How Does Art Reflect Life?

How Art Reflects Life

           

“The Dirty Dozen,” is the story of twelve convicted criminals during World War II, but the movie took some liberties on a lot of things. The movie is based around the commutation of the sentences of the convicts in exchange for their service on a suicide mission led by Major Reisman. While these are fictional characters, they were based on a real group called the Filthy Thirteen. The Filthy Thirteen attacked Germans in the attack on D-Day, as they did in the movie.

The director of the movie kept certain things in the movie as they would be during the war, but many things were changed from the true story of the Filthy Thirteen. For example, the uniforms, army jeep and the Nazi banners shown in the 20 Artifacts Project page were portrayed in the movie accurately. The gavel, judges’ robes and the photo shown below either would not have been used in the real situation or were changed in the movie.

The uniforms were accurate because they were the uniforms that would have been used by the real soldiers in World War II and the banners would have been seen hanging up around Nazi-occupied lands. The army jeep would have been used to go places by the soldiers. The main artifact from the 20 Artifacts Project, which was the gavel would not have been needed in the real situation, since the real soldiers were not actually convicts and the same could be said for the judges’ robes since there would be no commutation hearing anyway. The photo of the Filthy Thirteen was changed in the movie since they changed the group to the Dirty Dozen.

Even changing small details such as these can change the audience’s view of the situation being given in the movie. One example is how the fact that in the movie the soldiers were convicts serving in exchange for sentence commutation makes the stakes seem higher. Also the lower amount of soldiers in the movie made their relationships seem closer and friendlier than if there were more people. Certain differences can also influence how the audience is affected by the movie.

This all shows how art reflects life because it gave a chance to be able to retell the story of the Filthy Thirteen even the events in the story weren’t exactly on par with what really happened. It opened the window to being able to think more about the group as real soldiers, even if the events in the movie are fictional or exaggerated, because sometimes it’s easier for the audience to imagine the events that would take place in a real mission after seeing them as exaggerated versions of what really happened.

Picture from http://www.pri.org/stories/2013-01-24/jake-mcniece-d-day-paratrooper-dies-last-filthy-thirteen (originally from Stars and Stripes)