Bipolar Slaurghterhourse 5: Chapter 5 Part 4 of

THE BIG PICTURE: A POST-JUNGIAN MAP OF GLOBAL CINEMA

by James Whitlark, Ph.D.

BIPOLAR PSYCHOSIS and SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE (1972)

Most of my adult life has been spent in bringing to some kind of order sheets of paper. . . . This severely limited activity has allowed me to ignore many a storm. It has also caused many of the worst storms I ignored. —Kurt Vonnegut, Palm Sunday

The book Slaughterhouse-Five from which the movie of the same name comes has as part of its full title the word “Schizophrenic.” To Vonnegut, it has acquired a private meaning: “I think I have a terror of schizophrenia without having been seriously schizophrenic. I think it is dangerous to believe that there are enormous new truths, dangerous to imagine that we can stand outside the universe” (Vonnegut 1988, 73-74). His opposition to such arrogance came partly from his own malady, of which he wrote to Lawrence Broer: “The medical school at the University of Iowa did a study of established writers at the Writer's Workshop, myself included, and learned that we were all depressives” (Broer 13). Vonnegut has undergone therapy for that condition (Vonnegut 1988, 87). He almost seems proud of it as in his asserting, “You cannot be a good writer of serious fiction if you are not depressed [i.e., concerned about the world’s major problems and exempt from the arrogance that mania brings]” (Vonnegut, 1991, 29). Although this generalization is a comic exaggeration, some creative artists undoubtedly are driven to struggle with serious, existential questions as a way to cope with depression or vice versa.

Vonnegut added that before he started taking medication for his depression he napped each afternoon for the “Technicolor [ movie-like] dreams” it provided. Vonnegut’s other ways of self-treatment, creating and enjoying works of art, are themselves kinds of dreaming. If depression stems from trying to repress internal chaos, it equals fearfully trying to hold fast to an existence doomed to dissipate; dreaming equals flinging wide the frightening but infinitely exciting gates of opportunity.

The lure of the latter pulls people upward, yet in addition to this carrot as a motivator, there is sometimes also the stick of dysfunction driving them. In many instances—definitely in Vonnegut’s—the spur comes from mood changes, in his case probably hereditary, given his family history. His son, Mark, for instance, was once diagnosed as “schizophrenic” but now realizes, “Under the new definitions I would be classified as manic–depressive [later called bipolar] rather than schizophrenic” (Vonnegut 1991, 205).

Clinically defined: “First, it [schizophrenia] is a disorder of younger groups. Second, there is disordered thinking, which may be manifest in abnormalities of speech and action. Third, there is emotional flattening. Fourth, delusions are common. Fifth, auditory hallucinations are more common than are visual hallucinations” (Howells xv). Despite the presence of “Schizophrenia” in the subtitle of Slaughterhouse-five, none of these symptoms (with the possible exception of the vague term “delusions”) apply well to the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim. He is old before his daughter thinks him mad, evidences no abnormal speech patterns, and his visionary experiences are not merely auditory. With many followers, he becomes the prophet of a gospel from outer space (i.e., a manic presumption of Truth rather than “Schizophrenia” per se).

To what extent is either book or movie of Slaughterhouse-Five “schizophrenic” actually? In Sanity Plea: Schizophrenia in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut, Lawrence Broer summarizes a mass of coincidences in Slaughterhouse-Five between the experiences of the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, in burning Dresden and that character's paranormal experiences (time and space travel). Like many critics, Broer sees the latter moments in book and film as Billy’s schizophrenia-like hallucinations. The novel, however, also contains evidence to the contrary. For example, “hallucination gave way to time-travel,” positing a difference between the two (Vonnegut 1968, 49). Moreover, in the first chapter, the character Vonnegut states that the whole work is his fiction and that it comes from experiences so traumatic that he had to wait years before utilizing them.

With his condition in mind, one may see much of the book as bipolar autobiography exaggerated until it sounds “schizophrenic” where it describes escape from sorrow into fatalism (associated with comic aliens called “Trafalmadorians”). Exaggerated sufficiently, the horrible becomes totally hopeless, so that (temporarily) one can escape into laughter. As a youth, for instance, Vonnegut had an unmuscular physique, leading to acute embarrassment when his gym teacher gave him a subscription to a muscle-building course (Vonnegut 1988, 88). A composite of Vonnegut and Joe Crone, a dying P. O. W., Billy is “funny-looking . . . tall and weak, and shaped like a bottle of Coca-Cola” (Vonnegut 1991, 106; Vonnegut 1968, 23). The Tralfamadorian space creatures are “shaped like plumber's friends”—an even-more-exaggerated vision of unmuscular, gangling, “funny looking” alienness (Vonnegut 1968, 26).

In an interview for Playboy, Vonnegut described the “schizophrenic” (or, more precisely, manic) science–fiction passages as being like the clowns in Shakespeare, a change of pace necessary whenever the tragedy became unbearably depressive (Vonnegut 1988, 94). Vonnegut is not offering the Tralfamadorian “gospel from outerspace” as his philosophy but as comic relief—a humor he manages as a compensation for psychological pain. Although much of his brilliant comedy makes its way into the movie, only those viewers familiar with the book will recognize consciously its artistry as “utilization,” but it has implicit within it a laughing at adversity, the essence of that “utilization.”

Gone With the Firestorm

There are only two American novelists who should be grateful for the movies which were made from their books. I am one of them. The other one? Margaret Mitchell, of course —Kurt Vonnegut, Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage

The 1972 movie won a special jury prize at the Cannes Festival, and Vonnegut loved the film. Nonetheless, in it, the character Vonnegut, to whom the entire first chapter and several later sections of the book are devoted, disappears. No longer is the fiction a mixture of exaggerated autobiography with the viewpoints of various characters. Does it then become entirely Billy's fantasy? The movie begins with Billy's daughter, unseen by him, about to invade his house. There is no reason to think the scene is in his mind. The movie generally focuses on him but not always. His time- and space-traveling thus comes closer to being presented as objectively real than in the novel.

What does this do to Vonnegut's metaphysical “big picture”? He believes: “An effective religion allows people to imagine from moment to moment what is going on and how they should behave. Christianity used to be like that. Our country is now jammed with human beings who say out loud that life is chaos to them, and that it doesn't seem to matter what anybody does next. This is worse than being seasick” (Vonnegut 1981, 199). This version of spiritual chaos may resemble extreme psychosis, in which “the brain views the world as a series of disconnected events...” (Goldman-Rakik 117).

The Tralfamamadorians see life much this way and deride human fascination with cause and effect. Timesick, from being “unstuck” in the flux of temporality, Billy agrees with them finally. He began with “a meek faith in a loving Jesus which most soldiers found putrid” (Vonnegut 1968, 31). That faith does not survive the bombing of Dresden and his being “unstuck in time.” So Billy ends preaching the Tralfamadorian “gospel” that everything simply is, and “corpses are improvements” (Vonnegut 1968, 210).

Although Vonnegut derides this Tralfamadorian quietism, he sees his work as religious (albeit not pious): “It’s my religion the censors hate. They find me disrespectful toward their idea of God Almighty. They think it's the proper business of government to protect the reputation of God” (Vonnegut 1981, 106).

Inquisitions

Perhaps one of the reasons turbulence has fascinated artists is that its subtleties mirror the ... shifts in our own psychologies and moods. —Briggs, Fractals (1992)

In book and movie, Billy Pilgrim is on a pilgrimage, but not quite the same one. Admittedly, in the latter, his time-slips still proceed by associations of ideas. In both, for example, the capturing Germans snapshot him. Then the movie cuts to his being photographed before his own “Pilgrim” building. This transition, however, is no longer presented as Vonnegut's associated ideas. Do the time jumps mean anything? The movie’s Tralfamadorians say: “There is no how. There is no why. The moment simply is.” This is the silly religion from the novel, but unlike there, it is not propounded by talking plumber's helpers. The film has the Tralfamadorians invisible, which makes the preposterousness of them (and consequently of their words) a shade less evident. Furthermore, Billy is a more presentable apostle of their irresponsible creed. In the novel, he passively lets his friends crash in a plane wreck. No undeniable evidence proves that he has foreseen it. In the movie, he loudly warns, showing that his time traveling (the basis of Tralfamadorian metaphysics) is real. In both film and novel, he makes a Christ-like sacrifice, accepting death as he preaches what he believes to be a message of hope: eternal life. Then the book cuts to his endless sufferings that sour the revelation. In contrast, the movie concentrates its ending not on the Dresden “corpse mines” of the novel's closing but on fireworks celebrating the birth of Billy's son on Tralfamadore. He is left in an extraterrestrial heaven while Glenn Gould plays a sacerdotal fugue and the credits roll.

The passion of the pilgrimage—the frustration with which Vonnegut fruitlessly seeks a believable religion—is diluted but much else remains. In abbreviated form, Hill preserves ironies and insights into how people turn religion into “schizophrenia” and unholy inquisition. Billy is still an assistant chaplain forced into battle with nothing to defend him but prayers. As in the book, his mother drives him deeper into psychotic withdrawal with her fatuous, pseudo-Christianity: “I knew that God would send Billy home to me. I prayed every night, even though we don't belong to a church of our choice.” Admittedly, the movie vividly dramatizes the core of the book, its denouncing people's faith in a “Children's Crusade,” which incinerated Dresden.
In sum, the movie operates at Graves’s stage five. It ridicules stage-four, dogmatic religion and enjoys playing with the laws of time and space, but it does not launch into the Rashomon-like exploration of multiple points of view it would need to reach Vonnegut’s stage-six lessons in empathy. Quite possibly, Vonnegut’s sharply contrasting moods helped him to mastery of that stage, whereas, for whatever reason, the particular filmmakers fell short of it—so that what the movie needed was something Hollywood usually supplies in abundance—emotionally turbulent artists (such as those who produced the following film).

Continue to THE BIG PICTURE Chapter 6 Part 3

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