Lee Ermey & "the World of Shit" in _Full Metal Jacket_ (was Re: Breakfast of Champions)

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Sun Sep 19 12:49:04 PDT 1999


jordan wrote:
>I think that another excellent example of this can be found in
>Louis Malle's "Murmur of the Heart" (http://us.imdb.com/Title?0067778)
>when Laurent is left with his pal after being an alterboy at a
>Catholic service and is asked by his mischevous friend if he wants
>to munch on some leftover wafers -- the bad old priest has left
>them alone to clean up -- and he replies: to blaspheme means you
>still believe.

Interestingly, the above also serves as an unintended comment on the overall theme of the film: incest and the so-called Oedipus triangle. The film comes with a proverbial whore with a heart of gold, I may add.


>Does Kubrick not let Modine's character off the hook because it's
>impossible or simply as a dig on Altman's attempt to let the MASH
>crew off the hook? Clearly Zizek thinks they still believe.

Perhaps Zizek didn't get it quite right about _Full Metal Jacket_. It may be that former US Marines Drill Instructor R. Lee Ermey (who plays Sgt. Hartman) got the last laugh (despite the fact that his character gets destroyed by his own creation in the film). Perhaps the distance between 'ideology' and a 'rich human person beneath it' that Zizek speaks of as the very work of ideology is in part provided through the self-consciously over-the-top performance of Lee Ermey: "Ermey told one interviewer that a drill instructor is an actor anyway: 'Nobody can be that nasty'" (Norman Kagan, _The Cinema of Stanley Kubrick_, pg. 217). Lee Ermey was also quoted as saying in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle:

***** ...nobody's going to convince me Kubrick hasn't made a great war movie, and an accurate one. If I thought there was a hint of bullshit that was against the war in Vietnam, if I'd thought he was making an antiwar film, I would've had nothing to do with the thing.... (Mike Felker, "Back to Vietnam," _Jump Cut_ no. 33, pg. 29) *****

Joker says in the end (after his shooting of the female Vietnamese Communist soldier): "I'm in a world of shit, but I'm alive and I am not afraid." (Remember that neither Ermey nor his character Sgt. Hartman ever said otherwise.) And whether viewers hear this as a remark that is expressive of a living death of Joker and damns American militarism & imperialism entirely depends on the interpretive frameworks that each viewer brings to the film, since there is no alternative worldview represented by it.

Yoshie



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