Full Metal Jacket

A detailed Summary of Full Metal Jacket

Full Metal Jacket: An Accurate Portrayal of the Vietnam War

The Vietnam War was one of the most controversial American military involvements of the twentieth century. There has always been much discussion as to why the Americans were forced into defeat and as to why so many American soldiers died for a purpose that was not achieved. Many directors have made attempts at recreating the horrors of this war, and many have been criticized for providing an unrealistic depiction of it. In 1987, Full Metal Jacket, a Stanley Kubrick film, dared to oppose these traditional expectations of failure. Beginning in a Parris Island boot camp and ending in the Vietnamese city, Hue, it attempts to show, "the distasteful irony between the desire for combat and true terror of war."1 The film, Full Metal Jacket provides its audience with a historically accurate picture of all aspects of the Vietnam War.

Although the screenplay is based on a fictional story line revolving around a Vietnam War journalist, Stanley Kubrick provides a variety of factional occurrences that would be expected of a Vietnam War movie, which create a realistic setting. First of all, the movie begins at the U.S. Marine Corps Recruit Depot on Parris Island, South Caroli

na. This depot was actually used as a basic training area for the Vietnam War. The story line does follow actual war events such as the TET Offensive, the fall of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, and the battle of Hue. Also, Kubrick provides an accurate setting around American soldiers by using war code and racist slang such as "Charlie", "grunt", "dogpatch", "gooks", and "zipper-heads". Many of these terms were actually used as code over radio transmissions so that the North Vietnamese could not comprehend them, but they also were developed to give the American soldiers a sense of superiority and unity among themselves. Thus, factual occurrences were used to provide a realistic setting.

The film makes truthful suggestions about the role of prostitution in the Vietnam War. For instance, during one of the battles at Hue, a South Vietnamese soldier brings in a young Vietnamese woman for Joker's entire platoon to share for only five dollars each. It was usual for a soldier who stayed in Vietnam for any length of time to depend on Vietnamese prostitutes to answer to their sexual cravings. Although not many men enjoy revealing their endeavours with prostitution during the war, there are accounts that prove the abundance of it: "Saigon was an addicted city, and we were the drug...the mass prostitution of women...it had all been done in our name."3 This quote from James Fenton in 1985 reveals that prostitution, among other things, was something that both the American soldiers and the South Vietnamese inhabitants thrived on to survive the war. The open attitudes towards twenty men sharing a young foreign girl sexually really shows how much certain aspects of this war broke any remote sense of traditional morality among anybody involved. So Kubrick does a good job of attempting to explain the decrease in basic moral values caused by war through situations like prostitution.

Secondly, the film gives an accurate account of the methods and goals of Vietnam War journalists. In the film, the main character, Joker, is assigned to work for the war paper "Stars and Stripes." In the scenes concerning the paper there is much discussion about what the journalists have to set their goals for, that is providing stories that make the Americans look good. "Stars and Stripes" was a real newspaper during the Vietnam War and there is evidence that journalists were pressured by their advisors to only produce stories that were pro-American, and in s

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Approximate Word count = 1652
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: History