Despite
the portrayal of heroism and altruism (two traits that Kurt Vonnegut condemns
when they are associated with war) in the movie Saving Private Ryan, both the film, with its realistic gore and
questionable morals on both sides
of the battle field, and Slaughterhouse Five share a the common theme of portraying the morality
in war to be ambiguous; also, both seek to show the audience the horrors of war
in order to denounce the widely held attitude that glorifies war.
In
Saving Private Ryan, it is evident from the first combat scene that Steven
Spielberg desires to be as realistic as possible when rendering the decimation
of human life that was D-day. Though Tom Hanks, playing the Captain that
eventually won the Americans the Omaha beach head, was shown as heroic for his
leadership and courage (therefore leading one to believe that war is being
glorified) this one act of heroism is heavily outweighed by the slaughter that
preceded it. As soon as the “ducks” carrying the men to the beach opened their
hatches, life is equated to almost nothing. Men are killed before they can even
take one step off the transportation vessels much less take one step onto the
beach. Everything about the scene engenders abhorrence towards war, especially
when Tom Hanks (the Captain) is shown experiencing a moment of trauma (to say
the least) in which he seems to lose himself.
The sounds become muffled,
everything turns to slow motion, and we see things from his perspective: the
man carrying his own lost arm, the soldier cowering behind the mine, the tide
thick with blood, the strew of dead bodies. This creates a bigger imprint and
effect when shown in this manner. It is as if to say, “how can I continue
fighting when so much death and suffering has already happened). But the carnage
and slaughter never capitulates. Perhaps the scene that causes the most
repugnance toward war is when the German (whom the group had previously
captured and let free instead of executing) comes back and stabs the Jewish
American soldier with the Hitler Youth Knife. All of these instances incite the
questions, “how can humans do this to one another?” and “What causes us to feel
the need to cause so much suffering upon another group of people?” Slaughter
House Five begs the same question. Vonnegut
states atrocities that occurred in his experience of the war so bluntly and
abruptly, as if he were making them commonplace. For example, at the very
beginning of the book in the prelude, Vonnegut, talking about the cab driver
Gerhard Müller, states, “He had a pleasant little apartment and his daughter
was getting an excellent education. His mother was incinerated in the Dresden
fire-storm. So it goes.” Or his calm, upfront approach to mentioning death with
his reoccurring phrase, “so it goes.” This candid way of speaking is parallel
to how undisguised the gore and horrors of war are in Saving Private
Ryan. Nothing is left to the imagination.
The
occasional absence and ambiguity of morals in war is also a common theme in
both works. However, both put an emphasis on the questionable scruples of the
supposed “good” side (the Allied forces) especially the Americans. In Saving
Private Ryan, for example, the Americans,
after winning over the Omaha beachhead, continue to kill Germans after they
have held their hands up in surrender. When they burn the inside of the gun
tower in the same scene one of the American soldiers yells, “don’t shoot! [the
German soldiers who are on fire] Let’em burn.” Similarly, in Slaughter
House Five Vonnegut draws the attention
away from the commonly told horrors of WWII (D-day, the Holocaust, Pearl
Harbor, Iwa Jima) and focuses on a situation where devastation and suffering
was caused by the Americans: the fire bombing of Dresden. Vonnegut also talks
of the cruelty and selfishness of the American soldiers accompanying Billy
before he gets taken as a POW. Both scouts abandon Billy and his oppressor,
Roland Weary; after this abandonment Weary proceeds to brutally beat up Billy
and, just as he is about to kill him, a small group of German soldiers appears,
with one of the Germans described as, “the soldiers blue eyes were filled with
a bleary civilian curiosity as to why one American would try to murder another
one so far away from home…”
By
providing evidence of the supposed “good” side committing the same type of
obscenities as the supposed “bad” side, Vonnegut and Spielberg divert the
attention away from the battle against good vs. evil. They are putting down the
common conclusion that people make about war: since the “good” side beat the
“bad” side, war is necessary and good. The dubious morals that the American’s
are shown to have and the stark descriptions and depictions of the savagery in
war in both works show that war itself is the culprit; war should be treated as
the enemy, and the only way to fight war is to stop fighting.
