The Making of a Killer: ‘Full Metal Jacket’ (1987)
Making the publicity rounds for Full Metal Jacket in 1987, Stanley Kubrick was talking with the Paris paper Le Monde about his new film and the contradictory interpretations it was bound to provoke. “You shouldn’t make a war film,” he said, “if all you have to say is, ‘There should be no more wars.’ Even the generals will agree with you about that.”
So he’d made a movie instead about what war does to people, to some people, beginning with the rigors and rituals of basic training, and then taking his examination all the way into the chaos of battle its brutal self. We witness the making of a killer — of two killers, really, but the journey that takes us from the beginning of the movie to its end is that of the character nicknamed Joker (Matthew Modine).
His is the longer journey to killerhood. He begins boot camp an irreverent wiseass (hence the nickname), competent but not gung-ho about it, just smart and energetic. After basic training, he’s assigned to a journalism outfit, the military’s Stars and Stripes newspaper, and from there, at his request, he’s sent into combat. By the end of the movie, he has taken a life — a young female life, at that — at close range. He’s the same person, of course, but he’s a different person, too — he’s been made into a killer.
The same thing happened, on a more accelerated track, to his boot-camp buddy Private Pyle (Vincent D’Onofrio). Pyle’s swift descent into insanity and its grotesque outcome is what people remember most about the movie, while the second half and the continuation of Joker’s journey are typically forgotten or, worse, actively dismissed.
But we do ourselves a favor if we look at the movie as Joker’s movie. By doing so, we witness a methodical, elaborate psychological evolution — a larger structure in which the boot-camp sequence takes its proportional part. The fact is, Full Metal Jacket delivers a whole lot of movie after what too many consider its (premature) climax, and it deserves to be considered in its totality.
At the time of Full Metal Jacket, Kubrick had “economy of statement” very much on his mind. I put it in direct quotes because that’s exactly the way he kept saying it in interviews, and not only about his own movie. He said it about television commercials, which he admired vis-a-vis his own chosen form because “[e]conomy of statement is not something that films are noted for.” That was him talking to Frances Cline of the New York Times. That very same day, the Chicago Tribune published an interview he did with Gene Siskel, in which he talked about the “tremendous economy of statement” in The Short-Timers, the book on which Full Metal Jacket was based — “which I have tried to retain in the film. All of the ‘mandatory’ scenes, explaining who everybody is — this guy had a drunken father and that guy’s wife is a…are left out. What you find out about the characters all comes from the main action of the story.”
Growing familiar with his lines, he was soon in Rolling Stone, telling the interviewer that The Short-Timers is “a very short, very beautifully and economically written book, which, like the film, leaves out all the mandatory scenes of character development: the scene where the guy talks about his father, who’s an alcoholic, his girlfriend — all that stuff that bogs down and seems so arbitrarily inserted into every war story.”
There’s nothing wrong with this sort of backstory, of course, particularly in war films, where the characters all tend to look and dress alike, absent those social signifiers that can distinguish characters in other contexts. But I think I know why Kubrick was averse to the idea here, even though he never said so explicitly and for the record. I think he meant to show that, more than anything else in their young lives, these military recruits were shaped by their barbaric and belligerent drill instructor — the values he instilled, and the hardships he imposed. I think that before Kubrickknew the boot-camp sequence would swallow the rest of his movie, he wanted it to stand as the central influence in how his characters behave during the war — the courage and cruelty they manage to find within themselves.
You can understand why the sequence is so celebrated — a 45-minute masterpiece of high humor and powerful pathos that’s worked itself so thoroughly into the cultural DNA, you can’t even think about boot camp — especially boot camp for the screen — without reckoning with its legacy.
It begins with the recruits being shorn of their hair like animals (indeed, animal razors had to be used in order for the hair to surrender so easily). They’re being shorn of their individual identities, too, as if all that backstory Kubrick wanted to disregard in the interest of “economy of statement” had never even existed. The sequence ends with a murder-suicide so grotesque, so profoundly hideous, it renders all previous experience moot. As far as this movie’s concerned, their personal histories before boot camp don’t exist.
The boot-camp stuff wouldn’t be half what it is without R. Lee Ermey, who’d advised on military films before and was brought on to serve a similar function here. It wasn’t long into preproduction, however, when Ermey let Kubrick know he’d been eyeing a bigger part for himself, that of the drill instructor, Sergeant Hartman, which had already been cast. Instead of putting him off entirely, Kubrick had Ermey interview those actors auditioning for the roles of recruits. Ermey later claimed that Kubrick believed he couldn’t be vicious enough, although Kubrick, in his interviews on the matter, never mentions this. Whatever the case, when Kubrick saw tape of Ermey’s interviews,
It was even crazier than anything I had ever imagined. Lee Ermey had gone into this whole wild improvisation, where he started insulting these young men, literally terrifying them. And he had a huge repertoire of insults. He had a new one for each guy who came in, whatever his name was, whether he was small or large, whether he had a pimple on his nose or a dimple in his chin. He was a walking encyclopedia of insults. So he got the role right away.
Kubrick then made a wonderful distinction about Ermey’s abilities, one that — mutatis mutandis — is applicable to so many realms of human endeavor: “I wouldn’t say that Lee is the greatest actor in the world, but I do think that the greatest actor in the world couldn’t have played the role better than Lee did.”
Those cast in the other major roles were more experienced actors than Ermey, but they were hardly better-known. Matthew Modine had some small renown for having played a Vietnam vet in a movie called Birdy (1984; which is where Kubrick got the notion to cast him), while Vincent D’Onofrio (recommended to Kubrick by Modine) was known only in theater circles.
Kubrick found his other Marine recruits through an elaborate videotape casting call that allowed him to conduct auditions via the comfort and privacy of his English estate. He had Warner Bros. place ads in the trades letting young actors know they were to send in tapes. There were military-specific instructions: In T-shirt and pants, they were to perform a three-minute scene pertaining to Vietnam, then talk about themselves and their interests. At the end of this, they were to hold up a large card with their vital information — name, address, phone number, age, date of birth — and then a series of shots of themselves: close-up, full-length, left and right profile. It might sound silly, but this is how it was. Kubrick’s staff received some 3,000 tapes, of which 800 were deemed worthy of Kubrick’s personal perusal.
So it went with Kubrick at this stage of his career. He had become increasingly reluctant to leave the comfort of his residence and its environs, even for location shooting, and so, for this — his first film in seven years — many were wondering how he would pull off Vietnam. Not even Kubrick himself could have anticipated the answer that soon arrived.
In the East London neighborhood of Beckton, it turned out, was an abandoned coke-smelting plant that had been bombed out during World War II, just as the buildings of Hue had been bombed out during Vietnam, giving it the same urban-war-torn look Kubrick needed for his climactic battle scene, as well as for the scenes that occur in Da Nang and Phu Bai. What’s more, the buildings of Beckton had been designed by some of the same French architects who later designed the buildings of Hue. Some of those buildings were identical. And, what’s even more, the company that owned those buildings, Britsh Gas, had scheduled the whole lot of them for demolition — meaning that Kubrick and his team could arrange to have them further destroyed precisely to their specifications.
The odds of this serendipity occurring at just this moment belong to the realm of astrophysics. As for recreating this set of structures, in this particular way: you can forget it. “It’s beyond any kind of economic possibility,” said Kubrick. “To make that kind of three-dimensional rubble, you’d have to have everything done by plasterers, modeled, and you couldn’t build that if you spent $80 million and had five years to do it. You couldn’t duplicate, oh, all those twisted bits of reinforcement. And to make rubble, you’d have to go find some real rubble and copy it.”
At the end of it all, Kubrick was able to say with apparent wonder, “It looks absolutely perfect, I think. There might be some other place in the world like it, but I’d hate to have to look for it. I think even if we had gone to Hue, we couldn’t have created that look.”
All that rubble finds its starring role in the film’s finale, unique among Vietnam-movie battle scenes in that it involves urban warfare, unique among almost all movie battle scenes in that you can feel both the eminence and imminence of danger. You really do get the sense that anything can happen. Shots zip out randomly from amidst the abandoned buildings, and we can see and hear them as individual shots, and imagine just how much damage they could if they made human contact. Then we see it for ourselves, and suddenly war-on-film is no longer an abstraction.
When the unit is secreting itself behind the wall looking for the sniper, there are fires burning all throughout the vicinity, because this is a movie where bullets have visible consequences that remain long after their initial discharge. (There’s also, incidentally, a black slate that eerily resembles the monolith of 2001, but it’s a Kubrick-certified accident.) To get the right light, to make the fires really stand out, they filmed the sequence at sunset only, which meant hours of rehearsal followed by just 45 minutes of actual shooting.
“Light,” Kubrick said: “that’s the key to everything.”
And so it is in the abandoned building where they eventually find the sniper. Again there is fire. In stroboscopic slow-mo, the sniper turns around and we see that she is female, barely a teenage one at that. “We used a take where she looked strange as she turned around,” cinematographer Douglas Milsome said, “where the fires blazing in the room seem almost to eat into her face as they bleed in from the background.”
Kubrick once said that the only character in Full Metal Jacket who’s “absolutely beyond the pale” — the only one who’s morally unambiguous — is the helicopter door gunner who, when asked how he can kill women and children, replies, “Easy! You just don’t lead ’em so much.” In practically the same breath, however, Kubrick was able to say that American soldiers in Vietnam were “unprepared culturally” for “the fact that every man and woman and child might have been a V.C.”
Incidentally, the person who asks the door gunner the question that sets him up for one of the movie’s best-remembered lines is Private Joker, who by the end of the movie has killed someone who is both a woman and a child, and his reasons for doing so — at last merciful in nature — are more complex than he ever could have imagined.
“What is this Mickey Mouse shit!?”
That’s Sergeant Hartman storming into the barracks head to find out why Private Pyle is reciting the “Rifleman’s Creed” at the top of his lungs. It’s the middle of the night, their last night on Parris Island; the recruits have graduated and are no longer recruits. They’re fully certified Marine killers-in-waiting. Hartman asks what’s this Mickey Mouse shit and gets his chest blown open for it.
At the journalism headquarters where Joker ends up, there’s a Mickey Mouse doll positioned just off the conference table where Joker is trying to explain to his editor — a commissioned officer — that there are rumors the Vietcong may take advantage of the Tet holiday to attack U.S. forces. The editor says this rumor comes around every year, essentially dismissing it as so much Mickey Mouse shit. When, in the very next sequence, the journalists’ own unit is attacked by VC on what’s now known to history as the Tet Offensive, a leader of men in Vietnam once again pays for his all-too-cavalier dismissal of what he takes to be Mickey Mouse shit.
When, in the film’s very last frames, Joker and the rest of his platoon are heard singing the Mickey Mouse Club theme song (official name, appropriately, “Mickey Mouse March”), there are connotations that both enhance and transcend Kubrick’s own stated intentions for including the song: “What I wanted to suggest here was that these boys who are fighting this war are very close to the children they used to be, when they sat in front of the television and sang the Mickey Mouse song.”
Joker, like Sergeant Hartman and his commanding officer before him, has seen enough of war to dismiss it as mere Mickey Mouse shit, and we can be pretty sure that he’s about to make a mistake similar to theirs.
