Kelly Faulkner's List: Full Metal Jacket

• the brain, the world, and the system connecting the two, start to break down from internal and external causes
• the killing field of "Full Metal Jacket" churns out killers. Humanity is  a victim of such environments. But these environments are man-made. Thus the puzzle loops in on itself. People shape  the world around them, and are then shaped in turn by the worlds they have created.
• people  are indivisible from the background. The gaming board becomes indivisible from the people who sit down to play on it.
• extreme symmetries, the oh so neat squares on the board, which presage disaster
• "Full Metal Jacket", a crucial  scene, the training sergeant’s murder, takes place in a sterile white latrine. Abandoning his usual hyper-accuracy in  favour of artistic license, Kubrick specially created a set with two rows on opposing walls. Why? So that the blood splattered  slaughter could take place among symmetry.
• Kubrick uses symmetry to achieve two very specific effects: firstly, to lull an audience into  a sense of false security, and secondly, to parody or counterpoint the ensuing chaos, the asymmetrical destruction.
• Routine and rituals broken. To protect himself form the harsh unpredictability of life, man insultates himself in a blanket  of of routine and ritualisation.
• Kubrick's uneasy blend of hyper-reality  with expressionistic lighting and set design, often creates the same dissonance that arises from his blending  of flamboyant caricatures and muted acting.
• The geometry and precision  of everything
• everything is carefully crafted to comment on another moment, or to call  into consideration a previous or future occurrence. His films are awash with rhythms within rhythms. Echoes.
• Scenes at either end of a film may be thematically linked by a single colour or sound effect.
• Kubrick's  "man" is always trapped in one form or the other.

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