The Thousand Yard Stare

“The Thousand Yard Stare – a Marine gets it after he’s been in the shit for too long… It’s like you’re really seeing beyond.”

“The Thousand Yard Stare” was something mentioned during the middle of the film, but didn’t occur until the end of the movie. For the audience, it was the sign that Joker has been in the war for too long.

The climax of the film was taking down the SINGLE sniper using the force of an entire squad of trained American soldiers. True, the sniper had the advantage of being hidden and the ability to keep all the soldiers at a distance, but the sniper was singled handedly able to take down three American soldiers. Before the sniper was shown, I expected that ‘he’ would be an extremely well built Vietnamese soldier. It was much to my surprise to see that the sniper was a helpless looking girl. It seems like Kubrick deliberately made that choice to have the sniper be a girl to poke fun at how easily the American army fell down.

There was fire surrounding the entire place. The building is in shambles. Kubrick brings the audience to a place resembling Hell. The world is deteriorating as the soldiers stand in a circle watching the helpless Vietnamese girl suffer through her last moments on Earth. The helplessness of the Vietnamese girl is further portrayed through the pained whispering of her prayers and her dying wish for the soldiers to “shoot me [her].” In any normal situation, the audience will feel sympathy for the little girl; however, the fact that she was a sniper that took out three soldiers is a fact that can’t be neglected either. Kubrick toys with the audience’s emotion as they struggle to figure out whom to “root” for. This is the exactly same feeling that runs through Joker’s head. From that scene of the Vietnamese girl looking at the soldiers with vigilant eyes and commanding them to end her life, an uneasy feeling is created. Right and wrong are not as white and black as they should be. The gray area emerges and leaves the audience wondering if shooting the girl would be morally right. Of course, with war, nothing follows strict rules and have distinct moral values built into them.

The actual death of the sniper is never shown. The camera focuses on Joker’s face the entire time. Joker’s face flashes through different emotions. First you see hesitation, then vengeance, and then finally determination. A gunshot is heard, an echo of the gunshot, and a sickly silence that follows it.

It is during that sickly silence that Joker got it in his eyes: “The Thousand Yard Stare.” It appeared that he was looking directly at the sniper that he had just mercilessly killed, but you could tell that he was looking beyond her. That stare was the way of Kubrick telling just how much a war or a moment in time can change a man.

The moment is broken by laughter, echoing off the walls. The soldiers joke about Joker getting the “congressional medal of ugly” and Joker being a “hard core man”, but the camera never leaves Joker’s face and his eyes. In this, Kubrick is inserting his “comic relief” of the situation, but still maintains the serious and solemn tone of the scene. This reflects the overall movie, where everything else is taken so lightly, almost as a joke.