The Zombieslayer

This post is dedicated to Miladysa.

WWI may have been the most pointless multi-national war in the past one hundred years. In WWII, there were clearly good guys and bad guys. WWI was a war between imperialistic nations where millions of young working class men died in the trenches for pretty much nothing, and it resolved very little because less than a generation later, it had to be fought again with even more nations caught in the middle of it.

WWI also was pointlessly brutal, with thousands of young men literally getting their faces blown apart. Plastic surgery was still in its infancy and plastic surgeons at the time performed miracles, taking men who had next to nothing left of their faces and giving them something that was good enough to go in public again, although not good enough to lead normal lives.

The Smithsonian has a display of before and after masks of men with their faces demolished and the masks made after the fact. The pictures are quite graphic and will leave you both shocked and astonished that plastic surgeons back then were talented enough to give these men something.

Live Through This

Now imagine this - you’re a WWI Vet. You’ve been in a stinky, filthy trench infested with rats for two years. Your feet are covered in fungus and you and your buddy took turns fending off the rats who enjoyed nibbling at you when you were trying to get some sleep. Your bread’s full of maggots, but you eat it anyways because it’s better than starving. You can’t stand all the way up or else you’ll get your head literally shot off with machine gun fire.

Then a crude hand grenade falls in your trench. You get your face partially blown off. You lose an eyeball, half your nose, and the flesh from one side of your face. You wake up in a hospital with plastic surgeons doing the best they can, but your face is so bad that you get to wear a mask for the rest of your shortened life.

The thing is, you’re better off than your comrades. Shortly after being taken out of the war, they all got hit with mustard gas. You visit them often and watch them die slowly as they’re coughing and wheezing all day and then within a year, they’re all dead as they literally drown in the watery buildup in their lungs as their bodies do everything they can to rid them of that mustard gas.

The Phantom of the Opera

The Phantom of the Opera was a French novel written by Gaston Leroux in 1909 that probably would have faded into obscurity had it not been made into a 1925 silent film starring Lon Chaney as the hideously deformed Phantom. His character plays a tragic role that lives under an opera house, has a beautiful voice, and longs for the love of the beautiful actress/singer Christine who instead loves a fellow actor Raoul.

The movie ends with the Phantom’s death, but throughout the movie, although the Phantom does bad things, the audience feels for the Phantom. It is intentionally sympathetic to the Phantom, a sort of anti-hero with a full range of emotions.

It was very popular with WWI vets who often returned from that stupid war disfigured and shunned by society as children would stare at their battle scarred faces in horror. Although the story was written before WWI, the silent film appealed strongly to these Vets who would watch the movie over and over again, seeing themselves in that tragic role.

So this movie is right up your alley. For two hours, you notice people in the audience actually feel some remorse for how they treat freaks (like you). Before you die, you watch the movie ten times. Living vicariously through the Phantom is the closet you get to actual intimacy with a beautiful woman.