Who’s your favorite full metal jacket character and why?
i am going to be a normie and say joker but not just because he’s the protagonist, and a lot because of the book (which i maintain is better than the movie, sorry stanley).
joker is a GREAT vietnam war movie protagonist for a few reasons, imo. the first is that the vietnam war was kind of a ‘media war’ in the sense that on US turf it was very much about the reception of the war based on how journalists portryed it, and joker as a combat correspondent is almost a personification of US presence in vietnam.
the second is that in the movie we see him as an observer, and a lot of the time things sort of happen around and near him, rather than to him. in a way the lens of his camera is a filter through which he sees the war; he’s distanced from it in an almost childlike way, by those glasses which are absolutely not regulation (they should’ve been thicker rimmed i think, and definitely should’ve had a strap), his mickey mouse watch, his impressions, and the fact that he wrote for his high school newspaper, and the peace badge, which was a kind of childish adherence to nonconformism out of spite. now, i know matthew modine was in his late 20s during the filming of this (this is one of the things i think the movie got wrong; they were all WAY too old and should have been late teens/early 20s at most), but i do think the movie does a good job
the third is more obvious if you take the book (and also a couple deleted scenes) into account. spoilers incoming!
(in case you’re curious to read it, the short timers is available as a PDF for free here, since it’s out of print everywhere else and physical copies are pretty $$$)
so, in the book, most of the events are the same, with a couple differences that i think are actually vital to the story. the first thing is that early into the second ‘half’ (i.e. in vietnam), joker attempts to refuse a promotion from corporal to sergeant:
Captain January picks up a manila guard mail envelope and pulls out a piece of paper with fancy writing on it. "Congratulations, Sergeant Joker." He hands me the paper.
TO ALL WHO SHALL SEE THESE PRESENTS, GREETING: KNOW YE THAT REPOSING SPECIAL TRUST AND CONFIDENCE IN THE FIDELITY OF JAMES T. DAVIS, 2306777/4312, I DO APPOINT HIM A SERGEANT IN THE UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS...
I stare at the piece of paper. Then I put the order on Captain January's field desk. "Number ten. I mean, no way, sir."
(cool that we get an almost full name for him here too – interestingly james t. davis was the name of one of the first americans to die in vietnam, in 1961.)
one of the scenes that IS in the movie is the one where lieutenant lockhart sends joker to phu bai and saddles him with rafterman. sometime after this in the book, rafterman is run over by a tank and killed, and crucially the end of the movie is different: they’re slowly being picked off by a sniper, shot in non-lethal areas to force more of the squad to come out and try to save the others, and eventually cowboy hands control of the squad over to joker, and runs out himself, and is obviously instantly shot up. rather than run out after cowboy, joker mercy kills him.
WITH THOSE EXTRA SCENES IN MIND here’s my theory and the reason i think joker is the most compelling character: his whole character arc in the book is about him being given some sort of responsibility and trying to refuse it, but when he’s saddled with it anyway, it leads to the death of an american soldier, who is killed NOT by a vietnamese person but by an american – private pyle by his own gun (and more esoterically by american military conditioning/training), rafterman by an american tank, and cowboy by joker.
i guess my point here is that joker as a character is interesting to me because he’s neither a hero nor a villain. he’s an observer who consistently attempts to refuse responsibility which would place him more centrally in the story, which is such an interesting position for a protagonist. even in the movie, without the additions of those scenes i mentioned, his final act is not to defeat the sniper, because he fucks up and drops his gun; his final act is to shoot a little girl who is dying and in pain. in contrast to a lot of other war movie protagonists, it’s not his story, but he’s obviously central to the story because he is the protagonist, and the person you follow throughout it. that’s a really difficult needle to thread.
he’s a pretty strong allegory for the soldier in vietnam; not the US military as a whole, which is a different thing entirely, but an individual soldier or marine, who often just wanted to get through his one tour and rotate home, who didn’t want responsibility, who were more often than not just a bunch of kids in way over their heads, who, in order to survive, either had to change completely (like, idk, animal mother, and like the botched transformation that ultimately kills private pyle) or shirk responsibility to avoid putting themselves in danger. i have a lot of thoughts about how fmj as a movie could be improved but i do really like that last scene, the contrast between a bunch of teenagers singing the mickey mouse song while surrounded by the fire and brimstone of war – it’s a perfect distillation of the contradictions that make full metal jacket so interesting, i.e. the duality of man.
also i think matthew modine used to be very hot
