The second nomination in the category of peace is “Regeneration,” 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 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.
As a film that brings to light the war protest of poet Siegfried Sassoon, who claimed that Britain’s role in World War I changed from defender to aggressor and therefore wanted to become a conscientious objector to the war, Gillies MacKinnon’s Regeneration has been nominated for an award as 1998’s best exposé film. Otherwise, no new films have been nominated since the most recent Political Film Society Newsletter.