The humiliations of military training – a veritable dehumanisation process – followed by the confrontations in Vietnam turn the Marines of Full Metal Jacket into depersonalised beings. These soldiers in uniform form a group but without heroes, dispossessed of their names replaced by grotesque nicknames.
Customised by the soldiers, the helmet enables them to create an identity and becomes a place for individual expression. A personal accessory, it passes to the soldier after leaving the army, unlike the rifle. Fetish objects (photo, cross...) but above all, "shock" phrases such as "I'm Hard" or "I am become Death" decorate the helmets, alongside diverse useful belongings tucked into the strap that holds them. On his, Sergeant Joker has drawn a target and in black marker the phrase "BORN TO KILL" in black marker. This motto, associated with the "Peace and Love" button he wears on his military jacket over his heart, peace symbol and vestige of the hippie America, expresses his schizophrenia. Interrogated by a colonel about the meaning of what the latter suspects to be "some kind of a sick joke", Joker justifies this absurd, obscure combination as an allusion to "the duality of man, the Jungian thing, sir" (1). Kubrick thus puts into images the dual facet of human nature, crystallising the moral ambivalence that reigns in the film.
Chosen by the filmmaker as the emblem of the film, Joker's helmet is pictured on the poster with the "Peace and Love" button, to accentuate the paradox of the association and the impossible reconciliation at the heart of Full Metal Jacket.
(1) In Jungian theory, the shadow represents the dark, primitive side of Man's subconscious, the other side of the light (the persona, the "social ego").