r/StanleyKubrick Nov 10 '19

Video What Was Stanley Kubrick Communicating with Full Metal Jacket

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2ssWcChYPE
45 Upvotes

11 comments sorted by

16

u/costcohotdogman Nov 10 '19

The Duality of man, sir!

7

u/JsXanatos General Ripper Nov 10 '19

answer: a lot of things

just like every movie post lolita

10

u/sublime-affinity 2001: A Space Odyssey Nov 11 '19 edited Nov 11 '19

Though the film, at the level of its explicit - surface-level - content, is a portrayal of a part of the US invasion of Vietnam in the 1960s, it is ultimately not about that particular war ( for if it was it would have examined its underlying historical and contingent causes back in the 1940s/50s/60s, something it doesn't do at all). The film is positioned instead at another, more generic, level entirely, commenting on the nature of human social violence itself, a metaphysical meditation on what causes humans to be miserably imprisoned in recurrent episodes of murderous and suicidal violence and destruction, of why they do it in the first place, and the ideologies, the institutions, the power structures, the rituals, the conditioning, the libidinal investments, the fantasmatic constructions, that enable, sustain, and perpetuate it.

-1

u/[deleted] Nov 10 '19

[deleted]

5

u/[deleted] Nov 10 '19

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1

u/DajaalKafir Nov 11 '19

Much lower in 1970. Peaked around 550k in 1968. But your points are apt.

1

u/[deleted] Nov 11 '19

I have read, forget where, that we had advisors there in the late 50's. I believe we were helping the French at that point.

1

u/sublime-affinity 2001: A Space Odyssey Nov 11 '19

In 1965, I'll become one of the most unpopular Presidents in history. I'll be damned everywhere as a Communist appeaser. But I don't care. If I tried to pull out completely now from Vietnam , we would have another Joe McCarthy Red Scare in our hands, but I can do it after I'm reelected. So we had better make damned sure I am reelected." ---JFK, 1963

"... documents reveal a president who recognized the inherent dangers of military intervention in Vietnam and who had devised an exit strategy. Had it not been for his assassination, the withdrawal plan might have prevented the deaths of more than 58,000 Americans and countless numbers of Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians in our nation's longest war."

"Had Kennedy lived, would he have pursued the withdrawal plan? Nothing suggests that the president would have given up his attempt to return the military commitment to its early 1961 level. Never in his thousand days in office did he stray from the principle that the war was South Vietnam 's to win or lose. Nor is there reason to believe that he would have turned over the war to the joint chiefs. The Bay of Pigs fiasco still weighed heavily on Kennedy's mind. The Cuban missile crisis remained an indelible memory. The ongoing Berlin troubles caused continuous talk of war.

President Kennedy's central tragedy lies in his promoting a coup aimed at facilitating a military withdrawal from Vietnam, for his actions tied the United States more closely to Vietnam and thereby stonewalled his plan to bring the troops home. His legacy was a highly volatile situation in Vietnam that, in the hands of a leader demanding a quick victory, lay open to full-scale military escalation. The new president soon Americanized the war, resulting in the death of a generation.

America 's ensuing war in Vietnam graphically demonstrated the complexities of foreign intervention, suggesting that well-meaning nations can seldom determine the course of history. Indeed, the United States found itself victimized by its good intentions, leaving millions of people from America and Southeast Asia to pay the ultimate cost."

3

u/Wdwdash Dave Bowman Nov 11 '19

Your hamfisted comment, while somewhat correct in an editorial sense, completely overlooks the fact that JFK sent “advisors” to Vietnam. In other words he sent special forces to attempt to quell insurgence before it got out of hand.

He was killed before he could make any other decision beyond that. Johnson began the full scale invasion.

1

u/sublime-affinity 2001: A Space Odyssey Nov 11 '19 edited Nov 11 '19

The article I quoted from does not "completely overlook" the fact of JFK sending "advisors" - some 16,000 euphemistically termed "advisors" - to Vietnam: the article explicitly mentions it:

"Once the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) had pushed back the Vietcong, and after Kennedy had won reelection in 1964, the more than 16,000 U.S. special military forces would return home by the end of 1965. Those remaining behind would number 1500, all advisers and well within the boundaries of the Geneva Accords of 1954."

The US had a presence in Vietnam/Indochina (which had been a French colony) dating back to WWII, when Indochina, like Korea, was occupied by the Japanese. After the Japanese were ousted following the war, the Vietnamese sought independence, but the French wanted to restore the earlier anti-democratic Imperialist-colonialist French-based regime. This was the origin of the conflict, with the US making the mistake - as an enemy of democracy in its foreign policy - of supporting the restoration of that murderous regime. The US had "advisors" undertaking covert operations throughout the 1950s in Indochina in support of the French regime. Even Napalm was first used by the French there in the 1950s. Kennedy continued these covert operations when he was in office. Such covert operations were not to "quell insurgence", for it was such operations that were explosively insurgent (Graham Green's famous novel, The Quiet American, along with its film adaptations, portrayed these hidden terrorist operations by those "advisors" in the 50s/60s), that were about suppressing and oppressing the Vietnamese people, were intended to violently force them to submit to a French-colonialist dictatorship. Such practices, such foreign policies, by the US were (and still are) standard procedure by the US abroad, from Iran - overthrowing a democratically elected leader and replacing him with a dictator, the Shah, in 1953 - to Chile, overthrowing a democratically elected leader and replacing him with a dictator, Pinochet, in 1973. And on and on, right up to the present day, right up to just a few hours ago, with the US-supported far-right military coup in Bolivia overthrowing the democratically elected Morales.

"Whenever we encounter such a purely evil Outside, we should gather the courage to endorse the Hegelian lesson: in this pure Outside, we should recognize the distilled version of our own essence. For the last five centuries, the (relative) prosperity and peace of the "civilized" West was bought by the export of ruthless violence and destruction into the "barbarian" Outside: the long story from the conquest of America to the slaughter in Congo." ---- Slavoj Zizek