ABSTRACT
The first voice heard in Terence Malick’s The Thin Red Line hauntingly asks, “What is this war at the heart of nature?” In manifold ways, the entire film repeats and suggestively fleshes out this question in terms of the warring that occurs between nature and nature, between humans and the rest of nature, and between humans and humans. Because The Thin Red Line is notoriously nonlinear and equivocal, it refuses to provide internally an easy answer. Critics have, therefore, been led to conflicting interpretive possibilities: the film portrays a world collapse, an indifferent naturalism, a lonely world in which everyone faces death singly, Nietzchean materialism, or, in a rather different vein, a story of love and peace.
