Thin Red Line

For some the thin red line is a movie about war. For me it is a book written by James Jones. There is a thin red line between the movie and the book. The book is a brick and might prove discouraging to the average reader. It is a book which, if read properly can be rewarding. As a matter of fact the director of the movie did just that, he read a book which he knew not many people would have the patience to read and he turned it into a movie. The following essay will try to meditate more closely on the process of turning a book into a movie and how editing can be a very painful process similar to killing an actor.

I am one of those people who read the book before seeing the movie. I admit there are not many of us out there- THANK GOD! It takes a lot of patience to read a book over 500 pages in length but it was worth it. After reading the book I searched the internet for information concerning the making of the movie and the making of the book. The treasure I found was a documentary entitled the private world of James Jones. In this short but telling film I viewed on Youtube I could see a man posing as an author.

A creator, a true writer. The setting is Paris. The Paris of the lost generation that came after the other lost generation. I was later to find that the director of the movie also read the book in Paris, at least that's what wikipedia says or said. James Jones looked like Popeye the sailor man. A strong man who liked to talk about fishing and politics after having one too many drinks. Hemingway is the one who most likely inspired the man, but not necessarily the author. Hemingway would never have written such a long novel. But James Jones is writing a book that has to be long in order to transmit a certain feeling of being there. A book about war can either be very short like eric maria remarque's all quiet on the western front, or very long like Tolstoi's War and Peace. It is in my opinion the legacy of the Illiad, a perfect mixture between prose and poetry.

The main purpose of James Jones is to show the reader how different war is from what we think it is. This is where the thin red line emerges between the book and the movie. The movie is always tempted to save the heroic images, the images relating to the soldier, the hero. But the book has the advantage that it has no limits in terms of how long it can be. It can be as long as the writer wants it to be. The movie has to preserve the interesting parts and to avoid the boring ones. The most important quote I found in the book is almost a message given by the hidden genius of the writer to the director: "Bell lay with his face against the rock facing Witt. Witt lay looking back. Quietly in the insect-humming heat they lay and looked at each other. Bell was thinking that Witt had come through it all right. Like himself. What power was it which decided one man should be hit, be killed, instead of another man? So Bugger's little feeling attack was over. If this were a movie, this would be the end of the show and something would be decided. In a movie or a novel they would dramatise and build to the climax of the attack. When the attack came in the film or novel, it would be satisfying. It would decide something. It would have a semblance of meaning and a semblance of an emotion. And immediately after, it would be over.

The audience could go home and think about the semblance of the meaning and feel the semblance of the emotion. Even if the hero got killed, it would still make sense. Art, Bell decided, creative art - was shit." page 244