War is Hell

Combat Shock (1986)

War is a sanitized concept in today's world.  You can pick up a controller and teleport directly into World War II through any numbers of titles.  Commercials show square-jawed Supermen climbing mountains to slay the dragon; or, even more terrifying, men silently hunch over a computer screen playing the new high-tech video game -- piloting an unmanned drone.  Our movies even connect to our subconscious with shallow visuals of things going boom while faceless models bravely throw themselves into the fire, consequences be damned.

It's rare we're ever greeted with those consequences.  You rarely hear about the men when they try to re-assimilate into society and fail; you rarely hear about when they become the victims; rarest still, is when those men are consumed by their own demons.  The stories we hear are those of triumph and bravery, not fear and cowardice.

Combat Shock is a movie that deals only in fear and cowardice.

Frankie Dunlan is a pathetic man.  He's not pathetic in the same way Robert DeNiro's Travis Bickle is pathetic, a wayward loser with redeemable qualities.  He's pathetic in the way most normal people are pathetic, incapable of coping with the intense monotony of a "normal" life yet slowly stumbling through it one mistake at a time.

Frankie lives in poverty with his over-bearing wife and special needs child, a creature almost directly transported from David Lynch's Eraserhead.   He can't find work.  He's haunted by the images of what he did in service of his country.  His own father thinks he died in Saigon.  This is his life.  He's never presented with the possibility of something better coming along.  Even when he finally decides to do something, in this case commit a crime to finally get his hands on some money, the consequences are terrible.

To say the movie is nihilistic would be a severe understatement.  It's climax suggests the only logical conclusion for Frankie is a murder-suicide.  But that isn't an attack on the film.  In its nihilism there is a dark, unrelenting honesty that rarely goes addressed in civilized society.  We simply can't understand how men, especially our veterans, can go crazy one day and snap, and often it's not something we even want to understand.  This movie is trying to find a place where an answer to that question might reside.  Combat Shock isn't arguing that the men who fight war are free of the consequences; to the contrary, it's arguing that the men responsible for war are free of those consequences while the men who fight it are the ones forced to continually bear the crushing weight of that burden.