Full Metal Jacket's brutal ending explained.
Summary SCREENRANT VIDEO OF THE DAY SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT In Full Metal Jacket, the final narration and the accompanying Mickey Mouse March singalong can seem somewhat inscrutable without further context. Director Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket arrived late in the helmer’s career and midway through the cycle of Vietnam War movies.
Why The Squad Sings " Mickey Mouse March" At The End Of Full Metal Jacket In the final scenes of Full Metal Jacket, most of the movie’s main characters are swiftly killed by an unseen sniper. Eventually, the surviving recruits track down their attacker only to discover that she is a child. In one of the most gut-wrenching war movie endings of all time, the movie’s vaguely well-meaning antihero Private Joker shoots the child as she bleeds out.
American soldiers who fought in Vietnam would have been the right age to have grown up with the Mickey Mouse March as a childhood favorite, so it makes sense that they collectively recall the lyrics. The song is technically also a march, although it was more of a parade march in the show. To this end, Mickey Mouse is a symbol of American culture and capitalism’s rapid encroachment on Vietnam.
Full Metal Jacket's visuals make Vietnam’s burnt-out cities look like Hell thanks to walls of smoke and fire in these closing scenes. Thus, Joker can be seen as worse off than the dead since he is alive but has to continue existing in the world of s*** as he suffers from the trauma of his experience in Vietnam. This line also ironically recalls Pyle’s line earlier before he takes his own life, claiming he is doing so because he, too, is in a world of s***.