Was wondering this about one of the greatest characters (the genius actor Vincent D’Onofrio) in movies for decades. It got so bad for Leonard that Sgt. Hartman (played by R. Lee Ermey, on that same list of greatest movie characters) had to assign Private Joke to train him one on one. Then once he got beat up and got his shot together, we all know how it ended for “Gomer Pyle” and Sgt. Hartman.
Every time I watch this movie, I get the impression Leonard was intellectually disabled (a ruder and now unacceptable term was used to describe this during the time this movie came out) and wonder if others like him were drafted in Vietnam, or was there any way to screen someone who fell under this condition, and perhaps should not have served?
Or was Private Pyle maybe higher IQ and just in the “substantially lower than 100 IQ” class? OR was he just a spoiled rich boy that couldn’t mentally handle the rigors of a Marine boot camp? Or was there a mental illness involved?
The military at the time - and maybe still - believed that it could make a warrior out of anyone. It believed that enlisted men were interchangeable blank slates, featureless lumps of clay that it could press into whatever form they want. Gomer Pyle was the film’s way of showing how wrong they were - that some people were just not meant to be soldiers, and that forcing them to be can have disastrous results. What was wrong with him is irrelevant; the point is, he had no business being there in the first place.
Imo, Pyle was created by Kubrick as an example of how the military turns regular people into murderers. His character arc makes no sense otherwise. Pyle grew into a competent soldier and Hartman recognized it. The soldier as murderer was developed further in the pretty bad second half of the film.
Except at the end of bootcamp Pyle HAD become a competent soldier. Was this even an issue in WW2? When many more young men were turned into soldiers? If it werent for the brilliant performances by Ermey and Danofrio FMJ would have been a bad film.
As a rule, competent soldiers don’t shoot their sergeants and then themselves. He may have learned how to load and fire a weapon, but that came at the expense of his sanity, and commonly-held myths aside, soldiers need sanity more than they need shooting skills.
I really don’t understand people who watch the movie and think that Pyle’s training was successful. He shot his sergeant and himself! You can’t fail more spectacularly than that!
I’ve never encountered a murder-suicide, but a few weeks into my own basic training I was sent along with a squad of fellow trainees to serve as an honor guard for a funeral. Seems that a kid from one of the other training companies had shot himself with his own weapon. It happens. Take teenagers, put then under a lot of pressure and give them guns, and some of them will break. The trick is to spot them before they hurt themselves or others.
I always saw Pyle as being a buffon and incompetent but not disabled in any way (besides the whole breaking down under stress eventually).
When I was in the Army there were a ton of guys who were smart or charismatic who still broke down at some point and either needed firm guidance or eventually got mustered out. The top guy in my boot camp class who was smart and funny for most of it eventually got super suicidal and had to be reassigned to a special medical unit for mental health reasons to determine if he could stay in the Army or not. Never knew if he continued in the Army eventually but it happens.
An aside, since a lot of people don’t seem to realize this: When Sgt. Hartman assigned Joker to be Pyle’s personal mentor, he wasn’t doing it just for Pyle’s benefit. I don’t think it was even primarily for Pyle’s benefit, though he undoubtedly considered that a good side effect. It was for Joker’s benefit. Hartman, like any good teacher, saw that Joker had a lot of potential that he was squandering, and that the way to get him to achieve that potential was to give him greater responsibility.
Right, it happens the same time when Hartman fired Snowball from the squad leader permission and given it to Joker. Joker said he didn’t believe in the Virgin Mary, and refused to back down even though Hartman was berating and slapping him. The scene is here.
This. I disagree with those who think that Hartman ever wanted to turn Pyle into a soldier. Hartman wanted Pyle to serve as an example to the other recruits of what happens to soldiers who can’t hack it and instill a fear of failure and of letting their brothers in arms down.
Not to offend anyone but couldn’t Pyle have just been your garden variety dumbass?
When I graduated high school quite a few of us had taken the military entrance exams and enlisted. I knew of a couple of guys who tried to get into the Navy or the Air Force and were basically told, quite bluntly, they were too stupid. All those guys ended up in the Marines, except one went to the Army. True story.
Heinlein somewhat addressed this type of thing in Starship Troopers. He felt that, in the course of learning how to kill, if a trainee was allowed to hurt others or himself then the instructors were 100% to blame as they should have seen it coming and taken whatever steps were necessary to prevent it.
I have 0 military experience so I have no idea how realistic this is in real life.
Except that after the blanket party, when Pyle straightened his shit out, Hartman was apparently pleased with him. He even said he’d consider letting Pyle serve as a rifleman in his beloved Corp. I doubt Hartman was expecting that Pyle would become useful, but he was willing to accept it if he did.
And we all know of course that R. Lee Ermey was in fact a Marine drill instructor during the Vietnam war, right? He was hired on the movie as a technical consultant, but convinced Kubrick to give him the role as Gunnery Sgt. Hartman.
I’m sure that Hartman considered turning Pyle into a competent Marine to be the best-case scenario, and he was happy when it looked like he might succeed at that. But he also knew that, no matter what he did, it might not happen.
