The young Marine, played by Matthew Modine, wears a peace button, but his helmet says "Born to kill.''  He does John Wayne imitations, he's a journalist of sorts, and his name, for all practical purposes, is Pvt. Joker.
    Also for all practical purposes, Pvt. Joker is the central character in Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket.  But he's not the hero.  He's just the person we follow through boot camp, to the corrupt streets of urban Vietnam and, finally, to the bloody battle for Hue City during the Tet offensive of 1968.
    Just what Pvt. Joker is all about is the chief mystery of Full Metal Jacket, one of the strangest, coldest and most challenging -- and suspenseful -- movies anyone has yet made about Vietnam.  Although he comes on as a hip young kid who challenges the tough gunnery sergeant (Lee Ermey) and seems to be a rebel against something, he's quickly taught to keep a rein on his opinions, and soon you wonder if he really believes in any of them.
    He's also no use at all when it comes to standing up for the platoon's misfit private, a smiling, inept fat boy named Leonard (Vincent D'Onofrio).  Pvt. Joker has been assigned to help this kid, but he keeps his distance and actually winds up participating in the brutal hazing of Leonard, who starts talking to his rifle when he can find no friends in the platoon.
    This section of the movie, with the sergeant barking at his closely shaved, nearly bald soldiers and referring to them as maggots, is probably the least compromising account of the process of the making of a soldier that
the movies have ever given us.  There's none of the sentimentality of Jack Webb's The D.I. or Clint Eastwood's Heartbreak Ridge to soften the dehumanization or make it acceptable.
    By the time they're finished with basic training, the soldiers resemble the warring apes in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Their training scenes, which are photographed, edited, paced and even scored like the gladiator-school scenes in Kubrick's Spartacus, recall the warning in that film that gladiators do not make friends of other gladiators.
    At one point the gunnery sergeant cites Lee Harvey Oswald and Charles Whitman as examples of "motivated Marines,'' and the soldiers are driven to adopt the attitude that "my rifle is my best friend.''  The first third of the movie ends with a grimly ironic shocker, also foreshadowed by the gladiator-school scenes in Spartacus.
    Then Kubrick makes an abrupt shift to a Vietnam city, where Pvt. Joker walks through the streets to the tune of a 1960s Nancy Sinatra hit, with an emphasis on its lyrics, "you been a-messin' where you shouldn't a been a-messin'.''  It's almost a different movie -- looser, friendlier, funnier -- but eventually it also turns lethal as the soldiers find themselves drawn into a deadly combat situation.
    Full Metal Jacket isn't really a satire or a conventional war drama, although it's clearly the work of the same man who made perhaps the two greatest American war movies: Dr. Strangelove and Paths of Glory.  Like the Vietnam War itself, it's both appalling and appallingly funny.
    "Anyone who runs is a VC,'' says a smiling helicopter gunner who shoots at almost anything that moves. "Anyone who stands still is a disciplined VC.''  There isn't much distance between that and some of the real pronouncements that came out of the war.  (Remember "It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it''?)
    Like Francis Ford Coppola, who used only television images of Vietnam in Gardens of Stone, Kubrick plays with the idea of the conflict as a media event, a ghastly farce/tragedy that could be called Vietnam: The Movie.  At one point the soldiers even line up for the news cameras, and everyone adopts a role that doesn't fit the reality of the situation.
    Joker's hip playfulness turns sour and inadequate as he faces real anguish, real death.  Leonard is nicknamed Gomer Pyle, but without friends this jolly hick becomes a killer.  There's even something not quite convincing about "Animal Mother'' (Adam Baldwin), who wears a helmet that declares "I am become death'' and resembles the near-psychotic soldier Tom Berenger played in Platoon.  No one seems quite right; it's as if they haven't
been typecast well; and that's clearly the intention of Kubrick and his excellent cast.
    Kubrick worked on the script with Gustav Hasford, whose novel, The Short-Timers, was the inspiration for the movie, and Michael Herr, who wrote Dispatches and the narration for Apocalypse Now.  It's never as accessible or as comforting as the script for Platoon, which ends with hope and the promise of an end to suffering.  Partly for that reason it's not likely to achieve the commercial success of Platoon.
    But with all due respect to Platoon, which is a fine and necessary film, Full Metal Jacket seems to me to be the more challenging, serious, disturbing work.  As always with Kubrick, it's more about human nature than it is about a particular war or event.  It will still seem gutsy and relevant when Vietnam is as distant as the War of the Roses.
    And like most Kubrick films, it is filled with images -- the doll-like movements of a dying woman's head, a boot camp drained of normal colors, flickering lights in the bombed-out wasteland of Vietnamese buildings, the glowering stares of men pushed to extremes -- that are impossible to erase.
 

Copyright Seattle Times Jun 26, 1987