Bonus: JUDGE MOVIES 03 – FULL METAL JACKET
FULL METAL JACKET (Stanley Kubrick 1987)
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or,
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"America Brainwashes Its Children Into Becoming Jolly Green Giants with Guns, Spreading Hell on Earth as They Sing Their Favorite Mickey Mouse Songs"
Comments (14)
Listened while also watching Full Metal Jacket instead of last night’s Super Bowl. Seemed appropriate for the celebration of military achievement. 😐
Pretty sure my middle school football coach was inspired by Ermey. If one kid messed up at practice, he’d have to stand and clap while the rest of the team was punished with push-ups. Would make the rest of the team gang up on the fuck-ups. We did the “blood makes the grass grow” chant before games
In the Boots Are Made For Walking scene I'm fairly sure the sex worker is Trans due to her build and the credited name is Papillon (Butterfly) Soo. It would fit with Kubrick's subversive humour and highlights how little the reporter and photographer actually see of the country they are occupying. I enjoyed the podcast but it's pretty obvious that when Joker and the other Marines are being interviewed by the TV crew they are all self aware and giving ironic answers. I'm looking forward to the rest of the series.
Did a rewatch. Joker is such a supreme douchebag. Movie really is the school shooter explanation guide !
Thank you for this awesome bonus content. I dunno if this is possible but if you could get you and your brother, and maybe like one of the Chapo movie buffs (Matt or will) to do a final recap on themes or maybe just discussing favorite scenes or just whatever. It’d be a pleasure to listen to with your or the Chapo boys added historical/cultural dimension to the recap. Or shit, even if you straight up did a paid commentary tracks for each movie with the extended universe crew, it’d gladly pay for something I could sync up to a rewatch of the movies.
My cousin helped drive R. Lee Ermey around to different events (NASCAR, concerts, etc.) where he'd help recruit for the Marine Corps, decades after this movie came out. Reminding potential Marine recruits of this movie, and of Ermey's character in particular, seems like a bad strategy but it did, apparently, work. Something about film and TV makes it impossible for people to not admire and seek to emulate the main characters, even when the work itself is doing everything in its power to show that this person isn't someone to emmulate or admire. From Scarface to Fight Club to The Sopranos and all the anti-hero TV shows of the last decade plus, no one seems to be able to create a bad-guy that won't make people want to be like him. On an unrelated note, let me recommend reading the sequel to The Short-Timers, called The Phantom Blooper which features Joker joining the Vietcong and attacking Americans before going back to the USA and wondering across late 60's America. It's really fucking good and interesting. This series rocks, keep 'em coming, I cannot wait for the Eyes Wide Shut ep.
Yeh this is so true. I guess the movie maker needs to create an anti hero we’ll like. Otherwise noone will want to watch the movie in the first place.
Interesting that you dub R. Lee Ermey's drill instructor as a kind of "priest"; when he guested on X-Files, he played a priest who has (gets?) stigmata. He's killed off early on in that, too.
I always loved this film, and you're doing excellent work with this pod, but at this point it is depressing af for me to hear all of this. My stepson, my only child, who I raised as my own, from the age of 2, and love with all my heart and soul, just turned 18 last February and is at Parris Island right now, as I type, completing his first 3 months of Marine training despite his father and I's pleas and adamant protesting of this choice. His best friend joined and talked him up into joining as well. I was heartbroken, as this is the last thing I ever thought a child of mine would want to do with his life. I'm an artist who also works full time in a greenhouse and his dad a union journeyman wireman and a Marxist on top of that! We were always upfront with him as to the downright evil and hypocrisy of the US government and its military industrial complex, but apparently none of it sank in, or worse, maybe it did and he likes it?? It's scary and sad. I have to support him bc he's my son, but damn, I never thought this would be the path he'd choose, and that Full Metal Jacket would have any meaning in my life other than being a great film that so accurately shows the horrors of being brainwashed and turned into a killing machine. Ugh
Well, I don't want to sell false consolation for something I know I can't really understand, but I do know this: I've been acquainted with a lot of people who have ended up in the military, one way or another, and for the vast majority of them, actually being there was a far more effective means of inoculation against military propaganda than any history or reasoning could offer. God knows why he's there now, or what it means to him – I don't really understand most of the shit *I* did when I was 18, much less this – but both my anecdotal experience & the vets I know would suggest that not many soldiers, even active-duty ones, believe most of the shit they did on day 1, and a lot no longer believe a word of it. Whatever happens, I hope he stays safe & gets back home as soon as he can. When he does, he'll probably be able to construct a far more vivid indictment of the war machine than either of us can.
Wanted to put in here another aspect of cultural derangement that is downstream of this movie, and that was the rural ex-soldier to high school substitute teacher pipeline. We had this absolute Gomer who would only sub gym classes, demanded we call him sarge, and would just yell at us and make us do push-ups and shit. He was one of several. Astounds and embarasses me to this day that the school’s administrators seemed to seek out people who thought they were R. Lee Ermey.
The most sadistic chef I ever worked under quoted this movie fucking constantly (Hartman lines at nervous cooks, love you long time when an Asian woman walked past the line etc.). There's a lot of pseudo-military aspects of kitchen culture, from the jargon to the hierarchy, but the thing that strikes me the most from the training scenes is the inversion of machismo into total submission to authority. Like, the toughest most badass thing you can do is accept any level of humiliation and physical hardship and slavishly obey the person dishing it out to you. One of our favorite topics of conversation is to brag about grievous burns and cuts we've received and still finished the shift, or times we've worked sick or pulled insane hours, all in service of these petty tyrants
The series is off the wall I’m HOOKED! Thanks for sharing 🙏🏼🙏🏼
Very Kind!