Don't Talk About The War
Feb. 10th, 2025 07:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphilo British films made immediately after the end of WWII are either all about the War or else ignore it completely. Case in point: The October Man (1947) an effective little thriller about a man recovering from a serious head injury who is falsely accused of murder. So how did he get that injury- bullet to the head? piece of flying shrapnel? Colliding with a tree after baling out of his Lancaster? No, he was travelling on a late night bus and the brakes failed and it smashed into a wall. Why, yes, of course- an entirely civilian accident. I look at him and all the people round him and I think, "Two years ago all of you were either in uniform or sheltering from air raids and it's as if none of it ever happened"
I think I get it. The war was such a big thing in everybody's lives that it had either be dealt with full on- as in your standard war movie- or not at all. Refer to it even casually in a story about something else and its going to take over. It's not yet- and perhaps never will be- something to be treated casually.
I think something similar is happening with Covid.
I think I get it. The war was such a big thing in everybody's lives that it had either be dealt with full on- as in your standard war movie- or not at all. Refer to it even casually in a story about something else and its going to take over. It's not yet- and perhaps never will be- something to be treated casually.
I think something similar is happening with Covid.
no subject
Date: 2025-02-10 03:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-02-10 08:15 pm (UTC)The protagonist of this film is suffering from PTSD. I think the film makers chose to make its cause a peacetime accident because many of the audience would have been suffering wartime PTSD and to see that on the screen would have just too distressing for them. They were in the cinema to be entertained and not to have their wounds exposed.....