Mental Case Youtube clip

The youtube clip showed the real footage of soldiers who were both mentally and physically disabled. The clip, with melancholic music on behind, showed various symptoms of mentally disabled soldiers. These include trauma from shell shocks which lead them to constant shivering and unrelenting fear, phobia to certain words such as ‘bomb’ and paranoia of getting killed. The clip gave viewers sense of feeling that horror does not finish when the war ends instead it could exsist in the form of mental illness.

The clip used various film techniques to convey the shocking symptoms of mental tourment these include, soundtacks, shot types and close ups. Throughout the clip, it is evident that the composer used melancholic music to constantly frighten the viewers, close up shots to clearly show mentally unstable soldiers and medium to long range shots to show viewers that vast amount of soldiers have been both mentally and physically disabled. Narration also provides us with information and situation during war that the soldiers felt.

The theme of Wilfred Owen’s poem Mental Case is similar to the film as it presents horror of the disabled soldiers. Owen used various language techniques to convey the shocking symptoms of metal tourments felt by the soldiers, which include use of rhetorical question, alliteration and connotation.

The poem begins with the introduction of rhetorical question which quoted as ‘Who are these?’ ‘Why sit they here in Twilight’ This quote is purposely made grammatically incorrect by Owen because he wanted readers to think that the poem was addressed by mentally disabled person, this creates horror to the reader as it shows how once normal person could become so mentally unstable. When Owen quoted ‘lungs that had loved laughter’ shows the image of soldiers that they once happy. Throughout the poem there are many connotation that are evident for example ‘sunlight’ as something beautiful and ‘ravished’ as negative connotation for seize and carry off