Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket and Eisenhart's You Cant Hack It Little Girl

Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket and R Wayne Eisenhart's “You Cant Hack It Little Girl: A Discussion Of The Covert Psychological Agenda of Modern Combat Training,”

Stanley Kubrick uses his film, Full Metal Jacket to say that people today are brainwashed products of decades of conditioning. Kubrick strongly encourages us to relish individual thought. He expresses that society’s ideology encourages conformity, which can eventually cause fatality. Also the article “You Cant Hack It Little Girl: A Discussion Of The Covert Psychological Agenda of Modern Combat Training” by R Wayne Eisenhart realizes the extreme repression on individuality in the Marines.

We all like to think of ourselves as individuals. However, in truth, we all live in a mass denial created be ourselves to feel less guilty about instituting severe pressure to, and the consequences if one does not, conform. The way one learns about oneself is often through others’ words and actions. This outside feedback creates a role for a person that he/she accepts as “who he/she is.” Therefore, it is the words and actions of another that forms the self-identity of a person, and ad this relationship develops, positive, reinforcing words and actions become necessary for ones healthy existence. Of course, there are varying degrees of conformity, and in most people there is the struggle to hold on to their individuality. This struggle is apparent in the scene in Full Metal Jacket when Gomer Pyle is beaten with soaps in towels. The other members of the troop become upset at Pyle’s nonconformity, and their negative feelings eventually reached the point of violence. Then Pyle’s struggle was ended and he became like the others, a killing machine. In his article, Eisenhart recognizes that “the training process created intense emotional conflicts generated by the formation of a male role,” and that there was a “continual structured effort to degrade and shape the individuals self-image.”

Because all throughout history conformity was a necessary way of life, one may see society now as completely brainwashed. Kubrick depicts the longstanding tradition of the US Marines as a kind of cult where everyone is uniformly behaved and not one thought is individual. Even Joker, who has an image of originality in the film, eventually gives in to the group. First in the scene where he is cajoled in to hitting Pyle with the soap, and second when he struggles with himself, but ultimately conforms by killing the Vietnamese sniper at the encouragement of his peers.