Episode 145 – NEVER LET ME GO / THE THIN RED LINE
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Jett Loe
TFT 145 running time: 50 minutes – 24.1mb mp3
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This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 29th, 2010 at 11:11 pm. It is filed under Action, Blog, Drama, Gareth Higgins, Gareth Higgins Reviews, Jett Loe, Jett Loe Reviews, Podcast, Reviews, Science Fiction and tagged with film review podcast, movie review podcast. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
I love both Malick’s “Thin Red Line,” and Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan,” though for vastly differing reasons.
“Saving Private Ryan” is often compared to “The Thin Red Line” and in Film Talk installment #I45, during their review of “Red Line” Gareth and Jet do so again. It makes sense, because as Jett says in #145, “Private Ryan” is the anti “Thin Red Line.” That is exactly why my reasons for loving both films are vastly differing. Where the venerable Terrence Malick is profoundly adult, even antique in his cinematic and narrative sensibilities, Steven Spielberg is the eternal adolescent, forever revising the mythos and fairy dust of Walt Disney.
I won’t go into detail here about my love of “Ryan,” because I am a rational man, and thus I admit that Jett was right (I dare anyone other than Gareth to long elude Jett’s implacable, steely intellect when it comes to interpreting a cinematic artwork from skin to bones while disdaining the indulgence of sentimentality–in other words, he aint a Spielberg man, our Jett). Another reason I won’t defend my love of “Ryan” here is because I’ve belabored the subject already in a separate Film Talk post.
Jett has rightly pointed out the far more adult message of “Red Line” and it is certain that the message is far superior to the adolescent ‘civics lesson’ of “Private Ryan”. Ouch.
So then, WHY is “The Thin Red Line” so anti-Disney? For all their talk of philosophy (which, sorry Jett, Gareth beats you at) neither of our boys spoke very much of the cinematic and narrative details of “Thin Red Line” as the Gothic artwork it really is, nor did they truly get what’s really happening thematically in “The Thin Red Line.”
For you see, the old dragon Terrence Malick is not just remorselessly adult in his sensibilities, he’s downright antediluvian. His vision, as is first and most decisively displayed in “Badlands” (1973), is reptilian.
He truly does, as Gareth argues, show us the unspeakable beauty of the natural world, but Gareth misses the point: Malick is not trying to portray that beauty, because he is like Nature itself: indifferent, and merely specular. He is not ‘displaying’ us the natural world’s beauty, but is in fact displaying for us the world itself. And in fact I wonder now if it is even ‘for us’ he does this.
“Natural world” implies that there is something or some place else besides that world. There is not any other place, as far as Malick’s art is concerned. There is only our own pathetic, tragic misconception that we somehow stand against Nature, or that we are surrounded by it, overwhelmed by it, run up its hills to attack the Japanese, cross its oceans to find some new world, or race through its badlands on killing sprees. When we think we are stalking the enemy through its tropical forests a bushman or two will pass by us, going the other way, completely unconcerned with the ‘greatest generation’ or its ‘clash of nations’ to ‘save democracy’ or even to establish the primacy of real estate.
In Malick’s films we are led to believe that we sometimes stop to contemplate Nature. No. It is us and we are It. That we have an identity apart from It, that there is in fact a such thing as a human race or ‘civilization,’ a God, Hope, Love, are just a story we tell ourselves, as Private Witt tells himself that his wife loves him. She doesn’t. It turns out that she is a shallow, selfish, trivial woman who cannot sustain her love for her husband when a more handsome, or just more available soldier on leave (with rank!) comes along. Witt discovers the truth in a typically Malickian way: reality intrudes upon his fantasy in the form of a “Dear Witt” letter from home.
Sorry Gareth, but you are dead wrong, and you are committing the same mistake Witt does, if you think that “Red Line” ‘shows us’ a more pure, primitive world of native bliss and natural grandeur. Nature is a yawning, inhuman void of indifference (the crocodile crawling into and out of the swamp, a repeated shot in the film, is the true face of Nature, if not of Malick himself–his own sort of cameo).
Nature is an alien intelechy, as philosopher, Terrence McKenna used to argue, that does not oppose or punish us because the more frightening truth is that it IS us. We are of Nature, are extrusions like fractals, of that larger, violent consciousness, and we kill each other because everything in Nature behaves that way, upon closer inspection (in a far more fetishistic manner than Malick, director, David Lynch says such things, and said it in his typically surrealistic way in the unsettling opening sequence of “Blue Velvet” (1986) in which a man has a heart attack, collapses on a lawn, and the camera proceeds to penetrate the lovely green plushness of the grass to focus upon the teeming world of violently hungry insect life beneath our notice. The mask beauty is stripped away.
As for the bucolic nativist Nirvana depicted at the Beginning of “Red Line”? It turns out that this tableau is all in Witt’s imagination. His fantasy of redemptive love is stripped from him when he returns to his AWOL getaway to see his native lover and discovers not the heavenly Melanesian choral songs sung by the Choir of All Saints of Honiara, his former bliss before Sgt. Welsh (Sean Penn) had rudely awakened him, but discovers instead dirty children, savage wild dogs fighting over un-named dead meat, conflict, and grinding poverty. The truth.
As always happens in Malick’s films (as when several of the victims butchered by Kitt (Martin Sheen) in “Badlands” (1973) are lulled by his euphoric behavior only to suddenly find themselves at the receiving end of his psychotic brutality) the characters of “Thin Red Line” are awakened over and over again to the folly of their own sleepy assumptions (“Real estate. It’s all about real estate”).
So too are we, the audience, awakened after being lulled. Some critics are missing the point, but Staros (Elias Koteas), for all his ethical ire in seeking to protect his men, “All my sons,” he thinks of them, is actually quite easily bought off by Colonel Tall’s offer of a comfortable posting back home with career starting military decorations. Do you doubt me? Watch the scene again without your thumb in your mouth, in which Staros guiltily rebuffs the hero worship and gratitude of his men, who do not know what a cushy gift Staros has been given. When they offer to continue his protestations by objecting to his decommission, he hastily douses the idea. He has something now to lose.
Tall himself, masterfully imbued by Nick Nolte with the feverish desperation of men a little older than me (I see them all the time–soon I’ll be them) who are facing the oblivion of ending unaccomplished, unheralded, and unrewarded for their self-abnegation and their sacrifices to the male social order (“The closer you are to Caesar the greater the fear”) is not without astonishing intestinal courage (he strides across the battlefield shouting, slapping the men’s helmets with a riding crop, barking encouragement, never deigning even to flinch at near mortar bursts). His bravura and bravery in his element is of the kind we’d expect to see in a combat officer, and we can’t help but be impressed. Unlike General Quintard (John Travolta) Tall comes ashore, Tall squats in the field beside his radioman to give orders under threat, and Tall strides right to the front line to stand ‘tall’ under fire. You feel for him. He’s obviously deserving of the accolades he’s been denied.
But the truth of Tall’s ultimate ruthlessness and his inhumanity is searingly mirrored in the far more laconic and more business-like courage of his jr officer, Captain Gaff (John Cusack). Gaff is dressed in the clean, neat expeditionary force combat uniform of a veteran who has obviously fought many battles under Tall. He is the clean-up man. He, like Tall, seeks accolades, and he’s young enough to know he’ll get them. He slavishly volunteers to do Tall’s will without the existential hesitations Staros feels. Yet Gaff betrays a moment of unmasked contempt for Tall in a fleeting glance when Tall promises him the Medal of Honor in an embarrassingly effusive display of affection, and it is clear that Gaff sees Tall the way all sons see fathers who stand between them and patriarchy’s imprimatur: why isn’t Dad dead yet? The Buick should be mine by now, dammit.
Nick Nolte in fact has been one of the actors who’ve worked with Malick who have been uttering a discourse about Malick that contrasts the talk of critics about ‘beauty’, ‘Nature’. and the ‘idiosyncrasies’ of a director who makes movies every twenty years and shoots a million feet of film to cut and can only 100,000.
Nolte, interviewed by Charlie Rose in December, 1998 painted a portrait of Malick as a genius, an oblique hierophant lost in his own contemplations of trees and of insects while hundreds of actors roved across the jungle in costume breaking into improvised jabbering, two hour takes of ranting at the sky, and un-choreographed mass battle shots. All to be ordered, and given meaning, Nolte assured Rose, in the editing the actors, producers, and studio would never see or control, to be done at Malick’s pleasure. Can anyone say “Auteur”?
Like Kubrick, Malick is clearly unconcerned with the idea that people are anything more than captives in the skinner box of Nature, toying with their inventions and their obsessions (“Eyes Wide Shut” would seem to be a film about amoral urbanity, but is in fact more concerned with the “Nature” of corruption, death, and sex, as the worm within the bud of the polite cosmopolity.
Nolte clues us in on how strangely abstracted from the Sapient universe Crocodile Malick can be.
Don’t take me however, for what I am not trying to say here; as in Kubrick, whose heart and soul are of a stellar coldness like the void surrounding the ship in 2001, Malick’s vision is simply indifferent, not negative, judgmental, or cruel. Nothing in Kubrick or Malick is good or bad, but thinking makes it so: if we think about it, there are plenty of examples of true nobility, many moving and quite visually exquisite shots, moments, and sequences in “Thin Red Line”: Witt’s truly unselfish sacrifice for the men, Gaff’s taciturn dignity in the face of pointless violence, the boyishly foolish self sacrifice of Sgt. Keck (Woody Harrelson) who throws himself onto a hand grenade to save his platoon, and the ultimate and only true father figure in the film, Sgt. Welsh (Sean Penn), who sincerely seeks to protect and to enlighten Witt about the error of his dreams.
Even Witt who says “I seen another world”, admits to a sneaking suspicion: “Sometimes, I think, it was just my imagination.” Penn delivers the lines that are the most certain key to understanding Malick’s overarching theme when he says to Witt, “In this world, a man, himself, is nothing. And there ain’t no world but this one.” Penn’s character, BECAUSE he is the one character without dreams or noble pretensions, is the one character who can actually be brave without being callus, and can be merciful without having to sell out as a result.
Finally, there is the visually breath-taking, Hans Zimmer scored, long charge up the hill, some of it deftly steadycam-shot from first person point of view–a sequence beginning with “Eos Rhodo Doktylos,” (‘rosey fingered dawn’) and ending with the heart rending images of pathos that is the sacking of the Japanese fire camp at the hilltop, overthrown by American soldiers. The compassion Witt shows to a traumatized Japanese enemy by tenderly holding his hands is all the more poignant because Malick makes certain to contrast it to the horrific image of an American soldier taunting a dying Japanese, and searching amongst the corpses to pull teeth for souvenirs.
This is classic Terrence Malick both in image and in narrative, both of which yield Malick’s reptilian theme: we are food for the Gods, for the vultures, and for each other. Thence comes whatever nobility we can muster, because only in such a huge context of indifference (the natural world, of which we are a creation) can nobility, or the yearning for it at least, really matter.
To end where I began, I think although I disparaged it back in 1998 when it was released, the saving grace of “Private Ryan,” which won me over after repeated viewings, was not its simplistic message of VFW fantasies of patriotic sacrifice, or the hygienic, small town morality of Captain Miller, but rather the ironic death of Private Caparzo (Vin Diesel) whose child-like enthusiasm in trying to save a little French girl is rewarded by death at the strike of a sniper’s bullet.
Spielberg is nothing if not derivative, and he recycles all our boyhood dreams, gotten from movies such as “The Longest Day” (1962), and the heroic stories our fathers, grandfathers and uncles told us. One of which was the long march off the beaches on D-Day into the interior of Europe, where our grandfathers did just what Caparzo stupidly sought to do: rescued the victims.
My grandfather’s generation was not dubbed “the greatest generation” without cause, however cynically that cognomen might have been bestowed by hack TIME magazine writers and PBS documentary geeks who weren’t present at Omaha Beach.
Somebody landed on those beaches alright, and somebody took out those machine gun emplacements under a hellish hail of fire, and somebody lived through that, and through Anzio and the Battle of the Bulge, and all the rest in order to liberate Auschwitz and Treblinka and take home broken hearts that yes, most of them seldom spoke of to us.
Maybe it takes a Spielberg to combine all the rousing war films of fifty years into a gestalt in which the simple heroism of a Captain Miller is allowed to show in the reticence of his dialogue that reminds us of our grandfathers and in the shots of his tremoring hand rather than in his alacrity at killing an enemy.
I agree with Jett, we are in history, and it has not ended yet, even though I did, we all did imagine in the early 90′s that Jesus Jones’ song, “Right here, right now” was the true soundtrack for the felling of the Berlin Wall.
We actually thought we were “watching the world wake up from history.” What I want to TRY to believe anyway, is that the common difference between “Ryan” and “Red Line” is the differing portrayals of the same idea: we ARE history. We can never wake up from what is tangible and real, and the only dream worth having is depicted the in shot of departure from the battlefield near the end of Malick’s vision as the island recedes and the men who’ve survived breath easy at last.
It is the dream of the end of violence.
CORRECTION:
It is Private BELL who receives a “Dear Bell” letter from home, in which his wife asks for a divorce, thus, he is just one of the characters in “Red Line” who discovers that his fantasies are not the truth.
Fantastic post.
Rayfield, are you saying that, in opposition to Gareth’s review, Malick isn’t showing us the transcendent, but the world “as is”, and it is us (the audience as well as the characters) who infuse meaning, however contradictory, illusory or imagined?
That would explain the differing perspectives people have with TRL. I hated the film when I first saw it — I thought it was a trite, Rousseauian mess, a Walden Pond war movie.
In the following years, my perspective of the world has since changed, and I’m more inclined to see it as you described: ordered violence of mankind within a vast and indifferent world.
As an aside, I see Gaff differently: a junior officer of West Point privilege who has been spared the horrors of combat as Tall’s staff officer. Like the junior executive in a corporation handed cushier jobs, he volunteers to lead the assault to finally prove to himself, his peers, his “father” that he is a warrior and thus worthy of entering the Pantheon. But he finds no Pantheon at the end — even when the prospect of a CMOH is dangled before him. Only the cynicism, clarity, and exhaustion of a post-adrenaline high.
Note that his first comment to Tall concerns the men, ensuring that they get enough water. Has the veil fallen from Gaff’s eyes? Or does he simply only care about how utterly thirsty he is?
Daveed,
This is certainly an alternate reading of Gaff worth considering.
I don’t see him at all as having the veil fall from his eyes because of the water incident, but I do think you make a strong point that he may be an untried soldier fresh out of West Point who volunteers in order to prove himself.
Also, it is just some darn good writing on your part:
“But he finds no Pantheon at the end — even when the prospect of a CMOH is dangled before him. Only the cynicism, clarity, and exhaustion of a post-adrenaline high.”
I don’t know if you’re right there, but you wrote a description of your claim that is so exquisite that you sure do DESERVE to be right. Good writing is its own exculpation, and that’s good writing.
Jett and Gareth;
Though I should have been long ago asleep, I’m up with my thoughts shambling about because earlier this evening I got into a pretty heavy argument via email with two old grad school chums who read my post about “The Thin Red Line” and both of whom accused me of claptrap for claiming that Nature mirrors Homo Sapien or vice versa. One of my chums even went so far as to say “Nature has no correspondence whatsoever with Man [sic] save in the sense that Man [sic] arises out of Nature and then stands in alienation and opposition to Her [sic] from thence forth. Prove one single objective and scientific sense if you can Ray, in which Man [sic] is somehow embedded existentially in Nature as an ‘entelechy’, as you’ve mused here.”
Ok. Here’s a doozy. It’s from the philosopher Terrence McKenna, one of my favorite thinkers, from one of his lectures of the 80′s and 90′s, entitled, “Eros and the Eschaton.”
McKenna makes a very pointed assertion that is self evidently correct: Mathematics, which is a purely subjective construct arising out of human ratiocination and which cannot be objectively ‘seen’ in Nature (numbers don’t grow on trees, or crystalize in a lithic process like stones at the bottom of the ocean) is nevertheless a powerful tool for the description of the natural world. Why? How??
This is such a difficult question, McKenna points out, that it was never even asked in philosophy until the twentieth century. He says that this indicates “a fundamental congruency between processes that are mental and the structure of the world itself. He claimed that there can possibly a mathematical theory of human consciousness.
For me, this indicates that either the human mind is merely an extension of the natural intelechy (as I believe Terrence Malick’s cinema implies or assumes), or, that “Nature” itself, is not there at all, but is a potentiality wave of the sort theorized by Shroedinger (of cat fame), and is created by our own consciousness out of quantum nothingness, as indeed, all matter seems to be–merely reflective of our own conscious thought.
McKenna can be found with a google search, String Theory, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, and Malick’s weird to the point of astonishment ‘interview scene’ be Kit and his captors at the climax of “Badlands” can all be found likewise.
Kit unsettlingly reveals himself to be not there, spiritually speaking. He is a construct of the society that thought him, that thinks him, and brings him into being by the questioning they enact over him, filling him with the joy of being, which he would otherwise not possess. This is why he kills. It is an act of creation for him.
Malick’s point is strange, but clear. Man is his own reason for being and evil is not imposed upon us from without any more than love is radiated from a godhead. We create the universe and everything in it, including our selves.
Or something like that.
Thanks for the kind words, Ray.
I just watched that attack on the redoubt sequence last night, and picked up on something quite interesting: the attack stalls and Gaff orders his men to fall back, but it is Witt who urges them to press on, ultimately resulting in victory.
I wonder whether Gaff’s cagey reaction to the Tall’s effusive praise was because the young officer did at a critical moment lose heart.
Good question, but I read Gaff’s falling back not as a loss of heart but as rational–which it seems he is, and as the reality of the underlying humanity of Gaff. He’s not the same sort of son of a bitch as Tall. Witt, we have to remember, has sort of a death wish, or at least is lost in his dreams, is unrealistic, and does crazy, self destructive things.