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Following up on the trooper's letter at the end of High School, Frederick Wiseman finds another indoctrination mill. Fort Knox military center, Kentucky, shaping of the 16th battalion. (Groundwork for Full Metal Jacket is at once visible with a shearing and photographing montage: "Smile like you did when you got your draft card.") The war overseas is mostly kept abstract, the preparation ahead is described to new recruits as "rigorous" and kicked off with toe-tapping fanfare for dental hygiene exercises. The M16-A1 rifle is not a gun, specifies the trainer who must also deal with philosophical queries. "The man on the other side. What are his thoughts on killing me?" The brunt of pressure falls on the bespectacled misfit who cannot quite keep up with his colleagues—the chaplain learns of his suicidal tendencies and offers warmed-over homilies, the sergeant sees a smirk on his vacant face and threatens to wipe it off. (The lad is later seen helping out with a strangulation lesson, a smiling dummy for a demonstration on how to snap necks.) The rebellious Black private declares himself a man without a country, one officer wearily accepts that, another blabs about Karma and reincarnation. "Well, did you see the movie Patton?" Contorted faces behind gas masks adduce a note of Dovzhenko's Arsenal, the fellows in the latrine are from LeRoy's No Time for Sergeants. Camouflage in the woods, hymns in the chapel, family tears for "a true American soldier." Marching cadences, ribald and sad: "Mr. Nixon dropped a bomb / Cuz I didn't wanna go to 'Nam..." Graduation speeches, pomp and circumstance of a nation "undefeated." Wiseman has the aftermath in Manoeuvre. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |