I was less prepared for Malick than most.
Looking back, that was undoubtably a good thing.
I'd never seen Badlands. I'd never seen Days of Heaven. If I had, I don't think I would have been equipped to endure the twenty or so intervening years, knowing that one of cinema's modern masters was alive, kicking and keeping his life-expanding lens firmly capped.
But I hadn't, so I went into The Thin Red Line with little more than the faint anticipation that builds from hearing everyone around you readying themselves to be astonished.
I expected a war film.
I experienced poetry.
Those three words right there make the following 3,000 all the harder. The Thin Red Line is a difficult film to do justice to in words. Firstly because of its ethereal poetic heart, which bleeds forth in Malick's floating, bodiless voiceovers and in his symbolic use of images and imagery. Secondly because of how immersive an experience it is, how it enfolds, caresses and buffets you from beginning to end. And finally because it is such a personal film, which may sound strange given I've never fought in the Pacific (and don't expect I ever will). Why that is, I have never quite been able to put my finger on. If I had to explain it in a sentence it would be that Malick manages to combine poetry's soaring indelible truth with the inexact immediacy of life's grimy viscera.
Now to make sense of that...
-oOo-
Paradise and the Green Poison of War
I've always felt a curious affinity with Witt. That probably sounds ridiculous given Malick's young soldier is about the most accessible entry point into the philosophical maelstrom that is The Thin Red Line. Perhaps many people feel an affinity with Witt. Perhaps many people don't think it curious that they do. I still do.
I'm no soldier. Witt is no soldier. I find it hard to place myself in Witt's shoes, and at the same time I don't. Perhaps it is that, like Witt, I am a dreamer. I can take myself anywhere in an instant. In the horror of WWII, that is exactly what Witt does, both physically (at the film's opening), then mentally, either back to his childhood, to his mother's bedroom, or back to his newfound paradise. Dreaming comes in useful as soon as Witt and his buddy are wrenched from paradise. The look of The Thin Red Line becomes gun-metal severe, all steel plates and rivets. Faces float in front of blackness. We may be part of nature but we've built ourselves a cage and not given ourselves a window.
Witt's memories become his window, a way to go back to a happier, more connected time. The snatches of the past are fleeting, flowing, insubstantial but nourishing amongst the ringing metal floors. These flights of fancy, these transportative digressions assert the souls of these warmongering men. Individually they are barely-men who have hopes and fears and loves and dreams of being back with their families or anywhere out of harm's way. Together they are a force of unthinking destruction, out of step with their own ecosystem.
One image stuck with me when I first saw The Thin Red Line. A small, insignificant image. It was probably never planned, just something captured and given prominence by Malick in the editing suite. It is the image of a young soldier caught in the rage of war, lowered in the grass, hiding from the unseen enemy.
Between heartbeats he reaches out and rolls his finger along the back of a leave. The leaf gently folds its two halves together as the soldier stares in wonderment.
Somehow, amidst all this death, there is the chance for a connection. A brief acknowledgement that the world we grew apart from can still hold us in its thrall.
Man on Man
In doing so, Malick creates the anti-war film par excellence, balancing intense external action with equally intense self-inspection. In the gulf between thought and action Malick finds his bloodletting honesty. Time and again we see the dissonance of word and action. We see Nick Nolte's Lt. Col. Tall deferring to John Travolta's patronising Brigadier General many years his junior, whilst on the inside his world-weary hackles raise. We see Tall's unspoken insecurity push into the battlefield with brutish force, insisting Capt. Staros (Elias Koteas) order his company to certain death, a command Staros refuses to much bluster.
Malick depicts a battlefield where insecurity is layered upon insecurity, where nobody is fully sure of their decisions and where, given the lives at stake, they shouldn't be. Malick allows his soldiers to question but rarely to act in direct insubordination. Staros' act of defiance creates one of The Thin Red Line's most impressive heroes, one that perfectly fits the film's framework of moral uncertainty. Staros is one of the few soldiers who, despite the barking orders to consign his company to their graves, despite begin absolved by his own men of the decision, despite knowing the chain of command, finds the strength to put his insecurity to good use.
Even Malick's more obvious heroes, such as John Cusack's Capt. John Gaff, find a place to draw the line, thereby leaching out the hypocrisy of hierarchy and the limits of honour.
Before the close of The Thin Red Line most of these men have fallen behind Witt in their questioning of military authority and the righteousness of war, or fallen below the grass line. Capt. Staros has called it out and been given an honourable dismissal for his trouble. Capt. Gaff has challenged its priorities, and been dressed down for it. Even Lt. Col. Tall is granted his moment of sobering, soul-destroying self reflection.
It is Welsh though who sees the true enormity of Witt's vision and who has to mourn both Witt and the other world he himself cannot encompass. Witt enters into his own personal poetic freedom. Welsh is left to continue to trudge back into the man-made inferno.
Fire and Mercy
Both sides grieve the loss of their humanity. Japanese troops silently pray, waiting for the end, or scream quietly over their lost friends. The Americans drown themselves in drink. One soldier whimpers holding the teeth he has pulled from his enemies and the world closes in around him.
"War," says Pfc. Doll, "don't ennoble men. It turns 'em into dogs. Poisons the soul." Nobody walks out of the scene a hero, they only walk out alive. Alive on the outside, perhaps, deader on the inside.
Love, Loss and Family
In my younger years, it was Pvt. Bell's solitude that moved me the most. I connected with his romantic idealism, his staunch belief that love can keep the world true. Not having loved myself, I felt his aching loneliness as much as I felt his betrayal. When Bell's wispy wife (Miranda Otto) writes him asking for a divorce, I felt it as keenly as he because love was only conceptual for me. She didn't just betray him, she betrayed love. It is easier to think that way when you don't have to take into account another human being. Now, having lived a little more, I feel her situation just as keenly.
What strikes me more now is the camaraderie and sense of family Malick builds amongst the soldiers on Guadalcanal in the fallout of the success of their manoeuvre. I look at Witt and Welsh and their moment in the dusk. I look at Doll as he stares across the carrier surveying his brothers. I look at Staros emotionally saying farewell to the men he has now adopted into his heart as his sons.
Paradise Lost
We find it overrun, diseased. The men who never used to fight are at each others' throats. The children are fly-ridden, their one-time shyness has become wariness and fear. Whatever the soldiers brought with them, the seed of evil in their soul, has taken over. The crocodile is captured.
Witt's world is now even more distant, removed from our world forever. He leaves, when he leaves, to a place that exists only in memory.
There is no such thing as the untouched. Not nowadays. We've been everywhere. Done everything. Experienced all. Shared all. Devoured all.
Malick takes us back to a time before we devoured, shared, experienced, went, touched. He finds a world we were yet to corrupt. A world we were still to strip bare. He asks us to watch its destruction, to bear witness to our folly.
He asks us to create paradise in retrospect, as if we can undo what has been done. As if we can un-be what we are. As if we can find within ourselves that moment where the horror of the life we have fashioned for ourselves is less real.
If we cherished those moments more, maybe we would never have gotten ourselves into such a mess.
The Thin Red Line is #62 in my Personal 100, a journey back through my hundred most beloved films.
You can track my progress here.
What's this war in the heart of nature?
Why does nature vie with itself?
The land contend with the sea?
Is there an avenging power in nature?
Not one power, but two?
Out of the darkness, under the low groan of a throbbing chord, a hulking blue-grey crocodile glides under the green-algaed waters of paradise. It is the one concession in the Melanesian idyll that opens The Thin Red Line that this world is not inherently peaceful. It is a lurking unrest in Malick's uncomplicated, unspoilt, idealised vision of paradise.
I bristled slightly revisiting Malick's Melanesia this time around. It is a paradise too uncomplicated, too unspoilt, too idealised, too untouched by "civilisation", and what's more it is populated with only the noblest "savages". Then I checked myself. I think back to when I first experienced the pristine beaches of the film's carefree opening scenes and and I remember how they affected me. I was living at the time in a remote Aboriginal community with friends who themselves had to bridge the disconnect between their lives and their representation in the mass media on a daily basis. This meant that back then I was more than ready to pick apart Malick's simplistic idealism, and yet, I found myself immediately involved.
To be fair, this idealism serves a purpose in The Thin Red Line's thematic DNA and it is easily read as a Westerners under-developed viewer an unfamiliar world. Whether you want to take that Westerner to be Jim Caviezel's Pvt. Witt or Malick himself is your call, yet it is interesting to note that Malick returned to similar territory in fuller force with his next film, The New World. Back then, out of appreciation for the enclosed experience he gave me, I gave Malick the benefit of the doubt. On reflection, I am even more inclined to cut him slack on this score, purely because in the scope of Malick's ecosystem, we are all organisms. Malick's camera levels us all with an ethnographer's keen eye for observation. We all become part of nature. That is to say, he lets us know that while we may set ourselves apart from the rest of the planet, its plants, its crocodiles, its other peoples, he doesn't.
When Malick asks, through Witt, "Why does nature vie with itself?", we are a part of that vying. A rather large part of it, in fact.
Approached from this less privileged vantage point, Malick's paradise is necessarily idealised, it takes on a poetic hue and draws its potency from its otherworldliness. It is an escape. A concept that exists in the ether. It inspires from intangible distance. It exists in the past, in "the good old days" and it exists, depending on your religious persuasion, in the future. As soon as Witt leaves the beach, Malick uses its distance to profound effect.
I bristled slightly revisiting Malick's Melanesia this time around. It is a paradise too uncomplicated, too unspoilt, too idealised, too untouched by "civilisation", and what's more it is populated with only the noblest "savages". Then I checked myself. I think back to when I first experienced the pristine beaches of the film's carefree opening scenes and and I remember how they affected me. I was living at the time in a remote Aboriginal community with friends who themselves had to bridge the disconnect between their lives and their representation in the mass media on a daily basis. This meant that back then I was more than ready to pick apart Malick's simplistic idealism, and yet, I found myself immediately involved.
To be fair, this idealism serves a purpose in The Thin Red Line's thematic DNA and it is easily read as a Westerners under-developed viewer an unfamiliar world. Whether you want to take that Westerner to be Jim Caviezel's Pvt. Witt or Malick himself is your call, yet it is interesting to note that Malick returned to similar territory in fuller force with his next film, The New World. Back then, out of appreciation for the enclosed experience he gave me, I gave Malick the benefit of the doubt. On reflection, I am even more inclined to cut him slack on this score, purely because in the scope of Malick's ecosystem, we are all organisms. Malick's camera levels us all with an ethnographer's keen eye for observation. We all become part of nature. That is to say, he lets us know that while we may set ourselves apart from the rest of the planet, its plants, its crocodiles, its other peoples, he doesn't.
When Malick asks, through Witt, "Why does nature vie with itself?", we are a part of that vying. A rather large part of it, in fact.
Approached from this less privileged vantage point, Malick's paradise is necessarily idealised, it takes on a poetic hue and draws its potency from its otherworldliness. It is an escape. A concept that exists in the ether. It inspires from intangible distance. It exists in the past, in "the good old days" and it exists, depending on your religious persuasion, in the future. As soon as Witt leaves the beach, Malick uses its distance to profound effect.
I've always felt a curious affinity with Witt. That probably sounds ridiculous given Malick's young soldier is about the most accessible entry point into the philosophical maelstrom that is The Thin Red Line. Perhaps many people feel an affinity with Witt. Perhaps many people don't think it curious that they do. I still do.
I'm no soldier. Witt is no soldier. I find it hard to place myself in Witt's shoes, and at the same time I don't. Perhaps it is that, like Witt, I am a dreamer. I can take myself anywhere in an instant. In the horror of WWII, that is exactly what Witt does, both physically (at the film's opening), then mentally, either back to his childhood, to his mother's bedroom, or back to his newfound paradise. Dreaming comes in useful as soon as Witt and his buddy are wrenched from paradise. The look of The Thin Red Line becomes gun-metal severe, all steel plates and rivets. Faces float in front of blackness. We may be part of nature but we've built ourselves a cage and not given ourselves a window.
Witt's memories become his window, a way to go back to a happier, more connected time. The snatches of the past are fleeting, flowing, insubstantial but nourishing amongst the ringing metal floors. These flights of fancy, these transportative digressions assert the souls of these warmongering men. Individually they are barely-men who have hopes and fears and loves and dreams of being back with their families or anywhere out of harm's way. Together they are a force of unthinking destruction, out of step with their own ecosystem.
Together they press into the green undulating hills of Guadalcanal. They are a cancer entering a nature's healthy body, a devastating natural corruption. They have no role there. The locals don't recognise them for what they are and they don't register the local's absence of urgency.
There's a wonderful scene when the column led by Sgt. Storm and Pfc. Doll (John C. Reilly and Dash Mihok) are passed by an Islander going about his day to day life. They stare at the old man, perplexed. He glances nonchalantly back. It is an incongruous image and one of the few times Malick allows these two worlds to come into direct contact. The bewildered look in Doll's eyes, his confusion, speaks volumes of how disconnected he and the rest of the American forces are from their surroundings. We see beauty, they see menace. And with good cause.
The flowing grasses of the battlefield hide their enemy, the other cancer, the one they are competing with to see who can demolish the most beauty in the shortest amount of time. Malick devotes an inordinate amount of time to nature's unnerving, beautiful silence, its still movement, the grasses' rippling indifference. It is as if the island lays waiting, ready staring accusatorially at the mens' movements. Two privates stand above the grass to scout the ridge and from nowhere two bullets take them. The grasses continue to sway indifferently and the carnage begins.
There's a wonderful scene when the column led by Sgt. Storm and Pfc. Doll (John C. Reilly and Dash Mihok) are passed by an Islander going about his day to day life. They stare at the old man, perplexed. He glances nonchalantly back. It is an incongruous image and one of the few times Malick allows these two worlds to come into direct contact. The bewildered look in Doll's eyes, his confusion, speaks volumes of how disconnected he and the rest of the American forces are from their surroundings. We see beauty, they see menace. And with good cause.
The flowing grasses of the battlefield hide their enemy, the other cancer, the one they are competing with to see who can demolish the most beauty in the shortest amount of time. Malick devotes an inordinate amount of time to nature's unnerving, beautiful silence, its still movement, the grasses' rippling indifference. It is as if the island lays waiting, ready staring accusatorially at the mens' movements. Two privates stand above the grass to scout the ridge and from nowhere two bullets take them. The grasses continue to sway indifferently and the carnage begins.
One image stuck with me when I first saw The Thin Red Line. A small, insignificant image. It was probably never planned, just something captured and given prominence by Malick in the editing suite. It is the image of a young soldier caught in the rage of war, lowered in the grass, hiding from the unseen enemy.
Between heartbeats he reaches out and rolls his finger along the back of a leave. The leaf gently folds its two halves together as the soldier stares in wonderment.
Somehow, amidst all this death, there is the chance for a connection. A brief acknowledgement that the world we grew apart from can still hold us in its thrall.
---
Maybe all men got one big soul who everybody's a part of.
All faces of the same man.
One big self.
Everyone looking for salvation by himself.
Each like a coal drawn from the fire.
None of this discussion of nature and destruction and dislocation is intended to take away from the importance of what this military action was meant to achieve. Seizing control of Guadalcanal from the Japanese meant removing their impending ability to mount air assaults on the east coast of Australia and the west coast of the United States, which would have been a pressing fear following the destruction to Pearl Harbour the year before.
I'll quite proudly admit to being a pacifist. I don't understand violence. I'm not naive enough to believe that it isn't sometimes a necessity but I'd like to believe that international conflicts can be diffused before any one nation needs to take up arms. The Thin Red Line crushes that belief unceremoniously. Not because it delves into the gestation of WWII but because it lays bare the ridiculous cock-measuring that men are prone to. In the face of that, humankind has no way to avoid war.
Men have an innate desire to control. They gain outward strength from their ability to order others around. Given enough time and enough people under their command and outward strength becomes inner meaning. Men draw their personal worth from their ability to control. At least in the army they do. This is a truth that Malick's film masterfully asserts. It is also a truth he has Witt persistently pick apart, perceptively, sensitively, and morally.
Witt's sits outside the hierarchy of men. We meet him on an island that, if we are being generous to Malick, is completely egalitarian (if we are not so generous, Witt merely sits atop the heap in his army khakis) and that island egalitarianism remains in his soul even as he is reabsorbed into the army's regimentation. Witt's interrogation by 1st Sgt. Edward Welsh (Sean Penn) exemplifies his churlish refusal to live by military rule, just as it lays the foundation for Welsh's practical education on the matter.
I'll quite proudly admit to being a pacifist. I don't understand violence. I'm not naive enough to believe that it isn't sometimes a necessity but I'd like to believe that international conflicts can be diffused before any one nation needs to take up arms. The Thin Red Line crushes that belief unceremoniously. Not because it delves into the gestation of WWII but because it lays bare the ridiculous cock-measuring that men are prone to. In the face of that, humankind has no way to avoid war.
Men have an innate desire to control. They gain outward strength from their ability to order others around. Given enough time and enough people under their command and outward strength becomes inner meaning. Men draw their personal worth from their ability to control. At least in the army they do. This is a truth that Malick's film masterfully asserts. It is also a truth he has Witt persistently pick apart, perceptively, sensitively, and morally.
Witt's sits outside the hierarchy of men. We meet him on an island that, if we are being generous to Malick, is completely egalitarian (if we are not so generous, Witt merely sits atop the heap in his army khakis) and that island egalitarianism remains in his soul even as he is reabsorbed into the army's regimentation. Witt's interrogation by 1st Sgt. Edward Welsh (Sean Penn) exemplifies his churlish refusal to live by military rule, just as it lays the foundation for Welsh's practical education on the matter.
WELSH - In this world, a man himself is nothing and there ain't no world but this one.
WITT - Your wrong there... I've seen another world. Sometimes I think it was just my imaginationRules, hierarchy and the human cost warfare weigh heavy on everyone in under Malick's purview and though only a few of them outwardly challenge military order, he ensures everyone's insecurities are open to inspection.
In doing so, Malick creates the anti-war film par excellence, balancing intense external action with equally intense self-inspection. In the gulf between thought and action Malick finds his bloodletting honesty. Time and again we see the dissonance of word and action. We see Nick Nolte's Lt. Col. Tall deferring to John Travolta's patronising Brigadier General many years his junior, whilst on the inside his world-weary hackles raise. We see Tall's unspoken insecurity push into the battlefield with brutish force, insisting Capt. Staros (Elias Koteas) order his company to certain death, a command Staros refuses to much bluster.
Malick depicts a battlefield where insecurity is layered upon insecurity, where nobody is fully sure of their decisions and where, given the lives at stake, they shouldn't be. Malick allows his soldiers to question but rarely to act in direct insubordination. Staros' act of defiance creates one of The Thin Red Line's most impressive heroes, one that perfectly fits the film's framework of moral uncertainty. Staros is one of the few soldiers who, despite the barking orders to consign his company to their graves, despite begin absolved by his own men of the decision, despite knowing the chain of command, finds the strength to put his insecurity to good use.
Even Malick's more obvious heroes, such as John Cusack's Capt. John Gaff, find a place to draw the line, thereby leaching out the hypocrisy of hierarchy and the limits of honour.
I've waited all my life for this. I've worked, slaved, eaten... oh, untold buckets of shit to have this opportunity! And I don't intend to give it up now. You don't know what it feels like to be passed over. I mean, you're young. You're just out of the Academy. You're, you know, you've got your war! This 15 years, this is my first war!
Before the close of The Thin Red Line most of these men have fallen behind Witt in their questioning of military authority and the righteousness of war, or fallen below the grass line. Capt. Staros has called it out and been given an honourable dismissal for his trouble. Capt. Gaff has challenged its priorities, and been dressed down for it. Even Lt. Col. Tall is granted his moment of sobering, soul-destroying self reflection.
It is Welsh though who sees the true enormity of Witt's vision and who has to mourn both Witt and the other world he himself cannot encompass. Witt enters into his own personal poetic freedom. Welsh is left to continue to trudge back into the man-made inferno.
---
Are you righteous? Kind?
Does your confidence lie in this?
Are you loved by all?
Know that l was, too.
Do you imagine your sufferings will be less because you loved goodness?
Truth?
It is almost an hour and forty minutes into The Thin Red Line before we get any serious look at the enemy. Till Capt. Gaff's seizure of the bunker that had been cutting the men down so relentlessly, the enemy were nothing more than unseen bullets and shapes in the grass. Now, conquered, they are given faces to be hated, pitied, distrusted.
It is a necessary evil of war films that they require an oversimplification of whatever conflict they are treating. The best war films (and I cannot admit to seeing too many) understand that the greatest enemy in any war is war itself. War is a shared folly, and while it may have reasonable justification at the outset, those getting chewed up on the front line are rarely those with the greatest stake in the decision making. Malick understands this full well. In his film he finds an admirable balance between dehumanising the Japanese and humanising them. The first must be done to give the soldiers credibility, the second to give his film as a whole the same.
The Thin Red Line's centrepiece battle is no triumphant rout of the Japanese, it is a horrifying, stomach churning, soul carving undertaking that brings every soldier face to face with their own mortality and the depths they will go to survive. This scene is the well where all of Malick's moral ambiguity, uncertainty and hopelessness drains. Within it, the fear of the soldiers on both sides folds in upon their hopes, crushes their humanity and devolves them back to basest organisms.
Both sides grieve the loss of their humanity. Japanese troops silently pray, waiting for the end, or scream quietly over their lost friends. The Americans drown themselves in drink. One soldier whimpers holding the teeth he has pulled from his enemies and the world closes in around him.
"War," says Pfc. Doll, "don't ennoble men. It turns 'em into dogs. Poisons the soul." Nobody walks out of the scene a hero, they only walk out alive. Alive on the outside, perhaps, deader on the inside.
---
Love, Loss and Family
My dear wife, you get something twisted out of your insides
by all this blood, filth, and noise.
I wanna stay changeless for you.
I wanna come back to you the man I was before.
How do we get to those other shores?
To those blue hills.
Love.
Where does it come from?
Who lit this flame in us?
No war can put it out, conquer it.
I was a prisoner.
You set me free.
More than staying alive, staying human in war is what most concerns Malick. Having dragged us through the atrocity of hand to hand combat, he forces us to understand the soldiers' eagerness to recede into their memories, these places of solitude war cannot touch.
Malick regularly removes his soldiers to quiet moments of contemplation, to happier places in their lives. Most have their thoughts. Witt has his paradise, his childhood, his mothers bedroom. Pvt. Bell (Ben Chaplin) has his memories of his wife back home. These internal fortresses give the soldiers strength and shield their souls from being torn apart in the melee.
Malick regularly removes his soldiers to quiet moments of contemplation, to happier places in their lives. Most have their thoughts. Witt has his paradise, his childhood, his mothers bedroom. Pvt. Bell (Ben Chaplin) has his memories of his wife back home. These internal fortresses give the soldiers strength and shield their souls from being torn apart in the melee.
In my younger years, it was Pvt. Bell's solitude that moved me the most. I connected with his romantic idealism, his staunch belief that love can keep the world true. Not having loved myself, I felt his aching loneliness as much as I felt his betrayal. When Bell's wispy wife (Miranda Otto) writes him asking for a divorce, I felt it as keenly as he because love was only conceptual for me. She didn't just betray him, she betrayed love. It is easier to think that way when you don't have to take into account another human being. Now, having lived a little more, I feel her situation just as keenly.
What strikes me more now is the camaraderie and sense of family Malick builds amongst the soldiers on Guadalcanal in the fallout of the success of their manoeuvre. I look at Witt and Welsh and their moment in the dusk. I look at Doll as he stares across the carrier surveying his brothers. I look at Staros emotionally saying farewell to the men he has now adopted into his heart as his sons.
Amongst all this I see true loss. These boys weren't only being lost, they were losing. They were losing loved ones they had only just come to love. They were losing men who had saved their lives only to be cut down seconds later. They were building family and having it stolen away from them all at the same time.
Just another of war's evils.
---Just another of war's evils.
Paradise Lost
This great evil.Late in Malick's film, the director returns to paradise.
Where's it come from?
How'd it steal into the world?
What seed, what root did it grow from?
Who's doing this?
Who's killing us?
Robbing us of life and light.
Mocking us with the sight of what we might have known.
Does our ruin benefit the Earth?
Does it help the grass to grow or the sun to shine?
Is this darkness in you, too?
Have you passed through this night?
We find it overrun, diseased. The men who never used to fight are at each others' throats. The children are fly-ridden, their one-time shyness has become wariness and fear. Whatever the soldiers brought with them, the seed of evil in their soul, has taken over. The crocodile is captured.
Witt's world is now even more distant, removed from our world forever. He leaves, when he leaves, to a place that exists only in memory.
There is no such thing as the untouched. Not nowadays. We've been everywhere. Done everything. Experienced all. Shared all. Devoured all.
Malick takes us back to a time before we devoured, shared, experienced, went, touched. He finds a world we were yet to corrupt. A world we were still to strip bare. He asks us to watch its destruction, to bear witness to our folly.
He asks us to create paradise in retrospect, as if we can undo what has been done. As if we can un-be what we are. As if we can find within ourselves that moment where the horror of the life we have fashioned for ourselves is less real.
If we cherished those moments more, maybe we would never have gotten ourselves into such a mess.
---
What difference do you think you can make?
One single man in all this madness.
If you die, it's gonna be for nothing.
There's not some other world out there where everything's gonna be OK.
There's just this one.
Just this rock.
The Thin Red Line is #62 in my Personal 100, a journey back through my hundred most beloved films.
You can track my progress here.
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