One of the most noticed Stanley Kubrick trademarks is a scene in a bathroom. I haven’t seen too much about why there is always a scene in the bathroom, but even more importantly I haven’t seen people comment about what goes on in the bathroom. Different activities have different meanings. Urination (A Clockwork Orange, Eyes Wide Shut) is a sexually arrogant act. It’s the one bathroom activity in Kubrick’s films that is done with an open door. Bathing (Spartacus, Lolita, Barry Lyndon, A Clockwork Orange again, The Shining, a lot of films really) is hedonistic bourgeois indulgence. It’s an indulgence and an escape; a bath is a safe place. Kubrick is not beyond exploiting the bath’s mythological, symbolic connotations as the unexplored subconscious (the subversion of Aphrodite iconology in The Shining) or the womb (Star Child Alex in A Clockwork Orange, more on that at a later date). Bathing is mostly a private activity, you see; it is sometimes interrupted, but when it is interrupted the invasion of privacy has significance (James Mason’s interrupted bath, for example, had purely narrative and character-based implications. He regarded it as just another humiliation to add to the pile.) Defecation is even more private, so private that it has never been interrupted by a Kubrick character. To defecate (Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey) is human, you see. Everybody has to take a shit, but to shit is shameful. The perfect human being would not shit; he would be beyond shitting. To shit is to show human limitation. The HAL computer doesn’t shit, does it? Does the Star Child shit? I sincerely doubt it!

The few readings I have seen about the bathroom seem to be curiously shit-centric, but again I argue that Kubrick’s films are too rich to just limit us to this simple misanthropic conceit. The bathroom leitmotif allows Kubrick to make a consistent comment about human society and nature, and cement his auteurism. Full Metal Jacket is significant in that nobody defecates, urinates or bathes through the whole movie. Defecation shows physical limitation, bathing psychological limitation, and urination is what supreme beings do. Since none of the privates in the film urinate, then this means that they are not beyond defecation and bathing. They are not idealized Star Children; they are still “worms,” “maggots,” “pieces of shit.” The effect of war in Full Metal Jacket, however, is dehumanization in the full sense of the word. They aren’t dehumanized in that they evolve into Star Children, and they aren’t dehumanized in that they de-evolve into apes. They are dehumanized into ciphers. The cause for Pvt. Gomer Pyle to go insane and kill himself and Sgt. Hartman is mostly labeled as just plain dehumanization. I’m going to be more specific. As he blows his brains out while sitting on a toilet, it seems that the poor guy was suffering from constipation. He sat there broken-hearted, he came to shit but only farted. And so suicide was in fact the sanest response.

On my first, maybe first two viewings of Full Metal Jacket I sympathized with the popular view that the Parris Island segment was brilliant but the rest of the film was just padding, rote and exhausting. I still liked the film a lot; a third of brilliance was enough for me. But it wasn’t one of Kubrick’s best films and it didn’t rank with the best of the Vietnam films. I still feel that way, but my opinion towards the film has improved significantly. Like Barry Lyndon, which was another Kubrick film I had a hard time with, you really need to see it twice as it really is an “anti-movie.” I wondered after my first viewing or so if the bile that people had against the film was just because the Parris Island segment kicked so much ass. It has arguably two of the greatest performances to ever grace a screen, Vincent D’Onofrio’s Private Pyle and R. Lee Ermey’s Sgt. Hartman. Their very casting has become legend. D’Onofrio gained a record 70 pounds for his role, and somehow played Thor that same year in Adventures in Babysitting (the very first movie I ever remember seeing in the theater, by the by). Ermey was hired on as a consultant for the actor playing the drill instructor. He produced a video where Kubrick’s assistant pelted him with oranges and tennis balls as he went on a tirade in which he never repeated himself or stopped talking. He didn’t even flinch. Aside from Peter Sellers, Ermey was the only actor that Kubrick ever encouraged to improvise dialogue. When asked about his infamous love for multiple takes, Kubrick said that he only did multiple takes because his actors were never prepared. Ermey only had to do four, five, sometimes only two takes because he always knew his lines and could nail the scene from the get-go. Kubrick made him sound like he was one of the greatest actors that he ever worked with.

The kind of acting that Ermey and D’Onofrio do is the kind that Kubrick was most fond of, the kind of acting he got Jack Nicholson and George C. Scott to do. Over-the-top doesn’t begin to describe it; it’s baroque. Nicholson described Kubrick’s criticism of his early takes as, “That’s realistic, but it’s not interesting.” That’s the kind of acting that Kubrick likes, and that is the kind of acting that Kubrick fans like. On a whole, the Parris Island sequence is classic Kubrick. The charms are hardly character-based; it’s intriguing as a work of pure cinema. It has an abstract quality to it. After the Parris Island sequence though, the movie goes smarmy as all fuck. There are a few scattered moments of true cinematic brilliance. The last few shots, of the soldiers wandering a war wasteland during magic hour, are truly haunting. Some of the music selections are equally chilling: The Dixie Cups’ “Chapel of Love,” The Rolling Stones’ “Paint It, Black,” Vivian Kubrick’s score (under the pseudonym of Abigail Mead) is excellent.

But then there are moments where Kubrick doesn’t seem to be trying very hard at all: “Wooly Bully,” anybody? And all the characters do is wisecrack, and they aren’t even good wisecracks; they sound like wisecracks written by a recluse who doesn’t ever go out into society. The characters talk about how the gooks would never attack during the Tet holiday (chuckle chuckle), and how they hear that Walter Cronkite is about to announce that the war is officially unwinnable. My generation knows next to nothing about Vietnam; high school history class and even introductory college history classes stop at World War II. You have to take another class to find out what happened after World War II. The United States has too much history! Still, I always peeked ahead in the high school textbook. Full Metal Jacket seems to be written by somebody who peeked ahead in the high school textbook. Somewhat surprising for a Kubrick film, as his reputation suggests that he researches his every project thoroughly and would read every book about Vietnam he could get his hands on in order to create a richly deep reality. The hero of the piece, Private Joker, does a really lame John Wayne impersonation all through the movie. I could not believe at any point during the film that these soldiers would talk like they do in this movie. The dialogue is written and uncomfortable in the mouths of the actors; it’s painfully inorganic.

Post-Parris Island, Full Metal Jacket does indeed seem to legitimize all those classic Kubrick criticisms, that he knows more about things than people. There is an angle though that we are missing. The Rosetta stone to solving Full Metal Jacket, to “getting” it, was provided to me by Mark L. Leeper: “Full Metal Jacket is not the Vietnam War the grunts saw. That was Platoon. It isn't the war the Cambodians saw. That was The Killing Fields. The Vietnam War the middle-aged right wing saw was The Green Berets. If I ever figure out from whose viewpoint was seen in The Deer Hunter or Apocalypse Now, I'll let you know. Full Metal Jacket is the Vietnam War that the college kids who didn't go (and a few who did) saw.” Yes, yes and yes. YES! This explains and justifies everything that happens post-Parris Island and why it doesn’t seem to “work.”

The film isn’t able to turn its soldiers into hypermasculine icons, into mythological superheroes the way that Platoon and Apocalypse Now did. Like Kubrick, Oliver Stone and Francis Ford Coppola are egghead intellectuals. Both Apocalypse Now and Platoon were shot in the jungle, and the filmmakers instilled introspective, haunted, masculine leads as our guides: Martin Sheen in Apocalypse and his son Charlie in Platoon. Unlike Kubrick and Coppola, Stone fought in ‘Nam but he did it for a spoiled white boy reason: he wanted to commit suicide. Stone instilled a grungy “reality” (for lack of a better word) to Apocalypse Now, a film that he admired greatly, but he kept Coppola’s vision of Vietnam as Hell. Like Apocalypse Now, Platoon is a romantically pessimistic view of the Vietnam conflict. It’s like an old worn-down Vietnam Vet on the street lamenting how he will never again feel the sensation of a chunk of burning metal being pried out of his body with a Bowie knife. ARGGHHH!! I absolutely adore both Platoon and Apocalypse Now, they’re MOVIES for GUYS who LIKE MOVIES. Know what I’m saying? The romanticism, the cinematic visceral horror of Platoon and Apocalypse Now is subverted in Full Metal Jacket. Oh, Kubrick CAN make a movie like that; he proved it with The Shining and A Clockwork Orange. But he hasn’t with Full Metal Jacket.

Two famous scenes are brought into the movie from Apocalypse Now. The “Ride of the Valkyries” sequence is recreated, only without the opera music and without the explosions. It’s just a lone wacko shooting at Vietnamese from a helicopter. The lone wacko spouts off some of that stilted dialogue. When asked how he can shoot women and children, he responds with the cliché: “Easy, you just don’t lead them too much. Ain’t war hell?” Well, in Full Metal Jacket it certainly is not. The “Ride of the Valkyries” sequence got us high on mayhem; it was sad and horrific, but was simultaneously exhilarating and hilarious. This same scene in Full Metal Jacket is made dry and lifeless; it seems like moralistic violence. (Lifeless moralistic violence in a Stanley Kubrick film?) The film also re-enacts the filmmaking scene of Apocalypse Now. In Apocalypse Now a platoon of troops marches into the fury while a filmmaker, none other than Francis Ford Coppola himself, directs them to just keep walking and to not look into the camera. We see Francis Ford Coppola MAKING Apocalypse Now while he is INSIDE Apocalypse Now. Coppola doesn’t want space-time to implode on itself like it does at the end of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona; the moment is fleeting and insignificant, Coppola doesn’t make a big deal about it. It exists only to add another surreal touch to the insanity, telling us that we are in Hieronymus Bosch’s “Hell,” that the devil has a grandiose and sick sense of humor. In Full Metal Jacket it feels like it had been scheduled, pre-ordained and deliberate. That old complaint about Kubrick: inorganic and lifeless. The soldiers talk directly to the documentary crew, and thus to us, spouting cutesy-pie dialogue. The hero, Private Joker, steals a joke from Woody Allen (I’ve since learned), saying how he wanted to go to Vietnam to see the world, meet interesting people and kill them. This sequence seems to confirm our suspicions that the film is a bitter cynical work that is about being late in the Vietnam war movie game. It’s a copy of a copy, about boys and not men.

The characters quote and imitate John Wayne, but he is never properly evoked. The film isn’t about John Wayne, it’s about boys who idealize John Wayne and think that they are going to be him. Matthew Modine was cast as Private Joker in the film. Anthony Michael Hall was actually Kubrick’s original choice, but he could not tolerate Kubrick’s filmmaking style and quit. Kubrick’s vision for his narrator and protagonist was clearly in direct opposition to the Charlie and Martin Sheens. He even puts Modine in glasses. Joker’s buddy is the similarly nerdish Cowboy played by Arliss Howard. These are not manly men. We do get a few biceps with Private Eightball who pulls out his allegedly “just big enough” penis for a Vietnamese hooker, and especially with Adam Baldwin’s Animal Mother, but I found them to have a really shy insecurity and an adolescent morality. Yes, Apocalypse Now and Platoon also showed us that many of the troops in Vietnam were just boys, but they also had real, hard soldiers who seemed to have been in the shit for years. All we see in Full Metal Jacket is boys. The men in the movie are drill sergeants, newspaper editors, voices on the other end of a radio. One sounds like a football coach (“How about getting with the program? Why don't you jump on the team and come on in for the big win?”). These seem to be the positions for privates to move up to, provided that they do well on the battlefield.

Although Kubrick has often been accused of being a misogynist, as somebody who hates women, Full Metal Jacket could be argued to be the first feminazi war movie. The soldiers in the film strive to become men, but we don’t see any men in the picture, and so masculinity is a sick idealized myth. The film’s conclusion, where Joker encounters a wounded Vietnamese sniper, and executes her was always terribly unsatisfying to me. I think I get it now: it’s supposed to be unsatisfying. Joker is seeing it as breaking his cherry; he thinks that he is becoming hardened, is becoming a warrior. He’s not. In the next scene he sings the Mickey Mouse Club song with his fellow Marines. There is no growth here. They are still little smartasses. The scene has a real, solid significance however, and not an ironic one. Joker is entering a decaying building, he is in his subconscious, and he encounters this woman. Before she dies she mumbles something. When asked what she is saying, Joker replies that she is praying. Now not only is she a woman, she is an Asian woman; she’s symbolic of “earth mother” spirituality then. In executing her, Joker is executing this part of himself. The result is not one of a tauter masculine being, but of an empty shell. Kubrick is the proverbial sweater-wearing lesbian saying, “You men need to tuck away your penises and surrogate penises (guns), because you will never get anywhere with them. Masculinity is a myth and a dead end.”

Joker says during the Parris Island segment that the Marines do not want machines. They want killers. The conceit sounds Nietzschean. Like 2001 it states that HAL is not the ideal; the ideal is the Star Child. However, it’s a vision that is never fully realized by these Marines. They aren’t the Star Children, you see; they are the 2001 civilization before the transformation to the Star Child. Change is violent. In 2001, mankind was cutting the apron strings to its material machine-like mother, in order to evolve into a greater being. A being greater than mind and body, a being of pure spirit. In The Shining mankind was fed up with his comfortable static existence and, failing to evolve into a greater spiritual being, de-evolved to the ape through murder. This is regrettable, but certainly preferable to the static existence. The violence in Full Metal Jacket accomplishes little. Those who kill in the film only move sideways. To be a Man (masculine man) is to be an angel is to be an ape. To be of the 2001 civilization is to be marginal.

Private Pyle is a curious case in that he does not fit in with the rest of the Marines, and he doesn’t really fit in with the film’s universe as a whole. He resembles Jack Torrance to a degree. We do get the glowering eyebrows, et cetera. But Torrance’s digression into insanity is seen as an almost ethical decision; he’s regaining his usurped masculinity and moving out of the hell of marriage and children. We are meant to see Pyle as more of a HAL (for lack of a better example) or a military product gone haywire. I don’t feel comfortable calling him a machine, as I think it illustrates that he has become a true killer, a real Marine and the very ideal that Joker wishes to achieve. He malfunctions, I believe, because the Marines don’t REALLY want killers. A true killer kills for himself, not for God, or for America. The prototypical American (Nietzschean) hero is an individualist, one that follows his own rules; he is not the product or willing participant of the war machine. As good boys from good families that more or less fit comfortably into the system, Private Joker and the other Marines could never become the killer that Pyle is. Joker’s narration in the last shot, saying that he is “in a world of shit” (quoting some of Pyle’s last words), shows a misguided belief that he has become that killer. He hasn’t, of course; he’s still just a four-eyed weakling smartass.

As social criticism, Full Metal Jacket is certainly more than intriguing. What saves the film from criticism that it is utterly gratuitous after Platoon and Apocalypse Now is the knowledge that it is about an utterly gratuitous war. Kubrick seems to be suggesting that “war is dead” post-World War II. That we could never possibly have a decent meaningful war in the state of economic comfort, and with the technological advancements in warfare, that we enjoy today. Vietnam is the ultimate farce in Full Metal Jacket. Kubrick may be the first to successfully reduce it to the level of little boys playing cowboys and Indians. What function does war have anyway? I don’t believe that it can adequately be described as one of defense. The amount of defense that we have severely outweighs the threat that is posed against us. I suppose that we could argue that it serves no purpose anymore, and concepts like immediate foreign threat, altruism and patriotism are instilled in the minds of Americans for no other reason than to help perpetuate the military industry. I think that that belief does get in deeper to what Kubrick is showing us with Full Metal Jacket, that since we don’t have a war of our own to fight, we need to find one. But it sounds goofy; I’m not entirely convinced that our values and psyche are really at the whim of a power elite. Rather, I think that war exists out of our fear of stasis. I don’t think Americans are afraid of change at all, I think that they look for it. War then exists for the same reason that religion does: because we don’t want to believe that we are finished yet (whereas the truth, I think Kubrick is saying, is that we are).

The Shining feels more prophetic than Full Metal Jacket; it’s basically a picture about Abu Ghraib, September 11, Gulf War Part Deux, Dubya et cetera. War has gotten back its pulp quality in recent years, its ruthlessness. Not only does The Shining feel particularly topical, but so do Apocalypse Now and Platoon. In contrast, Full Metal Jacket is positively Reagan-esque. It was produced during the rein of a 64-year-old former actor who saw the elimination of Communism as his retirement project. It sees Vietnam in those terms, as literally a small chapter in a truly Cold War. Never has war seemed so positively meaningless and banal.

That Full Metal Jacket is brilliant, I find inarguable, but Kubrick is giving us harsh truths as opposed to ideals. The film is the real ideological synthesis between the atheism of the horror genre and of the comedy genre. Kubrick is effectively lamenting the meaninglessness of the human dance, while winkingly pretending to peddle it. There is a thick veneer of irony to the film, but it’s worth wading through. It’s challenging and thought-provoking. For my money, Full Metal Jacket is Kubrick’s iciest, sourest and most cerebral picture. It could then be argued, I suppose, that it’s his most “Kubrick-esque.” But the question as to if it’s one of the greatest war movies, or if it’s one of Kubrick’s best; that is more arguable for me.

It seems to me that any film about Vietnam, or any war film viewed in light of Gulf War Part Deux, must at least recognize the sadomasochistic appeal of violence (as Kubrick’s other films did, and other Vietnam films did) to be genuinely successful. Francois Truffaut famously said that it is impossible to make a successful antiwar film because all war films, by nature, make war look like fun. Well, recognizing that making war is fun, and that it is exhilarating and frightening and intoxicating, and you can’t imagine what it’s like to be shot or use morphine or to take revenge on the battlefield, et cetera, is recognizing something essential to the human experience. War is an atmosphere of moral, emotional and visceral extremes (fun doesn’t begin to describe it); to deny so is a lie.

And yet, while I’m not sure I can say this about the Vietnam conflict, a good part of me sees the Bin Laden/Hussein mess as one of utter banality. These aren’t the next Hitlers, they are just simple thugs. We’re not that much more past simple thugs either. At times the whole thing (indeed) seems like that scene in 2001 where one tribe of apes beats the other with a bone. Comparing it to World War II seems like we’re grasping at straws; there just isn’t anything like that happening. Even September 11 doesn’t seem to have very much significance; it was just a bleep in space-time. It was intended to be a symbolic castration, to dress down American arrogance, but I think I agree with Bush’s otherwise especially banal September 11, 2001 speech when he said: “Terrorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundation of America. These acts shatter steel, but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve.” His one-year anniversary speech paid the event more significance, of course, but this passage suggests that the event is tragic but ultimately insignificant. America will heal. If terrorist attacks cannot touch the foundation of America, whether to reform it or harm it, then they cannot have any lasting impact. It doesn’t seem like America is creating any real mythology with this.

Going back to Full Metal Jacket, something certainly needs to be said about the drained hollow feeling of it all. The whole thing doesn’t make me sad or angry, just depressed, and I certainly think that I would have felt different if I experienced any of this firsthand. And so there you go, I suppose, war as seen from the college kids who stayed home. It’s not the definitive or best perspective on the subject, but certainly we can’t knock it for existing.