Brett's Thin Red Line Notes

The Thin Red Line (1998)

Background

Casting

Wikipedia

20th Century Fox agreed to put up $39 million of the budget with the stipulation that Malick cast five movie stars from a list of 10 who were interested.

Supposedly, when word got out in 1995 that Malick was making another film,

numerous actors approached him, flooding the casting directors until they had to announce they wouldn't be accepting more requests. Some A-list actors including Brad Pitt, Al Pacino, Gary Oldman, and George Clooney offered to work for a fraction and some even offered to work for free. Bruce Willis even went as far as offering to pay for first-class tickets for the casting crew, to get a few lines for the movie. At Medavoy's home in 1995, Malick staged a reading with Martin Sheen delivering the screen directions, and Kevin Costner, Will Patton, Peter Berg, Lukas Haas, and Dermot Mulroney playing the main roles.

That’s makes the casting of relative small fry (e.g., Jared Leto) or unknowns (e.g., Jim Caviezel, John Dee Smith) at the time worthy of further scrutiny. Caviezel was suggested to Malick by Sean Penn, according to Bleasdale.

The cast was trained by Warriors, Inc., through a “boot camp” put on by Vietnam veteran and former Marine Mike Stokey, described elsewhere as an “executive officer” with Warriors, Inc. I discussed this outfit a bit in the Arlington Road episode:

Dale Dye founded “Warriors, Inc.,” in 1984, which “specializes in training actors in war films to portray their roles realistically, and provides research, planning, staging and on-set consultation for directors and other film-production personnel. His company is the top military consultant to Hollywood.” And Dye apparently had no trouble mixing service to the US military and media-related jobs:

After retiring, Dye became a correspondent for the Soldier of Fortune magazine. He worked for the magazine for one year, during which he worked in Central America, providing guerrilla warfare training to troops in El Salvador and Nicaragua while reporting on conflicts in the region.[6]

Producers

Producer Robert Michael Geisler has only three production credits. He produced the Robert Altman film Streamers (1983), written by David Rabe, and offered an adaptation of Rabe’s “The Boom Boom Room” to Malick, who declined. Rabe, a Vietnam veteran, was the recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation grant in 1967.

Geisler’s other credit, besides Streamers and The Thin Red Line, is for a movie called Secret Friends (1991).

He is an establishing member of “The Builders Association,” an experimental theater company.

John Roberdeau, Geisler’s producing partner, is the son of a US Air Force colonel. He also produced Streamers and Secret Friends. Both are accused of dubious professional practices.

Mike Medavoy is credited as “CEO of Phoenix Pictures.” Medavoy was Malick’s agent going back to pre-Badlands days. Phoenix Pictures produced several sus projects, including the MK-Monarch films Black Swan and Shutter Island. They also produced Zodiac and The Sixth Day.

George Stevens, Jr., former director of the United States Information Agency and founding director of AFI (created partially through funds from National Endowment for the Arts, which he helped set up through his Washington connections), is credited as an executive producer. See Malick background notes for more. Stevens was recruited by Medavoy, according to Bleasdale, although Malick already knew him through his time at AFI.

Line producer Grant Hill is a regular collaborator with the Wachowskis and other sus projects (Sniper, The Crow). Interestingly, he’s been the production manager on many of the films he’s produced.

One of his current projects in pre-production is “The Dimona Affair,” about successful Israeli efforts to obtain yellowcake for its illegal nuclear program.

Others

Production designer Jack Fisk, whom we discussed in Malick 1, was the art director on Badlands, where he met Sissy Spacek his wife. The next year, they both worked on Brian DePalma’s Illuminati film Phantom of the Paradise, on which Fisk was the production designer.

Movie, Themes

Combination of linear and non-linear storytelling, similar to first two films but even more non-linear. Still, it’s more linear than I appreciated until viewing it again here recently: they enter the island on one side, fight to the other side, and then get back on the boat. I think this narrative structure relates to Malick’s view of war as a metaphor for the strife and conflict at the heart of the world. Remember Clooney character’s line that it’s “going to be a long war.”

What happens in subsequent films is that the linear aspects providing a foundation for the non-linear elements (which are often about the internal world of the characters) disintegrates little by little, and what’s left are, to me, cinematic exercises at best.

Thematically, it begins in Eden. Eden is then invaded and assaulted by the fallen, civilized world, which in turn infects the Edenic world itself, so that it too becomes corrupted by the contact, reflected in the fear and aggression Witt witnesses in the indigenous village later in the film.

Producer Robert Geisler says that Malick envisioned it this way from early on in the pre-production stages of the project, in the early 90s:

Malick's Guadalcanal would be a Paradise Lost, an Eden, raped by the green poison, as Terry used to call it, of war. Much of the violence was to be portrayed indirectly. A soldier is shot, but rather than showing a Spielbergian bloody face we see a tree explode, the shredded vegetation, and a gorgeous bird with a broken wing flying out of a tree.

Witt, whom Bleasdale sees as representing Malick himself, longs to return to the Eden he tasted at the beginning of the film, which puts him in a class with other Eden-longing Malick protagonists, namely, those in Badlands and Days of Heaven. But Witt, even as he nourishes his vision of “the other world” amid the degrading brutality of war, is himself now too contaminated in his own soul by this fear and aggression. These characteristics have gotten the upper hand among the postlapsarians, and they lead ultimately to an irrational aggression directed at nature itself, as when the brutish guy who executes the prisoners is shooting up at the leaves of a tree, as if enemies are literally everywhere, sewn into the landscape, as it were. He has come to identify the enemy, the Japanese, with nature itself in a way.

In this connection, consider that the Japanese, who have been hunkered down here for some time, almost seem to have been physically consumed by the terrain, having already been infected with the same postlapsarian disease as the Americans. Apart from their generally rundown appearance, note the shot of the Japanese soldiers’ faces almost buried with the rest of the bodies in ash; the guy squatting half naked in a burned out forest; the way the Japanese are initially like ghosts in the landscape; how they, like the Viet Cong, attach foliage to their helmets and uniforms as camouflage; etc.

The first shot, of a crocodile submerging into a green swamp, represents evil embedded, camouflaged in a creation that is inherently good. This paradox is the theme of the film: the world was created good, but good and evil are both embedded in the natural world.

One could say that the solution to the paradox for Malick is in Christian theology, which teaches that nature was made wholly good by God but was corrupted by man’s misuse of his godlike free will.

Thin Red Line as a personal allegory about Malick, who thinks of himself as caught up in the Hollywood machine (“This man’s army”) but really rooted in something higher, more spiritual, more pure, that can “shine through,” as “the glory shines through” in a line from the line. ???

More theological points

The “maybe we’re all one big soul” speech tends toward pantheistic immanentization.

Also some danger, with so much Eden and so little New Jerusalem, that Malick is guilty of a version of what Ken Wilbur calls the pre-trans fallacy, where primordial states are misinterpreted as transcendent states.

It’s significant that Starros is implied to be a Christian and probably an Orthodox Christian, since he’s Greek. We cut from a scene of him praying over the moral agony of his position to the transmoral colonel asking him if he’s read Homer and saying that they read it “at the point—in Greek.” There’s a clear contrast here, it seems to me, between the colonel’s brutal, militaristic pagan morality (associated with a mechanically advanced, civilized, fallen world) and Starros’s morality of compassion and brotherly love even in the midst of duty.

Witt (though less overtly Christian and possibly a mystic pantheist at heart) is an even better exemplar of this Christ-like morality. When the Woody Harrelson character is dying, Witt reassures him that all is well because he gave his life for his brothers. Christ teaches that there is no greater love than dying for one’s brothers (John 15:13). As Harrelson dies, Witt smiles, as if knowing that his soul is redeemed from his sins (as he seemed to be a hardened and sinful sort of man).

According to Bleasdale’s manuscript, Penn and Caviezel didn’t really connect on set due to their religious and political differences. The dialogue in the scene at the plantation house is really the two actors discussing their views of each other, Penn unwilling/incapable of sharing Caviezel’s faith.

The movie was rightly contrasted with Saving Private Ryan, a Spielberg-directed WW2 film released the same year, in that The Thin Red Line eschewed the glorious cause narrative that’s obligatory in WW2 films of any era instead used the war as a vehicle for the theme of war as the ugly extension of the post-natural/postlapsarian/post-Edenic world. It also breached in some measure the taboo against showing American war atrocities. Saving Private Ryandid this in a typical Spielbergian, limited hangout fashion, while The Thin Red Line went further to portray dishonorable and brutal conduct by American soldiers, and a lot more of this was cut from the film.

Animals

Very moving shot of a dying baby bird writhing around as a result of human warfare.

This theme of human-animal mimicry keeps coming up: the bird (?) imitating a gun sound seemingly on purpose to scare the humans and make its escape; Witt imitating jungle birds as Kit did similarly in Badlands, also to hide/escape from pursuers.

Keen sense of justice and injustice in various sorts of human relationships as a continuing interest of Malick’s.

Monarch?

There is an odd shot of a birdcage in the opening scene with AWOL Witt amongst the Edenic Melanesian natives, flashing between that and images of his mother dying in a room with yellow floral wallpaper.

Notice the repeated shots of birdcages framed around Witt in the scene where he’s talking to Sean Penn. And one can’t help noticing that Caviezel as usual is playing a dazed but spiritually attuned, morally upright character.

(In an interview for the film, Caviezel says he applied for the Naval Academy three times.)

And what do we make of lines like, “I love Charlie Company; they’re my people”?

In a deleted scene, the one with Mickey Rourke, he says another mysterious (to me) phrase, “Nine in country,” to which the Rourke character asks, “Miss it?” and he replies, “Oh yeah.” Shortly after this exchange, the Rourke character, who appears highly traumatically affected, goes on this semi-coherent tangent about “them” hitting him repeatedly in the head, apparently making him repeatedly change his posture.

There’s a shot of an owl.

Misc

Leto goofy and stilted.

What does the dying Japanese prisoner say to the tooth collector that says he wants to “sink my teeth into your liver”? From imdb:

In the scene where the American soldiers are sitting around among the Japanese prisoners after their bivouac is captured, you see an American soldier sitting next to and taunting a dying Japanese soldier. The Japanese soldier is retorting and what he is saying over and over to the American soldier is this: "Kisama mo itsuka shinun da yo!" Kisama is an unfriendly way to say you, similar to "you nasty person". Mo is "too". Itsuka is "someday or sometime, one day et cetera." Shinu is the verb "to die". "Da yo" just gives it force and provides an exclamation point. So he's basically saying "you too, will die someday."

Clooney as a blowhard, which is close to his actual personality, I assume. “They just keep coming,” says the Penn character in narration, “one after another.” Is Malick taking a dig at Clooney as another child of an entertainment industry family slated for stardom, as another Hollywood CIA shill? Maybe, since he cut the scene that frames the Clooney character as a good guy and a pensive man.

What are we to make of Malick’s portrayal of stoic Japanese Buddhists/Shintoists meditating as their positions are overrun?

What does fire mean in this film?