SOURCE: “Full Metal Genre: Stanley Kubrick's Vietnam Combat Movie,” in Film Quarterly, Vol. XLII, No. 2, Winter, 1988-1989, pp. 24-30.

In the following essay, Doherty places Full Metal Jacket within the context of the Vietnam War film, contending that it “exemplifies the Vietnam War film in its mature stage, a stage whose distinguishing quality is its reliance on cinematic, not historical, experience.”

For over a decade now, Hollywood has been succeeding where Washington consistently failed: namely, in selling Vietnam to the American public. To be fair, the motion picture industry enjoys a crucial edge. If the military's classic mistake is to fight with the tactics of the last war, the moviemaker's decisive prerogative is the license to fight the same war over and over again. Whatever the historical uniqueness of what Time-Life Books calls “the Vietnam experience,” the conventions of the Hollywood combat film have proven flexible enough to...