Why is it a shame that nobody’s marking the occasion? Because Full Metal Jacket is one of the most meticulously crafted films of the past 20 years. I think it’s damn near perfect.

(Interesting side note: Believe it or not, this will be Full Metal Jacket‘s first home video release in widescreen. The film was originally shot in a 1.85:1 aspect ratio, what you and I call “widescreen.” But if you’re an eccentric genius like Stanley Kubrick, you get to make unconventional decisions. Before his death Kubrick decided that, since 98% of the world’s TV sets back then had a 4:3 aspect ratio — i.e. “fullscreen” — henceforth and forevermore his films would be released in a 4:3 aspect ratio. None of that devil letterboxing for Stanley! It’s only now that Warner Home Video, with the collaboration of the Kubrick estate, is restoring the films to their original specs.)

Audiences have had a peculiar relationship with Full Metal Jacket since its debut on July 26, 1987. It’s much loved in some quarters, but it’s equally despised in others. Everyone seems to appreciate the taut first act set in a Parris Island Marine boot camp, yet many never get over the film’s sudden shift to Vietnam in its second half. Even so perceptive a critic as Roger Ebert famously called the latter half of Full Metal Jacket “a series of self-contained set pieces, none of them quite satisfying.”

But Full Metal Jacket is designed to be a two-part story; just about everything you see in the first half of the film has a parallel in the second. It’s a structure Kubrick has used before (cf. the apes/the astronauts in 2001, and Alex’s life before/after his treatment in A Clockwork Orange).

More than that, the film is full of dualities: Joker’s helmet with the peace symbol and “Born to Kill” inscribed on the side (“I think I was trying to suggest something about the duality of man… The Jungian thing, sir”). The two dramatic deaths at the end of each section. The two-mindedness of the American public about the war. Joker’s own conflicting desires to “get into the shit” and to get out of there as quickly as possible. His dual nature as Leonard’s teacher and as the one who beats Leonard the hardest. And so on.

Of course, most of the moviegoing public doesn’t want to see films about Jungian dualities, and so people often go into Full Metal Jacket with false expectations. Hollywood generally only gives us three categories of war films: (1) the anti-war film (Platoon, Kubrick’s own Paths of Glory) (2) the war-is-sordid-but-necessary-and-sometimes-ennobling film (Saving Private Ryan), and (3) the out-and-out propaganda film (John Wayne’s The Green Berets, 300). But what do you do with a Vietnam movie that not only refuses to take a stand on the Vietnam War, but actually embraces its contradictions? “Do I think America belongs in Vietnam?” Crazy Earl says in response to a question from the television interviewers in FMJ. He looks totally perplexed, like he’s never even considered the question before. “I don’t know. I belong in Vietnam, I’ll tell you that.”

So if you’re going to get the most out of Full Metal Jacket, be prepared to take the long view. The way long view, the view of an alien civilization dispassionately studying humanity under a microscope. Like those hypothetical aliens, Kubrick rarely makes moral judgments; he simply observes. Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, Joker, Animal Mother, the Vietnamese sniper, even the crazy gunner gleefully shooting down fleeing Vietnamese civilians from a moving helicopter — the film doesn’t really take anybody’s side. It doesn’t give you convenient moral labels to tell you who the good guys and who the bad guys are.

Take Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, played with vicious brio by R. Lee Ermey (you know, the guy who’s played the military drill sergeant in every fucking movie since 1987). At first blush, he seems like as good a candidate as any for a villain in this movie. A manipulative brainwasher, a callous tool of the U.S. government. But on repeated viewings, you realize that he’s not the villain at all — quite the opposite. He’s doing his best to prepare these soldiers to survive out in the field. He’s a father figure. He’s a protector and teacher. He’s Obi-wan Kenobi, if Obi-wan Kenobi called his Padawan learners “unorganized grabastic pieces of amphibian shit.”

“Because I am hard you will not like me,” says Hartman. “But the more you hate me, the more you will learn.” Didn’t Mr. Miyagi say something similar to the Karate Kid when making him paint the fence?

Put in that light, Hartman’s abuse of Leonard Lawrence (Vincent D’onofrio) becomes not just understandable; it’s necessary. Look at the scene where the platoon goes tearing through the mud in slow motion, only to have Leonard trip and pull the whole team down into the mud with him. We fat and happy civilians look at that scene and think, why doesn’t someone give that poor kid a hand? Hartman looks at that scene, and he thinks: that kid’s not just going to die in Vietnam, he’s going to get a whole shitload of other Marines killed too.

So Hartman is playing the role of the Teacher. But you know what happens to the Teacher in all these stories: he dies. In fact, he must die, because our Hero must learn to prove himself, alone.

Who’s our hero in Full Metal Jacket? He’s called the Joker (Matthew Modine). His name is never given, but if you look closely, you can see that the nametag on his shirt says “J.T. Davis.” And Full Metal Jacket is the story of his coming of age, the story of his transformation from protected child to self-actualized soldier.

At the film’s outset, he’s a gentle soul who’s trying his best to maintain an ironic detachment from the reality of the Vietnam War. He responds to Hartman’s diatribes with a mock John Wayne swagger; his “war face” is the pathetic imitation scream of a man who’s only seen death on TV; he tells the television crews that he wants to be “the first kid on my block to get a confirmed kill.” For the Joker, war is something remote. Death is something that happens to other people at a distance.

But over the course of the next 120 minutes, Joker will see the barriers between him and death slowly stripped away. Notice how the authority figures protecting Joker from the big, bad world become less and less authoritative as the film goes on. At first, we have the stern and menacing Gunnery Sergeant Hartman; then there’s the sour-faced colonel who tells Joker to “get your head and your ass wired together, or I will take a giant shit on you”; next there’s Lieutenant Touchdown, who seems competent if not particularly fearsome; then there’s Crazy Earl, who’s hardly much of an authority figure at all. By the time Cowboy takes command of the squad, you can see that he’s too green to have any sway over the anarchic Animal Mother (Adam Baldwin, now known to many as Jayne Cobb from Firefly). In the last scenes, even Cowboy is gone, leaving the Marines bereft of any real authority figure.

When we reach the last minutes of Full Metal Jacket, Joker comes face to face with death for the first time. As he faces down the Vietnamese sniper, we realize that Joker’s never really been under fire before. Nor has he ever killed another human being. Oh, he’s hunkered down in a bunker during the Tet Offensive and fired wildly at darkened figures in the distance. But to look the enemy directly in the eye and pull the trigger? No.

So Joker has reached his moment of truth, the moment that Gunnery Sergeant Hartman was trying to prepare him for. Can Joker set aside the irony, the sarcasm, the phoniness, and perform the job he signed up to perform as a Marine?

No. Joker fails, as Hartman foreshadowed way back in Parris Island. “Your rifle is only a tool,” he said. “It is the hard heart that kills. If your killer instincts are not clean and strong, you will hesitate at the moment of truth. You will not kill.” Joker hesitates, his rifle jams, and he withers under fire. He reaches for his pistol, drops it. Only by dumb luck — by the quick thinking of his buddy Rafterman, who Joker tried to leave behind — does he survive.

Earlier in the film, Joker asked the helicopter door gunner incredulously “How can you shoot women and children?” Now the question comes back to haunt him as Joker stands over an enemy sniper who is both a woman and a child (about 16, by the looks of her). The camera lingers over his face as he finally accepts the duality of man, the Jungian thing. Human beings are savage and civilized, kind and cruel, noble and deranged. Joker shoots.

Full Metal Jacket ends with Joker marching confidently alongside his brothers singing the Mickey Mouse Club theme song. “I am so happy that I am alive, in one piece and short,” Joker narrates in the end. “I’m in a world of shit… yes. But I am alive. And I am not afraid.”

***

So the Harry Potter series is over, and I was pretty much right. (Read my entry What Will Happen in the Final Harry Potter?)

I predicted that Harry, Ron, and Hermione would all live to the end of the series, though J.K. would keep us in suspense until the last minute. Bing! I predicted that Snape would reveal that he had killed Dumbledore and turned Death Eater on Dumbledore’s orders. Bing! I predicted that Harry would triumph over Voldemort at the expense of lots of secondary characters. Bing! I predicted that Harry would find some way to contact Sirius Black again from beyond the grave. Well, no bing! there, but I’d suggest that I deserve a partial bing! since Harry does manage to contact another dead mentor (Dumbledore) from beyond the grave.

Of course, you can chalk this up less to my amazing powers of prognostication than to the fact that J.K. Rowling made a lot of this fairly obvious. I think many of us knew that Dumbledore was going to die from the second or third book in. I mean, didn’t Obi-Wan Kenobi die on Luke Skywalker? Didn’t Gandalf die on Frodo? That’s simply the way these stories go: Our Hero receives instruction from a Wise Mentor, who later dies and leaves the hero to confront the Big Bad Villain alone.

I’ve heard a lot of people complain that the Harry Potter novels are “too derivative.” To which I say, Yes! J.K. Rowling is derivative! And that’s the entire point. One of the things that makes these books so terrific is the fact that the author is very consciously following traditional patterns. She’s taken something old and familiar, dusted it off, and made it seem fresh and new again. It’s harder to do than you think.

So how does Deathly Hallows rank? How good was the book? I’d say Deathly Hallows is the third best in the series, behind Order of the Phoenix and Prisoner of Azkaban.

I admit I was very worried about this book. L. Frank Baum got lazy a few books in to his Oz series and wrote a real stinker called The Road to Oz, which basically consists of Dorothy meeting up with all her pals and going to the Emerald City for a big party. (Baum even pulls in characters from his other books in a crass effort to draw attention to them and boost lagging sales.) Then in the sixth book, The Emerald City of Oz, Baum tried to wrap the whole thing up by making Oz invisible. C.S. Lewis had similar issues drawing Narnia to a close in The Last Battle. I dreaded the prospect of Deathly Hallows becoming a Road to Oz-type wrap-up with endless cameos by secondary characters.

So imagine my surprise that Rowling didn’t fall into this trap at all. There’s very little of that last-time-around nostalgia kick going on in Deathly Hallows. No last ride on the Hogwarts Express, no last trip to Hagrid’s shack, no last game of Quidditch. Hell, they don’t even make it to Hogwarts until the last hundred pages or so. About three-quarters of the book is focused exclusively on Harry, Ron, and Hermione, and there are quite a number of new characters here to sink your teeth into. Characters like Dobby, Neville, and Hagrid (the last of whom seemed in danger of staging a Fonzie-like takeover of the series two or three books in) only show up for short bits here and there.

That’s not to say that the book is perfect. Rowling does still indulge a number of her less-than-admirable habits in this book too. She makes too much of the plot revolve around obscure details and marginalia from several books back that we can’t be expected to keep track of. Remember how frustrating it was when Sherlock Holmes would bend to the ground at the scene of a crime, take notice of something that our narrator Watson couldn’t see, and then produce this insignificant thing at the conclusion as the final damning piece of evidence against the villain? Rowling’s got that affliction too.

Why didn’t Harry die when Voldemort cast the Avada Kedavra curse on him at the end? Why did the spell rebound on the Evil Dude? There were a couple of long convoluted explanations about switched wands that I couldn’t really follow, nor did I think it really mattered that much. Ditto with the overly complicated back story for Albus Dumbledore. What mattered was that Voldy’s selfishness, arrogance, and shortsightedness did him in in the end, and Alby’s faith, patience, and trust in Harry won the day.

(And has anybody else noticed Rowling’s little joke here, that “Avada Kedavra” sounds a heck of a lot like “abracadabra”? Well, maybe it’s not so much of a joke, as Wikipedia explains.)

The other questionable tactic Rowling uses is her excessive killing off of characters. About a dozen characters bite it in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, but it almost seems like the author chose them at random by writing their names on note cards and tossing them up in the air. I mean, really, Tonks? Crabbe? Anybody wonder what logic there was in some of these choices? (And anybody else find it peculiar that Mad-Eye Moody’s body was never found?)

So now that we’ve seen the whole Harry Potter saga from start to (presumed) finish, what can we say about it? Will the Harry Potter novels endure?

I say yes, but not necessarily because of the clever plotting and suspense. The primary virtue of these books is that they provide such an incredibly convincing portrait of a boy’s coming of age. So many other authors who write about children either gloss over the turmoiled adolescence or yank their characters from childhood to adulthood in one fell swoop. Harry starts the series as a cute kid who discovers a magical world, and undergoes a very gradual transformation through the seven books to a responsible adult. It’s an impressive achievement, made all the more impressive by the fact that Rowling is a woman. (Although once future generations finally shake off this irritating Puritanical streak that runs through our culture, people will start to wonder why Harry is the only teenaged boy in history to grow up without a sex drive.)

So if you’re one of those people feeling incredibly sad that Harry’s adventures are over, don’t worry — I’m sure J.K. Rowling will return to Hogwarts at some point. Even though we know what happens to Harry, Ron, Hermione, and Ginny nineteen years down the line, there’s still plenty left to show. I’m betting that the lure of the four hundred zillion dollars the publishers throw at her will prove irresistible.

I’m betting on a collection of Potter-related short stories sometime in the middle of the next decade, and/or one or two novelties like Quidditch Through the Ages and Fantastical Beasts and Where to Find Them done for charitable purposes.

***

A side note: Perhaps I missed this in earlier books — but did anyone else notice that the death date on James and Lily Potter’s graves was 1981? Which would make the present day of Deathly Hallows 1997-98, not 2007-08. Rowling eschews the use of topical references and specific dates through most of the series, and this is the first time I noticed when the series was supposed to take place. It’s an insignificant thing, really, but I’m curious if there’s any reasoning behind it. Remember how in Superman Returns, if you looked at the dates closely, the Man of Steel turned out to have gone off on his little five-year hiatus right before 9/11?