Posted on 04/16/2018 12:34:41 PM PDT by ethom
It’s hard to think of many actors who became as legendary as R. Lee Ermey did for just 40 minutes of screen time. From the moment he first strolled through the milky gray barracks of “Full Metal Jacket” as Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, screaming into the faces of his recruits, popping off taunts like firecrackers, you knew in your bones — you just knew — that you could forget every movie drill sergeant you’d ever seen. This is what those guys were really like. Everything about Ermey seemed to be made of leather: his face, his neck, his vocal cords, his soul. He wasn’t a Southerner (Ermey was born and raised in Kansas), but his voice had the sinewy contours of a mean drawl, and he turned the act of raising it into a thrilling feat of domination. Every word he spoke would be more than just heard. It would be etched onto your brainpan.
And what words they were! The fiendishly over-the-top threats and insults flew out of Ermey’s mouth from moment one, and they were more than just “colorful.” They were voluptuous in their baroque sadism, their dirty purplish fusion of joy and hate. Ermey, a former U.S. Marine Corps staff sergeant, was originally hired as a technical adviser on “Full Metal Jacket,” and it was totally his idea to take over the role of Sgt. Hartman. He waged a campaign for it, showing Stanley Kubrick an instructional video he’d made as a kind of demo tape. It didn’t take Kubrick long to realize that no actor could match the found-object, lower-depths-of-the-Marines quality that Ermey brought.
He wrote almost all his own dialogue, improvising dozens of hours of flamboyantly hostile basic-training patter, and the result sounded like the world’s most obscene graffiti turned into redneck grunt poetry.
Much of it, of course, was scabrously funny. “You’re so ugly you could be a modern-art masterpiece!” “What is your major malfunction, numbnuts? Didn’t your mommy and daddy show you enough attention when you were a child?” “I want that head so sanitary that the Virgin Mary herself would be proud to go in there and take a dump!” “I will give you three seconds, exactly three seconds, to wipe that stupid grin off your face or I will gouge out your eyeballs and skull you!”
Hartman was the drill sergeant as apocalyptic insult comic. Yet the more you listened to it, the more you realized that his herky-jerky monologue of abuse was so mesmerizing because it expressed worldview. One that you couldn’t just dismiss. Ermey’s Hartman is nothing if not an equal-opportunity hater.
After a while, his tough-nut pensées begin to add up to something, a vision that says: If these words hurt you, then what are sticks and stones — and guns and grenades — going to do? Steel yourself; kill your self-pity; or you won’t survive. Hartman starts off as a stylized figure, a satirical gung-ho fascist out of Kurt Vonnegut, but the key to Ermey’s performance is that we like Hartman, and grow to respect him, in the same way that the recruits do. He may seem like a lunatic, but that’s because he’s training these men to do something insane. It’s called war.
“Full Metal Jacket” is one of my favorite films (I’ve seen it dozens of times, and went to see it every day for a week when it first came out), and what I think a lot of people — even Kubrick fans — don’t understand about the film is that it’s not nearly as acerbic and cynical about war as many believe. It’s a film that mutates and evolves in tone and outlook as it goes along. The trick of “Full Metal Jacket” is that it draws on “counterculture” attitudes only to disarm them.
Many viewers love the Parris Island sequence, and Ermey’s performance in it, because its exuberant bootstrap nihilism seems to fit all too snugly into their knee-jerk liberal view of the military as an extreme institution. “Full Metal Jacket” is, after all, a movie about Vietnam, a word that tends to evoke the Pavlovian response of “War — bad!”
Yet Kubrick’s view of what it means to be a soldier is far more ambivalent. Matthew Modine’s Joker starts off as a detached ironic cut-up, facing off against Hartman, but by the end of the basic-training sequence his compulsive jocularity has begun to compete with a more sobering view of what his place in the military is; he’s a Joker who morphs into a soldier. And in the cauldron of Vietnam, as captured in the sniper episode of “Full Metal Jacket” that may be the single greatest sequence in any war film, he discovers how to be a brave one. Bravery, along with the mysterious code of military fellowship, is a major part of what “Full Metal Jacket” is about, even though those things aren’t the first to leap to mind as Kubrickian themes.
And the film plants the seeds of those ideas in the reckless charisma of R. Lee Ermey’s performance. His Hartman is a bug-eyed fanatic, but not a monster; his spirit is strange and scary, but that doesn’t mean it’s unnecessary. In “Full Metal Jacket,” Ermey showed us something we hadn’t seen before (not fully), and it was funny, shocking and in some screwy way, weirdly admirable. It was the spirit of combat, alive on screen in every hypnotically garish and fearlessly shouted word.
Lee Ermey had small part in “Apocalypse Now”. He was in one of the helicopters during the assault and he had one line “..... fifty cal, fifty cal....”
Always wondered what reaction Vincent D’Onofrio had every time he ran into Ermey socially.
GREAT POST, terrific article.
Drill Instructor not Drill SGT. GD civilians....
The book and screenplay of the movie were written by a man who served in the same Marine unit as my Brother in Viet Nam. He and his fellow Marines were often coptered to the worst and most dangerous outposts and the unit had 50% casualties. My Bro liked the man and was not surprised that he wrote the book. RIP to both of them! Semper Fi!
Yet He was only nominated for a GG, and only won a Boston Actor's Guild award for his performance as Sgt. Hartman. None of the Academy Awards nominees will be remembered for their respective performances 10-20 years from now, but Ermy's will remain forever.
I agree, probably one of the greatest supporting actor performances in a film ever..
I love Gunny! The one thing though I learned before I joined the military in 1976 was the TIs could not hit you. Oh the stories of Basic Training, good, bad and funny for days:-)
DI SSgt Gaither was quite simply, the meanest and scariest MF I have ever met in my life.
Sir.
“Geico tells Fox News that Ermey was not fired and the company had simply moved on.”
It’s always good business for a company to move on from one of it’s most memorable ads to something else. s/
I’ll always remember him in “The Frighteners”........................
He shouldn't be. As memorable as "Full Metal Jacket" was, Ermy has a wide body of work playing a variety of characters. He was a very versatile character actor.
I know, I know. And 'soldiers'.
S/F
God help the idiot who forgets....
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