Beauty's Failed Seduction: The Thin Red Line

Gorgeous. Sumptuous. Palm fronds and the high light they wave through. Hillsides of wind-blown grass shifting through hue and shine. Clear waters that rock and hold American soldier Witt (Jim Caviezel) and a few island kids, all the embodiment of delight. Terrence Malick knows how to film Eden. He does it in other films, too—The New World and Days of Heaven in particular. His lens is rapturous when it turns away from "action," and part of me admires and even loves that he reaches toward beauty in times of horror, that he insists on the discordant coexistence of the larger world's ongoing gorgeousness and the industrialized human's noisy violation of it.

But there is also a smoothness to these moments that I immediately want to pick apart. Such a beautiful, seductive surface. So lush, tender, and quiet. I can't help but ask, What is he trying to slip by me? What is he using nature to sell?

When the natural world (which in Malick's world of The Thin Red Line, troublingly, seems to include indigenous people living traditionally) is offered up as balm and perfection set against The Moral Decay of War and Modern Man, I feel like I've crashed right into Wordsworth. And then there's the voice-over, making of those beautiful scenes a vehicle for the tender soul's ruminations. A magnificent backdrop to ground the inner thoughts of the outsider who wonders not at the gorgeous world itself, but while bathed in it. Can you get any more Romantic-lyric than that, wandering "lonely as a cloud," reveling in its beauty without any responsibility for its care or well-being?

Malick is not oblivious to the Romantic influence and legacy. imdb's "Trivia" section even informs us that the movie's final voice-over, in which Private Train (John Dee Smith) says, "Darkness and light. Strife and love. Are they the workings of one mind, the features of the same face?" is taken largely from Wordsworth's Prelude. ("Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light—/Were all like workings of one mind, the features / Of the same face"). Of course I should have noticed this myself, but, as he probably intended, I was suckered into the wash of it all—beauty's soothing murmur.

What does Romanticism as a way of engaging with the natural world offer us in the long-industrialized world (as opposed to the recently industrialized world of Wordsworth)? What does it offer me, as a viewer? In 1998, when the film was released, ecocriticism had already begun opening our eyes to the importance of this conversation in literature. Lawrence Buell published The Environmental Imagination in 1996, challenging us to upend our use of nature in art, to see it clearly for itself and not just as pathetic fallacy.

As a naturalist, I spend a lot of my life debunking and correcting people's responses to nature. No, that deer is not responding to some deer-love you exude from your soul, it has just been habituated to humans and taught to expect food from them. No, snakes/sharks/spiders are not malicious, they're just living their lives. No, ants are not pests, they are essential to a functioning ecosystem. It makes me tired and it makes me feel like a jerk.

I know Malick is an avid birdwatcher, which endears him to me and reassures me that he has some interest in and knowledge of the reality of animals' lives. It also speaks to what I sense is his patience and openness to surprise entering from the periphery of things. And the naturalist in me is relieved to find that the birds (hornbill, rainbow lorikeet) and reptiles (crocodile, not alligator) are indeed native to Guadalcanal, where the film takes place, although I'm suspicious that the cute marsupial is not the region's Phalanger orientalis but another species—the creature in the film darker than what the guidebooks offer.

To me, there's nothing worse than movie-making laziness when it comes to accuracy about the...