On Laura Hillenbrand's “Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption” (2010) and Nagisa Oshima's “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence” (1983)
Natural companions: the former is a nonfiction book and the latter is a fictional film.
It's easy to empathize with the prisoner of war and difficult to understand the torturer.
The Bird in “Unbroken” remains opaque no matter how many layers Hillenbrand reveals (and some of it by guesswork). He embodies that title in some sense (without the redemption part) as much as the real subject of the book is. In Oshima's film, Yonoi supppresses his homo urges, channels it, and oppresses. And am I to believe that's enough to explain his cruelty?
War time exists in in its own dimension. Power corrupts and even more so in those conditions. The captors ignore the Geneva Convention because they are not in Europe, as one of the officers say in “Unbroken” and they are not in Geneva, as Yonoi says in “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence.” They are nowhere. The usual rules do not apply. Abu Ghraib and Gitmo come to mind.
In both works, there are redemptions: Zamperini's in “Unbroken” and Hara's in “Merry Christmas ...” I find them the least satisfying parts. Those are internal journeys both characters undergo that both works do not ably take us through. They feel tacked on as endings.
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