The Thin Red Line

David Davies

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781135977566
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

The Thin Red Line is the third feature-length film from acclaimed director Terrence Malick, set during the struggle between American and Japanese forces for Guadalcanal in the South Pacific during World War Two. It is a powerful, enigmatic and complex film that raises important philosophical questions, ranging from the existential and phenomenological to the artistic and technical.

This is the first collection dedicated to exploring the philosophical aspects of Malick's film. Opening with a helpful introduction that places the film in context, five essays, four of which were specially commissioned for this collection, go on to examine the following:

• the exploration of Heideggerian themes – such as being-towards-death and the vulnerability of Dasein's world – in The Thin Red Line

• how Malick's film explores and cinematically expresses the embodied nature of our experience of, and agency in, the world

• Malick's use of cinematic techniques, and how the style of his images shapes our affective, emotional, and cognitive responses to the film

• the role that images of nature play in Malick's cinema, and his 'Nietzschean' conception of human nature.

The Thin Red Line is essential reading for students interested in philosophy and film or phenomenology and existentialism. It also provides an accessible and informative insight into philosophy for those in related disciplines such as film studies, literature and religion.

Contributors: Simon Critchley, Hubert Dreyfus and Camilo Prince, David Davies, Amy Coplan, Iain Macdonald.

Chapter 1
Introduction

I

TERRENCE MALICK IS AMONG THE MOST celebrated and critically acclaimed contemporary American directors. Yet he is also a deeply enigmatic figure whose artistic career is punctuated by a twenty-year absence during which time his whereabouts and activities remain unclear. Malick studiously avoids interactions with the media, giving no interviews since his first film, Badlands, in 1973. He has, in over thirty years, directed only four feature films, the others being Days of Heaven (1978), The Thin Red Line (1998), and The New World (2005). His work has, from the first, been described as “poetic” and “visionary,” qualities that relate to his often breathtaking use of natural imagery and to his cinematic explorations of human nature and our relationships with the natural world.

It is surprising, given Malick’s elevated standing in the pantheon of modern directors, that there are to date few critical studies of his work. Two critical monographs have appeared thus far (Morrison and Schur 2003; Chion 2004), the latter restricting itself to The Thin Red Line. Another general monograph is forthcoming (Martin 2008). There is, in addition, an extended treatment of The Thin Red Line in a chapter of a book (Bersani and Dutoit 2004), and a comparative assessment with other directors such as David Lynch and Robert Altman in a chapter of a book on contemporary cinema (Orr 1998: 162–87). Prior to the present volume, only one collection of critical articles on Malick’s cinema has been published (Patterson, ed., 2003; expanded edition 2007).

Given Malick’s philosophical training (see “Note on the director”) and the overtly philosophical material in The Thin Red Line, it is not surprising that many commentators, including contributors to the present volume, have sought to locate the film in philosophical space. Later in this Introduction, I shall briefly survey the divergent conceptions of that location and, relatedly, of the role of images of nature in his films. I shall also outline the contributions that the five papers contained in this volume make to furthering our understanding and appreciation of The Thin Red Line. First, however, I shall look at another approach to the film, which sees it as intentionally engaging with generic expectations about “war” movies in order to call into question the adequacy of those expectations to their subject.

II

It is not difficult to assign Malick’s films to well-established cinematic genres, and to compare them with other contemporary films belonging to the same genres. Badlands and Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde are readily ascribed to the “outlaw/road movie” genre (Campbell 2003; Orr 2003), and much was made, on their release, of the relative virtues of The Thin Red Line and Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan as war movies (see Flanagan 2003). Days of Heaven seems to fall into the genre of Western, and The New World into that of grand historical drama with humanistic intent. But, while all of Malick’s films clearly draw upon certain generic expectations in the receiver, commentators have claimed that, given how the films elicit and then fail to satisfy these expectations, this must be done in pursuit of some end other than expanding or renovating the genre.

In the case of The Thin Red Line, taken to be a “war movie” (the DVD of The Thin Red Line appears in the series Fox War Classics), our generic expectations are that the narrative will be tightly structured and will present various scenes of combat action whose purpose is the attainment of some shared goal that is realized, or that tragically fails to be realized, at the end of the film. We expect that the characters will be sharply individuated from one another in order to personalize them for the audience, and that what is achieved will depend upon the different skills and the camaraderie of the “band of brothers” working together. In the case of The Thin Red Line, however, such expectations are constantly frustrated: “many of the characters are indistinguishable from one another. Then there is the great battle, which seems to resolve nothing and serves as an anti-climax” (McGettigan 2003: 50). The generic failings of The Thin Red Line have been seen by some commentators as deliberate devices that serve an ulterior interest in critically undermining the genre and providing a more realistic cinematic representation of the realities of modern warfare (Flanagan 2003). But this reading of the film, like other readings that take its subject to be war in the literal sense, are difficult to square with the role that the film accords to images of nature, and with the overtly philosophical or religious dimension to the voiceovers that punctuate the narrative. Rather than being concerned with subverting generic expectations in the interests of more realistically portraying the realities that are subject to generic representation, one suspects that Malick begins with an alternative conception of his project, one that involves taking, as nominal subject matter, something that would standardly fall within a given cinematic genre, but with other goals in mind. While the “war at the heart of nature” announced as a principal theme of The Thin Red Line in the opening voiceover may be symbolized by the scenes of war in the film, the departures from generic expectations for presenting such scenes can be seen as dictated by the broader interests of this principal theme rather than by an interest in generic subversion.

Most serious interpreters of The Thin Red Line, perhaps aware of these difficulties, have looked elsewhere for the film’s intended thematic significance. (For a more extensive review of different interpretations of the film, see Davies, this volume.) A number of critics have seen the narrative as operating at the level of myth rather than history, as an expression of an “Edenic yearning” for a lost wholeness of being, or as an expression of an Emersonian Transcendentalism. The idea here is that Nature and Soul are the elements making up the universe, and that the individual can attain a kind of unity with the world soul through communing with nature. Others, however, aware of Malick’s philosophical training, find very different intellectual affinities in the film. They locate it in a more Heideggerian context, as a meditation on mortality and Dasein’s being-towards-death, or as a cinematic expression of the Heideggerian ontological critique of technology, and of the Heideggerian role of poet in destitute times who reveals through the medium of cinema the presencing of Being through language.

Associated with these readings of the thematic meaning of The Thin Red Line we find radically opposed interpretations of the many representations of nature in the film. Some see Malick’s cinema as expressing a broadly naturalistic conception of nature. Nature, non-enchanted, is a warring force that frames the human drama of war but is utterly indifferent to human purposes and intentions. For others, Malick represents nature as “a powerful sign of a higher good” or as the spiritual realm, communion with which allows us to transcend the individual strivings expressed in war.

III

The chapters in the present volume critically engage with, but go beyond, these more general currents of thought about The Thin Red Line. In so doing, they provide three kinds of philosophical perspectives on Malick’s richly textured film. First, they show how a complex cinematic work such as The Thin Red Line can, in more than a merely hyperbolic sense, be regarded as a medium for philosophical reflection. Second, they explore the cinematic techniques through which the philosophical themes in the film are articulated. And third, they enliven debates in the philosophy of film about the ways in which cinematic meaning emerges out of the putting together of image and sound, the role of the emotions in film experience, and the cognitive and moral values rightly ascribable to film as an art. Hubert Dreyfus and Camilo Prince, and Simon Critchley, examine in different ways the manner in which our understanding of broadly Heideggerian themes is explored and deepened in Malick’s film, while carefully resisting the “reductive” temptation to see the film as a mere exemplification of such themes. (Critchley writes: “it seems to me that a consideration of Malick’s art demands that we take seriously the idea that film is less an illustration of philosophical ideas and theories … and more a form of philosophizing, of reflection, reasoning and argument.”) Iain Macdonald examines one of the central puzzles in Malick’s cinema: the role that is accorded to images of nature. He reads The Thin Red Line through Malick’s subsequent work, The New World, which bears an eerie structural and visual resemblance to its predecessor. David Davies examines the thematization in the film of our embodied cognitive engagement with the world, both as perceivers and as agents, and the complex ways in which Malick achieves such a thematization through the manipulation of the different contentful elements that enter into our experience of the film. And Amy Coplan, drawing on a broad understanding of the cinematographic and editorial techniques that enter into the sculpting of the images presented to the receivers of films, explores in greater depth Malick’s cinematic style and the ways in which it shapes our affective and cognitive responses to the film.

Simon Critchley begins by considering the ways in which Malick’s film differs from James Jones’ book The Thin Red Line, which is its literary source. He cautions against the “hermeneutic banana skin” of taking the film to be an exemplification of philosophical themes grounded in Malick’s philosophical training. In the body of his essay, he identifies three key relationships in the film that thematize issues of loyalty (Tall and Staros), love (Bell and his wife), and truth (Witt and Welsh). Focusing on the relationship between Witt and Welsh, he argues that the key to understanding the film lies in the manner in which Witt confronts his death, a manner that echoes the “calm” that Witt ascribes to his own mother, on her deathbed, in an early scene in the film. At the core of The Thin Red Line, Critchley argues, is “this experience of calm in the face of death, of a kind of peace at the moment of one’s extinction that is the only place one may speak of immortality.” This experience of calm, he maintains, frames the film and, in particular, the character of Welsh, who, while attracted to Witt’s “spark,” never overcomes his belief that “everything is a lie.”

To see why calm is the key to the film and to Malick’s art, Critchley examines the film’s representation of nature, as “an ineluctable power, a warring force that both frames human war but is utterly indifferent to human purposes and intentions.” “Calm,” then, is the only proper response to “the fact that human death is absorbed into the relentlessness of nature.” Calm is also what lies at the heart of Malick’s art, “a calmness to his cinematic eye, a calmness that is also communicated by his films.”

Hubert Dreyfus and Camilo Prince argue that The Thin Red Line treats the phenomenon of war as a special case of the violent destruction of “worlds” and the need to confront the phenomenon of “world collapse.” In elucidating the notion of “world collapse,” they draw upon the Heideggerian distinction between “demise”—death as a terminal biological or ontic phenomenon—and “ontological death”—“world collapse” or the loss of what gives meaning to one’s world. Ontological death can befall both individual human beings and a culture. Dreyfus and Prince identify two important differences between demise and ontological death. First, unlike demise, ontological death is something lived through—one can experience “world collapse” only if one remains alive. Second, whereas demise eventually befalls all individuals and cultures, an individual or culture need not experience any form of ontological death during its existence.

Most of the deaths highlighted in the film, Dreyfus and Prince maintain, are cases of ontological death, not of demise, and their chapter focuses on the former. They briefly discuss instances of “cultural collapse” involving the defeated Japanese and the Melanesian villagers, and the “world collapse” that war represents through its destruction of the norms that normally regulate human interaction. The main focus of their essay, however, is on the different ways in which individuals in the film either confront or are invulnerable to “world collapse.” They distinguish two ways in which soldiers confront “world collapse”—through “identity failure” and through collapse of an “unconditional commitment.” Of greater significance for our understanding of the film, however, are two ways in which individuals can prove invulnerable to “world collapse”: first, as with Welsh, through cynical denial of the attempt to make sense of the world, and second, as with Witt, through achieving a “spiritual invulnerability.” Unlike his fellow soldiers whose way of life is threatened by their experiences of war, Witt “doesn’t form defining commitments nor expect to find meaning, and so does not live in a vulnerable world.”

David Davies begins by outlining the astonishing diversity of critical interpretations that have been offered of The Thin Red Line, interpretations which fail to agree on even the basic purpose and direction of the film. This, he suggests, is due in part to the structural and thematic complexity of the film, which punctuates its multi-faceted narrative with stream-of-consciousness voiceovers, stunning images of natural beauty, and a haunting musical soundtrack that is interwoven with equally haunting diegetic sounds. In attempting to make sense of this multiplicity of interpretations, he identifies what he takes to be a neglected central theme in the film, through which it not only engages with (without answering) the philosophical questions posed in the dialogic and monologic content, but does so in a uniquely cinematic way, thereby exemplifying the philosophical possibilities of cinema. What commentators have missed, he argues, is the centrality of the visual and the tactile, as inflections of our cognitive engagement with the world in which we act and are acted upon. The film, both thematically and cinematically, offers, through the character of Witt, a model of embodied seeing and embodied agency.

In the final section of his chapter, he examines how the notion of embodied seeing is exemplified in the cinematic style of Malick’s film. Malick’s images, he argues, have a tactile, holistic quality, the camera representing things in terms of their textures, and acting as a medium of touch as much as of vision. Like Critchley, he also focuses on the role of voiceovers in The Thin Red Line. The latter, he argues, present the viewer with a stream of reflective thinking that generally stands apart from the actions of the characters. The voiceovers serve, along with the depictions of nature, as the frame for the human actions presented—actions that are always those of embodied agents whose embodied actions, while called forth by the experienced world, are permeated by language and conceptual awareness. In this way, the voiceovers play an essential part in Malick’s cinematic presentation of the manner in which the human agent encounters and responds to his or her world.

Amy Coplan examines the relationship between formal features of The Thin Red Line and the emotional, affective, and perceptual experiences the film evokes. While it is characteristic of the cinematic medium in general that it can create stories through the selective presentation of visual and aural information, Malick’s films, she argues, are more cinematic than most because they foreground features of experience that can only be communicated through appeal to the senses.

The cinematic style of The Thin Red Line, she maintains, is highly unconventional compared to standard Hollywood cinema. Two effects of this style are that much of viewers’ affective experience of the film is non-cognitive or minimally cognitive, and that viewers’ perception and attention are often focused on sensory information. Coplan provides a detailed analysis of various filmmaking techniques that Malick and his cinematographer used to construct an episodic narrative and to create numerous shots, scenes, and sequences that are highly subjective and impressionistic. Three distinctive formal features of the film—a highly subjective perspective, impressionistic images and sounds, and an episodic narrative—result in viewers having an overall emotional or affective experience of the film that is, at least initially, primarily perceptual and embodied rather than cognitive and evaluative. This analysis helps to show how particular aesthetic characteristics are created during the process of filmmaking and how cinematic techniques through cinematic style influence audience response.

Coplan argues that Malick’s film directly engages the senses and elicits more non-cognitive affects than traditional films because of specific ways in which it presents information. For example, the opening sequence of The Thin Red Line organizes the narrative episodically and presents much of it from a subjective perspective. As a result, our response to the opening of the film is more experiential than intellectual. She also discusses the cinematography of the film, and the ways in which the camera movement contributes to the creation of a subjective perspective. Finally, she considers the contribution of the lighting techniques used in The Thin Red Line to the film’s formal style and some of the ways in which this influences viewers’ experience.

Iain Macdonald uses Malick’s most recent film, The New World, to explore in more detail a question raised by Critchley, namely the manner in which nature is represented in Malick’s cinema. Macdonald maintains that the specific quality of human participation in nature—the nature of the “war in the heart of nature” thematized in the opening sequence of The Thin Red Line—is the central concern of Malick’s cinema, but that, while Malick’s films show us the power and indifference of nature, we need to inquire further as to the metaphysics that underlies this view. The New World provides the occasion for pushing these reflections further because, beyond the conflicts that define the history of the interaction of the two cultures in the film, there is a deeper identity at work, a human identity in reason. The strength of the film, however, is that it does not stop with the idea of a common humanity. The question is rather what drives this common reason. It is, Macdonald claims, a question of origins and, more specifically, a question of the relation of human reason to blind nature. If Malick’s films attest to a “community of being” that t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of illustrations
• Contributor biographies
• Note on the director
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Simon Critchley CALM—ON TERRENCE MALICK’S THE THIN RED LINE
• 3 Hubert Dreyfus and Camilo Salazar Prince THE THIN RED LINE: DYING WITHOUT DEMISE, DEMISE WITHOUT DYING
• 4 David Davies VISION, TOUCH, AND EMBODIMENT IN THE THIN RED LINE
• 5 Amy Coplan FORM AND FEELING IN TERRENCE MALICK’S THE THIN RED LINE
• 6 Iain Macdonald NATURE AND THE WILL TO POWER IN TERRENCE MALICK’S THE NEW WORLD