Full Metal Jacket

I've been thinking about the western references on this rewatch. John Wayne obviously acts as a model for masculinity but I believe there's more to it. The western genre is inseperably linked with the frontier myth and glorifies settler violence against Native Americans. The frontier myth is foundational to the American identity, it is essentially the American myth. The references evoke the same myth. To Kubrick, the soldiers see Vietnam as an unknown frontier to be conquered from the locals. In that sense, Full Metal Jacket's deconstruction of military masculinity and the soldier identity works as a counter argument to the American myth as a whole, which makes the vietnam war movie genre the thematic counter argument to the western genre.