MovieChat Forums > Slaughterhouse-Five (1972) Discussion > If the abduction to Tralfamadore is a ps...

If the abduction to Tralfamadore is a psychosis / hallucination...

posted 16 years ago by Pearl_Jade
21 replies | jump to latest

I've heard it theorized that Billy's abduction to the planet Tralfamadore is all in his mind. It is a hallucination or psychotic episode that has both mental (his war experiences) and physical (his head injury after the plane crash) origins. This provides a logical -- or "real world" -- explanation for a bewildering, other-worldly phenomenon that just isn't part of common experience.

But if that is the case, how does one explain the time travel? Billy had his first experience with time travel in December 1944 when he was hiding from the Germans in the forest (and here I'm going by the novel; I don't know if the movie differs). (1) We can't dismiss the time travel episodes as merely an escape fantasy because he saw FUTURE events of his life which actually came true 10 to 20 years later. (2) It's not an effect of post-traumatic stress disorder because he's right in the middle of the trauma -- not remembering it afterward -- when the time travel takes place. (3) And it can't be the result of his head injury because that didn't happen until the plane crash in 1967. (EDIT: My mistake. The plane crash was in 1968; the abduction to Tralfamadore was in 1967.)

What logical explanation is there for the time travel? Is it simply that Billy was clairvoyant?

[–] jconn426 13 years ago

Being from the future myself, I can say with great authority that Billy died during the Battle of the Bulge moments before the movie began. He was one of the captured GIs who were machine gunned by the Germans. The entire movie was the confused imagery of a young man bleeding to death and seeing images of the life he would never have: completing his education, getting married, having kids, etc. The little details, including the plane crash, the aliens, Valerie Perrine's boobs, the rebellious son, were all gleaned from magazines he'd read. (Montana's name, of course, came from the reference that Wild Bob made to his home state. Of course, he met Bob not at a train station but back in the woods before they were all shot.)

As far as Dresden was concerned, he'd read about it in his geography class back in school and had noticed that the news never mentioned it being bombed, unlike Hamburg and Berlin, for example.

All of this occurred within the last ten minutes of his life, give or take.

It's my theory, and if you don't like it, hold a seance and ask Vonnegut yourself. lol

===
And He has on His robe and on His thigh a name written:KING OF KINGS AND LORD OF LORDS.

[–] franzkabuki 12 years ago

Looks like a beginning of another tedious and largely pointless reality vs dream/hallucination thread, so I won´t read it any further.

What I do, however, wonder is whether the Tralfamadore Dome sequence was an intentional parody of 2001´s final scenes (Vonnegut´s book came out in 1969, so it is entirely possible he´d seen the Kubrick flick). Either way it´s hilarious though with the voice from above thundering out every now and then, demanding to see some mating.

"facts are stupid things" - Ronald Reagan

[–] 12 years ago

[deleted]

[–] sonofbeach-sheet 12 years ago

I found the movie super trippy when Billy is gathering the corpses after the Dresden bombing and at the same time, explaining to the Tralfamadorians how it looked like the end of the world and they explain to him about the future about the universe disappearing and Earth ending, but not to worry and focus on the good times and how the future has already been written