Man comes to Melanesia

Rating: Null/10 (28 November 2007)

James Jones' "The Thin Red Line", one of the finest WW2 novels, was published in 1962. The book was adapted for the screen in 1964. Terrence Malick would release another adaptation in 1998. All three focus on WW2's Guadalcanal Campaign.
Malick's version opens on Private Witt (Jim Caviezel), a young man who has deserted the US army and has sought refuge on an idyllic island. Witt's actions are typical of Malick's heroes, who tend to "cut themselves" off from mankind in an attempt to "connect to" or "create" some idyllic or spiritual realm. Malick's heroes seek to create "personal islands" for themselves, "islands" which tend to eventually degenerate into disease, corruption, death or disenchantment. Witt, a young man who has an almost religious faith in mankind, sees his island rot with the approach of others. With this rotting comes a loss of faith, optimism and eventually his own death. Witt, however, turns his death into an affirmation of his own faith in humanity. Even as the world around him reveals itself to be base, violent and barbaric, Witt sacrifices his life and becomes the embodiment of what he calls "the glory".
Malick, however, also focuses on a large number of other soldiers. His aesthetic itself seems to recall John Donne's quote, "No man is an island entirely unto himself", or perhaps what Ralph Emerson called "The Oversoul", all Malick's soldiers "living in succession, in division, in parts, in particles" such that "within every man is the soul of the whole".
In "The Thin Red Line", Witt is an optimist who sees "the glory" and "the wonder" in everything, firstly because he is absolutely deluded, and, of course, because he is absolute right. In the pantheistic sense, everything literally is God, every morsel a part of an immanent divinity. As the film unfolds, though, Malick will increasingly paint his war as being comprised of little oppositional ideologies. As such, all the men in the film are paired off according to very specific world-views, which they articulate via voice-over narration (like the opposing poles of magnets). Importantly the men don't grow or change. Their philosophies remain the same from beginning to end. And so we have the believer, the atheist, the cynic, the idealist, the loyalist, the lunatic, the romantic, the optimist, the lover, the hater, the pessimist etc etc...all these different character traits, thrown together on an island.
Malick mocks all these ideologies, or disagrees with them all, with the exception of 3 pairs. Of those 3 pairs, he identifies with 1 and romanticises the other. The first relationship is between Nick Nolte's Colonel Tall and Elias Koteas' Captain Starros. Both men battle over the question of loyalty. Whether a man is owned by those above, and whether his life is worth sacrificing for some greater "good". Starros believes that every life is precious, Nolte does not. Nolte wins.
The second relationship is based on love. It involves one private's "profound connection" with his wife. At the end of the film he receives a letter stating that his wife has left him. Love loses.
The third and most important relationship is between Pvt Witt and Sean Penn's Sgt Welsh. Penn becomes a stand in for Malick the philosopher or cynic, and acts as the polar opposite to Witt, who is essentially Malick the Christian. Witt believes that man is innately good, that we all have a "glory" within us and that there is an afterlife. Penn, the character Jones most identified with, is a sceptic. He believes in no afterlife, that everything "is a lie", and that we're in a Kubrickian world of "sh*t". At the end of the film, Pvt Witt dies. The cynic wins.
This relationship between Penn and Caviezel is the most important. The film opens and closes with this pair and gives them the most screen time. The film itself is structured as a lazy passage to and from islands, men constantly arriving and departing, seemingly contaminating everything they touch. "They want you dead or in their lie," Penn says, sceptical of yet another batch of arriving officers. "There's only one thing a man can do: find something that is his and make an island for himself." This, of course, is a philosophy which Malick, a Kubrick-like hermit, seems to have embraced.
Ultimately, though, Malick's films all portray a war between the Romantic Ideal of "man in harmony with nature" and the Post Enlightenment ideal of "man lording over nature". In this way Malick deals with what German sociologist Max Weber calls "Rationalization's disenchantment of the world", in which post Enlightenment society cherishes "instrumental Rationality" over and above "value rationality" to such an extent that magic/spirituality/religion is slowly eroded and the world is reordered such that everything is subordinated to a "rational" quest for efficiency, control and the pursuit of "mundane materials", often by force.
In breaking free of their worlds and retreating to the Romantic Ideal, Malick's "heroes" are thus searching for some mythical wholeness, some non-existent Eden which is unattainable precisely because all pre-enlightenment myths of wholeness have been displaced by the modern discovery of a plurality of worlds. The tensions of Malick's films, however, arise from the fact that the modern world which allows for all, also allows for nothing. As plurality is threatening, the Social Order attempts to reduce this threatening plurality - and the sceptical undermining of knowledge and morality it entails - to one universal world again by means of conquest and domination. And that is the paradox Malick explores: the Post Enlightenment world which preaches multiplicity but seeks to impose its own unity, its own singular Law (imperialism/colonialism/the Big Other), and the Romantic Ideal which promises some spiritual wholeness (or monotheism or pantheism), but delivers only the lawless, malevolence of Nature.
10/10 - One of the most influential films of the 1990s.