First musicians, and now movie stars: Donald Trump’s rallies keep pissing people off. Matthew Modine has issued a strong critique of the Trump campaign’s use of clips from Full Metal Jacket in an ad played at several recent rallies. On social media, Trump shared the video — which switches between footage from Stanley Kubrick’s 1978 classic and clips of military service members in drag — alongside the caption, “WE WILL NOT HAVE A WOKE MILITARY!” Modine, who played Private Joker in the Vietnam War film, said in a statement to Entertainment Weekly that Trump has “twisted and profoundly distorted Kubrick’s powerful anti-war film into a perverse, homophobic, and manipulative tool of propaganda.” The actor also brought up Leni Reifenstahl, who directed Nazi propaganda films and worked with Adolf Hitler. “It is no exaggeration to see Trump’s reflection in the terrible figure Hitler was,” Modine said in his statement. “Please listen to Riefenstahl’s final warning: ’…we didn’t know how bad things were to become.’ Trump has shown us who he is and made no secret of what he intends to do.”
On the other hand, Stanley Kubrick’s daughter, Vivian, has suggested that her filmmaker father “would be a Trump supporter and would forgive using FMJ incongruously, if it helps the cause of freedom!” In a lengthy statement shared on X, she acknowledged the “irony” of using footage from an “anti-war movie,” but argued that the film is about the paradoxes of human nature. “And thus, on this tooth and claw planet, you need a very strong military – so I’m going to stick with the idea that FMJ footage was used primarily because of its powerful, realistic portrayal of boot camp, juxtaposed with the entirely demoralizing and inappropriate injection of WOKE ideology into the USA military,” she wrote. “Which I agree with myself and which I’m certain my father would have agreed with.”