An ultimate militarism antidote

When I've just moved to Berlin, my first husband introduced me to one of his friends from the uni, who loved inviting people into his uncozy apartment he shared with some other pretentious Berlin fags. I and him never got along, as he was quite an arrogant prick with a fat ass and quite a bit of an attitude. Nevertheless, I came to one of those events.

In his dark bedroom we settled on a second hand sofa, I figured no one was drinking and this was herewith a very promising evening. Initial chit-chat finished, and he presented us with the cultural program: Johnny got his gun. I thought we would watch Avengers, but well, no.

The movie started, and I realized it's in black and white, and we had no subtitles. I was worried I wouldn't understand much, as you might know, ADHD has this kind of bug. Stuffy room, middle-aged ever-student Germans, black and white movie. About war. Charming.

When the movie started, I realized it was about a veteran, who was a typical meat grinder material, which came back from the war, well, grinded. He has no intact input organs and limbs left and the only thing he can do, is to wonder around in the labyrinth of his memories and thoughts, struggling to distinguish them from reality.

The loss, the helplessness and the futility of war, the mismatch of the vision of the brainwashed with patriotism and war propaganda, the endless nightmare that the life can become, all of that is served to the viewer in concentrated form.

Johnny tries to escape, the only possible way to do it is, of course, through death. The narrative is hypnotic and repetitive, mirroring the sensation of the protagonist, as if we were lying there with no limbs in a hospital bed ourselves.

Johnny had it all, he wanted to marry a girl, he wanted to father a child.

You wanted to get a career, to travel a world, to build a house, to milk a cow with your bare hands. Or you wanted to cure cancer, to fly into space, to learn how to pilot an airplane. Johnny wanted too.

War destroys everything, and if somebody tries to tell you the opposite, punch them in the face. On my authority.