WEIRDLAND: Luhrmann's Elvis biopic, Rock & Roll, Vietnam, Analysis of Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket

Tuesday, July 02, 2019

Luhrmann's Elvis biopic, Rock & Roll, Vietnam, Analysis of Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket

Miles Teller: “I feel they’ve never really got an Elvis biopic right yet. I want to play young Elvis. It’s easy to do wrecked, bloated, and drug-addicted. You’ve got to see him rocking and rolling. Just gotta make my accent a little more ‘Memphis’”

Ansel Elgort, Miles Teller, Austin Butler and Aaron Taylor-Johnson are in the funning to play Elvis Presley in Baz Luhrmann's Untitled Elvis Presley Project. Five young actors have tested for the part of the King of Rock and Roll in Baz Luhrmann’s upcoming Elvis Presley biopic. Ansel Elgort, the Baby Driver star who is about to start shooting Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story; Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who appeared in Kick-Ass and Avengers: Age of Ultron; and Miles Teller, the Whiplash actor who will be in the Top Gun sequel, tested for the filmmaker last week. Also Austin Butler, who has a role in Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. The lead role is expected to be filled in the coming weeks. Tom Hanks is already on board the project as Col. Tom Parker, the legendary manager who controlled every aspect of Elvis' life. Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com

Elvis completed his 18-month stint in Germany and arrived back in the U.S. in March of 1960. At Fort Dix, New Jersey he was honorably discharged from active duty on March 5, 1960. He received his mustering-out check of $109.54 and Elvis Presley, Sergeant E-5 returned to home the life and career he had left behind.  Where did Elvis stand on the Vietnam War? He did not issue a single public statement about the Vietnam War, either for or against it. Elvis may well have supported the war, if we take into account his letter written to President Nixon in December 1970, but his stance was not cut clear. Other musicians like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez wrote a handful of protest folk songs. Jimi Hendrix was not an official protestor of the war, and he actually sympathized with the anticommunist view. However, with songs like “Machine Gun”, dedicated to those fighting in Vietnam, he did protest the violence that took place during the conflict. While Hendrix’s point of view was probably not similar to the protestors, his songs became anthems to the antiwar movement and a driving force during the war years even after his death. 


There are few songs particularly representative of that period and, all of them, are openly against the war. In chronological order of recording: “Eve of Destruction” (Barry McGuire), “Give Peace a Chance” (John Lennon), “Fortunate Son” (Creedence Clearwater Revival), “Ball of Confusion” (The Temptations), “Ohio” (Crosby Stills Nash & Young), and “War” (Edwin Starr). These songs were written (except the first one “Eve of Destruction” which was released in the 1965) recorded and released between late 1969 and early 1970. In fact, a few of them were during in the same month: at the height of the American presence in Southeast Asia and at the height of the anti-war movement in the U.S. In the immortal words of the German Romantic writer Jean Paul Richter “Music is moonlight in the gloomy night of life”. Vietnam was in fact known as “America’s first Rock ‘n’ Roll War.” Much of the music written during the 1960s and 70s characterized the discontent of American youth with the escalation of America’s involvement in the Vietnam conflict (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from November 1955, to the fall of Saigon in April 1975). Since Rock music was the most popular genre at the time with American youth, it inevitably became popular also in Vietnam among the young American soldiers. In retrospect, Rock ‘n’ Roll music ultimately became an anthem of the American youth demonstrating their anti-establishment anti-war sentiment. 90% of the combat soldiers were under 23 years of age.


For instance, “Purple Haze”, by Jimi Hendrix, made reference to a slang term for the M-18 violet smoke grenade, used by United States armed forces. In the song “Magical Mystery Tour” by The Beatles, the lyrics “Coming to take you away, dying to take you away”, had special meaning for Marines during the battle of Khe Sanh (when the Marine base was isolated and there were a series of desperate actions that lasted 77 days). The most common medium for the music between soldiers in Vietnam was the Armed Forces Vietnam Network (AFVN) Radio. This 24 hour radio station was created by the U.S. Armed Forces to entertain the American troops. As Michael W. Rodriguez (combat veteran of the Vietnam War and writer of the book “Humidity Moon”) stated: “Rock ‘n’ Roll meant fully automatic fire, get some adrenaline running through the body like a runaway train.” Rock music became the megaphone of an idealistic and confused generation, which ultimately identified itself in the lyrics and music by artists such as Jim Morrison and The Doors, Janis Joplin, and Bob Dylan, just to name a few. These so-called “cursed heroes” became wonderful interpreters and their songs have survived long past the war torn years during which they were created. The music itself has become immortal still listened to today, some 40 years later, by American youth who have little knowledge of the Vietnam War. Source: faculty.buffalostate.edu

The Balance of Order and Chaos in Full Metal Jacket: The combination of the demented treatment the recruits receive in boot camp with the combined hours of boredom and terror of the Vietnam scenes is intense. There is the ongoing theme of dehumanisation, the cynical world view, the hilarious black humour, the cold, distant and unsympathetic characters, the key use of disconnecting popular music, and the central role of war and conflict. Yet again, and very much like Werner Herzog he makes the surreal seem utterly believable, and reality seem surreal. The dehumanisation and brutality of boot camp, the moral ambiguity of the war and the questionable mental stability of some American soldiers is shown unsparingly, but so is the uncompromising barbarity of the communist enemy. When Joker finally confronts the sniper, Kubrick begins anew his deconstruction of hypermasculinity, in extremely complex ways. To begin, that the sniper is revealed to be a woman has enormous implications. In the ideological programming of the Marine Corps, that a woman could kill and hold off a whole platoon of marines is in itself deeply emasculating. 

The ending moment is keenly allegorical. Kubrick has created in this space apocalyptic signifiers, staging a Dante’s Inferno. When Joker approaches the unknowing sniper, Kubrick juxtaposes Joker with a conspicuously undamaged Vietnamese flag, which later becomes juxtaposed to the five men hovering over the mortally wounded Vietnamese woman soldier and then becomes a signifier throughout the mercy killing scene. Kubrick again uses shorthand signifiers to offer us larger allegorical meanings, in this case, represented by the space of the allegorically coded Vietnamese building and the allegorically coded Vietnamese woman. Arguably, up to this moment, Joker has not fully succumbed to the hypermasculinization process. Throughout the film, Joker has mocked and ironized the hypermasculinization process as well as America’s ideological rationalizations of the war: his mocking John Wayne line; his “duality” conception throughout, especially as he defines it to the colonel asking him “which side are you on?” 

Killing the (woman) sniper is a killing of the self. The fact that Joker delivers the shot that finally kills her can be read to mean that, in killing the sniper, Joker takes a further step toward self-mutilation and, therefore, toward self-destruction. Joker’s killing of the sniper can be seen not just as a self-mutilation but as a suicidal act. Kubrick establishes once again, that the Other is always the Self because the distinctions between the masculine and the feminine are false. Masculinity and femininity are  symbolic scripts, and masculine is not to be confused with male. In other words, the Vietnamese woman sniper becomes a kind of symbolic mirror image of Joker as he wrestles against his action, the contemplation of which is very much an interior Otherness (in ideological terms, the “feminine” within) pushing back against such a traumatic, monstrous act. The dramatic music, lighting (half of Joker’s face cast in shadow emphasizing his duality), Joker’s peace sign disappears when he takes the shot, leaving only the “Born to Kill” on his helmet, suggesting that his duality is at an end. Joker’s face contorts in a mask of what looks like supreme will power to commit this extremely difficult act. 

The Mickey Mouse Club song chanting in the end can be confusing to the viewer. Seen through a conservative or patriotic perspective, some film critics found a bit suspicious the lack of an explicit condemnatory stance in Kubrick's final conclusion. In order to save communist Vietnam (or the woman sniper) America had to mercy kill her? Or, more likely, Kubrick forces us to see the hidden reality of war: Sanctioned killing is sanitized by the military and in most war genre representations (especially filmic), but when presented in this naked form, where ideological/moral sanctioning does not apply, we witness a killing of the self. In this way, like Kubrick showed with the developmentally challenged Private Leonard "Gomer Pyle" Lawrence (who killed himself), Kubrick teachs us in this decisive moment that killing the Other can be, from a moral perspective, a killing of the self or “suicidal” act. Source: www.yourfilmprofessor.com

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