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MASARYK UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF ARTS

Department of English and American Studies

English Language and Literature

Robert Krátký , Humanity, and Nature in The Thin Red Line by

MASTER’S DIPLOMA THESIS

Supervisor: Stephen Paul Hardy, Ph.D. 2017 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the Works Cited section.

...... Robert Krátký

ii I would like to thank my supervisor, Stephen Paul Hardy, Ph.D., for his encouragement and guidance.

iii Table of Contents

1 Introduction ...... 1 2 The Thin Red Line ...... 11 2.1 by ...... 13 2.2 1964 Film Adaptation ...... 22 3 Terrence Malick’s Filmography ...... 28 4 The Thin Red Line by Terrence Malick ...... 52 4.1 ? ...... 56 4.2 The Role of Nature ...... 64 4.2.1 Malick on the Set ...... 67 4.2.2 Voice-Over Narrative ...... 71 4.2.3 War, Humanity, and Nature ...... 76 5 Conclusion ...... 82 Works Cited ...... 86 Works Consulted but not Cited ...... 91

iv 1 Introduction

The Thin Red Line, directed by Terrence Malick and released to great expectations and mixed reactions in 1998, is a multifaceted film that—despite its ostentatious war theme—defies genre categorization. For some, the contemplative realization of the film’s narration, its length, and the lack of a clear storyline are all evidence of a failed attempt at a ‘war movie’. For others, the film, with its philosophical musings, mesmerizing , and strong anti-war message is a masterpiece and a worthy successor to Malick’s critically acclaimed first two films from the 1970s—Badlands and Days of . This thesis explores the critical reception and interpretation of the film’s three main motifs: war, humanity, and nature—as well as the way the director works with them. The chief aim is to interpret the film with regard to these three themes—which collide as well as coexist in the director’s vision. While existing research provides a wealth of information about how Malick works with each of these elements, this thesis expands on that by postulating that Malick uses the combination of these themes (and the ways they are portrayed) to carry the main message of the work. In doing so, the thesis offers a clearly articulated critique of Malick’s intent and its artistic realization, thus contributing to the body of re- search about the film as well as its director. As the thesis is primarily concerned with the review of a film material (related literary works are mostly considered in a supporting role), it employs a number of critical approaches towards interpreting its subject of study. In ad- dition to exploring the technical aspects of the film’s cinematography, the the- sis also concentrates on the director’s mise-en-scène work. While the thesis does not overlook the narrative features of the film, for which a topic-based and—to a degree—structural approach is employed, its main attention is focused on an

1 1 INTRODUCTION iconic interpretation of both picture and sound. To that end, the thesis considers a number of critical and academic sources that examine both The Thin Red Line and Terrence Malick, the person and director, in order to ground the discussion in existing research material. The postulations and conclusions about Malick’s treatment of the ‘war, humanity, nature’ trio of motifs presented by this thesis draw on the consulted secondary sources and uti- lize them both to support the thesis’ observations as well as to identify differences in the manner the film has been perceived by various critics and scholars. To complement the main content and to establish historical, literary, and film-making context for the subject matter of the study, this “Introduction” is followed by a chapter that discusses a number of other literary and film works that pertain to The Thin Red Line. Most notably, it provides a concise introduction to the eponymous novel by James Jones that the film was based on, as well as an overview of Jones’ other literary works that focus on the Second , with a particular emphasis on From Here to Eternity, which—together with The Thin Red Line and —form Jones’ World War II trilogy. The next part of the chapter continues by offering a comparison of Ma- lick’s The Thin Red Line from 1998 with the earlier film adaptation of the same name (directed by Andrew Marton, released in 1964). This sub-chapter weighs the influence the earlier film had on Malick’s approach and investigates the rea- sons why Malick felt compelled to borrow from that film. To lay foundations for an informed examination of Malick’s film-making, the third chapter, “Terrence Malick’s Filmography”, introduces and briefly dis- cusses the director’s other films, starting with the two films that preceded The Thin Red Line—Badlands and —and continuing with anecdotal

2 1 INTRODUCTION mentions of Malick’s work that came after the director’s return from the twenty- year hiatus, which was ended by the release of The Thin Red Line. The thesis con- siders Badlands and Days of Heaven in order to trace the origins of Malick’s use of various cinematic techniques, including voice-over and natural imagery, to when they first made appearance in Malick’s work. The chapter continues with an examination of Malick’s motives for making The Thin Red Line and attempts to reconstruct the events that led to the director’s involvement with the project, including the lengthy negotiations that took place during the pre-production pe- riod when the producers were trying to persuade Malick to come out of retire- ment. The main chapter of this thesis, “The Thin Red Line by Terrence Malick”, first scrutinizes the critical and public reception of the film, which were both strongly influenced by a number of factors that usually do not figure in the list of criteria upon which an audience’s opinion is based. For critics and film writers, it was the director’s reclusive nature and the highly anticipated return to film- making following a twenty-year pause, during which he disappeared from the public eye. For the public, on the other hand, it was the wave of World War II- inspired films that started to appear in the 1990s. The chapter contains a discus- sion of the sentiment fostered by war films from that period (with an emphasis on Saving Private Ryan by Steven Spielberg, released in the same year as The Thin Red Line) and the way it reflected the cinema-going public’s changing tastes at that time. These films mostly celebrated the heroic achievements (and mostly disre- garded the more unsavoury exploits) of American servicemen (turned respected war veterans) while introducing a higher level of naturalistic imagery than what had been deemed appropriate and acceptable before. Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan epitomizes this approach, and the enthusiastic reception it received

3 1 INTRODUCTION serves as a handy reminder of the sort of taste that both the lay and critical audi- ences had when The Thin Red Line was released later that same year. Even before the release of The Thin Red Line, both critics and the public struggled with the film’s demonstrative avoidance of the ‘war film’ label, which was in sharp con- trast to the expectations of the prospective audiences. The celebration of Spiel- berg’s film also provides clues to understanding both the critical reception of The Thin Red Line and the diversity of audience reactions to the film. This is followed by a description of Malick’s directorial style, personality, and his general approach to film-making. The director’s conduct on the set of The Thin Red Line serves as the focal point for this part of the thesis. All of the above is discussed because it allows us to glimpse Malick’s creative process, which in turn heavily influenced the way the film was shot, actors led, and the final cut achieved. In the next part of the main chapter, I discuss Malick’s use of voice-over in the narrative structure of The Thin Red Line (and compare this to his other films), and how the use of this cinematic technique helped to change the film. The dis- tanced, calm, and meditative quality of the voice-overs corresponds with the use of nature and the emphasis on its serenity. And the combination of these two ele- ments provides a platform for both overt and disguised expressions of the film’s central message. In the main part of the chapter, I offer my interpretation and critique of the underlying message communicated by Malick—it is expressed through the film’s carefully balanced exploration of the three motifs that give title to this the- sis: war, humanity, and nature. The film does not posit—as it may appear—war against nature, violence against peace, and wanton death and destruction against nature’s calm and beauty. Instead, it uses its purposefully underdeveloped treat- ment of diegetic action to place war “in the heart of nature” (The Thin Red Line

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00:01:58)—the emphasis is not on nature alone, the war, the soldiers, the fight- ing, or the dying. It is on a fusion of all these things—the oneness of existence as experienced by the sum of all its parts. The final chapter, “Conclusion”, reiterates the main points discussed in the thesis, summarizes the argument presented by the thesis, and outlines the ways the thesis expands on and contributes to the body of existing research on The Thin Red Line and Terrence Malick. The thesis uses a number of secondary sources to both support its argu- ments and to draw on insights presented by authors who either worked directly with Malick or studied his work. Terrence Malick is an influential figure in the world of cinematography and philosophy and as such is afforded considerable attention by scholars of these fields. Interestingly though, it has taken almost a decade since The Thin Red Line was released for the first major study to be pub- lished about it. The film was often mentioned in articles by film critics, and it also attracted a lot of attention of film fans, but it had not received a serious, dedicated treatment until nine years after its release. Starting in 2007, thus allowing enough time for the film to achieve its ‘cult classic’ standing, a flurry of books came out that all attempted to rectify the situation. In researching the subject of this the- sis, I consulted a number of these publications, but the following were especially useful. The first is The Thin Red Line, edited by David Davies and published as a part of the Philosophers on Film series by Routledge in 2009. Davies’ five-essay collection, to which Davies himself contributed one of the essays, “Vision, Touch, and Embodiment in The Thin Red Line”, explores four areas of interest related to Malick’s treatment of his subject: Heideggerian themes, human experience in the world, cinematic techniques, and images of nature. Of these, this thesis is first and foremost interested in the last: images of nature and the role they play not

5 1 INTRODUCTION only in The Thin Red Line but also in other films by Malick. However—as will be- come evident—the exploration and analysis of this topic necessarily involves the other three areas as well. Cinematic techniques and Malick’s stylization of images inform many aspects of our perception of nature in The Thin Red Line, and the di- rector’s employment of various artistic methods directly influences the way the audience reacts on an emotional and intellectual level. The thesis touches upon these subjects and draws on the essays in the collection when contrasting (and debunking) Malick’s seeming lack of concern for an individual with his almost obsessive preoccupation with natural imagery. This is also where the thesis taps into the remaining two areas highlighted by Davies’ collection: human experience and Heideggerian philosophy. While the thesis delves comparatively deeply into different aspects of Malick’s portrayal of human experience (and how it relates to war, nature, and relationships), it only examines the Heideggerian roots of Malick’s philosophy briefly. Nevertheless, even this area provides valuable points that helped to shape my understanding of Malick’s background. All contributors to the collection have a background in philosophy, and their essays “critically engage with, but go beyond ... general currents of thought about The Thin Red Line.” (Davies 4). David Davies’ The Thin Red Line from the Philosophers on Film series is therefore one of the most important secondary sources used by this thesis. On the topic of Malick’s treatment of philosophical questions and espe- cially on his adoption of Heideggerian influences, I consulted several sources, of which the most prominent was Robert Sinnerbrink’s article for the Film- Philosophy journal published in 2006, “A Heideggerian Cinema? On Terrence Ma- lick’s The Thin Red Line.” Sinnerbrink‘s research focus at Macquarie University

6 1 INTRODUCTION in Sydney is on links between philosophy and cinema. In the article, he consid- ers the question as to whether The Thin Red Line can be justly called ‘Heidegge- rian cinema’. His analysis is based on a discussion of two different approaches to studying philosophical themes in The Thin Red Line: a ‘Heideggerian’ approach, which seeks to “exemplify Heideggerian themes” (26), and a ‘film as Philoso- phy’ approach, which regards the film as philosophical but “refrain[s] from read- ing it in relation to any particular philosophical framework” (27). In examining these two approaches, Sinnerbrink draws on arguments made by other notable scholars of film and philosophy, including some referenced by this thesis. Sinner- brink’s concluding remarks (that the film performs the “staging [of] the poetic difference between saying and showing” (37)) inspired the argument that Ma- lick’s expressive use of natural imagery as the backdrop to both the atrocities of war and the peaceful reflections of those involved in it is used to convey that the two—(human) nature and war—are inseverable. Another important body of work related to The Thin Red Line is a part of a larger collection of essays about Malick’s films titled The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America, which was edited by Hannah Patterson and published as a part of the Directors’ Cut series by Columbia University Press in 2007. The chapter dedicated to The Thin Red Line in Patterson’s collection of essays is titled “Negotiating The Thin Red Line”. It includes five essays that attempt to cover the breadth of the most discussed topics about the film: critical reception, clash with the of a ‘Good War’, disregard for genre, the role of nature, and Heideg- gerian philosophy. Despite the partial overlap of topics in this collection and in Davies’ volume, which was described above, many of these essays have proven a useful resource for my studies, and I reference them on a number of occasions in this thesis. However, given the topic of this thesis, Robert Silberman’s essay about

7 1 INTRODUCTION the significance of nature and landscape in Malick’s portrayal of war and its ef- fects on individuals (titled “Terrence Malick, Landscape and ‘What is this war in the heart of nature?”’) was of particular interest. Silberman analyses many as- pects of Malick’s treatment of natural imagery and argues that it is misleading to interpret the film in terms of a perceived philosophical questioning of a rela- tionship between man and nature. Instead he suggests that “for Malick, nature and war are inseparable” (167). I subscribe to this view, and I further posit that it was Malick’s intention to discredit and ultimately eliminate the notion that hu- man affairs (including ) are somehow in contrast or opposition to nature’s supposed peacefulness. A close ‘reading’ of the film’s ample use of voice-over narration is a prerequisite to the understanding of the way Malick develops this agenda throughout the film. One of the most recognizable features of Malick’s adaptation of The Thin Red Line is the pervasive use of voice-over, a narrative technique often employed by Malick. Both of Malick’s highly acclaimed films that were shot before The Thin Red Line (Badlands and Days of Heaven) utilized voice-over to a great effect. The Thin Red Line was to follow the trend set by these two films—not only in the ex- tensive use of voice-over narration but also in making it serve a distinctly differ- ent role than in the preceding films. While Badlands has a single, dreamy narrator in Sissy Spacek, Days of Heaven uses hard, uncompromising delivery by Linda Manz. In The Thin Red Line, numerous characters provide a musing, philosoph- ical backdrop for the visual action (or non-action) that carries the main story. Almost all critiques of The Thin Red Line mention this aspect of the film, but the majority—regardless of their overall opinion of the film—fail to recognize the nu- anced, unintuitive nature of Malick’s treatment of this technique (such as a voice- over narrated by a character that has not yet appeared on screen in the film), and thus fail to appreciate the level of sophistication that Malick’s voice-over brings

8 1 INTRODUCTION to the film. A doctoral dissertation for The University of Tennessee, published by C. Clinton Stivers in 2012, All Things Shining: A Narrative and Stylistic Analysis of Terrence Malick’s Films, is one of the very few sources that stand out from the crowd by virtue of having correctly identified many of the rather cryptic refe- rences offered by Malick’s use of voice-over. Stivers’ dissertation is an auteur study that thoroughly examines Malick’s first five films, including the third, The Thin Red Line. The main focus of the dissertation is Malick’s critique of modern cultural (often propagated by Hollywood cinema) and its roots in Heideg- ger’s work. Stivers’ analysis of The Thin Red Line, presented in a chapter titled “’What’s your name kid?’ The Enigmatic Voiceover in The Thin Red Line”, bases much of its argument on a careful scrutiny applied to the film’s use of voice-over. The reasoning behind Malick’s decision to obscure the identity of the characters behind many of the voice-over passages is interpreted as a deliberate attempt to step outside of the boundaries of the genre and to challenge the prevalent expec- tations regarding war films. Stivers argues that the complexity of the voice-over narration “demonstrates the subtlety of Malick’s art and his ‘defiance’ of conven- tional filmmaking” (174). This thesis draws on Stivers’ dissertation to support a number of its arguments related to the investigation of Malick’s treatment of identity and the individual. The dissertation was also used as an inspiration for exploring multiple other interesting secondary sources. This concludes the introductory first chapter, which sketched out the sub- ject matter of the thesis, outlined the research approach used to critique and dis- cuss the film and the literary material that is the main focus of the thesis, and prefaced the subsequent chapters by laying out the summaries of the most im- portant secondary sources that form the framework of existing research upon which this thesis builds, which it seeks to expand, and whose gaps it endeavours

9 1 INTRODUCTION to fill. The second chapter establishes literary and film context for the study of Malick’s The Thin Red Line by reviewing the original novel on which the film is based, The Thin Red Line (1962) by James Jones, as well as the first film adaptation, The Thin Red Line (1964) by Andrew Marton.

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Terrence Malick’s film, The Thin Red Line, takes its story and theme from the eponymous novel published in 1962 by James Jones. Malick’s film was also in- spired by an earlier film adaptation, which was directed by Andrew Marton and released in 1964. This chapter contains a general overview of both the 1962 novel and the 1964 film, as well as a discussion of similarities, influences, and other points of interest that link Malick’s film with the original book and the earlier adaptation. In the sub-chapter about Jones’ novel, “Novel by James Jones“, I also consider the title of the work, its origins, and its significance with regard to the way the novel and later Malick’s film went against the popular trends of the times when they came out. It is important to note that barring a handful of significant exceptions, Ma- lick’s screenplay stays relatively true to the novel’s narrative (not to the novel’s theme though, as will be discussed later), both in the area of actual happenings and in the way they paint the atmosphere—what tone they adopt, and how they present their characters. The tone of both works is set by the structure and compo- sition of the narration, which defies genre categorization (even though the novel and the film are both ostentatiously ‘about war’, they do not readily fit into the ‘war fiction’ or ‘war film’ categories). Jones and Malick succeed in subverting the traditional expectations associated with the ‘about war’ label by marginalizing all tangible aspects of war—combat, , , or the chain of command. The focus is on individuals, and although the aforementioned attributes of war are described and rendered with spectacular (and thus alarming or rather sicken- ing) realism, they remain firmly in the background and only form the backdrop for Jones’ exploration of the devastating effects that war has on its individual participants and for Malick’s contemplations of a man’s place within nature.

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When it comes to the presentation of characters, the novel goes to great lengths to give voice to many of its protagonists, affording them a chance to share their views, motivations, emotions, and opinions in an environment and circum- stances that would normally numb down personal feelings and discourage in- dividualism. Malick’s film embraces this style with the prominent and almost intrusive use of voice-over, and it then takes this commitment a step further: in addition to letting many of the protagonists provide a commentary of events that unfold in their immediate surroundings as well as in their mind’s eye, the film serves as a vehicle for the director (and screenwriter) to develop his own philo- sophical agenda. This is achieved not only through the voice-over narration but also through thoughtful, imaginative photography and the combination (and, at times, juxtaposition) of these two techniques. These qualities of the film, and the way they are developed by Malick, are discussed in detail in this thesis in the sub-chapter titled “The Role of Nature”. The 1964 film adaptation by Andrew Marton (written by Bernard Gordon) is only loosely based on Jones’ novel—the film only follows some of the events as they unfold in the book, and it mostly ignores the psychological and social probing that Jones employs. However, despite the fact that the film is largely un- concerned with the personal struggles of its main characters (although there are some scenes that hint at attempts at a deeper meaning, they ring hollow when seen as a part of a ‘hero film’ whole), elements of the screenplay found their way into Malick’s script. The second sub-chapter of this part of the thesis, “1964 Film Adaptation“, investigates whether the connection between the two films may be stronger than what a cursory look would suggest and also asks why Malick de- cided to give the older film so much credence.

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2.1 Novel by James Jones

James Jones (1921–1977) was an acclaimed writer of war fiction who had already published a well-received novel, From Here to Eternity (1951), by the time The Thin Red Line came out in 1962. These two were followed by other novels and fi- nally by Whistle, published posthumously in 1978, which completed the so-called World War II trilogy. All three novels share some of the same main characters, though their names are altered to allow for the fact that some of the protagonists die in the individual novels only to reappear later in the trilogy. While From Here to Eternity describes the months leading to the attack on Pearl Harbor from the perspective of soldiers stationed on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, and Whistle takes place in a veterans’ hospital, The Thin Red Line is the only novel in the tril- ogy to include accounts of actual and combat action. In this sub-chapter, I discuss the following three main themes of the novel and their representation in Malick’s film: fatalism and the unimportance of individuals, degradation of char- acter (joy in killing, treatment of the Japanese), and realism—which can also be defined as a total lack of self-censorship on the part of Jones and the willingness to divulge the innermost thoughts of the characters. Jones’ The Thin Red Line describes combat and the general condition of soldiers at war—on both sides of the conflict—in a very unflattering tone. There are no heroes, only naïve or confused youngsters, cynical veterans of other wars or earlier engagements, and overzealous commanders feeding their egos or am- bitions. There is no silver lining to all the bloodshed, only the realization that individual lives do not matter. The focus is on individual soldiers and on the in- evitable loneliness that settles in their minds despite the proclaimed camaraderie that soldiers are expected to enjoy. This is reflected in the title of the novel, which references a poem by Rudyard Kipling, “Tommy”, which was published as a part

13 2 The Thin Red Line of the Barrack-Room Ballads (1892) collection. In “Tommy”, Kipling mocks the his- torical meaning of the ‘thin red line’ term1 by using it as follows: Yes, makin‘ mock o‘ uniforms that guard you while you sleep Is cheaper than them uniforms, an‘ they‘re starvation cheap; An‘ hustlin‘ drunken soldiers when they‘re goin‘ large a bit Is five times better business than paradin‘ in full kit. it‘s Tommy this, an‘ Tommy that, an‘ “Tommy, ‘ow‘s yer soul?” But it‘s “Thin red line of ‘eroes” when the drums begin to roll, The drums begin to roll, my boys, the drums begin to roll, O it‘s “Thin red line of ‘eroes” when the drums begin to roll. (Kipling, “Tommy” 17–24) In the poem, Kipling bemoans the scorn that soldiers are exposed to—until the time comes for them to go to war, and then the slights suddenly turn into flattery and patriotic zeal that are both as insincere as they are fickle. Jones includes lines 21–22 of Kipling’s poem in the preamble to The Thin Red Line; this in itself is a strong indication of the attitude that the book adopts towards war heroism—it is one of scepticism. This is further reinforced by the inclusion of a second ‘thin red line’ ref- erence in the preamble to Jones’ novel: “There’s only a thin red line between the sane and the mad.”, which is attributed as an “old middlewestern saying” (this saying was invented by Jones for the purposes of the novel (Carter 167)). By

1 ‘The thin red line’ refers to a military exploit of British troops during the of Balaclava in 1854, which took place as a part of the Crimean War. At one moment of the battle, a Russian was stopped and routed by a small force of British infantrymen who, somewhat brazenly, awaited the charge in a mere two lines instead of the more common four or even more lines. A correspondent for The Times then wrote that he could see only a “thin red streak tipped with a line of steel” between the advancing cavalry and the British rear (Russell). Hence, ‘the thin red line’ is a term that alludes to the bravery and fighting prowess of British troops.

14 2 The Thin Red Line deriving the name of the novel from the poem, “Tommy”, and from this, albeit fictitious, saying, Jones re-appropriates the ‘the thin red line’ term for his own purposes. Clearly, in The Thin Red Line, the soldiers are not a “line of heroes”, and the military connotation is exploited to invalidate the term’s original, sentimen- tal meaning: firstly, the scorn of Kipling’s poem is used to express how soldiers really feel about going to war, and secondly, “the thin red line” is not what stands between the enemy and those the army professes to protect—instead, it is the fragile shell that stands between the soldiers and the insanity of war. The novel’s title states, beyond any doubt, that the book explores both the perception of war (the Kipling reference) and the experience of war (the old-saying reference)—both in a manner that disrupts and uproots established (and establishment-promoted) ways of romanticizing or aggrandizing human exposure to war. The plot of the novel is simplistic in that it follows a linear series of events that come one after the other without any unexpected twists or surprises. An army unit is deposited to Quadalcanal, waits for orders, moves up to the combat zone, is pulled off the line, spends a week off in the rear, moves to the combat zone again, and is eventually transferred to another island. The locales are de- scribed in a pithy manner, the place names are invented, and the text does not pause to consider the landscape or other features of the surroundings beyond what is necessary for painting a picture that serves as a backdrop to what the characters are experiencing. The progression of the story is predictable, and there is no suspense, even when fighting is described. The focus is so squarely on the fear of dying, emotional reflections, and personal thoughts that the reader does not wonder about the outcome of the described engagements, does not anticipate the next strategic steps, and does not root for one side or the other.

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Even though the entire novel is written from the perspective of the Amer- icans, the reader is not expected or encouraged to care about the military re- sults that follow from the involvement of the text’s protagonists. Instead, the reader is constantly reminded of the futility of hope and of the absolute ran- domness of events that together form the soldiers’ fate. All of these realizations and revelations are presented as trains of thought of the individual soldiers, and there is only a very limited amount of commentary from the author. Rather than directly offer his own take, Jones has the characters in the novel come to the understanding—each in his own way and based on his own experience or circumstance—about the inconsequential nature of death when suffered while a person is a cog on the wheels of a war machinery. This fatalistic determinism is the underlying theme of the whole book, and each of the soldiers whose views are included sooner or later comes to realize the insignificance of any deliberate action on their part—both in the grand scheme of things and in the death or survival lottery. The only difference is in the way the different characters arrive at this realization, and the way they react to it, which is usually dependent on their intelligence or their prior life experience. Thus the perceptive and intelligent Corporal Fife observes very early on, while fearing for his life during an air raid on a troop-transport ship, the inconsequentiality of his actions: The very idea itself, and what it implied, struck a cold blade of ter- ror into Fife’s essentially defenseless vitals, a terror both of unim- portance, his unimportance, and of powerlessness: his powerless- ness. He had no control or sayso in any of it. (Jones, The Thin Red Line 47) Another soldier’s reaction is presented as follows: The emotion which this revelation created in Bell was not one of

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sacrifice, resignation, acceptance, and peace. Instead, it was an ir- ritating, chaffing emotion of helpless frustration which made him want to crawl around rubbing his flanks and back against rocks to ease the itch. (226) Quite surprisingly, this arguably chief attribute of the novel surfaces only very briefly in Malick’s adaptation (Sergeant McCron’s lament at 1:23:452), and it is not given any space before or after. When contrasting the extent to which Jones focuses on this message with its almost total absence in Malick’s film, it becomes clear that in this regard, the book was only one of a number of inspirations to Malick—despite the inclusion of a number of directly quoted dialogues, use of a similar basic storyline, and the continuance of the trend to reach outside the boundaries of the genre, the film does not even attempt to further the agenda of the novel. On the contrary, the film’s extensive meditative commentary about the roots of evil and the strife for peace, coupled with the serene presentation of natural elements, seem to go directly against the fatalism and hopelessness of the book. In his paper delivered at the Twentieth-Century Literature Conference in 2002, Patrick Christle bluntly states that “the film amounts to a repudiation of Jones’ view of the world as meaningless, chaotic, and deterministic” (1).

2 Sergeant McCron is played by John Savage, who excelled in the role of the charmingly naïve, patriotic, and morally firm Claude Hooper Bukowski in Miloš Forman’s (1979)— another fiercely anti-war film. In Malick’s The Thin Red Line, Savage only delivers a few lines, but they are among the most recognizable ones in the whole film because they partly translate the theme of the novel to the film by underlining the randomness of death and the absolute futility of any attempts to make sense of men’s fate in war. Following the annihilation of McCron’s unit, the Sergeant walks around the very place where the soldiers died and cries distractedly and in- consolably: “Who’s deciding who’s gonna live? Who’s deciding who’s gonna die? This is futile! Look at me. I stand right up here and not one bullet! Not one shot. Why? How come they all had to die?” (1:23:45).

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The second most striking feature of the novel, and one that is featured slightly more prominently in Malick’s film—but still in a decidedly subdued manner, is the non-discriminatory portrayal of violence, sadism, and racism to- wards the Japanese soldiers (on the part of American troops) and—to a lesser extent—the disregard for the suffering of the American enlisted men (on the part of American officers). Jones not only tells about the atrocities that become rou- tine during the adrenaline-fuelled frenzy of close-contact combat but also probes the minds of the perpetrators. The novel lays bare the soldiers’ emotions and thoughts (or the lack thereof), and—crucially—documents the disturbing ordi- nariness of the actions, regardless of how deplorable they are (or how they ap- pear to a reader who has not experienced such situations first hand). In doing so, Jones unmasks the horrific reality of war—without sanitizing the report to make it palatable for audiences back home (by absolving American servicemen of their sins to maintain the illusion of honour and justness, and to further the conviction that it is possible to apply the god-is-on-our-side formula—all of which is usually accomplished by simply overlooking or even denying any transgressions). For the protagonists of the novel, this goes together with the realization that their fate is not in their own hands, and it accompanies their first experiences of the true horrors of war: the soldiers begin to lose the inhibitions imposed by a modern society. They start to recognize that the chaos, brutality, and anonymity of war allow them to act with impunity and without the scruples of civilization. Some are capable of perceiving this change, such as Private Bell: he was able to note the same ahumanness in many other faces, some more than others, all of them almost precisely measurable in direct ratio to what the owner of the face had been through since dawn today (Jones, The Thin Red Line 254) Others are overwhelmed by the emotion and act accordingly: “There was a joyous

18 2 The Thin Red Line feeling in the safety of killing. They slapped each other on the back and grinned at each other murderously.” (273). The book is quite relentless in pursuing this line, as if to ensure that the reader really has no illusions left, and that there is no ambiguity in the mat- ter. Jones is adamant: there is no dignity in , and it corrupts the morality of those who participate in it as inexorably as it destroys their physi- cal bodies. Malick’s film is, again, somewhat restrained in the way it carries this message. While Malick shows a number of incidents that reveal the same kind of behaviour, the scenes do not have the urgency of the novel. An example of the watered-down effect is a scene in which an American soldier is beating an unarmed Japanese who surrendered, but it is happening off-screen, and only the thuds made by the blows of the rifle butt to the body are heard while the camera shows a distraught face of another American nearby (Malick, The Thin Red Line, 1:37:20). A different approach is used in a scene that shows an American soldier brutalizing Japanese prisoners of war (extracting gold teeth from wounded, con- scious people) in the aftermath of a major battle (1:52:35): the scene is almost mute and accompanied by serene music with frequent cuts to birds that are circling in the evening sky. That is not to say that it is not a harrowing scene, but it lacks the direct starkness of Jones’ text. Perhaps even more tellingly, the American soldier in question is later shown haunted by his conscience and, in a fit of despera- tion, throws his loot of gold teeth away—and on top of that, the soldier is then metaphorically washed of his crime by the pouring rain while a voice-over talks about how war poisons the soul (2:06:41). This is, of course, Malick’s addition— there is no such maudlin sentiment present in Jones’ novel. Overall, the effect of

19 2 The Thin Red Line such scenes in the film is weaker, and the accusatory tone is missing altogether.3 Lastly, the realistic (or naturalistic) quality of the novel bears mention- ing. This includes not only frank descriptions of the gory details of wounds or fights but also the readiness to expose the most private thoughts of individuals, scrutinize their motives, and let the reader inspect the characters in an unusu- ally straightforward manner. The result is a disturbingly open picture. Jones does not shirk away from unearthing sadistic thoughts, killing-inspired sexual desires, moral doubts, homosexual acts, and similar. As with the previously discussed at- tributes of the novel, this frankness and penetrating honesty is not reflected to any appreciable degree in Malick’s film. In fact, the film limits itself to showing the gore (but presented in a matter-of-fact manner, not to show off or excite), of which there is plenty, yet given the action, it does not seem out of place. And it still does not reach the level presented by the book, especially with regard to the portrayal of the Japanese. While Jones gives graphic descriptions of their mindbogglingly wretched state—emaciated, suffering from unending dysentery, exhausted to the point of catatonia—Malick contends himself with using reasonably skinny ex- tras who are usually shown either in fits of rage, weeping, or praying. It does not come even close to Jones’ account that shows the depths of depravity exhibited by the American soldiers, such as when a group decides to ‘cure’ a semi-conscious Japanese prisoner, who they are carrying to the rear, of dysentery by smashing him against every rock they pass on the way:

3 On top of that, the level of barbarism that Malick decided to depict is easily eclipsed by accounts of real savagery inflicted upon Japanese soldiers by American troops. In an essay titled “The Greatest Generation Steps Over The Thin Red Line”, which was published in The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America, John Streamas compares Malick’s film with the testimony of , a combat veteran and literary critic, who wrote of examples of far worse acts of inhumanity: “Our glimpse of the soldier’s brutal desecration in Malick’s film is, therefore, less brutal than the historical realities cited by Fussell.” (142).

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“Let’s bump him a little,” he said as they came to a rock. “Maybe we can knock the shit out of him, hunh? Or, at least, enough of it to make him stop till we get him down.” Swinging him in unison, they bumped his behind against the rock and made him squirt, all of them laughing uproariously. (Jones, The Thin Red Line 326) The question remains whether Malick chose to omit (or disregard?) this powerful aspect of the novel because he did not want to distract viewers from his own philosophical message, or because he feared the film would not be accepted by Hollywood or audiences if it was too harsh in its depiction of American sol- diers. Either way, the fact that Malick elected to downplay such significant quality of the novel in his film serves to confirm the assertion that for Malick, the book only provided an inspiration, and that he did not treat it as a canonical work to be adapted but as a library of topical anecdotes to be used in a whole new narrative of his own. There is also almost nothing of the rest of the book’s honesty about the state of mind of individuals. The novel’s well nigh voyeuristic incursions into the minds of the soldiers are all but absent, with a small number of exceptions, of which the most notable is the following inner voice of Private Doll: “I killed a man. Worst thing you can do. Worse than rape. I killed a man, and nobody can touch me for it.” (Malick, The Thin Red Line 0:53:11) and the ruthlessly ambitious Colonel Tall’s career reflections that were adapted by Malick from a mind’s inner voice4 into an open conversation: ‘I’ve waited all my life for this. I’ve worked, slaved, eaten... oh, un- told buckets of shit to have this opportunity! And I don’t intend to

4 “This was a chance Tall had waited for all his professional life. He had studied, and worked, and slaved, and eaten untold buckets of shit, to have this opportunity. He did not intend to lose it now, not if he could help it.” (Jones, The Thin Red Line 278)

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give it up now. You don’t know what it feels like to be passed over. I mean, you’re young. You’re just out of the Academy. You’re, you know, you’ve got your war! Fifteen years, this—this is my first war! John, some day you’ll understand.’ (1:42:30)5 While it is true that some of the voice-overs in the film do provide insights into the minds of the characters, they mostly tend to offer detached musings, not the actual thoughts of those who voice them. As this sub-chapter shows, there are fundamental differences between Jones’ novel and Malick’s film. That, in and of itself, does not mean that one is inferior to the other, but it clearly indicates that Malick’s screenplay and direction is not concerned with delivering an adaptation that would be true to the ideas of the novel. As has been briefly touched upon at the beginning of this sub-chapter, for Malick, the novel served merely as an inspiration, and he moulded the mate- rial based on his own, substantially divergent vision.

2.2 1964 Film Adaptation

Released only two years after the publication of Jones’ novel, the first film adapta- tion of The Thin Red Line was radically different from the adaptation of Jones’ first novel, From Here to Eternity (published in 1951, film released in 1953). Whereas From Here to Eternity was a first-class production with a number of established stars, (including Frank Sinatra, Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, and Deborah Kerr), a renowned director (Fred Zinnemann), and a generous budget, The Thin Red Line could lay claim to none of these. That said, it needs to be noted that even

5 In all fairness, the delivery of this speech by Nick Nolte is one of the highlights of dialogues in the film, and it is greatly enhanced by the silent but superbly acted—with a stare of mixed stoicism and incredulity—reception of the monologue by John Cusack.

22 2 The Thin Red Line though the director, Andrew Marton, did not have a name that would be known to the public, he was a proficient craftsman who had worked on a number of big productions, and he knew and had previously worked with both James Jones and Fred Zinnemann. His credits included the direction of American exteriors in The Longest Day (1962), an ensemble-cast big-budget war film for which Jones contributed parts of the screenplay. Marton also served as the second-unit direc- tor for Zinnemann’s first major film, The Seventh Cross (1944). In addition to that, Marton had experience with wide-screen filming, having directed one of the Cin- erama travelogues, Seven Wonders of the World (1956), which meant that he was well equipped to shoot The Thin Red Line in CinemaScope6. The film only follows the storyline of the novel loosely: locations and events are changed, removed, and added, and only the basic premise of an Army company fighting on Quadalcanal is kept. Similarly, characters are omitted or mashed together, and almost nothing remains of the way their personalities are developed by Jones. The film tries quite hard to avoid being a run-of-the-mill war feature, but the attempts to suggest otherwise are abortive and, considering the film as a whole, rather out of place. Whenever the screenplay makes an effort to step outside of the genre or to tack on something potentially deep or disturbing, the results are either laughable or pitiful. Summarizing this aspect of the film in an essay titled “Calm—On Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line”, published as a part of a collection of critical articles about The Thin Red Line in the Philosophers on

6 Both Cinerama and CinemaScope were the film industry’s attempts to offer a new expe- rience to viewers in order to stem the decline in cinema attendance caused by the introduction of television. The systems had succeeded in attracting audiences to wide-screen presentations, a technology that the television medium only started to adopt half a century later, but they also presented a new challenge for film makers. To take full advantage of the enhanced format, filming in wide-screen required working with larger areas, less panning, and a number of other changes that directors, set designers, and photographers had to take into account.

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Film series by Routledge, Simon Critchley commented that the viewer is “offered a series of more or less trite reflections on the meaninglessness of war” (13). This is not helped by many moments of stiff and ungainly acting, especially on the part of Keir Dullea7 in the role of Private Doll—who is the main character in this adaptation. The two most cringe-worthy moments are a rookie soldier’s desperate blood-rage that turns into sobbing when Doll kills a Japanese sentry with his bare hands (Marton 0:25:15), and Doll’s dream sequence in which images of Doll’s wife are mixed with war (0:33:08). The former scene had the potential of captur- ing some of the confusion and associated with an act of killing a fellow human being, but the way the screenplay plotted it was clumsy, and the way it was acted was not credible. The latter is a woeful combination of banal dialogue and a comically misguided stab at eroticism, the result of which is ill-matched with the rest of the film (unless one starts to see a pattern in the film’s insistence on including such examples of storytelling incompetence). Still, the film deserves credit for at least trying to tackle the more complicated aspects of Jones’ material. Unfortunately, the effort falls flat because the majority of the film is too formulaic: the model looks of the actors, the bravado of the soldiers, the trumpet music, and the clichéd dialogues are omnipresent symbols of the production, and they set the tone of the film. Compared to the book, the film is also properly sterilized, so that there is no swearing, no drunkenness, no killing of prisoners, no violent atrocities, and no homosexuality. The characters and their relationships receive a similar treatment, and thus the Jewish Captain Stein becomes the all-American Captain Stone, the cynical, spiteful First Sergeant Welsh becomes the pragmatic,

7 Keir Dullea later excelled in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)—his rigid deliv- ery was well suited for the role of astronaut Dave Bowman and the game of wits between himself and HAL 9000, a sentient computer.

24 2 The Thin Red Line stern father figure who is ready to lay his life for his troops, and the unspoken jealousy and testosterone-fuelled rivalries between the soldiering youngsters be- come a misplaced, unrealistic brothers-in-arms sentiment. Given the above, it might be somewhat surprising that Terrence Malick chose to use a number of dialogues from the 1964 film—such that were not fea- tured in the novel—in his screenplay. Malick was not interested in the actual story of the earlier film, which is evident from the manner the lines were used: even though Malick cherry-picked pieces of dialogue from the first adaptation, he used them in different contexts in his film. One could be inclined to think that the deci- sion to incorporate the parts from the 1964 film were just a nod to its screenwriter, Bernard Gordon, on Malick’s part8, but that would mean disregarding the rather intriguing fact that these dialogues ended up being among the best in the 1998 film. It is true that Malick’s film is not particularly laden with dialogues, most likely because a substantial part of what needs to be said is included in voice- overs, but it is still interesting to consider that some of the most captivating or provocative lines of dialogue actually come from Gordon’s (otherwise very for- gettable) script. Arguably the best example of these is the way Colonel Tall puts Captain Stone (Captain Staros in Malick’s version) in his place and, at the same time, asserts his superiority—both from a military as well as personal perspective. It should also be noted that the delivery in Malick’s film is far superior to the 1964

8 For Bernard Gordon, The Thin Red Line was one of only a very few films for which he re- ceived scriptwriting credit. The majority of other films he wrote or co-wrote were released either using a pseudonym or the name of some other member of the crew listed as the author of the screenplay (usually the co-author or the director). The reason was that Gordon was blacklisted in Hollywood because as a one-time member of the Communist party (in the 1940s) and a political activist, he was investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee.

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film, which is without a doubt due to Nick Nolte’s qualities in the role of Colonel Tall—quite possibly the best performance of the entire cast of Malick’s illustrious ensemble: [Staros:] No, sir. You’re right. About everything you said. [Tall:] Fine. Fine. That’s all, Captain. [Tall:] One more thing, Staros. [Tall:] It’s not necessary for you to ever tell me that you think I’m right. [Tall:] Ever. [Tall:] We’ll assume it. (Malick, The Thin Red Line 1:21:20) The laconic quality of the statements and the assuredness of the content make for a powerful scene. Regrettably, the lines were wasted in the 1964 film by includ- ing the dialogue before any disagreement between the two characters occurs and because Captain Stone (Ray Daley) has the demeanour of a chided child (Marton 0:18:45). Andrew Marton’s The Thin Red Line from 1964 is an ambitious film that tries—and fails—to capture some of the thought-provoking essence of James Jones’ novel. The screenwriter, Bernard Gordon, opted to substantially modify not only the novel’s action but also the characters. To the film’s detriment, the story is limited to revolve around a single character who is equipped with a melange of incongruous traits that are taken from a number of characters in Jones’ novel. The result is an unbalanced film that, on the one hand, conforms to many ‘war film’ stereotypes, and on the other seeks to break free from that template by including scenes that allude to the novel’s non-conformist message; these scenes, however, suffer from poor acting and from being ill-suited for the otherwise con- ventional film. Nevertheless, Marton’s film can claim some influence on Terrence Malick’s 1998 adaptation of The Thin Red Line because a number of dialogues were

26 2 The Thin Red Line lifted from Gordon’s script and included in Malick’s version without having ap- peared in Jones’ novel. This concludes the second chapter of the thesis, which introduced, in sep- arate sub-chapters, the novel by James Jones that inspired The Thin Red Line by Terrence Malick, and the 1964 film adaptation of the novel directed by Andrew Marton. The respective sub-chapters outlined the main attributes of the novel and the 1964 film, compared the content of the works with Malick’s The Thin Red Line, and discussed possible reasons for Malick’s inclusion or omission of various aspects of the two works in his film. The next, third chapter is dedicated to the fil- mography of Terrence Malick. It introduces his first two films and discusses how they relate to The Thin Red Line.

27 3 Terrence Malick’s Filmography

As a script writer and film director, Terrence Malick has achieved the status of a legend. Revered by most actors and lauded by most critics, he is also the subject of unending media speculations, which are mostly fuelled by his insistence on shun- ning all media attention. Malick usually does not attend premieres or any other public screenings of his films, does not grant interviews, does not come to award ceremonies, and his contracts with production companies always forbid the use of his likeness for promotion purposes. Home editions of his films also never fea- ture commentaries by the director. This behaviour, so atypical for Hollywood, has led to Malick being called a recluse by various writers, labelled “the film world’s J. D. Salinger” (Blackall), or likened to (Michaels 1). The fact that he guards his privacy so closely only serves to enhance his reputation as an enigmatic auteur genius and provides fodder for media rumours. However, as will become evident in the course of this chapter, Malick is no freak, and the rumours that circulate about him are mostly due to sloppy or sensationalist jour- nalism. His methods as a director and author, as well as his public demeanour, may be judged as slightly eccentric, but generally far less so than those of many other members of the film industry who go out of their way to be in the spotlight. Terrence Frederick Malick was born on November 30, 1943, probably in Ottawa, Illinois9, to an affluent family of an oil industry executive. The eldest of

9 While Ottawa, IL, is usually listed as Malick’s birthplace, it was, in fact, the birthplace of his mother, and no evidence is known that would support the claim that Terrence was born there as well. Malick himself stated in one of the rare interviews in the 1970s that he was born in Waco, Texas (Ciment 17). That, however, seems rather strange because the Malick family only moved to Waco in the early 1950s when Terrence’s father, Emil Malick, was promoted to Division Manager at a plant near Waco.

28 3 TERRENCE MALICK’S FILMOGRAPHY three brothers, ‘Terry’ was an honours student as well as a promising athelete (played American football), and enjoyed a relatively regular childhood. His fam- ily, however, suffered a number of blows throughout the years, the circumstances of which have later found their way into some of Malick’s films. Terrence’s brother Larry, a talented musician, went to study flamenco guitar under the ac- claimed virtuoso Andrés Segovia in Spain. There he became frustrated by what he perceived as his slow progress and committed suicide in 1968—after having intentionally broken fingers on both of his hands. The youngest brother, Chris, was involved in a car accident in which he was badly burned and his wife killed, and he later also committed suicide (in 2010), just as Terrence was editing The Tree of Life (2011). Malick’s later films, including The Tree of Life (2011) and Knight of Cups (2015) deal with some of these themes. Malick received an A. B. in philosophy from Harvard College, during which time he also spent a semester in Germany, studying Heidegger and even visiting the philosopher himself. The circumstance of his Harvard sojourn was peculiar in that his father disapproved of this choice of school, preferring instead for Terrence to go to M.I.T. to obtain education in natural sciences—with the hope that the son will follow in the father’s footsteps and seek a career in the power industry. Terrence insisted on Harvard, and his father refused to pay for the uni- versity. Malick was able to pursue his interest in philosophy only because a friend of his from high school offered to pay the tuition for the first year from his inher- itance. Malick agreed, got accepted to Harvard, and later worked various jobs during summers to support his further studies. Following graduation, Malick started a graduate programme at Oxford (as a recipient of the Rhodes scholar- ship), but left during his first year when his thesis proposal was not accepted.

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Quoted in One Big Soul: An Oral History of Terrence Malick by Paul Maher Jr.10, Hubert Dreyfus, an American philosopher and a renowned Heidegger scholar, explained: Terry, when he met with his advisor Gilbert Ryle explained that he wanted his thesis to be on ‘World’ and Heidegger and Wittgen- stein. I think also, Nietzsche. Ryle’s response was something like, ‘you can’t do that.’ Heidegger still wasn’t taken seriously by the academics, so he told Terry that his thesis wasn’t ‘philosophical’ enough. Terry’s response wasn’t to compromise, but to turn his back on it. (34) This episode is perhaps emblematic of the sort of attitude Malick has had towards all of his later projects: unless it is possible to pursue and complete a particular piece of work—be it a film, a screenplay, or a theatre production—in a manner that would reflect his own convictions and measure up to his standard of quality, Malick does not hesitate to abandon it, regardless of the amount of work or resources that have already been invested into it (the long and winding path

10 Paul Maher Jr.’s One Big Soul: An Oral History of Terrence Malick, published in the 3rd edition in 2014, is a collection of (all seven) existing interviews with Malick and a multitude of personal reminiscences and anecdotes about Malick’s life, family, and work by people who met him in almost any capacity—ranging from the woman who cleaned his parents’ house and childhood friends to Hollywood stars who had roles in his various films. This is accompanied by occasional original texts by Maher that add details or summarize periods of Malick’s life. The work is quite likely the most extensive compilation of biographical information about Malick, but it suffers from an almost total disregard for proper attribution—excerpts from magazine articles, books, and on-line texts are interspersed with (partial) transcripts from TV interviews, YouTube videos, or special features from home-edition film releases. Considering the fact that a substantial portion of these materials is cited without proper source attribution, this thesis only makes use of the materials collected in Maher’s biography when their source can be established (authors of quotes, snippets from magazine articles, direct interviews, etc.).

30 3 TERRENCE MALICK’S FILMOGRAPHY towards the eventual production of The Thin Red Line, which was lined with a number of prolonged, costly, and ultimately abandoned projects, is discussed in more detail in chapter “The Thin Red Line by Terrence Malick”). After the fall out with his thesis supervisor, Malick returned to the US and worked as a journalist, taught philosophy at M.I.T. (and, remarkably, published an English translation of Heidegger’s Vom Wesen des Grundes as The Essence of Reasons), and eventually enrolled at the Conservatory, from which he earned an MFA in 1969. Malick described his transition to film- making in an interview with Shaun Considine for the After Dark magazine in June 1974 as follows: “When the draft started to breathe down my neck, I taught philosophy at M.I.T. During that year, I began to write short scripts, and that led to my enrolling at the American Film Institute in Beverly Hills.” (11). This chapter provides brief introductions to Malick’s films, comments on their most interesting qualities, and discusses how they relate to The Thin Red Line. The emphasis is on the first two films written and directed by Terrence Malick—both released in the 1970s: Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978). Some space is also given to the 20 years that spanned the period between the release of Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line (1998), which have been vari- ously called Malick’s film-making hiatus or disappearance from the public eye. As will be become evident, Malick neither stopped being involved with films, nor disappeared—he just eluded media attention. During that time, he actively worked on several projects, one of which resulted in the The Thin Red Line adap- tation. It seems likely, that the experience he acquired from the projects that had not materialized strongly influenced and helped to shape not only The Thin Red Line but also his subsequent films. Before starting work on his first feature-length film, Malick wrote (or rewrote) a number of film scripts, but he was mostly disappointed with how the

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films eventually turned out. Mike Medavoy, a film producer and Malick’s long time collaborator who commissioned a number of scripts from Malick and later went to co-produce The Thin Red Line with his production company, Phoenix Pic- tures, commented for Maher’s Oral History: “when Deadhead Miles, the first film he received credit on, turned out so bad that Paramount didn’t think it was worth releasing, Terry decided to direct his next film himself.” (42). In the interview with Shaun Considine, Malick talked about the reasons to self-produce the first feature film he was to direct: I started to write Badlands in 1971, and I had a finished shooting script by the spring of ’72. Except for an eighteen-minute short11,I had never directed or produced a film before. But I knew I wanted total freedom, total control, so I stayed away from studio involve- ment. (11) In writing Badlands, Malick was partially inspired by the real-life murders and actions of Charles Starkweather who went on a killing spree with his girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, in Nebraska and Wyoming in 1958. Malick chose South Dakota and Montana as the setting for his film and stretched the story to several weeks or perhaps months as opposed to the two days it took for Starkweather and Fu- gate to be apprehended. Malick acknowledged the inspiration in the Considine interview: As a kid, I was fascinated by the case. I grew up in Texas and Ok- lahoma, and you couldn’t get away from the story. I’m not afraid

11 Malick described the short film in an interview with Michel Ciment for the French magazine Positif (June 1975): “During my studies at the AFI, I made a short film called with some friends. It was the story of two cowboys who leave the West on horseback, enter the modern world, and try to rob a bank.” (17). The film has never been released, and the director has only given permission for students and alumni of the institute to view it (“Lanton Mills (1969)”).

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of lawsuits by admitting I based Badlands on the Starkweather case, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to go into all that right now. Caril is still in prison. (11) Malick went as far visiting Fugate in prison to secure her consent with his filming of the story. When the film was completed, Fugate (who was later paroled in 1976) was invited to a screening and spent some time with the director and Martin Sheen who was cast as the character based on Starkweather. Even though Malick never claimed that his film was anything but fiction for which the real-life events only served as an inspiration, a number of the scenes in the film contain direct references to the actual murder spree. The most notable of those is likely Malick’s treatment of a situation that (in real life) unfolded at the mansion of a rich industrialist in Lincoln, Nebraska. Starkweather murdered the man’s wife and maid, waited at the house for several hours for the husband to arrive, and then killed him too. Fugate and Starkweather stole jewellery from the house and drove off in the family’s car. In Malick’s retelling, Martin Sheen’s character, Kit Carruthers, does not kill anyone in the house, and the couple (Sissy Spacek played Holly, Kit’s girlfriend12) leave in the man’s car after stealing groceries and other supplies from the house. The significance of this alteration lies in the fact that it sheds light on the creative process behind the script. Malick intended for his ‘hero’ to be a confused

12 Spacek was 24 when she portrayed, quite convincingly, the 15-year-old Holly. Sheen was 32 when he played the 25-year-old Kit. In fact, Sheen looks even younger than 25 in the film. In a 2011 interview with Seán Rocks, recorded at the Galway Film Fleadh, Sheen shares that when he was being considered to play Kit, he felt he was too old for the role—the original version of the screenplay had Kit 19 years old. Because Malick really wanted Sheen to play the part, he offered to make the character of Kit older, so that it would be closer to Sheen’s real age at the time (Sheen).

33 3 TERRENCE MALICK’S FILMOGRAPHY young man who is unable to figure out his role in society. Kit is at once boister- ously courageous and childishly scared. Comically chivalrous and unapologeti- cally rude. Rebellious and fatherly. In having Kit spare the lives of the rich fam- ily, Malick attempts to imbue the character with a personality—lift him above a black & white categorization. The director talked about this aspect of the film with Michel Ciment in the interview for Positif : “The only person he doesn’t kill, and who could be a potential threat, is the rich man. But he spares him because he’s a man after his own heart. He spares him, but not the friend he was work- ing with.” and continued to highlight the uncertainty and doubts he wanted Kit to represent: “he isn’t sure of himself; he doesn’t really know what’s expected of him as a criminal” (reprinted in Maher 18). A similar uncertainty is perceivable in Pvt. Witt’s character in The Thin Red Line—not only do the ubiquitous voice- overs teem with unanswered questions (though these are usually voiced by Pvt. Fife—even in situations where it is Pvt. Witt who is being shown on screen), but the behaviour of Pvt. Witt is one of unending search for anything firm to hold on. His AWOL episodes are, uncharacteristically, more about exploring his own self than about attempts to avoid combat or desert from the war. On the one hand, Witt feels a connection to the other men in his company, and he is ultimately will- ing to sacrifice his life for them (more on this unfortunate concession to war films in the sub-chapter titled “War Film?”) but on the other hand, he is detached and appears to only care for himself, or rather to not care about anything at all. In this way, Witt is a typical Malick protagonist and follows in the same direction as Kit in Badlands and Bill in Days of Heaven. When considering Malick’s entire filmography to-date, one thing that be- comes quite bewilderingly obvious is that his vision and the stylistic realiza- tion of his oeuvre seem consistently perpetual and non-evolving. What evolves are the workmanship and the scope, but not the style and the ideas that form

34 3 TERRENCE MALICK’S FILMOGRAPHY it. Beginning with Badlands, Malick presents a matured, fully-developed style that employs similar instruments and techniques that manifest themselves in scripts, tropes, and cinematographic approaches. With each subsequent film, Ma- lick worked on improving and perfecting this set of tools—both by honing his directorial skills and through securing ever more generous production budgets. Along with many others, Lloyd Michaels, writing in a section titled “Marks of the Auteur” in Terrence Malick, a volume in the Contemporary Film Directors series edited by James Naremore, identifies the two main distinguishing characteristics of Malick’s films: “His signature can be discerned in several recurrent concerns ... the grandiose representation of nature and the distinctive employment of sub- jective voiceover narration.” (Michaels 6). The first of Malick’s features, Badlands, was no exception in this regard. The first, most prominent, and easily recognizable element of Malick’s style is the innovative, yet, at times, downright confusing, use of voice-over. The inclusion of a detached, seemingly unconcerned, and often disembodied narrator is a fixture of Malick’s films. It started with Badlands and the unconcerned, matter- of-fact voice of Holly, and it has continued to be an indispensable part of the di- rector’s toolbox. At times, the voice-over narrative is tied relatively closely to the events unfolding on the screen (as in Badlands or partially in Days of Heaven), at other times, the voice-over is much more cryptic, and it serves Malick’s moralis- tic, philosophical, or metaphysical agenda (as in The Thin Red Line or, even more prominently, in The Knight of Cups). In Badlands, this feature of Malick’s story- telling style is overtly on display from the very first scene to the very last, and while there is no doubt about the identity of the character whose voice recites the narrative, other customary properties of film voice-overs are not present. Firstly, it is unclear when the actual narration is taking place. Is it Holly’s inner voice, her thoughts, and silent reflections that run through her mind as

35 3 TERRENCE MALICK’S FILMOGRAPHY the events unfold, or is it a retelling of the story at some later point in time? Even more importantly, the voice-over is presented by an unreliable narrator— and the reason is not that Holly would want to withhold something or lie about the events; it is because she does not understand the events and interprets them in a naïve manner. In “Terrence Malick”, a chapter dedicated to the director in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, David Davies confirms that Holly is not a reliable reporter “not because she misrepresents ‘what is going on’ in a nar- row sense, but because she fails to grasp ‘what is going on’ in a moral or human sense” (577). This treatment of the voice-over, with heavy, prominent presence but an intentional disregard for commonly expected attributes as employed by other directors, established an interesting precedent: Malick has since been able to ex- ploit this instrument—effectively allowing himself to tell two stories at the same time—throughout his entire career without ever falling into the trap of making the voice-over narrations sound preachy or presumptuous. The second trademark sign of Malick’s narrative style is the ability—and insistence—to incorporate motifs, scenes, or shots of nature that seem to be out- of-place, incongruously patched onto the fabric of the narrative or wedged in between events or actions that, at first glance, do not require any embellishment, pause, or further visual support. Even though seemingly superfluous, the cut- ins that show animal still lifes, macro details of insects, sweeping landscapes, or other similar themes—which amount to a tradition of unabashed adulation of nature—force the viewer to consider the implications of men’s actions in relation to nature—or the lack thereof. As in the case of the voice-over, Malick’s fasci- nation with nature already was in evidence in Badlands where bugs, lizards, or bucks provide the backdrop against which Holly paints her disarmingly unpre- tentious picture of the deteriorating idyll she lived through with Kit. Similarly to

36 3 TERRENCE MALICK’S FILMOGRAPHY the voice-overs, images of nature allow Malick to say more than the main story- line would allow. The capacity of his films to carry multiple meanings and invite their indi- vidual or overall interpretations equips the works with the potential to develop and address complex themes without appearing bloated or overly complicated. In The Routledge Companion, Davies professes: “The manner in which natural im- ages function as an independent semantic level in Malick’s later films brings out one of the most striking stylistic features of his cinema—its polysemic character” (574)13 and adds that the three main semantic elements—the narrative, the im- ages of nature, and the voice-overs—balance each other (574). Days of Heaven and later The Thin Red Line wield these techniques to an even greater effect. The com- bination of voice-overs and non-diegetic images of nature permeates Malick’s work and endows it with an almost documentary air, suggesting that for this screenwriter and director, film is more of an educational than an entertainment medium. The low-budget production of Badlands, without the backing of a film studio, was fraught with problems. On more than one occasion, filming equip- ment was destroyed by accidents, including a botched special-effects scene with a burning house that left a crew member severely injured. Malick, acting as a pro- ducer, went over budget and was unable to pay his crew. Members of the creative team repeatedly left the production (the film ended up being shot by three dif- ferent cinematographers), and Malick’s lack of experience contributed to a tense atmosphere on the set. The post-production process was similarly difficult, and Malick had to fend off both creditors and tax collectors before the film was ready.

13 The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film featuring Davies’ essay on Terrence Malick was published in 2009, so by “later films” Davies means The Thin Red Line (1998) and The New World (2005).

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Desperate to finish the project, Malick racked up large personal bets. Following the completion and the very successful14 release of Badlands, Malick shared with Shaun Consadine: They kept calling up, threatening to impound my car and repossess my house. But after a while you learn to ignore all impediments. To survive as a free agent in this world you have to maintain certain fictions. I had already signed up to $200,000 worth of promissory notes—to the color labs, the sound people, and the cinemobile out- fit. I would have signed anything in order to finish the film and get to New York to show it to the Festival committee. (12) The patience and resilience eventually paid off. Badlands was a critical suc- cess, both Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek became international celebrities, and Malick was vindicated in his insistence on directing his own script. The director’s next project, Days of Heaven, was substantially more ambitious, was produced by a major studio (Paramount, though with limited funding), and cemented Malick’s reputation as an auteur director to be reckoned with. Days of Heaven was released in 1978 after another tumultuous production, which, as if echoing the troubles of Badlands, included several members of the crew departing and uncomfortable tensions between the director and the cast. According to Peter Biskind who briefly mentions Days of Heaven in his rather scathing portrait of the 1970s Hollywood, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1998), Ma- lick soon realized that his original ideas for the film were not going to work and resorted to capturing as much film material as possible with the intention of reinventing the film from scratch in post-production: “Malick decided to toss the script, go Tolstoy instead of Dostoyevsky, wide instead of deep, shoot miles

14 Malick eventually did deliver the finished film to the New York Film Festival where it pur- portedly “overshadowed even ’s Mean Streets” (Biskind, “Runaway Genius”).

38 3 TERRENCE MALICK’S FILMOGRAPHY of film with the hope of solving the problems in the editing room.” (297). That, however, is probably not the whole truth because much of the cutting in post- production was demanded by the studio. Chris Hodenfield, a film critic for various magazines, reflected on his conversation with Malick about the editing process in a 1978 article (“Terrence Malick: Days of Heaven’s Image Maker”) for Rolling Stone: “At the time I didn’t grasp just how hurt he might have been over the cutting of Days of Heaven. He allowed that he had to cut quite a bit from it. If I’d dug into it more, I might have learned that he had to cut a LOT from the original.” Which would explain Malick’s unease and eventual departure when, while working on his next Paramount-funded film project (Q, also called Qasida, described below), the studio was not content with vague, changing descriptions and an unconventional script. The prolonged post-production period has since become a trademark of Malick’s creative process. In the case of Days of Heaven, Malick spent two years editing the material, recording (and re-recording) voice-overs, and largely chang- ing the entire film—a statement that can be applied to all Malick’s films to-date and The Thin Red Line in particular. Compared to the shooting script (Malick, Days of Heaven script), the resulting film features fewer scenes overall, less di- alogue, and more ambiguity. Davies’ characterization of the director’s modus operandi summarizes the importance of the post-production phase as well as the two main devices in Malick’s arsenal: “Malick’s films after Badlands are gen- erated through the manipulation, in post-production, of material realized in the shooting—principally through the adding of voice-overs and the radical editing of the visual content.” (576). The film’s beautiful visuals, which are dominated by the vast vistas of rolling wheat fields, mesmerizing sunsets, and calm, dreamy dawns, owe much to the fact that the majority of scenes were filmed during the so-called golden

39 3 TERRENCE MALICK’S FILMOGRAPHY hour15, eschewing the use of artificial lighting. Deservedly, Nestór Almendros’ work won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography16. And even though Biskind ascribes this aspect of the shooting schedule to unrelated production problems17, the fact remains that the film is visually stunning. The camera work, which presents rich, saturated colours, and the flow of the film, which, at the ex- pense of plot development and dialogues, unashamedly gorges on the expansive landscape views and the riveting displays of elements (including the spellbinding sequence of prairie fire), presage Malick’s later productions and the significant role such visual elements play in them. Similarly to Badlands, the plot of Days of Heaven is very simple, and there are hardly any twists or surprises. As with Badlands, it can be argued that the actual plot and story were not important to Malick—that was just the canvas on which he could realize his vision. The layers of meaning combined with the artis- tic properties of the film together create the illusion of an involved narrative—a seeming complexity that can be difficult to unravel at first viewing. Recognizing

15 The golden (or magic) hour in cinematography and photography refers to the short period of time just after sunrise or before sunset when the light of the Sun is softer in tones than during the day when the light travels shorter distances through the atmosphere. Shadows are also softer, and there is a lesser risk of overexposure.

16 Because the production did not finish on time, Almendros was unable to complete the work—due to prior commitments. He approached Haskell Wexler to take his place, and Wexler ended up shooting a substantial part of the film. According to Wexler, more than 50% of the final film was shot by him, yet he only received credit for ‘additional photography’, which disqualified him from being considered for an Academy Award (Ebert).

17 “The ancient harvesting machines were always breaking down, which meant that shooting often didn’t start until late in the afternoon, allowing for only a few hours of daylight before it got too dark to continue, although the footage, suffused with the golden glow of sunset, looked great, despite the fact that DP Nestor (sic) Almendros was slowly going blind.” (Biskind, Easy Riders Raging Bulls 297).

40 3 TERRENCE MALICK’S FILMOGRAPHY this quality of the film, the renowned music critic, Harold C. Schonberg, wrote for about Days of Heaven the following: “In back of what basically is a conventional plot is all kinds of fancy, self-conscious cineaste techniques.” (qtd. in Maher 83). The narrative structure is entirely lineal, and the characters in the story, while attempting to assert any sort of agenda, are always swept by cir- cumstances, thus exercising very little actual freedom of thought or movement. Even in situations where there is a decision to be made, the characters are steered, quite organically and believably, as if by exigencies inherent to their station. This aspect, again, applies to all of Malick’s subsequent films. In The Routledge Compan- ion, Davies observes: “As a rule, [Malick’s] characters are represented as acting in ways that are elicited from them by the world as it is given to them in experience, rather than as engaging in exercises of deliberation.” (579). The story is set during the First World War in the Texas Panhandle re- gion where a love triangle develops between Bill (Richard Gere), who escaped from New York after accidentally injuring or killing his factory foreman, Abbey (Brooke Adams), Bill’s girlfriend who pretends to be his sister, and The Farmer (Sam Shepard), the rich owner of the estate on which Bill and Abbey are hired as harvest hands. The main narration in the film is provided in voice-over by Bill’s young sister, Linda (Linda Manz). The Farmer is smitten with Abbey, and when Bill overhears that The Farmer is terminally ill, Bill encourages Abbey to sub- mit to The Farmer’s advances, which she does with the intention to eventually pocket The Farmer’s inheritance. However, The Farmer stays alive and well, and Abbey gradually falls in love with him. Bill recognizes his mistake and is pre- pared to leave Abbey and the farm when, in classic tragedy style, The Farmer’s hitherto suppressed suspicions about the true nature of Bill and Abbey’s relation- ship overboil. The Farmer confronts Bill who panics and kills him. Bill flees with Abbey and Linda, but the trio is soon tracked down, and Bill is shot to death by

41 3 TERRENCE MALICK’S FILMOGRAPHY the police. Abbey inherits The Farmer’s riches, puts Linda in a boarding school, and goes in search of other adventures. So does Linda who escapes from the boarding school. The end. Just like Holly in Badlands, Linda is an unreliable narrator. Her childish perspective and frequent conversational detours, in which she talks about things seemingly unrelated to the story, clash with the gravity of events unfolding on the screen. Linda’s voice18, composed and aloof, yet coloured by an unsophisticated east-coast accent, is what creates the equilibrium that allows the film to commu- nicate its sense of loss and longing. The down-to-earth quality of the voice-over counterbalances the heady visuals and the strong Biblical undertones (explained below). The voice-over continues the trend started by Badlands where the original- ity of the content and the manner of delivery of Holly’s narration laid foundations for Malick’s further pushing of the boundaries of how a voice-over can be used in a feature film. Linda in Days of Heaven was another step, and the multitude of voices in The Thin Red Line confirmed the trajectory of Malick’s development of this narrative instrument. Some critics, including , found the voice- over one of the best assets of Days of Heaven (“Her voice sounds utterly authentic; it seems beyond performance. I remember seeing the film for the first time and be- ing blind-sided by the power of a couple of sentences she speaks near the end.” (Ebert, “Days of Heaven”)). Other viewers, such as Daniel Abbott, echoing the opinion of many disappointed moviegoers, had no patience with it (“[the film’s failure] is partly down to the dramatic action being drained by the inclusion of Manz’s awkward, improvised narration. ... the narration is a mumbled, exposi- tory word-vomit that adds nothing to the film”).

18 Linda Manz was 16 when she played and narrated Linda—a girl of 11 or 12—in Days of Heaven.

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Defying the traditional themes of the western genre (though Malick him- self referred to the film as a western (“Young Directors” 5)), Days of Heaven is brimming with Old Testament references. So much so that Hubert Cohen, writ- ing in an essay titled “The Genesis of Days of Heaven” for the Cinema Journal, suggests that “Old Testament stories are the source of much of the plot [and] ... a transcendent power intervenes in its events; and that Malick has therefore cre- ated a religious film.” (46). While the biblical influence is indeed significant and easily recognizable, various critics, including Cohen, tended to overemphasize it and sideline other influences and motifs. For example, in his Cinema Journal arti- cle, Cohen stated that the title of the film was taken directly from the Bible: “as days of heaven upon the earth”, attributing it to Deuteronomy 11:21 (48). This is, however, incorrect because it misquotes. In the passage in Deuteronomy, God does not promise ‘heaven on earth’, instead it tells people that if they obey God, they will be allowed to live in the promised land for as long (as many days) as are above the earth (“Deuteronomy 11:21”). In an essay titled “The Tragic Indiscernibility of Days of Heaven”, published in Terrence Malick (part of the Film and Philosophy series and edited by Thomas D. Tucker and Stuart Kendall), Stuart Kendall is guilty of the same misinterpretation (154). However, Kendall at least prefixes his mistake by acknowledging that “Malick’s films cannot be understood through reference to any single influence or source” (153). Still, the theme of a couple who pretend to be siblings in order to keep their relationship a secret while currying favours of an unwitting third-party suitor is a common one in the Bible. According to Cohen, a variation on this scheme appears at least three times in the Bible, with Abimelech, the king of Philistines in Gerar, being the subject of such deception twice: first by Abraham and Sarah, then by Isaac and Rebekah (48). In all cases, the situation comes to a head when the de- ceived suitor becomes suspicious. Similarly to the biblical stories, Malick’s script

43 3 TERRENCE MALICK’S FILMOGRAPHY paints The Farmer as a benign character—even though he is the owner of the es- tate and his station is far above the migrant workers, he is not an evil capitalist taking advantage of his position to have his way with a poor girl. Instead, he really does fall in love with Abbey, thus further complicating Bill’s and Abbey’s moral dilemma. Foreshadowing the climactic end of the love triangle is another motif that appears to be taken from a biblical source: a swarm of locusts that de- stroys the crop and acts as the catalyst that initiates the untangling of the main trio’s unhealthy relationship. The scenes of locust infestation and the subsequent fire in the devastated wheat fields offer some of the most cinematographically compelling images in the film. Rivalled only by the monumentally imposing scenes with the steam- powered farm machinery (accompanied by a thunderous soundtrack), the hellish footage of out-of-control fire, billowing smoke, and the resulting state of gloomy destitution are among the most visually compelling in the film. Tellingly, when Ennio Morricone scored the film, he let Malick use the various musical pieces and compositions for whichever scenes the director saw fit, but he requested that the score for the fire scenes stays as the composer intended it (Maher 81). Malick agreed, and the scene is one of the most powerful ones in the film. Considering that Morricone scored the music without ever having seen the film (at Malick’s request), the resulting achievement is all the more impressive. This and other qualities of the film were recognized not only by the aforementioned Academy Award for cinematography, which was the only nomination out of the four the film received to be converted, but also by the prestigious Prix de la mise en scène (Best Director Award) at the in 1979 (uncharacteristically, Malick attended the festival and accepted the award in person). Notably, two of the four Academy Award nominations that Days of Heaven received were for Mor- ricone’s soundtrack and for Best Sound. Audio effects, which (along with Ennio

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Morricone’s superb score19) punctuate many of the film’s most visually potent scenes, set the film apart from Badlands, which showed none of the indulgence in raw noise that Days of Heaven seems to revel in at times. This quality links Days of Heaven to The Thin Red Line, which also features an impressive soundtrack (by Hans Zimmer) and excellent sound effects—ranging from subtle to overpow- ering. The seven nominations for The Thin Red Line received included both Hans Zimmer’s original soundtrack and Best Sound. Malick’s next film, The Thin Red Line, was to be released a full twenty years later in 1998. This period of time is often presented as Malick’s departure from film-making (Blackall, Winter, and others), an interpretation that is overly sim- plistic and misleading. The following paragraphs in the rest of this sub-chapter offer an outline of what Malick was working on during that time. It will become clear that not only did Malick not retreat from the public’s view to quit making films—quite the contrary: he shun media and industry attention in order to be able to continue as well as to enjoy making films—but also that The Thin Red Line had been an active project for over a decade before it was finally released—which makes Malick’s ‘disappearance’ sound much less dramatic. As Billy Weber, Ma- lick’s long-time collaborator who worked on most of the director’s films as the editor, shared on the commentary audio track of the Criterion release of Days of Heaven: “He just got waylaid for 20 years” (qtd. in “The Lost Projects”). Despite the fact that Days of Heaven had not received the same universal

19 Ennio Morricone, who had already been an acclaimed composer (and 50 years old) by the time he started work on the score for Days of Heaven, recalled how Malick (working on his second film and 35 years old) insisted on giving him advice: “He didn’t know me very well, so he made suggestions, and in some cases, gave musical solutions. This kind of annoyed me because he’d say: “This thing... try it with three flutes.” Something impossible! So, to humor him, I would do it with three flutes and then he’d decide to use my version after all.” (qtd. in Maher 81).

45 3 TERRENCE MALICK’S FILMOGRAPHY praise upon its release as Badlands, it has since come to be recognized not only as one of the best films of the 1970s but as one of the best films ever (“The 100 great- est American films”). In Hollywood circles, Malick’s name became synonymous with quality, demanding, and intriguing feature films. Despite having released only two full-length films, Malick had established himself as a capable, talented, and artistically creative film-maker, which opened the way to lucrative contracts with big Hollywood studios. Even though Malick had proclaimed his distaste for Hollywood productions as early as 1974 when he commented on the reasons for financing Badlands independently (Cook 6), he accepted an offer for a gen- erous production deal from Charles Bludhorn, the head of Gulf & Western, the parent company of Paramount. According to Peter Biskind’s article for Variety, “The Runaway Genius”, in which the circumstances of Malick’s 20-year hiatus are presented in a somewhat sensationalist manner, Bludhorn “fell in love with Malick’s melancholy tone and dreamy landscapes”. The studio agreed to retain Malick without any specific promise—just on the basis of an understanding that Malick will work on and eventually deliver his next film (Biskind, Easy Riders 298). Such benevolence was the benefit that came with the reputation Malick had built. In his biography, Paul Maher summarized Malick’s prominence as fol- lows: He was another breed, a newer breed of filmmaker, it was apparent. Though he wasn’t raking in huge profits like George Lucas, Stephen Spielberg and Francis Coppola, instead he was breaking the mold of conventional filmmaking, developing an aesthetic unmatched by the others. (86) The problem with having emerged into the spotlight so relatively quickly (based on only two films released in the span of five years) was that it clashed with

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Malick’s reluctance to appear in media or be courted by studios or producers. In a 1993 article titled “Re-Enter the Reluctant Dragon, Terrence Malick” for the Los Angeles Times, spurred by speculations about the imminent release of a number of new films and projects by Malick, Mary Williams Walsh quoted Rob Cohen, a producer on one of the films for which Malick wrote a screenplay (Desert Rose), as reminiscing about Malick who purportedly said: “Why is everyone looking at me? I’m just a guy who suffered through a couple of movies.” Malick started to develop a new, ambitious project that was tentatively named Q (short for Qasida)—an unconventional film that was supposed to show Malick’s vision of the origins of life on Earth. Using the trust the studio put in him, he scouted numerous locations, sent cameramen to various parts of the world to shoot natural wonders, and worked on an extensive script. However, Paramount ultimately felt that the freedom afforded to Malick was too excessive and started to request that Malick hand over some results. David Picker, former president of Paramount, quoted in Paul Maher’s biography, recalls: “The Malick project was considered exorbitant, unrealistic. All the effort Terry was putting into the thing didn’t seem to jibe with the studio’s expectations. The script they got was like a poetic science book; pages and pages of prose, no dialogue.” (88). Eventually, Ma- lick grew tired of the studio’s inquiries and abandoned the project. For the small crew that the director assembled to work on the film, this was an enormously disappointing outcome because they felt they were participating in a very special project. Richard Taylor, the film’s special effects designer, said about the abrupt end of Q: “Finally he calls us, and says he’s in love. He wanted us to pack all the stuff up and leave it. It was one of the most disappointing things in my life.“ (qtd. in Maher 89). Although the filming came to a halt, and Malick started to pursue other ideas, the work that had already been completed did not go to waste: some of

47 3 TERRENCE MALICK’S FILMOGRAPHY the footage was used by Malick in his later films, including The Tree of Life (2011) and The (2016): Said, Peter Parks, a natural history photographer who worked for Malick: “I now know that thirty years later, some of that material went into The Tree of Life, to which I, my son Chris, and a close colleague, Simon, contributed with recent material we shot two years ago.” (qtd. in Maher 87). Malick then worked on or was involved with a number of abortive projects, all of which shared one common denominator: producers Bobby Geisler and John Roberdeau. The duo of producers befriended Malick and tried to inter- est him in directing a number of films or writing various screenplays. In return, Malick made counter-offers based on his own preference. Of note was a screen- play for a stage drama based on the Japanese film Sansho the Bailiff (1954), which Geisler and Roberdeau commissioned Malick to write. Malick’s screenplay was to be directed on Broadway by Andrzej Wajda, but despite advanced stages of pre- production, the plans never materialized. The producers went nearly bankrupt because of the costs and later, following an acrimonious fall out with Malick, claimed that Malick’s indecisiveness and inflexible approach to the matter was at the root of the project’s failure (Maher 99). At the same time, preparations for The Thin Red Line proceeded. Malick suggested the topic to Geisler and Roberdeu in 1988 and, upon being paid $250 000 to start working on a script, turned in a first draft that weighed in at 277 pages in April 1989. The script, at that time, was very true to Jones’ novel. Throughout the first half of the 1990s, the producers went back and forth with Malick about the script while racking up debts for other un- realized film projects as well as Sansho the Bailiff, which was ultimately shelved as well. The proliferation of ideas and the allure of bringing Malick back from ob- scurity were the main incentives for Malick’s many collaborators to continue working on his projects (or projects he expressed interest in), even though it

48 3 TERRENCE MALICK’S FILMOGRAPHY seemed that none of them ever overcame all the hurdles to become a reality. Still, many of those projects attracted considerable attention, and throughout the en- tire period of the wait for a new release, Malick had no trouble finding willing and eager backers and partners. Journalist James Sterngold is quoted in Michael Nordine’s article for Los Angeles Review of Books (“Hollywood Bigfoot: Terrence Malick and the 20-Year Hiatus That Wasn’t”) as quipping: “Terrence Malick has legendary status for two things: the movies he has made, and the movies he has not made.” After many twists and turns, a lengthy casting process, and a total disin- tegration of the relationship between Geisler & Roberdeau and Malick, The Thin Red Line eventually went into pre-production in 1996, and filming started in early 1997. Despite being banned from the set and variously vilified by representatives of Mike Medavoy’s Phoenix Pictures (Maher 102), which ended up producing the film, Geisler and Roberdeau appeared in the film’s credits as producers, and when the film was nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award, the two pro- ducers were, along with , listed as the nominated parties. The Thin Red Line opened in December 1998 to mixed reactions from both audiences and critics. The film and its many aspects are discussed in further detail in the main chapter of this thesis: ”The Thin Red Line by Terrence Malick”. This concludes the introduction to Terrence Malick’s filmography with the main focus on his work before the release of The Thin Red Line. The twenty years that passed between the release of Days of Heaven in 1978 and The Thin Red Line in 1998 seem almost improbable given Malick’s prolific output that followed. It took seven years from The Thin Red Line for The New World (2005) to come out and another six years for The Tree of Life (2011) after that. But ever since then Malick has been putting out one film after another, often working simultaneously on multiple films: (2012), Knight of Cups (2015), Voyage of Time (2016),

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Song to Song (2017), Radegund (to be released in 2017). While this thesis does not aspire to cover all of Malick’s filmography, it bears mentioning that these latter films by the director share many stylistic attributes and cinematographic features with the first three films, including the prolific use of voice-overs, meticulous work with natural light, and dreamy, expansive shots of landscapes and other natural imagery. As with the earlier works described in this chapter, there has also rarely been any semblance of a critical consensus with regard to the films that came out in the new millennium. With the notable exception of Voyage of Time (a documentary feature), which garnered almost universally positive reviews, all of the other films opened to familiarly ‘mixed reactions’. The first two chapters of this thesis have established the literary and cine- matic context in which Terrence Malick filmed The Thin Red Line. The first chapter introduced James Jones’ eponymous novel as well as other works by this author, discussed the main themes of the book, and compared the original text with Ma- lick’s adaptation. The first chapter also considered the first film adaptation of Jones’ novel, directed by Andrew Marton and released in 1964, which can claim some influence on Malick’s version. In the second chapter, Malick’s filmography was introduced and summarized, with an emphasis on the first two feature films of Malick’s career, which preceded The Thin Red Line. The two films, both released in the 1970s, brought fame to Malick and secured his place among the Holly- wood elite. The chapter considered the films with regard to Malick’s directorial and creative style, drew parallels with his later films and especially The Thin Red Line, and also briefly touched upon Malick’s films that followed The Thin Red Line. The third, main chapter, which follows, focuses on the titular topic of this thesis: war, humanity, and nature in The Thin Red Line by Terrence Malick. This theme is examined through further scrutiny of Malick’s cinematic techniques, with partic- ular attention being paid to the director’s prolific use of voice-overs and natural

50 3 TERRENCE MALICK’S FILMOGRAPHY imagery. The third chapter presents the chief argument of this thesis.

51 4 The Thin Red Line by Terrence Malick

The Thin Red Line, the third feature-length film by screenwriter and director Ter- rence Malick, is the main topic of this chapter and this thesis. The film marked Malick’s return to public eye after a twenty-year pause that followed his first two films in the 1970s. The Thin Red Line continued the trend Malick set with Badlands and Days of Heaven, the breakthrough début and its equally acclaimed follow-up respectively, the two films that established Malick as an auteur director with a distinctive artistic style and visionary creative techniques. In The Thin Red Line, Malick utilized similar narrative methods, employed characteristically stunning visuals, and once more laboured in post-production. The released film, yet again, baffled some viewers, polarized critics, and gained him new devotees. Despite the recent flurry of releases from the director, The Thin Red Line remains one of his most recognizable films. This chapter formally introduces the film and its sto- ryline, considers the film in the context of Malick’s other works, and, in the first sub-chapter, questions whether the work can be labelled a war film. The next sub- chapter, “The Role of Nature”, discusses Malick’s work with natural imagery and how it relates to themes of humanity and war. The section also carries the main argument of this thesis. As has been pointed out at various places in this thesis, Malick’s adapta- tion of The Thin Red Line is not very true to James Jones’ novel after which the film is named and from which it borrows the main storyline. This is true with regard to the book’s main motif of fatalistic determinism and the unequivocal condem- nation of war as a corrupting, dehumanizing force. Jones dissects the soldiers’ psyche, uncompromisingly revealing their innermost conscious thoughts as well as subconscious motives. In doing so, Jones lays bare the debilitating pressure ex- erted on the human mind by the war-induced proximity of random, meaningless

52 4 The Thin Red Line BY TERRENCE MALICK death. Malick skirts many of the uncomfortable themes examined by Jones, and even though his film delivers a strong condemnation of war and its effects on people, Malick mostly uses Jones’ underlying narrative as a vehicle for his own, rather different, agenda. This includes metaphysical and poetic musings, philo- sophical forays into questions raised by the alienation caused by war, and artistic experimentation with various narrative techniques. With this in mind, it can be said that the film follows the events described in the novel quite closely, only slightly deviating to allow for the inclusion of the scenes with indigenous people as a part of character Witt’s experience. Other than that, the basic plot (or, rather, the lack thereof) is the same: C-for-Charlie company is deployed on Quadalcanal where it goes through its baptism of fire, is pulled off the line for a week of recreation, is sent back to combat, and finally is pulled off the island to be deployed somewhere else. As mentioned above, the linear, uncomplicated progression of events is used by both Jones and Malick as the framework for delivering their respective communications. In Malick’s case, the story and its individual turns are even blurrier than in the book. Following the precedent set by Badlands and Days of Heaven, Malick treats the actual unfold- ing story with a nonchalant indifference, focusing instead on his plan to paint an overall picture of men’s reaction to extreme stimuli—be it fear, friendship, or love—using the combination of proven instruments from his tool kit: voice- overs, inspired acting aided by non-sentimental editing, and images of nature juxtaposed with disruptive human endeavours. Stuart Kendall asserts in his es- say (“The Tragic Indiscernibility of Days of Heaven”) in Terrence Malick: Film and Philosophy that the sidelining of stories in Malick’s films is not just a side-effect of the director’s focus on other elements. Instead, it is deliberate: “Malick’s cine- matic style employs a number of effects and tropes that serve to destabilize our understanding of and expectations about the diegetic action.” (150). In The Thin

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Red Line, this is accomplished mainly through the confusingly non-attributable and almost totally non-diegetic voice-overs, which are discussed in more detail in the section dedicated to voice-overs below. Ever since Malick started writing film scripts, he had a reputation for cryp- tic stories, idiosyncratic characters, and an odd sense of humour. In a column for the Variety magazine, published just days before the release of The Thin Red Line, Peter Bart, then the editor-in-chief at Variety, wrote about his encounter with Ma- lick when he was a Paramount executive and about his impression of an early script by Malick for Deadhead Miles20: It was a brilliant piece of writing and, as with The Thin Red Line, nu- merous actors lined up to play the roles. Prior to the start of princi- pal photography at Paramount, however, I sat down with Terry and said, ‘This is a terrific screenplay, but the storyline is fuzzy. How about giving our audience a little help?’ Malick was not happy with that summary, but he did try to explain the ideas in the script to Bill. Unsuccessfully. Bart continued by admitting that he just could not grasp Malick’s way of thinking, and he passed the following judgement, which probably did not help The Thin Red Line’s box-office prospects: Terry Malick talked for ten minutes. By the time he had finished, I was even more confused. Not only did I not understand his script, I didn’t even understand his understanding of his script. It wasn’t just that he talked in abstractions: Terry Malick, I realized, was a

20 Deadhead Miles was directed by Vernon Zimmerman and starred Alan Arkin. The film was never released in theatres, but the money Malick received for writing the script allowed him to set up his own production company and start working on Badlands (Maher 46). Deadhead Miles was produced by Tony Bill who hired Malick to write the script. Later, Bill made a name for himself by producing The Sting with Paul Newman and Robert Redford.

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living abstraction. Leaving such lofty yet relatively empty proclamations aside, the fact re- mains that Malick’s stories (if they can be called that) and characters (despite their underdevelopment) are frequently very opaque and hard to interpret with- out attributing them some meaning or purpose that is initially hidden from view and that, more often than not, stays unexplained or left so ambiguous that mul- tiple interpretations are possible. The director’s background in philosophy is an obvious consideration for commentators when they attempt to decipher Malick’s metaphors or find sense in his non-orthodox use of cinematic techniques. In the volume of Contemporary Film Directors dedicated to Malick, Lloyd Michaels sug- gests that given the fact that Malick witnessed first-hand the late 1960s in the US, which Michaels abbreviates as “the civil rights movement, Vietnam protests, Watergate, and the collapse of the Hollywood studio system”, it is understand- able that Malick’s oeuvre would bear marks of having been influenced by the pe- riod (16). Which, of course, can be said of a number of other authors and directors. What sets Malick apart is the aforementioned education in philosophy, which is far less common in the film industry. Taking into account the above characteriza- tion of the 1960s and that Malick was academically trained to seek and question the truth, Michaels poses the following rhetorical question: “Is it any wonder, then, that his films have been shadowed by characters seeking refuge from civi- lization while engaged in various levels of metaphysical speculation?” (16). The Thin Red Line does not disappoint in that it is, at times, as raw as it is beautiful. As disturbing as it is reassuring. And as opaque in its overall message as it is clear in its condemnation of . The next sub-chapter discusses the film’s failings when seen through the lens of genre expectations and compares it to the other major war film that came out in 1998, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. Based on this comparison and on other indices, the next sub-chapter asks

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(and answers) the question whether The Thin Red Line is a war film.

4.1 War Film?

The Thin Red Line is ostensibly a war film—it is based on a war novel, it has hel- meted soldiers on the poster, it is set in the middle of the Battle of Quadalcanal, it features guns, enemies, combat, and dying, and it was marketed as such (though somewhat half-heartedly) by the studio. And yet, many critics and viewers alike would say it is not a war film, and such judgement would be shared by those who had no patience with the film as well as those who swear by it. In “Calm—On Ter- rence Malick’s The Thin Red Line”, Critchley smugly remarks: “it is a war film in the same way that Homer’s is a war poem” (12). And he is right because al- though war is at the centre of The Thin Red Line’s focus, the film is not concerned with the action, the tactics, the weaponry, the justification, or any other aspect of the war itself; instead, it is about the impact (or the lack of impact) that war has on the people and things caught up in the midst of it. As it is, Malick’s films defy genre expectations by default (Badlands is not just a crime road movie, Days of Heaven is not just a western, The New World is not just a historical drama, and so on). Some of the characteristics of the respec- tive genres are present, but Malick never really allows his films to ‘live up to the expectations’ of a particular genre. Why is that? What motivates Malick to ultimately frustrate the expecta- tions of audiences by denying them the possibility to find some comfort in re- cognizing a familiar ground? In his essay, “Terrence Malick“, in The Routledge Companion to Film and Philosophy, David Davies argues that there is an identifi- able motive: “given how the films elicit and then fail to satisfy these expectations, this must be done in pursuit of some end other than the development or simple

56 4 The Thin Red Line BY TERRENCE MALICK revision of the genre” (575). By subverting the genre in The Thin Red Line, Malick consciously resists the glorification of war that occurs when films conform to the stereotypical formula of war narratives epitomized by the popular but unrealis- tic soldierly bravado, allusions to higher callings, or two-dimensional categoriza- tions of good and evil—us and them. Writing in “‘Everything a Lie’: The Critical and Commercial Reception of Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line”, an essay pub- lished as a part of The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America, Martin Flanagan contends that the omission of the popular ‘war-movie’ tropes was done “to remove the war from such a comfortable zone of audience contact, to disman- tle the protective barriers of generic expectation and to recover some of the living contradictions of that traumatic experience.” (130). In other words, Malick refuses to let the cosiness that envelops even the most appalling or horrific subjects when closeted by genre restraints encroach upon his intent to expose war in its raw form. Davies summarizes in The Routledge Companion (with Flanagan’s help) this aspect of the film as follows: “the generic failings of The Thin Red Line can be seen as serving an ulterior interest in critically undermining the genre and providing a more realistic cinematic representation of the realities of modern warfare” (575). Unfortunately, the “realistic representa- tion” is marred by Malick’s failure (or refusal?) to adhere to the genre-breaking agenda in his treatment of the character of Witt who dies a martyr’s death, thus complying with the ultimate (read cheesiest) war-film trope: self-sacrifice of the hitherto unheroic character to save his brothers in arms. When the death of Jim Caviezel’s character, Pvt. Witt, found its way into the script and subsequently into the final cut of the film, Malick allowed it to have a purpose. And therein lies the crux of the disconnect: in Jones’ novel, and by extension in war, death has no meaning. It serves no higher idea, it does not have any special quality, and it is as pointless and arbitrary as the thought of

57 4 The Thin Red Line BY TERRENCE MALICK it is dreaded, unwelcome, and paralysing. Jerry H. Bryant wrote the following about this aspect of Jones’ book in The Open Decision: The Contemporary American Novel and Its Intellectual Background: “There is no saintliness here, no brotherhood, no cooperative utopia—only debasement and degradation” (qtd. in Christle 5). Thus, it becomes apparent that Witt’s self-sacrificial death does more harm than good by encouraging stereotypical understanding of the film. By inadvertently bowing his head before the self-sacrifice stereotype of run-of-the-mill war films, Malick constructed a film that conflicts with its own purport. On the one hand, it is a film that shows the horrors of war without glo- rifying them and without attempting to mollify the viewer’s chafed senses by following up with humour, camaraderie, or tear-jerking acts of wanton bravery that reaffirm the audience’s trust in the superior fighting prowess of the Amer- ican soldier—a remarkable achievement, comparable to earlier films about the , such as Now or Casualties of War. On the other hand, one could take the view that it is also a film that, in its acquiescence to the popular idea of a ‘proper’ heroic death, conforms, albeit only in this one aspect, to the expectations of the Hollywood film machine. In Film-Philosophy, Critchley observes that Malick refashioned Witt “into a much more angelic, self-questioning, philosophical figure” (14), which turns Jones’ description on its head. Indeed, Malick’s Witt is intelligent, melancholic, and—in the end—ready to die to protect the other members of his unit. This last trait is a rare yet very visible and very significant concession to the war-film genre. Malick broke with the rest of his efforts in the film and included a trope so typical for American war films and, at the same time, so out-of-place for his film (and for an adaptation of Jones’ original): a soldier sacrifices his own life to keep his brothers in arms from harm (or worse, a soldier sacrifices his life to advance the war effort). It could very well be argued that by incorporating this theme into

58 4 The Thin Red Line BY TERRENCE MALICK the film, Malick unwittingly devalued the entire work and completely divorced the adaptation from Jones’ novel—as has been mentioned previously, the novel only served as a topical inspiration; its fundamental message is lost in the film. In his presentation on The Thin Red Line, Paul Christle summed up this departure from the original by saying: “To depict Witt as some noble, self-sacrificing, spiri- tual seeker plays havoc with Jones’ whole novel.” (5). But for this one failure, the film is consistent in its refusal to conform to genre expectations. The Thin Red Line is often compared to (by those critical of the film’s per- ceived failings as a war film) and contrasted with (by those fond of the film’s reluctance to conform to war-film clichés) Saving Private Ryan, directed by Steven Spielberg, which was also released in 1998, only several months before The Thin Red Line. In terms of satisfying the mainstream audience’s appetite for war films with tough American troops who face overwhelming odds but still manage to crack jokes and ultimately prevail, a compelling argument could be made that Saving Private Ryan is all that The Thin Red Line is not. A critical viewing suggests that Spielberg serves a skilfully concocted mix of shocking gore and hackneyed, feel-good dainties of episodes in a succession that is carefully timed to never run the danger of slipping into a spectacle that would be depressing rather than en- tertaining. The doses of adrenaline fare are interspersed with breathers filled with good ol’ times in the army. It all clicks together and creates the impression that while certainly very dreadful, the war was also a rather delightful adventure, and those who served in it are, without fail, proud to have done so. The fact that such a perspective is considered acceptable and valid is the re- sult of a shift in public perception, which rebounded from the gloom of anti-war films of the 1970s. Those films, such as Coming Home or Apocalypse Now, which followed in the wake of the public (and publicity) nightmare that was the Viet- nam War, have largely been erased from the public’s mind by the myth of what

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Streamas calls “the Good War”, that is “a narrative of World War Two in which the Allied nations achieved an unchallenged unity and patriotic pride in their fight against the pure evil of fascism” (138). Malick’s The Thin Red Line, therefore, was seen by many as an affront to the memory of those great men who fought the good fight. The film was derided as esoterically artsy and, as such, inherently inaccurate and historically unreliable. Kenneth Jackson, professor of history and social sciences at Columbia University, was so incensed by what he viewed as the film’s numerous transgressions against a proper war-film narrative that he of- fered John Wayne’s Sands of Iwo Jima as an example of what a film about the War in the Pacific should look like in his scathing review. Predictably, Saving Private Ryan was cited as the best war film of the decade (“The Thin Red Line: Not Enough History”). In his essay, Streamas also reasons that “Saving Private Ryan ... lifted the Good War to moral and political greatness and unassailability.” (140). This cli- mate, besides colouring all criticism of American conduct during WWII or even criticism of the war itself unpatriotic, also confirmed the stereotypical film por- trayals of war as valid and desirable, thus poisoning the well for The Thin Red Line before it even appeared. In “Days of Heaven and the Myth of the West”, Joan McGettigan confirms that “The Thin Red Line (1998) baffled critics prepared by years of war movies and the proximity of Saving Private Ryan” and goes on to identify the major sticking point for these critics as “[Malick’s] refusal to conform to one narrative structure, one genre.” (52). Both Steven Spielberg and Terrence Malick were nominated for the Best Director Academy Award that year. Spielberg won. Saving Private Ryan is not ashamed of all the clichés; it is built around them. It starts with the sentimental, grey-haired, teary-eyed, Lincoln-quoting general who directs the military machine to save one private who is MIA (“The boy is

60 4 The Thin Red Line BY TERRENCE MALICK alive. We are gonna send somebody to find him, and we are gonna get him the out of there.” (Spielberg 0:35:26)). There is the stern but fatherly commander who is respected by his unit until his principles cause an unnecessary casualty— and who is able to redeem himself by sharing a piece of trivia from back home (“So, I guess I’ve changed some.” (1:40:10)). Amazingly, there is even the soldier who talks about his mother (or girlfriend) the night before he is, inevitably, the only one (of the Americans) to be killed (1:08:30). Ever so cool, there is the deeply religious yet lethal sniper who only succumbs to a tragic fate when destroyed by the enemy’s (evoking a ‘not fair’ reaction in the viewer when a sniper ri- fle is matched against a Panzer tank (2:19:25)). For general bemusement, there is the cheeky kid from Brooklyn who proves his mettle in the end (0:44:20). There is also the titular private who survives against all odds to live the American dream (2:40:20). And, last but not least, there is the final action sequence, which is con- ceived as a desperate but brave last stand21 that ends with a last-gasp deux-ex- machina intervention to ensure a happy ending (2:33:25). The Thin Red Line, on the other hand, in most cases reneges on the war- film promise. The film starts to introduce a character or a scene that has all the attributes of a war-film cliché, but then it never delivers on it, never quite finishes what it started, thus frustrating the expectations of the audience that is accus- tomed to the style of Saving Private Ryan, which dutifully obliged in this regard. There is the desperate of an enemy position, but it never becomes clear what actually won the fight (Malick, The Thin Red Line 1:37:50). There is the hint of a camaraderie in camp and after battle, but it is overshadowed by Private Train’s depressive voice-over (“Hours like months. Days like years.” (2:03:00)). There

21 Complete with historical references to stoke the nationalistic sentiment: “And this position right here, this is the Alamo. They push us back this far, last man alive blows the bridge.” (Spiel- berg 1:57:20).

61 4 The Thin Red Line BY TERRENCE MALICK are moments of individual heroism, but they never stem from a sense of patri- otic duty or commitment to fellow soldiers—instead, they are always motivated by personal fears, desire to impress, or budding bloodthirstiness (with the one exception of Pvt. Witt’s self-sacrificial death, which was examined above). There- fore, it is possible for Brady, writing in a review title “Negotiating The Thin Red Line”, to contrast the film with other war-films as follows: “The focus is typically on a single, heroic individual who attains final victory through some act of daring or sacrifice. In ... The Thin Red Line, there are no heroes.” (290). A similar situation is with the characters in The Thin Red Line. While Saving Private Ryan has all the characters expected of a war film, including the ones with which the audience can and wants to identify, The Thin Red Line does not have the stereotypical characters—most are the same, brooding, confused, and scared faces. And even if the character seems to conform to the stereotypical norm ex- pected of mainstream war films, it never develops into the form that would let it act out the anticipated tropes. The cynical, battle-hardened sergeant is there, and he appropriately demonstrates his courage and cool, but that is it. There is no undeserved yet heroic death, no vindication for the harsh training methods or for upbraiding of young recruits, no last-minute realization on the part of the enlisted men that he really did love them like sons. Instead, it is the soft comman- der who got demoted who thinks of the men as his sons, and although he tells the men, his true sentiment stays with him, and the soldiers are none the wiser. Malick’s fatherly Captain Staros fails to impart wisdom and exude confi- dence like Spielberg’s Captain Miller, and when he sees the carnage around, he does not put on a brave face—he is really, really scared that the men under his command are going to die. He also fails to die a hero’s death. Instead, he is re- lieved of his command and sent home—much to his relief. None of the characters

62 4 The Thin Red Line BY TERRENCE MALICK stand out, and they are easily interchangeable—Malick foregoes any individua- tion or character development, which why McGettigan can observe: “many of the characters are indistinguishable from one another” (50). For some critics (John- ston 141, for example), this was a minus, but only because they judged the film using the traditional war-film register. Taking a cue from Jones’ novel, Malick marginalized the discreteness of individuals to illustrate the utter unimportance of people (as opposed to expendable resources). As Davies points out in The Routledge Companion, this, too, goes against the established norm of the war-film genre: “We expect that the characters will be sharply individuated from one another in order to personalize them for the audience and that what is achieved will depend upon the different skills and the camaraderie of the ‘band of brothers’ working together.” (575). None of that happens in The Thin Red Line, and the audience is left with the realization that in a war, there is no time and space for human beings. The chain of command reliably dehumanizes the people behind the ranks, translates names and fates into numbers, statistically evaluates torn flesh as casualties, and has no patience with individuals. As has been described, the genre-related failings of Malick’s films serve their purposes, and the director consciously exploits the friction caused by the audience’s preprogrammed expectations and the redacted experience the film offers. Rather than contend with the difficulty of attempting to shoehorn Ma- lick’s amorphous, non-conforming fare into standard categories, Michaels, in Contemporary Film Directors, likens him to other directors who presented critics with a similar challenge and quips: “Like Yasujiro Ozu, Robert Bresson, and Eric Rohmer, [Malick] has produced a genre unto himself, one best described simply by applying his name.” (6).

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By pointing out some aspects of the The Thin Red Line’s treatment of tradi- tional war-film tropes and stereotypes, which audiences have come to expect, and by contrasting the film with Saving Private Ryan, which readily accepts the war- film label, this sub-chapter has explained how Malick purposefully torpedoes attempts at categorizing his film in order to undermine the viewer’s assumptions about war and its impact on those involved in it. The next sub-chapter discusses the way Malick works with nature: how it relates to the theme of the film, what symbolism is used, and what purpose it serves in expressing the director’s vision.

4.2 The Role of Nature

Arguably the most important, visible, and intriguing quality of The Thin Red Line is Malick’s treatment of natural imagery to convey a substantial part of the film’s message. As has been been mentioned earlier, Malick does not reinvent his film- making style with every new film—the stylistic properties of his films are re- markably similar, and the same holds true for other mechanics of his method of operation. Thus, it was nothing new for film critics and knowledgeable view- ers that when The Thin Red Line came out, it featured stunning images of nature that provided the backdrop for another exercise in provocative genre-breaking. In his essay for the Terrence Malick volume in the Film and Philosophy series, Stuart Kendall offers a simplistic description of this aspect of Malick’s films that reflects the mainstream view—pretty pictures that are perceived as extraneous to the rest of the material that ‘really’ tells the film’s story: In Malick’s cinema, seemingly objective or opaque images of nature—of birds and other beasts, of flowing waters and grasses, of clouds—are often inserted into scenes and sequences, or book- end them, without apparent purpose but with a memorable and

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affecting allure. (149). A more thorough inspection is required to extract the meaning of this phe- nomenon, and the sections of this sub-chapter seek to accommodate just that. The key is to stop looking at the images of nature as separate entities that do not tie in to the rest of the film. Unaware of the fundamental mistake in his approach, Kendall fails to consider nature as an indissoluble whole that subsumes the hu- man part of the action as well, and thus he continues to assert that “The powerful beauty of these images in particular often overwhelms the narrative sweep of his films.” (149). It is a true statement, but it is also flawed in its assumption that “the narrative sweep” of Malick’s films resists being “overwhelmed”. Insofar as Malick is not concerned with presenting a prosaic narration, there is no harm in sidelining “the narrative sweep”. The dependability of Malick in this regard, and the high standard of his craftsmanship led film critic James Hoberman to remark: “’Where other movies have fans, Malick’s produce disciples” (qtd. in Blackall). Hoberman chooses to neglect the fact that just as Malick’s films produce disciples, they also, with the same regularity, produce detractors who cannot abide the results of Malick’s film- making efforts. Lloyd Michaels commented on the apparent mismatch of viewer expectations and the director’s output as experienced by mainstream audiences in Contemporary Film Directors: “With their languorous narrative pace, arresting visual design, simple story lines, and relative paucity of dialogue, they do not comport well with the viewing habits of most Blockbuster patrons.” (3). This is evidenced by the The Thin Red Line’s performance at the box office. While the film had no trouble breaking even after world-wide earnings were counted, it certainly was not a blockbuster of Saving Private Ryan’s calibre (Box office Mojo, “The Thin Red Line”; “Saving Private Ryan”). As could be expected, considering the conundrums posed for critics when

65 4 The Thin Red Line BY TERRENCE MALICK interpreting Malick’s earlier films, the critics who reviewed The Thin Red Line were, likewise, prone to drawing very varied conclusions about the film’s var- ious aspects. Images of nature and Malick’s extensive use of this theme again posed a difficulty for reviewers, and, as will be discussed in the remainder of this sub-chapter, this element of the film drew notably contradictory commen- taries. In The Routledge Companion, Davies observes: “Not surprisingly, the very different overall thematic readings of the films are accompanied by radically op- posed interpretations of these representations of nature.” (572). This thesis pro- poses an interpretation supported by a minority of other sources but consistent with a very detailed reading of the film and a discussion of the way the natural imagery works in conjunction with the film’s other outstanding characteristics, including the use of voice-overs and the thematic deviations from James Jones’s novel on which the film was based. During the early stages of pre-production, Malick considered comment- ing on the effects that modern war has on the environment, or nature. Bobby Geisler, one of the film’s producers and, for a certain period, a close collabora- tor of Malick’s, reminisced about the original ideas regarding the role of nature in The Thin Red Line: “The notion that we discussed endlessly, was that Malick’s Guadalcanal would be a , an Eden, raped by the green poison, as Terry used to call it, of war.” (qtd. in Maher 92). This vision did not make it into the final film, where nature is shown as absently indifferent to men’s war, but it most likely influenced the way nature is portrayed. The lush greenery, pristine waters, animals—both majestic and fragile—all of these images evoke the notion of a paradise. This is, again, a part of the Malick trademark. Michaels comments that “each of Malick’s films incorporates its own fragile Paradise” (8). In The Thin Red Line, the paradise is ultimately shown to be the one entity that adopts and incorporates even the “green poison” (Geisler qtd. in Maher 92), but that does

66 4 The Thin Red Line BY TERRENCE MALICK not detract from the overpowering visual presentation. Following this introduction into the main sub-chapter, “The Role of Na- ture”, which forms the focal point of the thesis, the next section briefly discusses Malick’s creative style and the ways his conduct during production is reflected in the performance of actors and the crew.

4.2.1 Malick on the Set

Much as the cinematic style of Malick’s films is oftentimes puzzling or appears foreign to viewers, the director’s method of directing is quite different from what actors and film crews usually encounter. This has frequently led to misunder- standings, confrontations, and generally uncomfortable situations on the set of many of Malick’s films. Film professionals in particular, used to certain routines and unspoken rules that are usually taken for granted on the sets of most reg- ular studio productions, have tended to grow frustrated with Malick’s uncon- ventional requests and quirky behaviour. Some actors also have had a hard time adjusting to the director’s unorthodox processes. On the other hand, Malick’s nonconformist style also found many supporters, both among production col- laborators and actors. For example, while Malick went through three directors of photography when directing Badlands, Emanuel Lubezki worked with him on three successive films (The New World, The Tree of Life, and To the Wonder). Even more devoted to Malick’s work is who served as the art director or production designer on all eight of the director’s feature films (not counting the Voyage of Time documentary). Similarly polarized relationships developed with many actors. While Martin Sheen who starred in Badlands has remained Malick’s close friend (Sheen), Adrian Brody who played Corporal Fife in The Thin Red Line was devastated and angry when he learned that Malick cut him almost entirely from the final film, even though his character had been initially scripted (and

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filmed) as the main protagonist (Perez). Even when there was no disagreement, many actors found it challenging to work with Malick. Ever since the start of his career in film-making, Malick has had innovative ideas that confounded his crews and placed unusual demands on actors. William Weld, Malick’s fellow student from Harvard, recalled when interviewed for One Big Soul by Maher: When filming, rather than storyboarding a film, he sought to con- front this scene by keeping the cameras running at all times in the hopes of directly experiencing what he wanted to accomplish. Any- thing short of this wasn’t satisfactory. It would mean not filming at all if his filming method could not be accommodated. (32) On the set of The Thin Red Line, Malick would sometimes bewilder the producers by abandoning a carefully prepared scene to spontaneously start filming some other scene, only to revisit the earlier scene a week later, or direct the crew to film things that were not in the script at all. In “Hollywood Bigfoot: Terrence Ma- lick and the 20-Year Hiatus That Wasn’t”, Michael Nordine shares an example of this unpredictable behaviour: “[Malick]’s been described more than once as a butterfly-catcher, a truth-seeker who once halted a day-long setup of a fighter jet taking off in The Thin Red Line in order to film a bird that happened to be flying by.” The tendency to improvise was also manifested by Malick’s vague in- structions to actors or by his delight in unexpected developments. David Harrod, who played Corporal Queen, shared another anecdote from the set: “Terry’s big on improvisation. He liked the blood improvisation, especially because it was my own blood.” (qtd. in Young). Summing up the conditions on the set of The Thin Red Line, Jessica Winter wrote in her article (“Absence of Malick”) in Slate: “There’s no other American war film in which the soldiers look so convincingly lost, shocked, and exhausted, perhaps in part because the actors were often lost,

68 4 The Thin Red Line BY TERRENCE MALICK shocked, and exhausted.” Not only were Malick’s scripts for actors and collaborators at times diffi- cult to understand but he also pushed himself and others to achieve such level of quality and artistic perfection that it made it hard for members of the crew to keep up with his demands. Linda Palevsky, then wife of the famous computer millionaire and philanthropist, Max Palevsky, who helped to finance the produc- tion of Badlands, recalled that during the filming, Malick would describe the level of detail he wanted to capture and the commitment required to making it just right: “Terry’s quite mad, and he had this notion of wanting to make the perfect movie. He used to describe the kind of purity he wanted—he would say things like ‘You have a drop of water on a pond, that moment of perfection.”’ (qtd. in Biskind, “Runaway Genius”). In the role of a director, Malick feels no obligation to conform to the expec- tations of actors or audiences, thus often resulting in decisions that baffle both of these groups. As the one and only focus of his creative efforts is to achieve excellence in translating his artistic vision to the chosen medium, Malick has no problems with discarding material that others would consider too valuable to cast aside. This has been demonstrated many times in post-production when Ma- lick cut hours of footage he deemed unsuitable, often radically altering the flow of the story (if not creating a new story altogether—as was the case with The Thin Red Line). Given the fact that with his first two films, which are discussed in the third chapter, “Terrence Malick’s Filmography”, Malick has built a reputa- tion for himself that compels even the brightest Hollywood stars to flock to him and beg for roles, he is in a position that allows him to spend days or months shooting with ensemble casts overflowing with big-name actors and actresses, only to completely (and rather remorselessly) cut many of them—sometimes to their chagrin—out of the final film. Most other directors would have a hard time

69 4 The Thin Red Line BY TERRENCE MALICK not only justifying such approach but also attracting actors to consider accepting roles in their future productions. Not Malick. When casting for The Thin Red Line, Malick was famously approached by Sean Penn, an acclaimed actor and director in his own right, who told him: “Give me a dollar and tell me when to show up.” (Winter). Similarly, George Clooney, another famous celebrity by the time Malick was casting for The Thin Red Line, admitted he craved a chance to appear in the film because of the director’s name: “When I heard Terrence was making a new movie, I let it be known that, hell, I’d carry film boxes. I just wanted to be able to say that somewhere down the line I worked with Terrence Malick.” (qtd. in Maher 127). Sean Penn, who later helped Malick during the editing phase of post-production, has a major role in the film, and Clooney succeeded in being on screen for a few banal lines. As mentioned earlier in this section, other actors, such Adrian Brody, did not have that much luck. was cast in To the Wonder (2012) and spent considerable time shooting it, but all of her scenes were left out of the film. She reflected: I did it for the experience of working with him, but one never knows with Terrence Malick. You can shoot for three months and end up not being in the movie. That’s what happened to my story- line. So I had the experience of filming with him, but I didn’t get to see my work. (qtd. in Maher 184) In the opening passage of Terrence Malick in Contemporary Film Directors, Lloyd Michaels poses a question that may appear rhetorical at first glance but actually merits a serious thought: “Is there another American artist—let alone an American filmmaker—who has so regularly been granted genius status after creating such a discontinuous and limited body of work?” (1). Malick’s obsession with perfection manifested itself on the set of Days of Heaven when he would only allow filming during ideal lighting conditions (the

70 4 The Thin Red Line BY TERRENCE MALICK so-called golden hour), and it continued with The Thin Red Line. Based on inter- views with actors and crew members, Jessica Winter compiled a (non-exhaustive) list of Malick’s mannerisms and unconventional directing methods, which in- cludes the refusal to do rehearsals, requests for actors to perform scenes without the dialogue scripted for them, and similar. She also commented: “He doesn’t stick to the script, or even to the scene he’s shooting: He’ll stop actors in mid- stream and revisit the same material a week later, continuity be damned.” Linda Palevski also said that during the filming of Badlands, friends would tease Malick about his obsession with details and insistence on perfection: “You’d say to Terry, ‘You really ought to go into therapy,’ and he’d say, ‘If I go to therapy, I’ll lose my creative [juice].”’ (qtd. in Biskind, “Runaway Genius”). This section introduced some of the peculiarities of Malick’s directorial style to illustrate how the development of The Thin Red Line and other films was influenced by his relationship with the crew and actors. The section also sought to demystify some aspects of the director’s enigmatic persona, thus putting his artistic efforts in the context of his conduct in the real world. The next section focuses on Malick’s fondness for the use of voice-over and discusses details of its application in The Thin Red Line.

4.2.2 Voice-Over Narrative

The inventive employment of various original types of voice-overs has already been mentioned as one of the most prominent—in conjunction with the inclusion of visually arresting images of nature—attributes of Malick’s film-making style. The Thin Red Line is no exception in this regard, and the way voice-overs were applied in this film is a sign of the amount of confidence Malick had in his use of this instrument. This section highlights some of the most important aspects of the voice-overs in The Thin Red Line and discusses the various influences that helped

71 4 The Thin Red Line BY TERRENCE MALICK to shape the final form of the voice-overs. Continuing the course set by Badlands and Days of Heaven, the voice-overs in The Thin Red Line are almost wholly dissociated from the action that is hap- pening on the screen. David Davies wrote about the evolution of Malick’s voice- overs in his essay (“Terrence Malick”) in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film: “voice-overs are a prominent feature of all of Malick’s films, although their function is increasingly idiosyncratic” (576). This is partly due to the fact that Ma- lick sometimes records and edits voice-overs independently from the film-editing process. Also, the voice-overs often originate from spur-of-the-moment ideas, as- sociations, or other impulses that are unrelated to the scene to which the narration is applied or even to the film. Recalling the application of voice-overs to Days of Heaven material, editor Billy Weber said: We would take voice-over, one line of voice-over, and play it against a ten-minute reel over and over, like on a loop and just play it, and see if it fell anywhere that worked. If it did, without any conscious reason, we would say, ‘Well that works.’ (qtd. in Maher 79) Lengthy post-production periods have become a hallmark of Malick’s films, as has the knowledge that during the editing sessions, the film that was scripted and shot can (and usually does) radically change—not only with regard to the story and characters that appear in it but also the entire meaning and im- pression of the film. As was the case with Days of Heaven, Malick initially did not intend to rely on voice-overs so much when putting together the final cut of The Thin Red Line, but he ended up recording more than one version and subsequently only using one, completely discarding the other22.

22 Unlike the final version of the voice-overs, the first recorded narration was by the actor Billy Bob Thornton who does not feature in the cast of the film. This material was never used (Weber qtd. in Maher 127).

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For many viewers, the way the voice-overs are used in the film was con- fusing because they could not see any connection between the narration and the actual story. As with the non-diegetically used images of nature, the voice-overs proved a distracting element for those who wished the film would concentrate on ‘proper’ storytelling. Roger Ebert seemed to be particularly riled by the voice- overs that are ‘exposed’ in his review as “musings [. . . ] of the director” (Ebert, “The Thin Red Line”). Echoing this criticism are opinions that find it unlikely to hear such abstract, poetically formulated speeches from soldiers who would, pre- sumably, be thinking about more immediate concerns, including the things that Jones has them worry about in the novel. In other words, why would a member of an unit whose life is in danger muse about nature instead of the more pressing problems at hand? In an article titled “A Horrible State of War” written for the World Socialist Web Site, David Walsh captures this perceived incongruity: Because these men tend to speak and act as the embodiment of particular ideologies or spiritual principles, rather than as spon- taneously acting human beings, a good deal of the dialogue and voice-over commentary has a stilted and somewhat contrived feel to it. Another common point of confusion, a property of the voice-overs that be- guiled even seasoned critics and numerous Malick scholars (Sinnerbrink, Davies, and others), is the unintuitive manner in which the voice-overs not only do not follow or reflect the action on the screen but also the fact that the characters who narrate the voice-overs are often different from the ones that appear on the screen when the voice-over is spoken. This gets really confusing in cases when a narra- tion is voiced by a character that is yet to be introduced in the film. The viewer is then expected to make connections retroactively, which usually requires more

73 4 The Thin Red Line BY TERRENCE MALICK than one viewing. In an essay titled “The Inexpressible: The sense of the meta- physical in The Thin Red Line” published in Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism, Ka- terina Virvidaki observes that “it is strikingly difficult to attribute the voice-over to specific characters. This becomes a crucial dimension of the intricate relation- ship between the voice-over and the dramatic moment”. For most critics, all the voice-overs that cannot be readily assigned to a character on screen are automat- ically attributed to Pvt. Witt, the main protagonist, which erroneously elevates Witt’s character to places where it should not be. Investigating the ideas that can be inferred from properly attributing such voice-overs becomes incomparably more exciting for researchers who take the time to identify the various voices, and the conclusions drawn from such enquiry tend to be markedly different from those that are reached based on the assumed mistaken identities. For Clinton Stivers who explored the qualities of the voice- overs in The Thin Red Line in detail in his doctoral dissertation titled All Things Shining: A Narrative and Stylistic Analysis of Terrence Malick’s Films, this trait of the voice-overs “demonstrates the subtlety of Malick’s art and his ‘defiance’ of conventional filmmaking” (174). There are, however, other intriguing connections that can be made when the voice-overs are considered in the wider context of the film’s literary roots. A noteworthy example of the film’s genealogy is Pvt. Witt’s first voice-over. Witt’s voice-over monologue about immortality and his mother’s death is almost directly lifted from James Jones’ first novel, From Here to Eternity. As has been mentioned in the chapter about Jones’ work, “Novel by James Jones“, his World War II trilogy, which consists of From Here to Eternity, The Thin Red Line, and Whistle, has many of the same characters appearing in all three novels. Their names are changed to allow for the fact that the characters are not meant to suggest any continuity of the stories and also because some of them die before

74 4 The Thin Red Line BY TERRENCE MALICK they are ‘reused’ again in the subsequent novels. In some cases, the connection is rather obvious, such as with the character Prewitt from From Here to Eternity who becomes Witt in The Thin Red Line23. Malick paid homage to Jones by including motifs not only from the novel that inspired his film but also from From Here to Eternity. Private Witt’s first voice- over in the film (not the first voice-over of the film) is based on Prewitt’s recol- lections of his mother’s death. Witt’s voice-over ruminations about dying and his own fear of death exactly mirror those of the young Prewitt, and some lines are used almost verbatim, such as “afraid to touch the death he saw in her” (Jones, From Here to Eternity 22) and “I was afraid of the death I’ve seen in her” (Ma- lick, The Thin Red Line 0:04:42). When Witt faces his own death at the end of Ma- lick’s film, in a scene that shows his piece of mind and calm acceptance of the inevitable, we are reminded of his first speech in the film: “I just hope I can meet it the same way she did: with the same calm—‘cause that’s where it’s hidden, the immortality I hadn’t seen” (0:06:20). What is not immediately clear is that this entire sentiment is adapted from Jones’ Prewitt: “He only hoped that he would meet it with the same magnificent indifference with which she who had been his mother met it. Because it was there, he felt, that the immortality he had not seen was hidden.” (Jones, From Here to Eternity 22). Even though Witt does not die

23 In the novels, Prewitt is similar but definitely not the same character as Witt. Both come from a poor Kentucky family, but whereas Prewitt is an honourable man with a firm moral code, Witt’s morals are shaped by a confused mix of racism, a simplistic sense of duty, and a fierce loyalty to his unit and its members—though he only perceives the unit in a vaguely abstract way and is more attached to the idea of comradeship than to the people themselves. Thus, it is not a stretch to imagine that in retrospect, Jones really saw Prewitt as pre-Witt—the character only became fully developed when transplanted from the idyllic to the meat grinder of the real war on Quadalcanal. Critchley also makes this connection in “Calm—On Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line” (14).

75 4 The Thin Red Line BY TERRENCE MALICK in Jones’ novel, Malick honoured the connection Jones established between the two characters and built upon it by giving Witt a much larger role than in Jones’ book. Unfortunately, in doing so, Malick turned Witt’s character into something it very much was not in the novel; as discussed in the “War Film?” sub-chapter, this change can be viewed as ultimately undermining the anti-war message the film hoped to carry. Having described and examined the use of voice-overs, which constitutes one of the two most salient characteristics of Malick’s oeuvre, in The Thin Red Line and in other films by the director, the thesis has completed the bulk of its investi- gation of Malick’s work. Therefore, it is ready to sum up the hitherto developed ideas about the import and meaning of war, humanity, and nature in Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line and present its main argument.

4.2.3 War, Humanity, and Nature

As has already been established in this thesis, The Thin Red Line, not being a typical war film, is interested in more than just depicting events of war. It pro- vides a commentary on what war means in relation to those who wage it, to the surrounding environment, and to nature itself. Except, it is not a relationship that could be examined in terms of differences, common points, and powers that would work to influence one or the other. Malick positions war as an inherent component of nature, and humanity—both in the sense of human presence and the attributes that, in the eyes of men, distinguish people from the rest of the nat- ural world—is only an abstract concept that defines certain aspects of nature’s behaviour. Robert Sinnerbrink, in his essay titled “A Heideggerian Cinema? On Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line”, explains the context in which nature is por- trayed in the film in relation to the ostensibly foregrounded human action that

76 4 The Thin Red Line BY TERRENCE MALICK would, normally, take precedence in war narratives, but that is, in this case, side- lined. According to Sinnerbrink, the audience is forced to acknowledge “the mas- sive presence of nature, dwarfing the human drama of war, of physical violence and historical conflict” (34). The fact that such approach is singularly unique to a handful of films, of which The Thin Red Line is the most notorious one, can be attributed to the director’s attitude towards traditional genres (see also the “War Film?” sub-chapter of this thesis), which is benevolent at best, but more accu- rately described as hostile. Leading Sinnerbrink to appreciatively comment that “A philosopher turned film-maker is a rare and fascinating creature” (34). When investigating Malick’s style of genre-evasion further, it becomes possible to argue that The Thin Red Line eschews traditional forms of narration, which concentrate on communicating information of a historical or emotional character. Instead, it highlights the insignificance of human endeavours and al- ways makes sure to present the way events unfold as being in parallel with other—from nature’s point of view—equally insignificant happenings all around. This continues the style first employed by Malick in Days of Heaven where human action—though carrying the story—was always seen as a sort of a distraction. The drama acting as the sidekick to the real protagonist: nature. The Thin Red Line picks it up where Days of Heaven left it. Richard Gere, who starred as Bill in Days of Heaven, remarked the following about Malick’s gradual progression and his strife to perfect his style: “he’s essentially made the same movie every time” (qtd. in Maher 81). The theme of nature in The Thin Red Line has been probably written about in all reviews of the film. The majority of such commentaries are content with declaring this aspect of the film as artistically compelling but too distracting in the context of a war film, which should concentrate on the topic at hand: war. To investigate Malick’s discourse about humanity and nature more thoroughly, a

77 4 The Thin Red Line BY TERRENCE MALICK closer scrutiny is required. In “Calm—On Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line”, Critchley writes about the blurred boundaries between men and nature in the film: “Nature might be viewed as a kind of fatum for Malick, an ineluctable power, a warring force that both frames human war but is utterly indifferent to human purposes and intentions.” (25)24 The fact that nature both “frames” and is “indifferent” to human actions explains that there is no disconnect between na- ture, humanity, and humanity’s warring. They are all parts of a single unifying notion, and Malick does not draw a line between these concepts. Men’s war is thus but one of the conflicts that are happening all around, and it is not more important, interesting, or worthy of attention that any one of the myriad of other wars that nature sustains and nurtures without prejudice. In “Negotiating The Thin Red Line”, Lisa M. Brady picks this multifaceted conflict as the main theme of the film: “The Thin Red Line is not just another movie about the glories of war; it is a profound investigation into the meaning of conflict, not just for human societies, but for nature as well.” (291). The film sets this theme in the very first voice-over segment (narrated, somewhat confusingly, as discussed in the preceding section, by Private Train): “What is this war in the heart of nature?” (Malick, The Thin Red Line 0:01:58). The ambiguity of the question, which seems to ask both about the war that humanity is waging in the midst of a tropical paradise, as well as about the war—the spar- ring of elements, the Darwinian struggle for survival—that exists within nature itself, is the first hint of the film’s fascination with conflict. The film shows con- flict in a detached, non-judgemental manner that does not package it as a part of a story in which the viewer could feel invested. In this way, conflict, stripped of

24 Interestingly, David Davies, a renowned Malick scholar, uses the second part of this sentence—verbatim, without quotation marks and attribution—in his essay, “Terrence Malick”, published in The Routledge Companion to Film and Philosophy (573).

78 4 The Thin Red Line BY TERRENCE MALICK the various meanings that get attached to it by traditional narratives, is used as the catalyst that provokes the viewer to question established stereotypes. In “The Genesis of Days of Heaven”, Hubert Cohen comments about this aspect of Malick’s treatment of conflict in The Thin Red Line: “Malick wants us to acknowledge that war inherently has the power to make us see the world as it really is—not as our self-imposed innocence has made it seem to be.” (47). The world viewed “as it really is”, without the starry-eyed lenses that con- ventional narratives readily supply, reveals nature as unconcerned and untrou- bled by human strife because it is not external to it, it is not detached; it is an indispensable part of it: “the war in the heart of nature” (Malick, The Thin Red Line 0:01:58). Writing in “The Greatest Generation Steps Over The Thin Red Line”, published in The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America, John Strea- mas says of the uniquely Malickian racontuering accomplishment in The Thin Red Line: “he succeeds in narrating human nature’s ruination playing on the face of non-human nature” (142). The notion of belonging, of being an intertwined part of a larger whole is central to The Thin Red Line. The frequent inter-cuts to POV perspective (most hauntingly during every single death scene where the camera assumes the POV of the dying soldier for a few moments) combined with the outwardly out-of-place shots of trees, hills, animals, or other artefacts that seem to be disjointed from the flow of the story (when viewed with the expectations of a traditional war film) but that really furnish the link between war, humanity, and nature, communicate the main message of the film: humanity (and its wars) and nature are one. In “Terrence Malick, Landscape and ‘What is this war in the heart of nature?’“, also published in The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America, Robert Silberman confirms: “for Malick, nature and war are inseparable” (167). The images of nature are often misinterpreted as the impassive, peaceful

79 4 The Thin Red Line BY TERRENCE MALICK counterbalance to war and human suffering25. Contrary to this view, this thesis reads The Thin Red Line and Malick’s storytelling agenda—as developed in Bad- lands and later chiselled in Days of Heaven—as one that posits humanity, with all its foibles and vices, as an integral part of nature. Malick uses the expansive landscape and nature imagery (with the help of John Toll, his director of photography) to convey that there is, in fact, no sepa- ration between men and nature or between men’s war and nature. They are one and the same, and Malick does not juxtapose images of nature’s peace against humanity’s strife to illustrate a gap between the two, nor does he suggest that one influences the other. Instead, The Thin Red Line judges, condemns, and finally absolves men as an integral part of nature. This section discussed the significance of Malick’s use of expressive nat- ural imagery in The Thin Red Line, one of the most pronounced attributes of the film. In continuance of the discussion initiated in the preceding chapters of this thesis where the opinions of leading critics and film scholars regarding the im- port of this feature not only in The Thin Red Line but in other Malick’s films as well were considered, this section presented the underlying argument of this the- sis, and thus brought its body to a close. This concluded the main part of this thesis, and the following, final chapter will provide a brief overview of the main topics covered in this work and reiterate the chief arguments pertaining to the various aspects of The Thin Red Line in relation to James Jones’ novel of the same name, which served as an inspiration to Terrence Malick, Andrew Marton’s first

25 Interestingly, at least one critic, James Hoberman, interpreted the contrasting quality of the film’s action sequences and the accompanying images of nature as being both in opposition to each other and, at the same time, having no interest in the other. Hoberman commented that the film “thrive[s] on the tension between horrible carnage and beautiful, indifferent ‘nature”’ (qtd. in Winter).

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film adaptation, and other films by Malick. The last chapter will also position the thesis in the context of existing research on the work by Terrence Malick, thus attempting to justify the existence of this thesis.

81 5 Conclusion

The Thin Red Line, written and directed by Terrence Malick and released in 1998, is a critically acclaimed film the goes beyond the boundaries of the war-film genre in challenging the viewer to consider a number of ethical, philosophical, and social issues. The film achieves this by employing a combination of unconventional nar- rative and cinematographic techniques that are coupled with a powerful central theme and supported by a poetic script. While The Thin Red Line was almost uni- versally praised by critics and audiences alike for its photography, which presents stunning visual imagery, many felt that it failed to deliver on the premise of a ‘war film’. Some critics complained that the film should have done a more thorough job of providing a historical and military background to the combat action it in- cludes. Others rued what they considered the director’s preoccupation with artsy images of nature and snake-oil philosophy, which, in their view, dominated the film at the expense of a coherent story. This thesis argues that Malick left the generic expectations unfulfilled on purpose, so that the film could show the reality of war without the stereotypical embellishment commonly supplied by tropes and clichés associated with the cat- egory of war films. Furthermore, Malick had to break away from the genre to be able to consider the human condition at war uncensored by prevalent racist or na- tionalist sentiments that shape most other films of the war-film genre. Similarly, the director forswore the constraints of traditional storytelling—embracing in- stead his trusted method of having the visual narrative accompanied by thought- ful, probing voice-overs—to emphasize his own agenda of exploring questions of mortality, conflict, and morality. Many of these themes have roots in the novel Malick used as the inspira- tion for his screenplay. The Thin Red Line by James Jones, published in 1962, is a

82 5 CONCLUSION strong condemnation of war and of the societal norms that mask the true nature of war by idealizing it, while, at the same time, forcing men to take part in it. When Malick started working on his screenplay—over a decade before the film appeared in cinemas—he sought to create a faithful adaptation of the novel. Over time, the script diverged significantly from the novel, the focus shifted, and the re- sulting film—which underwent significant changes during the editing process— is only very roughly based on Jones’ original. The film retains the setting, and the succession of events is very similar, but the message the film communicates is largely different from that of the book. Malick chose not to explore the themes of determinedness of fate and the overwhelming insignificance of the individual when subjected to the machinery of war. Instead, Malick’s film explores questions of humanity’s role in nature and of nature’s indifference to even the most extreme examples of humanity’s conduct. Among the most conspicuous instruments of communication with the au- dience that Malick’s The Thin Red Line uses is the voice-over narration. The voice- overs, which accompany (but usually do not explain or comment on) almost ev- ery other scene, provide insight into Malick’s understanding of the ties between human fears, suffering, longing, and morality on the one side and nature on the other. Nature, which stands idly by, dispassionate and non-partisan, is the frame to which life is nailed. The pervasiveness of the voice-overs, which are often to- tally divorced not only from the action on the screen but also from the characters that are appearing on camera, follows the trend Malick started with his first two films: it is the disembodied narrator (or narrators in the case of The Thin Red Line) that move the film forward, and the events actually unfolding on the screen only have a supplementary quality. The oft-debated prominent inter-cuts to images of nature that seem to be only very loosely diegetically anchored to the main storyline, and thus irked some

83 5 CONCLUSION reviewers who viewed them as unnecessarily disturbing the flow of action, serve to express the sense of belonging—all human action, including the dehumaniz- ing artificiality and brutishness of modern, industrialized warfare, is internal to nature. Nature and the many manifestations of its various forms on the face of the Earth are one of the main motifs of the film. A superficial viewing of The Thin Red Line could suggest—and many critics were swayed by this attractively simple interpretation—that Malick uses the contrast between the calm of nature and the chaos of humanity’s war to express his disapproval of men’s actions. However, a deeper look reveals that for Malick, the trio of war, humanity, and nature is in- separable. Nature, in its all-encompassing quality, espouses humanity with all its failings along with all other struggles that are at the heart of life. This thesis bases its postulations in a careful work with a number of pri- mary and secondary sources. This includes close readings of The Thin Red Line, the novel by James Jones, which inspired the film’s basic story and certain larger themes within the film, as well as From Here to Eternity, the first book by Jones, parts of which made its way into Malick’s adaptation. Another essential cate- gory of primary sources were films, such as the 1964 adaptation of Jones’ novel by Andrew Marton, and Malick’s other films, especially the two films from the 1970s that preceded The Thin Red Line: Badlands and Days of Heaven. In addition to drawing on secondary sources, of which the most important ones were intro- duced in the first chapter, this thesis also makes a point of comparing conclusions reached by different authors and calling attention to the varying interpretations of Malick’s films in order to consider and weigh the verdicts against my own reading of Malick. Having presented the research about and critique of The Thin Red Line,

84 5 CONCLUSION as well as the chief argument about the film’s artistic and philosophical inter- pretation of the interconnectedness of war, humanity, and nature, this thesis en- deavours to expand upon and contribute to the scholarly discussion of Terrence Malick’s oeuvre.

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92 Shrnutí

Tenká ˇcervenálinie (1998), tˇretíceloveˇcernífilm napsaný a režírovaný Terrencem Malickem, je oceˇnován kritikou a vyzdvihován coby unikátní umˇeleckýpoˇcin, ale také kritizován pro nezvyklý zp ˚usobvyprávˇení.Tato diplomová práce roze- bírá zp ˚usoby, jakými film zachází s r ˚uznýmietickými a spoleˇcenskýmitématy, a zamˇeˇrujese na kritické pˇrijetía interpretaci Malickových vypravˇeˇcskýcha fil- maˇrskýchmetod—v souvislosti se tˇremihlavními motivy filmu: válka, lidskost a pˇríroda. Ve snaze zvážit vlivy a inspirace, které pˇrispˇelyk formování Malick- ova scénáˇre,nabízí práce struˇcnépˇredstavenístejnojmenného románu od Jamese Jonese, na nˇemžbyl film založen, jakož i pˇrehleddalších literárních dˇel,která Jones napsal o druhé svˇetovéválce. Práce rovnˇežbere v potaz dˇrívˇejšífilmovou adaptaci Jonesovy knihy a také další Malickovy filmy—zejména ty, které pˇred- cházely Tenké ˇcervenélinii. V krátkém životopisném medailonku se práce zabývá i osobností Terrence Malicka. Zvláštní pozornost je vˇenovánazp ˚usobu,jakým film využívá mluvený komentáˇra obrazy pˇrírody—nejvýraznˇejšíatributy Tenké ˇcervenélinie. Práce argumentuje, že Malickova práce se zdrojovým materiálem, jakož i zp ˚usob,jakým film zachází s kombinací motiv ˚uválka, lidskost a pˇríroda, napovídají, že Malick nestaví lidi a pˇrírodu proti sobˇe,ani neshledává rozkol mezi pˇrírodou a válkou. Naopak, Malick považuje ˇclovˇekai s veškerými jeho neduhy za nedílnou souˇcástpˇrírody.

93 Abstract

The Thin Red Line (1998), the third feature-length film written and directed by Terrence Malick, has been critically acclaimed and lauded as a unique artistic achievements as well as criticised for its unconventional narrative structure. This thesis discusses the film’s treatment of various ethical and social issues and fo- cuses on the critical reception and interpretation of Malick’s storytelling and cin- ematographic methods with regard to the film’s three main motifs: war, human- ity, and nature. To consider influences and inspirations that helped to shape Ma- lick’s script, the thesis provides a concise introduction to the eponymous novel by James Jones that the film was based on and an overview of Jones’ other literary works that focus on the Second World War. An earlier film adaptation of Jones’ book is also considered, as are Malick’s other films, especially the ones that pre- ceded The Thin Red Line. Terrence Malick, the person and director, is also briefly discussed, and a short biographical sketch is included. Special attention is paid to the film’s use of voice-over and images of nature—the most prominent attributes of The Thin Red Line. The thesis argues that Malick’s work with the source mate- rial and the way the film handles the combination of war, humanity, and nature suggest that in Malick’s eyes, there is no opposition between men and nature or contention between nature and war. Conversely, Malick sees humanity, with all of its flaws, as an inseparable part of nature.

94