psy·cho·pa·thy
1. a mental disorder in which an individual manifests amoral and antisocial behavior, lack of ability to love or establish meaningful personal relationships, extreme egocentricity, failure to learn from experience, etc.
One of the fundamental issues of humanity is how we justify the use of violence and hostility for furthering personal or societal goals. We seem to be imbued from birth with the sense that any use of violence for personal gain, such as robbery and mugging, is inherently evil and unacceptable. However, as the perpetrator and victim grow in scale from personal to communal, the issue becomes more and more clouded. While street fights are looked down upon, we seem all too willing to engage in full-scale spectacles of carnage known as war. At what point in the expansion, then, does killing become justified, and what methods are acceptable? What about the methods with which we convince others to engage in aggression? Stanley Kubrick tackles both of these questions in his film Full Metal Jacket. In the film, he presents the stories of various men in the United States military before and during their involvement in the Vietnam War. Over the course of the film, we observe the ways in which each of them react to the prospect of being forced to remove all traces of super-ego from their system and succumb to a world where they make a living by killing other people. The military machine achieves this goal by subjecting its recruits to a psychologically and physically rigorous training camp so radically different from normal life that it nearly destroys all shreds of humanity present in the soldiers. Kubrick accentuates this message through a palpable imbalance between ethos, pathos, and logos to emphasize the dehumanizing elements of the military lifestyle. In the film, militaristic logos is over-exaggerated in such an ironic manner that the argument against military structure and indoctrination becomes a pathetic appeal.
Full Metal Jacket is notably divided into two distinct sections, each analyzing a different aspect of the military lifestyle and how it dehumanizes all participants. The first half looks at how boot camp and military training go about removing all human emotions from the trainees through the story of a private nicknamed “Gomer Pyle” (after the character on The Andy Griffith Show who was a dim-witted, well-intentioned farm boy who eventually enlisted in the marines). Pyle begins the film as the stereotypical “fat kid” who can’t seem to do anything right, but as the drill sergeant becomes more and more frustrated with his incompetence and increases his punishments, things begin to go horribly wrong for all involved. The key catalytic moment occurs when the sergeant decides that the best way to motivate “Private Pyle” is to punish the other soldiers instead of Pyle himself. This angers the other soldiers to the point where they beat him with bars of soap wrapped in towels in the middle of the night, even convincing the innocent Private “Joker,” who has been assigned as Pyle’s mentor, to join in. This turns Pyle psychopathic: he begins talking to his rifle, and becomes completely focused on military discipline to the point of secluding himself from his fellow platoon members. On the last day of training, he loads his rifle “Charlene” full of live rounds and shoots the Sergeant in the chest, and then commits suicide.
Pyle’s (and, consequently, Kubrick’s) focus on the logic-based mindset of the armed forces is what first warns the audience of the dangers of militarism. Upon first viewing it would seem that the overwhelming use of white, sterile environments and repetitive scenes of marching and chanting in unison would hint at an emotionless logos-driven rhetoric (As the Sergeant says, “You will not laugh, you will not cry, you will learn by the numbers”). The lives of the marines are detailed in quotidian monotony; they are simply numbers to an emotionless construct, focused all too highly on the ultimate goal at the expense of its own health and well-being. This instability and heartless discipline is the source of Kubrick’s discontent, the distaste with the military machine which pervades the movie and is the ultimate end of his argument. This argument is made most drastically through the first half of the film, through the tragic tale of Private Pyle.
What makes Pyle’s story so haunting and disturbing is not necessarily the plot itself, although the plot is certainly disconcerting, but rather the stark imbalance of the three rhetorical devices: ethos, pathos, and logos. The film almost completely abandons any use of ethos (other than the portrayal of Joker as a mostly kind and moral character), and only uses logos in a decidedly ironic manner, to the point where scenes of logos become inherently pathos-based. Kubrick has, through Pyle’s (and later Joker’s) story, planted in the audience’s mind the concept that the logos of war is something to be lamented and avoided at all cost, appealing to the emotions of the audience. However, these scenes are not only used with heavy-handed irony, exaggerated to the point where it makes the viewer uncomfortable to see such monotony and mindlessness, but also to provide stark contrast against the melodramatic moments such as the night beating scene and Pyle’s final meltdown. By first lulling the audience into an emotionless, logos-driven void, and then throwing in disturbing scenes of complete pathos, the dramatic scenes become all the more vivid. Kubrick uses this amazingly effective technique to drive home his strongest arguments once he has the audience in the palm of his hands: that war is an inherently cruel and dehumanizing machine, through which all participants are fundamentally corrupted into committing unjustifiable actions.
Once the narrative progresses to the second half of the movie, located in Vietnam, the tone of the movie changes slightly but maintains Kubrick’s signature use of long stretches of content without much emotion alternating against scenes of intense melodrama. Although the progression of the second half of the movie is not as cataclysmic and therefore not as heavy-handed as the first half, it is essentially the same story. The main character of this portion is Joker, who was Pyle’s mentor and is now a military reporter who, following the Tet Offensive, has been moved to front-line combat alongside his friend Cowboy. While Pyle of the first half of the film starts completely incapable and ends up going off the deep end into complete psychopathy, Joker starts as a more human and identifiable character, which makes his subtle transformation into a killer more subconsciously disconcerting.
The role of the cold drill sergeant from the first half of the film is now replaced by two characters. The first is a gunner on the helicopter that takes Private Joker to the action, shooting indiscriminately into a field full of North Vietnamese civilians, saying that any who run will die, and any who are still are “well trained.” This door gunner is the most purely psychopathic character in the whole movie; he shows a comically (and therefore shockingly) complete absence of any sort of empathy for any other person involved in the war effort. Again, Kubrick again shows that his absence of pathos is something to be pitied by cutting to multiple shots of our lead character, Joker, in complete disgust. The second is a more prominent character nicknamed “Animal Mother.” Animal Mother is the quintessential heartless soldier, who believes that the only worthwhile aspect of war is victory, which must come at any price. Indeed, his helmet reads “I AM BECOME DEATH,” a quote from Oppenheimer when reflecting on his contribution to the atomic bomb project. Animal Mother has “become death” in that he has sacrificed his identity, his real name, and consequently his humanity to the military. He is precisely what the United States army wants out of its soldiers, as Joker says in the first half of the film: “The Marine Corps wants killers. The Marine Corps wants to build indestructible men, men without fear.” Whenever Joker is around Animal Mother, he seems both amazed and disgusted: he is amazed at Animal Mother’s ruthless efficiency and military skill, yet disgusted by his sheer lack of compassion or empathy for his enemy, a sure sign of the psychopathy in which war encourages its participants to engage. Yet again, Kubrick is presenting a character so full of military logos that we, like Joker, are to be swayed through pathos to his apparent plight, his lack of a soul.
This contrast between military logic and its dire emotional consequences are present even in the plot points of the time Joker spends in Vietnam. We are constantly exposed to scenes where all participants act in a logical and precise manner, following orders and procedure to the letter, and yet arrive at unacceptable conclusions. Logically, based upon past evidence, there was no reason to believe that there would be an enemy offensive on the Tet holiday. Joker’s unit progresses by the book into their first city, which results in the death of their commander. Once Cowboy takes command, the metaphor is made more evident when they march to the incorrect location, an unacceptable conclusion, where members of the unit are “wasted” by an enemy sniper. Only here does the unit begin to disobey command, to both positive and negative results. While going by the book would require them to retreat from the non-essential map point despite the death of a soldier, the members of the unit are too filled with pathos to let the logos and ethos of military order dissuade them from leaving their friend behind. While at first this decision is catastrophic for the team, costing them yet another member and their commander (Joker’s friend Cowboy), the situation is resolved once the unit finds the sniper and Joker mercy-kills her. As we watch Joker wrestle with the decision of whether or not to kill her, we as an audience are asked the core questions of the film in tandem: is Joker’s decision to kill this woman justified? How did he come to the point where he is able to make such a decision?
Kubrick seems to imply in the scene that the shot is justifiable, and indeed it seems the only truly moral death of the entire film. Each kind of killing is presented throughout the film: militaristic, vengeful, psychopathic, merciful, and suicidal. Military kills are those which the soldiers have been ordered to do, kills for the furthering of political goals. Vengeful kills are murders done in repayment for personal wrongs, like when Pyle kills the Sergeant. Psychopathic kills are those which are done for no true over-arching reason, random kills like those of the helicopter gunner. Merciful kills are those rare instances in which the victim would be worse off alive than dead, and often wishes for death at the hands of the perpetrator. Suicide is obviously any self-inflicted murder. Each of these motivations and styles of killing is presented and then torn down as immoral throughout the film, except for that of the merciful kill. The immorality of the militaristic murders are emphasized through the audience’s knowledge of the ultimate fruitlessness of the Vietnam war, reminding us that all these lives taken in a war which was highly lambasted by the public and generally seen as one of the largest US foreign policy blunders of its history. The vengeful homicide of the sergeant is obviously immoral to the audience. This is specifically displayed by Pyle’s immediate regrets, contributing to his suicide (another kill which seems to have no virtuous achievement), along with the astonishment shown by Joker. The psychopathic helicopter gunner is immediately shown immoral by Joker’s incredulous questioning of his shooting of the women and children. The mercy killing, however, is committed by the only (near-)consistently virtuous character and is done at the request of the victim. Even this moral homicide, however, is considered at length by the protagonist. With this scene, Kubrick is telling us through the ethos established by Joker’s virtuous nature and the pathos of the pleading woman that even the only execution which could be justified in the film is still just barely acceptable. Even perceptibly moral killings are to be approached with hesitation and extreme consideration.
Through this ending sequence especially, Kubrick is showing how even when the soldiers make the humane decision, rejecting the military machine in favor of human bonds, they suffer greatly. The system of war is so entrenchedly evil and inhumane that no heroic decision can salvage them. Although Kubrick would argue that essentially all vengeance kills are not acceptable, he has set up one that is acceptable as one could be, and on top of that the kill a mercy kill, but even still the execution is fundamentally corrupting of the previously clean soul of Joker, the only character who has built up any ethos in the film. As soon as humanity enters into the act of war, all participants both direct and indirect are harmed as a result.
As is evident, Kubrick completely rejects the essential assumption of war: that through acts of evil, greater good can be achieved. When his characters follow the precepts of war, they are killed, and when they disobey, they still suffer. As his characters are trained for war, they are stripped of all things which would make them human, all elements of a soul or a super-ego, turned psychopathic by a system which requires them to kill for the greater good. Whether they end up going ballistic or are simply tarnished by finally having to pull the trigger on an enemy, all are dehumanized by an institution which treats them more as numbers than as people, as elements of logos rather than pathos.
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