[Bonus Video] The Story Behind Pvt. Pyle's 'Headshot' Effect (Patreon)

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Video Script:

The character of Private Pyle went through so much abuse and humiliation during his basic training that it caused him to snap and kill Gunnery Sergeant Hartman and himself.

In the commentary, Jay Cocks says that Pyle’s death scene reminded him of Weegee’s crime scene photography (Commentary). Weegee was a photographer who went around photographing crime scenes and the seedy underbelly of New York City between the 30s and 60s. I spoke about Weegee’s influence on Kubrick in another video titled “Where does Stanley Kubrick’s Style Come From?”, but you can see how his spontaneous street photography necessitated a kind of harsh lighting and uncomfortable feeling–like you are witnessing something you aren’t supposed to.

In his Full Metal Jacket Diary, Matthew Modine wrote about the crew trying to get the kill shot right. The crew made up some squibs, which is basically a condom filled with fake blood and a small explosive that breaks the condom and sprays the blood everywhere. Usually, the squibs are triggered remotely by a member of the crew. This is how they had Hartman get shot in the chest.

Cinematographer Douglas Milsome said that he thought that Ermey must have done a bullet hit before because he reacted and flew backwards so well (AC 80). You can see the padding they put behind the explosive to make it hurt less. Of course, the more explosives you put in the squib, the more powerful the blast, but the problem here was, how do you put a squib on the back of a person’s head without seriously injuring them?

Modine writes that the special effects guys offered members of the crew twenty British pounds to test the squib on their heads (FMJ Diary). They put a metal plate behind the test subject’s head and put a squib with one-fourth of the explosives, but it didn’t look right, so they doubled it and eventually got to a full squib leaving a welt on the back of the guy’s head (FMJ Diary). Kubrick reviewed these test shots and said that it didn’t look good enough–he wants something bigger. After all, this is the climax to the Boot Camp section of the movie.

Kubrick asked Modine if he'd seen a good headshot in a movie and Modine said that there was a good one in William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in LA (FMJ Diary). Kubrick got a print and they watched the scene.

Kubrick loved the effect, but thought he could do it better (FMJ Diary).

So, they basically had a PVC pipe filled with fake blood and what Modine thought was pasta or something positioned just outside of frame and used “pressurized air” to shoot it all at the tile behind D’Onofrio (FMJ Diary). The stuff flew at the wall super fast, but you could still see it coming from just outside of frame, so Kubrick cut one frame out that would give away the illusion (FMJ Diary). If you look at it frame-by-frame, you can see that there is a little jump-cut when the gun goes off.

In his essay for the Kubrick Exhibition book, Georg Seesslen notes that this scene is similar to some of Kubrick’s other films in which a creation is “rebelling against its creator” (Seeslen 215). The most similar would be HAL 9000 revolting against the astronauts in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but it could also apply to Alex rebelling against that which created him or how Redman Barry rebels against his own status in the hierarchy he was born into. Hartman has made Pyle into a killer, but he wasn’t counting on being the one killed.

Seesslen also notes where Full Metal Jacket differs from Apocalypse Now in that Apocalypse Now depicts a linear descent into darkness whereas, in Full Metal Jacket, the process is a circle (Seeslen 215). When you become the killer you are trained to be, it becomes the journey of the machine instead of Apocalypse Now’s journey of the self.

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