Al said, "The thing that scares me the most is that everybody wants me back to normal." That quote reminds me of Paul from All Quiet on the Western Front when he comes home and sees something different from the battlefield. In another life, all the people around him that he experienced did not know what was going on, but instead used their own ideas to interpret the war and teach them how to fight and win. When watching "Billy Lynn's Halftime", I also remembered these two films, both of which talked about returning to real life from the battlefield of war and discovering the difference between self-reality and external objective reality. So when they return to the external reality, they will all be confused and will begin to doubt themselves and the world.
Paul would want to get back on the battlefield, Amy would be afraid to return to normalcy, and Billy would start thinking about what it means to be in war, what it means to be a soldier.
After staying in one place for a long time, some characteristics of human nature are suppressed, will it become more closed, and do not want to go out and touch new things, and have become accustomed to the comfort zone?
I think of Old Bo and Reid in "The Shawshank Redemption". Old Bo spent most of his life in prison for decades. When he was told that he could go out on parole, he wanted to kill people and wanted to commit a crime so that he could stay in prison, but he still Going out to real life, being a store cashier, everything is very uncomfortable, he can only commit suicide to seek relief. And Reid, too, went out of prison, everything became confused, he didn't know what he could do, and how he should survive. He said that I had reported it for 40 years, and suddenly I couldn't go to the toilet without reporting it. He also nearly killed himself.
So when the car drove to their house, everyone was polite to send the others back first, and they came home last. This kind of psychology also reflects that some of them dare not face the reality and dare not face the people closest to them.
When Amy's wife asked Amy to go to work, he hesitated and refused. Homer was also confused about the future, and Fred, who was full of confidence, slowly lost his confidence in the face of reality. This is the psychological performance of the soldiers after the war. This is normal. And pain takes time to heal.
Another difference is that when you return to real life after the war, you must survive to find a job. Starting a job is a reflection of personal worth. When Amy, who didn't dare to start over, heard that he could still be promoted is the talent the bank needed, he slowly regained his confidence and his life slowly got on track. Fred, who had many merits in the army, wanted to find his previous job, but he was not needed. Instead, he wanted to be an apprentice for his former apprentice. His specialties were useless. And his marriage is in crisis. And Huo Mo is because of low self-esteem, his sense of responsibility is also very strong, because his disability does not want to implicate his family and lovers, so he refuses their care first.
Life is still going on, Amy has a happy marriage and a happy family, and Homer also opens his heart to accept the love and care of his girlfriend, and the two are finally getting married. Fred and Amy's daughter have a good impression of each other but are not recognized. Fred finally made up his mind to divorce his wife. He also found a job that suits him, and met Amy's daughter at Homer's wedding. This wedding took a long time to describe. The pain and pain in the heart caused by the war was slowly healed with love and tolerance, and then happiness was obtained. Maybe I wanted to keep this beauty forever, so I used the wedding way of telling us that life is still going to get better. Fred also bravely walked up to Amy's daughter, and the two kissed. Happy Ending!
The film tells the war from the perspective of soldiers returning home after the war. The impact of war on soldiers and the people around them, whether psychological, emotional or life, also expresses an anti-war view. Telling the feelings and changes of their real life from this perspective is more touching than directly describing the cruelty of war. We seem to empathize with this delicate emotion, but in fact we don’t understand it at all, because we have not experienced it, and we will never know What the war meant to them, and what it meant to return to normal life. Like the others in Billy Lynn who felt that these soldiers were heroes, for themselves, they just really wanted to live. Like Paul said to freshmen in "All Quiet on the Western Front," I'm not going to tell you things you don't know at all. On the battlefield, they just want to save their own lives. Fortunately, the three soldiers in "Golden Age" have all started a new life and are developing in a better direction.
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