mxl3500's blog

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S06nIz4scvI

The following clip I chose to discuss is from the 1987 movie, Full Metal Jacket, directed by Stanley Kubrick. The scene discussed takes place with the protagonist “Joker” and his colleague “Rafterman”. They are Marine war journalists covering the Vietnam conflict. The first part of the scene you see Rafterman dry heaving at what he sees going on in the helicopter. He is doing this because this is his first mission in to combat and he is in shock at what takes place in war environments. This plays into the psyche of his thought process as the chopper gunner is shooting civilians in the rice paddy fields. Joker on the other hand is unaffected as to what is going on because he has more combat experience. In the next scene, the chopper gunner stops shooting the civilians and tells Rafterman and Joker, “Any person that runs is a VC, anyone that stands still is a well-disciplined VC”. This can be analyzed by thinking when you are sent to war, you make justifications for your actions. He doesn’t see it as shooting civilians, he justifies that by thinking everyone is the enemy. There is some banter about how many people he has killed and when asked if he has shot any women or children he replies with “sometimes”.  Joker then asks him, “How can you shoot women and children,” he implies that, “you just don’t lead them so much”. Just as a reference when you lead something in this context, it’s firing your gun ahead of the target so when the bullet reaches them they match up. This is an important pretrial of war because it shows how combat can make the less experienced sick at what they see, whereas the people with more combat experience have fewer emotions while in combat. From the chopper gunner’s point of view, he’s learned to hate the Viet Cong so much that they are not real people to him, just targets.