The following is the result of my attempt to write an entire paper in one day. So hopefully that explains the poor writing and often striking laziness! Only strength of will can prevent me from revising it. Pray for me.

The Other in American War Films

At no other time is the representation of an Other more imperative to a culture than during war. Whenever cultures or civilizations mobilize to inflict violence upon one another with the aim of power or survival, internal difference is naturally the first casualty. One need not resort to citing totalitarian or aggressive nations in order to prove this point. While hardly morally equivalent to Nazi death camps, the American internment of Japanese citizens during World War 2 offers a sobering example of the universal tendency of cultures to expel difference when under threat. An important priority of any war film is to define the other side of the conflict. Whether pro-war, anti-war, or neutral, the war film signifies its meanings largely through the representation of the other and the historical and political context it provides to the conflict at hand.

Director Terrence Malick provides a context of a different sort when he opens The Thin Red Line (1998) with an image of the Serpent. A shot of a crocodile, submerging itself under water, gives way to an image of the floor of a jungle with shafts of sunlight breaking through the thick foliage overhead. A voice asks “What’s this war in the heart of nature? Why does nature vie with itself?” It is clear from the opening montage of the film that Malick intends to address these questions by presenting the duality of nature with the oppositional images of the crocodile, a mindless killing machine, a representation of death, and the trees of the jungle, which represent life. This opposition is slightly reductive, however, as the trees themselves are choked with vines. The Thin Red Line doesn’t simply juxtapose the forces of death and destruction with those of life, but instead the film presents rich contradictions, where death and life are bound to each other inexorably.

The narrative of the film tells the story of the battle of Guadalcanal during World War 2. Malick intentionally avoids placing the battle in historical context (an important victory for American forces in the Pacific) in order to detach the fighting from historical, and hence political, meaning. No dates are given, and only the slightest attention is shown to the wider conflict. Anyone ignorant of the source material for the film (James Jones’ novel of the same title) wouldn’t have the slightest clue what the American forces are fighting for. Malick’s historical vagueness can be contrasted with Steven Spielberg’s use of the subtitle “June 6, 1944” before his depiction of the D-Day invasion in Saving Private Ryan (1998). That date carries enormous meaning for the audience, and it serves to place the ensuing action in a definitive context. The lack of historical markers in The Thin Red Line indicate that Malick is attempting to avoid the inherently political meanings of the war film. Even the climactic battle of the film emerges from a fog which obscures any larger picture of the surroundings. The battle, like the film, is self contained.

In keeping with the dehistoricized and depoliticized nature of the narrative, the Japanese forces in the conflict are never portrayed as less than human. However, with one important exception, they still represent the Other for the American soldiers. In addition to the Japanese forces on the island, the film depicts a second Other in the form of the native inhabitants of the island. After the opening montage several shots appear of native children swimming in gorgeous blue water. These images dissolve to introduce Private Witt. There no explanation given for his presence among them, and only later is it revealed that he is AWOL. The film draws upon a strong tradition of presenting island natives in a utopian paradise, but Malick isn’t simply rebuking civilization with images of a peaceful Other. Instead, much like Melville’s Typee, he examines the seemingly peaceful utopia of the natives in order to throw light on what Melville called “the mystery of iniquity.” As noted before, it would be a mistake to give in to the critical impulse to simplify the film by placing every element into oppositional categories. Malick, just like Melville before him, is asking whether man is fundamentally good or evil, and he consistently complicates every image. Private Witt, symbolically born in this island paradise, is possessed of a powerful innocence throughout the film. Nevertheless, he confesses his fear of death and longing for immortality, meaning that he too is a fallen man. Images of Witt happily cavorting with the natives are contrasted with these morose thoughts and images that place him at a distance from the happy natives. The natives themselves are made more complex when Witt asks a native woman why the children don’t fight. She replies that they sometimes do. When the American cruiser arrives to take Witt away to the battle, a young native boy idly kicks at a dog. Later, human skulls are found in one of the huts.

Why initially confusing, the tireless complexity of the film serves to isolate good and evil, utopia and the fallen world, as forces in their own right. Throughout the film these forces are often contained in and expressed through the same things: Nature, Private Witt, the natives, Sergeant Welsh (Sean Penn), and even Colonel Tall (Nick Nolte). After Witt is captured again, he is placed in an isolated cell, cut off from the other prisoners, yet he says “I love Charlie Company. They’re my people.”

All notions of utopia, illusory or otherwise, disappear when the film arrives at Guadalcanal. After the anti-climactic beach landing, the new strangeness of the Other is expressed when a soldier saying “They got fish that live in trees” is juxtaposed with an image of a native holding a machete. From this point until the end of the film all Others are presented as potentially hostile. Also, at this point the Japanese become the principle Other, while the natives are reduced to a strange unknown, which emphasizes the isolation of the Americans. Even nature menaces them, hiding potential dangers.

Significantly, the Japanese forces are not glimpsed for some time. As the wounded come back from battle, Private Witt muses, “Maybe all men got one big soul…one big self” and he continues later by noting that “everyone looking for salvation by themself. Each like a coal, drawing from fire.” The film’s representation of the other, divorced from historical or political meaning, takes on a tragic awareness of the isolation implied in the loss of innocence. At this point in the film Malick does not attempt to humanize to any significant extent the Japanese because he wants them to remain an unreachable, unknowable Other. The Japanese are non-existent in this portion of the film because it is concerned with the isolation of the Americans.

When the Japanese finally do appear it is at the point of conflict between the soldiers and the Other. In fact, the very first point of view shot for the Japanese is over the barrel of a gun, and even then they are not seen. The effect of this shot is to make the gun itself into the Japanese soldier. From our point of view in the audience all the Japanese represent at this point is conflict and death. In the first large battle of the film, no Japanese soldiers are seen at all, as they are only represented by bullets and explosions. There is perhaps no other scene in the film which so powerfully evokes the idea of a hostile Other, and it is notable that this is only accomplished by eliminating the Other’s actual presence.

Saving Private Ryan offers a similar depiction of the Other in its opening scenes, while its aims are much more conventional. The film takes great pains to create identification between the (presumably American) viewer and the characters. The film borrows from already powerful emotions when it shows an aging American walking through the rows of crosses at Normandy. Soon the film cuts to a beach, and the subtitle “June 6, 1944” appears, placing the film firmly in a specific historical context. All of the preceding gives the ensuing violence meaning and purpose. By doing this, Spielberg effectively brings the film down to earth, and away from the philosophical abstractions of the Malick film. Saving Private Ryan was hailed as the most historically accurate depiction of combat ever, and part of the reason for this response is the film’s declaration of itself as history exemplified by the informative subtitles and the fierce identification with the heroes. Saving Private Ryan is a self consciously conventional war film with ironic pretensions to historical accuracy. It is difficult to separate these elements and determine their meaning, but it is clear that when taken together the film presents the conventional World War 2 film (with extra violence for “realism”) as history.

Having fully defined the Same and placed it in a supposedly objective historical context, the film moves on to the battle and the Other. Once again, soldiers are seemingly slaughtered by bullets and explosions from nowhere. Spielberg employs almost the exact same point of view shot as Malick, but this time from behind a German machine gun. The portions of the Germans we do see (hands, arms) are blacked out. Like their Japanese counterparts, the Germans in Saving Private Ryan are defined as weapons. The meaning of this, however, is slightly different. Because a concrete historical context is explicit in the film the Other in Saving Private Ryan represents an actual Other, rather than the abstracted Other in The Thin Red Line. The implication is simple: the Germans are the bad guys, we are the good guys.

Other events in the film depict how the other is defined in close quarters. After a captured German soldier begins to talk rapidly in German an American soldier tells him to “shut up with that filthy pig-latin.” No subtitles are provided, therefore making the audience identify with the American soldier who cannot understand. One soldier, however, is able to translate the German, and tries to convince the others to spare the life of the prisoner. The prisoner begs for his life by shouting American catchphrases and even attempting to sing the national anthem. They eventually let him go in an affirmation of basic humanity. The prisoner returns again after the climactic battle, and is shot by the formerly sympathetic translator, who in the meantime, through the horror of war and the need for survival, has finally become able to think of the German as an Other. This portion of the narrative is perhaps the most powerful aspect of the film because it dramatizes how the Other is created in war time by the basic drive to protect one’s own and survive.

While The Thin Red Line defines the Other in a philosophical context by removing both historical and political context from the narrative, Saving Private Ryan attempts to define the Other in a strong historical context (thus implicitly political). Apocalypse Now (1979, dir. Coppola) falls somewhere in between. While the film uses classic literature (Conrad’s Heart of Darkness) and a surreal tone to make a philosophical point about war, it sets the narrative in a concrete time and place. It is clear Apocalypse Now is very much about the Vietnam War.

While there are a number of different Others in the film, the two most striking examples are both American commanders. Sergeant Kilgore (Robert Duvall) is portrayed as a death defying monster, unable or unwilling to notice the death and destruction around him long enough to take his mind off surfing and casual amusements. Kurtz (Marlon Brando), on the other hand, is a more sophisticated personality. He, as a highly trained and educated soldier, represents all the best of Western civilization. He also, perhaps paradoxically, represents the darkness (as Conrad called it) that is at the heart of civilization. The implication of the film is that civilization is a fragile thing at best, and an illusion at worst. On top of this, Apocalypse Now depicts the Vietnam War as a colonial nightmare, where Western imperialists are sucked into a moral vacuum where winning becomes the only objective.

The deaths of 18 soldiers in 1993 in Somalia, as depicted in Black Hawk Down evoked strong memories of the madness of Vietnam for many Americans. The film opens with a quote from Plato: “Only the dead have seen the end of war” and continues to offer a similarly bleak view of war. Soldiers refer to the native Somalis as “skinnies” and seem incredulous when one professes to caring about them. Clearly the film, as much as the actual event, represents the clash between idealism and grim reality. The irony becomes thick when soldiers whose intentions were to help feed and protect Somalis are forced to kill hundreds of them in a desperate fight for survival.

One scene in particular examines the American view of the Other at this point in history. A captured American soldier is asked by a Somali whether he thinks “We will put down our weapons, and adopt American Democracy?” The question is clearly rhetorical, and the general disillusion that the film presents answers it firmly in the negative. The intervention in Somalia was an attempt to make the Other into the Same. The crushing failure of the operation, like the quote from Plato, gives rise to a profound pessimism regarding America’s ability to enforce peace by remaking the world in its image. This film, like The Thin Red Line, presents a fallen world where the existence of the Other leads to inevitably to conflict.

Near the end of The Thin Red Line, Private Witt diverts the attention of Japanese soldiers to ensure the escape of his fellow scouts. Eventually he is surrounded on all sides. One Japanese soldier steps forward and shouts something at Witt, who does not understand. No translation is provided. He shouts again, with increasing hostility, and Witt still does not move. The emotional power of the scene is overwhelming because the sense of an unbridgeable divide between the two men is palpable. They are merely feet apart but they can never connect, each is isolated from the other. When Witt makes a move he is shot dead, and Malick returns him to the blue waters from where he came.