Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 6 No. 38, December 2002
Calm -- On Terrence Malick's _The Thin Red Line_ [1]
Life contracts and death
is expected, As in a season of
autumn. The soldier
falls. He does not become a
three-days personage, Imposing his
separation, Calling for
pomp. Death is absolute and
without memorial, As in a season of
autumn, When the wind
stops, When the wind stops and,
over the heavens, The clouds go,
nevertheless, In their
direction. Wallace Stevens, 'The
Death of a Soldier' [2] Wittgenstein asks a
question, which sounds like the first line of a joke: 'How
does one philosopher address another?' To which the unfunny
and perplexing riposte is: 'Take your time'. [3]
Terrence
Malick is
evidently someone who takes his time. Since his first movie,
_Badlands_, was premiered at the New York Film Festival in
1973, he has directed just two more: _Days of Heaven_, in
1979, and then nearly a 20 year gap until the long-awaited
1998 movie, _The Thin Red Line_, which is the topic of this
essay. It is a war film. It deals
with the events surrounding the battle for Guadalcanal in
November 1942, as the US Army fought its bloody way north
across the islands of the South Pacific against ferocious
Japanese resistance. But it is a war film in the same way
that Homer's _Iliad_ is a war poem. The viewer seeking
verisimilitude and documentation of historical fact will be
disappointed. Rather, Malick's movie is a story of what we
might call 'heroic fact': of death, of fate, of pointed and
pointless sacrifice. Finally, it is a tale of love, both
erotic love and, more importantly, the love of compassion
whose cradle is military combat and whose greatest fear is
dishonour. In one night-time scene, we see Captain Starros
in close-up praying, 'Let me not betray my men'. The ambition of _The Thin
Red Line_ is unapologetically epic, the scale is not
historical but mythical, and the language is lyrical, even
at times metaphysical. At one point in the film, Colonel
Tall, the commanding officer of the campaign, cites a
Homeric epithet about 'rosy-fingered dawn', and confesses to
the Greek-American Starros that he read the _Iliad_ in Greek
whilst a student at West Point military academy -- Starros
himself speaks Greek on two occasions. Like the _Iliad_,
Malick deals with the huge human themes by focussing not on
a whole war, and not even with an overview of a whole
battle, but on the lives of a group of individuals --
C-for-Charlie company -- in a specific aspect of a battle
over the period of a couple of weeks. To non-Americans -- and
perhaps to many contemporary Americans as well -- the
significance of Guadalcanal might not be familiar. It was
the key battle in the war against Japan, in a campaign that
led from the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 to American
victory and post-war imperial hegemony. If we cast the
Japanese in the role of the Trojans, and Guadalcanal in the
place of Troy, then _The Thin Red Line_ might be said to
recount the pre-history of American empire in the same way
as Homer recites the pre-history of Hellenic supremacy. It
might be viewed as a founding myth, and like all such myths,
from Homer to Milton, it shows both the necessity for an
enemy in the act of foundation and the often uncanny
intimacy with that enemy. Some of the most haunting images
of the film are those in which members of Charlie company
sit face-to-face with captured Japanese soldiers surrounded
by corpses, mud, and the dehumanising detritus of
battle. Malick based his
screenplay on James Jones's 500 page, 1963 novel, _The Thin
Red Line_. [4] Jones served as an infantryman in the
US Army in the South Pacific, and _The Thin Red Line_,
though fictional, is extensively based on Jones's wartime
experiences. Jones was following the formula he established
in his first book, the 900 page, 1952 raw blockbuster, _From
Here to Eternity_, which deals with events surrounding the
bombing of Pearl Harbor. [5] A highly expurgated
film version of the book, starring Burt Lancaster, Deborah
Kerr, Montgomery Clift and Frank Sinatra, won the Academy
Award for Best Motion Picture in 1953. Malick's movie won
just one Oscar, to Hans Zimmer, for best original
score. A curious fact to note
about Malick's _The Thin Red Line_ is that it is a remake.
Jones's book was turned into a movie directed by Andrew
Marton and starring Keir Dullea and Jack Warden in 1964.
This is a low budget, technically clumsy, averagely acted,
and indeed slightly saucy movie, where the jungles of the
South Pacific seemed to have been replanted in the Southern
Californian desert. But it is a good honest picture, and
there are many analogues with Malick's version, particularly
the dialogues between Colonel Tall and Captain
Stein. The narrative focus of the
1964 picture is on Private Doll, an independently-minded
existentialist rebel (closer to a young Brando than Albert
Camus), who discovers himself in the heat of battle through
killing 'Japs'. The guiding theme is the insanity of war,
the thin red line between the sane and the mad, and we are
offered a series of more or less trite reflections on the
meaninglessness of war. Yet, in this respect, the 1964 film
is much more faithful to James Jones's 1963 novel than
Malick's treatment, with its more metaphysical intimations.
In the 1964 movie, the existential hero finds himself
through the act of killing. War might be judged to be the
threat of radical meaninglessness, but it is that in
relation to which meaning can be given to an individual
life. Doll eventually crosses the thin red line and goes
crazy, killing everyone in sight, including his own
comrades. The novel is a piece of
tough-minded and earnest Americana, somewhere between
fiction and reportage, that at times brilliantly evokes the
exhausting and dehumanising pointlessness of war. The book's
great virtue is its evocation of camaraderie, the physical
and emotional intensity of the relations between the men in
C-for-Charlie company. Some of the characters are finely and
fully drawn, in particular Fife, Doll, and Bell, but I don't
think it is too severe to say that James Jones is not James
Joyce. Yet, in this regard, the novel serves Malick's
purposes extremely well, because it provides him with the
raw narrative prime matter from which to form his
screenplay. Malick has a very free relation to his material.
For example, the central protagonist of Malick's version,
Witt, brilliantly played by Jim Caviezel, is a more marginal
figure in Jones's novel. He drifts repeatedly in and out of
the action, having been transferred from Charlie company to
Cannon company, which is a collection of brigands and
reprobates, but he is eventually readmitted to Charlie
company because of his exceptional valour in battle. He is
depicted as a stubborn, single-minded, half-educated
troublemaker from Breathitt County, Kentucky, motivated by
racism, a powerful devotion to his comrades, and an obscure
ideal of honour. Although there is an essential solitude to
Witt's character that must have appealed to Malick, the
latter transforms him into a much more angelic,
self-questioning, philosophical figure. Indeed, the
culminating action of Malick's film is Witt's death, which
does not even occur in the novel, where he is shown at the
end of the book finally reconciled with Fife, his former
buddy. Fife is the central driving character of Jones's
novel, together with Doll, Bell, and Welsh. I have been
informed that Malick shot about seven hours of film, but had
to cut it three hours to meet his contract. Therefore, the
whole story of Fife -- and doubtless much else -- was cut
out. Other characters are inventions of Malick, like Captain
Starros, the Greek who takes the place of the Jewish Captain
Stein. And, interestingly, there are themes in the novel
that Malick does not take up, such as the homosexual
relations between comrades, in particular Doll's emerging
acknowledgement of his gay sexuality. Malick crafts the matter
of Jones's book into a lyrical, economical and highly
wrought screenplay. Whilst there are many memorable passages
of dialogue, and some extraordinarily photographed extended
action sequences, the core of the film is carried by
Malick's favourite cinematic technique, the voiceover. This
is worth considering in some detail, for, as
Michael
Filippidis has
argued, the voiceover provides the entry point for all three
of Malick's films. [6] In _Badlands_ the voiceover
is provided by Holly (Sissy Spacek), and in _Days of Heaven_
by the child Linda (Linda Manz). The technique of the
voiceover allows the character to assume a distance from the
cinematic action and a complicity with the audience, an
intimate distance that is meditative, ruminative, at times
speculative. It is like watching a movie with someone
whispering into your ear. If the technique of the
voiceover is common to all three films, then what changes in
_The Thin Red Line_ is the subject of the narration.
_Badlands_ and _Days of Heaven_ are narrated from a female
perspective: it is through the eyes of two young,
poorly-educated women that we are invited to view the world.
In _The Thin Red Line_ the voiceovers are male and plural.
The only female characters are the wife of Bell (who appears
in dream sequences and whose only words are 'Come out. Come
out where I am'), the young Melanesian mother that Witt
meets at the beginning of the film, and Witt's mother,
recollected in a death-bed scene. Although it is usually
possible to identify the speaker of the voiceover, their
voices sometimes seem to blend into one another,
particularly during the closing scenes of the film when the
soldiers are leaving Guadalcanal on board a landing craft.
As the camera roams from face to face, almost drunkenly, the
voices become one voice, one soul, 'as if all men got one
big soul' -- but we will come back to this. The powerful effect of the
voiceovers cannot be distinguished from that of the music
which accompanies them. The score, which bears sustained
listening on its own account, was composed by Hans Zimmer,
who collaborated extensively with Malick. The latter's use
of music in his movies is at times breathtaking, and the
structures of his films bear a close relation to musical
composition, where leitmotifs function as both punctuation
and recapitulation of the action -- a technique Malick
employed to great effect in _Days of Heaven_. In all three
of his movies, there is a persistent presence of natural
sounds, particularly flowing water and birdsong. The sound
of the breeze in the vast fields of ripening wheat in _Days
of Heaven_ finds a powerful echo in what was the most
powerful memory I had from my first viewing of _The Thin Red
Line_: the sound of the wind and soldiers' bodies moving
through the Kunai grass as Charlie company ascend the hill
towards the enemy position. Nature appears as an impassive
and constant presence that frames human conflict. Three Hermeneutic Banana
Skins There are a number of
hermeneutic banana skins that any study of Malick's art can
slip up on, particularly when the critic is a professional
philosopher. Before turning more directly to the film, let
me take my time to discuss three of them. First, there is what we
might call the paradox of privacy. Malick is clearly a very
private person who shuns publicity. This is obviously no
easy matter in the movie business, and in this regard Malick
invites comparison with Kubrick who, by contrast, appears a
paragon of productivity. Of course, the relative paucity of
biographical data on Malick
simply feeds a curiosity of the most trivial and quotidian
kind. I must confess to this curiosity myself, but I do not
think it should be sated. There should be no speculation,
then, on 'the enigmatic Mr Malick', or whatever. But if one restricts
oneself to the biographical information that I have been
able to find out, then a second banana skin appears in one's
path, namely the intriguing issue of Malick and philosophy.
He studied philosophy at Harvard University between 1961 and
1965, graduating with Phi Beta Kappa honours. He worked
closely with Stanley Cavell, who supervised Malick's
undergraduate honors thesis. Against the deeply ingrained
prejudices about Continental thought that prevailed at that
time, Malick courageously attempted to show how Heidegger's
thoughts about (and against) epistemology in _Being and
Time_ could be seen in relation to the analysis of
perception in Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore and, at Harvard,
C. I. Lewis. Malick then went, as a Rhodes scholar, to
Magdalen College, Oxford, to study for the B.Phil in
philosophy. He left Oxford because he wanted to write a
D.Phil thesis on the concept of world in Kierkegaard,
Heidegger, and Wittgenstein, and was told by Gilbert Ryle
that he should try and write on something more
'philosophical'. He then worked as a philosophy teacher at
MIT, teaching Hubert Dreyfus's course on Heidegger when he
was away on study leave in France, and wrote journalism for
_The New Yorker_ and _Life_ magazine. In 1969 he published
his bilingual edition of Heidegger's _Vom Wesen des Grundes_
as _The Essence of Reasons_. [7] Also in 1969 he was
accepted into the inaugural class of the Center for Advanced
Film Studies at the American Film Institute, in Los Angeles,
and his career in cinema began to take shape. Clearly, then, Malick's is
a highly sophisticated, philosophically trained intellect.
Yet the young philosopher decided not to pursue an academic
career, but to pass from philosophy to film, for reasons
that remain obscure. Given these facts, it is extremely
tempting -- almost overwhelmingly so -- to read through his
films to some philosophical pre-text or meta-text, to
interpret the action of his characters in Heideggerian,
Wittgensteinian or, indeed, Cavellian terms. To make matters
worse, Malick's movies seem to make philosophical statements
and present philosophical positions. Nonetheless, to read
through the cinematic image to some identifiable
philosophical master text would be a mistake, for it would
be not to read at all. So, what is the
professional philosopher to do faced with Malick's films?
This leads me to a third hermeneutic banana skin. To read
from cinematic language to some philosophical metalanguage
is both to miss what is specific to the medium of film and
usually to engage in some sort of cod-philosophy
deliberately designed to intimidate the uninitiated. I think
this move has to be avoided on philosophical grounds, indeed
the very best Heideggerian grounds. Any philosophical
reading of film has to be a reading *of* film, of what
Heidegger would call *der Sache selbst*, the thing itself. A
philosophical reading of film should not be concerned with
ideas about the thing, but with the thing itself, the
cinematic *Sache*. 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 -- let's call that a *philoso-fugal* reading -- and
more a form of philosophising, of reflection, reasoning, and
argument. [8] Loyalty, Love, and
Truth Let me now turn to the
film itself. The narrative of _The Thin Red Line_ is
organized around three relationships, each composed of a
conflict between two characters. The first relationship is
that between Colonel Tall, played by Nick Nolte, and Captain
Starros, played by Elias Koteas. At the core of this
relationship is the question of loyalty, a conflict between
loyalty to the commands of one's superiors and loyalty to
the men under one's command. This relationship comes to a
crisis when Starros refuses a direct order from Tall to lead
an attack on the machine gun position of the Japanese.
Starros says that 'I've lived with these men for two and a
half years, and I will not order them to their deaths' --
for the carnage that the Japanese are causing from their
superior hill-top vantage point and the scenes of slaughter
are truly awful. Suppressing his fury, Tall goes up the line
to join Charlie company and skilfully organizes a flanking
assault on the Japanese position. After the successful
assault, he gives Starros a humiliating lecture about the
necessity of allowing one's men to die in battle. He decides
that Starros is not tough-minded enough to lead his men and,
after recommending him for the silver star and the purple
heart, immediately relieves him of his commission and orders
him back to a desk job in Washington DC. Loyalty to the men
under one's command must be subservient to the pragmatics of
the battlefield. The second relationship,
based on love, is that between Private Bell (Ben Chaplin)
and his wife Marty (Miranda Otto), and is dealt with rather
abstractly by Malick. It is much more central to the 1964
version of the film, where it is transposed into the
relationship between Private Doll and one 'Judy'. In Jones's
novel, Bell is a former army officer who had been a First
Lieutenant in the Philippines. He and his wife had an
extraordinarily close, intense relationship ('We were always
very sexual together', he confesses to Fife), and after
spending four months separated from his wife in the jungle,
he decided that he'd had enough and resigned his commission.
As retribution, the US Army said that they would make sure
he was drafted, and, moreover, drafted into the infantry as
a private. All that we see of the relationship in the film,
however, are a series of dream images of Bell with Marty,
what Jones calls 'weird transcendental images of Marty's
presence'. Then, after the battle, we hear Bell reading a
letter from his wife saying that she has left him for an Air
Force captain. After the failures of
loyalty and love, the theme of truth is treated in the third
relationship, and this is what I would like to concentrate
on. The characters here are Sergeant Welsh, played with
consummate craft by Sean Penn, and Private Witt. The
question at issue here is metaphysical truth; or, more
precisely, whether there is such a thing as metaphysical
truth. Baldly stated: is this the only world, or is there
another world? The conflict is established in the first
dialogue between the two soldiers, after Witt has been
incarcerated for going AWOL in a Melanesian village (the
scenes of somewhat cloying communal harmony that open the
film). Welsh says, 'in this world, a man himself is nothing
. . . and there ain't no world but this one'. To which Witt
replies, 'You're wrong there, I seen another world.
Sometimes I think it's just my imagination'. And Welsh
completes the thought: 'Well, you're seeing something I
never will'. Welsh is a sort of
physicalist egoist who is contemptuous of everything. Jones
writes: 'Everything amused Welsh .
. . Politics amused him, religion amused him, particularly
ideals and integrity amused him; but most of all human
virtue amused him. He did not believe in it and did not
believe in any of those other words.' [9] Behind this complete moral
nihilism, the only thing in which Welsh believes is
property. He refuses to let Starros commend him for a silver
star after an act of extraordinary valour in which he dodged
hails of bullets to give morphine to a buddy dying on the
battlefield, and quips, 'Property, the whole fucking thing's
about property'. War is fought for property, one nation
against another nation. The war is taking place in service
of a lie, the lie of property. You either believe the lie or
you die, like Witt. Welsh says -- and it is a sentiment
emphasized in the book and both versions of the film --
'Everything is a lie. Only one thing a man can do, find
something that's his, make an island for himself'. It is
only by believing that, and shutting his eyes to the bloody
lie of war, that he can survive. Welsh's physicalism is
summarised in the phrase that in many ways guides the 1964
version of the film and which appears briefly in Malick:
'It's only meat'. The human being is meat and only this
belief both exposes the lie and allows one to survive -- and
Welsh survives. Facing Welsh's nihilistic
physicalism is what we might call Witt's metaphysical
panpsychism, caught in the question, 'Maybe all men got one
big soul, that everybody's a part of -- all faces are the
same man, one big self'. Witt is the questioner, the
contemplator, the mystic. Much of what he says is in the
form of questions -- the very piety of thinking for
Heidegger -- and not the assertions propounded by Welsh.
Unflinchingly brave in combat, with absolutely no thought of
his own safety, and prepared to sacrifice himself for his
comrades, Witt views all things and persons with an
impassive constancy, and sees beauty and goodness in all
things. Where Welsh sees only the pain caused by human
selfishness, Witt looks at the same scenes and feels the
glory. He is like a redemptive angel looking into the souls
of soldiers and seizing hold of their spark. It is this
metaphysical commitment which fuels both Witt's selfless
courage in combat and his compassion for the enemy. In one
of the most moving scenes of the film, he looks into the
face of a dead Japanese soldier, half-buried in the dirt --
which speaks to him with a prophecy of his own fate -- 'Are
you loved by all? Know that I was. Do you imagine that your
sufferings will be less because you loved goodness, truth?'
In their final dialogue, Witt says that he still sees a
spark in Sergeant Welsh. The truth is, I think, that Welsh
is half in love with Witt, and behind his nihilism there is
a grudging but total respect for Witt's commitment. Welsh
cannot believe what Witt believes, he cannot behold the
glory. And yet, he is also unable to feel nothing, to feel
numb to the suffering that surrounds him. As a consequence,
he is in profound pain. In tears, at the foot of Witt's
grave, Welsh asks, 'Where's your spark now?', which might as
well be a question to himself. As in the two other
relationships, there seems to be a clear winner and loser.
As Welsh predicts in their second dialogue, the reward for
Witt's metaphysical commitment will be death. Loyalty to
one's men leads to dismissal from one's position, loyalty in
love leads to betrayal, and loyalty to a truth greater than
oneself leads to death. Yet, Malick is too intelligent to
make didactic art. Truth consists in the conflict, or series
of conflicts, between positions; and in watching those
conflicts unravel, we are instructed, deepened. This
conflict is particularly clear in the depiction of war
itself. For this is not simply an anti-war film and has none
of the post-adolescent bombast of Francis Ford Coppola's
_Apocalypse Now_ (1979), the cloying self-righteousness of
Oliver Stone's _Platoon_ (1986), or the gnawing, sentimental
nationalism of _Saving Private Ryan_ (1998). One of the
voiceovers states: 'War don't ennoble men. It turns them
into dogs. Poisons the soul.' But this view has to be
balanced with a central message of the film: namely, that
there is a total risk of the self in battle, an utter
emptying of the self, that does not produce egoism, but
rather a powerful bond of compassionate love for one's
comrades and even for one's enemy. The inhumanity of war
lets one see through the fictions of a people, a tribe, or a
nation towards a common humanity. The imponderable question
is why it should require such suffering to bring us to this
recognition. Immortality I would like to stay a
little longer with the character of Witt and consider in
detail one scene from the movie, namely the instant of his
death. Witt, like all the male protagonists from Malick's
previous movies, goes to his death with a sense of
acceptance, willingness even. In _Badlands_, Kit (Martin
Sheen) desires nothing more than the glorious notoriety of
death, and we assume at the end of the picture that he is
going to be electrocuted. In _Days of Heaven_, the Farmer
(Sam Shepherd) is told by his doctor that he is going to
die, and it is this overheard conversation that prompts Bill
(Richard Gere) into planning the deception of a marriage
with his partner, Abby (Brooke Adams). After Gere stabs
Shepherd to death in a smouldering wheat field, one has the
sense that this is exactly what the Farmer desired.
Similarly, when Bill is gunned down at the end of _Days of
Heaven_ -- in an amazing shot photographed from underwater
as his face hits the river -- one has a powerful intimation
of an ineluctable fate working itself out. In short,
Malick's male protagonists seem to foresee their appointment
with death and endeavour to make sure they arrive on time.
Defined by a fatalistic presentiment of their demise, they
are all somehow in love with death. Yet, such foreknowledge
does not provoke fear and trembling; on the contrary, it
brings, I will suggest, a kind of *calm*. There is an utter
recklessness to Witt and he repeatedly puts himself in
situations of extreme danger. He is amongst the first to
volunteer for the small unit that makes the highly dangerous
flanking move to destroy the Japanese machine gun position,
and the action that leads to his eventual death at the end
of the film is very much of his own making. So, to this
extent, Witt fits the death-bound pattern of Malick's male
protagonists. Yet, what is distinctive about the character
of Witt is that at the core of his sense of mortality lies
the metaphysical question of immortality. This is
established in the opening scenes of the movie in the
Melanesian village, when he is shown talking to an unnamed
comrade who has also gone AWOL. Against the recollected
image of his mother's death-bed, he says, 'I remember my mother when
she was dying, all shrunken and grey. I asked if she was
afraid. She just shook her head. I was afraid to touch the
death that I see in her. I couldn't find anything beautiful
or uplifting about her going back to God. I heard people
talk about immortality, but I ain't never seen
it.' The point here is that
Witt is afraid of the death that descends over his mother,
he can't touch it, find any comfort in it, or believe that
it is the passage to her immortal home in bliss. Witt is
then profiled standing on the beach, and he continues, less
sceptically, and this time in a voiceover, 'I wondered how it'd be
when I died. What it'd be like to know that this breath now
was the last one you was ever gonna draw. I just hope I can
meet it the same way she did, with the same . . . calm.
Because that's where it's hidden, the immortality that I
hadn't seen.' It is this pause between
'same' and 'calm' that I want to focus on, this breathing
space for a last breath. For I think this calm is the key to
the film and, more widely, to Malick's art. The metaphysical
issue of the reality or otherwise of immortality obviously
cannot be settled and that is not the point. The thought
here is that the only immortality imaginable is found in a
calm that can descend at the moment of death. The eternal
life can only be imagined as inhabiting the instant of one's
death, of knowing that this is the last breath that you are
going to draw and not being afraid. [10] With this in mind, let's
look at the instant of Witt's death. Charlie Company are
making their way, very precariously, up a river, and the
whole scene, as elsewhere in Malick, is saturated with the
sound of flowing river water. Phone lines back to HQ have
been cut, enemy artillery fire is falling all around them
and is getting steadily closer. The company is under the
command of the peculiarly incompetent Lieutenant Band, who
is leading them into an extremely exposed position where
they will be sitting ducks for an enemy attack. Rather than
retreating, as he should have done, Bard hurriedly decides
to send a small scouting party up the river to judge the
proximity of the enemy. He chooses the terrified Fife and
the adolescent Coombs, and then Witt quickly volunteers
himself. After progressing a little way up the river, they
are seen by the enemy and Coombs is shot, but not fatally
wounded. Witt sends Fife back to the company and the wounded
Coombs floats back downstream. In an act of complete
selflessness, Witt allows himself to be used as a decoy and
leads off a squad of Japanese soldiers into the jungle. Witt
then suddenly finds himself in a small clearing surrounded
on all sides by some twenty Japanese troops. Breathless and
motionless, he stands still whilst the Japanese squad leader
screams at him, presumably demanding that he defend himself.
Witt remains stock still, recovers his breath and then
realises that he is going to die. The scene seems
agonizingly long, the music slowly builds and there is a
slow zoom into Witt's face. He is . . . calm. Then the
camera slowly zooms out and there is a brief shot of him
half-heartedly raising his gun as he is gunned down. Malick
then cuts to images of nature, of trees, water, and
birds. What is one to make of
this? Obvious philosophical parallels can be drawn here. For
example, Heidegger's notion of *Angst* or anxiety is
experienced with the presentiment of my mortality, what he
calls *being-towards-death*. In one famous passage from the
1929 lecture, 'What is Metaphysics?', a text that Malick
surely knows as it is directly contemporary with _The
Essence of Reasons_, Heidegger is anxious to distinguish
*Angst* from all sorts of fear and trembling. He says that
the experience of *Angst* is a kind of *Ruhe*, peace, or
calm. [11] Similarly, in Blanchot's tantalizingly
brief memoir, _L'Instant
de ma mort_, the
seemingly autobiographical protagonist is described at the
point of being executed by German soldiers, a fate from
which he eventually escapes. He describes the feeling as 'un
sentiment de légèreté extraordinaire,
une sorte de béatitude'. [12] One also thinks
of Wittgenstein's remark from the _Tractatus_: 'the eternal
life is given to those who live in the present'.
[13] One could go on amassing examples. To interpret
Malick's treatment of death in line with such thoughts is
extremely tempting, but it would be to slip up on one or
more of those hermeneutic banana skins discussed above. It
would be to offer ideas about the thing rather than *der
Sache Selbst*. At the core of _The Thin
Red Line_, then, 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 frames the film and paradoxically
provides the context for the bloody and cruel action of war.
In particular, it frames the character of Welsh, who cares
for Witt and his 'beautiful light' much more than he can
admit, but persists to the end of the film in his belief
that everything is a lie. His final words are, 'You're in a
box, a moving box. They want you dead or in their
lie'. All Things Shining -- The
Place of Nature in Malick Why do I claim that calm
is the key to Malick's art? To try and tease this out, I
would like to turn to the theme of nature, whose massive
presence is the constant backdrop to Malick's movies. If
calm in the face of mortality is the frame for the human
drama of _The Thin Red Line_, then nature is the frame for
this frame, a power that at times completely overshadows the
human drama. _The Thin Red Line_ opens
with the image of a huge crocodile slowly submerging into a
weed-covered pond -- the crocodile who makes a brief return
appearance towards the end of the film, when he is shown
captured by some men from Charlie company, who prod it
abstractedly with a stick. Against images of jungle trees
densely wrapped in suffocating vines, we hear the first
words of the movie, presumably spoken by Witt, 'What's this war in the
heart of nature? Why does nature vie with itself, the land
contend with the sea? Is there an avenging power in nature?
Not one power, but two.' Obviously, the war in the
heart of nature has a double meaning, suggesting both a war
internal to nature, and the human war that is being fought
out amid such immense natural beauty. These two meanings are
brought together later in the film by Colonel Tall, when he
is in the process of dismissing Starros from his commission
and justifying the brutality of war, 'Look at this jungle, look
at those vines, the way they twine around the tress,
swallowing everything. Nature is cruel, Starros.' Images of trees wrapped in
vines punctuate _The Thin Red Line_, together with countless
images of birds, in particular owls and parrots. These
images are combined with the almost constant presence of
natural sounds, of birdsong, of the wind in the Kunai grass,
of animals moving in the undergrowth and the sound of water,
both waves lapping on the beach and the flowing of the
river. Nature might be viewed as
a kind of *fatum* for Malick, an ineluctable power, a
warring force that both frames human war but is utterly
indifferent to human purposes and intentions. This beautiful
indifference of nature can be linked to the depiction of
nature elsewhere in Malick's work. For example, _Badlands_
is teeming with natural sounds and images: with birds, dogs,
flowing water, the vast flatness of South Dakota, and the
badlands of Montana, with its mountains in the distance --
and always remaining in the distance. _Days of Heaven_ is
also heavily marked with natural sounds and exquisitely
photographed images, with flowing river water, the wind
moving in fields of ripening wheat and silhouetted human
figures working in vast fields. Nature also possesses here
an avenging power, when a plague of locusts descend on the
fields and Sam Shepherd sets fire to an entire wheat-crop --
Nature is indeed cruel. Although it is difficult
not to grant that nature is playing a symbolic role for
Malick, his is not an animistic conception of nature, of the
kind that one finds lamented in Coleridge's 1802 'Dejection:
An Ode': 'Oh Lady! We receive but what we give/And in our
life alone does nature live'. [14] Rather, in my
opinion, nature's indifference to human purposes follows on
from a broadly naturalistic conception of nature. Things are
not enchanted in Malick's universe, they simply *are*, and
we are things too. They are remote from us and continue on
regardless of our strivings. This is what is suggested by
the Wallace Stevens poem cited in epigraph to this essay. A
soldier falls in battle, but his death does not invite pomp
or transient glory. Rather, death has an absolute character,
which Stevens likens to a moment in autumn when the wind
stops. Yet, when the wind stops, above in the high heavens
the clouds continue on their course, 'nevertheless,/In their
direction'. What is central to Malick, I think, is this
'neverthelessness' of nature, of the fact that human death
is absorbed into the relentlessness of nature, the eternal
war in nature into which the death of a soldier is
indifferently ingested. That's where Witt's spark
lies. There is a calm at the
heart of Malick's art, a calmness to his cinematic eye, a
calmness that is also communicated by his films, that
becomes the mood of his audience. As Charlie company leave
Guadalcanal and are taken back to their ship on a landing
craft, we hear the final voiceover from Witt, this time from
beyond the grave, 'Oh my soul, let me be in
you now. Look out through my eyes, look out at the things
you made, all things shining.' In each of his movies, one
has the sense of things simply being looked at, just being
what they are -- trees, water, birds, dogs, crocodiles, or
whatever. Things simply are, and are not moulded to a human
purpose. We watch things shining calmly, being as they are,
in all the intricate evasions of 'as'. The camera can be
pointed at those things to try and capture some grain or
affluence of their reality. The closing shot of _The Thin
Red Line_ presents the viewer with a coconut fallen onto the
beach, against which a little water laps, and out of which
has sprouted a long green shoot, connoting life, one
imagines. The coconut simply is, it merely lies there remote
from us and our intentions. This suggests to me Stevens's
final poem, 'The Palm at the End of the Mind', the palm that
simply persists regardless of the makings of 'human
meaning'. Stevens concludes: 'The palm stands on the edge of
space. The wind moves slowly in its branches'. [15]
In my fancy at least, I see Malick concurring with this
sentiment. University
of Essex,
England Footnotes 1. I would like to thank
Nick Bunnin, Stanley Cavell, Jim Conant, Hubert Dreyfus, and
Jim Hopkins for confirming and providing facts about Malick,
and also for helpful comments on my line of argument. I
would also like to thank my colleague, Espen Hammer, for
discussing _The Thin Red Line_ with me, and Robert Lang for
pointing out a number of infelicities in my first
draft. 2. Wallace Stevens, 'The
Death of a Soldier', in Holly Stevens, ed., _The Palm at the
End of the Mind_ (New York: Vintage, 1971), p.
189. 3. Wittgenstein, _Culture
and Value_, edited by G. H. von Wright (Oxford: Blackwell,
1980), p. 80. 4. James Jones, _The Thin
Red Line_ (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1998). 5. James Jones, _From Here
to Eternity_ (London: Hodder and Stoughton,
1998). 6. Michael Filippidis, 'On
Malick's Subjects', _Senses of Cinema_, no. 8, July-August
2000 <http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/00/8/malick.html>;
accessed 28 August 2002. 7. Martin Heidegger, _The
Essence of Reasons_, trans. Terrence Malick (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1969). 8. For a similar line of
argument on the relation of philosophy to film, see Stephen
Mulhall _On Film_ (London: Routledge, 2002). 9. Jones, _The Thin Red
Line_, p. 24. 10. To show the freedom
that Malick takes with his source material, the only
occasion Jones's novel discusses the lofty question of
immortality is in the following amusing passage, in a
conversation between Fife and Doll: 'Do you believe there's
any life after death?' he asked after a moment. 'I don't
know', Fife mumbled. 'Certainly not like all the churches
say anyway. The Japs believe if they die fighting they go
straight to heaven forever. How primitive can you get? I
just don't know. That's the truth.' 'Well, I don't know
either', Doll said. 'But sometimes I cant help wondering
about it. Let's go down to the dump and get some canned
fruit', he grinned after a pause. (Jones, _The Thin Red
Line_, p. 513.) 11. See Martin Heidegger,
'What is Metaphysics?' [1929], in _Pathmarks_
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp.
35-55. 12. '[A] feeling
of extraordinary lightness, a sort of beatitude': Maurice
Blanchot, _L'Instant de ma mort_ (Montpellier: Fata Morgana,
1994), p. 16. 13. Wittgenstein,
Proposition 6.4311, _Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus_ trans.
D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1961). 14. Samuel Coleridge,
'Dejection: An Ode' [1802], in J. Beer, ed.,
_Collected Poems_ (London: Dent, 1956), p. 256. 15. Stevens, 'The Palm at
the End of the Mind', in _The Palm at the End of the Mind_,
p. 383. Copyright © Simon
Critchley 2002 Simon Critchley, 'Calm --
On Terrence Malick's _The Thin Red Line_',
_Film-Philosophy_, vol. 6 no. 48, December 2002
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol6-2002/n48critchley>. Join the _Film-Philosophy_
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