This is Part II of our coverage of The Thin Red Line. Check out Part I here, or wherever you get podcasts.
Few war films feel as sensuous, fractured, and unsettlingly beautiful as The Thin Red Line. Released the same year as Saving Private Ryan but standing in stark contrast to Spielberg’s unabashed Americanism, Terrence Malick’s adaptation of James Jones’ novel turns war into a meditation on nature, destruction, cosmos, self. Van and Lyle welcome Andrew Coville, fellow Afghanistan veteran and author of Summer 2009, to try to make sense of the film’s most enigmatic but intriguing glimpses. Is there really “an avenging power” hidden in the natural world, as one character wonders? Or is there, as another counters, “no world but this one?”
The discussion explores the film’s mesmerizing cinematography, score, voiceovers and portrayals of combat leadership, from Nick Nolte’s grizzled officer desperate for his moment of battlefield glory to Sean Penn’s hard-earned cynicism. As well as when Malick gets the war’s technical nuances right, and how it’s the stray lines—“We were a family. How did we break up and grow apart?”—and nonviolent if excruciating interludes—like the “Dear Jack” letter scene—where the narrative’s force lands its hardest blows.
Further Reading
Summer 2009 (2023), by Andrew Coville
“The Iliad, or The Poem of Force,” by Simone Weil (1945)
“Terrence Malick’s ‘The Thin Red Line’: The Traumatic and Poetic Journey into the Heart of Man,” by Sven Mikulec
The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America, edited by Hannah Patterson
The Thin Red Line Trailer
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