Spectatorship - Full Metal Jacket

In Full Metal Jacket, Stanley Kuberick attempts to prevent us from aligning with a certain individual throughout the film. In bootcamp we never get the chance to align with Pvt Pyle as we never get a POV from him or any indication that we are seeing this from his eyes and this is the same for joker. We never really connect or align with him and see him as a comedian and maybe in over his head when he says a joke while Hartmann speaking.

 We are more encouraged to pledge our allegiance to the group and the core. With W/S and L/S we never really see anyone as individuals. In my opinion Pyle is just a passive character that is used to portray the process of changing an individuals motivations and ideologies, in this case being Pyle and Hartmann trying to drill the ideologies of the marines into him, ultimately creating an emotionless killing machine, and ultimately succeeds. As we have pledged our allegiance to the group we are encouraged to see him as a threat to the it rather than sympathise with him. Hartmanns role is ultimately to dehumanise the recruits and create killing machines.

 In my own opinion there is no main character, only a body to see through. Even if there isn't one stand out character Joker is almost like a carrier. Joker later in the film mentions the "Duality of Man" when asked what his peace symbol and writing on his helmet saying "Born to Kill" meant. The duality of man refers to the two opposing sides of the nature of man. Joker representing wanting to do good but often submitting to our animalistic desires to do so. An example of this is Joker submits to the animalistic act of beating Pyle under the pressure from the 'group' before not wanting to listen to the pain of Pyle. This supports the point of alignment, in many films we would know if the main character has good motives or bad motives while with joker we are not given an answer and have to search for it ourselves, due to not being given a motivation for jokers actions we are unable to align with him which is what Kuberick has tried to do and succeeded. Due to seing no real motive for the duality of joker it makes it hard for us to align with him. He yields to pressure from the group and the need for unity and beats Pyle.

At the beginning of the film we see the platoon all getting their head shaved and removing their identity, after this they are all put into the same uniforms and no one is seen as different, there are no individuals on a group. Hartmann also explains that nobody will be treated differently as "You are all equally worthless" further reinforcing this group mentality and the lack of individuals.

In the war scene we hardly ever see an individual in a shot. The interviews being an exception the only time we see a character on their own is when they are about to die or be wounded. This reinforces the group mentality shown in the first half of the film. Another example of the duality of man is the sniper scene when joker wants to commit an act of mercy and end the pain of the injured sniper. However to do this he must give in to his primitive desires and kill the sniper.