Why "Full Metal Jacket" is the Greatest War Movie Ever Made

As fans of my work (all six of them) will attest, the film for which I am most famous, and which will no doubt be mentioned on my tombstone, is the crudely animated "Star Wars" fan film "Run Leia Run", a piece based around the ill-advised conceit to cross "The Empire Strikes Back" with the German art film "Lola rennt" ("Run Lola Run"). Those of you familiar with Tykwer's hyperkinetic fever dream of a film are encouraged to explore the possibilities. Those of you who are not must under no circumstances subject yourself to my little experiment.

What few know is that it didn't have to be this way. Indeed, when first toying with the notion of crossing "Star Wars" with another film based on the comic potential of the title, I had another can't-miss combination in mind.

"Full Metal Jedi".

I was very excited when I sat down and started writing, but I couldn't figure out what two things could come from Tatooine that (1) rhymed and (2) led to an effective insult.

That was freshman year of college. My other big memory of "Full Metal Jacket" comes at the very end of senior year, when I chose to watch this film on my last day of work at my job in the computer lab. After the soldiers tromped off across Vietnam, singing their own dirge as they waited to die, I turned off the lights and locked the door, and took my first step toward the post-graduate world of adults and fear.

I understand why this film isn't popular. I know it's not the best-regarded work from certified (if certifiable) genius Stanley Kubrick, especially after Hartman's exit; after the most memorable character departs the film, we're pretty much out of iconicity to go round, except perhaps the prostitute... but most people don't actually know that this is the film that gave us the lines "Me so horny" and "Me love you long time"!

Oh, Kubrick. You give us new eyes to see, and yet we do not see.

The first mistake people make is dividing the film into two parts: the training and the war. This is incorrect, and stems, I think, from enjoyment factor rather than content; there's the part you like and the part you don't like, and evidently this is the right way to deal with the movie Kubrick made. I read the film as having three parts: the training, Joker's misadventures across the country, and the sniper sequence. (You could, I suppose, ask where exactly I divide part two from three, but for me, the cinematography, the feel, just naturally downshift at a certain point...)

Nonetheless the shift in the film's feeling after Hartman's exit is undeniable, and deliberate. With no drill sergeant, the soldiers we've been following, the unorganized grab-ass-tic pieces of (well, you know), are severed from their sense of order. The one element keeping the whole thing in unfailing line has been removed from the picture, and it sends everything whipping out into terrible upheaval. In one fell swoop we lose most of the characters, throw away every setting we've seen, even break away from Kubrick's near-fetishistically geometric and/or symmetrical compositions.

Notice the sinister perfection of Kubrick's framing and blocking in the early scenes, in the barracks. Hartman in the center, lines of soldiers on either side. Kubrick knows that we notice such regimented framing, that we take it to be for our benefit, directly speaking to us, even when it's not; think of Wes Anderson's use of such dead-center framing in "The Royal Tenenbaums", how each instance makes us sit up and take notice. We come to expect this order and reliability from the film, and then, before we know it, we're on our own.

Kubrick's trademark theme of dehumanization fits all too perfectly into this work, a film about the unmaking and rebuilding of human beings into something wilder but still unmistakably human. The system, as Joker reminds us, does not want robots, and certainly no desensitized machine would be able to come up with Joker's chilling closing narration. The symbiosis of man and weapon is established early on, in the famous "This is my rifle" speech: "Without me, my rifle is useless. Without my rifle, I am useless." Then they give their rifle a girl's name and sleep with it, just in case Kubrick felt the opening of "Dr. Strangelove" hadn't done enough in the field of ascribing human sexuality to war machines.

Like so many great war films, this focuses on the costs measured in human souls rather than human lives. As Aristotle said, and as my freshman English teacher so often impressed upon us, tragedy is defined as the catharsis of pity and fear. Had Joker died before ever reaching the sniper, it would be merely sad. What he goes through instead is tragic.

Having brought up other great war films, I suppose I owe you an explanation as to why this is the greatest war movie ever made. Rather than deflate the others point-by-point (this one's too glamorous, this one's overrated, this one isn't actually about war, this one isn't about war at all no matter what IMDB's genre readout tells you), we will skip to the big kahuna of the bunch, the heart of darkness (if you will), "Apocalypse Now", another iconic and important film about the Vietnam War by one of our age's best directors.

Coppola's film strays, appropriately enough, from the path of Vietnam as it goes downriver. Colonel Kurtz's situation, while compelling, was not a terribly likely or common scenario of the Vietnam War, and the darkness confronted is wider than our soldiers risk facing in day-to-day operations, a horror transcending war and simply became humanity. (Even Kurtz pointed out, in his way, that Willard was not a soldier.) His is a strange world, but it was strange before the war got there and it will be strange after it's over, and some people are even getting something out of it; the appropriately named Kilgore seems to be quite agreeable with his surroundings, and Dennis Hopper's photojournalist character, well, no one can accuse him of not making the best of it. They've found homes here. Indeed, Kurtz's inspiration in Joseph Conrad's novel wasn't even a man of war, at least not war as we traditionally think of it. He was a trader among conquerors, a noble gentleman shouldering the white man's burden. Our boys being sent to die weren't part of it.

In "Full Metal Jacket", the territory is not peppered with epic struggles or nightmarish conversations. There are no heroes nor people who are even trying. This is a film for today's America, a nation that has no room for the phrase "just war", and not even the seemingly gung-ho characters, such as Hartman or Animal Mother or the nameless colonel played by Bruce Boa (yes, General Rieekan... and the Waldorf Salad guy) are actually interested in the conflict itself. They're interested in results. They either don't know, or are very confused by, why Vietnam might be the target or what these people have to do with anything. They're just interested in getting their men in line to do what's required of them, and it would be fine if tomorrow if we were at war with Oceania instead of Eurasia...

Instead of blasting Wagner during attack runs, so the characters can inspire fear in other characters, Kubrick plays the Dixie Cups, so the filmmaker can turn right to us and inspire irony. After all, it's a film about us as much as them. We revel in their mistreatment in training, in that so-horrifying-it's-funny way; we howl with cruel laughter at the lines we'll be forever quoting afterwards. Then boom, the structure falls away, and we are left in a world of... well, you know.

Oh, structure finds its way back. We even hear director Kubrick's voice toward the end as Murphy, the man on the radio, literally trying to steer his characters to safety. And the film ends as it begins, with an "I am" statements.

And then music again. "Paint it Black" ensures that you can't turn the film off until the credits are done, because it's too perfect. Listen to the way it's mixed. It's not the typical rock song, with a triumphant singer front and center leaping about in the spotlight, on the stage. Mick Jagger's voice is in the back, coming from the throat, just a bit strangled. He's not commanding. He's not even getting your attention. He's the man in the back of a dim and smoky room, the voice in your head, craning his neck, shouting. He's a lone voice in the darkness, hoping he'll be heard.