Summary
As Joker helps Pyle button his uniform, Pyle observes that everyone hates him now, Joker included. Joker disagrees, but tells Pyle honestly that his mistakes have been getting others into trouble. Pyle admits that he needs "help," and Joker says he is trying his best to aid him. Later that day, Hartman has once again ordered the entire platoon to do push-ups, while Pyle sits on the sidelines sucking his thumb—presumably as a punishment for yet another of Pyle's mistakes.
That night, while everyone is sleeping, one of the recruits places a bar of soap in a white towel-cloth. Still awake, Joker checks on Pyle in the top bunk, who is fast asleep. Joker gives a signal to Cowboy and five other recruits, who creep silently out of their beds and across the barracks floor toward the sleeping Pyle. Surrounding him, the men immobilize his sleeping body with a blanket, gag him with a strap, and begin viciously beating him all over his body with the towel-wrapped bars of soap. As the beating begins, the remainder of the men in the barracks wake up and join in, each taking a turn bludgeoning Pyle, whose cries are muffled by the gag held by Cowboy. After the rest of the men are done, Cowboy urges Joker to strikes Pyle. Pyle looks at Joker and pleads for mercy through the gag, but Joker hits him several times in a row, and then crawls back under his bunk bed. As the rest of the men disperse, Cowboy tells Pyle, "Remember—it's just a bad dream." Joker covers his ears and tries to fall asleep as Pyle screams in pain.
The next day, Hartman once again leads the men in chanting and performing military drills. When Hartman asks, "What do we do for a living, ladies?" all the men shout "Kill! Kill! Kill!" except Pyle, who silently stares into the distance. Hartman asks the men first about a man named Charles Whitman, who Cowboy identifies as the "Texas Tower Sniper" of 1966, and then about Lee Harvey Oswald, who Snowball identifies as John F. Kennedy's killer. Hartman then asks if the men know where Oswald learned to shoot, and Joker tells him in the Marines. Hartman explains that Whitman and Oswald showed "what one motivated Marine and his rifle can do," and tells the men they'll soon be able to do the same, while Pyle looks on, looking sullen and deranged.
On Christmas Day, Hartman leads the men in a round of "Happy Birthday" in the barracks, and invites them to go speak with the military chaplain about how God will help the Marines defeat Communism. He tells them, "God has a hard-on for the Marines," because Marines are fundamentally destroyers, and thus God-like in their own way. Hartman explains to the men that the Marine Corps keeps heaven "packed with fresh souls," and that though their heart may belong to Jesus, their "ass" belongs to the Corps.
Later, Hartman oversees the men in the barracks as they clean their rifles. Pyle tenderly talks to his rifle as he cleans it, as Joker watches him with concern. While Joker and Cowboy are mopping the latrines, Joker tells Cowboy that Pyle talks to his rifle, and that he might be a "Section 8"—a category of military discharge for being mentally unfit. Joker tells Cowboy he wants to sleep with Cowboy's sister.
At the shooting range, Pyle's marksmanship begins to improve, and Hartman pays him a compliment. Later, in a lineup, Joker answers Hartman's drill questions incorrectly, while Pyle answers them flawlessly. Hartman calls Pyle "born again hard," and tentatively offers him a rifleman post. Over a montage of the men marching, Joker describes in voice-over that the men were "salty" and irritable as they neared the end of boot camp, ready to be unleashed as "killers." In their graduation speech, Hartman explains to them what the brotherhood of the Marines symbolizes, and that they will live forever through the Corps. As Hartman reads their official assignments, most men including Pyle are assigned to infantry, but Joker is listed with "basic military journalism," and Hartman scoffs at his desire to be a writer.
On the last night, Joker is the appointed night watchman. Armed with a flashlight, he walks toward Hartman's office, then into the latrines, where he finds Pyle sitting on one of the toilets next to his rifle. Joker shines his flashlight on Pyle, who says "Hi," and slowly loads his rifle. Joker asks if the rounds are live, and Pyle says, "762 millimeter. Full metal jacket." Joker tries to urge Pyle to go to bed, but Pyle stands up, loudly cocking the weapon, and begins shouting the Rifleman's Creed. Hearing the ruckus, Hartman barges into the latrines and screams at Joker for not keeping Pyle in line, until Joker explains that Pyle's "locked and loaded." In a calm, steady voice, Hartman orders Pyle to drop the weapon to the floor. When he refuses, Hartman begins to scream again, until Pyle fires a round through his chest. Joker cautiously tells Pyle to "go easy," but Pyle sits back down on the toilet, puts the gun in his mouth, and fires again, killing himself.
Analysis
Kubrick dedicates much if not most of the boot camp sequence to the ritualistic humiliation of Private Leonard Lawrence, a.k.a. "Gomer Pyle." Hartman's nickname for Lawrence is a reference to the character Gomer Pyle on The Andy Griffith Show, a bumbling private in the United States Marine Corps. With the boot camp sequence, Kubrick reveals how irreparable dehumanization and atrocity can take place even before men are even deployed into enemy territory. Although Hartman's abusive tactics are ostensibly designed to toughen the men up and increase their chances of survival in war, they ironically cause even more bloodshed, after a brutalized Pyle becomes uncontrollably violent.
The central event in the disintegration of Pyle's sanity is the "blanket party" to which the other Marines subject him in the middle of the night. After Hartman switches Pyle into Joker's squadron in a failed effort to improve his performance, Hartman begins punishing the rest of the platoon for Pyle's mistakes—a common U.S.M.C. training tactic that encourages the other recruits to resort to brutal hazing techniques to "motivate" the weakest link. Two years after Full Metal Jacket, Aaron Sorkin's Broadway play A Few Good Men also notably explored the legal and ethical defensibility of violent hazing as a form of extrajudicial punishment in the U.S. military—whether it constitutes a necessary training tool, or abusive gang violence.
Hartman, who clearly believes the former, criticizes the men for not giving Pyle the "proper motivation," after finding a jelly donut stashed in Pyle's locker. With these vague but crucial words, Hartman essentially gives the men an order to viciously beat Pyle in secret, in order to "motivate" him. Kubrick films the "blanket party" scene in a blue tint, making it visually distinct from every other scene in the film. The scene's use of sound is also notable, employing an eerie silence in a film otherwise bursting with fiery explosions, barked orders, and whirring helicopters. The surreal, blue tint of the scene, combined with its ominous quietness, anticipates what Cowboy will say to Pyle after the attack: that it was just "a bad dream."
After Pyle's harrowing, systematic brutalization at the hands of every single one of his platoon-mates, including his best friend Joker, two things happen: Pyle begins losing his grip on reality, and also begins to excel as a Marine. Thus, ironically, the hazing works, insofar as it turns Pyle into a capable killer and skilled marksman: "born again hard." Hartman's allusions to famous murderers like Charles Whitman and Lee Harvey Oswald also prefigure Pyle's imminent mental breakdown and murder-suicide, as does Kubrick's close-up of Pyle's deranged face. The rifle emerges again as a symbol when Pyle begins talking to his rifle, named Charlene. In doing so, Pyle essentially extends Hartman's philosophies about killing to a horrifying extreme, which culminates with Pyle manically shouting the Rifleman's Creed before killing Hartman and himself.
Pyle ironically learns everything he knows about homicidal brutality precisely from the official training regimen of the United States Marine Corps. "The Marines Corps does not want robots," Joker says. "They want killers." Though seeming to bring Pyle back into the fold, his violent hazing and torment actually lead him to completely shut down, becoming more alienated than ever from his former friends like Joker. In the scene where other men shout, "Kill! Kill! Kill!" Pyle stares sullenly off into the distance, indicating he has deviated internally from the rest of the platoon.
A "full metal jacket" bullet consists of a soft lead core encased in a shell of metal-- a metaphor for Pyle's simultaneously brutalized and weaponized state. The metaphor suggests that Pyle's former inner softness, after enduring the group's violence and Hartman's imperative to become "born again hard," has turned him into a pure, deadly, uncontrollable weapon. Pyle sighs with almost an almost erotic level of pleasure and relief after murdering Hartman, sustaining the film's exploration of men replacing sexual acts with violent ones.
