This post is a continuation of an initial set of reflections on Terence Malick’s 1998 film, the first of which may be found here.
As a portrait of the human totality, The Thin Red Line may be said to be one-sided. Of most of its characters, it might be said, as Hazlitt said of Wordsworth, “It is as if there were nothing, but himself and the universe.” To be sure, there is an obvious coordination among their activities—one that exceeds in its sophistication the mere fact that war is a collective activity. The surgical assault on the machine-gun nest led by John Cusack’s Captain, backed by a precision aerial bombardment implies a high degree of deliberate coordination. Private Witt’s sacrificial decoy action near the film’s close does the same, albeit in the lower, more vernacular key of teamwork. From the spiritual standpoint, however, the film’s portrait of collectivity has a serial character: its groups are assemblages of singularities, each of which must work out its relationship, not with the other singularities, but with the universe, with nature, and with God.
Hence, perhaps, the uncertain status of femininity within the film, an uncertainty that cannot be written off as merely derivative of the fact that the film takes as its setting the male terrain of War. For the feminine is not absent from it (a mother and her child appear early in the film, albeit as part of an idyll, apart from its primary world). Rather, femininity tends to appear at a certain distance: as the object of recollection and yearning, sometimes desire, in the memories and fantasies of Private Bell (Ben Chaplin), dreaming about and remembering his wife back home. (Later in the film, Bell will receive a “Dear John” letter informing him she is leaving him for another. The only other character to have his memories thus displayed, I believe, is Private Witt; his memory, however, is the masculine scene of haymaking with his father, a salient figure given Witt’s Christlike status, albeit an equivocal one in relation to the theme of embodiment. The cut from the scene of haymaking to the grated floor of the brig where Private Witt is being held prisoner for desertion is one of the film’s most interesting, so jarring after such abundant life. The thought crosses one’s mind that embodiment is a prison; yet for Private Witt not to be embodied is a prison. Like a sunflare on the retina, the thought flashes its own negative: an afterimage seared on the mind.)
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