A major point of reference for "Full Metal Jacket" is, I would argue, the films about WW2, especially those produced during the war itself or shortly thereafter. For instance, many of those of John Wayne. They have as their subjects the war experience itself, why fight, and how soldiers are made and what they finally are/become. Many of these films have the same two part structure of FMJ (which is, I think, the source of that structure for Kubrick): Part 1 is training from raw recruit/strangers to untested soldier/buddies; part 2 is the testing, battle itself, and something about the sacrifice exacted and its necessity, recruits are now men, true soldiers, and buddies are blood-comrades. Part 1 is the (efficient) cause (preparation, enabling condition) for Part 2, while Part 2 is the (final) cause (justification, need) for all that went on in Part 1. Read in this way the film is quite powerful and raises fundamental questions in a way "Platoon" doesn't approach. Its views on that war are not new and are liberal-leftist. If it has any kind of elegaic tone (along with the sort of dull numbness of its ending), it is quite different from "Platoon"'s, and is not for the individual soldiers involved but for the country, for a different, "juster" war, and a different knid of movie. Gordon observes that the outcome of Part 2 is to become a man by killing the enemy. But here the enemy is a woman, or even a teenager, someone who never would have been an enemy in WW2 films, someone who should be a civilian and for whose benefit the war is being fought. More importantly here, this event (and what it figures with respect to the war) is fundamentally related to Part 1 and undercuts it. In the training of these marines (the equiping them with their own 'full metal jackets' to make them real fighting men) they are constantly barraged with a sexist and deeply anti-female vocabulary. When they do something wrong they are women (in the crudest terms); a soldier can't be female in any form and it is this part of him that must be taken away, "turned into metal" if Part 1 is to succeed and the goals of Part 2 achieved. Thus, the fact that a teenage girl, presumably not drafted and there because she believes in what she's fighting for, is the sniper, and a soldier as good as they are (without the kind of training in Part 1), is more than ironic. It works as a device to undercut and put into question the war itself, and everything in Part 1 and what Part 2 stands/should stand for. There should now be a creeping sense of failure/horror: not just that the weapon forged in Part 1 is not superior to the enemy, but that it is deeply morally flwaed/compromised in its goals and self-conception. Jesse Kalin, Vassar College