Kurt Vonnegut Films

There have been several adaptations of Kurt Vonnegut’s work.  Several have been difficult to track down, and probly for good reason.

Slapstick (Of Another Kind) (1982), judging from several reviews, may be one of the worst movies ever. The summary isn't promising: A rich, beautiful couple give birth to deformed alien twins who, when their heads are together, are the smartest kids on the planet.  The IMDb rating is 2.1, putting it in company with some very bad and embarrassing films.  The film stars Jerry Lewis and might rival his previously unreleased The Day the Clown Cried (1972), which even Lewis admitted was terrible.

Happy Birthday, Wanda June (1971) I saw many years ago and have looked to see whether it was available anywhere.  It starred Joanne Woodward.  Whereas, I found Breakfast of Champions (1997) on Netflix, starring Nick Nolte and Bruce Willis, directed by Alan Rudolph. It's difficult to get through. Robert Altman had originally bought the rights to the film, and his cinematic style is more dynamic than Rudolph’s if not close to Vonnegut’s narrative style.

Even Slaughterhouse-Five (1972) wasn't the easiest film to find.  It’s director, George Roy Hill, is best known for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), The Sting (1973), and Slap Shot (1977).  Such popular successes didn’t transfer to Slaughterhouse-Five, but the film may be Hill’s most accomplished work.

The most notable difference between book and movie is the absence of the “Vonnegut narrator”. This may have been the boldest stroke taken in Hill’s directing career, not to mention that the film follows the novel closely (Vonnegut liked the film very much).  Besides, with the Vonnegut voice gone, a key element of the story will be realized more significantly.  But first a plot reminder.

Billy Pilgrim (Michael Sacks) is captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge and eventually taken to Dresden.  He’s present, protected in the bowels of the slaughterhouse, at the Dresden fire bombing.  After the war, he becomes an optometrist in Ilium, New York.  In middle age he’s taken by alien beings to their home planet along with a soft-porn star Montana Wildhack (Valerie Perrine).

The aliens are Tramalfadorians, who appeared in a previous Vonnegut novel.   Billy’s contact with them allows him to become unstuck in time.  This means he can go to all points of his life, including his death, like an internal time traveler.  Dresden, his childhood, his time in a hospital, his abduction from Earth. 

On the screen we move from one period of his life to another, usually initiated by an action, words, or a thing like a boot, and used for contrast and bitter irony. Within his life, Billy has stumbled into a form of the infinite, resembling the doctrine of the Eternal Return: “the universe has been recurring, and will continue to recur, in a self-similar form an infinite number of times across infinite time or space.” (Wikipedia)

Revisiting his past and future, he becomes reconciled to the multiple insanities that he’s lived through. His German captors take the American prisoners to the city where they encounter Jewish prisoners on the way to a concentration camp. Then he lives through the Dresden firebombing, a result of the military strategy concocted by Curtis LeMay.  The Germans subsequently execute Billy’s best friend, Edgar Derby (Eugene Roche), mistaking his innocent actions for looting.  Lastly, there’s Lazzaro’s (Ron Leibman) dogged stalking of Billy because he blamed Billy for the death of a soldier on the train to the p.o.w. camp.

Ricocheting through his own life exemplifies the “pilgrim” aspect of his life.  It seems both absurd – because it takes him randomly through event after event – and meaningful – he understands his life’s destiny.

His abduction to Tramalfadore is meant to help the aliens understand human love and sexuality.  Along with him, they have taken a soft porn actress, Montana Wildhack (Valerie Perrine).  They hope she will sufficiently arouse Billy, who feels self-consciously uncomfortable, situated in a bubble, being watched by all the Tramalfadorians, as well as maintaining fidelity with his wife, Valencia (Sharon Gans).

The element of captivity is a central part of another Vonnegut-based film, Mother Night (1996). Howard W. Campbell Nolte) sits in an Israeli prison not far from Adolf Eichmann, one the architects of the Nazi Final Solution.  Like Eichmann, Campbell has been kidnaped from the Americas and taken to Israeli for a war crimes trial.  Like Billy, he's given a task: write his confession. 

We never see Eichmann, but he communicates with Campbell occasionally and believes he’s close to his Nazi brethren.  Campbell lived in Germany before the war, was married to a German actress, Helga (Sheryl Lee), and had a very comfortable life.  Then Major Frank Wirthanen (John Goodman) enters his life and manipulates Campbell into becoming an intelligence agent for the United States.  During the war, Campbell becomes a propagandist (like Ezra Pound was for Italy) and loses himself in his role.  While saving Allied lives by coding information into his broadcasts, he also stirs virulent anti-Semitic feelings that result in condemning Jews to the death camps.

The contradictory life Campbell embraces is pure Vonnegut irony.  After the war, Campbell escapes with Major Wirthanen’s help but he must live a secret life essentially unable to trust anyone.  Finally, he befriends George Kraft (Alan Arkin), a painter, to whom he tells his story.  Things unravel from there.  A neo-Nazi group discovers him and the Israelis are in the wings.

Like Slaughterhouse-Five, the film jumps around in time, the reason for doing it not being as integral to the film's content as it was for Slaughterhouse-Five.  Campbell has been taken by Israelis, not Tramalfaforians.  Director Keith Gordon (A Midnight Clear) and Nick Nolte do a great job making the film compelling, given that Campbell is a difficult character with which to identify and sympathize.  This latter detail, however, gets to the crux of Campbell’s torn identity and torment. 

Billy Pilgrim became unstuck in time and found meaning in the face of life’s and history’s absurdities.  Historical forces seized Howard W. Campbell and never released him from its absurdity.