Film as Ideological State Apparatus
Theodor Adorno and Louis Althusser claim that cinema is predicated on the notion that, as a public form of entertainment, it supports the ideologies of the establishment, particularly capitalist notions of commercialization, despite any pretenses of refuting them. This, Adorno claims, is the result of the intrusion of industrialization into art. War films in particular can be guilty of this tendency to support the ideals of those in power, for war, in ways unlike other national endeavors, requires justification and support from the masses. This can be said to be true of Vietnam War films as well, The Green Berets (1968) being the favorite target for such claims.
Full Metal Jacket
Yet, neither the Althusserian notion of “Ideological State Apparatuses” nor Adorno’s strict outlook can be satisfactorily applied to a film as anti-establishment as Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987). Nothing about the indoctrination process depicted in the film lends itself to supporting the institutions behind the methods. From the meticulous breaking-down of the human will to the building-up of killers, the film provides no validation for the cruel system that leads, ultimately, to the total disintegration of an individual in Private Pyle (Vincent D’Onofrio). The violence perpetrated against the recruits by the Drill Instructor is extreme to say the least, and is not limited to verbal, as the D.I., famously portrayed by R. Lee Ermey, resorts to physical abuse more than once. Of course, other war films have depicted the hardships of boot camp, Allan Dwan’s Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) famous among them. Even in Dwan’s film, the D.I. (John Wayne), resorts to punishing a recruit with a physical attack (striking the soldier with a rifle-butt after he fails to properly perform a bayonet maneuver). Yet, unlike Ermey’s Sgt.Hartman, Wayne’s Sgt.Stryker makes amends soon afterward, and the recruit leaves the experience believing in the values of his Sergeant’s training and in the ideologies of the Marine Corps in particular.
John Wayne
The specter of Wayne’s mythical personification haunts Kubrick’s film both during the initial indoctrination sequence and during the later battle scenes. A film as iconic as Sands of Iwo Jima, which established multiple genre conventions, is the perfect film to reference in order to subvert it, thus subverting the entire genre. Joker’s imitation of Wayne during the boot camp sequence is particularly evocative of Sands, as the derogatory comment is aimed directly at Ermey’s D.I., the character in Full Metal Jacket standing in for Wayne’s Sgt.Stryker.
The Green Berets
Interestingly, though The Green Berets represents the polar opposite ideological stance on the war, there is at least one idea that both that film and Full Metal Jacket share; neither film places the burden of fault directly on the soldiers themselves. The troops in Full Metal Jacket certainly feel guilt - guilt over the deaths of fellow soldiers (the sniper incident), over Private Pyle (particularly Joker’s guilt), and over the slaughter of Vietnamese civilians (the helicopter gunner), but the fault, according to the film, belongs to the military machine itself. The soldiers are a product of a system, and their actions become the fault of that system. In The Green Berets, too, fault for the atrocities that took place in Vietnam is removed from the soldiers, but neither is it placed on the military machine. In Wayne’s film, the Vietcong are solely responsible, solely to blame, and it is the responsibility of the aforementioned military machine to ride to the rescue, saving, according to the film, the free-world from communism.
