FULLY CONSTITUTED METAL JACKET

Slavoj Zizek’s  ‘Military Subject’  +  Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket

Rupert Nuttle

http://critpaper.com/2013/01/18/fully-constituted-metal-jacket-slavoj-zizeks-military-subject-stanley-kubricks-full-metal-jacket/

In his 1997 Plague of Fantasies Slavoj Zizek upends the popular perception of Robert Altman’s MASH as a true satire of military ideology, calling it “a perfectly conformist film”, and demonstrating that the characters’ apparent rebellion (their “mockery of authority”) in fact confirms their complete ideological identification (Zizek 1997 20). His reason is straightforward: “the members of the MASH crew perform their job exemplarily, and thus present absolutely no threat to the smooth running of the military machine” – their irreverence bears no consequence and causes no impediment (Zizek 1997 20). Zizek also cites An Officer and a Gentleman, in which the same ‘perfectly functioning military subject’ is realized through the “awareness that behind the cruel drill-sergeant there is a ‘warm human person’, a helping father-substitute” (Zizek 1997 20). Here the protagonist’s sincere (angsty, not comedic) rebellion against the ideological machine, paired with his longing for paternal acceptance (repressed respect for authority), prompt the drill-sergeant to grant him the allowance – the ‘second chance’ – that the protagonist so craves.

Both these films operate through phantasmic depictions of a military structure that is apparently subverted, but left essentially unchanged. Both disavow their underlying fantasy, allowing the viewer to engage cathartically in the narrative, to project themselves onto those roles that resist ideological identification. The viewer thereby senses himself or herself a relieving (but temporary) disassociation from the symbolic order in which they actually exist – that order which provided the movie theater, the military, and the war.

Zizek contrasts these ‘conformist’ films with Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, from 1987. Full Metal Jacket introduces several more complex facets of the military ideological machine, and “successfully resists [the] … temptation to ‘humanize’” (either through patriarchal acceptance or prankster slapstick) (Zizek 1997 20). Kubrick achieves a critical distance in the film by establishing the weapon (the rifle) as the central fetish object of Marine Corps ideology. In the first part of the film, the recruits’ rifles serve as the medium by which they are indoctrinated. They chant prayer-like tributes to their rifles, sleep with their rifles, and are judged strictly on the proper handling of their rifles. In the second part, the rifle (and weapon machinery more generally) serves to evidence the moral degradation and complete absence of vision in the Vietnam War. The troops destroy impulsively and on a massive scale (i.e. the annihilation of entire cities – vast expanses of collapsed concrete structures on fire), but do so only as a method of compensation, to fill some ever-gaping psychological ‘void’, and out of utter terror. The results, consistent with Kubrick’s playful sense of irony and Douglas Milsome’s poignantly drab cinematography, are often deeply satirical. The humor in Full Metal Jacket is underlying and dark, produced by the characters’ own pathological deficiencies. It is the polar opposite of MASH, in which a superimposed secular humor dominates over the military machine, making it livable. In spite of its humor, Kubrick’s is not a livable depiction.

Marine recruit training in Full Metal Jacket begins with subject negation. Where there was a civilian, a person, now there is nothing, only the potential to become a killer. New recruits are defined by their lack; they are essentially ‘castrated’:

“If you ladies leave my island, if you survive recruit training … you will be a weapon, you will be a minister of death, praying for war. But until that day you are pukes! You’re the lowest form of life on Earth. You are not even human fucking beings! You are nothing but unorganized grabasstic pieces of amphibian shit!” (Kubrick 1987 0:01:30)

Not only are the recruits reduced to microbes by the drill-sergeant: the unspoken ideological Law of the military is coded subliminally in such violent corporeal rhetoric; “it is precisely [the] non-integrated surplus of senseless traumatism which confers on the Law its unconditional authority” (Zizek 1989 43). Such threats as “You had best unfuck yourself, or I’ll unscrew your head and shit down your neck!” provoke a self-doubting (self-effacing) fear, as the subject balances the evident hyperbole against the unacknowledged (and therefore vast) realm of plausibly administrable threats.

In A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, Charles Rycroft cites Ernest Jones, writing in 1916: ‘true’ symbolization “arises as the result of intrapsychic conflict between the repressing tendencies and the repressed … only what is repressed is symbolized … only what is repressed needs to be symbolized …” (Rycroft 162). Making the transition of self-identity from human to ‘puke’ requires a forced repression of the subject’s ego. This repression becomes symbolically manifested in the recruit’s rifle, the only provided signifier, which he uses to externalize his sense of the threat of castration. Freud says: “the horror of castration sets up a sort of permanent memorial to itself by creating this substitute” (Freud 216).

Symbolically read, the rifle would therefore index the development of a specifically military libido, which replaces ‘normal’ or civilian libido. The military subject, deprived of his sex life and his social life, must be trained to express his drive through his weapon, the handling and operation of which come to stand for sexual – or social – performance. The helicopter door-gunner who, for sport, mows down ‘gook’ farmers from the air (shouting, “Get some … get some … get some… yeah … yeah … get some!”) exemplifies this mentality perfectly. Joker asks him, “How can you shoot women and children?” “Easy.” he replies, “You just don’t lead’em so much.” By identifying his carnal urges with his rifle’s function the subject transforms into a pathologically crazed fighting machine – killing (using his gun) becomes the total expression and fulfillment of his phantasmic desires.

Zizek writes of the phallic signifier: “In its very positivity it is the signifier of ‘castration’ – that is of its own lack” (Zizek 1989 157). Not only do the soldiers’ weapons embody the act of compensation, but the symbol utilized (the fetish itself), by its very form and physical manifestation, directly signifies the very lack which is being symbolically compensated for. The subject is left helpless, but for his gun. His sublimation into the ‘phantasmic superego machine’ is complete.

This reading runs directly parallel to Freud’s conception of the sexual fetish. Zizek notes, “in Freud a fetish conceals the lack (‘castration’) around which the symbolic network is articulated” (Zizek 1989, 49). This is true of the direct symbolic reading above, but Freud’s theory also possesses a more complex maternal dimension:

When I now disclose that the fetish is a penis-substitute … I hasten to add that it is not a substitute for any chance penis, but for a particular quite special penis that had been extremely important in early childhood but was afterwards lost. That is to say: it should normally have been given up, but the purpose of the fetish precisely is to preserve it from being lost. To put it plainly: the fetish is a substitute for the woman’s (mother’s) phallus which the little boy once believed in and does not wish to forego – we know why. (Freud 214-215).

Here the ‘particular quite special penis’ is most intriguing. Using it, Freud makes the crucial distinction between the subject’s phallus and the (phantasmic) ‘mother’s phallus’ – the acknowledged absence of which poses the perpetual threat of castration. By substituting the fetish for the ‘mother’s phallus’, the mother’s lack is accounted for and the subject’s (inhibitive) fear of castration is alleviated.

Understanding the full-on identification with ideological machinery through Freudian fetishism is integral to understanding Full Metal Jacket (particularly as concerns Pvt. Pyle’s psychological breakdown in the film’s first half), but for the most part the actual relationships forged between the soldiers and their rifles are of a more nuanced fetishism. Alphonso Lingis offers a useful splicing between fetishism and animism – more delicate than Freud’s definition of the former, and well suited to Zizek’s notion of operative ideology:

Animism recognizes a spirit in material things. The voice that we hear in things is not their voice, the voice of matter; material things are animated by a spirit or by spirits…

Fetishism recognizes a spirit of material things. Things emit signals and issue directives on their own. The voice is the voice of their material bodies. (Lingus 111)

Senior drill instructor Hartman employs a mixed rhetoric when speaking about the private’s rifles – he is both animist and fetishist in his message:

“Tonight, you pukes will sleep with your rifles. You will give your rifles a girl’s name … because this is the only pussy you people are going to get. Your days of finger-banging old Mary-Jane Rottencrotch through her purdy pink panties are over! You’re married to this piece, this weapon of iron and wood, and you will be faithful!” (Kubrick 1987 10:05)

(In this scene the platoon proceeds to lie down on their bunks (“Mount!”), where they clutch their rifles to their chests. Hartman shouts “Pray!” and the recruits recite in unison:)

This is my rifle.
There are many like it but this one is mine.
My rifle is my best friend. It is my life.
I must master it as I must master my life.
Without me my rifle is useless. Without my rifle I am useless.
I must fire my rifle true.
I must shoot straighter than my enemy who is trying to kill me.
I must shoot him before he shoots me.
I will.
Before God I swear this creed.
My rifle and myself are defenders of my country.
We are the masters of our enemy. We are the saviors of my life.
So be it! Until there is no enemy but peace!
Amen.
(Kubrick 1987 10:39-11:58)
The first excerpt is essentially fetishistic in its reference to castration and its material (external) directives (“You’re married to … this weapon of iron and wood, and you will be faithful!”), and the second is animistic: the directives (“I must master [my rifle] as I must master my life.”) encircle the object – do not issue from it.

Sgt. Hartman’s most animistic characterization of the military weapon offers the key to the viewer’s ideological entrance into Full Metal Jacket – the phantasmic space shared by both audience and fictional character discussed with MASH and An Officer and a Gentleman:

“Your rifle is only a tool. It is the hard heart that kills. If your killer instincts are not clean and strong you will hesitate at the moment of truth. You will not kill! … And then you will be in a world of shit!”
(Kubrick 1987 0:22:04)

The true fantasy that is sustained (and sustains the viewer) throughout Full Metal Jacket is that of the realist-humanist subject – Pvt. Joker. Ostensibly he is the author, providing the occasional voice-over commentary; Kubrick adapted the film from Gustav Hasford’s 1979 semi-autobiographical The Short-Timers (with Hasford’s help). In the film’s second half Joker wears a peace symbol pinned on his vest and, in seeming contradiction, the words ‘BORN TO KILL’ written on his helmet. When a Colonel unknown to him inquires, “What’s that supposed to be, some kind of sick joke?” Joker replies,

“I think I was trying to suggest something about the duality of man, sir.”
“The what?”
“The duality of man. The Jungian thing, sir.”
“Whose side are you on, son?”
“Our side, sir.”
“Don’t you love your country?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then how about getting with the program? Why don’t you jump on the team and come on in for the big win?”
“Yes, sir!” (Kubrick 1987 1:05:05)

We see here a distinct alignment with the power relations present in MASH, that is, the authority figure’s ignorance revealed through the hero’s cleverness, but with crucial differences. Instead of the protagonist using silliness to mock dry military language, as in MASH, Joker introduces dry ‘extra-ideological’ (in this case psychoanalytic) non-military language to reveal the Colonel’s inherent silliness – his inane perception of war as sport. The humor is distinct in being utterly humorless, but distinctly unsettling as well. Nonetheless, the joke is undoubtedly on the Colonel (the authoritarian ideological perpetuator) and shared privately between Joker and the viewer, again allowing the viewer to project as ‘subversive’ within the film. The issue of the pin and the helmet is excused by default.

It must be noted that Joker does make the final concession in this interaction (“Yes, sir!”), just as on his first day of training he responded “Sir, to kill, sir!” when asked “Private Joker, why did you join my beloved Corps?” (Kubrick 1987 0:04:15). He does want to “jump on the team and come on in for the big win”, but, presumably, he also wants peace as the end goal, and the freedom to express what is apparently an ideological contradiction. Joker, like Zack Mayo in An Officer and a Gentleman, challenges the moral integrity of military ideology while engaged in its praxis. The peace symbol/BORN TO KILL pairing becomes a symbol of Pvt. Joker’s own dual nature. Embodied by his character is precisely that ‘Jungian thing’ to which he offhandedly refers.

In Joker’s synthesis of dual signifiers we discover the Zizekian ‘trans-ideological kernel’, which in fact confirms the subject’s complete identification with military ideology:

An ideological identification exerts a true hold on us precisely when we maintain an awareness that we are not fully identical to it, that there is a rich human person beneath it: ‘not all is ideology, beneath the ideological mask, I am also a human person’ is the very form of ideology, of its ‘practical efficiency’. (Zizek 1997 21)

He further qualifies:

It is only the reference to such a trans-ideological kernel which makes an ideology ‘workable’
(Zizek 1997 21, his italics).

Joker’s interactions with higher-ranking officers are assertions that he is ‘not fully identical’ to military ideology, yet, at the film’s climax, when a wounded Viet-cong sniper-girl is begging to be shot, and the other troops hesitate, it is Joker’s ability to bridge the ‘duality of man’ in action as well as thought – to bring together his humanism and his ‘killer instinct’ – that reveals him to be “the fully constituted military subject” (Zizek 1997 21).

Works Cited

MASH. Dir. Altman, Robert. Prod. Preminger Ingo. 20th Century Fox, 1970. DVD.
Freud, Sigmund. “Fetishism (1927).”
Sexuality and the Psychology of Love. Ed. Philip Rieff. New York: Macmillan, 1963. 214-219. Print.
An Officer and a Gentleman. Dir. Hackford, Taylor. Prod. Elfand Martin. Paramount Pictures, 1982. DVD.
Full Metal Jacket. Dir. Kubrick, Stanley. Prod. Kubrick Stanley. Warner Bros., 1987. color film. Lingis, Alphonso.
Body Transformations: Evolutions and Atavisims in Culture. New York, London: Routledge, 2005. Print. Rycroft, Charles.
A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1972. Print. Zizek, Slavoj.
The Plague of Fantasies. London, New York: Verso, 1997. Print.
The Sublime Object of Ideology. London, New York: Verso, 1989. Print.