Full Metal Jacket

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Recommended: duality in humanity

The duality of man is a struggle in the mind of every human being, it is a characteristic of being two fold, having two different sides to a personality, a kind of Dr. Jackal and Mr. Hyde inside of everyone. Humans all contain that good verses evil, that little devil on the left shoulder and the angle on the right, talking to people during any given choice in life. The film “Full Metal Jacket” demonstrates the duality of man and symbolizes in many ways the shaping of a human beings mind and character to one side or another.

Sergeant Hartman starts the film with a remarkable motivational speech setting a definite tone on how the young solders are going to be trained, how they are going to act and most importantly how they are going to think. He does this by breaking them down mentally, but doing so by telling them what they will become. This is clearly represented in his own words. “If you ladies leave my island, if you survive recruit training, 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. You are not even human beings. Because I am hard you will not like me. But the more you hate me the more you will learn”. This demonstrates Sergeant Hartman’s strategy of training the soldiers mind to become a weapon to kill and does so by using the duality of man inside them, training them to believe it is ok to be evil, it is in the best interest to learn to kill. When he stats “you will be a weapon”, it is already challenging their inner conscious into believing its ok to kill. “but until that day you are pukes”, this makes the soldiers believe that maybe they are not anything yet, but they will become something important, and when somebody is eighteen, nineteen, or twenty years old it makes it easy to convince them that this is ok because they become apart of something and their lives mean more in their own minds when they are. As the eight week boot camp proceeds Sergeant Hartman continues to use unique strategies to train the young solders minds to become killers. One way he does so is by giving nicknames, and by giving someone a new nickname it inhibits their mind into starting to believe that they are becoming someone different or someone new.

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