The Thin Red Line

Lover Lover Lover… Like a dying bird. I decided to gently ease my way into Terrence Malick by choosing a familiar genre. There have been many films made about the dehumanizing nature of war. The Thin Red Line is a film about the humanity of it. More broadly, it is a film about the war which rages in every man between inhumanity and humanity. Beauty in the midst of mortal terror, the presence of God in searing flame. The presence of God in the rustling of the grass, the flickering of the candle, the billowing smoke, and the smoldering of the mountainside after an artillery barrage. This is a film that invites you to feel the presence of God in all things. The God of Guadalcanal is the God of all creation, of silence and of thunder, of stillness and of storms. The clouds drifting overhead don't know that you're at war, nor does the sun when it breaks through and shines on the still and vacant body of a man you knew moments earlier. You heard the gunshots before you saw his emptiness next to you. This is very close to the most perilous war has ever looked on screen, and yet this peril is breathtakingly beautiful. What Terrence Malick presents is a genuinely radical -ultimately primeval- view of war, wherein all its terror and beauty can be encountered as the glory and power of God. At the same time the we are challenged with another view, one which creeps in at the margins like a rot, a hopeless, doomed world in which all the suffering conceived and beheld by man is death’s triumph over creation, every moment of small cruelty, this victor’s mockery. What the film simply will not allow, is for the viewer to exist in a world devoid of immaterial forces. The Thin Red Line is not a morally grey film, there is a cosmic good and evil woven into every frame, a battlefield which cares not for the lines drawn on the map by the Americans and the Japanese, but rather for the lines drawn on their hearts. Regardless of uniforms, there is a war between men who give peace and men who steal it. A war between the Giver of all peace and that terrible spirit which animates men toward the destruction of their brothers and themselves. A spirit which tells them that all -but most especially Love- is a lie, and that there is nothing else beyond the world of strife. When men take lives senselessly it feels as though they are possessed, and another hand guides theirs to the trigger. Even the warmonger who drives his men toward meaningless destruction is more than just that here. He is a man who is encountering his mortality and dying to himself, his identity shattered by the desperation of slow decay "shut up in a tomb, I played a role I never conceived.” A lot of what makes The Thin Red Line work so well is that it uses the framework of a familiar genre, which everyone can understand to invite in and to host the transcendent. The audience is anchored by the structure of a war film, so that when its more cerebral elements drift in, we are not lost in the clouds. This effect works best perhaps with the images themselves, but it is not lost on the characters either. Though they at first seem only to be familiar war film archetypes, their inner monologues draw the viewer into their great depth. Terrence Malick is quickly ascending to the status of my favorite directors. Like PTA and David Lean, he possesses an overwhelming empathy and understanding of the connection between the personal and the profound, the psychological and the mythic. He is a documentarian of the encounters with transcendence that I watch films for. 9/10