Debaser@: Full Metal Jacket

“Personally, I think, uh... they don't really want to be involved in this war. You know, I mean... they sort of took away our freedom and gave it to the, to the gookers, you know. But they don't want it. They'd rather be alive than free, I guess. Poor dumb bastards.”

There’s no way to mentally prepare yourself to see a Kubrick film—it’s going to work on your brain in ways you can’t anticipate. I’d been jonesing to take advantage of the SIFF (Seattle Intl. Film Festival for any out-of-towners) Kubrick series, which was screening some of the director’s best works all month long. I missed out on A Clockwork Orange and 2001: A Space Odyssey, so I made it my beeswax to catch yesterday’s showing of Full Metal Jacket, arguably Kubrick’s most contemporarily relevant work (see above quoted dialogue, for example).

The film was screened with a trailer for Jen-Pierre Melville’s 1963 French New Wave film Les Doulos.

Despite the monophonic sound and occasional grittiness of SIFF’s copy, the film remained as immersive as any of Kubrick’s masterpieces. The verisimilitude of Kubrick's films was accurately summed up as "the impression of complete and utter cinematic dominance" by The Stranger's Andrew Wright. Seeing FMJ on a larger screen also catapulted the beauty of Douglas Milsome’s cinematography into the collective consciousnesses of the audience members.

It’s still potent as all hell, and peppered with amazing performances from actors who would go on to do great things (is that Serenity and Firefly’s Adam Baldwin? Oh man, I forgot he was in this!). Naturally, Vincent D'Onofrio’s Leonard “Gomer Pyle” Lawrence is still a stunning turn, but the common criticism that the film loses its way after Pyle’s suicide is, I feel, unfair. It’s simply a rather jarring switching of gears…the most effective scene in the film isn’t Gomer’s murder/suicide in the bathroom, it’s the shot of the Vietnamese girl lying in a pile of rubble, dying slowly, and imploring the marines to shoot her. She’s staring straight into the camera as she says this, making the audience the target of her imploration. Her words simultaneously expose the primal killing urge and greatest fears of the marines, as embodied by the bloodthirsty soldier “Animal” and our de facto protagonist “Joker”. The enemy is personified in the weakened form before them, begging them for the death they brag about dealing out, and by extension “the shit” that is so initially attractive to the naïve military reporters. And yet, Joker hesitates to shoot. In the film’s first half, he was mentally assaulted until his brain had been refashioned as a cold blooded killer’s, but it was only with hesitation that he could kill the girl.

Before this digresses into a half-cocked attempt at film school heavy analysis (it’s been a year, exactly, since I took a film course) I’ll just say that it’s fascinating stuff, as one might expect from one of The Greatest Directors of All Time and the Second Greatest Movie Ever Made About the Vietnam War.