[March 11th marks the 80th anniversary of General Douglas MacArthur’s famous departure from the Philippines. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that moment and four other aspects of the war’s Pacific Theater, leading up to a special post on the U.S.-Filipino relationship.]
On the clear and telling differences between two similarly star-studded
World War II films.
Jack Smight’s Midway (1976) and Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998) have more in common than just their Pacific
Theater settings. Or at least they have one pretty obvious and striking thing
in common: each uses a huge and star-studded cast to capture a wide range of
soldier and officer experiences within its focal battle. Midway features Henry Fonda, Glenn Ford, Charlton Heston, Hal
Holbrook, James Coburn, Dabney Coleman, Robert Mitchum, Toshiro Mifune, Pat
Morita, Cliff Robertson, Robert Wagner, and Erik Estrada (among others!); Line includes Sean Penn, Adrien Brody,
Jim Caviezel, George Clooney, John Cusack, Woody Harrelson, Nick Nolte, John C.
Reilly, and John Travolta (to say nothing of the equally big-name actors, such
as Martin Sheen, Billy Bob Thornton, and Gary Oldman, whose parts were cut by
Malick during editing). When it comes to cast size and scope, the two films are
similarly old-school epics to be sure.
The similarities pretty much end there, though, and while some of the
differences can be attributed to Malick’s particular and very unique style—see:
long, long shots of waving grass and the
like—others can reveal a great deal about both the eras in which the films were
made and the distinct genres in which they could be classified. For example, Midway makes significant use of stock
footage, both from wartime camera shots of aerial battles and from numerous other
films (American and Japanese); Malick’s film features no such footage. That’s
partly a difference in period, as the use of stock footage was still
somewhat common in the 1970s and has almost entirely disappeared from
filmmaking in the decades since (other than in rare and significant cases such
as Forrest Gump). But to my mind it
also reveals a key difference in the films’ emphases and goals: Midway is largely uninterested in
engaging critically or analytically with the history it portrays, focusing
instead on the character identities, interactions, and communities as they
experience those events; whereas in Line individual
characters come and go almost at random (and again, some were dropped entirely
in post-production), making the history itself far more consistently central
than any particular identities or interactions—and making the battle scenes the
film’s acknowledged centerpieces, rather than simply stock footage to be
quickly shown before we get back to the characters.
To connect those distinct emphases to genre, I would argue that the films
break down along the “period fiction” vs. “historical fiction” line that I
delineated in this post. As I noted
there, such a distinction is never absolute when it comes to individual
works—it would be silly to claim that Midway
could be set against the backdrop of any battle without changing in one
important way or another; and some of Line’s
key themes of individual choice and war’s destructiveness could be located in
any military conflict. Moreover, it’s important to note that Midway includes an interesting subplot
dealing with a very specific and important history, that of the Japanese Internment. Yet those qualifications notwithstanding, Midway is to my mind about
its star-studded cast, and the individual characters they create and
interactions they portray; while Line’s
famously haphazard usage of its equally starry cast makes clear how much Malick sees those
individuals as instead part of a larger and more central tapestry. While that
distinction does to my mind make Malick’s the more historically complex and
interesting film, the truth, as so often in this space, is this: watching both
provides a particularly balanced picture of how epic films can portray war.
Next
PacificStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other aspects of the Pacific Theater you’d highlight?
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