Summary

• Full Metal Jacket dismantles the romanticized image of military training, portraying a grim and intense boot camp experience. The movie challenges the notion of heroism in war.
• The soldiers' collective singing of the Mickey Mouse March provides a stark contrast between extreme violence and a cutesy song, capturing the banality of killings in the film. It represents a desire to return to innocence and a nostalgia for childhood.
• Joker's final line about being alive in a world of s*** reflects the profound trauma experienced by soldiers in Vietnam. The visuals of the burnt-out cities emphasize the idea that surviving in such a world can be worse than death itself.

In Full Metal Jacket, the final narration and the accompanying Mickey Mouse March singalong can seem somewhat inscrutable without further context. Director Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket arrived late in the helmer’s career and midway through the cycle of Vietnam War movies. Although a few more Vietnam movies were released after Full Metal Jacket, such as Born on the Fourth of July and Hamburger Hill, Kubrick’s contribution to the Vietnam movie sub-genre came after Platoon and Apocalypse Now had already offered definitive, albeit very different, cinematic portrayals of the invasion. Despite this, Full Metal Jacket was a critical success.

Kubrick’s Vietnam movie focused on young recruits completing a grueling boot camp before heading off to the fray. In many ways, Full Metal Jacket was the anti-Top Gun as the movie systematically dissembled the romanticized image of military training seen in the previous year’s blockbuster. The boot camp scenes were a grim, intense endurance test as viewers watched a pitiless instructor and uncaring fellow recruits psychologically torture Pyle, an isolated newcomer. After this misadventure ended in a blackly comedic punchline, Full Metal Jacket’s latter half headed to Vietnam. There, the story got even darker as the squadron was picked off one at a time by a methodical sniper.

Why The Squad Sings "(The) Mickey Mouse March" At The End Of Full Metal Jacket

In the final scenes of Full Metal Jacket, most of the movie’s main characters are swiftly killed by an unseen sniper. Eventually, the surviving recruits track down their attacker only to discover that she is a child. In one of the most gut-wrenching war movie endings of all time, the movie’s vaguely well-meaning antihero Private Joker shoots the child as she bleeds out. Even his sociopathic fellow soldier Animal Mother finds the callousness of his decision shocking, but it is the next moment that stands out to many viewers. As the soldiers leave, they begin to sing the Mickey Mouse March in unison.

The ironic juxtaposition of the previous scene’s extreme violence and this jarringly cutesy song is obvious, but there is a deeper meaning to the moment. Playful tunes like these were sung by soldiers in Vietnam and elsewhere for a variety of reasons including nostalgia for childhood after the trauma they and experienced and a desire to return to a more innocent mental state. While Platoon’s version of Vietnam included more operatic tragedy and spectacular violence, there is a childish banality to the killings of Full Metal Jacket that is underlined by this moment. Although they are murderers, most of the squad’s are only a few years older than their young attacker.

American soldiers who fought in Vietnam would have been the right age to have grown up with the Mickey Mouse March as a childhood favorite, so it makes sense that they collectively recall the lyrics. The song is technically also a march, although it was more of a parade march in the show. To this end, Mickey Mouse is a symbol of American culture and capitalism’s rapid encroachment on Vietnam. The novel that Full Metal Jacket is based on, The Short-Timers, also included this singalong albeit not in its final scenes.

The Meaning Of Joker's Final Line About Being Alive In A World Of S***

Future Stranger Things villain Matthew Modine began a career of playing morally ambiguous figures with his portrayal of Joker, and the character’s motivations are never less clear than in Full Metal Jacket’s closing narration. When Joker says he is in a world of s***, an optimistic viewer might assume that he is glad to at least be alive despite all his woes. However, most of the movie’s events would point to the opposite interpretation. Given all he endures in Full Metal Jacket, it is more likely that Joker is saying he is technically alive but this is a pyrrhic victory as he lives in a world of s***.

Full Metal Jacket's visuals make Vietnam’s burnt-out cities look like Hell thanks to walls of smoke and fire in these closing scenes. Thus, Joker can be seen as worse off than the dead since he is alive but has to continue existing in the world of s*** as he suffers from the trauma of his experience in Vietnam. This line also ironically recalls Pyle’s line earlier before he takes his own life, claiming he is doing so because he, too, is in a world of s***. Unlike Pyle and the heroes of later Vietnam movies, Joker can’t escape his fate through death.

How Matthew Modine Changed The Ending Of Full Metal Jacket

According to IGN’s interview with Modine, Joker’s MI6 jamming the moment he took aim at the sniper and his character not dying were ideas the actor brought to Kubrick. The rifle jamming in the climactic scene was a perfect choice because this often happened in real life, as MI6s were notoriously unreliable. The moment also ironically echoed the opening half of the movie’s use of the rifle as a phallic symbol. After Joker was told he was useless without his rifle, the weapon jammed the moment he was finally called on to perform his duty. Meanwhile, Joker not dying allowed the movie to prove that even survivors were left with deeply damaging psychological scars.

Full Metal Jacket's Ending Compared to Kubrick's Other War Movies

Full Metal Jacket was the last of many radical war movies Kubrick made throughout his career, including Fear and Desire, Paths of Glory, and even the dark Cold War satire Dr. Strangelove. The soldiers singing in Full Metal Jacket’s ending could be seen as a dark reflection of the girl singing at the end of Paths of Glory as, here, the soldiers have supplanted that earlier image of innocence. As the draft forced every eligible American man to fight in Vietnam regardless of his moral objections, the line between civilians and soldiers blurred. Thus, in Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, everyone was born to kill regardless of youth or innocence.

Meanwhile, Fear and Desire offers an even more indicative image of Kubrick’s changing view on portraying war onscreen. Although Fear and Desire was released during the Korean War, the movie didn’t explicitly name the conflict at its center. Like Top Gun’s nameless villains, Fear and Desire’s combatants belonged to no known nation. This allowed the anti-war movie to make a broad statement about the nature of conflict, but Full Metal Jacket took the opposite approach. In Full Metal Jacket, the soldiers are so American that they sing the Mickey Mouse March en masse after a massacre, forcing the viewer to connect this foreign brutality with seemingly harmless US culture.