Full Metal Jacket / YMMV

Adaptation Displacement: It's based on a novel, The Short-Timers by Gustav Hartford, with some elements of Michael Herr's new journalism book Dispatches. Both works are mostly remembered as sources of the film and rarely mentioned in their own contexts.
Alternative Character Interpretation:
- Who bears most of the responsibility for Lawrence's murder-suicide of Hartman?
  - Gunnery Sergeant Hartman was either just doing his job and honestly trying to prepare his trainees for war, or his methods were so unnecessarily extreme and brutal that they drove one of his recruits to madness and got both himself and said recruit killed. R. Lee Ermey—a former Drill Instructor from that time period himself—jossed this by placing Hartman firmly in the latter camp^note, but the debates still rage to this day.
  - On the other side of the coin, some people either see Private Lawrence as The Woobie who was ultimately broken due to being relentlessly bullied by the Drill Sergeant Nasty, while others look at him as someone who really did not have the mental fortitude to make it as a Marine and who really should have dropped out for the good of both himself and everyone else.
  - Or, it's Joker who is unfit, since he does nothing when he finds Pyle loading a rifle in the head (a violation of at least three regulations). Instead of either taking the (unloaded) rifle away and alerting the MPs, or just alerting the MPs, he just stands and watches Pyle, who has clearly snapped, load a magazine and load his rifle, and as a result two Marines die.
  - There's also the concept that Cowboy is responsible, or at least shares some of the blame. Regardless of how you feel about the blanket party he orchestrated, he also urged Joker not to report Pyle's growing instability when the latter suggested doing so.
- The movie is set at the time Project 100,000 was in place. Project 100,000 was an attempt to increase the number of drafted soldiers by drastically lowering the recruitment standards (i.e. recruiting people who would previously be considered as physically/mentally unfit for service, as well as people with criminal records). The movie makes no mystery that Lawrence is unfit. We don't even know if he was a voluntary recruit; while the Marine Corps has been volunteer-only since its inception, during World War II and Vietnam it was not unheard for Marine recruiters to meet quotas by comandeering Army draftees.
- At least one book on Kubrick's filmography explicitly frames Animal Mother as a dark reflection of Gomer Pyle, a snapshot of what Pyle might have become had he not snapped under Hartman's abuse and the pressure of basic training, and instead lasted long enough to become dehumanised by the war itself.
- Does Hartman truly believe his rhetoric about war and the Marines being elite killers and warriors or is he just saying what he needs to? Considering how the events of the war that follow radically go against his claim of the Marines and war in general, it's worth asking if he's ever even seen real combat himself or has he spent much of his career as a drill sergeant with little idea of what he's preparing men for (his medal rack does include multiple service medals for Korea and Vietnam— and being a Phony Veteran on Parris Island would be sorted out very quickly — meaning he has been overseas in some capacity before but likely not in a long time).
Anvilicious: The '80s saw an unprecedented military buildup and lots of patriotic movies like Top Gun and Iron Eagle which may have well have been recruiting videos. While there were other anti-war films (Platoon being the most famous) this movie definitely made many Gen-Xers think twice about whether a military career was right for them.
- Cowboy's squad getting lost, falling for a trap designed to drag them in and waste their ammunition, receiving unclear direction from superiors, and being severely harmed by a much smaller and less technically advanced opponent is a very unsubtle geopolitical allegory.
Award Snub: It was nominated for one Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. It was not nominated for Best Picture, Best Director for Stanley Kubrick or Best Supporting Actor for R. Lee Ermey or Vincent D'Onofrio, despite many people saying they felt that not only did it deserve to be nominated in these categories, but it deserved to win, too. Unsurprisingly it lost its one Oscar nod to The Last Emperor.
Awesome Music: "Paint It Black", by The Rolling Stones, which plays during the end credits.
- Also "These Boots Are Made For Walking", which plays during the first Vietnamese sex worker scene.
Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The helicopter ride with the door gunner taking shots at Vietnamese civilians is never brought up again after the scene.
Complete Monster: The unnamed door gunner spends the entirety of his brief appearance shooting down Vietnamese civilians, laughing and casually chatting with other soldiers the entire time. He has over 150 confirmed kills, including women and children. His crimes are considered loathsome even in the nightmare world of wartime Vietnam, disgusting even other soldiers.
Crosses the Line Twice:
- Hartman's insults are meant to belittle and demean, but one could sympathize with Pvt. Pyle's giggling due to the sheer creativity of Hartman's ranting. Truth in Television, many Boot Camp instructors are purposefully funny, they try to teach recruits to have the mental control not to laugh, which gives mental fortitude in other areas.
- The Door Gunner, heinous as he is, delivers his lines in such a casual, unapologetic, and funny way that the war crime scene becomes borderline Comedic Sociopathy.
Diagnosed by the Audience: Pvt. Pyle is commonly speculated to have some kind of developmental disability or intellectual disability, as he struggles to grasp even simple tasks and directions.
Ensemble Dark Horse:
- Animal Mother has a fair following.
- The Da Nang prostitute at the start of the second half.
- The Door Gunner, due to Comedic Sociopathy and for being a Fountain of Memes like Hartman.
Epileptic Trees: Rob Ager theorizes that Private Pyle's suicide never actually happened, but that it was a dream sequence symbolizing his rebirth from a fat, slovenly moron into the brutal warmonger Animal Mother—played by a different actor to subconsciously emphasize how the military machine has transformed him. More interesting and compelling is his theory on the middle part of the movie essentially being a deliberately unrealistic, Hollywood Style reenactment of the Vietnam war, which gets dropped the moment the characters walk into (and out of) a movie theatre into the actual war and are faced with Surprisingly Realistic Outcomes.
Fanon:
- It's not uncommon for fans to argue that, given his improvement in basic training, had Pyle made it to Vietnam, he would have been similar in combat effectiveness and general asskicking to Animal Mother.
- Others argue that Pyle would have snapped and committed something akin to the My Lai Massacre, which is backed up by the heavy implication that Pyle is based on Lt. William Calley, who orchestrated it.
First Installment Wins: The boot camp half is better regarded and remembered due to the increased focus on specific characters than the one that actually goes to Vietnam which is more of a series of events than an intimate character study like the first half.
Fountain of Memes: Hartman's insults are so creatively and hilariously profane that almost everything he says has become a meme. EVERYTHING the Door Gunner says has become a meme.
Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Judging from all the fanart, the film seems to have a cult following in Japan. One video game, NAM-1975, even outright used still images from the film for its characters.
He Panned It, Now He Sucks!: Gene Siskel came down hard on Roger Ebert on Siskel & Ebert for giving Full Metal Jacket a Thumb's Down while giving Benji the Hunted a four-star Thumb's Up (both films were released the same year). This got parodied in The Critic.
Hilarious in Hindsight:
- Sergeant Hartman warns Private Joker, "You had best unfuck yourself or I will unscrew your head and shit down your neck!" Then there's Duke Nukem 3D, where Duke not only says that to an Overlord before killing it, but he also means what he says, and he does it literally, keeping true to his word.
- Matthew Modine, who plays Joker, appears in a film where the main character's archenemy (and Big Bad of the last movie) is a character called "Joker".
Just Here for Godzilla: Nine times out of ten, people who haven't seen the movie yet but want to are going to be surprised when the film isn't exclusively about Gunnery Sergeant Hartman.
Love to Hate: Sergeant Hartman, due to his actor's memorable performance, despite being a Hate Sink.
Memetic Mutation:
- Gunnery Sergeant Hartman in general, thanks to the legendary performance by R. Lee Ermey. Good luck trying to find any drill instructor in films made post-FMJ that is not, in some way, based on Hartman.
  - Pretty much anyone in the US military (and many people outside of it) trying to sound witty and badass will quote selections from the same scene of Hartman singling out recruits in the barracks. Anyone from Texas is probably quite familiar with the list of things that come from Texas. Not to mention that the "steers and queers" line can also substitute Texas for any state someone doesn't like or wants to make fun of.
  - "What is your major malfunction?!" (you know the rest)
  - "Holy Jesus. What is THAT? WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?"—Hartman's reaction to finding Pyle's jelly donut. Has since been repurposed to illustrate shock at other things.
  - "LET ME SEE YOUR WAR FACE!"
  - Disclaimer: You Will Not Laugh. ^Explanation
- "Me so horny, me love you long time," much to the chagrin of any East Asian woman walking down the street. The controversial Hip-Hop group 2 Live Crew even sampled that line in the song "Me So Horny" on their infamous album As Nasty As They Wanna Be, as did Sir Mix-A-Lot in "Baby Got Back" (albeit only in one line of the song).
  - Another part of this scene, "Sucky sucky five dollar," became better known when it was used by South Park.
- The "Let me hear your war cry" scene replaced with the faces of mannequins. (Nightmare Fuel ahead.)
- Basically everything the Door Gunner says, he's almost as quotable as Hartman.
  - "Anyone who runs is a VC! Anyone who stands still is a well-disciplined VC!"
  - "How do you shoot women and children?" "Easy, you just don't lead 'em so much!"
  - "GET SOME, GET SOME, GET SOME!"
Misaimed Fandom: Once again proving François Truffaut's maxim that it's impossible to create an anti-war movie, the film overall is very popular with military personnel, especially Marines and Vietnam veterans, as well as those who wish they were.
- Tons of people seem to love Sgt. Hartman, despite the point of the character (according to both Ermey and Kubric) being that he's a failure as a drill instructor. Hartman doesn't understand Pyle and is ultimately out of his depth in dealing with him. He's physically abusive to his troops, punishing all of them for the actions of one, and even punches Joker and both slaps and chokes Pyle. Hartman even considers his troops hating him to be a good thing to the point of praising Lee Harvey Oswald (the man who killed his commander-in-chief), and Charles Whitman (who had killed 17 people the year before) for good marksmanship seemingly for shock value. Despite all this, and the fact that these character deficiencies ultimately get him and Private Pyle killed in a Murder-Suicide, the Drill Sergeant Nasty character was codified by this film, Ermey was typecast as this sort of character for the rest of his life, and it's still what most people think of when they imagine a drill sergeant.
- There are general reports that the first part, designed to show the worst possible basic training experience, is seen as a recruiting tool to young audiences as the ultimate challenge to tackle after high school.
- Even though it was used to depict the desperate social situation of South Vietnam at the time and carried no racist connotations, in the ensuing years, the Da Nang prostitute's broken English has been used by reactionary elements on the internet to mock Asians in general, and promote misogynous stereotypes against Asian women in particular.
Moral Event Horizon: The Door Gunner crosses it in seconds as he's introduced gleefully killing unarmed civilians. He then boasts about his "prowess" and then casually jokes with a technicism when asked how he can kill women and children (and 50 water buffaloes too, all certified). Ain't war hell?
One-Scene Wonder:
- The Da Nang prostitute ("Me love you long time") and the door gunner who shoots Vietnamese civilians from a helicopter ("Get some, get some!").
- Ngoc Le as the VC sniper. The sniper is slowly built up over the course of several minutes as a remorseless and deadly accurate killing machine, picking off the platoon one by one. Finally they infiltrate the sniper's lair, and the sniper is revealed to be a remorseless and deadly accurate killing machine who's a pigtailed, teenaged girl. Even after Rafterman empties an entire magazine into her, she still isn't dead and begs them to shoot her. Joker does so, completing his character arc.
Parody Displacement: Mention the name "Gomer Pyle" to someone. A younger person will probably think of "the fat Marine recruit from Full Metal Jacket who blows his brains out" instead of "the gas station worker from The Andy Griffith Show who got a spin off sitcom where he was in the Marines," which is where the name came from and why Gunny Hartman gives it to him.
Signature Scene: The blanket party scene is so famous that searching up "blanket party" on Google Images yields multiple shots from it as the top results. This scene is so iconic that it's one thing drill instructors point out as something that recruits are never allowed to do under any circumstances unless they want the entire platoon to be screwed to hell and back. The drill instructors will institute punishment and violence is not allowed to be a part of it (though it will occasionally happen behind closed doors).
Squick:
- Pvt. Pyle's suicide.
- Joker referring to his, ahem, "gun," as his "tubesteak."
- Some of Hartman's Flowery Insults and threats can veer into this.
  "I'll PT you until your assholes are sucking buttermilk!"
  "It looks to me like the best part ran down the crack of your mama's ass and ended up as a brown stain on the mattress!"
  "Your days of fingerbanging ol' Mary Jane Rottencrotch through her purty pink panties ARE OVER!"
  "You climb obstacles like old people fuck!"
  "I bet you're the kind of guy that would fuck a person in the ass and not even have the goddamn common courtesy to give them a reach-around!"
Tear Jerker:
- Pyle's entire arc. The poor guy simply is not suited to being a Marine, but Hartman refuses to see that and simply comes down even harder on him to shape him into being a killer and turns the other Marines against him. He ends up so broken that he ends up killing Hartman and himself.
- Pyle crying tears of pain while intermittently screaming “ow” after the blanket party is absolutely gut-wrenching.
Vanilla Protagonist: Joker and Cowboy are the protagonists, but they're much less memorable than the colourful supporting cast. Most people will point to Hartman & Pyle as the real main characters of the first half, with Animal Mother being the most interesting part of the second half.
Visual Effects of Awesome: The scenes in Hue were filmed at an abandoned gasworks on the outskirts of London. Yet in an era before CGI manages to be quite convincing as a war torn Vietnamese city. Note that they simply use smoke and careful camera angles to obscure backgrounds since digitally erasing it was not an option at the time.
The Woobie:
- Poor, poor private Pyle. Though he was fat and dumb, he didn't deserve his fate.
- Sgt. Joker also counts, particularly by the end of the movie.

YMMV / Full Metal Jacket

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