Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line: Some Historical Considerations

What was it, really, this EVOLUTION OF A SOLDIER? What is it still?...I think that when all the nationalistic or ideological propaganda and patriotic slogans are put aside, all the straining to convince a soldier that he is dying for something, it is the individual soldier's final full acceptance of the fact that his name is already written down in the rolls of the already dead.

James Jones

An Overview of the Combat-Movie Genre: Then and Now

In the years since its release, Terrence Malick's film adaptation (1998) of James Jones's novel The Thin Red Line (1962) has aroused both critical praise and opprobrium. Critical debate has centered on a number of issues: Malick's fidelity to Jones's novel; the film's treatment of the American fighting man during a pivotal campaign in the Pacific war; and, more broadly, the relationship between narrative film and history. Woven into these are issues that dogged Jones, as well, particularly the question of history as personal experience—and personal experience as a literary genre. Each of these issues has been the subject of interdisciplinary debate,¹ so addressing all of them is beyond the scope of this paper. Instead, I will consider two fundamental aspects of the film: Malick's adaptation of Jones's novel and the film's relation to the American combat movie.

The Thin Red Line is neither the distortion of Jones's novel nor the historical aberration that some have claimed it to be. In fact, Malick's film not only offers a complex adaptation of Jones's novel but also engages with elements of the historical record that have been largely overlooked in many previous film representations of the Pacific campaign. The result is a tension between, on the one hand, the film's narrative structure, characters, and representation of history and, on the other hand, the audience expectations regarding the conventions of the combat film. In order to realize the accomplishment of The Thin Red Line, one needs to see it within the context of the combat film, a popular genre that has changed in significant ways since its origins during World War II. As a very specific sub-genre of the war film, the combat film is distinctly historical in its concern for representing the realities of combat, distinctly political in its affirmation (or criticism) of national identity, and distinctly mythic in its invocation of an ideal America. As Dana Polan writes,

For the soldiers, the mission can become the occasion for emotional growth and self-discovery, but, in the ideology of the World War II film, one discovers what was really there all along— the meaningfulness of nation and national mission, the rightness of one's place, the justification of cause.

(59)

In a brief chapter of his book A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema: 1930-1980 (1985: 113-125), Robert Ray outlines a similar combination of concerns underpinning the combat-movie genre. While identifying "motifs that would dominate [Hollywood's] wartime films" emerging from Howard Hawks's 1939 action adventure film Only Angels Have Wings (1939) – namely the isolated male group of ethnically distinct characters that relies on both teamwork and individual exploits, that displays professionalism and stoicism in the face of death, and that is threatened by an outsider who eventually wins admission to the group -Ray concludes that

Hollywood's combat films...were merely a new and radically simplified version of the classic pattern of reconciliation established by the prewar commercial cinema. Above all, they reaffirmed the myth that proposed the compatibility of individual and community values.

(125)

While Ray simplifies what has become a rich and complex film genre, his identification of these general mythic traits is not inaccurate. Furthermore, his claim that early combat films reaffirmed core values in Hollywood film is relevant if one considers the way combat films have contributed to war propaganda and, more recently, to the commemoration of significant war-time events (such as D-Day), all in patterns of "reconciliation" between the...