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.
I think they were in a “Law and Order: SVU” together.
LOL I wondered those first 4 weeks(the toughest imo) why the heck I hated myself that much!! HAHAHAHA LOVE MY CORPS!!
NO.
Drill instructor.
Is that a swagger stick?
The Taco Bell Dog commercials were dropped due to the jokes that the dog was in the tacos. They were tired of it. I didn’t say that Geico would do many more commercials with him but a couple of more wouldn’t have hurt.
Donofrio killed Ermey in at least one other film, The Salton Sea
If you’re referring to Gustav Hasford, the Marine combat correspondent-turned-novelist, he actually lobbied against casting Ermey as GySgt Hartman. From Hasford’s perspective, Ermey was a REMF, despite the fact he served in Vietnam and pulled a tour as a USMC drill instructor (Ermey’s primary MOS was in aviation maintenance, not infantry). Luckily for all involved, director Stanley Kubrick rejected Hasford’s arguments, and cast Ermey in the role.
BTW, Hasford’s choice to play Hartman was (Ret) Marine Corps Captain Dale Dye, who has served as a technical consultant on dozens of military films and appeared as an actor in a number of productions, including Band of Brothers (he played the airborne regiment commander in Band of Brothers). Dye is a capable actor, but Kubrick realized the importance of the Parris Island sequence to the overall film and knew he’d found acting gold in Lee Ermey.
One factor that worked in Ermey’s favor is that Kubrick and Hasford fought constantly over the production. At one point, Kubrick fought to have Hasford’s name removed from the writing credits, arguing that the novelist’s contributions didn’t warrant inclusion on the screen play credit. And he had a point; Ermey created most of his own dialogue for the Parris Island sequence and the combat scenes were largely written by Kubrick and Michael Herr. In the end, Hasford got a screenplay credit (and Academy Award nomination), but he never worked in Hollywood again, and died at the age of 45 in 1993.
I had read that when Ermey pitched his role to Kubrick, he launched into a 10 minute diatribe where he never paused and never repeated himself. Apparently that sealed the deal.
Very good article that needs to be read at the source. You posted an edited version without noting the edits.
Dale Dye was with Hasford in VN, he’s the character ‘Daddy DA’ in the book.
This reads like it was written by a fourth grader attempting (flailingly) to cram three pages of only half comprehended vocabulary words into a single essay.
The Gunny deserves better.
Once we finished the official tour, we were walking back to the car, and I was vastly and quietly amused while watching what was obviously a brand new mob of ree-cruits stumbling down the street, doing the prison shuffle, with each holding the belt of the body in front of them, while the drill instructor screamed himself hoarse...
My wife asked why the "D.I." was screaming like that, and I told her that "DI" meant "Damned Idiot", and that if they used those initials, they would be doing Bends and Motherf###ers Forever. Behind me, I heard a voice suddenly howling with laughter, and there was a man in cammies unlocking his car...
I've always considered the first half of Full Metal Jacket to be the premier service comedy, thanks to R. Lee. There was very little he said that I hadn't heard, 30 years before and a continent away, from SSgts Foxx, Cooper and Johnson, but he told it to the rest of the world.
I had an AIT instructor, he was a SFC at the time. He was a former Marine. He said he was tired of being called sh*th*ead all the time, even after boot camp. He said the Corps cleaned themselves up and started calling the recruits maggots a few years later.
When I went in at the end of the Carter administration I had a bootlace break on a hump to Edson Range. One of the Drill Instructors of the following platoon picked me up over his head and hurled me off the road into a ditch.
Par for the course back then.
I hope someone can answer this question for me ...
I have a terrible problem laughing when I see drill sergeants in action on TV/in movies. It’s a knee jerk kind of thing. I just find what they say and how they say it hilarious.
Now, I could guarantee you I would have cracked up when I first got to boot camp had I enlisted. It wouldn’t have been a form of disrespect. It would have simply been my brain reacting to the situation. I know I’m not the only one.
What would have happened to people like me? How many push ups would it take to correct that problem :-)?
There was so much more to him than just “Full Metal Jacket”.
If you notice in the movie, Gunny Hartman is savage but there's a reason for everything he does...Ermey noted that when they hit a recruit, it was because they didn't have time to make them drop and do 50 pushups, as Marine Corps boot camp was cut from 13 weeks to 6, to get more troops into Vietnam.
When I was in last week of Army boot camp, our Drill Sergeant asked us what we thought Boot Camp was going to be like...to a man, we all said, "Full Metal Jacket, Sergeant!"
(it wasn't, not by a long shot).
Yeah, being at the wash racks at sunset, looking at all those houses on the hill, wondering what it was like........
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