As often in Kubrick's films, the narrative construction of Full Metal Jacket is symmetrical: the film unfolds in two matching parts, each punctuated by a murderous catharsis with, as a main thread, the soldier Joker: in the first part, we witness the training (the indoctrination) of the future Marines for the war in Vietnam, under their drill sergeant's iron rule. In the second part, we follow the wandering of a battalion caught up in the fighting during the Tet offensive, illustrating the behaviour "in the field" of soldiers "programmed" to kill. Without transition we leave the empty, monochromatic universe of the ordered world, represented by the barracks and ritualised to the extreme, for a chaotic hell of fire and blood.
This excerpt reiterates a symmetrical visual composition of which Kubrick was fond: in dolly out, the future Marines drill, singing, rifle on the shoulder and hand over the sex, in two parallel lines with, at the centre, Gunnery Sergeant Hartman. At a given moment, the soldiers part respectively towards the left or the right, and go off on the sides in a parallel path. The sergeant makes an about-turn.
The perfect symmetry of the composition with its verticals (the rifles), diagonals (the rafters of the barracks) and horizontals (the transverse beams, the perfectly aligned bunks) visually expresses the depersonalising of the recruits, reduced to the state of robots. The lighting treatment adds to the vision of an icy universe.
This business of manufacturing "killing machines" glorifies man's primitive aggressiveness and works on a diverting of sexuality as expressed by Sergeant Hartman's words, repeated by the soldiers in unison. Military and sexual vocabulary become confused: the "rifle-phallus" becomes their sole object of desire. They must give it a woman's name and sleep with it whilst vowing unlimited scorn for the female sex. This taming of the libido is manifested in this march-past where the recruits clutch their sex with one hand, holding their weapon aloft with the other.