Abstract

Central to Terrence Malick's 1998 film The Thin Red Line is the lightning strike of insight. Insight: a potentially life-altering phenomenon, a rare melding of language, image, and feeling. Insight: a temporality joining the seductiveness of memory, the perceived purity of the moment, and the threat of insight's decay. This thesis is about the problem of insight, and explores cinema's intervention into the motivation, structure, and representation of this phenomenon as philosophy. Malick's drama of American soldiers struggling to survive the Battle of Guadalcanal depicts a crucible of private insight and compulsive public philosophy through a unique cinematic aesthetic pitched between the sublime and the banal. My discussion centers on Malick's use of 'linguistic' figurative tropes and their interaction with Malick's 'visual' cinematic events: a meeting of two forms of expression which reinvigorates the longstanding 'quarrel' between philosophy and poetry, tests the tension between visual and verbal discourses, and gives expression to the wonder, desire, inequality, and disappointment at the center of the experience of insight. By looking at some of the strategies of philosophic communication experimented with by Plato, Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Walter Benjamin this thesis understands Malick's work as one that renews fundamental questions about the nature of both private philosophic experience and the public mediums through which it is communicated. The Thin Red Line is a unique expression of what is at stake in the meeting of film and philosophy---as well as a stunning artistic achievement---and deserves a thorough analysis.