AARYAN SANWAL
The award-winning TV
series, Peaky Blinders is set in Birmingham, England at the end of the First
World War and gives an account of the Peaky Blinders that is headed by the
Shelby family. Thomas Shelby was a tunneller in World War I and for his
actions, received two medals of honour after the war. This blog post shall look at the
representation of war trauma, its accuracy in depictions and its effects on the
lives of the characters.
The two main characters
that this blog post will be focusing on are Thomas Shelby and Daniel Owen
(a.k.a. Danny Whiz-Bang). The two of them were tunnellers in the War and were
going through a routine tunnel expedition when the Germans broke through the
end of their tunnel and attacked the men in the tunnel and brutally injured Thomas
and Daniel. They were able to kill the enemies and leave the tunnels, alive but
severely injured.
During various instances
throughout the show, Thomas Shelby has recurring nightmares of his time in the
tunnel. He lies in his bed at night, awake and afraid that the German soldiers
might break through the wall at the opposite end of his bed. He can even hear
the scraping of tools on the walls and prays for the sun to come up before the
wall breaks. To calm himself down, he smokes opium but to no avail. Every night
he goes through the nightmare over and over till the sun rises. These were the defining symptoms of shell
shock, a condition that is now subsumed under PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress
Disorder). Symptoms
included fatigue, tremor, confusion, nightmares and impaired sight and hearing
(Jones, 2012).
Danny Whiz-Bang has
extreme and severe hallucinations which result in violent outbursts that he is
unaware of. He enters a pub whilst violently shouting ‘They’re going to get me’
and creates a commotion inside. After he has been quietened down, he does not
remember what took place. During another such instance, he sits outside a
business that is closed and is seen talking loudly to himself, the owner comes
out and asks him to leave, when the owner pulls out a knife, Danny gets
extremely startled and ends up killing the man. He does this without having any
memory of it afterwards. Danny is also affected by the incident in the tunnel and
acts in a manner falls under the definition of being shell shocked.
Even after the end of the
War, “Fifteen thousand men were still in hospital with shell shock in 1921” (Summerfield, 1998, p. 1396).
The treatment and implications of shell shock however at that time were not
understood by many doctors. The report of the War Office Committee of Inquiry
into Shell Shock says the following about contributing factors to shell shock, “Here
we find a consensus of opinion that a poor moral and defective training are one
of the most important, if not the most important, etiological factor”. (“Shell
Shock”, 1922) This official report published in The British Medical Journal
makes clear the fact that very less was understood about war trauma and more
specifically ‘shell shock’ during World War I. The treatment for the same was very
bizarre and in certain cases, patients were electrocuted to rid them of the
physical ailments. Professor Roussy even went on to say that “the war created
nothing in the way of the psychoses” (“Shell Shock”, 1922). But modern
diagnosis methods and the way the PTSD diagnosis was developed clearly show
that “we had to link it [PTSD] to memory (symptoms such as flashbacks and
nightmares) because if we had focused on other major symptoms then the VA could
continue to claim that PTSD developed in veterans because of their childhood or
some genetic abnormality rather than in response to war itself (Kolk & Najavits, 2013, pp. 516-522).
Thomas Shelby and Daniel
Owen were going through what is now known as PTSD because of the events that
took place in their life during the war and by the events that succeeded it.
The show tries to accurately bring together our understanding of PTSD today into
the situation prevalent in the 1920s after the War. The producer of the show,
Laurie Borg said that, “This year,
being the centenary of the First World War, this was very key in our thinking”
(Burns, 2014). She was referring to the theme of PTSD that is visible
throughout the series. The show brought and increased awareness to a very important
issue by making use of its cinematic liberty but keeping intact for the most
part, the inherent problems that many people may face in differing severities.
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References :
Jones,
E. (n.d.). Shell Shocked. Retrieved October 10, 2019, from https://www.apa.org/monitor/2012/06/shell-shocked.
Summerfield, D. (1998). Media: Shell
Shock Patients: From Cowards to Victims. The British Medical Journal, 317(7169), 1396–1396. doi: 10.1136/bmj.317.7169.1394f
Shell Shock. (1922). The British Medical Journal, 2(3216), 322–323.
Kolk, B.
V. D., & Najavits, L. M. (2013). Interview: What is PTSD Really? Surprises,
Twists of History, and the Politics of Diagnosis and Treatment. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 69(5), 516–522. doi: 10.1002/jclp.21992
(2014,
October 21). Retrieved from https://www.bigissue.com/interviews/cillian-murphy-clean-cut-heroes-dont-interest/
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