Film Analysis: Johnny Got His Gun

Joe wants people to see what war does to you and how it isn’t as great as everyone says it is. Joe chose to go to war because he wanted to be this great human and he ended up paying the price by losing half his body and not being able to communicate with others.

Many times in someone's life they do not understand why they are doing something. In Johnny Got His Gun, by Dalton Trumbo, Joe a young soldier who is fighting a war that he thought he understood. He believed that he was fighting with a purpose and then the unexpected happened. He lost his legs, arms, and was left with a large hole in his face. This is when he becomes to realize that he is not personally invested in the war and that he only went because it was expected of him. This is similar to Sam from Shenandoah. He is a young confederate soldier who is called off to fight in the Civil War on the day of his wedding and is forced to leave his new bride at home to wonder if she will ever see her husband. He is heartbroken getting the news that he has to leave for war but knows he has to be strong. He is caught by the north army and is taken by train. When his bride’s brother goes missing her family goes out to look for him. Instead of finding the boy they find Sam and his wife is relieved. Sam has his realization that he doesn’t fully understand why he is in the war. Although Sam and Joe realize the truth in different ways, both do eventually understand that they weren't personally invested in the war.

Film noir is a famous era of filmmaking that defined the cinematic experience in Hollywood for a whole decade. No film can correctly represent such a influential cinematic era like Gun Crazy directed by Joseph H. Lewis. Gun Crazy is a unique expression of film noir of the 1950s that utilizes many cinematic elements in unparalleled ways to tell its story in a distinct fashion. Lewis uses cinematic techniques such as lighting, composition, editing, music, and mise-en-scene of the opening sequence to establish the tone and character motivations of the story.

In Johnny Got His Gun, Trumbo illustrates the relationship between a father and his son as it changes through an internal transition that occurs in the son. The son’s natural and universal transition is conveyed through the nature of the campsite. The fishing rod symbolizes the close relationship between the father and the son, and illustrates how two people can grow apart physically while still preserving their tight bond with each other.

At the beginning of the book Joe starts to truly realize how destroyed he is as a man, “My arms are gone. Both of my arms are gone Kareen both of them. They’re gone. They’ve cut my arms off both of my arms. Oh jesus mother god Kareen they’ve cut off both of them. Oh jesus mother god Kareen Kareen Kareen my arms” (38). Just by reading this excerpt, the sad cries and absolute desolation of Joe is apparent through the use of repetition. Trumbo first repeats “my arms are gone” multiple times before switching clearly to repeating “they” and finally to repeating “Kareen”. He does this to powerfully ingrain and fix a dilemma, before placing the blame and then showing how hopeless this situation really is. Trumbo’s use of repetition was very well organized in the sense that they pressed these ideas into the reader by repeating them and highlighting the theme. The last use of repetition serving purposely to show what Joe is emotionally going through by repeating “Kareen”, representing how Joe has become almost like a child, or not in a powerful enough state to do anything about his issue. Trumbo emphasizes the helplessness of being drafted and forced into abhorrent situations again, “He too had been taken away from his home. He too had been put into the service of another without his consent. He too had been sent to a foreign country far from his native parts. He too had been forced to fight against other slaves of his own kind in a strange place” (183). Here, the repetition of he, referring to soldiers but more so just the average man, is repeated here to emphasize how regular people are forced like “slaves” to fight for people who are higher up. This strongly resembles like the quote above, just like a child and their parents earlier, where Joe repeatedly cries out for Kareen like a child begging for help. Really, Dalton does this to show the bigger picture which is how soldiers are

In the wise words of Charlie Anderson, “[I]f we don’t try, we don’t do. And if we don’t do, why are we here on this Earth?” Charlie Anderson is the protagonist in the movie Shenandoah, who lives with his six sons, Jacob, James, John, Nathan, Henry, and Boy, and his daughter, Jennie. Charlie Anderson is the type of person who responds to everything by trying and giving it his all, but only if it concerns him. The movie takes place during the Civil war, which occurs near their family farm and Charlie’s intent was to stay neutral because he felt that the war did not concern him, until his youngest son, Boy, was mistaken for a union soldier and taken by the confederate army. Charlie ventures off with five of his sons and his daughter, while James and his wife, Ann, and their baby stay back at the house. Along the way, tragedy strikes the family, affecting them in ways that cannot be undone. The protagonist in the novel Johnny Got his Gun, Joe Bonham, was drafted into the war and greatly injured as a result. Joe experiences a loss of his eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and limbs. The only thing that Joe is left with is a working brain and very little ways to communicate with the outside world. As the novel progresses, Joe faces an immense amount of internal conflict and struggles with the effects that war has on him. Although both Charlie and Joe experience the harsh impacts of war, they respond to them in quite different ways.

The text, ‘The Things They Carried', is an excellent example which reveals how individuals are changed for the worse through their first hand experience of war. Following the lives of the men both during and after the war in a series of short stories, the impact of the war is accurately portrayed, and provides a rare insight into the guilt stricken minds of soldiers. ‘The Things They Carried' shows the impact of the war in its many forms: the suicide of an ex-soldier upon his return home; the lessening sanity of a medic as the constant death surrounds him; the trauma and guilt of all the soldiers after seeing their friends die, and feeling as if they could have saved them; and the deaths of the soldiers, the most negative impact a war

In a different fashion, Charlie is also similarly thrusted upon the knowledge that his way of life has been negatively affected by the war. While working on the farm like any other day, the neighbors slave, Gabriel, who was spending time with his son Boy, came with inauspicious news that Boy had been taken by Union soldiers. Here Charlie learns that his son who meant so much to him because he was born the day his wife died, has been taken which puts an immediate stop to his thinking that everything is okay. This further promits him, like Joe, to go and search for Boy who represents the past and normal life that has been taken away by war. Even though Joe and Charlie find out what the war has taken from them in unmistakably different ways, they both begin searching for a part of their previous life that has been forcibly taken away from them because of war.

Since he has chosen to go to war at a young age, he sees several things others do not want to see. Since being home, he lives on his own and does not bother looking for a wife because he thinks he is too old. Although he is only 23, he says he becomes old from seeing too much, old from too much life, and old from knowing too much. He is walking with a cane, and he passes blood. Charley does not think he will be alive any longer. In certain ways it makes him sad, but in other ways it makes him happy having to not remember all that he has gone through. He makes himself a picnic near the creek. While watching the water flow, he often wonders whether he should visit the others, and by others Charley means the people who got killed in the war. Charley keeps a weapon he took off of a confederate officer, who has been dead. He comes close to visiting the others because he wants the pain to go away, but now he decides not to leave. He is continuing to think about the pretty things instead of the bad things he thinks about

The Charlie Company is made up many different types of men in their teens and early twenties ranging from the boys who grew up in upper-class family with a very privileged life to boys that grew up in poor families. Many of these young men never imagined that they would be drafted into the Vietnam War and in turn it would change their lives forever. There were men that voluntarily enlisted into the Vietnam War like John Young. John Young, who was inspired by John F. Kennedy, was attending college when he decided that it was his calling to enlist in the military. John Young served as a squad leader in the 1st platoon. He came to war eager and ready to fight for his country. He thought that he was so smart and skilled that when he gets to Vietnam he will not lose many of his men, but he thought wrong. When he first arrived to Vietnam with his unit it did not take long until he started losing his men. At this time in America Uncle Sam was sending out drafts for young men aged late teens to early twenties to join the war. There was a problem with this draft because if you did not want to go to war you did not have to. Men that went to college did not have to go to war. This caused many people at this time to go to college and get a degree and maintain their grades. Men that were gay or had a doctors note from their doctor saying they were “injured” did not have to go to war either. Men that were

In his book The Boys of ’67: Charlie Company’s War in Vietnam, Andrew Wiest tells the story of a combat company through the collected interviews of the veterans and their family members. Charlie Company, 4th Battalion of the 47th Infantry of the 9th Division in Vietnam began as a diverse group of young men. From lower class to middle class, consisting of whites, blacks, Hispanics, and a Native American. These men were trained and sent to a war in their formative years, many had wives with children or children on the way. Charlie Company’s stint in the Vietnam War would transform these impressionable young men and challenge their hearts and souls. From Andrew Wiest’s book The Boys of ’67: Charlie Company’s War in Vietnam, we can glimpse into what it was like to be a citizen turned soldier in Vietnam.

As evidenced from the past tense verb in the title of the novel, Johnny Got His Gun takes as its focus the aftermath of war for a soldier, rather than the optimistic, patriotic prewar time frame upon which other novels—as well as the original song "Johnny Get Your Gun"—focus. Although the novel remains clear about the fact that Johnny received his injuries from an exploding shell, Johnny does not ever think back to combat warfare. The novel takes as its opponent not combat warfare but rather the mentality of warfare and organization of modern warfare by the moneyed classes. Joe's memories related to the war, such as the Lazarus story, or the story of the man with a flap over his stomach, do not directly deal with warfare. Instead, these various memories create a sense of the incomprehensible decay, injury, and pain that result from war. Joe remembers the stories with a wry tone that gives a sense of the absurdity of each of the situations—such as the rumor about the man who lost his face only to return home and die at his wife's hands. In this sense, the use of the war in the text remains true to its use in the title of the novel: the war exists as a precondition for senseless and grotesque injury and

This passage helps the reader understand how the emotional burden of uncertain death weighed on the soldier. However, it also acts as a symbol by giving light to the fact that the emotional baggage they carry was brought about by their own fear of humiliation and shame. Many of the soldiers are there only to avoid the persecution that ensued those who evaded the draft. Through the use of symbolism, O’Brien is able to effectively highlight the burdens faced by the soldiers who conformed to the expectations of society.

(Page 110). It is clear that many soldiers, like Joe, didn’t have a clear reason for fighting. Many people say they fight for freedom or liberty or democracy, but when they die, they aren’t happy that they risked their life for these words. When they die, they realize that they want to live. Furthermore, the contrast between the Charlie’s and Joe’s personal investments reveals that there are some things worth fighting for and risking your life for.

The wartime lives of the soldiers who fought in the war were in a state of mind of mixed feelings. Happiness and devastating are two adjectives that can describe the soldier’s feelings in the war because at one second they can be happy that they succeeded on a mission, but on the other hand, it can be very devastating because one of their own soldiers could have been killed during the war. Aside from physical danger losing one of your own soldiers or having your family worry about you every day and night are some negatives and unpleasant parts about fighting in a war. For example, soldiers loved ones worried each day, and hoped that they would not get a knock on their door by someone who was going to tell them that their fathers, husbands, sons, or brothers have died in the war.