#120: Johnny Got His Gun

Johnny Got His Gun

Dalton Trumbo
Initial release: August 4, 1971 (USA)

"Now the world is gone, I'm just one, oh God help me!

— Metallica, "one"

I like Dalton Trumbo. He was one of Hollywood's generational talents, who wrote stories that spoke truth to power, promoted solidarity against evil, and examined what it meant to be free in an unfree world. His script for Spartacus helped shatter the infamous Hollywood blacklist (and consequently open the door for New Hollywood.) But he might forever be most famous for a music video that used footage from his film Johnny Got His Gun, a movie that took years off my life. Probably more people have seen the video for Metallica's grim ballad "One" than they have Trumbo's film.

For 20-year-old Joe Bonham, the Great War is over, and so is his life, at least the way he knew it. An artillery blast has taken his sight, his speech, his hearing, his arms, his legs — perhaps, as the Metallica song suggests, even his very soul. Trapped in his own body with no way to communicate, he languishes for years, drifting in and out of consciousness in a sort of metaphorical sensory deprivation chamber from hell. He revisits his past life, slowly disintegrating into a kind of dreamy fantasy. Along the way, he meets his girlfriend, his deceased father, and Jesus Christ.

This is not a pretty film by any stretch of the imagination. Trumbo was a screenwriter, not a filmmaker, and as such was a director of middling skill who approached the whole thing largely like it was a TV show; but a somewhat workmanlike camera and schmaltzy script don't take away from an emotionally moving work. In fact, that schmaltziness may be the film's saving grace — while it's altogether rather talky, for a film like this, talky is the point. More to the point, the fantasy scenes speak to the honest, lonely mind of a 20-year-old kid who got shipped off to fight someone else's war. Trumbo does bring an artistic sensibility to the film in separating reality from fantasy through the use (or non-use) of color. The real-world scenes, set in the hospital, are in a stark black and white, deliberately evoking the gothic horror films of the 1930s with simple sets and monstrously apt framing and lighting. Conversely, the fantasy scenes are in the muted color palette common to low-budget early 1970s films, grainy and muddy, made worse by the low definition film transfers that floated around for years, further enhancing its dreamy quality. Sometimes it feels like certain scenes were pieced together through clips of different quality — a noticeable one is a severe drop in quality for a few certain shots in a scene late in the film.

Johnny Got His Gun is, in some ways, a product of the Vietnam era. While the original novel, written by Trumbo, was published in 1939 ahead of World War II, the film is Trumbo's reaction to everything that followed, most especially Vietnam and its parallels to World War I. The cruelty, the seeming randomness of the death and destruction, the way men were just thrown into the meatgrinder for vague reasons that had little to do with good or evil — and in the end, the way everyone decided it was better to just forget about the war and the people who fought it. A generation of men returning home broken, and for what? What was achieved? No wonder the original poster art for the film, subsequently reused for reprints of the novel, feature a giant stylized hand in the shape of the peace sign, that most iconic hand symbol of the Vietnam years.

Unfortunately, infuriatingly, Johnny Got His Gun is long out of print in English-speaking territories. And yes, it's Metallica's fault: the "One" music video used several clips from the film, and the band eventually just bought the film rights to avoid paying royalties. The film languished in VHS hell until Shout! Factory's 2009 DVD release; as of now this is the only version available on DVD and streaming services in the US. But if you care about cinema, are looking for a good anti-war flick, or just like Metallica, you owe it to yourself to see it. Make no mistake, this is not a war drama. There are no heroes. This is an anti-war film in the plainest possible terms, an indictment of a military that sends young men to fight old men's wars and then doesn't even have the decency to let them die.

Everything you saw in that Metallica video is just scratching the surface of how relentlessly depressing this film is. It's easy to see why Metallica wrote that song: this isn't just about war, this is the primal scream of a society that doesn't seem to know anything but. To scream is to function, and in the end, we all are Joe, unable to scream, only silently beg for death, but being told that it's against regulations.

-june❤