This is strange to admit, and it’s gonna take me a moment to convince you of its truthfulness, but FULL METAL JACKET might be the only Kubrick film to unambiguously point beyond the problem of nihilism. 2001 and A CLOCKWORK ORANGE both ambiguously point beyond the problem depending on a). how trustful you are of the Star Child’s gaze, and b). how confident you are that Alex was actually “cured.” There are optimistic and pessimistic ways to interpret both films. FULL METAL JACKET is weird because it ultimately—and unambiguously—commits to humanity with paradoxical moral courage, even though it never erases the satiric dualism of our capacity for violence and empathy. To arrive at this interpretation is to see how “born to kill” and the “symbol of peace” are part of the same human dilemma, the same human identity. 

Kubrick understood this dualism well. He situated the problem into a structural, often misunderstood diptych that uses order and chaos to muse over the contingency of “humanity” in an otherwise “mechanistic” universe. Now I have to be careful here. This is very difficult to discuss because, on the one hand, I don’t want to paint the impression that FULL METAL JACKET is a film of Mickey Mouse optimism or unwavering hope for humanity. It’s not. On the other hand, the film most certainly chooses compassion over hatred, and that alone represents the first iteration of the Star Child’s gaze that ekes its way further beyond nihilism, further beyond the dark specter of history, and further beyond the mechanical universe than any other Kubrick film has previously imagined. That’s my thesis folks. 

Now time to defend it. 

FULL METAL JACKET is a compelling diptych of order and chaos. Part 1, on Parris Island boot camp, functions as a symmetrical nightmare of hard, clean surfaces, regulated soldiers, rigid lines of conformity, and machine-like obedience to a drill instructor from hell. The goal of basic training is to turn these soft, half-formed young men into mechanized weapons of death. Hartman’s abusive conditioning and psychological attacks behave as a reverse-Ludovico Technique, a process that isn’t trying to “cure” these men of ultra-violence, but to the contrary squash their conscience and make them into ultra-violent, State-sanctioned killers. Every degrading tactic Hartman uses is an attempt to cancel his men’s humanity. Shouting at, insulting, shaming, hitting, bullying and other forms of humiliation are all a part of his mechanistic, dehumanizing process. 

Thomas Allen Nelson states: 

“Hartman represents another version of the Kubrickian Institutional Man—in this case, one who disassembles his male children like an M-14 rifle and then puts them back together again as “ministers of death.” He takes from these young “ladies” and “faggots” their hair and their manhood; he strips them of their names and identities, then rebuilds them into killers.”

“The Marine Corps does not want robots. The Marine Corps wants killers” says Private Joker. This is a half-truth. The Marine Corps wants killers, yes, but what they really want are well-drilled, robot-like killers who identify only with their rifles and never question their cause. Unthinking conformity is the brand of machine efficiency that programs these subhuman “pukes” into weapons of mass destruction in uniform. Which is to say there can be no dualism in the human heart on Parris Island. Dualism implies contingency and the wild card of malfunction, which further implies the existence of a divided mind not in lockstep with the Marine Program. No contingencies of personality or individuality are permitted. Any part of these men’s humanity, like telling John Wayne jokes or sneaking jelly donuts into the barracks, must be collapsed to the monistic substance of Hartman’s own machine-like nature. “This is my rifle, this is my gun!” is even a complete takeover of the men’s masculinity (rifle) and sexuality (gun), reprogramming their desires with a primitive love of violence and aggression. Like DR. STRANGELOVE, 2001 and A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, these Kubrickian themes return us to humanity’s ever-toxic love affair with machines and the evolution of men bent towards mechanical perfection. True to any Kubrick film of this nature is the failure of the system to account for the contingencies of the accidental universe, which always reveal to us that human nature is much more absurd and irrational than what authorities like Hartman are willing to admit. 

Leonard Lawrence (“Gomer Pyle”) is the first example of wild card contingency in the film. There’s a special irony in watching this guy evolve from oafish innocent into deranged madman. He’s programmed, like everyone else, to become a controlled weapon of the State, but he ironically ends up less programmed and more uncontrolled as a result of his abusive training. Hartman’s training is meant to toughen this softie up and prepare him for survival in Vietnam, but the authoritative control he wields over Pyle’s fragile soul never accounts for the contingencies of insanity that bring the poor guy to his utter breaking point. Paradoxically, Pyle does become a better soldier as a result of the abuse levied at him, but he also loses his grip on reality and becomes completely unhinged. The Marine Corps strategy was designed to create regimented killing machines, but in Pyle the compound of man and machine climaxes with the bleakest of satire. Pyle goes “full metal madness,” says Nelson, “erupting in an orgasm of blood and brain all over white, antiseptic surfaces of Hartman’s utopian dream.” Another way to put this: Pyle is the unaccounted “human factor” in a system designed to collapse competing dualisms and attain mechanical monism. With jelly donut in hand, Pyle is the human “accident” in Hartman’s orderly, controlled, rational universe. He is Johnny’s “foolproof” plan fed to the jet propellers of parody. He is the “automated and irrevocable” system of the Doomsday Machine no longer subject to rational intervention. He is the fallout of the State that prefers the efficiency of machines—of HALs, of Alexes—instead of Star-Children. He is the clockwork orange whose human nature is dispensable yet ultimately the wild card in destroying the systematic order of the platoon. Attack his smile of “peace” long enough and you’ll awaken his “born to kill” grimace that ticks with time-bomb destruction. In other words, the detonation of Leonard “Gomer Pyle” Lawrence is the perfect segue-way into Part 2’s descent into chaos, rubble, and further paradoxical duality. 

As a preface to Part 2, there’s a common lack of appreciation and consideration for how the second half actually fits into the film’s overall schizophrenic nature that I think is worth unpacking. Part 1 is in some ways Hollywood propaganda that possesses that airtight storytelling logic and 3-act narrative structure that plays into popularized myths of what the Hollywood idea of a war film is supposed to be. Part 1’s beats are explosive, the characters are engrossing, and the story itself is entertaining yet unsettling in all the right ways for a popcorn blockbuster to succeed. Even the characters themselves are seduced by the Hollywood myth-making machine of what war is supposed to be. Joker’s exaggerated “war face,” John Wayne imitations, and references to his movies are in full swing. Cowboy gets his nickname from the western “Lone Ranger.” Joker and Rafterman in Part 2 reminisce over THE GREEN BERETS (1968), calling it a “Hollywood soap opera about the love of guns.” There’s this pattern of Hollywood male heroism that gets attached to these young men’s minds, epitomizing their assumptions of how war is supposed to look, sound, and operate. The brilliance of Part 2 is that it challenges these stereotypes and gets us to consider the real war behind Part 1’s satiric impersonations and mythologies. It twists the straight-lined geometry of Hartman’s immaculate bathrooms into jagged concrete; it scatters and confuses the entertainment of the Hollywood proper war film; it creates a highly disjointed world of contingency that can neither be rationally predicted or controlled. The hard, clean, sanitized surfaces of Hartman’s orderly barracks in Part 1 are now replaced by the dirty, smoke-filled, orange-burning world of Vietnam in Part 2. This is “entirely by design,” says Letterboxd reviewer Zack Mosley. Zack nails it with this passage:

“If you read enough Letterboxd reviews of this movie, you’ll notice a trend: people like this Parris Island sequence a lot, but are mildly disappointed by the Vietnam sequences that follow. The popular appeal of the Parris Island sequence is, I believe, entirely by design. Kubrick is deliberately drawing you into his Vietnam War, “recruiting” you with an entertaining (bordering on comedic) and largely self-contained character piece. You’re not meant to contemplate the larger implications of the war too deeply here, you’re just meant to laugh at Hartman’s “jokes” and drill yourself for what will surely be some ass-kicking war sequences in the back half. Then it shows you what war, and the marine mindset, actually does to people. From the blanket party scene to the final showdown between Pyle, Hartman, and Joker in the head, the glib humor turns chilly.”

Kubrick’s untidy directorial style in Part 2, while not as entertaining as Part 1, serves the purpose of challenging Hartman’s artificial male utopia and the very nature of representation itself, questioning whether war can ever faithfully be captured and represented by mass media. Joker and Rafterman are now journalists in Da Nang, assigned to write/shoot sensational stories about America’s involvement in Vietnam. They’re instructed by their superiors to sanitize the details, whitewash their military achievements, in effect, transform the war into entertainment regardless of the facts. Propaganda, not reality, is what Joker and Rafterman are trained to generate, which mirrors the propagandist training they received on Parris Island and the overall propagandist style and structure of Part1. In maintaining this ruse of satiric observation, Joker’s role in Vietnam is to effectively preserve an American business that sells a product, like Hollywood, in making truth the first casualty of war. Kubrick cynically put it this way:

“Vietnam was probably the first war that was run — certainly during the Kennedy era — as an advertising agency might run it…It was managed with cost-effective estimates and phony statistics and kill ratios and self-deceiving predictions about how victory was the light at the end of the tunnel.” 

Part 2 is at minimal a clinical deconstruction of the John Wayne wet dream that espouses popularized war mythologies and patterns of male heroism that, by nature, are traditionally embodied in Part 1 “kinds” of stories. Even more than that, Part 2 is ultimately about digging under the satirical surfaces of Part 1 by showing us a shadow world of Parris Island that isn’t populated with machine-like men or melodramatic movie stars, but by characters who look and sound like real human beings. Joker and his men may have come to Nam with the expectation to be John Wayne saviors, but what they get in return is a concrete nightmare and a lime pit full of dead bodies. Some men behave more machine-like than others, like Animal Mother, who resembles the kind of killer Pyle would’ve become had he made it to Part 2, but the emphasis is largely on Joker and his grotesque apotheosis into a human being. Joker’s satirical mask of “trickster” and “passive witness” only begins to crack when he’s confronted with the real dark horrors of war, where at one point Animal Mother reminds him: “This ain’t no Hollywood movie, Joker. Stand down or I will cut you in half.” If part 1 is the Hollywood movie about the evolution of Pyle becoming a machine, then Part 2 is the arthouse movie about Joker putting off the machine and becoming a human being. Which is to say Part 2 is about preserving that “Jungian thing” regarding “the duality of man,” despite being blunted by a military complex and a horrifying war where machine-like killing is the only “ethical” code.

In the final 25 minutes, we get one of the greatest, most soul-stirring moments in Kubrick’s filmography that represents a significant evolution in the Star Child’s gaze, unlike anything we’ve seen in previous work. In the ruins of a burning Vietnamese temple, Joker confronts a young female sniper who reveals to him the contingencies and contradictions of his own nature. Recall just a few scenes earlier when Joker asked a crazed helicopter gunner, “How can you shoot women and children?” The question was disturbing then, but it’s even more disturbing now as Joker, a pacifist, stands over an enemy sniper with gun in hand, realizing the sniper is both a). a woman, and b). a child. The paradoxical duality on his helmet — “Born to Kill” vs the “peace” symbol — now reaches burning monolithic suspense. Animal Mother insists on leaving the girl to suffer, which feels like the kind of odious instinct that only a Ripper, Alex, Jack or HAL would be capable of. Joker has his flaws, but he doesn’t at all drink the nihilism those characters imbibe. If anything, he’s just a bad soldier whose nerdy presence in Vietnam feels completely at odds with the barbaric institution of war. Kubrick’s camera holds on Joker’s face as we contemplate his new “war face” in the making, one no longer tinctured by the melodramatic shape of a John Wayne war cry. This new face is different. It’s a face of accident. A face of contingency. A face of confused trauma and aching sympathy. A face that twists against its own heartless programming and becomes paradoxically human in the process. As an act of humanity, Joker kills the female sniper. Through this mercy killing, he becomes the second example of wild card contingency next to Pyle, only where Pyle demonstrated the failure of the human to subdue the machine, Joker demonstrates the failure of the machine to subdue the human. As the military-industrial complex was built to weed out the dualism of the human soul — especially the “peace” part — the Joker-Pyle dynamic represents the failure of the Institutions to account for the contingent realities of life itself. Which is to say that life, according to Kubrick, isn’t orderly, rational or enlightened. Life is absurd, irrational and deeply paradoxical. 

That the unaccounted “human factor” of part 2 seemingly reverses the machine-like efficiency of part 1 is, in my estimation, proof that the Star Child has evolved beyond its predictable boundaries in the Kubrickian universe. Almost every other Kubrick film ends in either a) the repeating cycle of self-destruction, or b). a chaotic dystopia nearing cyclical self-destruction, with neither path re-coursing to explicit acts of humanity or twists of paradoxical moral courage. Joker truly is the “wild card” (pun intended) because his very presence in the Kubrickian universe symbolizes, however small, and however short, an unambiguous step beyond nihilism, beyond the dark specter of history, and beyond the mechanical universe. The term “unambiguous” might throw some people off though. After all, has Joker really changed? Is he the new awakened hype in Kubrick’s otherwise nihilistic universe? No, not at all. At least not in the way that Kubrick’s universe desperately needs. The final image might even be showing us an incompatibility between the human being ever meshing with the war machine, and here’s why. 

Joker and his platoon are seen in silhouette marching against a besieged Hue city while singing the Mickey Mouse March. It feels contrapuntal in every way to the horror we just experienced in the scene before. Is Kubrick giving us another reversal of his humanity? Has Joker simply — and so quickly — moved on from his mercy killing without letting the moment truly detonate? Pyle couldn’t move on, which is why he killed himself. Why can Joker move on? Joker’s journey into the dark and increasingly orange burning world of Hue City is the kind of maze that confuses our pathway to the guy’s center. From beginning to end, he’s been trying to keep his duality and reconcile his contradictions in the face of the absurd mechanisms of war, always making us wonder whether he’s lost his humanity in the process. The Mickey Mouse March might ironically suggest “detach[ment] from the horrors that he has participated in,” says Zack. It also might suggest primitive regression back to an infancy that seeks safety from all the trauma and reversals he’s endured. A desire for Mickey Mouse purity amidst burning monoliths of concrete would represent not only an important Kubrickian sign of evolutionary growth, but an unprecedented kind of primitive regression that wants to return to the womb and not the glaring evils of a Ripper, Alex, Barry, HAL or Jack. Where previous Kubrick villains are entirely without “peace” and driven more by “born to kill” monistic bloodlust, Joker’s confused transformation reveals to us the complex nature of the human condition. He unambiguously commits to humanity in one breath but struggles to preserve that feeling in the next, so all he can do is sing about Mickey Mouse. He is both inner softness (human) and outer hardness (machine); in effect, a “full metal jacket.” Like the film’s two disjointed halves, Joker’s dueling soul points beyond the problem of nihilism by the very feeling that his “Jungian thing”” is never extinguished. To the contrary, his soul is forever in schizophrenic tension with itself, endlessly lost in the maze of human paradox without a center.

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