I watched the other day – with much delay – Terrence Mallick’s magnificently shot Thin Red Line. In it, Malick asks his usual sweeping questions, this time related to the carnage and destruction of war: “'How did we lose the good that was given us? Let it slip away. Scattered. Careless. What's keeping us from reaching out, touching the glory?” In word, how has humanity become so flawed and destructive? And how does Malick answer these momentous questions? By presenting war, in this case one of the most vicious battles in the Pacific, as the private experience of a few bewildered soldiers.
From this vantage point, war is, of course, senseless massacre and little else. So, toward the end of the movie, one of the shell-shocked soldiers reaches the following epiphany: “Everything a lie. Everything you hear, everything you see. So much to spew out. They just keep coming, one after another. You're in a box. A moving box. They want you dead, or in their lie... There's only one thing a man can do - find something that's his, and make an island for himself.” If most Allied soldiers during World War II had reached a similar conclusion, Malick might have seen himself recruited to make another propaganda movie for the Wehrmacht or Japan’s imperial navy. It’s curious how even a film maker often seen as a mild intellectual dissident or at least a maverick setting his own standards of truth and beauty can still embrace the individualistic Weltanschaung piped out tirelessly by Hollywood and the commercial media. After so many decades, it must have indeed seeped into the water supply.
