The amazing coincidences in Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Full Metal Jacket’: “Honestly, it was just there”
If there’s one thing that most movie-lovers can’t help but do, it’s find easter eggs, especially across a director’s body of work. It’s a little thing, but you can’t tell me that even the most serious cinephile doesn’t delight in a filmmaker referencing one of their earlier films.
What about when Marc Michel’s Roland from Jacques Demy’s 1961 classic Lola reappears in his candy-coloured musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, telling the story of how he failed to woo the titular character of the filmmaker’s earlier movie? Or how about when meta master Wes Craven referenced A Nightmare on Elm Street several times in Scream, even cameoing as Freddy Krueger himself by wearing a red and green striped jumper and posing as a janitor?
In an interview with Rolling Stone, Stanley Kubrick was asked if certain scenes from across his oeuvre were purposeful homages to earlier works he’d made, but the filmmaker insisted that any coincidences in his movies were just that, coincidences.
As one of the most legendary filmmakers of all time, Kubrick practically made a classic in every genre, but one of the few he came back to more than once was the war genre. While he did sci-fi with 2001: A Space Odyssey, erotic drama with Eyes Wide Shut, and horror with The Shining, war came to inform his first film, Fear and Desire, as well as Paths of Glory, and Full Metal Jacket, so it’s not absurd for critics to attempt to draw parallels between them.
While each is distinctively anti-war, the three films are strikingly different, not least because they all concern different wars, although Rolling Stone journalist Tim Cahill couldn’t help but notice that there was a similarity between the ending of Paths of Glory and the ending of Full Metal Jacket, both of which see a woman surrounded by soldiers.
“That resonance is an accident. The scene comes straight out of Gustav Hasford’s book,” Kubrick admitted, adding, “I’m trying to be true to the material”. Though, that wasn’t the only coincidence that defined Full Metal Jacket, Kubrick’s penultimate film.
“You know, there’s another extraordinary accident. Cowboy is dying, and in the background, there’s something that looks very much like the monolith in 2001. And it just happened to be there,” Kubrick explained.
An easter-egg-loving audience might see the inclusion of a monolith-like structure as purposeful, taking on incredible resonance and meaning, perhaps even spawning fan theories linking the two films, but Kubrick wasn’t the kind of filmmaker to cram references to other movies he’d previously made into his work, because each film was a separate entity, a world that existed alone, and any coincidences were merely accidental.
“When Cowboy is shot, they carry him around the corner to the very most logical shelter. And there, in the background, was this thing, this monolith. I’m sure some people will think that there was some calculated reference to 2001, but honestly, it was just there,” Kubrick concluded, before relenting, “I know it’s an amazing coincidence.”
