full Metal Jacket” precisely inverts the terms of the first, dropping us down in an open, disordered universe, one that is symbolically dominated by women (from the establishing shot of the hip-swinging prostitute to the closing sequence of the sniper) just as the tightly closed first half was populated exclusively by men.
It`s a harsh, disorienting break, one that directly contravenes every traditional rule of filmmaking. (But then, Kubrick is probably suggesting what he thinks of traditional film-making when he has a prostitute lead a client into a bombed-out movie theater for an assignation; the film on the marquee is ”The Lone Ranger”.) Where standard practice would dictate that the training camp be followed by battle scenes that demonstrate how well (or how poorly) the men`s training has served them, Kubrick at first brings across only one character, Pvt. Joker, and suggests that his training has left no imprint at all. This wisecracking, undisciplined Joker, not even a soldier but a reporter for ”Stars and Stripes,” bears little immediate resemblance to Sgt. Hartman`s prize pupil.
”Full Metal Jacket” is a film that deliberately blunts its climaxes, telegraphing its punches so far in advance (Pyle`s breakdown, for example)
that they have little or no impact by the time they arrive. But nothing Kubrick does in ”Full Metal Jacket” is as perverse as his presentation of Pvt. Joker. The first half of the film sets him up as a classic audience identification figure: We`re drawn to him because he has a sense of humor, a streak of rebelliousness, and (as signified by his glasses, the one possession the corps hasn`t managed to take from him) at least the outlines of a past, pre-military life. Most important, he has compassion–it`s he who takes the pathetically incompetent Pyle under his wing.
The second half of the film positions Joker as a journalist-observer:
It`s through him, seemingly, that we`ll gather our impressions of the war, and it`s through him that we`ll find out what it means (which is how, for example, Charlie Sheen functions in ”Platoon”). But not only does that not happen
–its exact opposite does. As the film progresses, Kubrick draws us further and further away from Joker, slowly cutting off our access to what he`s thinking and feeling, while at the same time leaving him at the center of the image and the center of the action. We no longer understand why he does the things he does, or what attitude lies behind his defensive sarcasm. He withdraws before our eyes, shrinking into inscrutability.
Joker wears a peace symbol on his battle fatigues and the slogan ”Born to Kill” scrawled on his helmet. The juxtaposition makes for one of the film`s better jokes, when Joker explains to an outraged officer that it symbolizes ”the duality of man–the Jungian thing, sir!” But it`s not the
”Jungian thing” that seems to interest Kubrick so much as the sheer contradiction. Joker becomes the embodiment of the film`s formal duality–its division into two opposing halves, its determination to leave out as much as it shows, its preoccupation with doubles and pairs.
In the first half of the film, an obsessive order is transformed into chaos through an act of violence; in the second half, a similar act of violence (Joker`s point-blank mercy killing of a wounded enemy sniper) is used to suggest that the moral chaos of war can be overridden by a determined, concentrated, act of will. Overcoming his horror, Joker kills, and order is restored.
But the real climax of the film comes in the extended close-up of Joker that follows his gunshot. We search his face for signs of how to interpret his action: Has he killed out of compassion for the enemy, or out of hatred? Has he conquered his training or has he fulfilled it?
The closeup, perfectly neutral, offers no answers–and as Kubrick lets it run on and on, all of the studied emptiness of Kubrick`s film opens up. There is nothing to see, and nothing to say.
It`s the void that fascinates; that, and the ingenuity, imagination and single-minded determination Kubrick deploys in producing it. But in the end, it is still damnably difficult to say what sort of status ”Full Metal Jacket” has as a work of art. It is a nearly perfect film, but it is also a nearly perfect blank.
