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4 comments:
I thought the movie left out alot of information that the book offered. Watching the movie after reading the book allowed me to see the differences.
I found the part in the movie where Billy is left holding the grandfather clock and then the guards just leave him laying there.
I laughed at the end of the movie when the child is born and they wave and the music starts and then of all things fireworks.
I have never heard of anyone seeing fireworks after a child is born tears yes but never fireworks.
The book does not make Billy's wife seem as crazy as the movie makes her out to be.
Over all I am glad that we read the book and then watched the movie.
The film definitely ignored certain aspects of the Billy's understanding of his special place in the world. He claims in the book that he didn't want to tell anyone about his time & space travel before his accident because the timing wasn't right. This is simply ignored in the film, because he is abducted after his wife's death.
This also removes that seeming contradiction that he never cheated on his wife but once, on the washing machine at a party, & was caught. Even if he travelled through a portal to Tralfamador & lived in a different crease in time, one that could be experienced by him as years & his family or whoever as only minutes back on earth, this would still seem pretty clearly to consist of infidelity. Therefore, his claims would be contradictory, posing a more interesting problem relative to his sanity & possible brain damage after the plane crash.
This reminds of that Robert Cormier book, _I Am the Cheese_, which I read in ninth grade or so. The kid is obviously suffering from various mental & psychological confusions & disconnected memories, as well as mind-altering influences (drugs, electric shock, something like that). This adds a rich layer of meaning to the stories woven throughout _Slaughterhouse-Five_, and presents a puzzle--Pilgrim's sanity--which leads to a problem: an individual's inability to come to terms with reality after his experiences in WWII, & especially surviving the Dresden bombing. & adding to his seeming narcosis, paralysis, or whatever his sleepwalking through life is in the novel--interrupted momentarily by the very real & naked nervous breakdown he had--is his wife's sudden death & his son's conversion to war hero. What could this image of his son mean to Billy, considering what he had seen of war?
The movie, on the other hand, seems to offer us only a man disconnected from reality, very clearly constructing a more pleasant version to counter the horrors of his wartime experiences. This "mental divergence" is definitely one way to read the novel's protagonist, but provides only a fraction of its intricacies.
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