ive never noticed

I remember two parts specifically:

"What in the name of mickey mouse s*** are you doing?"-when pyle has a gun

 

In the end with all the marines sing a song about mickey mouse.

 

"David Culpepper: I get a rather fatalistic feel from the end of Full Metal Jacket. I don't see how the darkness can ever be entirely overcome.

 

Sask696: Another thing that's puzzled me is the reference to the Mickey Mouse song at the end. The placement of Mickey and Minnie dolls on the window sill behind Joker in the news barracks, perhaps foreshadows the end of the film? Does this somehow fit into the Jungian thing?

 

Ichorwhip: I'd felt that the cheap and phoney connotation of Mickey Mouse served the film well. We think of things that are Mickey Mouse as being lousy and crummy.

 

Rick Nelson: I always figured that the Mickey Mouse theme song was the troops' expression of their triumphant Americanism. Having survived their part of the Tet Offensive, they release all their pent-up adrenaline by proclaiming their status as Jolly Green Giants, walking the earth singing the most American thing they could think of, the Mickey Mouse song. Nicely surreal that.

 

Tom Haynes: I don't take away a sense of the soldiers swaggering with US power at the end of Full Metal Jacket. Just the opposite. Mickey Mouse is referenced at least three times in the film, each time ironically. The first is when Hartman goes into the head to see what Pyle is screaming about: "What is this Mickey Mouse s***?" The second is in the Stars and Stripes office, where a Mickey Mouse doll is visible. The entire sequence is devoted to showing that the Stars and Stripes paper is a joke, and that everyone in the room understands that it is. Hence the banner, "first to go, last to know".

 

The singing of the Mickey Mouse song seems to me a kind of realization, by Joker at least, of what is important in his life. For all his earlier bluster and jokes, he knows now that the war isn't what's important. He's grown up.

 

Gordon Dahlquist: I would disagree. Yes, he has a clarity about what is important, yes one could say he's grown up, but I would say that this clarity and growth has everything to do with the war. That in fact, the war has become everything. I don't think the Mickey Mouse song is particularly ironic. One of the ironies is the exact lack of irony in which it's sung. In the audience, we smile stiffly at the distance between Hue city and Annette Funicello (it's a joke but not a very good one) ... but perhaps we smile even more stiffly, because the men singing it have managed to find a clarity, where no distance between Hue city and Annette Funicello exists at all. There's an element to the final scene that's wide open in a way the rest of the film isn't, and much of this relates to Joker's statement about being unafraid: for the first time in the film, I would suggest.

 

Mark Ervin: One has the sense that Joker has started the singing of the song himself; Mickey Mouse is identified with him throughout. It is his ability to embrace incongruity that separates him, by degrees at least, from the fates of Pyle and Animal Mother. The final image of hell suggests that, even for Joker, it no resolution, and no easier an endpoint.

 

Ichorwhip: It seems like the denouement of Full Metal Jacket is foreshadowed by Hartman: "If your killer instincts are not clean and strong, you will hesitate at the moment of truth. You will not kill. You will become dead marines. And then you will be in a world of s***.

 

T.D. Juede: The United States has the most sophisticated and powerful military forces in the world, not to mention the biggest entertainment icons. What America does best is entertainment and armed forces.

 

David Kirkpatrick: While John Wayne made some World War II films mythologizing the American war hero, Disney also made propaganda cartoons demonizing Germans and Japanese. And these figures stand against the context of John Wayne's association with Westerns and Disney's association with its Main Street USA theme park.

 

Gordon Dahlquist: You start thinking about a larger socio-economic picture; about how the military functions..... Full Metal Jacket is an inordinately layered piece of work.

 

Mark Ervin: I think so, and it's sad that so many people see this film as inferior to his earlier films.

 

Gordon Dahlquist: I believe Geoffrey Alexander used to say it was his favorite, and I can see why. It's sort of impossible for me to choose between Kubrick's Films, but I do reject that Full Metal Jacket is a lesser film in any way. It's one of those films that takes the measure of its audience, not the other way around. "

Sorianno, what did you get out of that movie? I pretty much got this (pretty much what I assume Kubrick wanted us to get): War effs people up hardcore. Could you imagine Mother going back to the U.S. and living a normal life? It can really screw people up. It gives me more of a better view (whether it is completely true or not) on what Vietnam was like, and why it was so hard for people to adjust when they came back.

 

P.S. That opening scene with the drill sargent is incredibly funny.