A very Kubrickian take on institution of war

Rating: 8/10 (15 March 2007)

Ah, Stanley Kubrick. The man has directed two of my favorite films, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb and Paths of Glory. So I took it upon myself to watch another one of his that I haven't seen yet. Full Metal Jacket is both a funny and disturbing look at the effect of the military on those that serve in it, at least, as far as I can tell.
One thing that I always particularly liked about Kubrick films is they have a wonderful grasp of black humor. Kubrick's direction is always so cold and controlled so that we're always just observing moments. When the funny hits, he doesn't "do" anything to indicate the funny, but rather coolly and dryly observes the absurdity of the moment therein. You can see this frequently in the training sequences where we observe the soldiers repeating the absolutely ridiculous rhetoric of their drill sergeant as though it were nothing. Another way that Kubrick likes to throw in humor in this piece is his often clashing use of old pop songs, which are placed up front in the mix so that they're loud and clear. The songs are clearly non-diegetic since there is often no place for the music to be coming from and the mix indicates it and yet somehow, even though the songs often don't fit lyrically, creating an effect that somewhat distances us from the image, somehow they also all fit together with the image such that you can't actually imagine the film without the music.
The sound mix on the film is also fantastic. It's not fully immersive: there's some element of the mixing that, like the music and the coldly observant camera, that leaves us a little detached from the film, creating a little reflexive space. It works so well with the rest of the elements of the film. It's strange because you'd think the distance created by Kubrick's overall direction would cause you to feel detached from the film, but it actually doesn't... we just watch everything a little differently. The one time that the film's music becomes diegetic is when the soldiers march on after a horrible incident--singing the Mickey Mouse show theme song. Again, a wild contrast of innocence in a place of horror.
I praise the direction, but I can't do the same for the story. It's a bit of a wandering mess. First of all, the structure of the film is basically two separate stories joined together by shared characters. The first half of the film deals with the recruits and their training under a straight-faced angry and somewhat unhinged drill sergeant. We watch as the new recruits are stripped of their individuality and become real Marines. There's a real drama in the relationship of the drill sergeant, "Joker" and "Gomer Pyle", but the story doesn't really seem to go anywhere. When all was said and done with the first half, I just stopped and had to wonder, "So?" The second half deals with the Marines in Vietnam. Here we see the military interact with the local populace, including some disturbing moments where the Marines treat the Vietnamese as sub-human. But because of Kubrick's direction, we actually don't side with them but just watch them and find ourselves in horror. You can see this a little in the Marines' interactions with the prostitutes as well. The fact that everybody finds it okay to bargain over how much a sex act costs and the relative ease of soldiers all sharing the same prostitute draws up a little recoil, at least in me. We also see slices of the hell of war, as people die unexpectedly. Again, many of the deaths are shown without dramatic effect, until near the end. As authority figures die, it's done without any of the expected slow-motion glory-deaths, but rather matter-of-factly. It gets really eerie near the end though, when a Vietcong sniper lies dying and the Marines are observing her. Suddenly, Kubrick steps into the picture and makes us think about the Marines and their enemies by lingering in the moment of her suffering, after she had killed a number of Marines.
But for all the moments that the film puts together so well, it still leaves you with a bit of "so what?" Kubrick observes a lot in this film, but it's hard to find his voice. This might be true of many of Kubrick's films, but it makes me wonder what I'm supposed to take from what I see. Full Metal Jacket, then, to me, is more about the story of the dehumanizing nature of both the military and the war. Joker, our protagonist, stands as our human character, who struggles to stay human in such awful conditions. At the same time, in the end, was there a lesson to be learned? Or are we all just supposed to sigh and continue on like we can't help ourselves? Or maybe that's what we were supposed to think all along? Either way, I found Full Metal Jacket to be quite impressive, even with all of its flaws. There's a lot in it. Good stuff. 8/10.