Robert Pippin – The Bourgeoisie at War: On Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line

In Terrence Malik’s five films, various genre conventions of Hollywood movies are invoked and clearly structure much of the narration. This is especially true of his 1998 film, The Thin Red Line, which has many of the elements of a Hollywood World War Two movie. But as in his other films, these genre conventions create expectations and suggest explanations that are then undermined, refused, left open, or even ironicized. Moreover, especially in this war movie, Malick’s two dramatic technical innovations – his almost devout emphasis on the visual beauty and sublimity of the natural world, and the unusual meditative voiceovers by individual characters – violate not only genre conventions, but many narrative, dramatic and psychological elements of realist fiction films. (They have also been intensely criticized.) The aim of this paper is to understand the relation between these narratological, visual, and psychological innovations, and the thematic developments in the film, most of which concern a traditional war movie theme: how ordinary citizens of a pacific, commercial republic can both come to participate in acts of extreme violence and come to understand in some way what they are doing. The implications of such a reading for his latest film, The Tree of Life, will also be briefly discussed.

Konzept: Ralph Ubl

Referierende: Robert Pippin (University of Chicago)

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