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War, Literature & the Arts: an international journal of the humanities / Volume 3 2 / 20 20
Johnny Got His Gun and “One”:
Remembering Basket Case Joe Bonham
Shane A. Emplaincourt
I feel that the great war [sic] picture has not yet been filmed. And I feel that it will not be filmed until some director with stark genius transplants pure insanity on the screen. —Dalton Trumbo^1
Prologue: “One” resurrects Johnny, and Johnny launches Metallica.
Certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons. —Tim O’Brien^2
eleased thirty-one years ago, Metallica’s platinum album … And Justice for All
(1988), nominated for its first Grammy Award in the new Best Hard Rock/Metal
Performance Vocal or Instrumental, was first runner up to Jethro Tull’s Crest of a
Knave, one of the “Grammy’s 10 Biggest Upsets” according to Michael Endelman in
Entertainment Weekly.^3 And their début music video “One” (20 January 1989), remixed with
sequences from Dalton Trumbo’s award-winning war film Johnny Got His Gun (1971) based on
his eponymous First World War novel (1939), ranked number one on MTV shortly after its release^4 and thirty-eight in MTV’s “Top 100 Videos of All Time” countdown (1999), giving many viewers not only their first glimpse of the band but also of the film. David Hale, James Hetfield’s older half brother, introduced the novel to him, and James and Lars Ulrich—Metallica’s principal composers—wrote the song in November 1987 with many of the lyrics as well as the title borrowed directly from the novel:
R
WLA / 32 / 2020 / Emplaincourt How could a man lose as much of himself as I have and still live? When a man buys a lottery ticket you never expect him to win because it’s a million to one shot. But if he does win, you’ll believe it because one in a million still leaves one. If I’d read about a guy like me in the paper I wouldn’t believe it, cos it’s a million to one. But a million to ONE always leaves one. I’d never expect it to happen to me because the odds of it happening are a million to one. But a million to one always leaves one. One. (86)^5
And that Metallica entitles their album verbatim sine the ellipsis from Norman Jewison’s film
And Justice for All (1979) starring Al Pacino as incorruptible impassioned attorney Arthur
Kirkland who shouts one of the film’s most memorable lines, “You’re out of order! You’re out of order! The whole trial is out of order! They’re out of order!”^6 is no coincidence. It encapsulates
the general theme of all the songs as a whole as well as Trumbo’s Johnny: i.e., Joe Bonham, who
never understood the true reason he had to go “over there” to fight a war, is protesting the “out-of-order” rich and powerful who dictate the terms and conditions of war yet who do not imperil themselves, for they send, instead, the working class “over there” to fight other working- class soldiers, a recurrent subtheme of war films well depicted, for example, in Michael Cimino’s
Oscar-winning The Deer Hunter (1978) and in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s César-winning Un long
dimanche de fiançailles (2004), his cinematic adaptation of Sébastien Japrisot’s World War I
novel. In the latter, for example, soudeur (welder) Francis Gaignard desperately tries to explain
that reality to other soldiers in the following: “[…] les pauvres font de leurs mains les canons pour se faire tuer mais que ce sont les riches qui les vendent” (13).^7 Based on Trumbo’s ideology, Joe probably would go to war for a good reason, such as defending the homeland or fight in the Second World War, “the good war,” as Trumbo exemplifies in the characters of fighter pilots
WLA / 32 / 2020 / Emplaincourt published 3 September 1939—two days after the onset of World War II when Germany invaded Poland. The first one involves Prince Edward VIII of Wales visiting a Canadian hospital where a nonpareil limbless solider was kept alive via a feeding tube in a secreted room: At the end of a hallway, there was a door marked “No Admittance.” “What’s in there?” he [Prince of Wales] asked. “We’d rather you not go in there,” they told him. But the Prince of Wales insisted, and when he came out of the room, he was
weeping. “The only way I could salute, the only way I could communicate with
that man,” he said, “was to kiss his cheek.”^10 Although not as severely injured as the character Joe, the soldier in question may well have been Ethelbert “Curley” Christian, one of the only surviving quadruple amputees of the Great War and thus the allegory to one in a million by Trumbo and “One” by Metallica.^11 The second one involves a British major so mangled that he was purposely reported missing in action. His family discovered years after his death that he had passed away isolated in a military hospital.^12 Those two horrific phantasmagorias so marked Trumbo that they inspired him to write what is perhaps, according to Ben Ray Redman, “one of the most horrifying books ever written. […] a book that can never be forgotten by anyone who reads it.”^13 That year, it won the prize of Most Original Book at the National Book Awards. In addition to being moved by the tragic stories of those two soldiers, Trumbo was,
likewise, inspired by the personal events in his own life which also appear in Johnny, particularly
those impressionable moments during his youth and adolescence in Grand Junction, Colorado— referred to as Shale City in the novel—such as fishing with his father, his father’s death, and his night shifts wrapping bread for almost a decade at the Davis Perfection Bakery in Los Angeles, just to name a few. In fact, Bonham’s life almost mirrors Trumbo’s, except Trumbo did not go to
WLA / 32 / 2020 / Emplaincourt
war, for he was too young to fight in la der des ders; however, he was, nonetheless, marked by
the grimness of the wounds that his hometown soldiers had suffered “over there,” and he believed that the United States should have never entered the Great War: “His reasons had their roots in his experience as a boy, seeing young veterans he had known returning from World War I—some maimed, blind, and broken—to Grand Junction.”^14 For example, Trumbo’s biographer Bruce Cook traces the creation of character Joe Bonham early in the writer’s life when, as a janitor and part-time clerk in Roy Chapman’s bookstore, he would help the young, recently blinded veteran by ritually fitting the shop owner’s glass eyes into his eye sockets every day.^15 Film historian Bob Herzberg, however, strongly criticizes Trumbo’s inserting much of his personal life, accusing him of abandoning his “[…] creative imagination, something that is sorely needed when writing a novel.”^16 Actually, all the flashbacks and the reminiscences of home are central to the theme of the novel and the motion picture, for they re-enforce the understanding of Joe’s retrospective thoughts on World War I: what was the point of fighting in that “far-away war” anyway? Whatever creativity Trumbo lacked in inventing Bonham’s youth, he requited it by choosing to show a masked face instead of a gored one, an effective concept later used by
David Lynch in Elephant Man (1980) and François Dupeyron in La Chambre des officiers (2001)
in the first half of their films. The novel’s title is a play on the verse “Johnny get your gun” from George M. Cohan’s jingoistic song “Over There” (1917), an effective ditty that persuaded many American men to enlist in the military during both world wars, one that Trumbo echoes thrice as Joe boards the train to go off to war so that “democracy may not perish from the face of the earth” (36), a reference to President Woodrow Wilson’s 2 April 1917 request to congress seeking a declaration of war against Germany for which he received a standing ovation. However, it was an onerous
WLA / 32 / 2020 / Emplaincourt ridiculously dispenses with little things like periods, commas and semi-colons, making already
awkwardly written sentences truly a chore to decipher.”^20 Chacun a son goût, or to each his own.
Trumbo logically divides the novel in two equal parts: Book I, entitled “The Dead,” is primarily a synthesis of memories and soliloquies in Joe’s head while Book II, “The Living,” focuses on Joe as a Lazarus figure trying to free himself. Even though an award-winning novel, it was taken out of circulation shortly after Pearl Harbor for being “Pro-Axis” and was not republished until 1959 by Lyle Stuart with a new preface by Trumbo and again in 1967 by Bantam just before the 1968 Tet Offensive, the height of the Vietnam War. Shortly after 1936 when Trumbo started writing movie scripts, he quickly became one of the highest-paid screenwriters in the 1940s, and despite being perhaps the most famous of the
“Hollywood Ten,” he nonetheless scripted many Academy-Award winning films, notably Kitty
Foyle (1940), Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944), Roman Holiday (1953), The Brave One (1956),
Exodus (1960), Spartacus (1960), and The Fixer (1968). However, the film for which he may be
best remembered happens to be the only one he directed: Johnny Got His Gun (1971), starring
nineteen-year-old débutant actor Timothy Bottoms as Joe Bonham (Trumbo originally had his
son Chris in mind),^21 Kathy Fields as Kareen (Joe’s girlfriend), Marsha Hunt as Joe’s mother, Jason Robards as Joe’s father (but Trumbo actually wanted Walter Matthau),^22 Diane Varsi as the new day nurse, and pro bono Donald Sutherland as Christ. Although not a box office hit upon its
release in the United States, it nevertheless won le Grand Prix Spécial du Jury at Cannes and the
FIPRESCI Prize, and Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter—who insisted that his cabinet watch it— said, “it should be required viewing for every American,”^23 just as President John F. Kennedy
required his staff to read Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August (1962).
WLA / 32 / 2020 / Emplaincourt Trumbo’s film was not the first to limelight incommodious war-mutilated soldiers on the
silver screen. Abel Gance’s “Army of the dead” sequence in his J’accuse (1937) showcased forty
actual World War I gueules cassées, or “smashed faces,” where interred soldiers from the Verdun
Douaumont Ossuary rise from the dead to horrify the living so that they not be swept into “the war of tomorrow.” Like Gance’s sequence of “living gargoyles,” Trumbo’s filming of Joe’s disfigurement and dismemberment, albeit as an entirely sheet-covered quadruple amputee with
a full-facial disinfectant drape, was his attempt to provocatively convey the ne plus ultra
impressionable representation of the violence that the Great War had engendered. With the end of the centennial anniversary of the Great War, and because of its entrenched legacy, it is imperative to keep the memory of the First World War in the public
imagination, and with the eightieth anniversary of the publication of Trumbo’s Johnny Got His
Gun, the soon to be fiftieth anniversary of the release of his landmark film adaptation, and the
thirtieth anniversary of Metallica’s “One,” it is also befitting and necessary to continue remembering, as Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker observe, that “[t]he history of violence in the 1914-1918 war […] cannot be separated from the body, for bodies had never previously suffered so much and on such scale.”^24 By limelighting Joe Bonham, the average Joe who readily answered the call to serve and survived—albeit as war’s most extreme victim, that hapless one in a million—Trumbo symbolically illustrates the horrific consequences of that unprecedented 1914 - 1918 violence. Thus, the purpose of this essay is to examine and analyze how Trumbo as auteur, scriptwriter, and director adapted his novel to the big screen by focusing on the portrayal of protagonist Joe Bonham’s “four faces”: “(1) Wounded Joe on the bed in the hospital; (2) Joe’s Image, unwounded but trapped in the hospital with the Wounded Joe; (3) Flashback Joe... as he was in those incidents from his past which he thinks about and which we
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ensues] Where am I? [another tick-tock] It’s dark in here” (Trumbo , 0:5:58-0:6:47). Thoughts of
Kareen make him homesick, but he does not know if he is in an English, French, or American hospital. When he dove into the dugout, he recalls seeing two Americans and the rest “Limeys,” so he assumes he is “[…] in some crummy English hospital” (146), intensifying the sense of loneliness because “[…] those Limeys were a funny bunch of guys. They were more like foreigners than a Frenchmen. A Frenchmen you could understand but a Limey was always twitching his nose and you couldn’t understand him at all” (146). Eventually, when he senses someone pinning a medal on his chest and mustached person kissing his left and right temple, he presumes he is in France (159- 160 )—a detail reminiscent of the Prince of Wales kissing Ethelbert “Curley” Christian, the Canadian quadruple amputee soldier who survived the Battle of Vimy Ridge.^28 After a ten-minute flashback prurient sequence of Joe consummating his love for Kareen, Trumbo resumes his present predicament with the clock ticking and the terrorizing bomb hissing as it falls to the shell hole where he sought shelter. Having lost all his senses but touch, Bonham desperately luttes against obscurity to know time, whether it be the hour, or day or night, or even year. At the overture of Book II in the novel, Trumbo dedicates much to Joe’s understanding the importance of time, referencing how Edmond Dantès and Robinson Crusoe kept track of it, and it becomes for Joe “[…] the most important thing in the world. It was the only real thing. It was everything” (126), as he first recollects the one day in September 1918 when he lost it. Eventually, Bonham discovers a way of estimating the sun’s rise and set by counting the number of nurse’s visits that happen with the number of times his sheets are changed. Then, the day he counted 365 days marks the first year of “his new time” in the hospital and “[his] new year’s eve” (141), the falling of a night nurse marks “his second year”
WLA / 32 / 2020 / Emplaincourt (154), the new hospital room his third, and his tapping “SOS. Help” with his head against the pillow the fourth (163). He finally grasps “real time” thanks to the new nurse who traces the letters that spell “Merry Christmas” against the skin of his breast (198-199). While scripting the film in 1964-1965, Trumbo had to resolve the problem of breaking the tedium of a long shot of a “Wounded Joe” lying in darkness and, at the same time, portray scenes other than those of his inevitable dire destiny; therefore, he and Bruñuel decided to incorporate “Joe’s Image” as explained in the following voice-over: When Joe awakens for the first time and asks, “Where am I?” the script describes a camera shot: “medium shot toward a darkened corner of the room.” Then, the script says: “Something sits on the floor. As we INTERCUT back and forth between this corner area and the bed area we realize that JOE’S IMAGE (i.e., Joe as he was before his accident) has been lying unconscious in the corner on the floor, waiting for the WOUNDED JOE on the bed to regain consciousness, thus permitting Joe’s Image also to awaken.” Joe’s Image is awake only when Joe is.^29 For the setting of the hospital room, production designer Harold Michelson—Academy Award
nominee for Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) and Terms of Endearment (1983)—explains
that, after much search, he decided to use the starkest room with the highest windows in the Doheny Mansion, for “it had an eerie feeling to it.”^30 With director of photography Jules Brenner’s unfiltered black-and-and white celluloid, Michelson’s hospital room establishes the
desired atmosphere of an austere, sterile, ether-permeated début-du-siècle infirmary, an
archetypal ambiance recaptured in color by Tetsuo Nagata in Dupeyron’s La Chambre for which
he won a César. In both films, the viewer can almost smell the crude anesthetic. However, Trumbo’s cameo appearance, for example, as a fantasy surgeon doing a monologue (Trumbo,
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image almost identical to the one in the unforgettable opening sequence of Joseph Losey’s King
and Country (1964).^35
As the deadly projectile stridently hurdles toward its target in Trumbo’s film, the frame fades to a series of documentary shots: first, an extreme zoom shot of President Woodrow
Wilson signing the declaration of war followed by the headline of the Los Angeles Evening
Herald of Friday 6 April 1917, “U.S. Calls For Volunteers”; then a packed crowd of young patriotic
Americans waving their Old Glory and a military parade; and finally armed soldiers boarding ship (Metallica, 0:2:04-0:2:17). After a quick cut of the full-frame close up of the bomb’s terrifying explosion, the six-second, dead-silent black screen—broken only by the sound of someone taking long, slow breathes—gradually illuminates, revealing three completely masked doctors resembling the Ku Klux Klan because the camera looks upward, thus elongating their fully covered faces. They are in a field hospital where one inquires about the unique, perplexing survival of the unidentifiable wounded soldier lying before them; another wonders how he was able to get such quick treatment; and another explains that his chest and belly are unmarked because soldiers often instinctively curl into a fetal position to protect their genitals and that “[…] this young man, unfortunately, succeeded” (Metallica, 0:2:44-0:3:00). Without battles or bloodshed, the flash-cut sequence effectively captures that devastating loss-of-innocence moment supplanted by the solid reality of war. Finding Joe’s survival almost unbelievable, Colonel M. F. Tillery, selfishly wanting to seize a unique opportunity to dedicate a year to study such an odd patient who presumably will never know what has happened to him, takes “[…] personal charge of this case until repairs are completed” (Metallica, 0:3:00-0:3:07). Once outside the infirmary and mask removed, dispassionate Tillery, maimed himself and sporting crutches, reveals that, because the patient’s medulla oblongata escaped damage, “[…] his heart, facial,
WLA / 32 / 2020 / Emplaincourt motor, and respiratory centers still function, in short, that he lives” (Metallica, 0:3:20-0:3:33). By compressing time through the use of montage, Trumbo starkly contrasts the lively enthusiasm with which tens of thousands of Americans enlisted in the war with the most horrific outcome: a
living dead, bringing to mind Robert Graves’s memoir Goodbye To All That (1929), an
autobiography describing the destruction and trauma of the Great War that he experienced both in the trenches and in a French hospital where he was pronounced dead while convalescing from shrapnel in his lung at la Somme.^36 Not too unlike Graves, Bonham also becomes a Lazarus figure in that he initially showed no signs of existence other than what the gauges of the life-sustaining machines indicated until the moment when a day nurse realizes that what the doctors had originally diagnosed as “involuntary spasms” are, in fact, his attempts to communicate with them. As Joe is being rushed from the ambulance and into the hospital, Tillery in the following imperturbable voice-over informs the audience of his post-operational orders regarding “unidentified casualty number 47”: Although the cerebellum still permits limited physical movement, such movement signifies nothing. If bodily actions become violent and persistently repetitive, it must be treated as reflexive muscular spasms, which is to say by sedation. […] There’s no justification for his continued existence, unless we learn from him how to help others. We must care for him as gently as if he knew what you were doing
and would feel the pain […]. (Trumbo , 0:4:36 - 0:5: 31 )
At this moment, five minutes into the film in that cold and sterile hospital room, with a reverse- angle showing the obtuse medical team towering over the “human wreck” who is in an out-of- field frame, thus removing the voyeurism element, the black-and-white one-minute scene marks
the moment when Bonham—perhaps an Anglicized contraction of the name Bon Homme
WLA / 32 / 2020 / Emplaincourt succor: “Father, father, I need help, I need help” (Metallica, 0:0:35-0:0:38)—the all encompassing leitmotif of the film. The camera switches to Hetfield’s left hand playing the cords on the guitar neck and then retracts to show only his torso, which, besides the head, is all that remains of “Wounded Joe” (Metallica, 0:0:39-0:0:40). Placing the audience inside wounded Joe’s mind for 111 minutes presented an enormous challenge in transposing the novel to the screen, and in addition to relying on voiceover technique, Trumbo also called on the talents of cinematographer Jules Brenner who explains that, in the script, Trumbo describes three colors: the color of memory, the color of drug-induced fantasy, and the desaturated color stock— without filters or manipulations—of reality, and as the cinematographer, “it represented a wonderful challenge.”^40 Both techniques, the voiceover and the alternation of black and white with color, had been successfully utilized by Trumbo’s collaborator and friend Otto Preminger in
Bonjour Tristesse (1958).^41 Brenner’s unfiltered black and white with the interplay of light and
shadow contributes immensely to the making of what some critics had called Johnny the
“unfilmable” book; however, Trumbo’s film was not the only war motion picture to carry that
label: earlier critics had said the same about Mike Nichols’ Catch 22 (1970), just as later critics
did about Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979).^42
WLA / 32 / 2020 / Emplaincourt From Innocence to Experience: In many ways he was like America itself, […], always there when you needed him, a believer in the virtues of simplicity and directness and hard labor. —Tim O’Brien^43
Like reminiscing seventeen-year-old Cécile (Jean Seberg) in Preminger’s Bonjour Tristesse
(1958), “Flashback Joe” always remembers his past in color, not black and white, and by vividly and trenchantly recapturing his youth and happy home life, Trumbo fittingly depicts the state of mind of much of the nation prior to April 1917, i.e., the American population was less than enthusiastic about wanting to go and fight a war “over there,” for “[t]he vehemently isolationist nation needed enticement” explains Jia-Rui Cook in “The Posters That Sold World War I to the American Public.”^44 Initially, President Woodrow Wilson wanted an all-volunteer army, but six weeks into the war, only 73,000 had done so, forcing him to accept Secretary of War Newton D. Baker’s proposal to establish the Selective Service Act of 1917. Thus, the numerous and the lengthy sequences of home “over here” in the novel and in the film constitute a central part of the narration and are crucial to understanding not only the face of “Flashback Joe” but also the three other faces as well. Why was he fighting a war in Europe five thousand miles from Shale
City? Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose—or the more things change, the more they
remain the same—for fifty years later on the other side of the globe, GIs were asking themselves the same question, prompting Trumbo more than ever to adapt his novel to the big screen. When Joe echoes the question, “What is democracy?”, his father replies, “It’s got something to do with young men killing each other,” and when he pursues his inquiry with, “When it comes my turn, would you want me to go?”, his Father replies, “For democracy, any man would give his only begotten son” (Metallica, 0:0:41-0:0:55). In this “artificial” father-son
WLA / 32 / 2020 / Emplaincourt memorable sequences of the movie—one which no words can better express and convey, one that contributes to the art and the science of making motion pictures. In that scene, the lens—fading from Metallica’s recording studio to the military hospital room—acts as “Joe’s Image” walking from behind the door toward the foot of the bed and gradually to the bedside, seeing “Wounded Joe” with both body and face draped, and we hear stolid head surgeon Tillery in his monotone voiceover assuredly confirming that, “[i]t is impossible for a decerebrated individual to experience pain, pleasure, memory, reason, or thought with any kind. This young man will be as unfeeling and as unthinking as the dead until the day he joins them” (Metallica, 0:1:15-0:1:33). Little does the colonel know how inaccurate his diagnosis is, for Joe spends all his time in thought—either remembering, or hallucinating, or reasoning—and he can, indeed, experience pleasure, as depicted in the film when the new day
nurse stimulates his penis until he climaxes (Trumbo , 1:11:21-1:12:06).
The video then flashes a superimposed image of Hetfield playing the guitar over bedridden “Wounded Joe” saying, “I don’t know whether I’m alive and dreaming or dead, and remembering. How can you tell what’s a dream and what’s real when you can’t even tell when you’re awake and when you’re asleep. Where am I?” (Metallica, 0:1:35-0:1:45), and then Hetfield, as if awakening from a waning post-surgical anesthesia, calmly and softly begins the song’s first verse with a continued alternation of Bm and G7M chords^47 which well depict Joe’s initial amnesia and confusion, his trying to decipher reality from hallucinations and dreams, as well as introduce the gruesome severity of his injuries—there is barely anything left of his body: I can’t remember anything Can’t tell if this is true or dream Deep down inside I feel to scream
WLA / 32 / 2020 / Emplaincourt This terrible silence stops me Now that the war is through with me I’m waking up, I cannot see That there’s not much left of me Nothing is real but pain now. (Metallica, 0:1:46-0:2:13) This opening verse encapsulates the description of “Fantasy Joe” in Book I of the novel, particularly chapter i when Joe, wounded and terrified, cannot distinguish reality from reveries: “He drifted again. He was hurt. He was bad hurt. The bell was fading. He was dreaming. He wasn’t dreaming. He was awake even though he couldn’t see. He was awake even though he couldn’t hear a thing except a telephone that really wasn’t ringing. He was mighty scared” (9). Later in the novel and also in the film, Joe imagines that the fat rat that had gnawed away at a Prussian captain’s face was now eating on him: “He could feel the sharp little teeth as they bit into the edge of the wound […] as it chewed. Then it would […] scoop out a bit more flesh that would hurt and then it would chew again” (91-92). Rats have always played a special role in war films, particularly the fat ones in that apocalyptic “mythical trench landscape of the Great War,”^48
and Joseph Losey’s King and Country (1964) showcases it perhaps better than any other in the
scene when the privates capture a huge, ear-biting rat, put it on trial, find it guilty, and give it a death sentence, just like the officers do Private Hamp. Joe eventually realizes that the rat’s gnawing at his body was a dream and recounts that his worst nightmare of all was of that when he believed he was “[…] an ant walking across a sidewalk and the sidewalk was so big and he was so small that he awakened yelling he was so scared. That was the way to stop nightmares by yelling so hard you had to wake yourself up. But hell that wouldn’t work for him now. In the first place he couldn’t yell and in the second place he was so deaf he couldn’t hear the noise
