# Auteurism and War-teurism

## Terrence Malick's War Movie

Dana Polan

If this were a movie, this would be the end of the show and something would be decided. In a movie or a novel they would dramatise and build to the climax of the attack. When the attack came in the film or novel, it would be satisfying, it would decide something. It would have a semblance of meaning and a semblance of an emotion. And immediately after, it would be over. The audience could go home and think about the semblance of the meaning and feel the semblance of the emotion. Even if the hero got killed, it would still make sense. Art, [Private] Bell decided, creative art – was shit.

James Jones, *The Thin Red Line*

At one point in Terrence Malick's *THE THIN RED LINE*, just before a battle we see a shot of a natural world followed by a shot of Colonel Tall (Nick Nolte) who intones a phrase in Greek and then tells his soldiers that it's the "rosy-fingered dawn" phrase from Homer's *Odyssey*. With this reference, *THE THIN RED LINE* does two slightly different things – things that suggest the complicated situation of the war film in today's culture. On the one hand, *THE THIN RED LINE* clearly wants to take up identity as an epic of war – a film of vast sweep with great means and great pretence. On the other hand, the use of an explicit 'citation' to 'declare' the film's lineage to an epic antecedent seems a resolutely postmodern gesture: like all major war films today, *THE THIN RED LINE* is an ersatz work, aware of fictionality, aware of tradition, only able to make itself seem traditionally a war film by fictionally declaring itself to be so. Like a speech-act which brings about a state of affairs by announcing that it is bringing about that state of affairs, *THE THIN RED LINE* isn't naturally an epic but constructs itself as one. Indeed, is it accidental that so many big war films of recent years emphasise the cost and effort that went into their production as if to reiterate the extent to which they build up narrative worlds and also build up the world views they subtend? Not naturally, but through immense creative human effort, they bring their war fiction into being. Even as eventually traditional a film as SAVING PRIVATE RYAN – applauded by middle-brow America as
a realist work that breaks through conventions to achieve Truth – seems in many respects to be about fictionality: from its play with the rules of genre (for example, the coward who in this case never finds the courage to become a hero) to the very ways it only gradually discovers narrativity out of an experimental opening battle that seems to go on and on, SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, too, is in large part about the war film as a construction, rather than a direct and innocent and natural expression of a national will about war.

Experiments in the revision of established, codified genres (such as the war film) probably have either (or both) of two intents. On the one hand, the attempt to alter the rules of genre can have to do with issues of content, with a sense that the ways the genre typically structures meaning blocks certain world views from achieving representation. A modification of the genre, it is hoped, will enable new experiences, new voices, new realities to come into existence. To take just one example, the shift from classic British detective fiction to American hard-boiled fiction was famously lauded by Raymond Chandler (in his “The Simple Art of Murder”) as the replacement of the limited unreality of the British aristocratic view of the world by a modern, bluntly real, experientially authentic one, more attuned to the nature of contemporary urban existence.

On the other hand, experiments in genre can also have as their intent to revise form, to play with it, to uncover its ludic possibilities – to see codes as formal structures that future examples in the genre enact productive permutations upon. Here, again, we can cite the example of British detective fiction. So generally fixed is the moral universe of this fiction (a sedentary world of privilege into which crime comes as a disturbing stain, an upset that must be put aright) that only a revolutionary shift of the sort Chandler announces could change its meaning; before that revolutionary shift then, the internal history of the British detective story is one of authors engaging in gamelike formal variations (let’s make the narrator the murderer, let’s make all the suspects the murderer, let’s make a totally incidental character the murderer; let’s have the detective be a priest, a ...) that leave the moral universe itself untouched but create new generic delights for aficionados.

We might grasp the evolution of the combat film as the history of a genre in which experiments in form and in content are both at work, pushing individual works to say new things about the experience of war and to find new forms in which to say that. Traditionally, the combat film was a highly codified genre with set structure and set meaning. As outlined by Jeanine Basinger in its Second World War paradigm (The World War II combat film: anatomy of a genre, Columbia University Press, 1986), the model for the combat film deals with a team of soldiers from diverse civilian backgrounds who go off on a mission (for example, SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, to quote the title of a more recent World War II film) and, along the way, encounter conflicts both external (fights with the enemy)
and internal (for example, outbreaks of cowardice that threaten group cohesion). For the soldiers, the mission can become the occasion for emotional growth and self-discovery but, in the ideology of the World War II film, one discovers what was really there all along – the meaningfulness of nation and national mission, the rightness of one's place, the justification of cause. There indeed can be internal division in the World War II combat film, but, as I argue in my study of Forties films (*Power and Paranoia: History, Narrative, and the American Cinema, 1940-1950*, Columbia University Press, 1985), the wartime film admits dissension only insofar as such dissension can be tamed, co-opted, converted. Indeed, "conversion" is, as I suggest in *Power and Paranoia*, a central narrative structure and strategy for the wartime film: for a war in which soldiers were told "there are no atheists in the foxholes", conversion to the mission of the combat team – and beyond that to the war effort as an organic whole – takes on directly religious meaning (see, for instance, Hawks's *SERGEANT YORK* where the pacifist title character converts after a weekend spent reading both the Bible and the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights). Moreover, conversion works here by suggesting not that the meanings of engagement are imposed onto the subject from without but that they exist rather as an inner spark that needs to be rekindled, a core of commitment that had been forgotten through cowardice or cynicism (as the opening title of the 1942 *CHINA GIRL* tells us, an American will fight for three things – money, a girl, his country – and the central character of the film is said to be fighting for two of these as the story begins). Conversion then brings back into the organic unity of nationhood those individuals who never really left, who had simply forgotten their national being and belonging (not for nothing does *CASABLANCA* tell us that Rick had a past as a freedom fighter; he does not convert to something new but rediscover a buried part of himself).

For the wartime World War II combat film, meaning was natural: there was a mission (both the literal mission faced by the soldiers and the national mission of the war effort) and its purpose was evident, inevitable. Hence, the importance of conversion, for in its suggestion that one doesn't learn new things, that commitment isn't imposed on the subject from without but wells up from within, the narrative of conversion makes growth into commitment natural, logical, ordinary. Although as I suggest in *Power and Paranoia*, the moment of war sows seeds for the dismantling of the classical Hollywood narrative – insofar as the narrative of conversion to war commitment requires a disavowal of a commitment to the private realm of the romantic couple so central to classical Hollywood narrative – and thereby prepares the way for disunified post-war genres of battles of the sexes like film noir and the woman's gothic film, it is also important to understand the World War II combat film as one of the last perfections or accomplishments of the classical Hollywood cinema. Here is a genre where ease of style, naturalness of narrativity, matches an ease of world
view, a naturalness of mission and meaning – a genre whose philosophy is pre-given (pre-given to the filmic form, pre-given to the characters in the narrative, pre-given to the target audience).

But in the recent combat film, unity – unity of form and content, unity of mission and meaning, unity of character and moral purpose – frequently comes undone. As cultural theorist Marita Sturken shows in her chapter on Vietnam and post-Vietnam variants of the combat narrative structure in her *Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic and the Politics of Remembering* (University of California Press, 1997), the manifestations of the genre in these later historical moments both adhere to initial meanings of the genre (the mission as process of self-education and accomplishment) while suggesting that the original organic unity of the genre is no longer easily or readily to be had.

Without a coherent ideology to shore it up, the war film becomes directly in-coherent: for example, images that are overfilled and chaotically unreadable (the psychedelia of *APOCALYPSE NOW*), narrative trajectories that fragment into monadic bits (*FULL METAL JACKET* with its two major segments and its numerous set pieces), a visuality of baroque tangle (the tunnels of *CASUALTIES OF WAR*, the labyrinthine camera movements of *FULL METAL JACKET*), an experimental fascination with a sheer temporality in which pure duration comes to substitute for the progress of narrative (the seeming endlessness of the opening battle in *SAVING PRIVATE RYAN*, the excruciating torture of the training sequence in *FULL METAL JACKET*, the temporally vast minimalism of the assault on the hillside in *THE THIN RED LINE*).

As Sturken notes, the political divisions of the Vietnam War have bequeathed to the representations of war a legacy of confusion, contradiction, struggles over meaning rather than assurances of natural meaningfulness. Indeed, if in the classic war conversion, we are passive participants in observing a meaningfulness that is naturally and easily recovered – conversion as the light of awareness that grows and glows across the face as the cynic realises his true mission, by contrast a number of recent war films show meanings being constructed, being tested, offered up as so many tentative hypotheses.

Hence, the sheer sense of discussion or didacticism in the recent war film: meaning does not pre-exist the characters and instead has experimentally to be built up for and by them. Thus, to take one example, *PLATOON* presents itself as a veritable debate – war as a battle for the souls of men (with the young innocent, Taylor, caught between the evil Barnes and the christological Elias). The allegorical weightiness of the film derives no doubt in large part from director Oliver Stone's sledgehammer conception of cinema as emphatic education (as is even more evident in *BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY* where scenes like that of the two vets in the Mexican desert become shouting matches of political position). But it is also necessary to see that this concern with cinema as imposed
and obvious instruction or interrogation into the meanings of war seems to be
the case of so many recent war films. Thus, to take an example that is often op-
posed to PLATOON, FULL METAL JACKET is a film of visual bravura, but it is also
a film of constant debate and discussion: at many moments, the swirl of war
(the emphatic sweeps of the camera matched by the frenetic rock music of the
1960s) gives way to intensely static shots in which figures face off against each
other and enounce positions (for example, the meeting of the war correspon-
dents with their commander, filmed as so many close-ups of talking heads; the
scene of Joker facing off against the General who mechanically intones clichés
of war patriotism; the scene of the men being filmed by a TV crew and express-
ing their often-cynical views of the war). Where FULL METAL JACKET differs
from PLATOON in this respect is not in its sense that meaning is a construction –
since both films argue that – but in its radical, and less reassuring, sense that
the construction of meanings has no end, that there is no morality that is natu-
ral, even at the end of a journey of discovery. Where PLATOON's Taylor learns
of the bifurcation of morality, of the essential and essentially conflictual Nature
of Good and Evil, it is not clear that Joker learns anything at all (how much lack
of irony, or not, is there, for instance, in his final declaration that he is not
afraid, enounced to the background chant of Mickey Mouse?). One shot in
FULL METAL JACKET is emblematic of its postmodern refusal of answers: as Ser-
geant Hartman slaps Private Pyle around once again, we cut to a shot of Pri-
vate Cowboy watching but the look on the face offers no clue of moral perspec-
tive, of narrational point-of-view.

Given this context, we would easily anticipate that the newest and most
ambitious of war films, Malick's *THE THIN RED LINE*, would readily come off
as an incoherent work, but one in which incoherence is less an aesthetic failing
than an aesthetic and 'political' inevitability for a film in this cultural moment.
To be sure, there is in Malick a romanticism that seeks to posit a coherent au-
thenticity of nature beyond all subterfuge, beyond all the incoherencies of hu-
man conflict. *THE THIN RED LINE* seems to imagine incoherence as only a con-
tingent situation that one is in danger of falling into rather than a fundamental
condition that one inevitably is always already in: hence, the opening of the
film which portrays a timelessness of nature and native into which narrative
gradually arrives (a white soldier appears, a naval boat appears). But in our
postmodern age, such romanticism itself can only appear ersatz, a derivative
cliché (and Malick's use of natives to portray lost innocence is certainly politi-
cally problematic and not at all itself innocent, just as is his similar use of femi-
ninity as memory-trace of a joy lost in the ravages of war – the intercut shots of
a woman, especially of her breasts, that posit her as an essential purity outside
the fall into war/culture – seems awkwardly out of time; as a friend of mine
says, "Where has Malick been for the last twenty years? In a cave some-
<figure><img src="image_1.png" /><figcaption>Martin Sheen in BADLANDS</figcaption></figure>

the experience of war and, more often, on the experience of filming war – Coppola's Vietnam, Kubrick's, De Palma's, and perhaps Stone's, and now definitely Malick's. In this respect, there is little possibility of reading the natural images of *THE THIN RED LINE* naturally; they come to us as voiced, as authored. To take just one example, how when an auteur has not made a film for twenty years, is it possible to read just the nature in the new film's opening shot (an alligator that immerses itself in murky swamp water up to its eyes) and not also read for authorial voice, visual talent, this director's take on the war movie?

Indeed, for all its romanticism for an Eden before the human fall, before the inscription of the human onto the surface of the world (as ostensibly is the case in the opening shot), *THE THIN RED LINE* is also very strongly a writerly film, a film of voice and narration and inscription, a film whose processes of construction are rendered manifest. As with other auteur Vietnam films, *THE THIN RED LINE* is a film of discussion and debate: there are numerous set pieces of verbal sparring, such as that between Welsh and Witt (for example, in the film's second scene, after its romantic opening), between Tall and Staros, between Tall and Quintard, and for all of the film's modernist emphasis elsewhere on private voices (men caught in their own agony, men given in to personal obses-
sion), it is also very much a film about conversation and interchange, albeit one
in which no closure of position is brought to the debate.

Indeed, cutting between the social world of public communication and the
private world of personal obsession or fantasy, there runs through the film the
experimentalism of its voice-over narration. Reviews just after the film's re-
lease tended to treat this narration – which moves around various characters –
as an expression of inner thought but the actual functioning of the narration
seems more complicated (more incoherent) than that for it is in no easy way a
direct expression of character thought. Like the infamous *style indirect libre* of
Gustave Flaubert's *Madame Bovary* which offers both the character's percep-
tion and an intelligent comment on her perception that Emma herself could
never have had, the narration in *THE THIN RED LINE* both originates in various
characters and goes beyond them, creating a floating perspective in keeping
both with the film's epic pretence and its poetic ambition to represent unities
of the human and of the natural beyond all artificial divisions. Not only does
the narration say things we do not necessarily imagine the particular charac-
ters to be capable of saying, but it also seems to waft beyond any particular
character's perception, becoming a virtually pan-individual disquisition on
war and existence. Indeed, many reviewers have noted, and criticised, the fact
that several characters resemble each other and have similar styles of narra-
tion, but what for the reviewers is generally a failure of the film can also be
read as part of the film's ambition, one of the things it is impelled to do as con-
temporary war fiction by an auteur.

But if intellectualising is one of the things we can expect auteurist cinema to
quest after, a very different experimental goal of such cinema has to do with its
desire to achieve what we might term a pure experience, an experience outside
debate and discussion. What I mean by this is not that experience 'of war' that
certain films try to offer up as their achievement of realism, their claim to
Truth. That mythology has been pinpointed by Sturken who talks of the ways
PLATOON's claim to "'experience' was contingent on its following certain
codes of cinematic realism – portraying the details of a patrol, the boredom, the
confusion of combat, the presence of the jungle. Heightened 'naturalised'
sound of the jungle at night, rapidly edited combat scenes, and on-location
shooting..." (p. 99). Beyond that documentary realism that claims to capture
Experience, there is in the works of several Vietnam auteurs the glimpsing of
experientiality itself, a pure immersion in temporality, in a duration that only
vaguely adds up to either meaningfulness or anything resembling realism. I
think, for instance, of the opening of FULL METAL JACKET where narrativity
only eventually emerges to give some sense to an experience at the limits of
tolerability, a cinema of cruelty not unlike extremes of theatrical experiment
(in the enclosed space of the barracks, the shaven-head men seem to come
from some ritual theatre laboratory on the edge of being, à la Artaud or Peter Brook or Jerzy Grotowski). Similarly, though its fall into narrative is all the more traditional, the battle sequence at the beginning of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN also catches some of the experience of a temporality outside of narrativity, a viscerality that only partially has to do with the horrific content within individual images.

In this respect, one of the most ambitious experiments in THE THIN RED LINE has to do with its rendition of its central battle – a set piece that takes on epic lengths (depending on how one segments it, it goes on for more than an hour) but that is only ambiguously epic in meaning. Strangely, for all its violence and explosions and action, the battle is also intensely minimalist, moving toward that sparse cinema, that cinema of silence, that also captivates Vietnam auteurs (see, for instance, the influence of Bresson on Paul Schrader). The legacy of the new war film comes not only from earlier forms of the genre but also from other Sixties forms, such as the structural cinema of Warhol or Michael Snow. As in the excruciating beginnings of FULL METAL JACKET and SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (discounting the latter film's kitsch prologue at a war cemetery), much happens but little happens, and action is emptied out to give way to blockage, repetition (the training that goes on and on in FULL METAL JACKET, the assaults that keep happening with new troops endlessly replacing the wounded and the dead in SAVING PRIVATE RYAN and THE THIN RED LINE) non-cumulative explosions of violence that lead nowhere and mean nothing. And where SAVING PRIVATE RYAN portrays battle as a messy chaos (the beach cluttered with war paraphernalia, the focus that blurs backgrounds against Tom Hanks), THE THIN RED LINE renders action sparse even in its look: the long waves of grass so beloved by Malick (see his fetish for wheat fields in DAYS OF HEAVEN) become here a pure space of experience as we see nothing but endless fields with no advance, no logic, no fixities of point of view.

Like the narration that can go anywhere but never adds up to a final meaning, the field of battle in THE THIN RED LINE is a space of floating, of meaningless violence that can come from anywhere, but also of the effect of just waiting, of living with non-action. One might want to imagine that this is the experience of war, but it is also an experience of cinema, a comment on modern cinema's narration, its rediscovery of what Gilles Deleuze famously termed the "time-image", a confirmation of modern cinema's ambitious and auspicious inability to find a clear way to recount war today.

*Author's Note (2003):* This short reflection was written for an imminent dead-line in the days that immediately followed the release of THE THIN RED LINE (1999). The time constraints meant that it could involve no research on the film. The piece was not revised for this present publication.
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