Full Metal Genre: Stanley Kubrick's Vietnam Combat Movie

Abstract

For over a decade now, Hollywood has been succeeding where Washington consistently failed: namely, in selling Vietnam to American public. To be fair, motion picture industry enjoys a crucial edge. If military's classic mistake is to fight with tactics of last war, moviemaker's decisive prerogative is license to fight same war over and over again. Whatever historical uniqueness of what Time-Life Books calls the Vietnam experience, conventions of Hollywood combat film have proven flexible enough to accommodate America's outcast war even as Vietnam has in turn reinvigorated a moribund Hollywood genre. Released in wake of Oliver Stone's Platoon and sharing marquee space with Hamburger Hill and The Hanoi Hilton, Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket exemplifies Vietnam War film in its mature stage, a stage distinguishing quality is its reliance on cinematic, not historical, experience. The Vietnam film has not yet settled into ripe generic dotage of private eye or western genre, but it has reached point where previous Vietnam films as much as Vietnam memory determine its rough outlines. As with any genre, a recurrent set of visual motifs, narrative patterns, and thematic concerns has emerged. For better and worse, these conventions are immediate and unavoidable referents for Full Metal Jacket, a cinematic usurpation of historical record that reaffirms vital cultural function of genre: to ease division and reconcile conflict through myth. Like Vietnam War Memorial on Washington Mall, Vietnam combat film is occasion for a soothing ritual of atonement and celebration, a screen that reflects back two faces of American regret and pride. That range of reaction is neatly encompassed by Michael Herr and Gustav Hasford, Kubrick's co-screenwriters for Full Metal Jacket. Both were participant-observers in war, Herr as a civilian journalist, Hasford as a combat correspondent for Marines; both wrote estimable accounts of their tours of duty, Herr in crystalline memoir Dispatches (1978) and Hasford in phantasmagorical war novel that serves as source for Kubrick's film, The Short Timers (1979). Herr's book is a kaleidoscopic series of snapshots alternatelysimultaneously-positive and negative. Despite everything, Herr finds Vietnam ground at once immoral and holy, glorious and horrible. Its penultimate image is darkly ironic. A wounded wreck of a war correspondent, crippled in mind and body, raves about impossibility of fulfilling a publisher's mandate to write a book whose purpose would be to once and for all take glamor out of war. He shrieks out a question that antiwar film-makers have agonized over since The Big Parade: Take glamor out of war! I mean how bloody hell can you do that? Hasford supplies answer. Where Herr is sentimental, and mythopoetic, Hasford is searing and ruthless-above all, toward celluloid-sustained image of Men at War. In The Short Timers Hollywood's combat dreams run headlong into Vietnam's charnel reality. Harry S. Truman once said that Marine Corps has a propaganda machine almost equal to Stalin's, observes Information Service Officer in Hasford's book, and crap civilians have seen in Jack Webb's The D.L and Mr. John