his paper will examine the topic of heroism in Stanley Kubrick’s films Paths Of Glory and Full Metal Jacket by comparing the visual styles and narrative structures and offer insight into Kubrick’s views on war.

Paths Of Glory is a 1957 film based on the First World War focusing on the political struggles of the French army as they battle the German army. It is a study of the bravery and cowardice that exists within the ranks of the army, as well as the results of extreme amounts of fear. The focus is primarily in the barracks and the court. The plot focuses on a group of soldiers who are charged with cowardice. No man is perfect, but war magnifies qualities such as honour and deceit, and this film illustrates this phenomena in a very clean, proper way. Paths Of Glory does not show actual combat very much, unlike Full Metal Jacket. Full Metal Jacket is a study of what becomes of a soldier at war. Set in the Vietnam War, it begins with a focus on the training of a platoon of U.S. marines and continues to follow the service of Private Joker in his experiences in Vietnam as he goes about his service. Full Metal Jacket is a well paced film that studies the violence of war, portraying the physical as well as the mental dangers in a hyper realistic way. One overarching element that ultimately combines both of these films is their emotional poignancy. Both are highly engaging, yet thoroughly disturbing films. These are two demonstrations against war, revealing the subject in an ironic and undeniably negative light.

Full Metal Jacket is a very rough film the whole way through. The pace is slow and slightly stiff, with a sort of boring, droning tone. The training base is extremely bland and lifeless, and the Vietnamese setting has a similar atmosphere. The behaviour of the soldiers is lazy. It is clear throughout that the training camp remade each soldier into obedient servants. Even blatant sexuality is made to look unbecoming and dirty, completely compassionate. When Private Joker and his men haggle to buy sex from a Vietnamese woman and a local villager, the atmosphere is never entirely negative, but it is awkward, nothing like what one would actually desire. Of course, such activities are not really to be desired, but that is the point: nothing in war is desirable. Despite being a Hollywood film, Full Metal Jacket does not scandalize sexuality- instead it shows that even the most appealing things are bleak in war. It is surely a victory when both sides can unity for any reason, and sexuality may be a very good reason for that union, but that union is of no use given the larger circumstance. An ever more strict movie, Paths Of Glory entertains no sexuality at all. This is a highly masculine film; indeed at the end we watch the men enjoy a show from a captured German woman, and it may be allowed that such a sight would be rare in such excessive homogonized environments, but that affair is sort of forced and unfulfilling. The woman serves just as much as a token as she does as a sexual object. Paths Of Glory is bone dry. This only goes to show that Kubrick meant to depict was as a downright miserable time, and he succeeded.

Uniformity is a very important element in both of Paths Of Glory and Full Metal Jacket. Kubrick's set designs and costumes aim for the greatest possible realism. This way the audience could get a proper view of the utter madness that is war. The costumes in these films are all precisely done. The soldiers all dress exactly the same; even in the training facility in Full Metal Jacket, ever soldier is required to dress their bed the same way, down to the inch. Nothing is pleasant in such scenes, as Kubrick uses a jelly doughnut as a symbol for the constricting nature of war. When Private Pyle is caught hiding a doughnut in his locker, the Gunner Sargent is furious. Similarly, in Paths Of Glory, Lieutenant Roget's alcoholism represents his 'shameful' humanity- his sensitivity in the face of the gun shots and bomb explosions that ring out throughout the film. Other soldiers look down on him for his weakness, which further emasculates him. In both movies, food represents the inherent frailty of man. We need to ingest foods to survive, but in these films, all pleasure is removed from those foods. It is ironic that in Full Metal Jacket the consequences of Pyle's gluttony are more severe, but it is true that Pyle himself is used as a scape-goat for the soldiers' disturbed personalities. Unlike Paths Of Glory, in which all of the characters can be viewed as equally victimized, Private Pyle is singled out as the scape goat not only for Gunnery Sergeant Hartman's wrath, but for the whole unit's wrath.The character of Private Pyle also represents the perceived weakness within all soldiers. Not only is he slow at learning, he is incapable of completing most of the athletic feats required for marines. His theft of the doughnut, for which the whole troupe punished, leading them to attack him in the night, only further solidifies his role as a failure. Paradoxically, he is very efficient with his gun. With that gun, he carries out his training perfectly upon himself and his tormentor, Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, in a stunning murder-suicide. This is the first kill we see in Full Metal Jacket. An element of uniformity which both films share is the buds it fact that they only show one army in either war, the French side in Paths Of Glory, and the American side in Full Metal Jacket. Perhaps this is how Kubrick kept his films simple. There are no excuses shown whatsoever for war. It is a fearful, dark environment; Kubrick never allows war to look good in any way, shape, or form.

No matter what, war is war, and war is inherently wrong. War is shown as being beyond discomfort. Whether in the grim, dark trenches or in a luxurious building, no one wants to be in a war zone. In Paths Of Glory, we follow General Miso around, and throughout the story, he is rarely happy, whether we see him leading his men or getting a raise. Only when he wins his court case, thereby condemning several of his own men to death, does he crack a smile. Similarly, the only thing that evokes any joy in the rest of the soldiers is the song of a captured German girl at the end of the film. In this regard to women, Paths Of Glory and Full Metal Jacket are very similar. The soldiers only seem to find amusement in haggling for prostitutes. Rather than a mysogonistic notion, this is highly affirmative- in war, the only bright light is those who aren't part of the war at all, and this seems largely to be the role that Kubrick gave to the fairer sex in these two films.

Private Pyle and General Miso are contrasting icons of the shame of war in terms of it's destruction of the psyche of man. Both men are similar in that they both crack under the pressures of their duties and go on to commit atrocities. A soldier surely should never harm one of his own comrades, especially not a superior officer, and one must ask how war can be justified in any way if such harm is a result of it. Private Pyle is driven beyond insanity by his comrades, and also pushes himself to be good enough even though he is clearly not physically fit to be in the war. This pressure leads him to take his anger out on the Sergeant, and also on himself, committing a murder-suicide. General Miso is order by his superior officer in a very frank way to send his men into a suicide mission to capture the Anthill. Even though he is well aware of the futility of this mission, the General complies and ultimately fails in this mission. The reason that he fails is that his men refuse to go out to be killed, which should be reasonable on many levels. It does not make sense for an army to simply sacrifice its soldiers for no reason, and it would not make sense for the soldiers to consciously run straight into the line of fire with no hopes of victory in that battle. For this, the soldiers are sentenced to death by General Miso. Colonel Dax, a rare protagonist figure in Paths Of Glory, attempts to save his comrades, even defending them in court, but to no avail, the General's wrath is final. The fact that General Miso would essentially murder his own soldiers only shows that the higher up in the army, the more corrupt the soldiers become. Another example of such behaviour is seen in Lieutenant Roget. The army simply destroys its inhabitants, and no one is safe. Kubrick's depictions of broken, disgraced soldiers, who were innocent men before the war took them, shows in the clearest way that man is simply not supposed to go to war. Further, the question is raised, in an atmosphere of war, what difference does it make who kills whom? This issue, already touched upon, is worth further investigation. Both Paths Of Glory and Full Metal Jacket depict the grim reality of this problem.

All soldiers in Kubrick's films are broken. This is a key part of the narrative structure of these movies. In Full Metal Jacket, we are immediately shown how these soldiers are broken: not by the enemy, but in training. No soldier is safe from this, regardless of their rank. The Senior Drill Instructor, Gunnery Sergeant Hartman is far more aggressive than necessary- all he does is scream abusive things. Although Pyle recieves the most abuse, all of the soldiers went through a living hell in the training before even arriving in the war. When General Miso cracks, after his failure to capture the Anthill (this is in Paths Of Glory) he punishes his own men with death. This is even worse that Private Pyle's rage induced murder because it was a straight up abuse of his power.

In conclusion, there is absolutely nothing good to be said about war. The images of it are grim. The masses of frightened men in Stanley Kubrick's Paths Of Glory depict a highly strained atmosphere for all, which is very terrible. In Full Metal Jacket, as well as in Paths Of Glory, no one is really themself, but a another piece in some elaborate chess game. To be an individual in war requires extreme measures because war itself is so extreme, and even normally somewhat pleasurable experiences are