The Thin Red Line - Is it "For" You? [part 3/3] [no spoilers]

Rating: 10/10 (28 February 1999)

Note: This post should be taken as a public-service announcement. It's intended as a guideline for any who have heard such mixed or negative things that they aren't sure, or who are afraid of finding it too disturbing. It was a movie _for me_ -- but then my tastes differ from many people's, so I'm not simply going to say "See it" because I don't think that's any more helpful than saying "It sux--" (If it isn't for you, this will help you decide that too; but this is not a put-down.) ===================================================> Is it for men? -- No.
Is it for military history buffs? --- Again, no.
It is for anyone who ever dreamed with Heyerdahl on Kon Tiki and Mowgli in the jungle ... for anyone who finds a strange echo in the soul at names like Kwajalein and Enewitok, Tulagi and Leyte and Wake Island and Truk Lagoon, Rangoon and Rabaul and Port Moresby and the Marianas -- for anyone who dreams of travel to far-off lands where strange people and stranger customs hold sway... where like any traveler what you bring away will depend upon what gifts you bring with you.
As those who favor trial dramas will undoubtedly know, there is an element of unreliabiity in every witness -- our challenge is to find out what our own witness's unreliability is, and see past it. If you "know" that war is about the destruction of nature and man's depradations, then that is what you will see -- even though there plainly shown is the jungle's inexorability to swallow up men and machinery without a trace (it requires millions of civilians with motor-cars to overthrow a rain-forest, not a few thousand infantrymen with guns: in two days an entire B-24 could be swallowed up in the Pacific jungles after a crash.) If you come knowing what a revetment is, and why the high ground must be held or taken, whence the need for air superiority and what, exactly, is a siege -- well, you will not realize that you know these things already, since you will not have them pressed upon you over and over again via infodump. If on the other hand you do not know what a BAR is or a DC-3/C47 or the several meanings of "flank" or how far a Zero can fly before refueling or what range a fixed 70 mm machine-gun can cover -- well, you don't really need to know, because things come and are as they are, and the world does not accommodate us to our lack of information but we must adapt to it, and what you know or don't know doesn't change some things. (But you can, if you wish, easily find out about these things, and more, in a few hours reading or a few weeks.) If you already know that Rank Has Its Privileges but you Salute The Uniform, Not The Man -- that No Battle Plan Survives Contact With The Enemy, and how to Hurry Up And Wait -- then you will likely find little surprising; appalling perhaps, but not terribly surprising. If on the other hand your view of the Military Industrial Complex is born of Dr. Strangelove or Wargames, then you may not be surprised either -- but you should be. If names like Bataan and Corregidor mean nothing to you, then you may or may not be surprised (but certainly appalled, one hopes) but even if they do, unless the code-name Cactus rings a bell, you will still be astonished and probably dubious about certain things -- but they are all true, and documented, in one form or another, for though TRL calls itself fiction, there is more fact in it than in many purported docudramas.
Isn't it slow?-- boring? --pretensious?
"Only the boring are bored--" --or as the French phrase it , "I bore myself."
It is measured. Deliberate. Except in nightmares, when are we ever thrown into the midst of a raging battle (unless so unfortunate as to experience an air-raid) without warning, without packing, without much carrying of _stuff_ and unpacking of _stuff_ and putting up of tents and so forth and so on? There is a time that must be lived before any event, and there is a time that must be lived after it, unless one dies; one does not in life have the liberty of fast-forwarding any more than rewinding, however we wish it were otherwise. But it is not boring to those who do not choose to be bored, any more than life itself is necessarily boring as we live it, even when we are not being shot at or chased by sinister foes for mysterious reasons--
But -- is it not too horrible? Too gore-stricken? Too awful?
--Yes.
--Not at all.
It doesn't allow you to _look away_ from what happens to people when sharp or hot or suddenly-projected things encounter them with abruptness -- yet it doesn't insist on plunging you into the depths of such carnage without companionship, without mercy. There is shocking horror, but there is also mercy, the mercy of smoke that hides the naked frame from the enemy's eye as from the eye of command; the mercy of a kind hand guiding a friend through the field of hell, the mercy of brotherhood, brotherhood of blood indeed; "things must get worse before they get better," and that is the truth. The suffering, the shame, the raw torture are not cruelly displayed for a gloating voyeur: they are suffered by those with whom we are, with whom we travel and tremble and weep --
-- But is it not anti-war? --anti-military? --propaganda?
No. That is not it at all. Those questions are simply immaterial. We are in hell, and we must endure. It does not matter how we got here, or why, or what cause or command put us here; we must do as we can, as best we can, however much or little that may be. The enemy we face is not this man or that, our own commander or the other sides -- the Enemy here is Death, and that which is behind Death, whether we believe it to be blind unknowing Chaos or a dark and lonely Power opposed to light and Life--
--Is it for you?
--It is for anyone who has been in hell and longed for heaven--
--Whoever does not study history is doomed to repeat its errors. "History is also written by the bystanders." --Timothy Zahn