Movie Review: Thank You For Your Service

CATEGORY: POPULAR CULTURE

Miles Teller, as Sgt. Adam Schumann

Written by Michael S. Scheeringa
Read time: 3.4 minutes
 
The understanding of human nature is today under continuous attack by government and culture. This is strange for many scientists, not in the sense of whether nature (genetics) versus nurture (life experiences) determines human nature is a valid question, but in the sense that the attacks from the progressive left are so sure that it is nearly all nurture. Trauma has been increasingly drawn into that arena as perhaps the most important element of nurture, and movies have been a frequent delivery device of that message.
 
The Plot
The 2017 movie, Thank You For Your Service, is a faithful recreation of David Finkel’s 2013 best-selling book of the same title, which followed the real-life psychological aftermath of war for Sergeant Adam Schumann and fellow soldiers. During deployment in Iraq, Schumann was a leader, a problem-solver, the one many of them trusted. Their luck, however, ran out. Men died and were maimed and Schumann blamed himself. 
Most of the movie takes place post-deployment, back in Kansas. One soldier panics when he finds his fiancé has left and cleaned out their house. Schumann is there to take him in.  Another soldier has a traumatic brain injury and cannot remember the day of the week. Schumann is there too to get him out of jams. Schumann is happy to be home with his wife and children, but posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has its grip on him, and suicide looms as an option.
Psychotherapy services at the Veterans Administration are of no immediate help. They are told it will be six to nine months to get treatment. Schumann’s wife tries to help him. A dead friend’s wife tries to help him. Schumann tries to help himself by visiting a paralyzed buddy. Improvement eventually comes, and the gracefulness of the movie is how individuals cope in a human clan.
 
Analysis
Where the movie shines is how PTSD is realistically portrayed as the never-ending struggle it is for so many. These men have a rough landing but they do not blame invented oppressors for their misfortunes. They’re fighters. They make do. They have each other’s backs. Trauma did not change them into bad men. What’s worth watching are their struggles to sort things out.
This contrasts to so many other Hollywood movies where PTSD is a plot device to drive violence or ill-fated, fantastical behaviors of trauma-exposed characters who flip into psychotic murderers.
 
The issue I’m driving at is human nature. The Founders of the United States understood human nature as unchanging both in terms of natural rights and behaviors. As Madison explained in Federalist 10, human behavior inevitably results in factions and conflicts. The Constitution formalized their understanding that the purpose of politics was to cope with the problems inherent in unchanging human nature.
The radical progressive liberal agenda for the past century to rewrite much of the Constitution has been inextricably linked to reframe human nature as highly malleable (the blank slate), thus removing all restraints on how government can grow and control human lives in neo-Marxist and socialist schemes. One can argue that the central impediment to the progressive liberal woke agenda is the idea that human nature is fixed.
 
The progressive liberal belief in the primacy of nurture—including that trauma can change your essential character—is a compelling narrative for movies but has no basis in science. Schumann, in contrast, is the living embodiment of fixed nature; trauma can rough you up but it does not change your essential character, which has a strong basis in science. 
 
 
(This is a revised version of a blog post by the author from 2020 at www.psychologytoday.com.)
 
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