After the longest hiatus of his career to that point, Kubrick followed the chilling symmetries of The Shining with the discursive confrontations of Full Metal Jacket, a Vietnam film whose darkly comedic tone embodies the grotesque cognitive dissonance of a futile military endeavor. Eschewing easy points of identification, the film depicts American military conditioning as a hellish crucible designed to warp impressionable minds into amoral killing machines, and it follows its cold logic from a boot camp in South Carolina to a bombed-out battlefield in Huế. Private Joker (Matthew Modine), a smartass recruit-turned-war correspondent, is the ostensible protagonist, though he and his fellow soldiers remain opaque ciphers whose absence of critical thought Kubrick weaponizes in the film’s wrenching climax. Most memorable among the ensemble is former drill sergeant R. Lee Ermey as Gunnery Sgt. Hartman, whose machine-gun verbal harassment in the film’s opening act is one of the most impressive actorly feats in Kubrick’s oeuvre.