‘The Best Years of Our Lives’ or — Trauma and Healing in The Nuclear Age?
When a film is called ‘The Best Years of Our Lives’ (1946) the obvious question is — but which years are the best?
Three servicemen return home to America after World War II. They are changed men but it seems that America itself has changed just as much in the meantime; modernity seems to have snuck in whilst they were away. Even the way people speak seems to shine with intimations of the future — ‘We should put YOU into mass production’. They left a country that was still bruised from the Great Depression and have returned to one soaring into the Atomic Age.
So readjustments need to be made by everyone — patience to accommodate wounds and trauma whilst men who learned to live with nothing must swallow their disgust and try to show patience towards a nation that now has everything. Tensions can’t help but arise yet what is interesting, and impressive, about ‘The Best Years of Our Lives’ is how these tensions are expressed and confronted.
On the surface it’s all rather mannered, even a little reserved, but listen closely to the dialogue because the script is riddled with tiny explosions of emotion. A seemingly innocent or banal statement is uttered only to be immediately destroyed or exposed by a seemingly innocent or banal retort, an ironic punch or undercut in disguise. Almost every sentence is a potential bomb, its little own Bikini Atoll of emotion. One of the big bombs comes from the daughter who gets one of the best lines of the movie — “I’m going to break this marriage up” — yet her mother’s response a minute later might be even better, and more brutal.
Or notice the sexual and social, and highly critical, connotations during all the talk concerning the use, function and application of make-up. Also notice how devastating these words about make-up become when one of the characters is seen applying her lip-stick in the mirror a while later and how if they were spoken during this scene it would destroy her completely. And it’s not just the vain woman the words would pierce but the very concept of this new America itself.
Another explosive device nestled in this movie is that it seems to predict the future of the American financial system, even the great crash of 2007/8. One of the characters returns to his job at the bank but is disgusted at how the system treats people. Interestingly though his response is to issue loans to people with no collateral. On the surface a decent and altruistic act yet America would go on to do this on a vast scale years later and end up crashing the entire system. But, then again, to see a bright future after trauma always needs a touch of excess and self-denial.
What’s also interesting about ‘TBYOOL’ is how far into the background the shadow of the military recedes. The men seem determined to put the past behind them and there’s hardly any military paraphernalia on display here for a film about war. This is about men attempting to blend back in with their unspoken experiences being just that — unspoken. We don’t need the details; we just need to watch and listen to these men speak. There’s a great scene when Fred and Al meet in a bar to have a heart to heart conversation over a drink, like regular folk do. The only problem, and it’s a funny one, is how the two guys have this ‘emotional conversation’ in the structure of a military exchange, unable to function any other way. Though, by and large, the military itself is surprisingly absent from the movie.
But this is a movie about absences — emotional absences, physical absences. Even the engines of the planes Al goes to visit are gone. Some spaces just can’t be filled up again.
Any country could’ve made a film like this after the war, a healing lick on a bleeding wound, but the difference is that America came out big winners and what the hell are you going to do with all that new power? Is that why the line about worrying about another Depression is so funny?
Al’s girlfriend utters a line about having wasted the best years of her life waiting for him so I thought the title was, maybe, ironic. Yet I don’t think it is as it feels more ambiguous. The best years of our lives could be in the past but they could also be in our future… or even the very present. It depends on how we decide to live these lives we have.
