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Humanities Core Course, Spring 2016Instructor: Tamara BeauchampMickey Mouse in Full Metal Jacket: Summarization of Secondary Sources ExerciseA key skill in writing a research paper is the ability to succinctly summarize the arguments of other scholars and to put them in conversation with one another. Below are four excerpts regarding Kubrick’s use of the Mickey Mouse Club song in the final scene of the film. The first a primary source (a quote from the director himself) and the other three are secondary sources (academic film analyses). Carefully read and annotate the following excerpts. You will then compose a paragraph of five sentences: one that introduces the scholarly conversation about the Mickey Mouse motif in Full Metal Jacket and four that summarize each source respectively. The majority of the summary should be in your own words; you may, however, quote key words or phrases that are distinct to the source material. Make sure to use signal phrases (e.g. argues, contends, analyses, indicates, maintains, claims, suggests, etc.) and transitional phrases (e.g. in contrast, in a similar vein, likewise, etc.) to show how the arguments of each author relate to one another.1) In an interview with the French newspaper Le Monde, director Stanley Kubrick expressed concern about how foreign audiences would receive the soundtrack to Full Metal Jacket. Worried that non-American audiences wouldn’t understand the meaning of the “Mickey Mouse Club” song in final scene, he noted:Unfortunately in France the Mickey Mouse Club doesn’t have the same meaning that it does in English, in America, but you know in America every child sits in front of his television set singing that song and what I wanted to suggest in that was that these boys are only just a few years past sitting in front of their TV set, children singing Mickey Mouse…When you realize that an 18 year old boy is only 6 or 7 years away from being a child.2) Daniel Shaw, in “Nihilism and Freedom in the Films of Stanley Kubrick” writes:When Joker’s platoon breaks into a rousing chorus of the theme from The Mickey Mouse Club, on their way back from the climactic battle, Kubrick’s message is clear (all too clear, according to some critics). Though I found the sequence jarring when I first saw the film, I now consider this ending to be a stroke of genius. The nascent fascism of the Disney empire blooms in the Vietnam War. The self-righteousness of our culture, which has blithely permitted us to impose our political system on so many recalcitrant nations around the world, stems from the unambiguous moral certainties of the Disney universe. Give me the Brothers Grimm any day. 3) Paula Willoquet-Maricondi, in “Full-Metal Jacketing, or Masculinity in the Making,” writes:As the platoon marches through the city of Hué against the background of smoke and fire, singing the “Mickey Mouse Club” song, two things are made clear. The first is the marines’ infantilism, which returns us to the opening segment of the film. This scene represents a return to childhood that puts into question that process of maturation and masculinization we have just witnessed. In terms of post-Freudian theory, it also represents a powerful urge back toward childhood that the child’s struggle for masculinity is a continuous unfinished “battle against these regressive wishes and fantasies, a hard-fought renunciation of the longings for the prelapsarian idyll of childhood.”Second, the Mickey Mouse episode shows that boot camp and war are continuous with the rest of American popular culture. The “Vietnam generation” was the first generation to grow up with television, and the “Mickey Mouse Club” was a popular program during the time the members of that generation were growing up. War is thus shown to be the logical conclusion of a process that begins with the Mickey Mouse Club, the Boy Scouts, the high school football team.4) Michael Klein, in “Historical Memory and Film,” writes: In the next and concluding scene the marines march off through the burning city of Hue into the darkness. They are singing. However, it is not the confident and affirmative marines’ “Battle Hymn”—“from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli”—that they practiced in boot camp in the early part of the film and that has been sung in triumph at the moment of closure in many Hollywood war films. Instead, the marines sing “Mickey Mouse is the leader of our club . . . / Mickey Mouse, Mickey Mouse / Forever let us hold our banners high,” as they march into the sunset on the road to nowhere. Full Metal Jacket, in contrast to the rhetoric of Rambo II and its appropriation by the commander-in-chief in the White House, asserts that after Vietnam the ideal of easy military conquest of a Third World nation cannot be simply affirmed in conventional discourse as relatively unproblematic. Its sound and image fuse into a complex trope: an army that sought world hegemony is linked with an ersatz culture, itself an aspect of that hegemony. There is an ironic ersatz glee in Kubrick’s construction of the scene; his reduction of the sacred heroic marine ritual to kitsch brings to mind the horrific banalities of Nazi culture. The analysis is further historicized through the implied ironic association with film images of the U.S. cavalry going into the sunset, in the case the glow of the films of the city the marines are protecting. The reference to Mickey Mouse as the leader of the club/army /society is not only surprising but suggestive. Mickey Mouse, of course, is a Hollywood artifact. A one level this may be a reference to the Hollywood antecedents of the incumbent commander-in-chief in 1987 when the film was made [Ronald Reagan]. More important, the cluster of associations—Mickey Mouse, U.S. film representations of the cavalry in Westerns, marines in Vietnam—suggest that the hegemony of an ideology that incorporates national chauvinism, racism, and sexism in the media and culture as a whole, can be a key factor in constructing a consensus of popular support for war or domination of Third World nations or people. The film ends on a bleak note. As the final image fades we hear the Rolling Stones’ “Paint it Black” on the sound track. Kubrick is far from optimistic about the possibility of change. ................
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