Full Metal Jacket and War-time Masculinity

Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket is an unusual Vietnam war movie. It doesn't have the raw, gut wrenching emotion of Platoon, and though it is somewhat bizarre, it doesn't have the full psychological horror trippy-ness of Apocalypse Now. It is, in typical Kubrick fashion, a film that is hard to access, hard to connect with. It is distant, austere and odd. In some ways, it doesn't seem an authentic portrayal of war. The first part of the film documents the rigors of basic training and seems far more real than the scenes that take place in Vietnam. Those are the scenes I want to examine anyway as they are all about the creation of a specific masculine identity. There is a strange doubling (a theme Kubrick loves) attendant in basic training in that "the military [tries] to create a military form of masculinity, but masculinity has already inflected the creation of the institution of the military in the first place, as well as the desire to propagate that genre of masculinity." It's difficult to tell where masculinity begins and ends in this situation. In a way, men go off to military bases to become what they already know, to become what is so familiar to them from images of military men in movies and books.

Private Pyle is not enjoying basic training.

The opening of the film starts with the standard procedure for new recruits--getting the regulation haircut. The camera zooms in on the faces of the men, they look serious; some frown, some look angry, others are nervous. This is a rite of passage, an entry into military life. What follows is the systematic erasure of identity beginning with the nicknames that Sgt Hartman (R. Lee Ermey) gives the privates. He doesn't allow them to select a name for themselves, rather he chooses names that are somewhat degrading, yet also reflective of each individual's physical or emotional characteristics. He also beats and punches the men who don't perform as he would like. One man, nicknamed Pvt. Pyle (Vincent D'Onofrio) bears the brunt of Hartman's anger. Pyle is slightly overweight and slow to learn which causes problems for the rest of the privates once Hartman decides that they will be punished for every mistake Pyle makes.

Stress levels in this situation are high. Basic training is tough, there are obstacles to overcome (actual towering wooden contraptions that poor Private Pyle can't navigate). At the same time, Hartman is trying to merge man and gun through endless drill marching that features cadence calls in which the soldiers sing about their rifles while grabbing their crotches. Later, the rifle becomes a girlfriend to the men, when Hartman demands they give their rifles a girl's name and sleep with them in their bunks. All this activity is supposed to make these men into soldiers- to make them forget who they used to be.  Indeed, Pyle gets in a lot of trouble when he makes a mistake during a march. Hartman immediately accuses him of trying to be "different." To become a soldier, difference and individuality must be eliminated. There is very little freedom in the soldier's identity- especially during the time of the draft when half the men serving weren't there because they wanted to be, but rather because they were forced.

All this training does make some of the privates into good soldiers and it drives others insane. Kubrick seems to be saying something about the fragile nature of masculinity-- attempt to create it with too much force and violence and it will self-destruct.


Source:
Reeser, Todd W.,  Masculinities in Theory.

The Limitations of Maleness

It is almost impossible to write about masculinity. It isn't done. Many would say that masculinity has been written about since the beginning of human existence. That all stories have largely been written by men, about men and their exploits. This perception seems erroneous, or, at the very least, lazy. Certainly, men have been the dominant force throughout history, but it might be wrong to assume that dominance is without its drawbacks.  Dominance, in itself,  might be limiting.  Consider the "paradox of masculinity-- that it is often perceived to be free, unlike femininity and its imagined constraints. [However, this] is an illusion of freedom, the illusion that masculinity itself can be defined as freedom, whereas in fact it is this very imagined freedom that insures subjugation and hides its own arbitrary functioning."

Really, there are only a few ways to be a man, or there are only a few ways to represent masculinity in the proper way. If anything, the action and crime film reveals this very limited spectrum of acceptable maleness. The violence inherent in them could be representative of a pushing against this construct (since there isn't anything else for men to do, why not take it as far as possible?) or it might simply be that scenes of explosions and car chases and fist fights are entertaining and make good movies. (And they do.) However, it's interesting that women always complain about how their gender are portrayed in movies as weak and one-dimensional, but men are often shown as strong and one-dimensional. The 70s film allowed men a little more depth, but by the 80s most men were flexing their muscles suggestively for the camera. When gender theorist Todd Reeser writes about masculinity, he insists that,"masculinity might be in crisis when many men in a given context feel tension with larger ideologies that dominate or begin to dominate that context." He suggests that "feminism in the 70s and 80s precipitated a crisis of masculinity."

He might be on to something. It could explain the way 80s film became so much about a pumped up masculinity. Certainly, by this time women were really invading the working world in numbers never before seen. A way to respond to this invasion would be by emphasizing physical difference via becoming an enormous, muscle bound man. Yet the action star of the 80s, in some ways, seems less masculine because of this behavior.  He's certainly far less complicated than the 70s star. He parades around in his form fitting clothes so that the world can see his physique. Sure, he's got guns, and knives and rocket launchers, but everything is about his body.  And everything is about the body with men. Men's brains are important, of course, but emphasis has always been placed on being big and strong. More importantly, male roles are concerned with providing and protecting-either their women, or their family or their country. Indeed, there is little that men can call their own if one eliminates all the responsibilities attendant in manhood.

Many of the films of these eras attempted to examine these responsibilities. In the next few posts, I will review some of the war films of 70s and 80s and see how masculinity is portrayed in them.

Source:

Reeser, Todd W. Masculinities in Theory