Stanley Kubrick’s Final Films: Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut

The last U.S. combat troops left South Vietnam in March 1973, ending America’s direct military involvement; the war itself continued until the fall of Saigon in April 1975. By then, more than 58,000 American service personnel had died, while the conflict had inflicted vastly greater losses across Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

Apart from the best pro-war efforts of John Wayne, whose critically derided The Green Berets attempted to bolster support for military action in Southeast Asia, there could be no straightforward cinematic glorification of this generational foreign policy nightmare.

As the dust settled, a range of filmmakers tackled its physical and psychological toll: Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978), Hal Ashby’s Coming Home (1978), Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986), and Brian De Palma’s Casualties of War (1989), to name just a few. Even the gung-ho likes of Chuck Norris in Missing in Action (1984) and Sylvester Stallone in Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985) reflected a need for revisionist fantasy in which the heroes could deliver some kind of cathartic victory.

Full Metal Jacket (1987)

In amongst all this came Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987), a movie that introduced us to one of the most iconic war movie posters of all time. In contrast to the harrowing image advertising Platoon—Willem Dafoe’s tragic character dying in a hail of bullets with his arms flung aloft—artist Philip Castle took a minimalist approach: a simple combat helmet set against a plain white background.

I’m not a huge fan of the tagline, “The wind in Vietnam doesn’t blow, it sucks”, but that hardly matters. What sticks in the mind is the helmet itself, especially the handwritten words “Born to Kill” next to a peace symbol badge. As Adam pointed out in his article about Castle, this contrast communicates the entire message of the film economically, not to mention Kubrick’s overall view of humankind.

After initially considering a film about the Holocaust, Stanley Kubrick teamed up with former war correspondent Michael Herr, who wrote the narration for Apocalypse Now, to focus on the Vietnam War instead. For the source material, Kubrick selected The Short-Timers by Gustav Hasford, who drew from his own experiences in Southeast Asia during the Tet Offensive of 1968.

Kubrick hired Hasford to contribute to the screenplay and wanted to meet him in person. Herr advised against it, describing the author as “a scary man, a big, haunted Marine”. As foretold, the meeting didn’t go well when Hasford visited Kubrick’s home, and they never saw each other again.

Full Metal Jacket throws us straight in at the deep end with a group of raw recruits at Parris Island, South Carolina, where they are shorn of their hair and handed over to Gunnery Sergeant Hartman (R. Lee Ermey) for eight weeks of intensive training. They are stripped further of their individuality as Hartman assigns his “maggots” nicknames and makes it clear from the outset that his job is to break them down and build them up again as killing machines.

From the get-go, overweight and painfully inept Private “Gomer Pyle” (Vincent D’Onofrio) becomes the main target of Hartman’s obscene rage. Private Joker (Matthew Modine) reluctantly takes Pyle under his wing and helps him shape up. Much to Hartman’s surprise, Pyle turns out to be a skilled marksman as graduation day approaches. But the relentless abuse causes his mind to snap, and he kills Hartman before taking his own life.

Anthony Michael Hall of The Breakfast Club and Val Kilmer were originally considered for the part of Joker before Matthew Modine was cast. In turn, Modine suggested his friend D’Onofrio to play Pyle, a role Kubrick believed was the most important in the film. D’Onofrio committed fully to the character, gaining around 70 pounds to portray the victimised recruit.

Ed Harris turned down the opportunity to play Hartman, while Robert De Niro was also considered before Ermey asked Kubrick for an audition. Ermey was a real-life Marine Corps drill instructor who served in Vietnam and had previously worked as a technical adviser on Apocalypse Now, also playing a small uncredited role.

To prove himself, Ermey recorded a video of himself drilling a group of British Territorial Army paratroopers while being pelted with tennis balls and oranges. He generated hundreds of pages of insults and improvisations, from which Kubrick and his assistant Leon Vitali shaped Hartman’s dialogue.

Kubrick resisted labelling Full Metal Jacket as either pro-war or anti-war. That ambiguity comes across in the training segment, which is presented matter-of-factly and with a strong vein of dark humour. Without much backstory for the characters, we aren’t particularly encouraged to identify with any of them, although we naturally gravitate towards Joker because of his wit, intelligence and compassion.

Hartman gives the sequence an element of vulgar black comedy with his endlessly inventive rants. He is both frightening and faintly ridiculous, presenting his brutality as necessary preparation for combat. Yet the first half of the film exposes the catastrophic cost of that logic: the process produces a killer who ultimately turns his training on Hartman himself.

The first half culminates in the notorious bathroom showdown between Pyle and Hartman, with Joker caught in the middle. Hartman is predictably infuriated to find these two “animals” in his “head” in the middle of the night, but there is an unmistakable note of pride when he realises that Pyle has his rifle locked and loaded and fully intends to use it. After a seemingly hopeless start, Hartman has successfully turned Pyle into a killer.

With Pyle and Hartman dead, Joker and the other graduates are off to ’Nam, although Kubrick and his cast and crew remained in rainy old England.

After Spartacus, Kubrick based his productions in Britain and became remarkably adept at recreating distant places close to home. Much was made of his supposed reclusiveness and fear of flying, but he was better described as a private, home-centred filmmaker who had earned enough control to build his productions around his family life.

In Full Metal Jacket, Bassingbourn Barracks, an army camp in neighbouring Cambridgeshire, doubled for Parris Island, while the filmmaker travelled further afield to the Norfolk Broads and London to recreate the Mekong Delta and the war-torn city of Huế respectively. For the latter, Kubrick took over the defunct Beckton Gasworks, using explosives and wrecking balls to create the rubble-strewn devastation seen in the back end of the film.

Realising that the functionalist architecture of 1960s Vietnam wasn’t all that different from 1930s Britain, Kubrick’s production team, headed by Anton Furst - who later won an Oscar for designing Gotham City in Batman - studied thousands of photographs from the era to dress the set as authentically as possible. To complete the look, dozens of palm trees were imported from Spain to London’s Docklands and carefully tended to keep them alive in the cooler climate during the prolonged shoot.

Unlike other Vietnam War movies such as Apocalypse Now and Platoon, which viscerally evoke the chaotic and harrowing nature of the conflict, Kubrick maintains the same anthropological curiosity that characterised the first half of the film.

Joker is now a sergeant in the press corps writing for Stars and Stripes, a relatively cushy assignment where he gets to crack wise while he and his colleagues are instructed to put a positive spin on the latest developments in the war.

After his base is attacked during the Tet Offensive, Joker receives a more dangerous assignment and is sent out into “the shit” to rendezvous with one of his fellow Parris Island graduates during the battle of Huế. Chewed out by a superior for combining his “Born to Kill” helmet with a peace symbol on his flak jacket—“I think I was trying to suggest something about the duality of man, sir” - Joker still attempts to maintain his sarcastic stance on the war:

I wanted to see exotic Vietnam, the jewel of Southeast Asia. I wanted to meet interesting and stimulating people of an ancient culture, and kill them. I wanted to be the first kid on my block to get a confirmed kill.

Lost in the bombed-out city, several members of the unit fall prey to sniper fire. Joker tracks down the killer first, only to discover that she is a teenage girl. His gun jams and she almost takes him out too, but another Marine saves his skin, leaving the girl mortally wounded. Joker is finally forced to set aside his ironic detachment and put her out of her misery rather than leave her to die in agony.

It’s a mercy killing, but there is no going back. As the surviving troops march through the blazing city, Joker falls into step singing the Mickey Mouse March. It’s a final note of bitter irony as the conflict destroys any remaining innocence in these young men. Matthew Modine summed it up best: “It is the moment that Joker dies and has to spend the rest of his life alive.”

Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

Stanley Kubrick directed seven of his 13 pictures between 1960 and 1980, but only Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut during the final two decades of his life. As a budding cinephile in the mid-1990s, I joined many other movie buffs in wondering whether we would ever actually get another Kubrick film to enjoy.

During the first half of the decade, he worked on a screenplay entitled The Aryan Papers, a Holocaust drama based on Louis Begley’s Wartime Lies. He even made a rare trip abroad to scout my adopted hometown of Brno as a potential double for Nazi-occupied Warsaw.

There was also tantalising news that he was preparing to make A.I. Artificial Intelligence, another long-gestating project based on Brian Aldiss’s science-fiction short story Supertoys Last All Summer Long.

Kubrick developed the project through the 1980s and early 1990s, but increasingly felt that Steven Spielberg might be the better director. The two discussed that possibility during the mid-1990s before Kubrick eventually returned to directing the project himself. Production was postponed once again, however, and Kubrick moved on to Eyes Wide Shut. As we all know, Spielberg eventually made A.I. Artificial Intelligence after Kubrick’s death.

The source material was Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novella Dream Story, or Traumnovelle in German, a psychological drama about a Viennese doctor whose life is upended after his wife reveals her sexual fantasies about another man. Kubrick updated the setting to late-1990s New York and pulled off a sensational casting coup by landing Hollywood’s glitziest real-life married couple for the lead roles.

The basic story remained the same. Tom Cruise is Dr Bill Harford, a slick physician who counts some of New York’s wealthiest citizens among his clients. His marriage to Alice (Nicole Kidman) has entered something of a rut, and cracks begin to appear when they both flirt with other guests at a high-society Christmas party.

The following night, the couple engage in the most dangerous kind of pillow talk by digging into each other’s unfulfilled desires. Jealous about Bill’s flirtations at the party, Alice reveals that she once fantasised about having a fling with a naval officer and would have given up their marriage for one night of passion with the handsome stranger.

Suddenly jarred out of his smug complacency, Dr Bill embarks on a nocturnal adventure through New York with the half-hearted goal of committing adultery. After near-misses with a grieving patient’s daughter and a sex worker, he receives a tip from an old friend from medical school and blags his way into a masked orgy in a stately manor. The secret society holding the gathering doesn’t take kindly to intruders, however, and Bill fears that his family may be in danger if he fails to heed its warnings.

Thanks to the superstar casting of Cruise and Kidman, the anticipation surrounding Eyes Wide Shut was incredibly intense ahead of its release in July 1999. By this stage, Kubrick’s reputation for perfectionism was beyond any doubt, and an unprecedented 15-month shoot only added to the mystique, boosted further by an enigmatic marketing campaign.

On top of all that, the film’s American release received an R rating after Warner Bros. digitally inserted figures to obscure some of the orgy’s more explicit action. International audiences saw the unaltered sequence, while Roger Ebert memorably described the American version as the “Austin Powers” cut of Kubrick’s film.

All the hype left me feeling pretty disappointed when I first saw Eyes Wide Shut at the cinema in 1999. Sure, I was really looking forward to a new Kubrick film but, as a horny 21-year-old guy, I was also eager to see all the sex stuff. For all the nudity on display, however, it’s a rather unerotic picture, and I was bored to tears by lengthy scenes of characters slowly repeating lines back to each other and Tom Cruise wandering around New York for what seemed like an eternity.

This was the Kubrick film I was least looking forward to revisiting for this series. Having watched it again, however, I now realise why the 21-year-old me was so disappointed. Back then, I’d had hookups and dated a few people, but I hadn’t had a serious relationship. Kubrick’s deeper themes were lost on me at that stage of my life.

For all the hoopla surrounding its sexual content, Eyes Wide Shut is a very mature study of the frustrations and temptations that inevitably bubble up during a long-term monogamous relationship.

Watching it again after spending 20 years with my former partner, I really got it this time around. Luckily, we had a long and happy time together, but there are always pressure points and moments of peril. Kubrick was also devoted to his wife Christiane, but he was fascinated by the themes of Schnitzler’s novella, which explored how hazardous a relationship can become when jealousy and secrecy are involved and questioned how well we can ever really know another person’s heart.

That is certainly the case for Dr Bill, who takes his beautiful wife for granted but only seriously considers having a fling of his own once she has confessed her fantasy about another man. Her revelation stings him into action, perhaps because he is also aroused by the thought of Alice making love to her dream guy.

Now that his eyes have been opened, sexual opportunities suddenly seem to present themselves at every turn as he meanders through the city at night. Bill enters a dreamlike state, his somnambulistic quest heightened by the film’s languorous pace and peculiar dialogue, in which everyone speaks as if they are in a trance.

Eyes Wide Shut stands alongside Barry Lyndon as one of Kubrick’s most visually ravishing films, with highly saturated colours competing against the soft, ever-present glow of fairy lights and Christmas trees as the Steadicam seductively follows Bill on his odyssey.

Continuing his preference for working close to home, Kubrick recreated remarkably detailed Greenwich Village streets on British soundstages. They appear authentic at first glance, but there is something deliberately off about them, further heightening the sense of unreality.

It’s an intoxicating brew: a film based on an Austrian novella, set in New York but largely shot in England, with Schnitzler’s Mitteleuropean decadence bleeding through into the Big Apple during the film’s carnivalesque orgy sequence.

The gathering centres around a ritual conducted by an incense-waving master of ceremonies chanting a Romanian Orthodox liturgy in reverse, while Bill attempts to blend in with the masks and cloaks gathered in the chamber. It’s one of the most hypnotically sinister scenes Kubrick ever filmed, charged with depraved sexual potential and the ever-present threat of our half-baked voyeur being discovered and unmasked.

Despite his well-heeled lifestyle, Dr Bill doesn’t belong in this setting. He has stumbled into a seamier realm of high society, forbidden to anyone other than the richest and most powerful. It is impossible to watch the scene nowadays without thinking about Jeffrey Epstein and other ultra-rich predators lurking in their pleasure palaces beyond the scrutiny of ordinary people, using their wealth and influence to buy whatever—and whoever—they want and to intimidate anyone who threatens to expose them.