Of Body and Mind, of Matter and Spirit: War and Melancholia in Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun (1938 and 1971)

Abstract

Directed in 1971 by Dalton Trumbo, the film based on his own First World War novel Johnny got his Gun (1938), has had its originality largely neglected by the public in general. This paper explores how the film, while appropriating some of the clichés present in most WW1 films, departs from a realistic, conventional narrative approach and centers on individual subjectivity as the main way to reflect upon the traumatic effects of war and the sense of loss it entails. Drawing upon a conceptual framework derived from the study of melancholia, our aim is to show how the film articulates in an extreme form a melancholia that resides in morbid self-scrutiny, the persistence of memory and a fractured relationship between body and mind. From the earliest accounts of melancholia, mostly following the Graeco-Roman tradition of Hippocratic-Galenic reasoning and its humoral theorization, the body has constituted the stage for the manifestation of melancholia. In the existential nadir it projects, Johnny posits a self-conscious, unimpaired mind trapped within a mutilated body, tallying with the idea that melancholia has always hinged on the Western espousal of, and infatuation with, self-focused attention, inwardness and the idea of the self. Whilst most films in the wake of the conflict were characterized by an emphasis on the group facing danger on the battlefield, more revisionist renditions of the war in the 1960s and 1970s have tended to dwell on individual protagonists and the effects of combat. Trumbo’s film enlarges on this topic by probing a situation in which the individual is absolutely helpless in the face of inhuman, desensitized structures-whether scientific or military-, doomed to loneliness and cut adrift from any form of spiritual/religious comfort. In this rather nihilistic vision, the film produces the ultimate anti-war statement, apt and used for other twentieth-century contexts.

What kind of doctor would cut a man down to what I am and let him live?

Joe Bonham in Johnny Got his Gun (1971) by Dalton Trumbo