In the US, when we say “Oriental” and the “Orient,” we think of East and Southeast Asia, but when Edward Said wrote Orientalism, he was discussing French and British Orientalism, which defined the Orient as the Near and Middle East. In the American confrontation with Asia, “Orientalism” merges with regeneration through violence, meaning that American soldiers use their violence and prove their heterosexual manhood by killing, raping, and conquering Orientals. Eventually (and here this is my argument and that of many others) that frontier crosses the Pacific to the Philippines and Asia, culminating in the Viet Nam War. They master violence in using it against the frontier, the wilderness, and its inhabitants, the others to (American) civilization. Richard Slotkin argues that American culture and masculinity are built on the need for “regeneration through violence,” which means that American men see mastering violence as a necessary test of their masculinity and, eventually, patriotism. This is instead about pointing to the direct line from the core of American culture and history to the Viet Nam War to the Oak Creek massacre and a couple of other massacres many of us have already forgotten about.įirst: Americans conquer people, okay? For the obvious reasons of territory, resources, and power, but for the more controversial reasons of culture, hate, and psyche. This is not a post about gun control, as I am sure my position on gun control is evident, and nothing I say will change any minds. Then the massacre of Sikh people in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, yesterday of the day I am writing this, when an Army veteran and white supremacist invaded a temple and killed six before being killed himself. The Batman massacre in Aurora, Colorado, which happened the night before I saw The Dark Knight Rises (my tickets bought in advance). Why am I thinking of this? Because just when I thought I had gotten some anger out of myself, there are now more things to get me angry. The fact that the killing and the rape are not just about gender and sexuality but race and nation is fairly obvious.
![full metal jacket movie firearms full metal jacket movie firearms](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/f0/d3/96/f0d39621d69375bc4fd983aab9cf0323--full-metal-jacket-movie-lines.jpg)
She herself is surrounded and killed by the surviving Marines in a moment that the critic Susan Jeffords, in The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War, calls a symbolic gang rape.
![full metal jacket movie firearms full metal jacket movie firearms](https://i0.wp.com/www.kindertrauma.com/wp-content/uploads/full7.jpg)
The rifle is a phallus, an extension of the rock-hard cock, and in Kubrick’s film, the narrative is completed in the battle for Hue, when a female sniper castrates the Marine squad by killing a few.
![full metal jacket movie firearms full metal jacket movie firearms](https://flxt.tmsimg.com/assets/p10114_p_v8_aa.jpg)
#FULL METAL JACKET MOVIE FIREARMS HOW TO#
Military types and weapons specialists care about these distinctions. Stanley Kubrick satirized the unconscious psychosexual energies behind wielding a gun in Full Metal Jacket, when Marine recruits parade with their weapons doing this chant of “This is my rifle, this is my gun, this is for fighting, this is for fun.” They seize their crotches at “gun” and “fun.” When I showed it to my students, some were puzzled at how to interpret this moment that seems so clear to me. This is an article about the recent massacre of six Sikh Americans by a white supremacist US Army veteran, but I begin with this, a United States Marine Corps chant to remind new recruits in boot camp that their weapon was not just a GUN, but more importantly a RIFLE.