Slaughterhouse 3

I probably read this book not long after it came out, early 70’s, I know I’d read it before seeing the film in ‘76. Hadn’t re-read the book until now. Only found out about the graphic novel couple months ago. Can’t remember what spurred my new interest in Vonnegut. And not on google but on my local library system, which not only was where I discovered the graphic novel, but also that they had a DVD of the movie, which I never expected to see again. Then the idea sprung forth to experience all three and write about it. Wondering about the differences of media, adaptation versus creation.

1: The Novel

“All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.” So begins Slaughter House Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death. The title page has a longer explanation, ending in “This is a novel somewhat in the telegraphic schizophrenic manner of tales of the planet Tralfamadore, where the flying saucers come from.”

The novel is about Billy Pilgrim, WWII preacher’s assistant, POW and witness to the fire-bombing of Dresden, who becomes a successful optometrist and is kidnapped by aliens from Tralfamadore. Did that abduction actually happen? These aliens see time as a continuum, with all of one’s life available. “Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time,” tells you all you need to know of the structure of the telling.

The book’s other key phrase, oft repeated, usually when someone dies or something else unexpected happens, is “so it goes.”

Giving a plot synopsis tells you little about the experience of this novel. Vonnegut is an amazing writer, in terms of his skill with language, the full-bore creativity of the contents, and how it’s told.

The novel itself is a bit unstuck in time. The story of Billy’s war experience is told fairly sequentially, his other life experiences get threaded in and out, giving the feeling of a sudden change in tv channels. This is how Billy’s mind /existence zips around. When he goes to another time he is not watching but living it. One channel is Billy’s life on Tralfamadore, where he lives in a transparent dome with movie actress Montana Wildhack under constant observation. As a reader, I get used to the jumping around (more of the book is in WWII than out of it), feeling a little disoriented, as Billy might. In part a comment on how contemporary society—even back in the late 60’s when this book was written—also keeps jumping around, with unexpected sudden confusions, surprising deja vus and history repeating.

How does one categorize this book? As it contains extra-terrestrials and time travel, a science fiction label seems obvious. But those elements are just tools for Vonnegut’s story-telling, implying that our view of reality can be as speculative as any sci fi novel.

Above all (and who’s to say a novel can’t be in more than one category) it’s an anti-war novel, published in ’69 when the Vietnam War was hot and heavy. The bombing of Dresden and the resulting firestorm destroyed more than 1,600 acres of the city center. Up to 25,000 people were killed. There’s still controversy on whether this attack was necessary. By February 13^th of 1945, when the Dresden bombing started, the German army was well-depleted and getting hammered on the Russian front. Germany surrendered less than 3 months later. A historian character in the novel compares Dresden with Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Billy’s war experiences are often bleak, but described fairly journalistically. Vonnegut shows how cruel Americans can be to each other when stressed in survival mode. Billy is short and emaciated, dressed in theatrical hand-me-downs, making him stand out like a target. I’m reminded of the movie King of Hearts, a French anti-war film that came out three years before this book did. Vonnegut balances war’s horrors with aliens, social commentary, quirky characters and “so it goes,” which can be intoned a variety of ways.

This book is also a satire of the American dream, the post-WWII lifestyle. There are many laughs at different levels here, from cheap puns to razor irony. As Billy and the other Americans are about to be sent to Dresden, one of the British POWs who’s staying, says “You needn’t worry about bombs, by the way. Dresden is an open city. It is undefended and contains no war industries or troop concentrations of any import.” So it goes.

This is also a novel about novels, about how to tell a story. The first chapter is in first person, a nameless writer who was in Dresden during the bombing (as Vonnegut himself was), wrote a non-fiction book about it, and later wrote a novel, which is the rest of this book (he comes back to first person in the last chapter.) The narrator and Billy cross paths on the way to and in Dresden. Whose story is this?

A couple other writer characters show up here, including the sci fi write Kilgore Trout (who appears in other Vonnegut books, and was pseudonym for a parodic sci fi novel Vonnegut wrote.) Kurt’s playing with the idea of authorship. One of Trout’s novels involves aliens with an alternative Gospel, with lines like “Before you kill somebody, make absolutely certain he isn’t well-connected.”

There’s so much going on in this novel, done with such a casual voice that belies Vonnegut’s mastery.  I’m sure countless analyses and theses have been done on it. One could get unstuck in this novel. The complexity just makes it richer. It’s a brilliant display of the writer’s craft, of one man’s multi-dimensional creativity, and a reminder of how terrible war (& human stupidity/short-sightedness) can be.

2: The Movie

The Slaughterhouse Five movie starts with Billy Pilgrim, older, at a typewriter. “Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time” he types, and then the shifting starts, sometimes with a voice of another character taking us from one scene/time to another.

From an oldish Billy at the typewriter we go to WWII, to Billy’s life and family in Illium, NY. The war part proceeds chronologically—basically the same story line as the novel but expanded a bit—while the other timelines, including life in a dome on Tralfamadore, jump around a bit.

Some of my inability to engage with this film is Billy Pilgrim as played by Michael Sacks. WWII Billy is so wide-eyed and naïve, too much of a tabula rasa, for me to empathize with. Mid-life Billy also stays blank-faced, rolling with fate and his material success. This was a deliberate choice, Billy as Everyman or the eternal innocent, but I need a little more to hold on to. Also the blankness of Billy gives a little more credence to his family’s worry that his tales of another life on a distant planet are hallucinatory madness. (In ’69, when this book came out, PTSD was only beginning to reach public consciousness.)

Add in the over-the-top performance of Billy’s wife, the satire of middle-class existence, and the spoofing of war movie cliches and science fiction, and the impact of a horror like Dresden is a bit diluted. Amid the post-bombing rubble we can feel for the destruction and dead bodies, but the engagement took too long in coming.

Director George Roy Hill made Slaughterhouse Five between Burtch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting, so it had some Hollywood cred, though not much star power cast-wise (Ron Liebman and Valerie Perrine are the two names.) Craft-wise, it’s a well-made film.

Does the failure of this film to work for me mean the novel is unfilmable? The screenwriter and director stayed pretty close to the novel, adding cinematic attention-getting devices like more frequent time-cuts and exaggerated characters. Does the film stay too faithful to the book, instead of adding some film-appropriate vision of its own? There’s so much linguistic and literary in the book that its strength lies more in the telling than in what happens. Books and movies “tell” in different ways. Do original screenplays—as opposed to adaptations—bring more creative energy to a film?

3: The Graphic Novel

I’ve read very few graphic novels. No reason, maybe just habit.

This one starts acknowledging Vonnegut (who shows in the story) and that this is an adaptation. Then a page of “our supporting cast” and a pictorial timeline of Billy Pilgrim’s life.

The story begins in WWII and stays there for the first ten pages. This book is a war story, and follows the same timeline as the other two versions. It’s fairly true to the book as a whole, but does make some changes, some new side journeys.

One most notable change is seeing the Tralfamadorans, who we, like Billy and Montana in the movie, couldn’t see because they’re “in the 4^th dimension.” They’re pretty silly looking, but then the whole dome on the planet surface thing is silly in itself.

Being new to graphic novels, I am impressed with how the artists arrange the pages—a wide variety of grids and panel sizes, occasional insets, other effects. Being able to flash to another time in one panel and back the next is effective, especially as the artists vary the lengths of these flashes. Even merging the times as in one panel soldier Billy is in bed with his middle-aged wife. And the way hallucinations can just be part of the panel—we’re seeing through Billy’s eyes.

Billy, as drawn, is unattractive, older-looking as a soldier, but still draws me into sympathizing with him. He’s not naïve, just a bit confused and unsure. He does become more confident later in life, becoming a successful author and lecturer. I much appreciate the way Billy progresses through and is presented in this novel: his story arc works well and keeps me along.

But Billy’s the co-star. This is an anti-war war story. It’s winter, drab and dark—compared with the brighter and broader color pallet of the other times and places. Some ugly, haggard people all around.

This graphic novel works, maybe in part due to the freshness of the format to me, and largely in how well those involved here executed it. They let their imaginations go in many places, making this story their own. They honor the media-consciousness they share with the novel by having Vonnegut appear, being himself and also the narrator of the novel, as well as a one-page discussion on “Is the novel dead”? But the chief reason for the graphic novel’s success, to me, is the strong anti-war focus.

4: 1-3 and beyond

The old telephone game—how a sentence can change going through a chain of ears and mouth.  What is the nature of adaptation (a subject so exquisitely handled in the movie of the same name)? Are you adapting the plot and the characters, the emotional appeal, the source material’s sub-texts? And each medium brings a different set of tools, rules and expectations.

Even when a movie is remade—there are six film versions of Little Women—changes can be made, if only to better match the audience and available technologies, if not to add the director’s creative re-vision.

Probably we’ve all been disappointed by film adaptations of novels we loved. The only example I can think of a novel that to me worked better as a film was Cloud Atlas, with the film shuffling together the six stories well, instead of keeping them only halved as the book did. In judging any medium, subjectivity is unavoidable. The novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is narrated by Chief Bromden. The movie is focused majorly on Jack Nicholson’s character, McMurphy. I played Bromden in a college production—Cuckoo’s Nest was a play before it was a movie—and my prejudice against the movie’s choice of emphasis kept me from enjoying it fully.

One way of comparing the three Slaughterhouses is focus. The novel is focused on multiplicity. The horror of the war somewhat speaks for itself, but there’s so much more being commented on here, including the nature of story-telling. The graphic novel focusses strongly on the war, while including enough of the other aspects of Bily’s life for me to wonder how much he was permanently damaged by the war. The movie makes many parts a little louder and more hectic, but doesn’t give me a Billy I can focus on, though that probably wasn’t its intent.

One of the things I’d wondered about when I started this essay was the difference between creation and adaptation. Both of the adaptations display a strong range of artistic skills. As a creator, I know the exhilarating energy when the poem first comes out. There’s nothing like it. I also get great, but different, satisfaction when I put on my editor hat (though my creator brain is just beneath.)

Maybe I liked the movie least of these three because I saw little creativity expanding or altering the world of the novel. North, Monteys et. al. infused the graphic novel with a variety of creative bubbles, sometimes expanding Vonnegut’s energy, sometimes taking it a little appropriately afield. But it’s the novel that shines the brightest. To a large extent because it’s the original, but also because a novel is (usually) a single person’s vision and effort. I swear there’s something special in that singularity which few multi-person creations can match.