WARNING: Some of the below links, in particular the video, may contain graphic violence and/or bad language and are not for the faint of heart. View at your own risk.
So I was watching Kubrick's
Full Metal Jacket over the weekend because I have Netflix and I felt like something dark and depressing and IMPORTANT. Or something like this.
Anyhow, imagine my surprise when I catch a glimpse of a billboard in the film's background that reads "HYNOS" (as seen at 8:06 in
this video). (More on this video later. For now just forward to that.) This rang a bell of course because of the Hinos references in
ODST and also because of the "There Are Many Like It" Daily Challenge, which I recently realized was a reference to
The Rifleman's Creed, which is prominently featured in
FMJ.
I did a little research on Hynos and according to Rob Ager, who has written extensively on the subliminal messages present in the film (and is the creator of the above youtube video), Hynos was a real-life Vietnamese toothpaste manufacturing company. Thus, the billboard makes sense in the context of the film. However, Ager hypothesizes that the film's billboards contain hidden messages.
Ager is kind of like us, or put another way, Ager is to Kubrick what we are to Halo - totally committed and more than a little insane. You can read for yourself
here, or
here for the whole dissertation, but I warn you: it's quite a slog. The two things that leapt out at me were a) that the film is widely believed to contain hidden messages (sort of like something else we know) and b) that Ager believes one of the central themes to be that the soldiers are really fighting themselves. Whether this is a psychic battle (as most of us might draw from watching the film or any other good war movie) or whether Kubrick is actually alleging some kind of conspiracy (as Ager hypothesizes), I really cannot say. BUT I did find this interesting because it's another case - as with the terminals and datapads - where we have stories within stories and where this second "hidden" story seems to indicate that the enemy is not who we believe it to be.
Anyhoo, I'm getting grandiose as usual. Most likely, the Bungie guys are big hoo-rah! fans of
FMJ and the Hinos company is a shout-out among the more obvious shout-outs, the main one being the casting of
FMJ's Animal Mother,
Adam Baldwin of
Firefly fame, as the voice of ODST Dutch, who says things like, "Haven't you ever seen
Full Metal Jacket?"
