Johnny Got His Gun: Special Edition (Review)
Tuesday, 16th March 2010, 11:47

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Although the book was published over 70 years ago and the film is nearly 40 years old, Johnny Got His Gun feels very topical. The recent, and still ongoing, conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have brought home, yet again, the horrors that occur on a battlefield and what a human body can survive. In addition, the revelation that some coma patients can communicate via computer and are ‘locked in’ whilst the debate over assisted suicide continues to rage makes this story more relative than ever before.

Written by Dalton Trumbo and published before the Second World War, the bestselling novel tells the story of Joe, an idealistic American who joins up to join the fighting in northern Europe. On the eve of the Armistice he is sent out with a group of men to take down the corpse of a German who has begun to rot and make the trench smell even worse. When the burial party comes under attack from the Germans, they flee and the sound of a shell dropping quickens the search for cover. Joe dives into a crater just before the shell lands and wakes up in a hospital.
 

The explosion has taken his arms, legs and most of his face, leaving Joe immobile, deaf, dumb and blind. His only remaining sense is touch. Assumed to be nothing more than a piece of meat that can breath, Joe is kept away from the other patients and most staff, fed through a tube and left to his thoughts.

Unsure whether he is awake or asleep and suffering a horrendous nightmare, Joe thinks back to his childhood and the period before he joined up whilst lapsing into fantasy and talking with Christ and seeing himself as a carnival attraction. One of the nurses cares for Joe as a person, still believing there is someone inside the deformed body, and traces ‘Merry Christmas’ on his chest with her finger. She also thinks that there is more to the rhythmical tapping of Joe’s head on his pillow to muscle spasms and notifies the top brass who realises he is using Morse code to try and communicate.

When the General and other high ranking officers decide to see if he is really compos mentis, a Captain taps on Joe’s forehead to see what his name is and what he wants. When the reply comes that he wants to be put in a glass case and taken on a carnival around the country to demonstrate the horrors of war, his shocked superiors tell him it’s out of the question, at which point Joe asks them to kill him.

I imagine that like most people my age, I first became aware of Johnny got his gun through Metallica’s song ‘One’ from their ‘And Justice For All’ album and the superb video that features clips from the film. I then read the book but hadn’t seen the film in its entirety until this release. I expected the film to be quite dated and polemic, given the age and Trumbo’s politics but I was surprised at just how powerful and horrific it is after all these years – the end is truly nightmarish.             

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