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Duality In The Film 'Full Metal Jacket'

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The main message of the film, “Full Metal Jacket” I would describe as the term, “duality” which means the state or quality of being two or in two parts. One scene in the film, the Colonel calls out the “born to kill” writing on Joker’s helmet and he responds “the duality of man, sir!” Throughout the movie the Joker’s Character points at duality, his whole character is struggled through his complexed sides of duality. He publicly portrays his the role of “killer.” However, deep down you can see his idealistic views against war and how he’s constantly battling between his two personas. Take a look at his job for instance; he is a reporter for a newspaper in the Marine Corps. Each Marine is trained to be one and each Marine is a rifleman trained to kill. It consistently gets berated into them in boot camp all the time. Then he gets a job as a reporter having nothing to do with killing, but simply observing the chaos of war. “This is my rifle …show more content…

It’s not just a line from the drill instructor; I believe it has a lot of meaning. It’s almost like Joker’s instructions to hide behind his public persona of a warrior, a facade that helps him get through the entirety of the film until after killing the female sniper in vengeance of Cowboys death, his ultimate war face has to be shown. All in vengeance of Cowboy being killed. The death of his best friend finally made him transform into a killer, he wanted to truly kill. But once he gets to the sniper he sees that not only is the sniper critically injured, but to the point they will die, but it’s a female sniper. This is when he has to make the ultimate choice of either killing her to end her suffering or let her die in pain. The term duality of that situation is portrayed quite well. The humane way to do is to end the suffering and what does Joker do? The humane way. Which I believe is the thing, I think, he’s been struggling with internally this entire

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