ABSTRACT
Several authors1 have commented on the importance of the role of death in The Thin Red Line. Their arguments turn on the idea that the film is a philosophical investigation into the nature of death and how each individual has to face his own end. Although we consider this to be true, we differ from previous authors in the way we view how death is treated in the film. The main focus of previous work on the subject is solely on the role of death as a terminal biological or ontic phenomenon, what Heidegger terms “demise.” For Heidegger, terminal death “is something distinctively impending” (Heidegger 1962: 294), an event that will one day overtake each of us. But ontological death as Heidegger understands it is “a way to be” (ibid.: 245). It is a way of living that takes account of our constant vulnerability to the collapse of our way of life. Most of the deaths in the film are not cases of demise but of the loss of what gives
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beings in cases of world collapse such as identity failure, and that can befall a culture or a cultural epoch in cases such as being taken over by a culture with an alien cultural style (for a striking example, see Lear 2007). We are interested in two important differences between demise and all existential ontological ways of dying.
