Summary:
Generally, the movie adaptation of the Kurt Vonnegut novel Slaughterhouse Five is a faithfully adapted version that does not veer horribly far away from Vonnegut's own vision. Both mediums tell the story of a teenager stuck in war in his past, in a zoo on a planet for aliens in his future, and of a hapless middle-aged optometrist in his present.
Matt Clark
ENGL 238
7 April 6, 2006
Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five
Vs.
George Roy Hill's Movie Adaptation
For the most part, the movie adaptation of the Kurt Vonnegut novel Slaughterhouse Five is a faithfully adapted version that does not veer horribly far away from Vonnegut's own vision. It is no secret that Vonnegut displayed some extremely obsessive tendencies in this novel due to his own experiences as a prisoner of war. For this reason, I did not believe that the movie would be able to accurately display Vonnegut's own personal feelings regarding these issues. However, I felt that the film did a good job of keeping with what Vonnegut had intended to be seen and felt in his novel.
I was extremely surprised by the way in which Hill's movie managed to successfully portray the ideas of the novel which I believed would be nearly impossible to visualize on screen. I had a hard time imagining how it would be possible to show abstract topics such as "being unstuck in time" on a movie screen. However, I came away extremely impressed with the way that Billy managed to travel around different points in his life as seamlessly as he did in the novel. Throughout the novel I actually had a harder time following Billy's travel through time. I came away surprised by this as I imagined it to be much tougher to follow in the movie.
I think that Hill was able to make the time traveling easier to follow by incorporating an aspect that Vonnegut did not use in the novel. In the novel Billy's travels seemed to be completely at random, with him at the mercy of time itself. Hill's tactic for disguising what seemed to completely random and without any rhyme or reason was by making it so that whenever Billy traveled to a different portion of his life, it always corresponded somehow with the portion that he had been in prior to traveling. An example is, if he was lying in his bed in the hospital then he would travel to a point when he would be laying down in his bed on Tralfamadore. These transitions give the movie an almost artsy feel as Hill uses a strong musical element during these times, typically with the music heightening to its crescendo right at the moment of transition. This gave what in the novel was an entirely nonlinear, basically random life, an almost linear albeit clearly not chronological by any means.
I did not feel that there were any obvious plot differences from the novel to the film. It almost seemed as if the director, Hill, was probably a great fan of Vonnegut's work and he wanted to keep it as similar to the book as possible. He managed to do a good job I felt of conveying the novel as accurately as possible. As has been mentioned in class it seemed like it would be hard to keep Billy as the hapless individual that Vonnegut describes due to the fact that being the center of attention on screen makes one take more of an interest in that person as a character. However, I felt with the use of the time traveling and even getting further in depth with other characters, Hill manages to accomplish this feat. I felt like we learned more about characters that in the novel were completely secondary. Characters like Edgar Derby, Paul Lazzaro, and even Billy's own daughter, we get a more detailed idea of what they are really like in the movie then we ever do in the novel. Thus, through this closer look at these characters Billy manages to stay out of our minds as the only important character in the story. While he is maybe a bit more important in the movie, he is less important that probably he would be if Hill had only described the secondary characters as much as Vonnegut did in his novel.
The director, Hill also manages to keep many of the themes from the novel just as prevalent in the film. To me the biggest and most important theme was that of isolationism. Billy is isolated throughout the whole novel and movie. Vonnegut clearly tries to create the idea that Billy has no one else like him. From the coat that the Germans give him when he arrives at the Prisoner of War camp, to Billy going and living on Tralfamadore all alone for a long time, until Montana comes. Hill also does a good job of portraying this theme. His portrayal starts from the very first scene and continues on. In the first scene, not only does he isolate Billy, but he also takes advantage of another theme Vonnegut had in the novel, that of black and white. He does this by making Billy the only speck of black on an all white background. This sets Billy apart from the rest of the screen and essentially isolates him as the only person around.
While I felt the director did a terrific job of accurately displaying the novel as Vonnegut had intended, just as in all move adaptations, there were some inaccuracies and differences from one medium to the other. One scene in the movie that I really noticed a difference was the abduction scene. In the film, Billy is abducted from inside his bedroom. A white ball of light gradually grows until it encompasses the entire screen. After a quick cutaway Billy is on Tralfamadore. This is not the way that Vonnegut described his abduction in the novel. He was not simply sitting in his bedroom with Spot, but rather he had been watching a war movie backward. Then he had walked outside in order to allow Spot to go to the bathroom. He was outside when the aliens came for him. In the movie they do not display the war movie at all. To me this was an important portion of the book that was left out of the movie, as it was an opportunity for Billy to relive his experience in the war, and more specifically the bombing of Dresden.
The war experience for Billy is drastically different in the movie. The bombing of Dresden is the best example of this. Vonnegut describes the aftermath by saying that the city looked like the surface of the moon. This creates an extremely different visual for me than, the movie displayed. In the film, the city appeared to me to be no different than any other city I had ever seen which had been bombed. Perhaps I was expecting something different than what Vonnegut had intended, but Dresden still had portions of buildings standing, and there were also many more people moving around then I had expected. Another portion that surprised me in the movie was the lack of time that Billy spent with Roland Weary. In the book it seems as if he travels with Weary for a much longer time than he is shown as doing so in the movie. After reading the book I had envisioned Weary as a great soldier who was out in enemy territory heroically fighting for his country. However, after seeing the movie I came away thinking that Weary is nothing more than a psychotic man, hell bent on making people thinking he is far superior to them, when in reality he is no better at all then even a chaplain's assistant as helpless as Billy.
Generally, the movie adaptation of the Kurt Vonnegut novel Slaughterhouse Five is a faithfully adapted version that does not veer horribly far away from Vonnegut's own vision. Both mediums tell the story of a teenager stuck in war in his past, in a zoo on a planet for aliens in his future, and of a hapless middle-aged optometrist in his present. I loved the novel, and therefore I was skeptical of the movie before watching, because I have never seen a movie adapted from a book that I have read that I felt did the novel justice. However, this case was different. Thanks to the director staying loyal to the novel which he based his movie on, I enjoyed seeing Billy, as much as reading about him.
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