8

Make Sure It’s Big—Lon Chaney Big:

Full Metal Jacket

IN 1980, a few months before The Shining opened in New York on May 23, Kubrick moved from Abbots Mead into a very large house on 172 acres in Childwickbury, just north of St. Albans, about an hour’s drive from London. The sprawling grounds included a block of stables, two ponds, servants’ cottages, a park, a rose garden, and a cricket pitch. The manorial setup was ideal for Kubrick’s needs. The stables became offices and cutting rooms, and nearby was a gun club where he could do his target shooting.

“Childwickbury Manor wasn’t so much a big house as a collection of rooms randomly added onto a narrow Georgian building,” Kubrick’s driver, Emilio D’Alessandro, remembered. There were 129 rooms in all, and Kubrick told D’Alessandro to make four copies of each room key. “We need one for me, one for you, one for Christiane, and a spare copy, just in case all three of us lose the same key,” he said.¹

Kubrick’s office was in Childwickbury Manor’s Red Room (shades of The Shining!). He liked to hole up there and devour books, wearing his usual household uniform: tennis shoes, baggy threadbare pants, and shirts with lots of pockets, some of them ink-stained. The pockets were for little notebooks that he bought by the dozens at W. H. Smith, the stationery store in St. Albans. Kubrick still dressed like the same messy Greenwich Village bohemian he had been in the fifties. When he was on set and it was cold enough, he liked to wear a military jacket and an anorak over his rumpled shirt and trousers.

Kubrick’s beard was getting shaggier, and he had become noticeably more portly. He enjoyed being something of a Jewish Santa Claus during Christmas season, welcoming the children of St. Albans, who were allowed to pick out a Christmas tree from a heap of them he had cut and ready from his grounds. “Thank you, Mr. Kubrick,” the children recited. Like many New York Jews of his generation, Kubrick loved Christmas.

Along with the Kubrick family, Childwickbury housed a collection of pet dogs and cats. Kubrick loved the animals and worried incessantly when one of them fell sick. (“If the cat was sick he would drop everything and talk to the vet and tell him ‘We will do so-and-so,’ and argue with him,” Christiane remembered.)² D’Alessandro, originally hired as Kubrick’s driver, became an impromptu veterinarian, as well as a handyman, technician, gardener, builder, and errand boy.

Kubrick’s employees loved him, but he was taxing to work for. “Stanley kind of ate you up,” Leon Vitali admitted.³ Like D’Alessandro, Vitali worked sixteen hours a day for Kubrick, whose demands often seemed endless. Andros Epaminondas, who was Kubrick’s assistant for ten years, quit in 1980, worn out by the pressure, so Vitali had to labor harder than ever. He fielded phone calls from Warner Bros, tussled with distributors, theater owners, and advertisers, and painstakingly supervised the prints of Kubrick’s films. Kubrick insisted that Vitali watch as many prints as he could to make sure they were as flawless as possible. When Vitali restored some of Kubrick’s movies for Blu-ray years after the director’s death, he was well prepared: he had seen them hundreds of times.

Kubrick drove Vitali and D’Alessandro hard, but he cared about them, and they stayed loyal. He couldn’t do without them, and he made sure they knew that. “He was always so kind to me that I couldn’t say no to him,” D’Alessandro said.⁴ Vitali’s love and appreciation for Kubrick shine through the moving documentary Filmworker, which covers Vitali’s years as the director’s assistant.

Ever the control freak, Kubrick liked to tell people both on and off the set, “Don’t touch anything until you’ve read the instructions!” The zero-gravity toilet in 2001, with its lengthy set of directions, is Kubrick’s joke about his own penchant for writing step-by-step guidelines. At the Childwickbury house he explained what to do in case of fire, for example (two solid pages, including much detail about how to rescue the animals). On the set, Kubrick the doctor’s son liked to give medical advice. “He was certain that he was a good doctor,” Christiane recalled, “and would drive people crazy telling them to take pills of one kind or another. He would explain to the women who worked on the set what to do about a difficult menstrual period—‘Don’t eat salt, eat this and this’—and would walk away, his cigarette leaving a trail of smoke.”⁵

Kubrick needed to have his wife and daughters close by at Childwickbury. He had traditional ideas about a father’s role, and was at times a quizzical interrogator of his daughters’ boyfriends. “You’re kidding, right?” he asked his stepdaughter Katharina after talking to one of her dates. A crisis came when Katharina decided at age thirty that she wanted to leave the house and live in London. (She was getting married to a caterer named Phil Hobbs, who later worked as a producer on Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut.) Later, Anya, who was six years younger, decided to leave as well. “Why are they doing this to me?” Kubrick asked D’Alessandro.⁶

Surrounded by his family, his employees, and his pets, a busy hive of activity, Kubrick was the reverse of a hermit. He liked to cook for his daughters and for guests, and could even be seen doing the laundry. And he was perpetually on the phone. Kubrick loved to talk to Warner Bros executives John Calley, Terry Semel, and Julian Senior, as well as Ken Adam, Spielberg, and other Hollywood insiders. He called his sister Barbara nearly every night. The director John Milius remarked, “Stanley had no regard for time. He’d call you in the middle of the night, whenever he felt like calling. I’d say, ‘Stanley, it’s the middle of the night.’ He’d say, ‘You’re awake, aren’t you?’ He’d never talk for less than an hour. He just had all kinds of things to discuss—everything.”⁷

When he wasn’t on the phone or the fax (a new favorite toy), Kubrick was trying to decide what kind of movie to make next. During the early eighties he pursued a science fiction project, an adaptation of a short story by Brian Aldiss about an android boy called “Super Toys Last All Summer Long.” In the end Kubrick, after years of work with Aldiss and other writers, passed the idea on to Steven Spielberg. It became Spielberg’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001), which came out after Kubrick’s death, a unique Kubrick-Spielberg hybrid.

Kubrick had another idea brewing. Early in 1980 he started talking to the writer Michael Herr about making a war movie. The conversations with Herr would eventually come to fruition in 1987’s Full Metal Jacket. Herr had gone to Vietnam as a freelance war correspondent and seen action during the Tet Offensive. He told his tales of combat in Dispatches (1977), one of the greatest books of war journalism ever written. Then Herr wrote the screenplay for Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), a movie that Kubrick admired. (After making Full Metal Jacket, he said that he thought Coppola’s movie was like Wagner and his own like Mozart, precise and classical.)⁸

Herr and Kubrick hit it off. Like Kubrick, Herr was Jewish, and he liked Kubrick’s wit and wide scope of interests. He found that Kubrick’s voice was “very fluent, melodious even,” despite his “Bronx nasal-caustic” twang. He talked “with a pleasing and graceful Groucho-like rushing and ebbing of inflection for emphasis,” Herr said.⁹

Herr got to hear plenty of the Kubrick voice. The director, he soon discovered, liked to call him up and talk for hours about everything under the sun. “I once described 1980–83 as a single phone call lasting three years, with interruptions,” Herr later remarked. “Hey, Michael, didja ever read Herodotus? The Father of Lies?” Kubrick might ask, or wonder why Schopenhauer was always considered such a pessimist: “I never thought he was pessimistic, did you, Michael?”¹⁰ They also covered opera, Balzac, Hemingway, and a full range of Hollywood gossip.

The day after their first conversation—about Jung, the Holocaust, Schnitzler’s Dream Story, and a few other things—Kubrick had D’Alessandro deliver two books to Herr: the Schnitzler novella and Raul Hilberg’s Destruction of the European Jews (1961). Lately he had been thinking of making a movie about the Holocaust. Kubrick bugged Herr every few weeks to read Hilberg, until finally Herr said, “I guess right now I just don’t want to read a book called The Destruction of the European Jews.” “No, Michael,” Kubrick replied, “The book you don’t want to read right now is The Destruction of the European Jews, Part Two.”¹¹

Kubrick and Herr had both read a 1979 novel by Vietnam vet Gustav Hasford called The Short-Timers (Vietnam slang for soldiers whose tour of duty ends soon). Hasford, a combat journalist with the First Marine Division, got caught up in the Tet Offensive, just like Herr. While still in Vietnam he joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War. After returning stateside he moved to Washington State, where he was a desk clerk in a hotel catering to loggers who, he said, had “been in fights and they’d be dragging these scrubby, extremely ugly prostitutes with them. The job gave me a lot of opportunity to read—like Nathanael West, you know. After about 3 o’clock when all the loggers had passed out.”¹²

Hasford eventually drifted to LA, where he stayed for a time in science fiction writer Harlan Ellison’s house and became an editor at porno magazines. As a sideline, Hasford stole books from libraries, amassing a large collection on the American West. When Kubrick, through Jan Harlan, bought the option on The Short-Timers, Hasford was working as a security guard and living in his car.

Hasford, who was paunchy and tightly wound, with an Alabama accent, ended up working a little with Herr and Kubrick on the screenplay, but his gonzo aggression didn’t go over well. Hasford’s letters to Kubrick, scabrous and funny, make entertaining reading, as Hasford by turns taunts, cajoles and butters up the director (he signs one letter “Warm regards, Fred C. Dobbs Hasford”).¹³

Kubrick began his relation with Hasford in his usual style: over the phone. Three or four times a week, he pumped Hasford relentlessly for information about Vietnam. Their longest conversation, Hasford said, lasted six hours. In a letter of January 1983, Hasford told a friend, “Stanley and I, after about a dozen long talks, are lobbing frags. I told Stanley he didn’t know shit from Shinola about Vietnam.” In August 1985 he was blunter: “Stanley is bullying me, threatening me.” Then, in March 1986, Hasford wrote, “I finally pried a copy of the shooting script out of Stanley’s famously anal-retentive fingers. It’s 99% mine.” Herr and Kubrick, he said, had simply “retyped” his book. Hasford demanded the return of a set of battlefield photographs he had lent Kubrick, and he also insisted on screenplay credit (which he got).¹⁴

No doubt a little freaked out by Hasford’s outbursts, Kubrick displayed his trademark calm in a letter that feels as if it could have been written by HAL. Remarking on “the extraordinary lack of objectivity which pervades your letter,” Kubrick wrote, “I cannot help but realize that you are very disappointed and unhappy, and I am genuinely sorry about that and wish it were otherwise. . . . I thought we were, at least, some sort of friends.”¹⁵

In The Short-Timers, the cantankerous Hasford shows an eerie eloquence that attracted Herr and Kubrick. “To carry death in your smile, that is ugly. War is ugly because the truth can be ugly and war is very sincere,” he writes.¹⁶ The novel, now out of print, tells the story of a Marine who, after going through basic training under a brutal drill instructor, is transported to “the shit”: the war in Vietnam. Hasford’s plot became the basis of Full Metal Jacket, and some of the movie’s best lines can be found in his book.

Herr and Hasford had been in the shit. Kubrick, for all his fascination with military history, most definitely had not. “I was very lucky,” Kubrick said about his lack of war experience. “I slipped through the cracks each time. I was 17 when World War II ended and was married when the Korean War began. I wouldn’t have volunteered.” Kubrick was, he admitted, a “confirmed coward.”¹⁷ On 2001’s Dawn of Man set he filmed the leopard’s attack on the apes from a cage while his actors sweated bullets inside their primate suits. (One can see Kubrick’s point: Should Admiral Nelson have shown up on deck during the battle of Trafalgar?)

Kubrick had a severely risk-averse personality, but he loved military history in part because war, like chess, requires the managing of risk. Soldiers become pawns in a great game, parts of a fighting machine rather than individuals. Paths of Glory, Spartacus, and Dr. Strangelove were all about war, and Barry Lyndon contained stunning battle scenes. Full Metal Jacket would be Kubrick’s boldest war movie yet, the one where he fully explored how the military remakes human beings for tactical purposes. Kubrick’s Napoleon screenplay shied away from this subject, downplaying the massive slaughter of the Russian campaign. But Kubrick’s Vietnam movie would deal with the absurdity of a war in which more explosives were dropped than during World War II, where civilians were fair game as long as they were in “free fire zones,” and where abstract bureaucratic talk about kill ratios and pacified hamlets obscured the grim facts of death and devastation.

During the Vietnam War, Kubrick had kept his distance from the peace movement as he did from all other political side-taking. When he was asked in 1968 whether he would be happy if the United States withdrew from Vietnam, he said only, “Sure.”¹⁸ The overt craziness of a futile, unexplainable war was what interested him, not some lesson about American imperialism.

In Full Metal Jacket the Marines of the Lusthog Squad are skeptical when interviewed by a camera crew about why they are in Vietnam. Are they fighting for freedom? “If I’m gonna die for a word, the word is poontang,” Animal Mother, the most straight-ahead brutal of them, comments. “Do I think America belongs in Vietnam?” another Marine muses. “I don’t know. I can tell you one thing, I belong in Vietnam.” This is one of the movie’s choicest lines. The Marines feel bizarrely at home, since the chaos and confusion around them has seeped into their souls.

Kubrick decided on twenty-seven-year-old Matthew Modine for Joker, Full Metal Jacket’s main character. He had liked Modine as a Vietnam vet in Alan Parker’s Birdy (1984). Modine had a friend from acting school, Vincent D’Onofrio, who was working as a bouncer, and D’Onofrio, a newcomer to movies, became Private Pyle, the hapless recruit tormented by his drill sergeant. Lee Ermey, a retired Marine drill instructor, was originally hired as a technical adviser on the film but edged his way into the role, which he played with disturbing perfection. As Kubrick put it, “I mean Lee is not as great an actor as, say, the greatest actor in the world but the greatest actor in the world couldn’t be better than Lee in that part.”¹⁹

Filming for Full Metal Jacket began at the end of August 1985 and lasted eleven months. The Vietnam scenes, all of the movie after the first twenty-two minutes, were filmed mostly at Beckton, near London, a ruined gasworks scheduled for demolition. “They allowed us to blow up the buildings,” Kubrick told an interviewer. “We had demolition guys in there for a week, laying charges. One Sunday, all the executives from British Gas brought their families down to watch us blow the place up. It was spectacular.”²⁰ Palm trees were imported from North Africa. Kubrick and his crew studied advertisements from Vietnamese magazines and used them to make the Vietnamese murals for the streets of Hue. Meanwhile, the actor-recruits got sharper and sharper; they were starting to become Marines. Marching and running precisely in tandem, drilling with their rifles: all this Ermey taught them, while they trained exhausting hours with him. The actors became a corps.

D’Onofrio and Modine spent hours with Kubrick in his trailer bouncing around ideas. “A lot of the time he would let us block scenes. And we worked on the script, in the trailer—a lot.” D’Onofrio remembered how Kubrick took the two young actors under his wing:

We’d come to his house every Saturday night to see movies, Matthew and I. . . . First we’d have dinner, with Christiane and the girls. There was a lot of drinking. Stanley liked those little Heinekens, the ones that look like grenades. Then he would show a movie. There were two projectors, and Stanley would thread the reels himself. Stanley was very kind. He made us feel free to ask any questions. Anything we wanted to know, he’d tell us. I learned so much from him. He showed us Woody Allen, Spielberg. He loved the Purple Rose of Cairo, Annie Hall, Manhattan, and he loved early Woody Allen. He was a big fan of Spielberg. With Scorsese I only heard him talk about Raging Bull—he was a big boxing fan.²¹

In Full Metal Jacket Modine is game but somewhat squeamish, and Kubrick draws on his uncertain character, neither rebellious nor gung-ho. Modine was uncomfortable at times during the shoot. A family-values Mormon who had just gotten married, he insisted on inserting a towel between himself and Papillon Soo Soo, who played a prostitute in a sex scene that Kubrick later cut.²² (He retained Soo Soo’s famous deadpan come-on, “Me so horny, me love you long time.”)

Full Metal Jacket’s first sequence, set in the Marine boot camp at Parris Island in South Carolina, is rigid, tunnel-shaped, and full of raw aggression. DI Hartman’s face looms too close over the “maggots,” his recruits. He hollers insults, slamming the men for being “faggots” and “ladies.” Ultrasmooth traveling shots survey the maggots as Hartman berates them furiously, and Kubrick’s abusive camera angles trap them.

This first part of the movie is about producing humans who will fit together perfectly in one greater body, “my beloved Corps” as Hartman calls it. Hartman clearly relishes the role, and in Pyle he finds his perfect victim. Private Pyle, slow and dumb, looks like a bug baby with a jelly donut tummy. Basic training will turn him into a drooling automaton, a Section Eight (eligible for psychiatric discharge).

Kubrick’s calling cadence sequences shine. The Steadicam smoothly eats up the ground as the recruits run and chant, “I don’t know but I been told, / Eskimo pussy is mighty cold.” (Eskimo pussy = death.) The erotic goal of warfare is to blow away someone else, but the soldier’s own death is always in sight too. “If I die in a combat zone, / Box me up and ship me home. / Pin my medals upon my chest, / Tell my Mom I done my best.”

Kubrick was once again meditating on how violence underpins what we are. Full Metal Jacket’s basic training segment, like A Clockwork Orange’s “Singin’ in the Rain,” backs up ruthlessness with musical-comedy moves.²³ 2001’s Dawn of Man has its own version of basic training, the blanket party when the apes take turns beating a rival’s corpse with bones. In all three films, viciousness retools humanity.

In Full Metal Jacket Kubrick backs up the Marine gospel with a stark-mad theology. Hartman in his Christmas Day sermon delivers a dead-serious parody of religious faith: “God has a hard-on for Marines, because we kill everything we see! He plays His games, we play ours! To show our appreciation for so much power, we keep heaven packed with fresh souls.” The Marine and those he kills are expendable, like the victims of atomic holocaust in Dr. Strangelove, but the Corps is eternal reality. Here is Hartman: “Marines die. That’s what we’re here for. But the Marine Corps lives forever, and that means you live forever.”

Kubrick ends the basic training sequence with a stupendous set piece. In the middle of the night, Joker finds Pyle, now fully psychotic, in the head, the recruits’ bathroom. The head is the one surreal set in Full Metal Jacket, comparable to the vibrantly red bathroom in The Shining, where Jack has his interview with Grady, the Overlook’s old caretaker. Pyle has become a meticulous obsessive about his rifle. As in the case of Norman Bates or Jack Torrance, it’s the careful, anal personality that lets loose crazy destruction. Going mad, always in Kubrick, is about losing control and being controlled and being a control freak. It’s a “major malfunction,” as Hartman puts it.

The night before the bathroom scene, Kubrick told D’Onofrio, “Just make sure it’s big—Lon Chaney big.”²⁴ Coincidentally, D’Onofrio had a few days earlier watched a silent movie with Chaney, and he copies Chaney’s leering face of horror when he glowers at Joker and Hartman. Kubrick wanted Strangelove-style grotesquerie from D’Onofrio, and he got it.

Ermey remembered, “You know it took seven days to light that bathroom.”²⁵ This head glows with a blue surreal light, unlike any bathroom on Parris Island or anywhere else on earth. We have entered dream space, Kubrick’s no-man’s-land. Pyle stares us down like Alex at the beginning of Clockwork, but where Alex thrilled with his exuberant malice, Pyle menaces, an idiot face over his inert drooling lump of a hunched body.

“What are you men doing in my head?” Hartman yells when he hears Joker and Pyle in the bathroom. And so they are—in his head, that is—contaminating Hartman’s hard pure devotion to the corps. Both are as usual in their white T-shirts and boxers. Pyle holds his loaded rifle. “What is this Mickey Mouse shit?” Hartman bellows, steel-hard superego to the last until his heart is blown open by his troubled child Pyle. Joker fears he is next, but instead Pyle points the rifle to his open mouth, sitting slackly on the john. He fires, and his brains blow out the back of his head. We are now ready for Vietnam.

Full Metal Jacket has a precise, sonata-like structure: the twenty-minute scene at the end featuring a teenage Vietnamese sniper matches the twenty-minute basic training episode at the beginning.

To elaborate, the movie divides into:

twenty minutes for basic training at Parris Island

two minutes for the bathroom scene

forty-five minutes for Joker and the other Marines in Vietnam, everything before the encounter with the sniper

twenty minutes for the sniper scene

two minutes for the coda, in which the Marines sing the Mickey Mouse song and we hear Joker’s voice-over

Structure is sometimes hard to see in Full Metal Jacket’s drifting, episodic Vietnam section. This is deliberate. Basic training is straitjacket-tight in its form, a regimented, collective insanity. But war means wildness, lack of control. After the deaths of Hartman and Pyle, never mentioned in the rest of the movie, madness becomes routine, rather than fervent and over the top, as in the Parris Island sequence. Everything falls apart, and all you know is this chaos, inside and out. (A joke from writer Phil Klay: “How many Vietnam vets does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” “You wouldn’t know, you weren’t there.”)

The spectacular, dreamlike coordination of Kubrick’s basic training section, with its rows of recruits standing at attention swaddled in their white skivvies, yields to a series of discrete episodes, where no visible plot propels the movie forward. Like the Marines it depicts, the last half of Full Metal Jacket seems a little lost, narrative-wise, but really Kubrick is on top of every smoke-bomb explosion and every tracking shot. Without looking virtuosic or self-consciously beautiful, the sky during the battles glows with precisely planted fires and smoke clouds.

Joker, quizzical as ever, stands at the center of it all, deep in the shit yet not completely of it. Like the narrator Lyutov’s glasses in Isaac Babel’s story “My First Goose,” Joker’s wire-rim glasses stand for a tenderness that is liable to be mocked by tougher men like Animal Mother (Adam Baldwin), whose helmet forthrightly reads, quoting Oppenheimer quoting Krishna, “I Am Become Death.” In Babel, wearing eyeglasses is code for being a Jew, someone weighted by ambivalence, the antithesis of the Cossack’s brute readiness. Animal Mother has the thousand-yard stare, stoned and numb: he looks far beyond you to the unspeakable core of the matter. Joker, by contrast, is still alive to uncertainty. His heart has not yet turned to stone.

Kubrick makes Joker’s ambivalence come to a head in the film’s last scenes. Huddled behind a low wall, the squad is being targeted by a sniper from a group of ruined buildings. One by one the men, as if caught by bad magic, get drawn into the sniper’s trap. The Marines are cursed: this place is their Overlook Hotel.

So begins one of Kubrick’s greatest set pieces, the sniper sequence of Full Metal Jacket. Jay Cocks remarks that this section of the movie, like Sam Fuller’s small-scale Korean War classic The Steel Helmet (1951), “gets its ruthless tension from its simplicity.” Here Kubrick is “very focused and precise and very unadorned,” Cocks continues. Like Peckinpah, he uses slow motion when the sniper picks off the Marines one by one, their blood shooting out like a fountain. The pressure is close to unbearable. “And this from somebody whose idea of a life and death situation was getting on a commercial airline,” Cocks marvels.²⁶ When Cowboy, the squad’s leader, is killed by the sniper, Kubrick stays with a master shot of the Marines clustered around the dying man: no emotion-drenched close-ups here. The masterly Arliss Howard, who plays Cowboy, dies in their arms.

Now comes an utter shock, an even stronger one than Cowboy’s death: the sniper is a teenage girl. She whirls around, spraying bullets like crazy. Meanwhile, Joker fumbles his gun like Jimmy Stewart in Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962).

Then Rafterman (Kevin Howard, playing a gung-ho greenhorn, Joker’s foil) shoots the sniper. Surrounded by the Marines and dying slowly, she begs to be killed. Joker, after hesitating, at last does what she asks.

The best comment on Joker shooting the sniper was written long before Full Metal Jacket, by Herr in Dispatches:

The problem was that you didn’t always know what you were seeing until later, maybe years later, that a lot of it never made it in at all, it just stayed stored there in your eyes. Time and information, rock and roll, life itself, the information isn’t frozen, you are.

Sometimes I didn’t know if an action took a second or an hour or if I dreamed it or what. In war more than in other life you don’t really know what you’re doing most of the time, you’re just behaving, and afterward you can make up any kind of bullshit you want to about it, say you felt good or bad, loved it or hated it, did this or that, the right thing or the wrong thing; still, what happened happened.²⁷

Watch Joker’s eyes just before he shoots, and then just after. As when Dave talks to the murderous HAL in 2001, everything is in that gaze. Joker, tongue in cheek as usual, earlier told a news crew that he wanted to “be the first on his block to get a certified kill.” This is his certified kill, a notch in his belt that also carves a notch in his skull. During basic training Hartman, who is later shot in the heart, rammed home the point that “your rifle is only a tool, it’s a hard heart that kills.” Joker kills from a hard heart and a pitying one too.

The movie’s startling epilogue follows. As fires blaze spectacularly on the dark heath, the wasteland they have helped create, the Marines sing the Mickey Mouse Club theme song. Then we hear Joker’s voice: “I am so happy that I am alive, in one piece and short. I’m in a world of shit. Yes. But I am alive. And I am not afraid.”

Maybe Joker, the wild card, is joking in this final monologue (though he’s never only joking). We can’t tell whether he is actually happy and reconciled in his world of shit. His initiation ritual complete, he achieves what the historian Richard Slotkin called regeneration through violence—or so he tells us. Kubrick said of Hasford’s The Short-Timers, “I love the Homeric honesty when Joker says I never felt so alive.”²⁸ But in the movie an irony suffuses Joker’s claim to aliveness. Joker says he is no longer afraid, and we might wonder whether this resembles Pyle’s lack of fear when he shoots Hartman and himself. For the moment he sounds perfectly sane, unlike Pyle, but then again this is Vietnam, so all bets are off.

Kubrick said that he used the Mickey Mouse Club song because he realized it had only been seven or eight years since these young men had been kids sitting in front of their television sets. Marching through ruined terrain, the Marines seem like boys again, innocents enjoying a rebirth after the cataclysm of the sniper’s attack, thinking now about getting laid instead about getting wasted by bullets. They are cured, all right. Or are they?

Critic Georg Scesslen writes that this ending is “the moment of highest comedy and deepest hopelessness” in the movie. Here is the saddest fact of all, Scesslen adds: “It is forever the free mind that keeps the madness” of the war going.²⁹

Joker stands alone in this ending, as he has all along. Full Metal Jacket differs from the typical war movie: it is about isolation rather than camaraderie. This is Kubrick’s strike against the typical Hollywood war movie, like Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) (the butt of a few derisive yucks in Kubrick’s movie). Kubrick here presages The Thin Red Line (1998), in which Terrence Malick isolates his soldiers inside their own heads, though Kubrick’s casual-seeming grace in Full Metal Jacket contrasts with what Janet Maslin calls Malick’s “innate momentousness”: Mozart, rather than Wagner.

That studied classical quality required much work from Kubrick the perfectionist. The smallest details mattered, as Kubrick scrutinized not just his actors and sets but also the weather, which needed to be precisely suitable for the smoke-bomb explosions. Every sunset, every cloud formation even, had to look just right. This required hours and days of waiting. On Full Metal Jacket Kubrick insisted on taking his time, more so than ever. The Warners quartet of Frank Wells, Ted Ashley, John Calley, and Terry Semel had given him permission to do things his own way, as slowly as he wanted. D’Onofrio recalls Kubrick’s careful method of filmmaking on Full Metal Jacket. At times the actors got fidgety:

He’d just sit up on the crane with his lenses and figure out what he was going to do. He would look at the clouds, the time of day, and figure it all out. So once Stanley is sitting up there on the crane and there are three hundred extras on the ground, all sitting on yellow tires, waiting. No talking. Stanley’s on the crane, about a hundred feet up, and we’ve been sitting there for an hour or so. One of the natives starts to curse him: “Get off the crane.” Terry Needham, a wonderful, great guy [Kubrick’s assistant director], comes over and says to us, “Alright, who said it, listen guys, you’ll never get another chance like this, you’re working with Stanley Kubrick, so watch it. No talking.” Terry goes away, Stanley keeps on working up there, and again someone says, “Get off the fucking crane.” This time Stanley comes down. He clears his throat and he says, “Okay, who said it? Who fucking talked?” And a voice comes from the back: “I am Spartacus.” And another: “I am Spartacus.” Three hundred extras burst out fucking laughing. Stanley too.³⁰

“Why Stanley waited, I never knew,” D’Onofrio says.³¹ Full Metal Jacket was released in June 1987, six months after Oliver Stone’s Platoon. Stone’s movie was a huge moneymaker: it cost only $8 million, with a domestic gross of $138.5 million. Full Metal Jacket, which cost $17 million, grossed $38 in its first two months of release. This was not bad at all, but coming on the heels of Stone’s massive hit hurt Full Metal Jacket.

Kubrick and Stone in fact argue against each other, with Stone providing the traditional Hollywood catharsis that Kubrick refuses. Kubrick’s movie is an anti-Platoon: think of the portentous voice-over in Stone’s film, or the too easily iconic depiction of Elias (Willem Dafoe) as a Christ figure shot by the Vietcong, arms stretched out as if on the cross. Stone’s taste for the grandiose contrasts with Kubrick’s understated manner, both satirical and sensitive.

In place of the giant heroic-scale dramas in Platoon, Apocalypse Now, or Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978), Full Metal Jacket is about a sheepish, regular-sized character. Significantly, Joker looks steadily at what he does as he kills the sniper. We have moved from Pyle’s insane glare to Animal Mother’s thousand-yard stare to Joker’s newly mature eyes, which he keeps open. Yet the epilogue, with its too-plain claim to happy life, suggests Joker’s retreat from his act of slaughter.

Kubrick’s final movie, Eyes Wide Shut, will also be about looking. It presents another version of the boyish hero who, like Joker, is not sure how much he dares to see, or how much he wants to know. Like Full Metal Jacket, Eyes Wide Shut is about coming to maturity, and in both films Kubrick asks how a free grown-up mind reckons with what happened, what it did and what it saw.