A Halfway Step to Nature

Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998) is less a war film than a film of metaphysical speculation that takes war as its setting. Its theme is “being in the world,” which always, in the final analysis, means to be in this place, here, now. War—composed of actions that are unintelligible except by reference to collective purposes, yet collective purposes that cannot be realized except by individuals, with their mortal human bodies—is what brings this theme to visibility. The movie’s central metaphor—the grass-covered hills through which “Charlie Company” moves on its assault on the Japanese machine-gun nest on Guadalcanal, culminating in the fateful assault on the Purgatorial Hill 201, gives sensuous form to this central paradox of the one and the many; it also embodies the shifting relations between humans and the natural world that, despite or because of its being the indifferent stage of their actions, is also an object of wonderment, or sensuous immersion. Not least among the Thin Red Line’s paradoxes is that the character, Private Witt, who is most convinced that there is “another world,” is also the one most sensuously present in this one.