Moral Ambiguity In Anti-War Movie

Moral Ambiguity in Kubrick’s Anti-war Films: Full Metal Jacket & Paths of Glory

A notable figure in philosophical analysis of morality is Nietzsche. I find him a useful thinker, because while he disagrees and critiques other theses by people like Kant and Aristotle, he also critiques morality in general. On one hand, he condemns it, because it becomes a problematic notion in the chaotic world. On the other hand, he considers it useful, even healthy in certain situations. According to Mark T. Conard (2009), this is because he analysed two understandings of morality – the one he condemns is the Judeo-Christian, absolutist, Kantian morality that is restricting to the point of becoming absurd, and the other one is morality in a sense of “other

The order is portrayed as the training of the marines, the creation of a group identity, and as Conard analyses – erasure of their own identity. It is a running thread in Kubrcik’s films to question and challenge one’s identity in different situations. According to Zivah Perel (2008), he mocks the dynamics of the Marine corps without it being specifically about the Vietnam war. He portrays the training as an identity replacement, in the name of creating a group identity. An example of that is the first scene of the film as their heads are shaved and real names are replaced by pseudonyms, which is Sgt. Hartman’s (R. Lee Ermey) way of imposing order on chaos. The events of the first half in the film are Kubrick’s way of confirming Nietzsche’s flux metaphysics, as we see Private Pyle (Vincent D'Onofrio) and Private Joker’s (Matthew Modine) character developments. Pyle is the outsider who does not seem to belong in the marine’s training, he struggles physically and mentally to reach their standards and keeps making mistakes to the point where everyone else gets punished for his incompetence. This leads the other troops to a horrible act of violence as they restrain him and beat him up in the middle of the night, everyone even Joker who was the one helping him (Figure 1). The uncomfortable scene adopts the same blue and high-contrast lighting as the scene in A Clockwork Orange where Alex

It is a noticeable pattern in Kubrick’s film that could also be analysed as an auteur method, to avoid the linear narrative in its simplest structure. Kubrick’s opinion on narrative differs from the conventional understanding as he sees parts of narrative as: 'non-submersible units' (Brian Aldiss, 1999), which means he does not treat narrative as a whole, allowing him to defy chronological and linear structure. This method could also be reinforced with the editing. When it comes to Full Metal Jacket, it is also interesting to compare the narrative structure of the film and the novel it is adapted from - The Short-Timers (1979) by Gustav Hasford. The book is analysed as harsh and short (Jenkins, 1997), with an abrupt cut between actions in the middle. The latter is very much visible in the film as well, although, Michael Herr, who collaborated with Kubrick on the script of Full Metal Jacket talks about Kubrick’s understanding of building the story within Full Metal Jacket as by story he meant: “book of such agreeable elements and proportions that he could break it down and build it up again as a film, a tree with perfect branches.” (Herr in Jenkins, 1997 p: 109). In Full Metal Jacket for example, this episodic structure is mostly visible in the first part as scenes are just shown together without connections, creating a montage of the training of the marines, in