Regeneration
is a British film directed by Gillies MacKinnon and based
on the novel by Pat Barker. The film begins with a scene displaying
the squalor of the trenches of World War I and then focuses
most of the film on soldiers psychologically unable to continue
at the battlefront who were sent to an army treatment center.
Rather than restoring the personalities of the soldiers and
sending them home, the aim of the center is "regeneration"-to
equip them to return mindlessly to battle. The methods of
the center vary depending upon the psychologist assigned to
each patient-from hypnosis to electroshock therapy to persuasion
through dialog. We learn that each soldier has valid reasons
for wanting to stay out of battle, and the treatment center
achieves surreal successes. Through the torture of electric
shocks, at least one soldier becomes immediately compliant,
but the psychologist who is our protagonist in the film clearly
finds this method barbaric; instead, he seeks to destroy the
emotions and even the logic that motivate those who have stopped
fighting. Either way, the objective is to strip patients of
their identities in order to get them to resume their duty
as fighting machines. All do indeed return to battle, mostly
to die in utter futility, so the film could easily have been
titled "Many Flew into the Cuckoo's Nest." War's dehumanization,
in short, is triumphant in this telling of Europe's Vietnam.
MH
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