Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five is definitely not what I expected a novel about
World War II to be about. It is extremely honest and straightforward, making
sure to portray everything at face value. Fury,
however, is exactly what I expected a war movie to look like: it was gory and
violent, yet showed fabulous looking people laying down their lives to protect
their fellow man. While both Fury and
Slaughterhouse Five depict extremely
graphic pictures of what it means to be a soldier in World War II with tones of
hopelessness and passivity, David Ayer’s Fury
carries an underlying theme of heroism and brotherhood, which is not as present
in Slaughterhouse Five.
Spoiler alert: Fury does not end well for the soldiers. In the final scenes of the
movie, the men are stranded in the middle of the German countryside in their tank,
and have decided to face certain death in order to take on an entire regiment
of German troops. The men know that they cannot survive, yet remain and fight
out of loyalty to their country and each other. In Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, there is a similar
feeling of hopelessness, seen in Billy Pilgrim’s experience in the train car where
the men become underfed and are forced to live in unthinkable conditions. He loses his will to continue as he becomes
more and more ostracized from the other soldiers. His only friend, the hobo,
dies and he treats it as if it was nothing, simply saying, “So it goes.” In Fury, the men have a similar numbness
towards death, but more out of desensitization. They see so much death, that a
young kid like Logan Lerman’s character, who breaks down after his first kill,
is seen as a source of entertainment rather than pity for the other men.
Early on in Slaughterhouse Five, it becomes clear that this book is in no way a
tale of great heroism. Billy is the farthest thing from a soldier; he’s
inexperienced and afraid, and has no desire to be in war. The other men don’t
like him, separating him in every situation possible: they make him stand in
the train car, they give him a civilian’s coat, they make him sleep in the
infirmary wing at the camp. The only people Billy has a chance to become close
to die, leaving him all along. This is completely opposite of what is portrayed
in Fury, where there is a certain
comrade-in-arms mentality. Before the big battle scenes of the movie, the men
always say, “Best job I ever had,” which
is their way of acknowledging the unbreakable bond that they share as a team. They
are willing to lay down their lives for each other, and go to great lengths to
ensure their unit stays intact, which lent a certain warmth to the film.
It was strange to see how two
different stories could surround the same war. One took a very patriotic and
American-central viewpoint, while another made the American weak and afraid.
What I took away from both, however, was that war is horrific and painful and
possesses the power to change people. For Billy Pilgrim, it forced him to deal
with his trauma in a way that made others think he was crazy, and for Logan
Lerman’s character Norman, it hardened him into a hateful killer in the name of
country.
