Expanding more on writing assignment #6, I think the scene where Billy is watching the tape on the projector of a battle in the war backwards would serves as a good repesentative of an essential part of the movie that would be able to represent the book in a movie quite accurately. In this scene, Billy is looking back at the war after already being through it himself. Slaughterhouse is viewed by some as an anti-war novel, even though Vonnegut says that war is inevidable, in chapter one. At the same time, Vonnegut does not want war. After being through WWII, he has seen some of the worst images that a human could see, such as mass amounts of dead bodies from bombs and other causes. Another theme is fate (there is no free will). This scene represents that because the person who watches the tape already knows what happens, and what has happened up to that, similar to how Billy sees his own life. He is looking back on the tape, as he does in his life. In the tralfamadorian perspective, there is no order or events, they all just happen at once. There is no time. Because the tape is being played backwards, there is no order to things compared to if it were to be played forwards. The way the author describes this scene made me feel as though all of the negative aspects of the battle were being turned into positive ones. The bombs were going back into the planes, the ground was being put back together, people were coming back to life, and so on. For this reason, this scene was actually one of my favourite pieces of writing in the entire novel. Everything was being put into its right place. Vonnegut created a beautiful contrast here because the war and that particular battle was gruesome, hideous, and terrifying but he made it graceful, optomistic, and beautiful.
As soon as I decided to choose this particular scene in the book, I immediately thought of "The Scientist" music video by Coldplay.The entire video is backwards. Much like the scene, it is one of my favourite music videos I've ever seen.
Near the end of the video (which would actually be the beginning), the singer was in a car crash, but it is shown in reverse. I think that by putting this in reverse, it actually shows the beauty in what had happened. Even though it was a brutal crash, and the girl who was sitting in the passenger seat died from it, it was shown backwards so she actually did not die in the video. She was dead, and at the end she was living. It was quite elegant to me as i watched the wind shield come back together, and the car gradually increasing in condition while rolling up the hill. The end was happy in the video, but in reality the end was terrible, and the same goes for the tape that Billy watched. That's the beauty of it.
hahahahahaha nice
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