something about Dalton Trumbo's "Johnny Got His Gun"

Johnny Got His Gun, a well-known anti-war novel by American writer Dalton Trumbo, chronicles a soldier's waking nightmare. The protagonist is Joe Bonham, a young American whose service in World War I costs him his arms, legs, vision, hearing, and mouth. Bonham, disoriented and displaced, regains consciousness in what turns out to be a hospital bed and gradually realizes the nightmare: that his mind is doomed to live on as the prisoner of a helpless, unidentified, and incommunicable torso on a hospital bed.

Bonham’s reckoning with his fate, his reasons for going to war, and the horror of it all comes amid rushes of pre-war memories. He also uses what remains of his senses to interpret his environment, and he grows determined to communicate with the hospital staff that keep him alive against his will.

Bonham’s extended memory flashbacks did not often connect with me, but some passages set in the present moved me in their intensity of anxiety and outrage.

Notes:

• Johnny Got His Gun was written in 1938 and published in 1939.
• Trumbo was blacklisted by Hollywood but continued working under pseudonyms. The influence of the blacklist soon waned, and he resumed getting credit for his accomplishments during his remarkable career.
• Trumbo directed the 1971 film adaptation of Johnny Got His Gun.
• Hearing Metallica’s single, “One,” around 1992, was my introduction to Johnny Got His Gun. The music video uses clips from the film.

something about Kirk Douglas

Kirk Douglas (1916-2020) was a star in a generation of greats. He was more accessible than John Wayne, Cary Grant, and Charlton Heston, and he combined the complicated humanity of Henry Fonda with the versatility and authority of Burt Lancaster. He was a confident and squarely handsome man with a distinctive cleft chin. I always thought one of his greatest assets was how his grin seemed to suggest a mischievous inner life.

Now Kirk Douglas is gone. He will be remembered primarily for his role in the great Kubrick film, "Spartacus." Other favorites of mine include "Last Train From Gun Hill" and "Lonely Are the Brave." "Last Train From Gun Hill," released in 1959, co-stars the great Anthony Quinn; Douglas and Quinn are friends pitted against each other in an old West-style battle of wills. "Lonely Are the Brave," from 1962, is a great late Western, and, as Roger Ebert said of Lee Marvin's "Monte Walsh," "like a lot of recent Westerns, it's about the end of the old West."