Male Bonding, Hollywood Orientalism, and the Repression of the Feminine in Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket

SUSAN WHITE Male Bonding, Hollywood Orientalism, and the Repression of the Feminine in Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket Nature was miraculously skilful in concocting excuses, he thought, with a heavy, theatrical contempt. It could deck a hideous creature in enticing apparel. When he saw how she, as a woman beckons, had cozened him out of his home and hoodwinked him into holding a rifle, he went into a rage. He turned in tupenny fury upon the high, tranquil sky. He would have like to have splashed it with a derisive paint. And he was bitter that among all men, he should be the only one sufficiently wise to understand these things. Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (Staííman edition, ch. 10) Full metal jacket was marketed as a traditional war film, basking in the reflected glow ofKubrick's ambiguous reputation as an eccentric genius. Like most war movies, this film is, at least superficially, unconcerned with the representation of women. However, in the Warner Brothers press kit,1 the reviewer David Denby articulates a return of the issue of femininity repressed from the film's manifest content: The first law of moviegoing happiness in the eighties is this: Anticipate nothing. Because if you dream about an important upcoming movie, if you expect it to save your life or even the movie season, the picture will turn out to be Dune or The Arizona Quarterly Volume 44 Number 3, Autumn 1988 Copyright © 1988 by Arizona Board of Regents issN 004-1610 Full Metal Jacket1 2 1 Mosquito Coast or The Mission. Burned, you'll feel like the high school nerd who gets his hands on the class cheerleader only to discover she's wearing falsies. Which serves you right for caring so much about boobs, you boob.2 There is here a curious coincidence between Denby's critical approach and the male fantasies both made available by and powerfully critiqued by this film text—as I hope to begin to make clear in what follows. And yet this passage from Denby's review also, despite itself, echoes a deep suspicion towards the film medium that is one of the most profound meditations carried out by this film: You cannot any longer use film as a simple facilitator of fantasy, especially fantasies about women. If you do, you'll get burned. A detail from Fui! Metaí Jacket: a Vietnamese whore is taken for sex into a gutted movie theater that is advertising a Vietnamese feature as well as a rerun of The Lone Ranger. Like 2001 and Barry Lyndon, Kubrick's Fuíí Metal Jacket divides into two distinct parts, punctuated (in the latter film) by a fade to black and a drastic change of location: from the Parris Island bootcamp which is the setting of the first half of the film, to Da Nang and then Hue City during the 1968 Tet offensive. Both parts feature a time-worn combat film formula—the adaptation of the individual to the demands of a ritualistic male group.' In both cases that adaptation fails spectacularly, though for radically different reasons. In the first instance this failure stems from what is termed, pace 200i's Hal computer, a "major malfunction " in the brain of Private Leonard Lawrence (Vincent D'Onofrio), otherwise known as Private PyIe (as in "Gomer PyIe, U.S. Marine Corps"), who becomes a suicidal maniac at the end of his humiliating bootcamp experience. The second failure of adaptation concerns the film's protagonist, ironically named Private Joker (Matthew Modine) by the foul-mouthed Sergeant Hartman (Lee Ermey) because of his imitation of John Wayne. This reference to John Wayne is hardly a casual one in a movie set during the days when The Green Berets was a gung-ho promotion for the U.S. Marine Corps.4 Clearly, Joker is easily influenced by the movies, despite his semblance of being a free-thinker. At the end of the film Joker is marching into the reddened Vietnamese night, speaking in voiceover of his "homecoming fuck fantasies" and joining in as the troops sing the "Mickey Mouse" theme song after a full day in the urban trenches. Joker is lost in the masses...