9/19/2023 0 Comments R lee ermey donald trump![]() Yet Kubrick’s view of what it means to be a soldier is far more ambivalent. “Full Metal Jacket” is, after all, a movie about Vietnam, a word that tends to evoke the Pavlovian response of “War - bad!” And the movie makes no political or moral defense of the tragic and wasteful morass that the Vietnam War was. Many viewers love the Parris Island sequence, and Ermey’s performance in it, because its exuberant bootstrap nihilism seems to fit all too snugly into their knee-jerk liberal view of the military as an extreme, dehumanizing, and even debased institution. The trick of “Full Metal Jacket” is that it draws on “counterculture” attitudes only to disarm them. ![]() It’s a film that mutates and evolves in tone and outlook as it goes along. But “Full Metal Jacket” is one of my favorite films (I’ve seen it dozens of times, and went to see it every day for a week when it first came out), and what I think a lot of people - even Kubrick fans - don’t understand about the film is that it’s not nearly as acerbic and cynical about war as many believe. If it sounds like I’m turning Hartman into, you know, a good guy, then that too may strike you as a little insane. He may seem like a lunatic, but that’s because he’s training these men to do something insane. Hartman starts off as a stylized figure, a satirical gung-ho American fascist out of Kurt Vonnegut, but the key to Ermey’s performance is that we like Hartman, and grow to respect him (sort of), in the same way that the recruits do. Ermey’s Hartman is nothing if not an equal-opportunity hater, with a weirdly liberated quality to his homophobia ( “I’ll bet you’re the kind of guy that would f-k a person in the ass and not even have the goddamn common courtesy to give him a reach-around!”).Īfter a while, his tough-nut pensées begin to add up to something, a vision that says: If these words hurt you, then what are sticks and stones - and guns and grenades - going to do? Steel yourself put your emotions on ice kill your self-pity or you won’t survive. Yet the more you listened to it, the more you realized that his herky-jerky monologue of abuse was so mesmerizing because it expressed…a worldview. Hartman was the drill sergeant as apocalyptic insult comic. “You’re so ugly you could be a modern-art masterpiece!” “What is your major malfunction, numbnuts? Didn’t your mommy and daddy show you enough attention when you were a child?” “I want that head so sanitary that the Virgin Mary herself would be proud to go in there and take a dump!” “I will give you three seconds, exactly three f-king seconds, to wipe that stupid grin off your face or I will gouge out your eyeballs and skullf-k you!” Much of it, of course, was scabrously funny. He wrote almost all his own dialogue, improvising dozens of hours of flamboyantly hostile basic-training patter, and the result sounded like the world’s most obscene graffiti turned into redneck grunt poetry. It didn’t take Kubrick long to realize that no actor could match the found-object, lower-depths-of-the-Marines quality that Ermey brought. He waged a campaign for it, showing Stanley Kubrick an instructional video he’d made as a kind of demo tape. Marine Corps staff sergeant, was originally hired as a technical adviser on “Full Metal Jacket,” and it was totally his idea to take over the role of Sgt. The comment drew roars of approval from the crowd.And what words they were! The fiendishly over-the-top threats and insults flew out of Ermey’s mouth from moment one, and they were more than just “colorful.” They were voluptuous in their baroque sadism, their dirty purplish fusion of joy and hate. “Unfortunately, you put the wrong people in a couple of positions, and they leave people for a long time that shouldn’t be there, and all of the sudden they are trying to take you out with bullshit. He also used profanity to rail against Sessions and Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. As he does in most rally-like speeches, he targeted the media as “fake news.” ![]() Trump’s speech covered a lot of ground, as he talked of his recent summit with Kim Jong-un, mocked proposals for a “green New Deal,” chided Republicans for opposing his emergency declaration to build a border wall, and imitated his former attorney general Jeff Sessions’ southern accent. Ermey, who died last year, also had roles in “Apocalypse Now,” “Seven” and the remake of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” He was hired by Stanley Kubrick to advise on his movie “Full Metal Jacket,” but he ended up being cast in the movie as Gunnery Sergeant Hartman. Lee Ermey, who was a former Marine Corps staff sergeant and gunnery sergeant and served as a drill instructor. Trump didn’t name the actor or the movie, but he may have been referring to R.
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