Duality of Man

The message behind both of these 1980s Vietnam War films is to show the “duality of man” as Joker in Full Metal Jacket phrases it while describing the irony of his peace sign pin and his helmet which reads “Born to Kill”. Both Platoon and Full Metal Jacket show the Americans who fought in the Vietnam War as torn between the ideal cause of peace and freedom and merely just shooting anyone with no purpose but to stay alive. This division is displayed by the “civil war” between Elias and Barns in Platoon and between Cowboy and Animal Mother in Full Metal Jacket. Barns actually shoots Elias himself and Animal Mother’s stupid decision against Cowboy’s orders is what ends up killing Cowboy. Perhaps the agenda of both Stone and Kubrick in these movies was to show that in Vietnam, evil conquered good. Perhaps this is an answer to why America lost the war. When faced with stressful times the Americans evil sides came out. They often took out their anger on innocent villagers or made stupid decisions.

It was obvious in both movies that the Americans did not care at all about the South Vietnamese civilians. In Platoon they set a village on fire and murder innocents. In Full Metal Jacket they used the women as prostitutes and several marines during the interviews said that they thought that the South Vietnamese didn’t want the Americans helping them and that they were ungrateful. One even said, “We’re shooting the wrong gooks”. This leaves the viewer to question: if the Americans were not fighting for the well being of the Vietnamese, then what were they fighting for? The soldiers themselves seemed to question the very same thing. At the very end of Platoon Pvt. Taylor seems to come up with an answer. He says that now the survivors have an “obligation to build again, teach to others what [they] know[… ]to find a goodness and meaning to this life”. In Full Metal Jacket, Joker also comes an answer, one that is not so poetic “yes I am in a world of shit, but I am alive and I am not afraid”. Both protagonists have changed over the course of their time in Vietnam and both now view the world in a different way. At the end of the movie neither is the naïve boy who the viewer meets at the beginning. Pvt. Taylor had changed from the spoiled college kid who felt he had done nothing important in his life, to the pot-smoking, bandana-wearing killer. Joker had changed from the guy who took nothing seriously to the man who killed a girl to put her out of her misery. Both protagonists know that even though it is necessary to be killers sometimes, it is also necessary for them not to give up, not to resort to the inhumanity that they witnessed in the war, to teach others what they have learned, and to strive for peace.