Desperately Seeking the Western Front

So far, I've ducked the whole Barbenheimer juggernaut. I think I will skip Oppenheimer altogether, though I intend to watch Barbie when I can see it at home.

Following Michael Leddy's recent rewatch and short review of the 1985 film Desperately Seeking Susan, I felt the urge to share in reliving that time from my mid-20s. 

I had also just recently said to my other half that we should watch the recent version of All Quiet on the Western Front... a film that's about as opposite from Susan as you can get. We joked that it would be our own version of Barbenheimer, and he came back with this: "We can call it 'Desperately Seeking the Western Front.'"

We didn't watch the two films back-to-back on the same day (we're too old for that), but saw Susan on Friday evening and Western Front on Saturday night.

As Michael wrote in his post, Desperately Seeking Susan is a "screwball comedy in bohemian drag, with amnesia, mistaken identities, and film canisters and liquor bottles for conking people over the head."

I felt like a bit of an amnesiac myself, having forgotten about Aidan Quinn's role in the film altogether. I enjoyed the nostalgia of seeing the mid-1980s and trying to remember what I thought of it back then. From a cultural perspective, the club scene in particular stood out, I thought, because I could see how Madonna's look at that point arose from the punk and New Wave scene, which I didn't perceive at the time.

After we watched it, I realized that the film was made almost 40 years ago, and that's just about the same time interval from the present as the 1946 film The Best Years of Our Lives was from 1985. Contrasting the cultural world of today, with that of Susan, with that of Best Years... That seems like an essay waiting to happen.

As I expected, All Quiet on the Western Front was about as far away from Susan as you can get. It was immersive and brutal. It's well-made as a film; I didn't realize the American release was dubbed.

I have never read the 1929 book, though I have read a number of other texts about the realities of trench warfare. It sounds as though the filmmakers' alteration of the story line genericizes the original somewhat: while it's still anti-war, it is shallower and more cartoonish. Quoting the Wikipedia page,

Jamelle Bouie in The New York Times said the 2022 version missed the essence of the novel, which is not just antiwar, but also portrays the alienation and terrible toll even on those who come home. "Remarque is not as interested in the war and geopolitics as he is in the war as human absurdity made manifest."

Reading about the omitted part of the book — where the main character, Paul, goes home on leave — I can understand why the filmmakers made the decision to leave it out, for reasons of length and filmic momentum. For me, the concept of war's absurdity, alienation, and terrible toll all came through loud and clear.

The filmmakers also decided to add another set of perspectives to the film — from a general and the armistice negotiator for Germany — which are not in the book at all, and then have the ending coincide with the armistice, interspersing scenes from the soldiers, the general, and the negotiators.

I have more argument with that change, which varies from the book's story timing at the end, than I do with the omission of Paul's trip home. It reeks of Hollywoodesque emotional manipulation; will Paul die before the armistice begins, or won't he? It's effective in the film, of course, but I resent it, especially now that I know it was not the way the author wrote the story originally.