R lee ermey casket1/16/2024 ![]() ![]() The trick of “Full Metal Jacket” is that it draws on “counterculture” attitudes only to disarm them. It’s a film that mutates and evolves in tone and outlook as it goes along. ![]() But “Full Metal Jacket” is one of my favorite films (I’ve seen it dozens of times, and went to see it every day for a week when it first came out), and what I think a lot of people - even Kubrick fans - don’t understand about the film is that it’s not nearly as acerbic and cynical about war as many believe. If it sounds like I’m turning Hartman into, you know, a good guy, then that too may strike you as a little insane. He may seem like a lunatic, but that’s because he’s training these men to do something insane. Hartman starts off as a stylized figure, a satirical gung-ho American fascist out of Kurt Vonnegut, but the key to Ermey’s performance is that we like Hartman, and grow to respect him (sort of), in the same way that the recruits do. Ermey’s Hartman is nothing if not an equal-opportunity hater, with a weirdly liberated quality to his homophobia ( “I’ll bet you’re the kind of guy that would f-k a person in the ass and not even have the goddamn common courtesy to give him a reach-around!”).Īfter a while, his tough-nut pensées begin to add up to something, a vision that says: If these words hurt you, then what are sticks and stones - and guns and grenades - going to do? Steel yourself put your emotions on ice kill your self-pity or you won’t survive. Yet the more you listened to it, the more you realized that his herky-jerky monologue of abuse was so mesmerizing because it expressed…a worldview. Hartman was the drill sergeant as apocalyptic insult comic. “You’re so ugly you could be a modern-art masterpiece!” “What is your major malfunction, numbnuts? Didn’t your mommy and daddy show you enough attention when you were a child?” “I want that head so sanitary that the Virgin Mary herself would be proud to go in there and take a dump!” “I will give you three seconds, exactly three f-king seconds, to wipe that stupid grin off your face or I will gouge out your eyeballs and skullf-k you!” Much of it, of course, was scabrously funny. He wrote almost all his own dialogue, improvising dozens of hours of flamboyantly hostile basic-training patter, and the result sounded like the world’s most obscene graffiti turned into redneck grunt poetry. It didn’t take Kubrick long to realize that no actor could match the found-object, lower-depths-of-the-Marines quality that Ermey brought. He waged a campaign for it, showing Stanley Kubrick an instructional video he’d made as a kind of demo tape. Marine Corps staff sergeant, was originally hired as a technical adviser on “Full Metal Jacket,” and it was totally his idea to take over the role of Sgt. And what words they were! The fiendishly over-the-top threats and insults flew out of Ermey’s mouth from moment one, and they were more than just “colorful.” They were voluptuous in their baroque sadism, their dirty purplish fusion of joy and hate.
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