نبذة مختصرة : Walter Benjamin asserts that to come to terms with a past does not mean to recall it “as it really was” (Benjamin, 255), rather to seize hold of a memory at “a moment of danger”. In that sense, I view the recollection of a past as a cultural tool that has the potency to not just shape and rework on a memory, particularly that of a violent memory of an individual to his immediate present, but that it has the potential to transfer that individual’s traumatic frame to a collective, such as an audience. Hollywood films have lent lens to introspect within the archives of political histories to unveil trauma. And with the cinematic effects of fictional depiction of war and human ignobility, they have also aided in inspiring a rise in national consciousness. My paper examines the politics of the collective consciousness of national trauma formed through Kubrick’s film text, Full Metal Jacket. Kubrick’s masterpiece was introduced right at the end of a cycle of movies that paid attention to the Vietnam War genre. However, though the context of the film text is on Vietnam, it is not about Vietnam, in itself. My thesis will demonstrate how the political play of the recreation of the brutality of war invokes post-war consciousness in the American audience, and births the production of cultural memory; both in the veterans and especially in the new generation alike.
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