Deaths

It's difficult to imagine what happens to soldiers during a time of war. There is no way to truly understand what they go through when they return home, nor to grasp the difficulties they face after the trauma they endured. In Olia Lialina’s, "My Boyfriend Came Back From the War," the darkness and confusion is communicated through black and white with flashing pictures. These elements come together to produce a dismal interaction where the girlfriend is talking to her boyfriend, and the conversation escalates into various directions. He asks her to marry him, she continues to talk about the way he has changed, she tells him she cheated on him and asks her boyfriend no to kill “him,” and it changes to “them.” Interacting with this type of text through clicking on words and pictures creates a form of submersion that makes the images and conversations become more real. Using such a dark background with pictures that illustrate war and the boyfriend’s memories that are presented while the girlfriend’s words appear, make it seem as though the viewer is in the boyfriend’s head. It’s difficult to ultimately understand everything that he was dealing with, but it was clear what he saw and what he continued to see, as well as the complications his girlfriend graced him with upon his return. Had I read this on a page I would not have been able to comprehend the boyfriend’s struggles to the extent that I was able to after viewing this version of the text.