Kubrick on Vietnam

Rating: 9/10 (20 March 2000)

(Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon.)
Was this "the best war movie ever made" as the dust jacket proclaims, or just a contrived bit of entertainment, seductive, but ultimately paper thin? Or maybe this was anti-war propaganda with chuckles from a bleeding heart liberal? Looking back and seeing it again some fifteen years later (and about fifteen other years after the fact) one can say, "no" and "no" and "something like that, thank you." The sheer waste and stupidity of war is gotten across, and Kubrick is to be thanked for that. Comparing Full Metal Jacket to some other war movies, say, the pretentious Saving Private Ryan (1998), we note that it may be the funniest war movie ever made. (But then one recalls Mister Roberts (1955).)
Vietnam was a lovely war, as all wars are, kind of like America's loss of innocence. One would suppose we'd lost our cherry long ago at Gettysburg or somewhere thereabouts, but we proved in Vietnam it wasn't so. We helped to pile them high at Ypres and Verdun, but that was a limited engagement, and we learned jack-zero. And in World War II we really had no choice. But in Vietnam JFK and LBJ thought with a little use of force we could stem the tide of a feared ideology, not yet knowing it would start to die of its own accord, and so we sent off a few of our youngest and brightest as a small price to pay. Well, maybe not our brightest, just our unluckiest or perhaps just those stupid enough to go ("hell no, we won't go!" said some) or poor enough to have no choice. Those who went were mostly "young and dumb and full of come." But, what the hey, wars are always a good way to kill off superfluous males. By the time we figured out we weren't getting any kind of bang for our buck, meaning we could pile them high at Da Nang or anywhere in the Mekong Delta and it wouldn't make a rat's ass worth of difference, it was too late. The body bags were coming home and some of the bro's of conscription age clearly didn't like the fit. They staged a protest or two, and amazingly enough a lot of people saw the wisdom of their position, and we were forced to declare a victory and pull out, this in the heyday of Tricky Dick.
Kubrick recalls those balmy times with boot camp ditties and a whole lot of well expressed jar head jargon to which he adds some amusing audio selections, e.g., Nancy Sinatra's "These Boots were Made for Walking," "Paint It Black" by Rolling Stones, and most appropriately in the classic Kubrick ironic style, the Mickey Mouse Club theme song, "Em-eye-cee, kay-ee-why, em-oh-you-ees-ee! Mickey Mouse! Mickey Mouse!"
Kubrick got the story from the novel The Short Timers by Gustav Hasford, the title referring to those lucky soldiers with only a short time left before rotating back to "the land of the big P.X.'s," the luckiest of whom were "so short" they could "crawl under a rattlesnake's belly with a high hat on."
Best poetic line: the lieutenant is telling Rafterman how to photograph Ann-Margaret, who is coming to entertain the troops, "Take some low shots, but don't make it too obvious. I want to see fur and early morning dew."
By the way, comparing this to Barry Levinson's fine Good Morning Vietnam from the same year, it's interesting to note that two directors independently came up with practically the same treatment of our experience in Vietnam, albeit with a different emphasis. I think they got it right.