Full Metal Jacket Meme Full Metal Jacket Funny Line

• Adaptation Displacement: It's based on a novel.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Who bears most of the responsibility for Lawrence's murder-suicide of Hartman?
    • Gunnery Sergeant Hartman was either just doing his job and honestly trying to prepare his trainees for war, or his methods were so unnecessarily extreme and brutal that they drove one of his recruits to madness and got both himself and said recruit killed. R. Lee Ermey—a former Drill Instructor from that time period himself—jossed this by placing Hartman firmly in the latter camp ^note Ermey declared that Hartman's antics crossed the line into abuse territory, and thus were not only counter-productive, but would have gotten him court-martialed in real life, but the debates still rage to this day.
    • On the other side of the coin, some people either see Private Lawrence as The Woobie who was ultimately broken due to being relentlessly bullied by the Drill Sergeant Nasty, while others look at him as someone who really did not have the mental fortitude to make it as a Marine and who really should have dropped out for the good of both himself and everyone else.
    • Or, it's Joker who is unfit, since he does nothing when he finds Pyle loading a rifle in the head (a violation of at least three regulations). Instead of either taking the (unloaded) rifle away and alerting the MPs, or just alerting the MPs, he just stands and watches Pyle, who has clearly snapped, load a magazine and load his rifle, and as a result two Marines die.
    • There's also the concept that Cowboy is responsible, or at least shares some of the blame. Regardless of how you feel about the blanket party he orchestrated, he also urged Joker not to report Pyle's growing instability when the latter suggested doing so.
  • The movie is set at the time Project 100,000 was in place. Project 100,000 was an attempt to increase the number of drafted soldiers by drastically lowering the recruitment standards (i.e. recruiting people who would previously be considered as physically/mentally unfit for service, as well as people with criminal records). The movie makes no mystery that Lawrence is unfit. We don't even know if he was a voluntary recruit; while the Marine Corps has been volunteer-only since its inception, during World War II and Vietnam it was not unheard for Marine recruiters to meet quotas by comandeering Army draftees.
• Anvilicious: The '80s saw an unprecedented military buildup and lots of patriotic movies like Top Gun and Iron Eagle which may have well have been recruiting videos. While there were other anti-war films (Platoon being the most famous) this movie definitely made many Gen-Xers think twice about whether a military career was right for them.
• Award Snub: It was nominated for one Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. It was not nominated for Best Picture, Best Director for Stanley Kubrick or Best Supporting Actor for R. Lee Ermey or Vincent D'Onofrio, despite many people saying they felt that not only did it deserve to be nominated in these categories, but it deserved to win too. Unsurprisingly it lost its one Oscar nod to The Last Emperor.
• Awesome Music: "Paint It Black", by The Rolling Stones, which plays during the end credits.
  • Also "These Boots Are Made For Walking", which plays during the first Vietnamese sex worker scene.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The helicopter ride with the door gunner taking shots at Vietnamese civilians is never brought up again after the scene.
• Complete Monster: The unnamed door gunner spends the entirety of his brief appearance shooting down Vietnamese civilians, laughing and casually chatting with other soldiers the entire time. He has over 150 confirmed kills, including women and children. His crimes are considered loathsome even in the nightmare world of wartime Vietnam, disgusting even other soldiers.

• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • Hartman's insults are meant to belittle and demean, but one could sympathize with Pvt. Pyle's giggling due to the sheer creativeness of Hartman's ranting. Truth in Television, many Boot Camp instructors are purposefully funny, they try to teach recruits to have the mental control not to laugh, which gives mental fortitude in other areas.
  • The Door Gunner, heinous as he is, delivers his lines in such a casual, unapologetic and funny way that the war crime scene becomes borderline Comedic Sociopathy.
• Do Not Do This Cool Thing: Which drove Kubrick absolutely bonkers. Even when he tried to make war as shitty as possible, some people still got off to things like the heli gunner shooting the civilians, and the dehumanizing boot camp led by the Drill Sergeant Nasty. Samuel Fuller called it "another goddamn recruiting film", believing that teenage boys going to Kubrick's picture would come out impressed and seduced by the idea of wartime combat and flouting authority.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Ask the average person about this movie, and pretty much the only character they'll talk about is Gunnery Sergeant Hartman. Not bad for someone who doesn't even survive the first half of the movie.
  • Pvt. Pyle to some.
  • Animal Mother has a fair following.
  • The Da Nang prostitute at the start of the second half.
  • The Door Gunner, due to Comedic Sociopathy and for being a Fountain of Memes like Hartman.
• Epileptic Trees: Rob Ager theorizes that Private Pyle's suicide never actually happened, but that it was a dream sequence symbolizing his rebirth from a fat, slovenly moron into the brutal warmonger Animal Mother—played by a different actor to subconsciously emphasize how the military machine has transformed him.
• Fanon:
• First Installment Wins: The boot camp half is better regarded and remembered than the one that actually goes to Vietnam.
• Fountain of Memes: Hartman's insults are so creatively and hilariously profane that almost everything he says has become a meme. EVERYTHING the Door Gunner says has become a meme.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Judging from all the fanart, the film seems to have a cult following in Japan.
• He Panned It, Now He Sucks!: Gene Siskel came down hard on Roger Ebert on Siskel & Ebert for giving Full Metal Jacket a Thumb's Down while giving Benji The Hunted a four-star Thumb's Up (both films were released the same year). This got parodied in The Critic.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Sergeant Hartman warns Private Joker, "You had best unfuck yourself or I will unscrew your head and shit down your neck!" Then there's Duke Nukem 3D, when Duke not only says that to an Overlord before killing it, but he also means what he says, and he does it literally, keeping true to his word.
  • Matthew Modine, who plays Joker, appears in a film where the main character's archenemy (and Big Bad of the last movie) is a character called "Joker".
• Just Here for Godzilla: Nine times out of ten, people who haven't seen the movie yet but want to are going to be surprised when the film isn't exclusively about Gunnery Sergeant Hartman.
• Love to Hate: Sergeant Hartman, due to his actor's memorable performance despite being made a Hate Sink by Kubrick.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Gunnery Sergeant Hartman in general, thanks to the epic performance by R. Lee Ermey.
    • Pretty much anyone in the US military (and many people outside of it) trying to sound witty and badass will quote selections from the same scene of Hartman singling out recruits in the barracks. Anyone from Texas is probably quite familiar with the list of things that come from Texas.
    • "What is your major malfunction?" (you know the rest)
    • "Holy Jesus. What is THAT? WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?" - Hartman's reaction to finding Pyle's jelly donut. Has since been repurposed to illustrate shock at other things.
    • "LET ME SEE YOUR WAR FACE!"
  • "Me so horny, me love you long time" — much to the chagrin of any East Asian woman walking down the street. The controversial Hip-Hop group 2 Live Crew even sampled that line in the song "Me So Horny" on their infamous album As Nasty As They Wanna Be, as did Sir Mix-a-Lot in "Baby Got Back" (albeit only in one line of the song).
    • Another part of this scene, "Sucky sucky five dollar", became better known when it was used by South Park.
  • The "Let me hear your war cry" scene replaced with the faces of mannequins. (Nightmare Fuel ahead.)
  • Basically everything the Door Gunner says, he's almost as quotable as Hartman.
    • "Anyone who runs is a VC! Anyone who stands still is a well-disciplined VC!"
    • "How do you shoot women and children?" "Easy, you just don't lead 'em so much!"
    • "GET SOME, GET SOME, GET SOME!"
• Misaimed Fandom: It goes over a lot of people's heads that this was an anti-war movie.
  • Tons of people seem to love Sgt. Hartman, particularly military personnel who think that more drill sergeants should be like Hartman. The entire point of the character is that he's meant to be an asshole and a demonstrable failure of a drill instructor. Hartman doesn't understand Pyle and is ultimately out of his depth in dealing with him. Hartman praises Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who killed JFK, for good marksmanship. He's physically abusive to his troops, punishing all of them for the actions of one, and even slaps Joker and chokes Pyle. And Hartman considers his troops hating him to be a good thing. These character deficiencies ultimately gets him and Private Pyle killed in a Murder-Suicide, and leaves mental scars on Private Joker. In fact, Ermey said in interviews that he deliberately played Hartman as a very bad drill instructor who stays just barely within the rules to avoid getting in trouble. And yet, the Drill Sergeant Nasty character was codified by this film, Ermey was typecast as this sort of character for the rest of his life, and it's still what most people think of when they imagine a drill sergeant.
  • Almost every YouTube video of Hartman will have some comment along the lines of "My 'Nam drill instructor was just like this, and what he taught saved my life." Whilst not completely implausible, it seems hard to escape the conclusion that a lot of these comments are Phony Veteran YouTube War Experts trying to idolize Hartman and pointing to fictional stories from "the 'Nam" to justify it.
  • In-universe, Hartman gloats about the Marine-taught shooting prowess of Austin sniper Charles Whitman and Lee Harvey Oswald. Doubly obnoxious because Whitman's massacre would have been barely a year old by the time the movie was set - which would be the point. The insensitivity is another sign that Hartman isn't a very good person. The problem is, most people don't even remember the Whitman massacre anymore, so it just seems like a trivia piece to modern viewers. On top of this, Oswald actually demonstrates piss-poor marksmanship, with one missed shot, one neck shot, and one off-centre headshot when, with a 4x scope at 88 yards, Kennedy's head would have taken up the entire scope.
  • Once again proving François Truffaut's maxim that it's impossible to create an anti-war movie, the film overall is very popular with military personnel, especially Marines. And Vietnam veterans, naturally. And some YouTube War Experts who claim to be Vietnam veterans online.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • The Door Gunner crosses it in seconds as he's introduced killing unarmed civilians, gleefully. He then boasts about his "prowess" and then casually jokes with a technicism when asked how he can kill women and children (and 50 water buffaloes too, all them certified). Ain't war hell?
  • The mass grave scene is one for the VC.
• One-Scene Wonder:
  • The Da Nang prostitute ("Me love you long time"), and the door gunner who shoots Vietnamese civilians from a helicopter ("Get some, get some!").
  • Ngoc Le as the VC sniper. The sniper is slowly built up over the course of several minutes a remorseless and deadly accurate killing machine, picking off the platoon one by one. Finally, they infiltrate the sniper's lair, and the sniper is revealed to be a remorseless and deadly accurate killing machine who's a pigtailed teenage girl. Even after Rafterman empties an entire magazine into her, she still isn't dead, but asks them to shoot her. Joker does so, completing his character arc.
• Parody Displacement: Mention the name, "Gomer Pyle" to someone. A younger person will probably think of "the fat Marine recruit from Full Metal Jacket who blows his brains out" instead of "the gas station worker from The Andy Griffith Show who got a spin off sitcom where he was in the Marines" (Which is where the name came from and why Gunny Hartman gives it to him).
• Signature Scene: Lots of candidates.
  • The "war face" scene with Hartman and Joker.
  • Hartman's entire opening monologue is iconic in and of itself.
  • Pyle in the bathroom.
  • The jelly donut scene.
  • The blanket party scene. Hell, just search up "blanket party" on Google Images right now, and all of the results will almost exclusively be from that scene.
  • While the Vietnam War half may not be as memorable as the boot camp sequences, there's also the "me so horny" scene, the door gunner scene, the mass grave scene, and the final confrontation with the VC sniper.
• Squick:
  • Pvt. Pyle's suicide.
  • Some of Hartman's Flowery Insults and threats can veer into this.

    "I'll PT you until your assholes are sucking buttermilk!"

    "It looks to me like the best part ran down the crack of your mama's ass and ended up as a brown stain on the mattress!"

    "Your days of fingerbanging ol' Mary Jane Rottencrotch through her pretty pink panties ARE OVER!"

    "You climb obstacles like old people fuck!"

    "I bet you're the kind of guy that would fuck a person in the ass and not even have the goddamn common courtesy to give them a reach-around!"

• Tear Jerker: Pyle's entire arc. The poor guy simply is not suited to being a Marine but Hartman refuses to see that and simply comes down even harder on him to shape him to be a killer and turns the other Marines against him. He ends up so broken he ends up killing Hartman and himself.
• The Woobie:
  • Poor, poor private Pyle. Though he was fat and dumb, he didn't deserve this fate.
  • Sgt. Joker also counts, particularly by the end of the movie.

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Source: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/YMMV/FullMetalJacket

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