Arbitrary picture capriciously selected and inserted here, regardless of your wishes.
While perhaps not quite so punctuated, in terms of idiosyncratic language, as the novel, the movie version of Slaughterhouse-Five (1972) has great fidelity to its source material, with not quite the emphasis on Tralfamadore and its inhabitants as the novel, but better music. If you’re not familiar with the novel, well, it’s a little hard to describe the plot. I could tell you that it follows Billy Pilgrim’s consciousness as he swoops from World War II prisoner to a married, then widowed, optometrist in Ilium, NY, to prisoner of the alien Tralfamadoreans on their planet of Tralfamadore, where he’s to mate with Playboy Playmate Montana Wildhack, for their edification, or perhaps to satisfy their prurient interest. This is linear, yet non-linear: it is what Billy is experiencing in linear fashion, and we’re just along for the ride.
But it all doesn’t really make any sense, and that may be the point of it. In a way, the story is fractal in essence. The Tralfamadoreans, in concordance with (allegedly) thirty or so other worlds, endorse a philosophy which has discarded the idea of causality in favor of viewing the Universe as a random collage of incidents. They embrace the idea that the bad incidents should be ignored, while the good ones enjoyed. Despite their command of time & space, they lay helpless in the hands of the Universe, well-aware that it’ll all end because of a panicked mis-decision by a Tralfamadorean space pilot working with an experimental power source. They’ve viewed the moment a hundred times, and disclaim any ability to actually prevent the outcome: their doom is inevitable.
In Billy’s life as an optometrist in post-World War II Ilium, he has the illusion of control, but when he’s lying in a coma following a plane crash, his wife manages to kill herself through incompetent, panicked driving, and Billy can find no way to stop the incident. His son’s misbehavior, his daughter’s poor selection of husband, and his wife’s chronic obesity, which she eternally proclaims she’ll beat for the husband she loves so much, all come together to emphasize his helplessness in controlling the circumstances of his life. Much like the Tralfamadoreans, he knows how it’ll all end – and can do nothing more than be a puppet to that ending.
And in his life in World War II, he’s a mere leaf, blown hither and yon. Men fall dead from gunfire, disease and malnutrition, yet he persists, clothed in ludicrous garments meant to humiliate him. He’s exposed to the madness of his own countrymen, and his best friend, a schoolteacher, is labeled a looter in the wreckage of Dresden, and shot with little notice. He cannot take control of his own circumstances, and only survives the same way a feather survives, so sensitive to the forces that would destroy it that they cannot catch up with him – but through no will of his own.
Perhaps this is the message: the horrors, the incomprehensible hatred exhibited in World War II, all that mad energy is necessary to rip the bandage off the raw chaos of the Universe, letting us glimpse for a few horrid moments the madness lying just below our veils of illusion that allow us to believe there is such things as Justice, fair play, or any of a host of other concepts which, in reality, are at best vestigial.
There’s little of pleasure in Slaughterhouse-Five, but perhaps a lot to meditate upon.
