Penguins & PTSD

 

    Hey! Admittedly it was a pretty slow weekend in terms of writing material, since I haven't been doing too much besides going out with a few friends and spending time with my family, in anticipation of my return to Tallahassee for the 2024-2025 school year. However, I was reminded earlier this night about a paper I wrote for my Intro to English Studies course I took last spring semester, and I ended up going back and rereading it.

 If you want to read it for yourself, check out the link here!

    The first thing that resurfaced in my memories when rereading this was how I even got to discuss PTSD as a topic. If I'm being honest, I really just wanted an excuse to talk about an obscure movie that I found conceptually funny, "A Penguin's Memory". I'm a simple guy: if I see an animated movie of penguins in the Vietnam War, then my interest is piqued. Though I couldn't just write about how I found the film conceptually funny- this was still my first year at college, writing for professors and turning in papers rather than essays. I had to somehow justify writing about it, and so I ended up rewatching the movie for the first time in years in search for a serious spin on it.

    Maybe my memory was foggy, or I just wasn't paying attention when I first watched the movie, but I was shocked at how depressing the film was. The Vietnam War scenes serve as only an introduction to the character- the entirety of the film focuses on how life is like for the protagonist after the war, not during it. The exploration into a veteran's reentry into society following a war was surprisingly deep, and it struck a chord within me to watch as a soldier, broken from war, learns to find happiness in life again... and it helped that the soldier was a cute penguin.

    Another thing that I'm remembering upon my rereading of this paper is how much research I put into the psychological side of PTSD, and ended up a bit short in terms of other media to compare this movie's depiction of it to. I eventually used a scene from the show Barry to use as a comparison against the penguin's portrayal of PTSD, despite having not watched Barry myself at the time (I have now, and it was a fantastic show). I also compared the character of Leonard from Christopher Nolan's Memento against the penguin movie's protagonist, Mike. I drew an interesting parallel between the two characters on how they both chose to repress their traumatic memories, as Leonard chooses to repeatedly forget the truths of his life through his head injury, and Mike aimlessly roams around the landscape doing random activities so his mind doesn't linger on the war.

    Overall, I'm still pretty happy with the resulting paper, though if I could rewrite it now, I think I would've added a little more evidence from Barry, since with the context I have now from actually watching the show, I think I could draw more compelling comparisons between Barry and Mike. Otherwise, I think it holds up pretty well!