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A passion project provides Furie with a chance of redemption. Cowritten with young, first-time screenwriter Rick Natkin, The Boys in Company C (1978) becomes the most idyllic filmmaking experience of Furie’s career. The film, financed by Hong Kong production outfit Golden Harvest and cast with an ensemble of unknowns, is the first film released by a major studio to examine American soldiers caught up in the Vietnam War. Kubrick appropriated many of the film’s conceits (and one of its key cast members, Furie’s discovery) for his own Full Metal Jacket (1987) ten years later. The film succeeds critically and financially and reaffirms Furie’s market value in the wake of his two previous flops. Afterward he quits Night of the Juggler (1980) in the middle of shooting and is fired from The Jazz Singer (1980) in the middle of shooting. He again becomes a pariah.

This chapter discusses how Kubrick implicitly undermines the characteristics of classical Hollywood narrative. In Kubrick’s adaptations, music is not only foregrounded, becoming audible, but also helps the progression of the story, often moving and motivating characters’ actions, as in the case of A Clockwork Orange. It is also an indispensable element in the creation and development of the metaphor of dance. The chapter discusses how and why this metaphor is used in 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, and Full Metal Jacket.

This chapter describes the large-scale narrative and musical patterns of serious Hollywood combat films made after Vietnam. Two larger narrative shapes are identified: two-part forms (such as training camp followed by battlefield) and alternating action-reflection forms. Then, the overall shape and content of combat film musical scores are described in a comparative context. Four strategies for the use of music in war films are described: films with very little music of any sort, films which alternate between scored and unscored scenes (Saving Private Ryan), music-laden films with music noticeably present much of the time (Born on the Fourth of July), and films with almost continuous music. The frequently blurry distinctions between sound effects and music, the role of popular music (Full Metal Jacket), the importance of diegetic silence, the ambiguous authorship of some film scores (Apocalypse Now, The Hurt Locker), and the shifting nature of the soundtrack mix are also considered.

The Vietnam War became the setting for more than 400 movies, documentaries, and TV series from the 1960s to the first years of the twenty-first century. Many of these Vietnam-era films explored class, race, and gender issues and reflected deep divisions at home over the war. Some reflected pro-war sentiments and vilified anti-war protesters. Others took exactly the opposite approach, criticizing official policies and government officials. They portrayed soldiers as victims of an inhumane war machine. Nevertheless, a common thread—withering contempt for civilian government officials—ran through Vietnam films whether they supported or opposed U.S. policies in Vietnam. Some of the most notable films were The Quiet American, The Green Berets, The Boys in Company C, Go Tell the Spartans, The Deer Hunter, Coming Home, Apocalypse Now, First Blood, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Born on the Fourth of July, and Forrest Gump.

Serious Hollywood war films moderate the dialogue norms of the action/adventure genre, opting for a reserved sort of male speech that is moderate in tone and delivery. Aggressive talk is typically used as an element of contrast to suggest characters are inexperienced, undisciplined, untrustworthy, or overaggressive. The masculinity of American soldiers in these films is thereby shaped for a mixed gender and generational audience, as evidenced by comparison of films with their sources and draft scripts. The foul-mouthed and confrontational drill instructor (especially in Full Metal Jacket) stands outside this norm. War film dialogue regularly draws from authentic military speech. Poems (“The Rifleman’s Creed) and sayings (the Vietnam expressions “don’t mean nothin’” and “sorry ’bout that”) resound across the genre, connecting these films to each other and to actual military culture. Some such sayings also function as refrains within given films (the African American soldiers who dap each other in Hamburger Hill).

Post-Vietnam Hollywood combat filmmakers set aside the most common musical trope of earlier war movies: the military march. Instead, new musical tropes were developed, initially in the 1980s Vietnam cycle. A particularly unstable musical register, here called veil music, uses musical texture rather than melody or meter to expresses a range of equivocal combat states, most related to the foreignness of the battlefield for the American soldiers at the center of these films. In the Vietnam cycle, veil music is connected to moments of moral liminality, when surprising acts of violence might be done. Examples from Platoon and Full Metal Jacket are discussed. Veil music in war films set in the Middle East often characterize the Arab other by way of untranslated singing voices, putting exotic musical tropes to rather generalized uses characterizing the foreign other. Examples from The Hurt Locker, Black Hawk Down, and Three Kings are analyzed.

In part by discussing the brutal Marine basic training regime that begins the Stanley Kubrick film Full Metal Jacket, the author argues that shame disrupts and breaks down the “I Can” body, and also one’s sense of belonging to a community, cognition, and moral deliberation. The shame-to-power conversion restores the “I can” body, a sense of masculine fraternity, a form of intelligence as technical proficiency, and provides a set of moral codes, especially in masculine warrior organizations such as the US Marines, to replace moral deliberation