Full Metal Jacket – dir.Stanley Kubrick, 1987

This film ostensibly obliterates any political sense, any socialistic sense, any sense at all of the Vietnam War, if there was any even there to begin with. The ascetic regimented lives of the marines are portrayed primarily.  The slow overweight one (Vincent D’Onofrio) is bullied, taunted, abused, verbally and physically, he is torn apart.  Barely able to recognise his own moniker, he finally goes ‘Section A,’ and, after first shooting his tyrannical taunting Sergeant (R. Lee Ermey), he blows his brains out over the bathroom wall.  Here is a glimpse of actual madness and of homicide, here in the confines of this bathroom, but what separates this act of an unhinged reality with that of the seemingly berserk American shooting down from a helicopter at the paddy fields below? Private Joker (Matthew Modine), our nominally punning protesting protagonist wears a peace badge, simultaneously his helmet is adorned with the bold scribble ‘Born to kill.’  Joker acknowledges in himself a Jungian Duality, as both an objector and willing participant.  Joker stands for America, unable to divorce a peaceful yet passive personal stance from the active governmental invasion.  He is a strange one, gently mocking, subtly loyal, rarely does he offer likability until, ironically, he shoots dead the writhing sniper girl, after she pleads and prays to be killed.  The others jeer, ‘hardcore man,’ but they misunderstand his action, it was not one of vengeance, but of mercy.  He acknowledges the pointless destruction of a culture, of a civilisation.  He witnesses the interchangeable identity of both the American soldiers and Vietnamese civilians, once victim, then enemy sniper, then back to victim, writhing on the floor, flapping around, praying for herself, for her country.  The soundtrack is intrusive at times, as though it were an active involvement of pop cultural relief in an otherwise hellish harrowing and unfamiliar world.  The real strength of the film comes in Joker’s wry perception of reality, he came here to kill, he says, but we know this bespectacled man is a writer, a thinker, he didn’t come here to kill, but to see, to witness things. He has no apparent threshold. He’s seen a man blow his brains out, kill in cold blood, and he’s seen virile beefy grown men die, shot at from a distance, by a little girl.  After he’s left, his narrative reflection says he’s glad to be alive, but after the things we’ve seem him see, we wonder if he’s joking.

★★★★☆

The Conversation – dir.Francis Ford Coppola, 1974

This film is about a conversation. The conversation takes place in a busy San Francisco square, between two people that we never meet, never know, as unfamiliar as two strangers that pass us for a moment and then disappear back into the world.  The words exchanged between the couple is tapped by Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) and relayed repetitively back to us throughout, each time the conversation supposedly becomes a little clearer and more loaded, we must be listening to future victims of something, but what?  Harry has some blood on his hands, in that some tapes he made some time ago resulted in a family massacre.  That’s quite some load to carry around with you. He repents, he prays, he seeks absolution.  What we have here is a man of faith, in a god-forsaken career.  So consumed is he by the reality of human nature, with all the bloody murder, all the bad parts of it, that he lives in paranoid asceticism.  His flat is empty and stark, his relationships are fleeting, meaningless.  Harry snaps at a practical joke, which has him temporarily bugged.  The tapes of the conversation play on, the words flood the room, they become heavy, intrusive even, seemingly plastering themselves onto the lips of whomsoever is around.  The words, strangely dismembered from the mouths from which they came, become something unforgivably sinister for Harry, who seeks to save the couple so inevitably in danger.   For a film so dependent on words, it is in the silence that the drama truly explodes.  The spooky cheap hotel room, silent and proper, until the toilet seat gushes out blood.  This is the evidence stuffed, repressed, until the horrible unbearable truth comes flooding out in this fantastical way.  It is biblical even, the blood red water gushing out like the parting of the seas. Harry is Moses, clutching his case folder as though it were the two tablets, only has he delivered the wrong people? The quiet silent disappointed look, Harry gives the young woman he thought dead, that he had hoped to save, when all along had it been the wrong way round?

★★★★★