Someone just wrote me off-line (so I'll keep it that way) that IHO the movie of "Slaughterhouse 5" is very forgettable. And that's why I forgot it. It is very forgettable.
Gould's soundtrack is just fine, it just couldn't keep the movie mess afloat.
Oscar Levant called King Kong "a new symphony by Max Steiner, with accompanying shadow pictures." (There's actually a kick-ass modern re-recorded CD version of the "King Kong" score, conducted by Max's son Fred, with the New Zealand Symphony. I love it. I don't even think about giant monkeys when I crank it up. It's just so unembarrassedly bombastic.)
But back to those tangible book things.
I stumbled into this thang by saying I wasn't the world's greatest Vonnegut fan. I think most of his work is very momentary and cutesie and facile.
"Slaughterhouse 5" may seem at first glance to resemble some/all of his other faux science fiction cartoonesque books. The resemblence is superficial, like the resemblence of Huckleberry Finn to Tom Sawyer.
The cutesie sci-fi parts in S5 are Vonnegut's merciful way of saying that after Billy Pilgrim crawled out of the slaughterhouse where he was being kept as a teenage POW, and saw what had happened to the human inhabitants of a city that contributed to the German war effort by making pretty 18th-century china figurines, he snapped in and out of stark madness for the rest of his life.
And IMHO "Slaughterhouse 5" is a better book on a subject that is almost impossible to communicate to people who have never been caught up in war than the very fine, stark and deeply sincere and angry "Johnny Got His Gun." I am actually a far bigger Trumbo fan, for his remarkably interesting and intelligent screenplays, than I am a Vonnegut fan. "Johnny" (the book) deserves a lot of reading, too. (Trumbo directed the film.) I think Johnny, the hospitalized vegetable soldier, is played by Timothy Bottoms.
I also highly recommend a recent film on this subject, "Gods and Monsters." It connects the creative life of "Frankenstein" director James Whale with his nightmare as a young soldier on the Western Front in World War I. It's not the feel-good hit of the season, but I was very moved by the unusual depth of its study of the war experience, from echoes from so long ago. The young generation of historians no longer separate World War I from World War II -- they pretty much now write of a continuous century of world warfare without noticeable breaks, except momentary ones from exhaustion.
One reason stupid wars keep happening in a seemingly unthreatened democratic society that seemingly could have sat them out diplomatically with little detriment to the national interest is that very few of the electorate and very few of the decision-makers were ever in the military. In 1950, nearly 95 percent of the USA's Congress was composed of veterans; it's now down to something like 5 percent.
It's not a Patriotic thing. It's just that these people who can now order and vote for (or vote not to stop) new wars just don't know anything about war or the military. They see the traditional face of war they're supposed to see: the thousands of pretty uniforms, the martial music, the flags, the handsome, brave young men (the way they were in the Before picture).
While a POW's memoirs of World War II, Vonnegut's SH5 was published early in the Vietnam War, so it was very much "A WWII GI Writes about This New Sucky War, Hope Fervently That You're All Listening." So there was a great immediacy to it. (Studs Terkel called his oral history of WWII, published during Vietnam, "The Good War.")
How the people involved in earlier wars try to inform later generations about their new wars is a profoundly important matter -- literally one of Life and Death. Most veterans content themselves to take the line of least resistance. WWII vets have a legacy to protect and are most often afraid to sully it by turning themselves into the popular image of whacko whacked-out Vietnam veterans.
SH5 discusses such previously forbidden things as the free and breezy presence in every American public high school of military recruiters, of how they "counsel" troubled boys and help "make a man" of them. ("I enlisted in the Marines at 17 because I wanted to get laid." -- Gene Hackman.) I would feel our kids' welfare was being better served if they threw the military recruiters out of the high school and substituted drug dealers instead. Often the end result is the same; and it must be noted that at least drug dealers don't want or expect their customers to die. And drug dealers lie to high school students less than military recruiters do.
The author of "Slaughterhouse 5" is a brave and first-rate intelligence who, as a very young man, had the misfortune to have a unique historical experience EVERYONE on the (blessedly) winning side has desperately wanted to forget and deny. When, 25 years later, he wrote about his experiences, he did not, as is often critiqued, resort to artifice and cheap, cartoon tricks. He told the story in a very straightforward, ultra-realistic way -- including the part about the capacity of modern war, which sucks the oxygen from cities for days and calls it "strategic" -- drives young, ordinary human beings, with their very fragile nervous systems, insane.
Bob / Elmer
SP5 (retired)
US Army, 1969-1971
(medals available on request)
Minard's Graphic of the Moscow Campaign:
http://www.javanet.com/~bobmer/smallprime.htm#Minard
Veterans of Stupid Wars:
http://www.javanet.com/~bobmer/VoSW.htm