Thanks to the remarkable team at All The Right Movies (a crucial Twitter follow if you don’t already do so), I am reminded that one of the great, harrowing films of all time was released stateside today, 36 years ago. Check out some excellent trivia nuggets and behind-the-scenes insight here.
Writing about Stanley Kubrick, back in 2011, here’s my succinct appraisal of Full Metal Jacket:
A naturalistic tour into the dark heart of modern war, preceded by a disquieting tour into the darkness of the hearts that prepare our soldiers to survive there. The second section, on the front lines, a surreal sort of cinéma vérité, is more plodding than cathartic, which is probably the point. The first part of the film, devoted entirely to a group of Marine recruits at Parris Island, is a quicksilver tour de force—at turns riotous and harrowing. It is some of the most assured, affecting work of the decade: not too many movies can take you from hysterical laughter (the initial scenes where drill instructor R. Lee Ermey lambastes the boys is piss-your-pants funny) to disgust and, inevitably, despair. The blanket party scene, where the incompetent “Gomer Pyle” (Vincent D’Onofrio) is savaged by his fellow cadets lingers in the mind as one of the most disturbing scenes in movie history. It manages to illustrate a great deal about conformity, the military, the perceived necessity of truly breaking someone before they can function and what we must kill inside ourselves in order to survive. Most directors would inexorably play this scene for pathos; Kubrick films it matter-of-factly and his shrewd use of subtlety makes it many times more disturbing.
This poem, “Private Pyle’s Pain,” was certainly inspired by the movie (and “the scene,” above), but was written after having the extraordinary opportunity to see Matthew Modine speak about his experiences making Full Metal Jacket, in late autumn 2019. (And you can see that elements of my Kubrick appraisal were incorporated, verbatim.) The poem appears in my collection The Blackened Blues.
Thanks again to The Good Men Project for publishing more of my work, part of an ongoing project that explores (and interrogates) toxic masculinity.
This short poem also touches on males, the violence we do (to each other; in the name of country), and how, in order to properly become “men” we first must kill the innocent little boys we once were.
Private Pyle’s Pain
You think soap bars in a towel
hurts? Physical pain is fleeting—
and scars on skin heal quicker
than a soul broken by a band
of brothers, with darkened hearts,
trained to adapt and endure, born again
harder than anything you ever
imagined, back in a home town
where guns killed only for food,
when you could eat when hungry
and sleep soundly, safely; unable to
imagine monsters under your bunk
bearing arms against you, disrupting
dreams where baby-faced boys despair
about all the things we have to destroy
inside ourselves, in order to survive.
