SOURCE: “Kubrick and Crane in Full Metal Jacket,” in The Humanist, Vol. 48, No. 2, 1988, pp. 43-4.

In the following essay, Stevenson perceives Full Metal Jacket as based on Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage.

There is one characteristic of Full Metal Jacket which virtually all film critics have overlooked. And, although they have touched on the realism beneath Stanley Kubrick's satire, they have not emphasized how completely realistic the boot camp scenes are. But, most importantly, what really eluded the critics was Kubrick's grand sense of the ironic. Kubrick did not just create a film with ironic scenes and flashes of the sardonic. He constructed a twentieth-century parody of a famous nineteenth-century novel, The Red Badge of Courage. Kubrick's film is a marvelous antidote to that classic book and subsequent film starring Audie Murphy.

In sequence after sequence, Kubrick's film parallels Stephen Crane's “realistic” war story. Indeed, Kubrick's...