Books, Arts & Manners: Twice-Bitten Bullet

In his Esquisse d’une psychologie du cinéma (1976), André Malraux wrote: “The silent film knew sections [les parties]; the sound film no longer knows them, and editors encounter a permanent obstacle there. For the sound film does not want empty spaces and gives narrative continuity pride of place among its means of conveying action.” I am always leery of theory, even if it calls itself psychology, and I don’t know whether I would agree with Malraux in a blanket way; yet his statement surely applies to Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, a film in two sections that falls apart largely because of that bipartite construction.

Though I haven’t read Gustav Has-ford’s Vietnam novel, The Short-Timers, on which the film is based (screenplay by Kubrick, Michael Herr —the author of Dispatches—and Has-ford), I gather that it has the same structure. This is a film based, in effect, on two novellas. One shows how a group of Marine recruits on Parris Island gets the basest kind of basic training from the relentlessly jeering, physically brutalizing, and probably sadistic gunnery sergeant, Hartman. The principals are Hartman; an unfortunate overweight recruit whom Hartman renames, as he does everyone in some cruel way, Pyle—after Gomer, but with a scatological pun; and Private (also renamed) Joker, whose wits and savvy make Hartman appoint him squad leader, and who is clearly Has-ford’s alter ego.

JS

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John Simon

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In his Esquisse d’une psychologie du cinéma (1976), André Malraux wrote: “The silent film knew sections [les parties]; the sound film no longer knows them, and editors encounter a permanent obstacle there. For the sound film does not want empty spaces and gives narrative continuity pride of place among its means of conveying action.” I am always leery of theory, even if it calls itself psychology, and I don’t know whether I would agree with Malraux in a blanket way; yet his statement surely applies to Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, a film in two sections that falls apart largely because of that bipartite construction.

Though I haven’t read Gustav Has-ford’s Vietnam novel, The Short-Timers, on which the film is based (screenplay by Kubrick, Michael Herr —the author of Dispatches—and Has-ford), I gather that it has the same structure. This is a film based, in effect, on two novellas. One shows how a group of Marine recruits on Parris Island gets the basest kind of basic training from the relentlessly jeering, physically brutalizing, and probably sadistic gunnery sergeant, Hartman. The principals are Hartman; an unfortunate overweight recruit whom Hartman renames, as he does everyone in some cruel way, Pyle—after Gomer, but with a scatological pun; and Private (also renamed) Joker, whose wits and savvy make Hartman appoint him squad leader, and who is clearly Has-ford’s alter ego.