Van and Lyle are joined by Combat Obscura filmmakers Miles Lagoze and Eric Schuman—whose documentary launched Bang-Bang—to unpack what may be the greatest war film ever made.
They revisit Parris Island’s brutal choreography, where cruelty becomes a kind of moral training. They discuss the infamous towel party, the haunting arc of Private Pyle, and the eerie echoes between his final scene and the female sniper’s death in the film’s second half. They track Joker’s evolution from ironic observer to hollowed-out participant, and how the movie dares us to see no difference between the two. Also: animal grunts, John Wayne impressions, Stars and Stripes propaganda, and the Mickey Mouse Club as a funeral dirge for the American century.
As with Combat Obscura, Kubrick’s film lingers not just on war’s self-conscious, self-satirical aesthetics, but on complicity, spectacle, and what it truly means to be "in a world of shit."
Further Reading
Whistles From The Graveyard: My Time Behind the Camera on War, Rage, and Restless Youth in Afghanistan, by Miles Lagoze
The Short-Timers, by Gustav Hasford
Dispatches, by Michael Herr
“Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals,” by Carol Cohn
Working-Class War, by Christian Appy
Teaser from the Episode
Full Metal Jacket Trailer
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