Full Metal Jacket

I've mentioned the "Blind Spot Challenge" several times in the past. In it, a movie blogger picks 12 "essential" movies that you'd think most film buffs would have seen, but that for whatever reason the blogger hasn't. Then, the blogger blogs about one of them a month over the course of a year. I've never taken part in that largely because I don't have planned out far enough in advance what movies I'm going to be watching (or finally getting around to watching) over an entire year. But one of the movies that was one of my blind spots up until now is Full Metal Jacket. TCM finally premiered it when they did their 100th anniversary salute to Warner Bros., and that gave me a chance to record and watch it.

The movie is in many ways two discrete halves, although some of the important characters are in both halves of the movie. The first half is set at Parris Island, SC, which is home to the other big US Marine Corps base, the other being Camp Pendleton which I mentioned yesterday in conjunction with The Big Caper. A new class of recruits is there, although this being 1967 and the Vietnam War, you wonder whether any of these recruits are actually draftees. One that you could be forgiven for thinking is a draftee and not there by choice is Pvt. Lawrence (Vincent D'Onofrio) -- but more on this in a bit.

One of the tropes of Hollywood military movies is that the drill sergeants who take the raw recruits at the beginning of the movie are notoriously tough on those recruits. In some ways, that's necessary, as you have to have unit cohesion, and you're going to be trusting those other members of the platoon (or members of similar platoons) with your life if you're going out to a war zone, which most of these men were going to be if they could make it out of basic training. Unfortunately, the DI here, Gunnery Sgt. Hartman (R. Lee Ermey), isn't just tough on the men; he comes across as downright sadistic and almost sociopathic. He's particularly tough on the aforementioned Lawrence, whom he renames Pvt. Pyle after Gomer Pyle. Pyle is overweight and terminally incompetent; ultimately Hartman's plan is to issue collective punishment for each of Pyle's misdeeds, in the hope that the rest of the platoon will be able to get him to straighten up and fly right.

Given particular responsibility for that is Pvt. Davis (Matthew Modine), renamed "Joker" by Hartman because Davis tries to come up with a way to rebel against Hartmann that still stays within the very narrow rules that DIs set up. Hartman thinks Davis might have some leadership material in him, which is why he gives Davis the task of giving "extra" help to Pyle and seeing Pyle through basic training. Eventually, after all of the basic training, it's time to give the men their first assignments. Davis is sent into the journalism corps, while Pyle, well, you'll have to see the movie to see what happens to him at the end of basic.

In the second half of the movie, the Marines are sent to Vietnam, and almost the first action they see is the Tet offensive of February 1968. Joker, writing for Stars and Stripes, is given the task of putting a positive spin on the offensive, as well as writing other stories that keep of the morale of the enlisted men in uniform. But he's also a Marine, which means that he's going to need to fight if called on to do so, and you know that not only is that going to happen, but it's going to be the sort of fight that remains seared in one's memory....

I'm not the biggest fan of military movies, and certainly not a fan of Hollywood looking back on the Vietnam War, which seemed to be a thing for those Boomers who were subjected to the draft, as well as those people who weren't Boomers but also weren't old enough to fight in World War II. (Director Stanley Kubrick was born in 1928.) It's this second group that's probably more responsible for the revisionist obsession with the 1960s, since they were old enough to have real influence at the time but hadn't really had any chance to earn a high-status place in society the way the "Greatest Generation" had by fighting World War II. With that in mind, however, I still have to point out that it's easy to see why Full Metal Jacket is a high quality movie, and one that most other people would rate even higher than I would. It didn't leave me as cold as, say, Kubrick's earlier A Clockwork Orange, but it's definitely not one that I'll revisit the way I do some other movies.