<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="1" > This article is excerpted from the book The Wisdom of Cinema (Research and Criticism of Contemporary Chinese Cinema), originally published on May 28, 2018. </h1>
Full Metal Shell is the Vietnam War calling card of the famous Hollywood director Stanley Kubrick, released in the United States in 1987.
It is a classic Hollywood anti-war film that reveals the absurdity and evil of the Vietnam War waged by the United States.
Impressively, the Bali Boot Camp section in the first 45 minutes of the film is a complete book of English profanity.
The sergeant major scolded almost all the dirty words he could think of in the face of the recruits, calling them shit, bastards, homosexuals, premature babies, and lewd embryos, not recognizing them as men, calling them ladies and ladies, letting them pose in all kinds of degrading postures, and even running naked.
In order to inspire morale, the sergeant major even took them to do "masturbation queue exercises":
this is my rife ! this is my gun !
This is my rifle! This is my guy!
This is for fighting ! this is for fun !
For combat! For pleasure!
While running, he insulted Ho Chi Minh:
Ho chi minh is a son of a bithc !
HZM is a bitch!
Got the blueballs , crabs and the seven-year itch！
He contracted the venereal disease Pubic Lice and suffered from an itch for 7 years!
Many Hollywood military-themed films have a section where the harsh old sergeant major trains new recruits with crude means such as insults and insults.
For example, in the Hollywood patriotic theme blockbuster "Hacksaw Ridge" released last year, the way the sergeant major trains recruits is the same as "All Metal Shell", and even the bridge section of the recruits beating their partners at night is the same as "Full Metal Shell".
Why does the U.S. military train soldiers in this way?
Judging from the final effect, the training of the US military is to train people into beasts or machines. All of this was deliberately designed, and it wasn't entirely the Sergeant Major's personal brutality.
The basic characteristics of the whole training process are completely disrespectful of your personality, using all kinds of extremely humiliating means to stomp you from the psychological and spiritual point of view into the mud, stepping into, stepping into garbage, and completely losing any subjectivity, at which point you will become a killing machine that will not think and blindly obey.
Since recruits have completely lost any self-esteem during training, a "finished product" after training will think that he is not worthy of being called a "man" at all, and can only be saved if he absolutely obeys orders.
This is how the U.S. military trains recruits, but also the Japanese during World War II. Boot camp is synonymous with hell. In the 1970s, a Japanese film "Ah! navy! Among them, the Japanese Navy training flight cadets were like this, not only endless humiliation, but also endless slaps and corporal punishment.
The training of soldiers by the US and Japanese armies in the form of humiliation and corporal punishment actually reflects the political dilemma of all imperialist armies and exploiting class armies.
They cannot evoke the bravery of soldiers in a way of political identification, and they cannot tell soldiers the true purpose of war.
For example, throughout the Vietnam War (including the previous Korean War), the biggest difficulty for the U.S. ruling clique was that they could not explain to the American soldiers why Ho Chi Minh's desire to unify Vietnam (or Kim Il Sung's desire to unify Korea) threatened the security of the United States thousands of miles away in the Pacific.
No matter how clever the President of the United States, the Five-Star General, or Marilyn Monroe is, it does not explain why American youth should be allowed to dedicate their lives and blood to a place that has nothing to do with them.
The U.S. troops captured in the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea
Because the United States cannot solve the problem of who to serve and for whom to fight, training soldiers as emotionless, impersonal, thoughtless killing machines is the only option, albeit at the serious risk of divisions within the military, cannibalism, and the loss of initiative of soldiers.
"Full Metal Shell" is a good movie, and it is good that Kubrick reveals the absurdity of the way the US military trains with an almost cruel calmness.
In the first half, the sergeant major who is "equivalent to God" in front of the new recruits is shot by "Fool Bill"; in the second half, in the face of a Vietnamese girl sniper, the "finished product" and "clown" are also frightened and scattered.
True bravery, true cohesion and combat effectiveness, come from hatred for the invaders, from love for the homeland and the motherland.
A war waged for the benefit of capital, no matter how grandiose it may be, cannot arouse the true fighting spirit of the soldiers; on the contrary, it will only make them completely dehumanized and turned into devils or walking dead.
Even if you run every morning while shouting "I WANT WORK FOR UNCLE SAM" (I'm going to contribute to Uncle Sam!). ), is also useless.
"For whom are you a soldier?" For whom is the war? Chairman Mao successfully solved this problem when he built his army at Jinggangshan.
In the historical process of Chairman Mao's leadership of the people's army for half a century, the reason why the people's army was able to win more with less and defeat countless strong enemies at home and abroad with inferior equipment was because of this inherent quality that was superior to all other armies.
In this sense, the US military is an era behind the PLA, and there is a generational gap with the PLA.
During the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea, Chairman Mao discovered that the US military "has more steel and less gas." This is the fundamental flaw of the unjust war waged by the United States and cannot be solved.
The U.S. military can still win victories on the Iwo Jima in the face of Japanese soldiers trained in the same way, but in the face of volunteer soldiers with full initiative and consciousness who have gained courage and full initiative and consciousness by virtue of their high political identity of "for the motherland and for peace" in Shangganling, they can only bow to the wind.
What is strange is that in recent years, in some domestic military-themed film and television works, the training method of the US military seems to have been imitated as an advanced experience.
For example, in "Soldier Assault", the two "instructors" in the "Old A" training camp are quite "sergeant major", and the instructor is just playing soy sauce; in the "Wolf Warrior" series, "wolf nature" has become the power to overcome everything - this is really a bit of a "full metal shell", think about the fate of the sergeant major in the "shell", not only chilling.
Stop there!