I remain ambivalent about two shots towards the end of the film—let’s say the second and third shots or so from the end. The final shot, reproduced below, is perfect.1
Rather, I have in mind, first, the shot of the two brightly colored parrots (creatures we have not seen before) and, more importantly, the shot of Private Witt paddling a canoe with two Solomon Islander boys, a reprise of the idyll that begins the film. About the parrot shot I am relatively indifferent. Perhaps in an anticipation of the notorious merciful dinosaur from 2011’s Tree of Life (likely Malick’s nadir, though there is competition for that title), the director wished to introduce another image of that conjugality that informs the film so elusively and implicitly, this time in brighter colors. Very well. It feels out of place, but I have no great objection to it. (The final image, of the water plant that will, presumably, germinate and take root on the beach, seems to me the more powerful, because more tentative, image of nature’s continuance.)
More troubling to me is the reprise of Private Witt, as it seems to point to a hesitancy in The Thin Red Line’s revision of traditional narrative art. The issue it raises is that of what status the film gives to the objective ratification of an idea. Two ideas seem primarily in dispute in it. One stems from the arena of objective fact: how to take that hill. As I argued in my first post, the film’s answer to that question is dizzying in that it frustrates all attempts to extract a general truth—unless that truth be knowledge of the binding of thought to circumstance, to particular moments, places, and bodies. Nevertheless, whatever it contains of the invisible (that is, paths not taken, the counterfactuals), the dispute between Tall and Staros retains an objective character. This objective character is the obvious logic of war. The hill is taken or it is not. One party attains dominance over the other or they do not. At its extremity, one kills the other or does not. Though there are, no doubt, on the deeper levels, grounds for questioning even this, there is an evident link between the logic of war and that of outward, objective narratives. (As Rachel Cusk observes in a recent essay, “War is a narrative: it might almost be said to embody the narrative principle itself.”2) And what matters above all for such narratives is how they end.
The other major dispute in the film follows a different logic. This is the dispute between Private Witt (Jim Caviezel) and Sgt Welsh (the “mother” of George Clooney’s jokey pep-talk, discussed in part 2). Their dispute is over whether there is or is not “another world” than this one.3 Witt declares that there is, and he has seen it. Welsh denies it: “In this world, a man, himself, is nothing. And there ain’t no world but this one,” he declares, in the trailer I linked earlier.) Later on, as he stands over the grave of Private Witt (who has been shot dead by a Japanese patrol after he led them on a self-sacrificial chase through the jungle to save his fellow GIs), Sgt Welsh believes himself to be vindicated: “Where’s your spark now?” Long past the day when Paul de Man asked, of the final stanza of W. B. Yeats’s “Among Schoolchildren,” whether its questions were rhetorical or literal, this literary-theoretical shibboleth here reveals its irrelevancy. Whether or not Sgt. Welsh believes the answer to be self-evident, it remains the case that what prompts his question is the finality of Witt’s death. For Welsh, in other words, the narrative logic of endings either supervenes upon or radically calls into question the testimonial logic of Witt’s witnessing of “another world.” The deep issue for The Thin Red Line as a film is not whether it affirms his answer, but his question.
As viewers, we would be foolish to accept Sgt Welsh’s interpretation of the event of Witt’s death as prompting either of these anxieties. Hence the obvious answer to the question, “Where’s your spark now?” is: in you, the recipient of Witt’s message, in whom it continues to live as an irritant, present even in your efforts to resist it.
To accept this logic, however, is to resist the logic of finality, of the decisiveness of outward things, and hence to insist upon the radicalism of the counterprinciple that the film erects against the War principle. (It should go without saying that the Christ story, which Private Witt’s life echoes, a little obviously for my taste, also centers on an outward defeat that transmits something enduring. Though here one would have to add that the dissemination of that message in the form of Christianity and its institutions does mark an ultimate reaffirmation of the outward, narrative principle, albeit in a way that transforms the nature of victory.)
It is for these reasons, that it weakens the film’s radicalism, that I have a reservation about the shot of Private Witt near the ending of the film. Does not the return to the image of Private Witt betray a belief that endings and visibility really are what matter? It can be argued, of course, that these recollections merely give visual form to the kind of endurance embodied in Welsh’s words. But, in this one instance, the reversion to the cinematic logic of visuality seems a falling away from the film’s deepest revisions to that form.
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