About thirteen years ago, I walked into the Max Palevsky
Cinema at Ida Noyes Hall at the University of Chicago with my season pass to
Doc Films in hand, fully intending and somewhat eager to watch The Thin Red Line, Terrence Malick’s war
movie that had been released early in 1999 (officially in limited release in
1998, to be eligible for the Oscars). The movie is notable for being the
“other” war movie of the year, released to far less fanfare than Steven
Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. The Thin Red Line also features almost
every male movie star you’ve ever heard of (George Clooney, John Travolta, John
Cusack, Woody Harrelson, Adrien Brody, even Jared Leto. Even Thomas “The
Punisher” Jane!), most of them in roles lasting between ten seconds and a
couple of minutes (this in a nearly three-hour-long film).
As a young cinéaste
brimming with culture and mindful of the accent aigu, I looked forward to comparing the two WWII epics, and settled into my
seat for what felt like an unusually long wait. Grumblings in the seats gave
way to frail resignation when the powers that be at Doc Films eventually
deigned to inform the audience that technical difficulties would deprive us of
a film this evening. What would I do now? Head home and not download the movie through the BitTorrent technology that did not exist at the time? Obviously, that’s
exactly what I did (or, what I did not
do?).
The years passed by. I directed a couple of films for my
dorm’s annual film fest, while Malick released a couple more films starring
Colin Farrell and Brad Pitt; our respective achievements being roughly equal in
distinction, I’d say. But in all the time since that abortive attempt in
college, I never got around to watching The
Thin Red Line. And so when the film was recently made available to me in a
free, non-torrent-related way, I decided to watch it. Thirteen years later, I
would have my revenge. (“Revenge?” you may ask. “Revenge on what?” I don’t
know, maybe nothing. Maybe I just wanted to say, “I would have my revenge.”)
Having seen Malick’s patience-trying The Tree of Life last year, with memories of it still painfully
fresh, I had a good idea of what to expect from my mercurial, well-documented compeer
in the cinematic arts. The Thin Red Line
is certainly epic, in the sense of having immense visual scale and ambition. It
is burgeoning with emotion and includes what must be every variant of anguished
facial expression.
Malick indulges his fetish for what I might call
“voiceover,” but which is probably more accurately a series of disembodied prayers
or spoken dreams that just happen to coincide with images of what must be the
most eloquent soldiers of all time.
Nature and man exchange moments of preeminence, the former
unambiguously holy, the latter a cauldron of self-doubt and self-destruction,
always taking for granted the primacy of the self, for better or (usually)
worse.
Much like Jessica Chastain in The Tree of Life, Miranda Otto plays the role of salvific beauty, a
memory both literally and figuratively “washed,” a singular image of
domesticity amid war and nature. She is gorgeously photographed, awash in lens
flares and ethereal lighting.
A first-rate composer (Hans Zimmer) is brought on board to
contribute first-rate work, which is then soundly overshadowed by glorious
selections of classical music.
Plot doesn’t much matter. In fact, I initially thought the
setting was Vietnam, until I heard a character utter the word, “Japs.” But
Vietnam, Korea, WWII, Wolf 359, it doesn’t matter because the movie doesn’t
take its meaning from the story and dynamics of those conflicts. Rather, it
strips away the social consciousness of specific historical incidents in favor
of a philosophical meditation on the relationship between soldiers and war
itself, and the conflict that war creates within the individual.
That, in a few paragraphs, seems to sum up what makes a
Terrence Malick movie.
So how does The Thin
Red Line compare to Saving Private
Ryan? Well, in homage to Tom Hanks’s parting words to Matt Damon in the
latter, I still delight in playing co-op war video games with my brother and
uttering, “Earn this!” every time I sacrifice myself to save him. But beyond
this and a general appreciation of Saving
Private Ryan as a great entertainment, worthy of all manner of movie critic
blather (“tour de force,” anyone?) I don’t know that it is as
memorable as The Thin Red Line will
be for me, and as The Tree of Life
has been. Saving Private Ryan takes a
conventional view of morality and pursues it through a familiar cinematic
language and aesthetic. It does many things right because it plays within a
sandbox of established standards. In contrast, The Thin Red Line is in some sense beyond good and evil. It seems
to try to create its own standards of aesthetics and morality.
Having said that, there are perhaps viewers who enjoy “difficult”
movies simply for the sake of their being challenging and different; I am not
such a viewer. For all the beautiful poetry that The Thin Red Line creates (and the same is true for The Tree of Life), for all the
philosophy it refracts, it is a supremely contemplative movie, more like a
vision quest than an entertainment. It could fairly be called tedious or
self-indulgent, but at its best, it feels like more than a movie.
I might compare it to going out to the desert and staring at
the sky and the mountains for a few hours, and then a snake slithers past
your feet and a dying man-child whispers inscrutably into your ear, “Are you righteous? Kind? Does your confidence lie in this? Are you loved by all? Know that I was, too. Do you imagine your suffering will be any less because you loved goodness, truth?” Yeah, it’s pretty much the opposite
of going to Disneyland.
Certainly, it wasn’t important enough to me at the time to
hunt out some other way of watching the movie. But it’s funny to think how one
accident of fate led to a thirteen-year delay. I wonder if it would have
changed the course of my life in any way had I seen it that night, when I had
intended to. Dare I ask, in emulation of Sliding Doors (a movie I actually did watch in college), what happened in that
other timeline?
Maybe I would have been inspired to create a completely
different life. Instead of graduating from college, I make my own vision quest
into the jungles of South America. Instead of working a day job, I contemplate
the futility of civilized society while foraging for berries. Instead of
learning to ballroom dance, I swim in lakes with indigenous children. Instead
of taking photographs, I am the photograph. Leaves are my toilet paper, and the
world is my toilet. One day, my child bride scrapes her knee, and I blow on the
wound, my breath unwittingly setting off a course of weather events that will
culminate in the hurricane of the century thousands of miles away that wipes
out the New England coast, enveloping Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg in its
wake. Facebook never exists!
Instead of wasting the best years of his life mired in the
death spiral of browsing mundane status updates and “poking” his “friends,” a
UChicago grad student in the Committee on Social Thought remains motivated
enough to build the world’s first time machine; materials include pointed critique,
snarky retorts, and the guarded praise bestowed by an emeritus professor. He travels
back in time to one evening at Doc Films, where years ago he waited in vain to
watch The Thin Red Line, thereafter
always wondering what would have happened in the alternate timeline where he
actually does watch it. He repairs the malfunctioning projector, and this time,
the audience watches the movie in full, rather than heading home to open Netscape Navigator to see if Amazon has finally opened a VHS store.
Somewhere in the audience, I am rapt by an image on screen
of the sunlight glimmering through the jungle canopy, and am boggled by the possibility
of loving and hating a movie at the same time. This cocktail of emotions
compels me to consider the fundamental role that discontentment plays in
motivating human beings toward something greater than ourselves. I unleash
ramblings to this effect upon the nearest willing soul, who happens to be a toothsome
first-year with a bonnet full of AP credits and a weakness for rambling men. Philosophical
discourse leads to sweet nothings and mad caresses, and I find myself an
intoxicated man in the bloom of new love; then a relationship man, expected to
provide the emotional responsiveness that underpins all human closeness, and yet
is ever elusive; then a man divided against himself, my devotion to the beauty
of a crumbling reality at war with my devotion to the beauty of childish hopes;
then finally, a shattered man, finding peace nowhere, able to neither serve nor
command, most alone when in society, and wondering, always wondering what might
have happened if only that blasted projector had malfunctioned that fateful
night, and I had to leave the theater without watching that accursed film. I
start muttering in my sleep, choking the words out upon my pillow, “Mother
Jungle, cradle me in your bosom.” My toothsome lass tells me, “If you love the
jungle so much, why don’t you crawl back up its womb?”
And so I do. I sell all my earthly possessions to buy the
autogyro from The Road Warrior, and I
fly south to a new world, in search of new life and no civilization, desperate
to become just a man. On the way, I am set upon by jealous bandits and thugs
led by a brutish yet strangely articulate madman named The Humungus. They fire
upon me, disabling my craft. I crash land in Belize, but narrowly survive and
am nursed back to health by a pack of stoic spider monkeys. When I have fully
healed, I am integrated into their simian society, and eventually earn my
monkey name by saving the life of the sanctified monkey chieftain from the jaws
of a wicked jaguar, the curiously named Jagar. In gratitude, he offers me his
daughter Poalipalina in marriage. I decline, because even for a man who has
turned his back on human society, the idea of marrying a monkey is pretty
disgusting. This rejection fills Poalipalina with shame and self-loathing; after
all, what monkey would want her now? Distraught, she commits ritual suicide by plunging
into the Chasm of Scorned Ambitions and dashing herself to pieces upon the rocky
feet of the Many-Fingered River God (who is really just a waterfall). The
monkey chieftain claims that I have disgraced his tribe and cries out for
blood, vowing that he will have his revenge. His warriors don the armor of the aggrieved and hunt me with the slings
of the affronted. I flee for my life and vine-swing through the wilderness
until I reach the jungles of South America, thus creating the timeline you have
just witnessed.
