Full Metal Jacket (Stanley Kubrick, 1987): Class Handout

Significantly, very few films were made about America’s involvement in Vietnam during the war itself, with the exception of the jingoistic John Wayne vehicle The Green Berets (1968) and Elia Kazan’s little-seen movie The Visitors (1972).

The Visitors was the first fiction film to openly question America’s involvement in Vietnam, but following the success of Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s a significant number of American films were made about Vietnam that openly criticised America’s involvement in the war. These films include Hamburger Hill (John Irvin, 1987) and several films by Oliver Stone, who was himself a veteran of the war: Platoon (1986), Born on the Fourth of July (1989) and Heaven & Earth (1993).

Also during this period, American authors began to write about Vietnam; the most significant author to deal with the trauma of the Vietnam War is possibly Tim O’Brien, who enlisted as an infantry soldier in Vietnam following his degree. O’Brien’s most famous books include the semi-autobiographical If I Die in a Combat Zone, the collection of short stories The Things They Carried and the magical realist novel Going After Cacciato.

In 1985, veteran filmmaker Stanley Kubrick announced his decision to make Full Metal Jacket; the film was completed in 1986 and released in early 1987. Kubrick had previously directed such significant films as Spartacus (1960), A Clockwork Orange (1971), The Shining (1980), Barry Lyndon (1976) and the anti-war movies Paths of Glory (1957) and Dr Strangelove (1964).

Kubrick had made his home in Britain, and refused to leave the British Isles. Consequently, Full Metal Jacket was shot in the UK, with the Isle of Dogs (in London) standing in for Vietnam.

The film was based on two sources: journalist Michael Herr’s Dispatches (from which, like Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket ‘borrowed’ much of its narrative voice), and a novel by Gustav Hasford entitled The Short Timers.

The film is divided into two sections: the first half of the film depicts the dehumanising training the new recruits experience in the US (and ending with ‘Private Pyle’s (Vincent D’Onofrio) suicide), and the second half of the film follows ‘Private Joker’ (Matthew Modine) during the 1968 Tet Offensive. This section of the film depicts the damage caused by war and the physical and psychological harm experienced by the young men who served in Vietnam. Vietnam is presented as an ‘other place’, something close to a Hell in which moral codes do not apply. The soldiers’ merciless killing of a female sniper at the end of the film is presented as the logical consequence of the training they have received at home, during which they have learned to see both their enemies and themselves as less than human: as one of the characters states, ‘After we rotate back to the world, we’re gonna miss not having anyone around that’s worth shooting’. Originally, Kubrick wanted to end the film with a sequence depicting the troops playing football with the woman’s head, but decided that this scene was too heavy-handed, and chose to omit it in his final cut of the film.

Full Metal Jacket divides audiences: some people see it as uneven, and upon its release the film came under severe criticism for its language and its representation of violence. Other Kubrick movies had been criticised for their representation of violence, including A Clockwork Orange, which Kubrick himself withdrew from circulation in the UK following allegations of copycat violence.

The Technical Advisor for the film was R. Lee Ermey, who had served as a Gunnery Sergeant in the Marines, and who plays the drill instructor during the first half of the film.


‘The dead know only one thing: that it is better to be alive’.

©Paul Andrew Julian Lewis, 2005

Straw Dogs (Sam Peckinpah, 1971): Censorship and Genre Hybridity: Class Handout

Filmed in St Buryan (near St Ives) in Cornwall, Straw Dogs was released during a tumultuous period in the history of British censorship: the long-standing Chief Examiner, John Trevelyan, had recently retired and his replacement, Stephen Murphy, was faced with a number of controversial films, including Straw Dogs, Ken Russell's The Devils and Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange. As with A Clockwork Orange, the chief problem with Straw Dogs revolved around its sexual violence, specifically a scene in which Amy (Susan George) is raped by two men—with one of her attackers (her former lover), Amy appears to consent to and even enjoy the act.

At the time, films made in Britain tended to consult the BBFC at the pre-production stage and again during post-production. Murphy advised the filmmakers to trim the second rape of Amy; due to the cuts, the sequence appears to involve a moment of buggery, which to some audience members made the already harrowing sequence even more upsetting. (Censors in the US made even more cuts before giving the film an 'R' rating: in this instance, the British censor was more lenient.)

Straw Dogs was given an 'X' in the UK, during a time in which jokes about rape were seen as permissable; in the 1967 PG-rated comedy Western Waterhole 3, James Coburn refers to rape as 'assault with a friendly weapon'. However, during the 1970s attitudes began to change, and by the time the Video Recordings Act came into play (in 1984), rape was considered a taboo subject. Consequently, post-VRA Straw Dogs was denied a video certificate until 2002: it was banned outright in 1999. However, after consulting a team of psychologists, in 2002 the BBFC gave the uncut version of the film an '18' certificate for its home video release: the psychologists concluded that the film contains a problematic but ultimately responsible treatment of the issue of rape: despite Amy's apparent concession to the first rape, the second assault is presented as harrowing.

Based on a middling novel by 'Gordon M. Williams' (a pseudonym) entitled The Siege at Trencher's Farm, Straw Dogs was directed by Sam Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch), and was his first venture outside the Western genre. In fact, the film contains many references to the Western: the Cornish village is presented in the same way as a Western town, and the local yokels ('hired hands' employed to rebuild the Sumner's garage) are quite simply an outlaw gang. The central portion of the film revolves around the siege of the Sumner's house, a narrative device familiar to viewers of the Western (where the forces of the 'wilderness' lay siege to a 'civilised' space: compare with The Alamo, Rio Bravo).


The film also refers to the themes of the Western, and it subverts the Western's attitude towards violence (i.e. that violence is justified and therefore acceptable if it is 'retaliatory'--in other words, in self-defence or an act of revenge). In Straw Dogs, once the characters become involved in violence they lose all semblance of humanity: Hoffman's mild-mannered mathematics professor becomes a bestial monster who murders several men (and, if that wasn't enough, appears to enjoy their deaths) before leaving his clearly disturbed wife (their marriage apparently irretrievably destroyed) and driving off into the night with the local simpleton; at the end of the film, David doesn't 'know [his] way home', and apparently doesn't care. The film depicts men who succumb to their (self)destructive impulses and unlearn their civilised behaviour, apparently celebrating their loss of identity. Is Peckinpah saying that 'real men' should be violent? I don't think so—David's fate is presented with irony. But it's up to you to decide. Critics who took the film's tagline ('The knock at the door meant the birth of one man... and the death of seven others') too literally certainly thought so, and New Yorker critic Pauline Kael labelled the film 'fascist'.


From the siege onwards, the film also refers to the iconography of the British horror film: an isolated house, swirling mists, night. Additionally, the film's cinematographer, John Coquillon, had also shot Michael Reeves' horror-Western hybrid Matthew Hopkins: Witchfinder General, and with that film Straw Dogs contains an autumnal that is as cold as slate and which reinforces the icy dread at the heart of the narrrative (which snowballs as events progress).

Peckinpah used to like to talk about David Sumner's (Hoffman's) complicity in the violence that befalls him: Peckinpah claimed that at several points in the narrative, Sumner could have stopped events from snowballing, but chooses not to because of his inbuilt bloodlust: subconsciously, although he claims that he's running away from violence, Sumner wants to become involved in conflict—he wants to spill blood. As Peckinpah put it in an interview he gave to Playboy, 'Violence is ugly, brutalising and bloody fucking awful. It's not fun and games and cowboys and Indians. It's a terrible, ugly thing. And yet there's a certain response that you get from it, an excitement, because we're all violent people, we have violence within us'.

At the time of the shooting of Straw Dogs, Peckinpah was becoming interested in the work of Robert Ardrey, the author of The Territorial Imperative and African Genesis. An anthropologist and screenwriter (!), Ardrey argued that at the heart of all human behaviour are the drives for territory and procreation. Because these impulses are built into our genes, they inspire competition, and hence the impulse for violence is a core aspect of all of our personalities. Much of Peckinpah's work has been interpreted as an exploration of Ardrey's thesis. 'Aggressiveness is the principal guarantor of survival'; 'Human war has been the most successful of our cultural traditons'; 'we were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides': Ardrey


In the film, the horror genre's representation of violence as horrific and disturbing jars with the Western's celebration of violence, and produces a film in which violence is presented with a great deal of ambiguity: Peckinpah provokes his audience, asking them to respond to violence without directing their responses. Perhaps the most disturbing thing about Straw Dogs is that we get from the film what we bring to it: the film amplifies our existing attitudes towards violence, whatever they may be, and consequently individuals respond to the film in very different ways.

©Paul Andrew Julian Lewis, 2005

Dawn of the Dead (George A. Romero, 1978): Class Handout

Released in 1978, Dawn of the Dead is a sequel to Romero's 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead. In Night of the Living Dead, Romero reinvented the zombie movie: until Night... zombies had been presented in the traditional manner, as the mindless slaves of voodoo priests (see Plague of the Zombies, John Gilling, 1965). In Night... Romero created the zombie as undead monster, feeding on warm human flesh; but as one of the characters notes in Dawn... the zombies are not cannibals—their feeding is intra-species (the dead feeding on the living), not inter-species. Additionally, no concrete explanation is given for the appearance of zombies in his films: they are just a fact of existence which the heroes have to deal with. In Night... and Dawn... the heroes try to come to terms with living in a world overrun with zombies, and tellingly by the end of Dawn... the zombies have become largely a simple nuisance: the heroes have become accustomed to their presence (and for a central portion of the film, they seem to ignore the zombies altogether).

In the three films that form his 'living dead' trilogy (Night..., Dawn... and Day of the Dead, 1985—a fourth movie, Land of the Dead, is due out this Summer), Romero uses the zombie to comment on pressing social issues, and he is one of the few mainstream filmmakers who are happy to talk about the social and political content of their movies.

In Night of the Living Dead Romero gave a starring role to the young African-American actor Duane Jones, and the film obliquely comments on the issue of racial prejudice in 1960s America (remember, 1968 was the year of the Watts Riots). In addition, the film deals with the paranoia of the Vietnam era, and the bickering between different social factions.

In Dawn of the Dead, Romero traps his heroes in a vast shopping mall (the Monroeville Mall in Pittsburgh). Significantly, the late 1970s saw the growth of 'mall culture' in America, and in Dawn... Romero comments on this growing fascination with consumerism and material possessions. He uses the figure of the zombie as a metaphor for the mindless mindset created by consumerism, and he uses cannibalism as a metaphor for the way in which people relate to one another in a consumerist society (he is suggesting that in a society dominated by commerce and money, people compete with and 'feed off' each other). Watch how the film's heroes become increasingly fascinated with the material goods in the shopping mall, and see how their relationships deteriorate because of this: they become no better than the zombies they have trapped outside the mall—they display the same mindless fascination with consumption (flesh, stuff—it's all the same).


Additionally, there is the suggestion of a gay relationship between Peter (Ken Foree) and Roger (Scott H. Reiniger); this is not surprising, considering Romero is one of the few mainstream genre filmmakers to make films (e.g. Knightriders, 1982) in which the central characters are gay—with Night of the Living Dead, he was one of the first genre filmmakers to give a starring role to a black actor.

What is the central question of Romero's zombie movies? I think it's this: Can a fallen society rebuild itself?

Other recommended movies by Romero:
The Crazies (1973), Martin (1975), Jack's Wife (1973), Monkey Shines (1988), Bruiser (2000)

©Paul Andrew Julian Lewis, 2005

Statement of Intent: What This Page Is About.

I've created this page for students of Film Studies, and I plan to store on this website every resource and handout I create for my own Film Studies courses.

Address for this site: http://iloveitwhenaplancomestogether.blogspot.com

All of the handouts and materials on this page are my own work; ©Paul A J Lewis, 2005.