MOVIE REVIEW: Slaughterhouse-Five (1972)
Déjà vu is a funny thing: when it happens, you believe it’s already happened before. I suffer from this dreaming déjà vu — more accurately called déjà rêvé — nearly every night. For me it’s rarely helpful because the event I experience is so minimal — no more than 5 seconds at most — that it doesn’t matter whether I have the event or not. I would have liked to be able to experience the future events with context. But it makes me wonder: would having the context matter? Would knowing and or acting on the things you’ve seen that happen in the future change anything?
Thinking on the 1972 movie adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s science-fiction novel Slaughterhouse-Five, it always seemed like a movie that spoke to me on some level. Non-linear story-telling, skipping ahead and backward — as if life read like a novel you had to go back and compare, or skip ahead to see how it resolves. A more accurate description would be like watching a video and your hand is on the scrubber control bar, moving backward and forward — except the movie does this on its own. Such storytelling tricks are its hallmarks, but its controversial history (both novel and movie) have less to do with déjà vu or fourth-dimensional fatalism and more to do with how deeply this movie is entrenched in 20th Century Western culture and its deadly mistakes.
So it goes.
In 1944, Billy Pilgrim (Michael Sacks, The Amityville Horror [1979]) is studying to be an optometrist in South Carolina when he is drafted to fight in World War II. He ends up in the European theater during the Battle of the Bulge as an unarmed US Army chaplain’s assistant. Things go sideways when he encounters Paul Lazzaro (Ron Leibman, “Archer” [TV-FX], “Friends” [TV-NBC], Zorro the Gay Blade [1982]) and Weary (Kevin Conway, Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace [1996]). All three are captured by the Nazis and marched through enemy territory to a transport train for prisoners of war. The Nazis take Weary’s boots and make him wear flimsy wrappings the entire march in the freezing winter cold, causing him to injure his feet that become gangrenous. Because Weary believes Billy made the mistake that got them caught, Weary with his dying breath asks Lazzaro to take revenge on his behalf...and Lazzaro is more than happy to oblige. More horrible things around Billy as fellow soldiers die and suffer indignities — even including the bombing of Dresden in February 1945 , which he and some of his fellow POWs survive — yet Lazzaro does not take his revenge. When the Nazis move to the Eastern front and leave the POWs behind, Billy is rescued by Russian soldiers and makes it back to America.
Once back in America things get bad slowly over time, in an emotional sense: he marries a plump woman named Val (Sharon Gans Horn, Artists and Orphans: A True Drama) who constantly promises to lose weight for him, but never does over the course of the film as she bears two children — Robert (Perry King, “Riptide” [TV-NBC], The Day After Tomorrow [2004], The Lords of Flatbush [1974]) and Barbara (Holly Near, Minnie & Moskowitz [1971]). Billy survives death in a plane crash, and his wife dies in an auto accident trying to see him immediately after. Not long after that, Robert dies fighting in the Vietnam War. Now a widower before middle age, Billy’s only companionship is his condescending daughter Barbara and his aging dog Spot. He lay in bed with Spot most days, wondering what will become of him…only to be abducted by a group of interested and invisible 4th-dimensional aliens called the Trafalmadorians. Under an atmospheric dome in the confines of what can be called a zoological exhibit, Billy learns from the Trafalmadorians how the universe ends and how his own life will end. There’s nothing Billy or the Trafalmadorians can do about it. The aliens educate Billy on how to proceed in the face of such: to ignore the bad and focus on the good.
Almost as an illustration of that point, one of Billy’s good memories focused on an adult film star named Montana Wildhack (Valerie Perrine, Superman [1978], The Cannonball Run [1981]) he saw a few times in the media — which is how she ended up being abducted by the Trafalmadorians in Palm Springs and delivered to Billy as a brood-mate. Despite their mutual abduction and in light of the Trafalmadorians’ insistence that the two of them mate, Billy makes demands of the aliens on Montana’s behalf — endearing himself to her as a real gentleman. It doesn’t take long before Montana and Billy become the parents of a little boy, to the delight of the Trafalmadorian host. The aliens give Billy one more gift: to be unstuck in time and visit all his events, past and future. He can always come back to this dome on Trafalmadore (which technically he never left thanks to 4th-dimensional thought) and can always stay. He can even experience the revenge Lazzaro promises in the far future if he wished. And so Billy does...because he understands.
And so it goes.
So much of this movie operates under bad-brained thinking separated by over 50 years of progress but it still boggles the mind how it even got to be considered a literary classic, fourth-dimensional examples not withstanding.
The novel is purported to be based on the experiences of the author of the novel, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., a World War II veteran. Many of the people in the novel were pastiches of individuals he met during his time in the service. In one instance, he kept secret the name of the basis for Billy Pilgrim because the parents of the individual he based the character on were still alive; once they passed on, he felt comfortable revealing the name. The idea that Vonnegut did this to avoid getting sued for royalties is kinda shitty, but it worked out in the end because of the Western civilization obsession with homosexuality.
Throughout this novel and movie, Lazzaro makes an effort to goad and terrorize Billy with the threat of taking revenge for Weary’s death. He peppers the threats with homophobic language. It’s not the only time he says this foolishness: he calls the turncoat American officer (replete with patriotic-themed uniform with prominent swastika armband) such names to ridicule his uniform. I mention this because the very mention of homosexuals in any way in literature at the time — the publish date for the novel Slaughterhouse-Five was 1969 — was deemed obscene and the offending literature to be banned. In the end, the US Supreme Court defended the book saying it could not be banned from schools under First Amendment rules and the book went on to great success. Much of this is not applicable to the film’s existence.
The 1972 adaptation was a box office flop, despite being chock full of violence with more than a couple overt sexual points. Perhaps the idea of non-linear storytelling and 4th-dimensional thought concepts were too much for the average moviegoer, which is why the movie ends on what many consider to be a happy note after what would have been a bummer ending after a bummer ride of a movie. I also think of it as the “good ending”: the alien breeding zoo is a safe space Billy can come and hide when he looks at his Earthly life and recedes — he couldn't change any of what happened to or around him on Earth. So Billy lets it all happen, as the Trafalmadorians said he would. It’s as solid as an ending we’re gonna get.
And so it goes.
CHOICE CUTS:
- I don’t mean to leave out Ed Derby (Eugene Roche, Cotton Comes to Harlem [1970], Oh God! You Devil [1984]), who was a cool guy who did not have to die.
- The Brits in the German POW camp were a bright spot.
- ADAPTATION CHANGES: Trafalmadorians are described in the book as small green aliens that look like a toilet plunger with a human hand on the handle’s back end, with a big eye in the center of the palm. The people making the movie probably thought that looked stupid, so they made the aliens invisible for the film adaptation.
- In one of the hospital scenes, Billy’s recovery roommate takes a full dump on the former POW’s experiences, touting the bombing of Dresden as necessary and carrying on with copious amounts of what-aboutism. If he had seen the people of Dresden before and after, and what really needed to be done after the bombing, he might not have spoken so confidently about bombing a civilian city with no significant military targets.
- It goes without saying that a woman kidnapped to be a breeding partner for ANYTHING is a very bad 20th-Century science-fiction idea, and the spin of her being an ultimately willing sex worker/actress changes nothing.
- Perry King was my idol in 1985 during his time on “Riptide.” A cool private eye with so many cool vehicles, I made sure to watch every night it was on. It was set in LA but I swore it was set in Key West, though…
- I was kinda worried when the ski team showed up in their balaclavas.
- Surviving the horrors of the Second World War to come home to a loveless marriage, surviving a plane crash only to become a widower, outliving your son who died in another war just 20 years after the one you almost died in…and the only good thing to show for your life is banging an adult film actress in an interstellar zoo for the entertainment of alien eyes. And this is the good ending for Billy.
- FUN FACT: This is the first major film role for Valerie Perrine, Perry King, and Michael Sacks.
- Gotta love that 70’s blood — red as the setting sun.
- When has a geodesic dome ever NOT been cool?
- There was a point during the brain surgery to save Billy’s life post-plane crash that I thought this must all be a hallucination brought on by the sever. Thankfully, the Trafalmadorians turned out to be real.
- Who the hell takes their family to see an X-rated movie at the drive-in theater?
- PRICELESS QUOTES: I give the Trafalmadorian greeting to close out the review: “Hello. Farewell. Hello. Farewell. Eternally connected, eternally embracing. Hello. Farewell.”
