Author Topic: Thoughts upon watching Full Metal Jacket re: obedience schools  (Read 2348 times)

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Offline asha-kun

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Thoughts upon watching Full Metal Jacket re: obedience schools
« on: December 06, 2014, 06:36:27 PM »
When I first watched this movie (a few years out of residential treatment) I couldn't sit through the first scene without a crying shaking meltdown.

Some years later, with perspective, I didn't mind it.  I even think it might be fun to be in the military (if they let me, which they wouldn't.)

The drill instructor, compared to the Bellefaire staff?  Was NICE.  Even benevolent, in a way.  If asked to choose between dealing with him and dealing with John "No-Neck" Sgroi, I would choose the drill sergeant from Full Metal Jacket.  Any day.  I don't know what that says about life, the universe, the troubled teen industry or me or anything...aside from being incredibly fucked up, that having Sergeant Nasty barking orders at me would be a preferable experience to the ones I had.

That and...Full Metal Jacket is a genius example of why this kind of discipline/"treatment" is a piss-poor therapeutic technique for anger management, or instilling blind obedience.

They even say in the movie that the training isn't meant to create robots, it's to create killers.

The troubled teen industry wants to create robots.  And yet, these are the methods they use.  Methods that instill a deep abiding rage.  Enough rage that those who go through it are left with a desire to kill.

But ex-troubled teen inmates are not being sent to war.  They are sent back to their homes.  Back to their parents.  Back to their schools.

The chickens are going to come home to roost, if they haven't already.  I'm not going to shed a single tear.

This madness has gone far enough.  Now, it's like these systems and the people who enable them are asking, nay, begging, for it to blow up in their faces.  And they will deserve it.

(P.S.  I almost hate Gomer Pyle now, out of sheer bitterness, because he could leave his situation if he wanted and I wasn't allowed the option of leaving, yet he took the weak way out of something nobody was forcing on him.)

dragonfly

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Re: Thoughts upon watching Full Metal Jacket re: obedience schools
« Reply #1 on: December 11, 2014, 11:30:19 PM »