Sir, - Kevin Myers's knowledge of the obscenity of war is not matched by his understanding of films, if his article on Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line is anything to go by. In stating the blindingly obvious - that art cannot convey a complete experience of the reality of war - he ignores Coleridge's plea that an act of faith is required for an understanding of poetry, or indeed any art: the willing suspension of disbelief.
Someone whose name I cannot recall once said that soldiers fight wars so that someone can write about them - the point being that if this were a world full of sweetness and light there would be no need for writers or movies, or indeed journalists. There is, in Kevin Myers's critique, a whiff of the fact-laden journalist putting those unreliable artistic guys in their place. Movie directors don't stick to the facts; they don't tell it like it is; they want to be poetic.
But if Terence Malick wanted "to make a great, filmically poetic statement about war", he should be judged on whether he succeeds in doing that, and not on the impossibility of bringing the total reality of war into the cinema.
In journalism, a strict adherence to what actually happened is essential; in art, reality is a false god, another form of make-believe. This truth is summed up for me in W. B. Yeats's lovely lines: "Painted players and stage took all my love, and not those things they were emblems of". - Yours, etc.,
Paul Butler, Neagh Road, Terenure, Dublin 6W.