ABSTRACT
In chapter 1, in which I follow the trajectories of a war photo back to the “home front,” much of my analysis is focused on the forces involved in recruiting the bodies that end up in zones of danger. In this chapter, with analyses of two films, Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter and Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (hereafter TRL), my emphasis is on the bodies themselves. Cimino’s film thinks primarily about the limits to what the men are able to say, while Malick’s film thinks primarily about the limits of their vision. Although both films contain war footage, a very limited amount in The Deer Hunter and a considerable amount in TLR, neither of them is typical of the war film genre. Both evoke complex political and philosophical questions about life and death as they connect wars with the lifeworlds from which American soldiers have entered them. Accordingly, both films achieve what Deleuze ascribes to cinema in his remark “[cinema] does not just present images, it surrounds them with a world.”2 Although neither film delivers an unambiguous position on war, on good versus evil, or on the responsibility for the death and suffering associated with war, they both employ storylines, images, and the juxtapositions that film form can deliver to think about both. Now, as at the time in which they were released-Cimino’s during an intense cinematic reflection on the Vietnam War, as increasingly critical films contested the traditional heroic versions of war cinema, and Malick’s during a cinematic revival in which films appeared to be aimed at resuscitating World War II as the “good war”—both films retain a powerful impetus to think about warring violence while providing appropriate vehicles for extending the reflections and analyses with which this investigation began.
