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Stanley Kubrick's film, Full Metal Jacket, unlike Gustav Hasford's The Short-Timers, the novel on which it is based, denies the spectator identification with a consistent point-of-view; rather, it establishes a serial, roaming identification that results in our panoramic point-of-view. Contrasting with the coherent point-of-view in the novel, Full Metal Jacket's identification is fractured, offering us a multiplicity of ideological reference points.1 In reading The Short-Timers, we immediately identify with the character Joker, for the novel's first-person, present-tense narration demands our participation solely through the filter of his consciousness; thus, we are easily funneled into his ideological stance that grounds us for the remainder of the novel. However, Kubrick allows the spectator of Full Metal Jacket to identify with characters in sequence, and subsequently undermines each attachment. Through this pattern of allowing our identification to take hold and then undercutting it, Kubrick creates a tension between our unquestioning acceptance of the character's moral point-of-view and the subsequent critical stance we must assume toward our own reactions to that point-of-view. In The Short-Timers, our identification with Joker is claustrophobic, but Kubrick's cinematic adaptation inserts a critical space between us and the dehumanizing process chronicled in the story - a space which provides us with an objective position from which to examine the connections between violence, sex, and physical and psychological survival - and to examine our own reaction to these connections. Thus, in viewing Full Metal Jacket, we find that it is ultimately our personal ideological point-of-view that we objectify from that critical space.
Our bonding experience with Joker's all-encompassing point-of-view in The Short-Timers also reinforces our identification with a counter-culture ideology. Essentially, The Short-Timers is a novel of typical plot conventions; only its subject matter and the intense realism of the experiences described make it exceptional. Characters function distinctly as what Roland Barthes calls "collections of semes," the proper names acting as "magnetic fieldfs] for the semes" (SZ 191, 67). The characters maintain consistent (in fact, stereotypic) characteristics and accrue depth of personality as Joker narrates his story, and the characters' names point to their function as a type.2
But Kubrick refuses to choose our ideology for us; instead, the "panoramic point-of-view" gives us a full range of ideological possibilities without our having to adopt only...