There is an otherness inside us

We never touch,

                                     no matter how far down our hands reach.

It is the past,

                          With its good looks and Anytime, Anywhere…

Our prayers go out to it, our arms go out to it

Year after year,

But who can ever remember enough?

Early in Terrence Malick's 1998 film The Thin Red Line, the character Witt, (Jim Caviezel) AWOL from the American infantry, sits contemplatively on a beach somewhere in the Solomon Islands reflecting on the death of his mother years before, and asks himself the question that in many ways shapes the entire film: "I wonder what it will be like when I die? How will it be to know that this breath, now, were the last one you were ever going to draw?" It is a question that poignantly signals the film's interests beyond the conventional genre of the "war movie." While the theatre of war presumably offers an intense and diverse range of experiences for those involved in it, Malick's film, as a contemporary representation of a 50 year-old conflict, focuses upon the issue of liminality, of explicit confrontation with fundamental points of human transition. Clearly evoking the ideologically and militarily impenetrable "thin red line" of imperial forces, the film's evocation of the term ironically critiques such a notion of "intactness," suggesting rather a highly unstable and permeable line between categories such as success and failure, the known and the unknown, the self and the other, the comrade and the enemy, the socially recognised and the perverse, and indeed between the life of the corporeal body and its limitations, its stalking death.

It is this evocation of liminality which forms the basis of my discussion here. As a textual scholar, I am interested in the ways in which the "theatre of war" -- here as it is enacted within a cinematic representation such as The Thin Red Line -- can, surprisingly in some ways, provide an arena in which to explore notions of permeability and indeed instability in the formation of subjectivities, at the level of both the social and the individual. While ostensibly operating within the discourses of dichotomous rigidity which are arguably the necessary precursors for the production of war -- discourses of nation and territoriality, of masculine/feminine, heroism/cowardice, winners/losers, comrade/enemy, even life/death -- the representational strategies of Malick's film actually work to explore and contest such rigidities. Located within the intensity of the crucible of conflict, The Thin Red Line shows both the human body -- and in particular the masculinized body of the soldier - and the social bodies of "nation" and "army" in extremis, at the margins of the known and the sustainable. On a literal level, war and its representations might be said to be very much about the breaking of bodies and yet, I would argue, for all the gore of special effects in the cinema, it is a breaking that is often ideologically suppressed, glossed over in favour of the eventual dominance of the sealed and codified body, the soldier entire. In contradistinction to more conventional narratives of war then, concerned with the reinforcement of such fixed dichotomies, The Thin Red Line foregrounds the various points of break, the vertiginous points of collapse and potential reconfiguration.

While The Thin Red Line's preoccupations can be said to exceed the specificities of war, at the same time it also raises vital sociopolitical questions about the nature of "war" itself as a contemporary phenomenon.  For example, can war, as an abstract category, be somehow differentiated from the mesh of detail, of political and personal imbrications which surround and produce it? However important, and indeed integral, it may be to know and trace the intricate details of any particular conflict as well as the complexity of political and ideological forces which have shaped it, it is perhaps even more crucial to find ways of conceptualising -- and therefore potentially deconstructing - what recent commentators of the Middle East crisis have referred to more structurally and perhaps oxymoronically as "the logic of war" [1]. On the one hand, as a circumstance of explicit conflict, territoriality and struggle for supremacy, war can be understood as paradigmatic of the structures of patriarchy, where patriarchy is interpreted as a rigid dichotomy of the powerful and powerless, of A/-A. In this sense, war is entirely metonymic of the twinned narratives of subject and social formation as found within the discourses of phallocentrism.  As a military, political or social narrative, war takes as its enabling premise, the dominant, sealed and central masculine subject, whose story of physical and moral struggle against an "other" is most often told in linear narratives of growth and achievement resulting in the replication of the phallocentric polis. In this sense, the "story of war" might be seen as perfectly aligned with the structures of Classical Hollywood Narrative [2], which conventionally trace the bildungs of a dominant and privileged subject. 

War epitomises what Kosofsky Sedgwick has referred to as the "homosocial" (Kosofsky Sedgewick, 1985)  economy of phallocentrism, in which, as a consequence of the assumed centrality of the masculine subject, male-to-male connection is paramount (irrespective of whether it is in camaraderie or competition). In such a scenario, power is conceived of as vertical, hierarchical and oedipal, and biological women, as well as all that "falls" into the othered category of the "feminine," are peripheral objects of transaction or, more notoriously, operate as rationales for homosocial contestation. In a related psychoanalytic sense, the "logic" of war also crucially requires the excision of all that is unacceptable or threatening to that dominant construct of masculine subjectivity [3]. Not only must the feminine be marginalised, but also in general terms an "other" must be clearly delineated and despised in order for that masculine, phallocentric "self" to be recognised and celebrated. The "logic" of war then, I would argue, while being one of profound perversity, is also directly related to the operations of power and the formation of a mythically sealed subject within phallocentrism -- the one who has successfully repelled the illegitimate penetration of an alterity, and reinforced the oppositional categories of self and other, nation and "enemy." War is thus not an aberration but rather an effect, an inevitable consequence of any discourse which formulates "self" through elaborate processes of repudiation and abjection. The "Other" is created and struggled with precisely in order to forge and to reassure a dominant subject position. War is thus metonymic of a dual process whereby both the (masculinised) subject and the (phallocentric) social are conceptualised as sealed and self-contained precisely because an alterity has been forged out of the actually self-amputating processes of abjection, where disturbing material concerning both the psyche and the social are disavowed and disowned, at great and unsustainable cost [4].

The cinematic representation of war -- its protagonists, its myriad events -- is a cultural mode which explicitly seeks to mediate between the present and the past, to comprehend each in the light of the other. As with all processes of history-telling or making, films about war, while necessarily more, or less fictionalised, are evidence of a broader sociocultural interest in and/or need to re-examine significant moments from the past both as signifiers in their own right, and as powerful, if not entirely understood, influences in the production of the present moment -- socially and subjectively. So, for example, when the elderly figure of "Private Ryan" (Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg, 1998) returns to the fields of white crosses in France, marking the graves of those who "saved" him and fought alongside him, his heightened emotion and reassessment of a lifetime are not only shared by his wife and family, but also suggest a pivotal moment of return and reflection that is common to the contemporary audience of this Hollywood film. Children and grandchildren of those who participated in the conflicts of World War Two, we stand with them, at our own moment in history and upon the brink of their mortality, to reconsider the significance of the upheaval and trauma of that war, of that turbulent time which shaped them and produced us - the various futures that streamed out both from those who returned and those who did not. However, given the traumatic and eruptive nature of the phenomenon of war, even where it is shaped and contained within the representational practices of art, a cinema which foregrounds war as horror, rather than repressing that horror in a narrative form which confirms the "logic" of war, will necessarily be one of disjunction and disturbance. It will evoke and embody a memory of the past that will be pocked with the silences of uncertainty, failure, grief and death as much as it will elicit the sounds and scenes of crucial events, potentially re-calling and making sense of them in the process. In these terms, narratives of war such as Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line in particular, with their graphic depictions of the traumas of the battlefield and of the consequences of a war "culture," can be interpreted as efforts to negotiate the personal and cultural catastrophes which are triggered by the historical occurrence of war, rather than as restatements of any conventional paradigm of war as adventure, and as masculine proving ground.

Malick and Spielberg's films reflect not only contemporary cynicism about the mechanisms and consequences of war, but also current sociohistorical shifts in discourses about nation and subject formations, as well as about the shifting nature of "identity" and its relation to the demands of the group. As recent narratives about World War II, they are also crucially influenced by intervening cinematic representations of the Vietnam conflict and of the fundamental disruption to the idea of a morally justifiable war and its progress engendered by the "messiness" and lack of resolution in that historical conflict.  Films such as Apocalypse Now (Coppola, 1979), Platoon, (Stone 1986), Full Metal Jacket (Kubrick 1987) and Born on the Fourth of July (Stone 1989) have, through their structure and content, all reflected and contributed to a widespread questioning both of American policy and moral superiority. Significantly, such political scepticism also has a direct influence upon the ways in which these narratives are structured -- in order to see the world differently, the story itself will be different, just as the way in which its telling will reflect different perspectives, different values. Like Coppola's Apocalypse Now, The Thin Red Line is also the product of a strong and imaginative director who comes close to auteur status is his ability to project an independent vision whilst still working within a mainstream Hollywood context. Again, both films are based on a prior literary narrative (Coppola's on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and Malick's on James Jones' The Thin Red Line, 1963), and explicitly allow their textual layers to inscribe and thus disrupt the surface tale of men at war. Malick's film eschews a single, central protagonist and instead focuses upon a range of characters in a way that prevents audience identification with any privileged one to the exclusion of other points of view and experiences. Each of these different men grapple with the shocking immediacy of the experience of being "soldier," and participate in the narrative of the present, protracted moment -- here, the territorial battle by the Americans to seize a certain hill and thus gain the strategic advantage in the battle against the Japanese in Guadalcanal. At the same time however, each character that the film thrusts upon is, in their different ways, shown to be rife with the complications and fragmentations of any subjectivity -- their different backgrounds, the pressure of the past, and of memory, upon the present moment, however urgent, and a complexity of desires that might lead them away from the simple forward trajectory of soldier, or ideological pawn.

In its deviations from a conventional paradigm of "war cinema" that either celebrates or takes as "natural," even if regrettable, the conditions of war, The Thin Red Line functions to disturb political and cinematic expectations. This aesthetics of disruption also operates as an explicit trigger to articulate and to remember more fully the personal and social implications of this war, as perhaps of every war. In this sense, it could be argued that Malick's film provides an opportunity to "work through" the repressed and discordant material inevitably generated by the experience of a war, both by those who actually participated and by the culture at large. As Freud theorised the phenomenon, such a working through would enable a transition from sheer repetition -- here epitomised by the genre of the war film that propagandises and becomes caught in a static logic of the same -- rather, facilitating a move toward integration and acceptance of war trauma (Freud 288).

In re-presenting at least some of the surface effects of war -- the troops, the landing, the adrenalin, the fear, the combat etc. -- The Thin Red Line of course runs the risk of perpetuating rather than critiquing an ideology of the phallocentric, nationalised subject. Similarly, the repetition of scenes of violence, which are a staple of the "war movie," might be interpreted, particularly as special effects have developed, to embody a graphic and morbid revelling in this visual language of domination. On the other hand, such repetitions may also refer to efforts to negotiate and actually address the trauma contained within the story of war. In a discussion of representations of the Holocaust, Eric L. Santer returns to Freud's theories on mourning and loss as described in "Beyond the Pleasure Principle":

I would argue that The Thin Red Line is a work of cinematic art that strives to locate the repressed anxiety associated with the theatre of war (Caruth 1-9) [5]. In contrast to a conventional war story, it is not a narrative aiming to repress that which would disturb the linear, surface story of oppositional conflict, of winning and losing. Rather, it is a film about the various processes of repression, offering a poetic and rigorous examination of depth as well as surface. It is a text haunted by the irruptive horrors of an unreconciled past, notably a past still within a contemporary audience's living memory. Importantly, by means of a variety of transgressive strategies -- most notably its number of protagonists, its movements between interior lives and exterior events as well as between narrative and lyrical modes of expression -- the film suggests a negotiation of those flashes of trauma, a cinematic re-experiencing of the fuller anxiety and disruption unavailable in the hyper-present of such events and thus only potentially accessible through art's processes of recollection and re-presentation.

In Malick's film, the grotesqueries of war are powerfully and repeatedly evoked, not as part of a visceral pornography, but rather than as continual disruptors of the so-called "logic" of war. These horrors are evident, for example, in the palpable fear aboard the troop carrier as it nears Guadalcanal, in the intense range of responses from denial, to bravado, to hysteria which the proximity to conflict engenders; they are graphically encoded in the mutilated American corpses found in the long grasses, and in the shocking death of Sgt Keck (Woody Harrelson). The cocksure sergeant, who bullies his men forward toward violence and death, fails to properly activate a hand grenade and mutilates himself, enacting a literal castration that leaves him bleeding, appalled, caught in a rapid and suddenly unexpected descent into coldness and the vertiginous slap-tide of death. The masculinized body, so sure of itself and its apparent invulnerability, is torn, ripped from the security of conscious will and symbolically feminised in its powerlessness, its abrupt exposure to its own repressed corporeality. This is an important moment, not only because it intensifies the agitation of the Americans as they are exhorted to charge up the hill after him and into a line of deadly combat, but also because it graphically encodes the shocking permeability of the body. Both masculinity, as a required construct for the position of "soldier," and indeed even the idea of a fixed subject itself, are violated and deflated by such physical wounding, by the exposed vulnerability of the carapace of the body. 

Significantly, mortality, or the literal seepage of subjectivity, comes not only to the named character, the known actor, but also and equally tragically to the film's unnamed individuals: to the young boy who dies in Capt Staros' (Elias Koteas) arms, his last moments charged with the sight of the sun, flickering through a filigreed leaf; to the defeated Japanese who are subjected to the whims of the Americans' violence and extremity as they sweep through their camp, or kick their already-dead bodies in an act which writes large the pervasive and dehumanising contaminations of the violence of war, a violence which surges across any "lines" of winners and losers, the "right" and the "wrong." Such episodes of loss and violence, of corporeal rupture and inhuman treatment of human to human, are not seen as the sad but inevitable corollaries of an ideologically dominant tale of struggle and survival, but rather fundamentally challenge the ways we think about subjectivity, about the "good" person under brutalising conditions, about the relationship between individual and social needs and desires.

Malick's depiction of violence, I would argue, is not used in the service of discourses of heroism, or in the construction of a bildungsfilm that traces the bloody rites of passage of an individual soldier. Instead it serves as a means of graphically encoding the catastrophic nature of the trauma of war, the very perversity of carving out a version of subjectivity and the social which requires the bloody -- and of course, self-damaging - excision of a huge and hydra-headed alterity. To remember violence, in the context of a war narrative such as The Thin Red Line which refuses any easy heroism, is to be reconfronted with the permeability of the body, the always- inadequate armour of the fortified, sealed self, just as it is to call into question the very fabric of a social which is reliant upon the suppression and/or repudiation of difference in order to elevate a singular, dominant masculinity and world view.

The cathartic moments of violence in The Thin Red Line also operate as points of shock and disruption because they emphasise the experiences and significances of such different subjects/personalities. In other words, by focusing on a wide range of characters -- from the Brigadier and Lt Colonel, through captains to privates and countless unnamed faces -- The Thin Red Line goes a considerable way in destabilising conventional Hollywood (and therefore political) representations of war as an assimilation of individual subjectivities into the patriarchally constructed single body of the "army." Where Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925) famously rejected individualism in favour of the representation of groups of people, The Thin Red Line critiques the notion of the homogenous group to consider the ways in which such groups are composed of individuals who nevertheless derive their subjectivity from a dynamic interaction, sometimes clash, with the dominant group– thus suggesting the complexity of any process of subject-formation. Thus even Lt. Colonel Tell (Nick Nolte), who embodies much of the macho, competitive ethos of masculinity at war, finally forcing out Capt. Styles for being "too soft," can think to himself that he has "played a role I never conceived," his voice-over thoughts emphasising the film's layering of surface and depth, subjectivity and role in the anxiety-driven crucible of war. And while more conventional film narratives have singled out individual soldiers to carry the weight of audience identification and to reinforce western notions of the primacy of the individual, such characters have functioned primarily as representative of that integrated, singularised group. This conventional soldier has an individuality that reflects the group in microcosm, because to actually produce a force of men willing and able to engage in the violent and dehumanising processes of conflict, any actual independence of thought or subjectivity is profoundly subversive. In this sense, Classical Hollywood Narrative is fundamentally and paradoxically torn between what might be argued are its two guiding principles: tracing and privileging the linear story of the individual within culture and the promotion of a model of dominant social ideology. The individual and the group -- a group here emblematised by the "army", or the "nation"  - are paradoxically dependent upon each other and indeed, as I have argued, are in metaphoric relation to each other; and yet, if considered closely, they are actually oppositional. How can individual subjectivity function within the repressive and homogenising regimes of the military and the logic of war -- unless of course that individual has entirely accepted his role as infantilised child of acknowledged superiors? And, as in all phallocentric formulations, what if that individual accepts a pre-ordained subjectivity from the fathers of military hierarchy which reinforces perpendicular patriarchal power chains while promising an oedipal inheritance -- the deferred symbolic "medal" of the ranks of the fathers?

In its explorations beyond linear, surface narrative, The Thin Red Line produces a poetic and suggestive juxtaposition of images. Thus, while on one level it tells a tale of a battle for strategic advantage in a historical conflict, it so far deviates from the model of Classical Hollywood Narrative as to emulate the fluid workings of dream, or the unconscious mind. In contrast to the linearity of the bildungsfilm, it moves forwards and backwards in time, in and out of individual soldiers' memories and contemporary experiences, their interiority and their external experiences. Beginning with the image of a crocodile slipping, half-submerged into slimy waters, Malick dramatises his theme of border crossing, demonstrating his interest in that which operates both above and below lines of delineation -- life and death, the human and the animal, the urge to survive and what is defined as savagery, what is remembered and what is lost or repressed. The eye of the film's narrative, a little like the eye of the crocodile, both observes and stalks, is indicative of what one of the characters refers to as the "cruelty" of nature yet at the same time suggests the amorality of such a world, a system of interaction between sentient beings that cannot be reduced to an anthropomorphised moralism.

The cacophony of war -- where war is seen as an externalisation of a subject formation within the violence of a social predicated upon abjection -- which on occasion threatens to subsume both characters and audience, is punctuated with Malick's own vision of an alterity not produced by a radical disjunction, but coterminous with the immediate experiences of corporeality. This alterity is predominantly articulated and given narrative shape through Witt, who, in his early conversation with Walsh (Sean Penn) persists in his view that there is "another world" and he has seen it - not a world of naivety and escape but of genuine difference to this model of self/other, enemy/friend. "Who are you, living in so many forms?," Witt muses as he tends to the suffering of others, recognising repeatedly a commonality of human experience, a level of sharing that is not the suppression of difference in favour of the uniformity of sameness which is required in a dichotomous conflict with the other. Rather, it is an acknowledgment of a continuum of self/selves/world that is mutually sustaining and not predicated upon the violences of power and competition.  Similarly, the taking of Guadalcanal -- which in itself becomes a secondary, almost incidental exercise within the film narrative -- is punctuated by a series of lateral perceptions: a tiny bird tumbling out of its nest is observed by a soldier, belly-down in the grass. Does he fall to life or death?, is the existential question which resounds in this patch of silence cleared amid the chaos of fighting. A leaf curls in the wind, a soldier looks down at the portrait in his locket before engaging in battle, Pvt. Bell (Ben Chaplin) remembers his wife, their tenderness and their intimacy, in a juxtaposition which affirms the power of love in the face of violence both within and without: "Why should I be afraid to die? I belong to you." In addition, Hans Zimmer's haunting soundtrack throughout draws the audience away from the literal, the sealed present of the narrative, and by thus utilising the emotional sphere so suggestively, further works to incorporate rather than to expel alterity, to instead facilitate a bi-directional movement between event and idea, between the apparent and that which exceeds apparition.

The Thin Red Line explores embodiment as seen and experienced in the crucible of war. It is concerned with the vulnerabilities and specificities of a body in extremity - under physical threat, wounded, or indeed in intimate embrace - a subjectivity which knows itself through the illusions and limitations of the corporeal. Men rush toward externalised combat only to discover this truth about themselves and their social groups waiting there for them. This is another boundary crossing which leads into ever-murkier waters. However, through the character of Witt, in particular, and the effect he has upon others in the Company, The Thin Red Line broadens its scope to a consideration of the nexus of the embodied and the disembodied, of the highly visceral and what might loosely be termed a spiritual, an extra-corporeal. "What's stopping us reaching out, touching the glory?" Witt asks, even amongst the horror and carnage of the battlefield. If "the glory" is a state of mind, a perception of inter-connectedness then it is always there for the seeing, perhaps all the more urgently in the context of war. In this sense, the body with its desires and its pains, its self-limiting capacity for attachment, as Buddhism has described it, is evoked by The Thin Red Line both as the unavoidable arena for the various performances of human subjectivity, and as a cage of perceptions to be acknowledged, and finally, moved beyond. When Witt recalled his mother's death, the film showed us his memory of her, as grey with disease and decay. However, as the camera pans from the caged birds by her bed we see her rise from that sick-bed to meet the life of memory - to clasp hands with the vivid whiteness of herself as a young girl, or as a new bride, to listen, with wonder, to the heartbeat of her lover - until finally, the camera moves up and out of the dullness of that room, through her suddenly open roof and into the brilliant blue of Witt's Pacific sky. This sequence is echoed later in the film when, in his last interaction with Walsh, Witt's gaze is lifted up and out of the sordid detritus of the war, past the now-empty bird cages and up to the war-blasted roof of an Island building. It is a moment which prefigures his own imminent death, an event which encapsulates much of what appears to be Malick's philosophy about the transitions of subjectivity in the context of a warring social. Adopting an almost Christ-like compassion for his fellow soldiers, Witt is himself finally a victim of the violence which has swirled so powerfully around him and which he has done his best to resist. It is also a coming into the moment of death which has been imagined, dreamed about, from the film's beginning. Seen especially through the eyes of Walsh, his death is a moment of profound tragedy and of loss, an extinguishing of all the vitality which he represented. At the same time, perhaps like all sacrificial figures, his death is explicitly figured as a moment of transformation, a crossing of the thin red line that was always looming, and which takes Witt, immediately and satisfyingly, into images of him swimming happily with the smiling children of the Island. In this sense, his death functions to draw together a thread of memory that, as the poet Charles Wright suggests, is, in the articulations of life, always elusive: "an otherness inside us/We never touch/…It is the past/…Our prayers go out to it, our arms go out to it/…But who can ever remember enough?" As a final deconstruction of the thin red line, the fragile membrane of embodied subjectivity, Witt's literal death, once it arrives, reconnects both him and the viewer with those seemingly lost memories and desires - with his mother and the images of his childhood which speckle the narrative of his present; with the almost pre-lapsarian world of the Islanders which he discovers in the temporary relief of his period of AWOL, where love and beauty and the natural world were perceived as functioning in compassionate harmony. Death is certainly loss, on one level, yet at the same time, The Thin Red Line suggests that it is not the worst kind of horror to be found in war. Indeed, it can be a kind of liberation, a freeing of the caged heart from the precarious pleasures, the knife-blades of corporeal experience.

The morally perverse arena of war provides a theatre of extremity which writes large the issues of phallocentric power, of connection, alienation and corporeality. However, while it can readily be seen as an explicitly anti-war film, which catalogues the horrors and futilities of war as a mode of social interaction, The Thin Red Line is also a profound meditation upon death and its inextricable connection to life -- wherever it occurs, and wherever it is faced and contemplated by human consciousness as an inevitable and advancing horizon of permeability.