Private Joke/r: On The Impact of Full Metal Jacket

Monday is about movies. And sometimes TV. Today a short post about the huge impact that Full Metal Jacket had on me. One of the movies I think about most often in this world.

“I didn’t know they piled crap that high!”

The teacher had said that the building was tall and someone had asked and she had given a figure. A thousand feet in the air she said.

And my response – blurted out – aged 10 was almost as worrying as where I had got it from.

We’d been in Auckland and a family friend – a precocious teen – had shown me the movie Full Metal Jacket. He would introduce me to Suicidal Tendencies (the band!) Also, Nirvana (the band too, alas, still hoping to one day find the path…) But the most profound thing he ever did was sit me down to watch Full Metal Jacket. I mean I was basically there with the eye-clamps on from that other Kubrick film.

And for a few months after, it would just come out. Lines from the film. Proof I’d seen it.

“You’re so ugly you could be a modern art masterpiece!”

And there was as much use of the word faggot as in that Eddie Murphy stand-up show. But everyone was saying the word then, so it wasn’t quite the worry – though I knew it wasn’t being used as any sort of kindness so I didn’t say it with any of the same anger.

Full Metal Jacket is a hell of a film. Even now. Perhaps my all-time favourite of the Vietnam movies. And there are a lot. They still make them. Which is so very American – building monuments to failure.

Holy shit, they really can pile crap THAT high!

Full Metal Jacket was my first warning against cruelness and what it will breed.

It’s not for everyone and it shouldn’t be for ten-year-olds. And I have let my boy see all sorts of things – and he’s already older than ten, but I am not rushing to let him see this.

I am still really glad that I saw it when I did. And I watched it again and again and listened to its soundtrack as if somewhere deep within Surfin’ Bird and These Boots Were Made For Walking there was some extra secret.

And you know what, there probably is…