#the amount of queer people who make this a cornerstone of their personality is actually insane to me

[vanity-complex]

Literally it’s almost 2025. You can let Harry Potter go, it’s okay 🫂

[itsclydebitches]

I ask you because you’re good at articulating your thoughts but why do you like BB? I just wanna know the hype behind this ship, I’ve seen people outside the fandom either say they’re waiting for it to be canon to get into the show or they claim it’s the only good thing about it.

Hey, anon! Ah, getting a lovely compliment about articulating thoughts while I sit here struggling to articulate my thoughts lol.

Okay, I want to start by saying that I personally like Yang/Blake about as much as the majority of the ships I have. Meaning, the 95% of fictional characters I enjoy seeing as a canonical couple and/or imagining as a potential couple, excluding the 5% that I get really, really into. I've got OTPs and I've got casual ships. BB is the latter. Why is this important? Because I think BB has been under an extreme amount of pressure over the years, with that pressure only increasing as time goes on and that... kinda sucks. They represent the growing demand for explicitly queer relationships. They're tied to a webseries and a fandom rather infamous at this point for its heated, controversial content. They're a part of an era where fans are more focused than ever on canonical status, whereas back in the day you just enjoyed ships for the hell of it, regardless of their chances of getting together on screen. It used to be that people unironically adored ships for characters who had never exchanged a single greeting. Nowadays, you need a ten page essay explaining why the ship is supposedly The Best. Blake/Yang is bound up in all of that, resulting in a community that, yeah, hypes things up to an arguably unnecessary degree. We've reached a point where this couple supposedly makes or breaks the entire show; it's either the greatest ship to every grace the small screen, or it's the ruin of the entire franchise. In reality, Blake/Yang is just... a ship. Like any other ship. Some people like it. Some people don't. It should be far more casual than it is. Which isn't to say fans aren't justified in being invested in the politics of the queer relationship — I am — or even just emotionally invested in a ship they really enjoy, but rather that I think the hype is due more to these external factors than the relationship itself. Blake and Yang arguably aren't unique in what makes them an attractive couple. Are they important in terms of that representation for an American webseries? Yes. Are they exceptional in regards to these two character types being shipped by a fandom? Not by a longshot. I could give you hundreds of ships that look just like Blake and Yang.

And that for me is part of the appeal. I like many of the same sorts of things in my ships. One of those is the "opposites attract" setup, where we have the brash party girl coupled with the quieter bookworm. They balance each other in a number of significant ways, from fighting styles to their backgrounds. And, for fic purposes, that balance can also provide great conflict for them to work through, resulting in a stronger couple down the line. Going off of that, I enjoy that they're already partners at the (near) start of the show. The different definitions of "partner" is always fun, but beyond that — and despite the before mentioned shipping of characters who have never interacted — there's a tendency to pair of the duos who have already been paired up by the story. There's a sense of inevitability about it (fate, perhaps?) alongside the practical benefit of them getting a lot of screen time together. There's a reason why Blake/Yang and Ruby/Weiss got popular, with the former arguably surpassing the latter only because of its likelihood of becoming canon. We reached a point where the show is actively pushing Blake/Yang in a way they never did Ruby/Weiss — their coding is far stronger — and that creates a snowball effect: popular ships keep getting more popular the more attention they're paid; you pay the popular stuff more attention. Round and round we go. But I also enjoy their awkward flirting and tender moments, no matter how many problems might be attached to those in the story's context. I like how they tease and push one another — even if, again, the story has largely failed in that regard. They have a lot of good potential, shall we say, which is all a fan ever needs. Whether you're analyzing one of their clearly coded moments, or just running with the balanced color scheme — Yang has purple eyes with Blake wearing purple, Blake has yellow eyes with Yang wearing yellow — there's a lot in the show to connect them together, making the already easy job of shipping even easier.

Blake/Yang is a solid ship. They just also happen to be a ship bearing most of the weight of their show. I've made the comparison before, but it's not unlike Dean/Cas becoming the cornerstone of Supernatural. You reach a point where the story itself is such a mess that the most popular pairing becomes the supposed answer to all these problems: it's either the saving grace, or the reason for the show's destruction. It'll either save RWBY or function as the explanation for its downfall. Yang/Blake is heading more and more in that direction, either built up or torn down to an extreme degree as it tries to bear that weight. But honestly? I don't think it's any better or worse than those hundred other ships I could toss out. Ignoring the f/f rep, they're a pretty classic setup, a dime a dozen, and the important takeaway is that there's nothing wrong with that. There's a reason pairings like Blake/Yang got popular in the first place. Saying "I've seen it before" isn't a bad thing because fans like familiarity. But it simultaneously means they're not the best thing since sliced bread. They're neither the devil nor the angel the RWBY community has made them out to be.

So basically, my own casual enjoyment aside, I don't think the external factors propelling the love/hatred for the ship means the ship itself is actually that astounding or horrific. In a better written show, a less controversial show, setting aside those fans who have Yang/Blake as their first OTP and are pouring all that intense love into it, etc. I think the ship would still be popular... but we wouldn't be in this "it's the only good thing about the show"/"this was the show's downfall" territory. Pretty much every large fandom is going to develop that one, popular ship — just look at how fast Loki/Mobius happened — which shows that Blake/Yang is not unique in regards to getting the majority of a community's attention. It's just that other shows are solid enough to let ships be ships, without expecting any one ship to prove the show's worth. Or herald its downfall.

[enthusiasticsobrietyabuse]

About Bob Meehan.  Originally posted on OnTheEmmis.com circa 2004. CW: Explicit Language & Slurs

***WARNING--EXPLICIT LANGUAGE, Some readers may find Meehan quotes offensive. First, most professionals believe the basic concept of teenagers helping teenagers is a good thing.  Young people often feel lost in traditional support groups such as AA and NA.  The idea of a staffed peer-support group, which Pathway, Insight, Cornerstone, and Crossroads claim to be, is a good one. Secondly, most genuine, credentialed drug and alcohol counselors are not opposed to the idea of encouraging and even urging young people, who are recovering from drug dependence, to avoid peers who are active drug users.  Many practitioners feel that this may be the single most important step that a newly recovering teen can take. Third, Palmer Drug Abuse Program as it operates today, is a legitimate and much needed organization.  Furthermore, there appears to be no indication that they currently meet criteria that would designate them as a destructive or cultic organization. Now, here is a little information on Meehan and his organization. Meehan currently sits at the head of a group of several devotees, who call themselves the International Coalition of Enthusiastic Chemical Abuse Programs (ICECAP).  The ICECAP "Board" is fully controlled by Meehan.  ICECAP operates several facilities in Arizona, Georgia, Colorado, North Carolina, and Missouri. "Technically", members of the ICECAP board independently own the facilities.  Bob Meehan, possibly under the name JAD (for Joy Ann DeFord his wife's maiden name), LLC , owns a licensed residential facility called Step Two Recovery Center, as well as, another residential facility called Step One Recovery Center.  At the time of the last investigation Step One was unlicensed, operating under the radar.  Step Two costs $16,000.00 for a 6-week stay, and to our knowledge uses no credentialed staff in it's "therapy" sessions. He recently opened another Step Two facility in Forsythe County, Georgia. As of the time of this writing, both facilities are operating illegally, as they are not propely zoned. His son in law, Michael "Clint" Stonebraker, "owns" Pathway Drug Abuse Program in Tempe.  Pathway may operate a chapter in Tucson as well.  Pathway provides free support groups for teens and parents. In addition, they have an outpatient treatment program, which charges a fee of about $7000.00 for 6 weeks of group counseling.  Stonebraker also "owns" a program in Atlanta called Atlanta Insight, and a third in NorthCarolina.  There is a program in Colorado operating under the name Cornerstone. It is "owned" by Frank Szachta Jr.    Finally, there is another program in St. Louis called Crossroads. It is also "owned" by Frank Szachta.  Both Cornerstone and Crossroads are identical to Pathway in that they offer free support group meetings and a fee based outpatient. All of these support groups serve as feeders for Step Two and Step One Recovery Centers.  In addition, Meehan holds seminars for each of these programs on a regular basis*.   All parents and teens are expected, pressured, and even manipulated into attending the seminars at a cost of $30 to $50 per person.  Up to 200 teens and parents may attend the 4 to 6 hour seminars over a weekend.  Meehan keeps all the money.  He pockets the cash, which can be a substantial amount. Meehan also operates a counselor training program under the name Meehan Institute.  It is a non-profit, tax-exempt 501 (C) 3. Meehan charges about $4000.00 per person to go through the 6-8 week training program.    All of the students are clients, referred by the ICECAP programs.  In most cases, their parents are happy to pay the tuition because they are convinced that becoming an ICECAP staff member will help to insure that their child doesn't return to drug use. The training program is a sham.  Courses, titles, and outlines have little to do with the actual content of many of the classes; The course outlines are created to insure that the courses are accepted by certifying bodies such as ABCAC and ICRC/AODA.  In reality, many of the courses are simply half-day sessions where students are subjected to various new-age type philosophical lectures given by Joy Meehan (who has no training or experience as a counselor and is not a recovering addict), Meehan himself, or some other Meehan devotee. Nearly all former trainees who have left ICECAP report that, as a regular part of the Meehan Institute curriciculum, Meehan teaches a course on his personal feelings about "niggers" and fags" (Meehan's words). They report that the young trainees are expected to adopt Meehan's intolerant views and that his opinions are presented as truth, couched in psuedo-science. Those who don't adopt Meehan's views can hardly be expected to succeed in the organization. In addition, Meehan uses the money from the Institute to pay staff that refer clients to Step One and Step Two.  All of the staff who are paid by the training program are also required to work in any capacity that Meehan wishes, including ways that benefit him financially. The training is ultimately useless outside of ICECAP because the trainees would need a college degree to become certified alcohol and drug abuse counselors.  I know of no treatment facility outside of ICECAP that recognizes Meehan Institute training.  Most importantly, this tax-exempt organization is taking young people who have been through Meehan controlled programs, charging their families for counselor training, and using the training as part of the client/student's indoctrination to insure that they themselves will go on to refer clients into Meehan's fee-based for profit programs. Meehan is technically a voting board member--in reality he fully controls the board--and he is financially benefitting from the institute. Therefore, Meehan is once again guilty of the same conflict of interest that got him in trouble in 1980, when "60-Minutes" exposed him for taking money from for profit hospitals while sending them, clients of the non-profit organization he ran. Those that are "fortunate" enough to be hired by an ICECAP program are overworked and often paid sub-minimum wages.  Any staff member is on call at all times.  If they work for any ICECAP facility they may be called to work at another ICECAP facility at any time.  Staff may be uprooted and moved to another city with little or no notice.  They may be demoted at any time on trumped-up charges or for alleged "spiritual" impurity.  No one is permitted to seriously question these kinds of decisions. Meehan expects total loyalty from staff.  They see their employment as a part of their recovery and are indoctrinated to believe that they can never make it without the program.  Staff members have no real relationships outside the program.  Many have been manipulated into severing ties with any family that is not in the program.  If one family member leaves or is thrown out, others in the program are encouraged to partially or completely sever ties with the individual who left. Meehan and his upper echelon (referred to as  "The Family") determine when an individual is ready to enter into a romantic relationship.  Staff relationships, even marriages, are set-up and managed by Meehan and "the family" which consists of his innermost circle. For a staff member, there is no such thing as a private matter.  Sex, relationships, thoughts, fears, past history, family matters, and money is discussed with and even managed by superiors.  As outlandish as it may seem, it is actually a seamless, natural progression for the client, who becomes the student, and then the employee.  Staff members, even those with years clean and sober are, handled as though they were clients in a Synanon-type therapeutic community.  Incidentally, these clients-turned-staff are not hard-core street addicts who have no hope of a normal life.  They are young people, mostly middle-class, who are generally in the early stages of drug dependence (if drug dependent at all) when they enter treatment.  If released from the program early on, most could go on to college.  Those who have a desire to help others could get an education and become counselors for a legitimate agency. Staff members are completely dependent upon Meehan and the program.  If they leave or do something to offend "the family" they lose their jobs, friends, recovery resources and possibly their families.  Usually, they live with another staff member in which case they lose their home. The active staff is very difficult to penetrate.  They are taught that it is acceptable to lie to outsiders.  However, total honesty is expected within the group.  They are paranoid.  Meehan is terrified of the media.  If the media, for any reason, contacts anyone in the program, a special meeting may be called to determine how it should be handled. The same tactics that are used to control staff are used, to a lesser degree, to control clients.  Clients may be blackballed or ostracized.  A young person who leaves the program stands a good chance of immediately losing all of his or her friends.  Romantic relationships and even some friendships are managed by staff.  Anyone outside the program is considered a drug user who should be avoided.  During treatment at Step Two, teens are allowed only limited contact with family, usually short phone calls once a week with a staff member present. Meehan is a bigot.  He refers to Muslims as "towel-heads".   He refers to Jesus as a "dead Jew-boy on a stick", offending both Christians and Jews.  Africans are referred to as "niggers" and staff is taught that Africans are less evolved than whites.  Hispanics are called "wetbacks" or "spics."  Women are bitches.  Gays, according to Meehan are "queers" or "faggots" who "suck their own shit off other people's dicks". These are Meehan's words. Meehan sits atop this empire yet he has no education, no training, no license (as a clinician), no certifications, and no degrees.  To my knowledge he has not attended a single training class in his 30+ years as the "Father of Drug Intervention".  He knows nothing of pharmacology, cannot state the 12-core functions of substance abuse counseling, and has never completed any type of supervised practicuum.  He is simply an ex-convict who claims to have a better understanding of addiction and recovery than anyone else in the world. * It has been reported that Meehan has stopped giving seminars for young people and is only providing seminars for parents new to the program. We have no information in regard to the current cost for attending these seminars.

[miseriathome]

Nah, queer theory is very much actively pushed by academics, who are people with real power over others - maybe not as much as some other category of people, but don't try and pretend that tenured faculty are weak and powerless outsiders. Besides that ... I can't dissuade you from your choice of ideology, but ime it was made very clear that "queer" was Not For Me, and I'm ostensibly one of those multiply-marginalized people who were supposed to find it liberatory.

[ presumably the same anon as this one ]

If your life experience doesn’t lead you to feel swayed by the really cool work that queer theorists are doing, then… whatever. I don’t feel particularly swayed by theoretical physics. But as somebody who is multiply-marginalized (aren’t we all?) who actually loves social theory, I’m still going to use my own blog as a platform to talk about it:

I don’t think you understand how broad the field of sociology is. Tenured sociology professors teach a whole broad range of topics. You know what tenured professors’ sociology classes really are? History, historical theory (pure theory, no applications), psychology, anthropology, economics, a lot more history, political science, and methodology courses. Things I’ve learned from tenured sociology professors: the history of capitalism as it developed from feudalism; Marx/Weber/Durkheim (which were beaten to death in every. single. course) ; the history of labor unions; pseudopsychology; a lot of statistics about population distributions based on things like age and sex; ethnographies about big industries; the history of factories; critical race/class/gender theory in the abstract; some weird shit about the function of sports in society, fuck if I know; the American Dream across time; modern cultural differences around the globe; political processes for passing legislation; fucking pussy hats, everyone couldn’t stop talking about the goddamn pussy hats; classifications of professions; lots of American history.

Social theory, economics, psychology, anthropology, political science, etc all are valid approaches to sociology. But being a tenured professor means being stuck in a niche all your life, never bothering to reach out of your own area of expertise. And you know what kinds of people have had a much more difficult time entering the present day class of tenured professors? People of color, disabled folks, queer people. You know, people who like queer theory. And research about minority issues doesn’t get funded as much as broader, “more applicable” research does., which makes it harder to enter academic fields and research positions if that’s your specialty.

You have to realize that people who are currently tenured professors have followed a career path to get there over the past 10+ years (if they’re even a newly tenured professor), and that’s in light of the changing political climate of that time which–as you go backwards to their early college days–would get more and more socially conservative, making it harder to have had that career path. Then there’s the fact that in a given sociology department at any university, there’s only so many professors that can specialize in identity politics, narrowing the potential for university-level teaching positions even further. Finally, a lot of queer theorists aren’t… even… sociologists? Like I said before, queer theorists are ordinary people who write about their lives and experiences, who sometimes come from other backgrounds like political science/anthropology/human rights and then  sort of get swallowed into academic sociological queer theory. So you don’t have to have any specific credentials to write cornerstone pieces of queer literature, but you do have to have them to teach in a university, and thus I don’t think it’s very fair to assume that queer theorists are entering universities in hoards to push their queer agenda. (Also, colleges don’t really want to hire people who are too ~radical~ because of controversy–even liberal colleges.)

Or, if you’re trying to imply that the few professors who do teach queer theory are intentionally pushing it as much as possible… it’s probably because it’s such a relatively new, unexplored, and underrated area that deserves attention? I don’t see how gender/sexuality professors are any different in that respect than every other professor who gets super enthusiastic about their own research.

The people I know who teach queer theory are grad students, aka they aren’t tenured?? I mean I’ll give you some benefit of the doubt if you mean women’s gender/sexuality studies professors, since my avenue is sociology, but even then. And you totally can’t act like grad students have power, given how poor and exploited they are and how easily they can be dismissed for toeing a line at their institution.

I legitimately do not think professors are people with any significant amount of power over others–especially not broad social power a a class. Like, there is soooooooo much social theory that could go into breaking down this ask. I literally just pulled up my class notes on the social distinction of professions. It’s the nature of the public to try to deprofessionalize certain skills and knowledge bases, and university professors are frequently attacked in this regard.

I also established already that most queer theorists aren’t actually people who have fulfilled an academically-acceptable career in queer theory. Faculty are the people who synthesize documents and structure syllibi around them in order to teach them effectively. The people who are “pushing” queer theory (still unfortunate rhetoric with queerphobic implications) are queer people. Non-professor queer people. Many of whom are multiply-marginalized and find writing about their lives liberatory. You’re getting uncomfortably close to “marginalized people actually have tone of power” conspiracy logic. It’s a lot simpler than all of that. Professor teach queer theory because a good education requires a broad representation of multiple sides, and queer theory is just another lens, just like neocolonialism, neoliberalism, neo-Marxism, and critical race/class/gender theory are. Like, my social theory textbook has one section about queer theory (which is literally only about Judith Butler, actually) which is only one part of one chapter on postmodernism.

But like… aside all of that, most theory–except maybe music theory, because fuck that shit–is descriptive. Theory is developed through observations and life experiences and quantitative/ethnographic research. If you read prominent works within queer theory, they’re either what are essentially memoirs/opinion pieces, argumentative essays that build off the work on philosophy-style theorists, or published, peer-reviewed studies. And considering the fact that those things are present in all branches of sociological theory, I don’t think you can be against that, either.

I definitely gave myself a headache trying to condense all of the things I’m trying to think of, and I’ve been chipping away at this ask for multiple hours. The bigger fact is that one person sending me super short, super vague anons is not a good start to a productive and meaningful conversation, because I’m just grasping at straws trying to make inferences about what’s really being conveyed. This might be an inadequate job but it’s a starting point and is hopefully broad enough that it hits on some meaningful points.

Also, anybody who doesn’t find the word queer liberatory but still calls themselves queer should really ask themselves why they want to be called queer in the first place when it’s a choice.

[akhenaten-037]

1988

I was a child, It was spring I suppose because I remember the breeze blowing through my brother’s window, which was always welcoming when coming in from playing outside and sweating all over; my family kept our only TV in his room, my parents weren’t really big on TV so they didn’t want us nagging them to have it on during dinner (as it was viewable from the dinner table if they would have kept it in the living room). I believe I was watching cartoons at the time when my oldest brother walked in around four thirty  from high school, if I’d be watching any of the Starwars films he’d let it finish because he liked having them on ( for a time, I’d say about three weeks, he or I would have Return of the Jedi playing every day after school, it was mostly just the second half of the movie, and for a time, I knew the entire script to the final scenes where the Emperor and Darth Vader are taunting Luke to give in to his animal instincts, to give in to his desires, to shift the scales of his duality and harness the power of the darkside, for he was on the verge of realizing the light, for only when he had unleashed the rage of the darkness within him, only when he had completely succumbed to darkness, was he able to defeat his father. It was necessary for Luke to taste to addictive qualities that the prospect of immense power had to offer, and only then at that moment when he resisted the temptation is when he became a Jedi. This was his initiation, his rite of passage, to prove to himself that he could be a master, a master of his duality. There is only the duality, there is only the binary, be not deceived. At the time all this was unbeknownst to me, I simply loved the lightsaber battle, but there was always something more about that scene that intrigued me.  Please allow me to go off into a tangent; the scene where Luke harnesses his darkside is accompanied by a beautiful pipe organ and choir, the type of beautiful voices you would hear at a church choir, such a splendid scene.) but if i was watching anything else he’d just physically overpower me for the remote control; basic insignificant sibling infighting, something I miss so dearly.  He walked in excited saying his friend let his borrow a movie about war and that “there were was lots of action and lots of bad words”;  “Full Metal Jacket” I read as he handed me the VHS tape, on the cover, a green U.S Vietnam-era Marine’s helmet with “BORN TO KILL” written in black maker, I nodded in approval; for the next 2 hours I was exposed to reality, realities that I as a child would never ever want to find myself in, and yet, a short nine years later I found myself in at least in one of the realities of that movie, I was in U.S Marine Corps boot camp, training in all sorts of ways to kill people.  I believe I was affected subconsciously as a child by the sheer fright Drill Instructor Gunnery Sergeant Hartman instilled in me in the first few scenes, it was partially because of this fear, that I chose the Marine Corps when I decided to enlist in the military, I wanted to meet Drill Instructor Hartman for myself, I wanted to feel the fear, I wanted to grow.

 The following is taken from the website:  http://www.visual-memory.co.uk

http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0093.html

The Jungian Thing: Duality in Full Metal Jacket

A Discussion

Ichorwhip: The Jungian thing is the distinction between the personal unconscious and the Collective Unconscious. The personal unconscious is composed of an individual's repressed thoughts or feelings. The Collective Unconscious is composed of primordial images found in all of humanity: Jung labelled them archetypes. A cornerstone of his therapeutic approach to psychology was the recognition of the way an individual's personal unconscious integrates, or conflicts with the Collective Unconscious.

In this light, how does Joker's sick joke pan out? If he writes "Born to Kill" on his helmet , it would seem to be a manifestation of the Collective Unconscious, for as Kubrick points out again and again in his films, we have a primordial urge to kill each other. Joker's peace button on his body armor is a symbol of his personal unconscious. "Where'd you get it?" "I don't remember sir." Has Joker repressed the origin of the peace symbol?

T.D. Juede: I believe Private Joker was making a statement about how he acknowledges his fate... or that there is no such thing as a mistake.

David Kirkpatrick: Private Joker fancies himself an individual... a writer's conceit. Pun on "private joke". But as a journalist for Stars and Stripes he must recite the party line.

Gordon Dahlquist: To push the duality stuff a little farther, it should very much be remembered that when Joker actually speaks this little gem:

1) he's talking to a shit-for-brains pogue colonel who knows fuck-all about combat and real life in country.

2) Joker himself is a wise-ass reporter who - when we really get down to it - also knows fuck-all about combat and real life in country.

3) Joker's WHOLE EXISTENCE, from the beginning of the film to the point where he kills the sniper, is all about denying, abstracting, ironizing, distancing the duality within him.

Mark Ervin: I think this is a crucial point. Jungian duality is merely another phrase where Joker can demonstrate his aloof superiority: unaware of how his own personality exemplifies the concept. His beating Pyle harder with the soap than anyone else, and then holding his ears to stifle the screams, is a perfect example.

Ichorwhip: Joker seems to have an acute sense of the conflict within himself: "I wanted to meet interesting and stimulating people of an ancient culture... and kill them.... I wanted to be the first kid on my block to get a confirmed kill." Joker reconciles conflicting components of his unconscious experience and achieves a sort of individuation and wholeness of self, albeit in a rather bizarre and ironic manner.

Gordon Dahlquist: when he's mouthing off about being "the first kid on my block to get a confirmed kill" he's not really embracing anything other than a posture that he hopes will protect him from any deeper risk and investment. Which is to say, his strategy for saving himself is consistently to deny that he exists.

I don't think Joker is accepting of his own duality at all, until the end. It's the killing of the sniper that finally allows him to embrace it, and that embrace is certainly also a gesture of self-destruction. While the comment about the Jungian thing is certainly funny and does reference a central theme of the film, it's also very much spoken within context, and by an unreliable narrator, which are part of the film's own duality of presentation: of the supposedly objective, with the desperately performed.

Mark Ervin: That's well put. What makes Full Metal Jacket a devastating experience for me, is the gravity of the self-realization when Joker kills the sniper. His drive to revenge Cowboy and at the same time his delivery of cruel mercy to a female child sniper rips his self-denial to shreds. It's clear that Joker recognizes himself in the pathetic duality of the sniper, and that the agony of firing that shot is because it's an act of suicide as well as aggression (as with Pyle's last act).

Gordon Dahlquist: The gun happens to be aiming in a different direction, which is perhaps an all-important political reading of the film, but a trivial psychological reading.

Boaz: "We had to destroy the village in order to save it." Remember that famous quote from the Viet Nam War?

Gordon Dahlquist: this is a complicated point Mark, but as you say, crucial: the connection of Joker's big tranformative gesture with Pyle's is what makes sense of the film as a whole. We pay attention to Joker for a reason, despite his wilfully shallow behavior he is consistently perceptive, improvisational and smart.

Mark Ervin: And he has a certain courage to be truthful to a fault. On several occasions his admissions get him into trouble, but while he can be truthful about himself to others, he can't be true to himself--until the killing of the sniper....

Gordon Dahlquist: A perfect example of this is where Joker's courage in standing up to Hartman (re: the Virgin Mary) is rewarded with the responsibility for getting Pyle into shape, that he can't ultimately live up to, because it would amount to a personal investment. We see that it's Joker's own guilt in failing Pyle that leads him to beat him all the harder. This also brings us back to the duality moment with the colonel. Almost all of what the antagonist figures to Joker (Hartman, Lockhart, Animal Mother, etc.) say about him in their criticisms is true.

Ichorwhip: The whole film reeks of duality, especially during the boot camp sequence.

"Sound off like you've got a pair!"

"Only steers and queers come from Texas..."

"One for the commandant. One for the Corps."

"This is my rifle. This is my gun."

And then there is the duality of "Left Right Left Right Left Right" ad infinitum. It's clear Pyle doesn't know his left from his right. Joker shows him how to lace his boots, "right one over the left, left one over the right..." Also Pyle has to be shown, one leg at a time, how to get over the obstacle. This is a crucial symbolic event in the film. It looks like Pyle might make it after all. He may achieve individuation similar to his doppelganger Animal Mother. "Congratulations Leonard, you did it." If only he hadn't succumbed to the allure of a jelly donut.

Peter Tonguette: One of the more interesting theories about "Full Metal Jacket's" unconventional narrative structure was proposed by critic Bill Krohn, who wrote, "...the little world of the training camp is portrayed as a brain made up of human cells thinking and feeling as one, until its functioning is wrecked from within, when a single cell, Pyle, begins ruthlessly carrying out the directives of the death instinct that programs the organ as a whole." In many ways, Pyle is on his way to becoming an ideal Marine - a strong rifleman with a hard heart - But he self-destructs when confronted with Joker's humanity.

Mark Ervin: I would argue it is Pyle's humanity at odds with the platoon not the death instinct. His humanity makes a final return in the scene in the bathroom, the conflict causing the murder of Hartman and his suicide. Joker thinks his intellect; his cynicism; his satirical attitude alone is enough to keep Hartman's training at arm's length. Joker rides herd on his shadow side, while Pyle flips like a light switch. After Pyle gets revenge on Hartman, he points the gun at Joker, who begs for mercy. Pyle grants it, then kills himself. If Joker could have helped him through that episode without Hartman finding out, one might assume that Pyle would have become a marine, very much like Animal Mother.

I see a deliberately chosen resemblance between Pyle and Animal Mother: black hair, large stature, constantly half-open eyes, and the same false grin. The main difference is Pyle's juvenile baby fat. I don't know which actor Kubrick chose first, but the similarities are striking.

Peter Tonguette: After Pyle's suicide, the film shifts to Viet Nam and abandons many of the threads begun in the first act. Animal Mother emerges as the Marine Pyle might have turned into, although significantly he lacks Pyle's humanity, having evidently overcome whatever weaknesses he may have faced in basic training ("You did it, Leonard.") Animal Mother has literally "become death," ("I AM BECOME DEATH") the full realization of the Marine undoubtedly Hartman was trying to mold out of Pyle.

Mark Ervin: I had never thought of the quote just that way, but I think you may be right that this is part of the reason Kubrick put this phrase on his helmet. This makes the resemblance between Animal Mother and Pyle all the more poignant.

Sask696: What is the relevance of Joker killing the sniper? Is it that he finally acts upon the "Born to Kill" capacity in him?

Ichorwhip: I've always taken it that Animal Mother had at first mistaken Joker when he says, "we can't just leave her here," as if he thinks Joker wants to take her with them. When the sniper starts begging them to shoot her, Animal Mother picks up on what Joker is getting at, he says: "If you want to waste her, go on, waste her." Joker does so, his moment of truth is consummated. I view Joker's wasting of the sniper to be humane. It's his crucial moment, and the reconciliation of his duality's is at stake, also vengeance for Cowboy's death is fresh in the wind. But the moment at hand is a moral one, to put the mortally wounded sniper to death so that she will not suffer.

Gordon Dahlquist: And it's telling that the actions of this "best and brightest" representative are to degrade himself, to talk the talk, to hide for as long as he possibly can. And when Joker gets to the - essentially - same point that Pyle does, it matters that much more to him to avoid it. Quite simply, the point resonates with Joker because he is in fact thoughtful, whereas the transition for someone like Animal Mother was probably a little ... uh ... easier. It's this connection that allows us to really read the ending, and the hands off quality with which Kubrick presents it. There's no question that Joker is free, that he has reconciled himself with his situation, that actually killing himself is just a truthful, sensible gesture, given the situation. I think the film succeeds where many similar films don't, because it presents this truthfulness without judgement or condescension, or an externally imposed morality that a movie like "Platoon" feels compelled to fall back on.

Also interesting to consider that a filmed-but-cut scene showed Joker shooting two ARVN soldiers in a helicopter: in that version of the film, we would have seen Joker kill by the time we get to the final scene with the sniper. Obviously removing the earlier killings, places the final one into higher contrast.

Mark Ervin: The crux of the film, and why I see it as a masterpiece, is that in the act of killing the sniper, Joker, who is largely a pretence, finally finds himself and ties together his experiences: his attempt to laugh things off; his somewhat forced and excessive friendship with Cowboy; his shepherding and protecting of Pyle and Rafterman; his pretence of being a killer and a Jungian-- are all ultimately a war face which he loses when he kills the sniper.

David Culpepper: And the sniper is a woman! Throughout the film, women are objects of pleasure - and nothing else, in the finest traditions of the male hero cult projection. Joker plays this out in the aforementioned facades, he attempts to make the traditional John Wayne myth role his own, through his maverick sarcasm. It's quite a jolt to our intrepid Marine, when he is confronted by a culture where young women become skilled "marksman," killers in a desperate grasp for self- determination. That wasn't in the movies!

Another angle is that of the Archetypal. Joker (not unlike Dr. Bill in Eyes Wide Shut), lives in the Persona; behind a mask. Jung decried this Western narcissism repeatedly, because to him it illustrated the shallow banality of the ego. The Shadow is quite active throughout the film, Joker keeps this darker reality of humanity at bay with the mask of his Persona. But the Shadow finds its song in the beating of Pyle; Pyle's suicide; the attack on the base in the Tet Offensive; the lime-covered bodies in the pit; the death of Cowboy; and finally in the confrontation with the young woman. The feminine principle, embodied by the sniper, interplay with the Shadow. Joker has no real experience of women, his only ones are those of subjugation, "female" being reduced to a mere "sign" not only socially but psychologically. The climactic encounter can be read as a conflict between the ego and the anima, the ego (Joker) has no choice but to kill the anima (the sniper). His psyche is caught in a dilemma with no resolution. The question is, where will he go from here?

Peter Tonguette: The larger point here hits at the core of how I view the film, and why I consider it to be the finest exploration of war ever put on film. Kurt Vonnegut has often written that, had he been born in Germany as opposed to Indiana, he probably would have become a Nazi. This is a pretty radical statement, it hints at the darkness within all human beings. And yet I think it's true. To overcome the darkness within all of us we must first recognise that darkness. I feel this is the point Joker has reached at the end of the film.

David Culpepper: I get a rather fatalistic feel from the end of Full Metal Jacket. I don't see how the darkness can ever be entirely overcome.

Sask696: Another thing that's puzzled me is the reference to the Mickey Mouse song at the end. The placement of Mickey and Minnie dolls on the window sill behind Joker in the news barracks, perhaps foreshadows the end of the film? Does this somehow fit into the Jungian thing?

Ichorwhip: I'd felt that the cheap and phoney connotation of Mickey Mouse served the film well. We think of things that are Mickey Mouse as being lousy and crummy.

Rick Nelson: I always figured that the Mickey Mouse theme song was the troops' expression of their triumphant Americanism. Having survived their part of the Tet Offensive, they release all their pent-up adrenaline by proclaiming their status as Jolly Green Giants, walking the earth singing the most American thing they could think of, the Mickey Mouse song. Nicely surreal that.

Tom Haynes: I don't take away a sense of the soldiers swaggering with US power at the end of Full Metal Jacket. Just the opposite. Mickey Mouse is referenced at least three times in the film, each time ironically. The first is when Hartman goes into the head to see what Pyle is screaming about: "What is this Mickey Mouse shit?" The second is in the Stars and Stripes office, where a Mickey Mouse doll is visible. The entire sequence is devoted to showing that the Stars and Stripes paper is a joke, and that everyone in the room understands that it is. Hence the banner, "first to go, last to know".

The singing of the Mickey Mouse song seems to me a kind of realization, by Joker at least, of what is important in his life. For all his earlier bluster and jokes, he knows now that the war isn't what's important. He's grown up.

Gordon Dahlquist: I would disagree. Yes, he has a clarity about what is important, yes one could say he's grown up, but I would say that this clarity and growth has everything to do with the war. That in fact, the war has become everything. I don't think the Mickey Mouse song is particularly ironic. One of the ironies is the exact lack of irony in which it's sung. In the audience, we smile stiffly at the distance between Hue city and Annette Funicello (it's a joke but not a very good one) ... but perhaps we smile even more stiffly, because the men singing it have managed to find a clarity, where no distance between Hue city and Annette Funicello exists at all. There's an element to the final scene that's wide open in a way the rest of the film isn't, and much of this relates to Joker's statement about being unafraid: for the first time in the film, I would suggest.

Mark Ervin: One has the sense that Joker has started the singing of the song himself; Mickey Mouse is identified with him throughout. It is his ability to embrace incongruity that separates him, by degrees at least, from the fates of Pyle and Animal Mother. The final image of hell suggests that, even for Joker, it no resolution, and no easier an endpoint.

Ichorwhip: It seems like the denouement of Full Metal Jacket is foreshadowed by Hartman: "If your killer instincts are not clean and strong, you will hesitate at the moment of truth. You will not kill. You will become dead marines. And then you will be in a world of shit.

T.D. Juede: The United States has the most sophisticated and powerful military forces in the world, not to mention the biggest entertainment icons. What America does best is entertainment and armed forces.

David Kirkpatrick: While John Wayne made some World War II films mythologizing the American war hero, Disney also made propaganda cartoons demonizing Germans and Japanese. And these figures stand against the context of John Wayne's association with Westerns and Disney's association with its Main Street USA theme park.

Gordon Dahlquist: You start thinking about a larger socio-economic picture; about how the military functions..... Full Metal Jacket is an inordinately layered piece of work.

Mark Ervin: I think so, and it's sad that so many people see this film as inferior to his earlier films.

Gordon Dahlquist: I believe Geoffrey Alexander used to say it was his favorite, and I can see why. It's sort of impossible for me to choose between Kubrick's Films, but I do reject that Full Metal Jacket is a lesser film in any way. It's one of those films that takes the measure of its audience, not the other way around.