Macho macho maniac
Today: Zach Rabiroff, a writer on books, comics, and culture living in Brooklyn, New York.
Issue No. 538
Hegseth: Full Metal Manhood
Zach Rabiroff
Hegseth: Full Metal Manhood
by Zach Rabiroff
1.
Late in the presidential campaign of 2024, at the Schroedingeresque moment when Donald Trump’s second election was both a foregone conclusion and a historical impossibility, the presidential candidate held a rally in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in which he debuted his plans for the U.S. armed forces. The theme of the speech was abolishing the “woke” military; to illustrate what he meant by this, Trump’s staff had prepared a video presentation titled, “AMERICA’S MILITARY PRESIDENT, DONALD J. TRUMP, VS. COMRADE KAMALA HARRIS.” On a large screen behind the candidate, rallygoers were treated to a montage of clips of R. Lee Ermey’s performance as the wild-eyed, shrieking Marine drill instructor and sadist, Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, in Stanley’s Kubrick’s 1987 film, Full Metal Jacket.
“YOU WILL NOT LAUGH! YOU WILL NOT CRY! YOU WILL LEARN BY THE NUMBERS!.”
“LET ME SEE YOUR WARFACE!”
“YOU WILL BE A WEAPON. YOU WILL BE A MINISTER OF DEATH PRAYING FOR WAR. BUT UNTIL THAT DAY YOU ARE PUKES. YOU ARE THE LOWEST FORM OF LIFE ON EARTH.”
Intercut with these clips were TikTok videos and news clips of trans people and/or drag performers, both military and civilian, scored to bouncy dance music. At the end of the montage, the text read, “LET’S MAKE OUR MILITARY GREAT AGAIN.”
For a very brief moment, Trump’s use of Full Metal Jacket ignited something of a scandal among film nerds, who spotted a rare and important moment to have something relevant to say. The movie’s lead actor Matthew Modine opined that Trump had turned an anti-war film into “a perverse, homophobic, and manipulative tool of propaganda.” This, in turn, garnered a response from the late Stanley Kubrick’s daughter Vivian, who—in a lengthy post on X, asserting that her father had voted for Reagan—conceded that the film was indeed critical of the military, and then explained that Trump was just using it in the service of propaganda, which her father would have loved:
Oddly enough, this was something of a rerun of the debate that had accompanied Full Metal Jacket when it was first released in 1987. Critics had liked the movie, more or less, but they were as baffled by its moral position as they’d been by all of Kubrick’s films; that this one, being about Vietnam, had to have a moral position was assumed as a given.
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