Kate and Kubrick

[rhogan@chaph.usc.edu (Ron Hogan)]

jorn@chinet.com (Jorn Barger) writes:

>3) Pull out the pin
>People who hated "Hanoi Jane" Fonda probably shouldn't know about this song, 
>sung from the perspective of a Viet Cong soldier hunting Americans.  I'll 
>always see it in terms of the heroine of Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket", 
>which actually ties into the Kate-Cloudbusting-WilhelmReich connection, 
>because *Kubrick's* title evoked Reich's psychoanalytic distinction between 
>'fascists' whose bodies are rigid with character armor, and loose, healthy 
>characters who still remember how to *shimmy*...!

Inspired.  Overinspired, but inspired.
For one thing, there are *no* loose, healthy characters in FULL METAL
JACKET who still remember how to shimmy.  Everybody in that film,
including the Matthew Modine character, is tainted and corrupted by the
war.  Modine does actively struggle against that, most notably by his
sarcasm and his peace button, but he also ultimately buys into the system.
Any shimmying elements (Nancy Sinatra, the Surfing Bird, the Mickey Mouse
theme) are subverted towards the war.

Also, in the one scene where psychoanalytic paradigms are drawn, Modine
specifically invokes Jung, not Reich.

And you know, the more I think about it, name any character in any
Stanley Kubrick film loose and healthy enough to remember how to shimmy.
I honest to God cannot think of a one, except *maybe* the little girl
on the videophone in 2001, and she's only there for a minute or two.

Full Metal Jacket, btw, means that one is carrying all of one's
ammunition, in that over the shoulder style war films fetishize.
But the film isn't so much about the fascism of that pose, but
the absurdity of it, and of war.  If it draws upon any school of
thought, I'd have to say it draws upon absurdism.

Which is not to suggest that there is nothing in what Jorn says;
there is a glimmer, but more from what he puts there than from
what is in the film itself, I think.

ObKate-- I always thought Cloudbusting would be a great closing
credit theme for a movie version of Richard Bachman's novel "Roadwork."