It worked, though, because it allows us to experience Joker’s journey towards becoming a killer from within.
Risky, because eliminate too much of a personality and you end up with something like Twilight’s Bella Swan, a protagonist so generic that audiences project rather than empathize. Removing much of Joker’s personality almost all of his voice was a risky move but it worked. There are more incidents and more downtime, and Joker has much more presence and character than he does in the film. Kubrick kept the essential structure: Joker goes through basic training and then jumps directly to Vietnam, the Tet Offensive begins, he meets the Lusthog Squad, and ends up in a showdown with a VC sniper at the end. The Short-Timers feels both compressed and scattered, and that’s a good thing. More than any other Kubrick film, Full Metal Jacket shows how far he would go in breaking down the story of a source novel to create the film. The writing credit on Full Metal Jacket reads “by Stanley Kubrick, Michael Herr, and Gustav Hasford, based on the novel The Short-Timers by Gustav Hasford” but the more accurate description would be “selected incidents from the novel The Short-Timers by Gustav Hasford, as expressed in the style of Dispatches by Michael Herr.” As I’ve said, it’s the tone of Full Metal Jacket that makes it so unique and effective, even for Kubrick, and Herr and Hasford are largely responsible for it.
