Posted by RJones2125 at s77-106.resnet.ucla.edu on November 16, 2003 at 17:42:52:
Hi all:
Alright, so I was watching Stanley Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket" (1987) last night with my roommate who had never seen it before. So less than 10 minutes into it, we're watching the scene with Gny. Sgt. Hartman (R. Lee Ermey) walking up and down the hall belittling everyone for the first time. Anyway, so he says "Holy dog shit! Texas? Only steers and queers come from Texas, Private Cowboy. And you don't look much like a steer to me so that kinda narrows it down. Do you suck dicks?" and my roommate pointed out that an almost identical line is spoken by Louis Gossett Jr. as a Gny. Sgt. in "An Officer and a Gentleman" (1982), a movie that I haven't seen. The line in that film goes something like, "Oklahoma, huh? Only steers and queers come from Oklahoma and I don't see any horns so you must be a queer." How come "Full Metal Jacket" and the other one have almost identical lines, it can't be a coincidence can it?
And then another thing. A little later in the movie when the "boot-campers" are marching in their hall saying, "This is my rifle, this is my gun, this is for shooting, this is for fun," my roommate pointed out that that line is a direct quotation from a Leon Uris book called "Battle Cry" that was later made into a movie in 1955.
Does anyone have an explanation for these? I was thinking that maybe they were allusions to these movies, but that doesn't seem like Stanley Kubrick's style. Do you think that maybe R. Lee Ermey just improvised them, forgetting they were from these other sources? I'd like to hear everyone's ideas, because it's kind of frustrating.