To get the dates straight, Basic Training was released in 1971, after being filmed during the summer of 1970. Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket came out in 1987. And if we need to be reminded, America’s military involvement in Viet Nam was at its highest level in the late 1960’s and lasted until 1973. Active anti-war protests began in earnest in early 1967, and in May 1970 National Guardsmen at Kent State University fired at protesting students, killing four and wounding nine more. This last event would have occurred just a short time before Basic Training was filmed. Also, draft lotteries began in December 1969, so the recruits in Basic Training would likely be a combination of volunteers and draftees. And to finish the timeline stuff, Full Metal Jacket’s first half, the part dealing with basic training, takes place in about late 1967, so all these time periods are very close together.
There are a couple of reasons for laying out these times. The first is that I hadn’t seen Basic Training after familiarity with Full Metal Jacket until now, and the connections are so clear they’re worth going over a bit. I think I once read in Michel Ciment's book on Kubrick that the director had watched this film "endlessly" while getting ready for Full Metal Jacket. (If I ever get back to my office, I'll have to check, but I don't need to, since it shows clearly right from the start of Wiseman's film.) Somewhere it’s told that Kubrick asked Wiseman for a copy of his film for free while preparing for Full Metal Jacket, and Wiseman insisted (quite properly I’d say) that Kubrick rent it, but however he got it and however many times he saw it, Kubrick absorbed it quite thoroughly. They would make a great double bill sometime, and I think the comparison is useful because it raises good questions about the differences between documentary and fiction and also highlights some ways Kubrick and Wiseman are very much alike beyond these two films.
Wiseman has been borrowed from before, even this early in his career. I’d say this is perfectly fine and it’s what should happen with great films like Wiseman’s. When I gave some thoughts here on Hospital a couple of days ago, I made no mention of the film scripted by Paddy Chayefsky and starring George C. Scott that came out just a year later, titled, not so coincidentally, The Hospital. Amazingly, both films were shot at the same place, New York’s Metropolitan Hospital! But the resemblances between the two films are pretty superficial. Chayefsky’s film goes heavy on the melodrama with a murderer on the loose and George C. Scott’s doctor character going through various personal crises. There’s maybe reason to note that Chayefsky used Wiseman’s film as a starting point, but I don’t think any further comparison is all that productive.
The case of Full Metal Jacket is another story. One could possibly argue that the Kubrick film is a similarly melodramatic rendering of Wiseman’s as was the case with the two Hospitals. But that’s unfair to Kubrick. For one, basic training is just the first half of his film. While the connections there to Wiseman are strong, as we’ll discuss in just a bit, Kubrick does of course go to Viet Nam in part two, and maybe we could say he didn’t have to, that all he has to say has been expressed in the self-contained first half, but his is genuinely a war movie and the second half is integral to his vision. While Wiseman’s film surely references Viet Nam, it’s still going to stay in Kentucky and we’ll hear Viet Nam talked about and being prepared for, but of course we’ll never go there.
The similarity between the openings of the two films is striking, most evident in the head shavings of the fresh recruits. Wiseman only has a couple of shots of this and Kubrick goes to town with a flurry of them, but it’s clear where the idea to start with this came from. Wiseman’s sequence is a processing in even more detail (fingerprinting a la Law and Order, photos taken looking like mug shots, some quick questions from an unseen fact gatherer, measurements for uniforms, vaccinations.) All of a sudden they are soldiers, and right away the shrill drill sergeant is barking orders. Speaking of which, Kubrick goes over the top with his loudier, funner, and more obscene drill sergeant (famously played by a real former Marine drill sergeant R. Lee Ermey), but again one could easily say Wiseman has set up for this more than adequately. And majorly tying the two films together is the role of the misfit, and Wiseman more than lays the groundwork for looking at what happens to the guy who doesn’t fit in, with his Private Hickman, a sad sack of a solder who we first see literally out of step with his fellow recruits. He’s actually treated fairly sympathetically, as he speaks first to an officer who talks with him about his family problems, followed by one of those already familiar and excellent phone call monologs where the officer is assessing all of Hickman’s problems and asking for additional help. It turns out he’s arranged for Hickman to meet with an Army Chaplain, who speaks with him at some length and again with some concern. He even lists those who are available to help him if he wants - a doctor, a mental hygienist, and himself, as well as encouraging Hickman to help himself if we can. In all, he’s treated with a great deal of attention and offers of assistance. In the process, it’s also suggested he’s suicidal, an idea that Kubrick jumped at with evident glee, where the misfit becomes a crazed killinh suicidal maniac. Once again, Wiseman gave him plenty to work with.
The similarities don’t end there. Kubrick also loves Wiseman’s several scenes of soldiers marching to somewhat humorous songs, and while he adds impressive tracking shots to the party, he replays the scenes pretty closely. With much more primitive equipment, Wiseman approximates the occasional tracking shot of his own in hand held style, both for marching and following an inspecting drill sergeant through a barracks, another situation where Kubrick tracks with fuller force while still following Wiseman’s template. That both films are showing the whole basic training process from arrival to finished “product” is matched quite closely.
All that said, Wiseman’s basic training still isn’t Kubrick’s. Wiseman’s I’d have to say is more humanistic and complex, even though I love Full Metal Jacket too. Wiseman’s complexity partly derives from his showing real people, and also not presenting situations in the relentless extreme mode that is Kubrick’s. Some of his officers are quite understanding, and we’re not required to look at them in stark dramatic terms. Also, he shows other forms of resistance to basic training, particularly by several black recruits, one of which is quite vocal about his opposition to Viet Nam. Because Wiseman eschews typical dramatic payoffs (I don’t think we ever see, for instance, if Hickman is successfully put into place), he can develop arguments out of separate pieces that don’t require an easy resolution. His still seems a cinema of ideas, rather than Kubrick’s visual brilliance and extremes of performance.
Striking about Basic Training too is how the process shown here connects so strongly with High School, which itself was full of explicit military references (like the principal’s letter which ends the film and the returning soldier talking with his former coach on a soccer field). When the recruits get off the bus at the start of Basic Training, still in their civilian clothes, they look like they’ve gone straight from one institution to the next. Basic training looks in large part to be another educational place. We see plenty of instruction, and even get the return of training movies. The several history lessons, simplistic and near humorous were they not in service of getting the men ready to fight, also seem not so far from classroom scenes in the earlier film. More strikingly, we get repeated lines straight out of High School, where they already sounded militaristic. The famous one would be "We're out to establish that you're a man and can take orders" said very early in high school to a troublesome student, and said here in an early lecture to the recruits. Variations abound, such as the succint "Do what you're told when you're told”, which we get in both movies too. Surprisingly here too, we get a few visits by parents (I didn’t know this happened in basic training), where the parents here voice the same line of needing to follow orders and rules in order to be successful. Arguing for discipline and suppressing individuality is a clear throughline from High School to here. Also, what was bizarrely aggressive physical education games in High School like the mad fight for a large ball in a gym becomes in Basic Training a whole set of exercises - recruits throwing each other to the ground, practicing beating up dummies, crawling under barbed wire, and other such fun stuff. And lest we forget, Basic Training gives us a ceremony we never had in High School, the final graduation with families again in attendance, and we get a valedictory speech that directly echoes the principal’s reading of the letter in High School, a model recruit who speaks about how they’re ready now for Viet Nam, a conclusion we can certainly treat as ruefully as we did its invoking in High School.
It’s probably not too early in Wiseman’s work to notice an already apparent liking for what could either be labelled surrealistic, heavily ironic, straight out humorous, or simply bizarre. Sometimes people speak as if out of Samuel Beckett or from some 60’s comedians like Shelley Berman or Bob Newhart. He’s sensitive to human peculiarities and not afraid to let people spout off. These situations can also have their simultaneously quite tragic dimensions as well, but Wiseman’s humor is plainly in evidence lots of times. A great example in Basic Training is the harebrained discussion where an officer offers his view of reincarnation, which includes such weird ideas as how if ”in one life you hate colored people, you'll come back as a negro”, as he puts it. Somehow General Patton becomes part of the discussion, and he winds up with the really out there notion that the rise of Atlantis figures in reincarnation too, as the “Atlantians had space travel, so those are now the people in the NASA program”. He sounds nuttier than most of the inmates in Titicut Follies, and I guess he’s here just to show that strange ideas can pop up in the unlikeliest of places. Still quite surrealist in appearance, but less humorous, is the wordless night exercise that begins with the painted faces of the soldiers covered in leaves engaged in weird slow-motion movements, eventually silently crawling under barbed wire, with close-ups of their hands moving slowly across the ground. It’s a fairly lengthy sequence that resembles nothing so much as a ballet, territory Wiseman will eventually get to more explicitly in a later film. But even here, he recognizes artful movement when he sees it, and which we’d hardly expect to see in a film about army training.
And I’m still surprised by how much music and poetry we find in this unlikely place, as I’ve already mentioned in several other films. Here, as it’s military music, the word “music” should be in quotes, but the marching bands, drill songs, and ceremonies feel like they’re giving Titicut Follies a run for its money in the unlikely music department. I won’t quote all the stanzas of the marching songs, but Wiseman usually presents them in their entirety, and usually repeated a second time. We’ve got "Mr. Nixon dropped a bomb, but I don't want to go to Nam" as the start of one extended verse, and earlier we had a lengthy marching tale that starts with “The prettiest girl I ever saw, was sipping cider through a straw" and later involves a shotgun wedding and some advice about drinking. Both times loaded with messages, I guess, but funny and sort of musical at the same time. We again get a church service with not one but two hymns, the second a soldier at a darkened organ singing in its entirety a hymn ending in "His name is wonderful, Jesus My Lord" . Again, something else you wouldn’t expect in this context. Elsewhere, Wiseman has some fun with the bands, as in an orientation session where he prefers to show a band leader full of exaggerated movements and not really required as an introduction to the speeches which follow. But it does give us a chance to have music at the beginning and again at the end, as we did with Wiseman’s first film. Here the appearance of music at the end is particularly strange, as we get not only a full dose of a band at the final ceremony is getting underway, Wiseman showing us as much of the marching band as he does of the soldiers marching. And the last thing we see in the film is not the soldiers but a bit more of the band, and then quite oddly, since Wiseman end credits are usually silent, the music even continues as we view those credits. This is perhaps mocking the usually patriotic strains which would accompany the end credits of your typical Army film. It certainly sounds odd.
And lastly, speaking of those end credits, this is another time, like Titicut Follies, where you need to keep watching past the listing of names. Here, the very last thing we see is a card which reads, in part, "THIS FILM WAS MADE AT FORT KNOX, KENTUCKY, IN THE SUMMER OF 1970. SINCE THAT TIME, CHANGES HAVE TAKEN PLACE IN BASIC TRAINING, WHICH IS CONSTANTLY EVOLVING AND CHANGING." This echoes strongly the final title cards in Titicut Follies which referred to the "changes and improvements" at Bridgewater. No mention is made here of whether this was required the way it was in Titicut (i.e. by some complaint or legal dispute) but its effect to me is the same. It suggests, as in Titicut, that it's an enforced disclaimer that means little once we've actually seen the film, which feels very disclaimer-proof. In other words, take what you’ve just seen seriously. And now that it’s fifty years later, plug in Iraq or Afganistan and probably a videogame simulation instead of a toothbrush movie, and maybe basic training hasn’t evolved all that much.