A Critical Companion to Terrence Malick (Critical Companions to Contemporary Directors) 1793608628, 9781793608628

Citation preview

A Critical Companion to Terrence Malick

Critical Companions to Contemporary Directors Series Editors: Adam Barkman and Antonio Sanna Critical Companions to Contemporary Directors covers many directors who have not been studied previously in academic publications and whose works nonetheless are highly renowned nowadays. The intent of the series is to offer interesting and illuminating interpretations of the various directors’ films that will be accessible to both scholars of the academic community and critically minded fans of the directors’ works. Each volume combines discussions of a director’s oeuvre from a broad range of disciplines and methodologies, thus offering the reader a variegated and compelling picture of the directors’ works. In this sense, the volumes will be of interest (and will be instructive) for students and scholars engaged in subjects as different as film studies, literature, philosophy, popular culture studies, religion and others. We welcome proposals for both monographs and edited collections that offer interdisciplinary analyses, focusing on the complete oeuvre of one contemporary director per volume.

Titles in the Series A Critical Companion to Terrence Malick, edited by Joshua Sikora A Critical Companion to Steven Spielberg, edited by Adam Barkman and Antonio Sanna

A Critical Companion to Terrence Malick Edited by

Joshua Sikora

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2020 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Name: Sikora, Joshua, 1984–, editor. Title: A critical companion to Terrence Malick / edited by Joshua Sikora. Description: Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “This collection presents comprehensive, unique scholarly analyses of Terrence Malick’s films through the lenses of philosophy, poetry, cinema, and theology”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020035840 (print) | LCCN 2020035841 (ebook) | ISBN 9781793608628 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781793608635 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Malick, Terrence, 1943—Criticism and interpretation. Classification: LCC PN1998.3.M3388 C75 2021 (print) | LCC PN1998.3.M3388 (ebook) | DDC 791.4302/33092—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020035840 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020035841 TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

To my teachers, John Mark, Craig, Matt, Al, and Pat, who cleared a path and showed the way forward

Contents

Introduction

ix

Part One: A Path of Philosophy 1 Thinking of Film: What Is Cavellian about Malick’s Movies? David LaRocca 2 Here and There: Malick’s Cinema and McGilchrist’s “Divided Brain” Adam Daniel 3 The Beautiful Light: The Supernaturalist Argument of The Thin Red Line David J. Gilbert Part Two: A Path of Poetry 4 Saturated Meaning, Poetic Portrayal: Phenomenology in the Films of Terrence Malick Kip Redick 5 How Can a Film Be Poetic?: The Case of The Thin Red Line Timothy E.G. Bartel 6 Fractal Reader-Response Structure: A New Narrative Theory in the Work of Terrence Malick Joshua Russell Part Three: A Path of Cinema 7 Auteurs and Movie Brats: Placing Malick’s Extraordinary Career in Context Dean Yamada vii

3

21

41

61 81

95

121

viii

Contents

8 The Search for Time: Terrence Malick and Andrei Tarkovsky in Dialogue Anthony Parisi 9 The Journey Home: A Unity of Memory and Cosmology in Cinema Joshua Sikora Part Four: A Path of Faith 10 Disputing Henri de Lubac’s Nature and Grace and Job’s Ending: The Tree of Life as Theological Discourse Naaman Wood 11 The Gifts of Death: Visions of Sacrifice in the Worlds of Terrence Malick Vernon W. Cisney 12 A Universal Priesthood: The Vocation of Being Human in Days of Heaven and To the Wonder Matthew Aughtry Part Five: A Way Forward 13 The Smile of Life: Recollections on Malick and the Work of Cinema Reno Lauro

137

155

177

199

217

237

Index

265

About the Contributors

269

Introduction

From the dust of the Montana plains to the farthest reaches of the cosmos, for nearly fifty years Terrence Malick’s films have enchanted audiences with transcendent images of nature, humanity, and grace. In an industry of evershifting ephemeral artifice, his work endures with a sense of solidity, reality, and truth. Few filmmakers in any era have been so attuned to the beauty of light and life, and to the deeper revelations that are buried in the shadows of our earth and souls. Malick’s films command our attention and imagination, yet the man himself remains a mystery. Conspicuously private and humble, he has managed to escape the Hollywood spotlight, enjoying the blessings of anonymity and simplicity in an industry built around celebrity and decadence. After an infamous two-decade hiatus from filmmaking and another twenty years avoiding press and publicity surrounding his films, Malick has developed a legendary mystique, prompting rampant speculation about his artistic intentions, unorthodox production techniques, unique cinematic style, and personal beliefs. Given the indisputable creativity and thought displayed in his films, it is little wonder that his admirers, imitators, and critics all want a peek behind the curtain—a chance to understand what guides and inspires the master. And yet the thrust of his work suggests that when it comes to life’s greatest mysteries, Malick sees far more value in asking hard questions than in settling for easy answers. Filling in the gaps of his biography and chasing after his personal motivations distract from more fruitful engagement directly with his films. Knowing more about Malick without actually knowing Malick is a vain and hollow exercise—his cinematic artistry points beyond himself toward deep, universal truths that resonate and take root upon contemplation and reflection.

ix

x

Introduction

In this book, my coauthors and I strive for this deeper level of engagement, working to consider the profound implications of Malick’s stories, images, processes, and convictions. Within this context, we seek to understand the way of Terrence Malick—that is, the path that his work charts for us—a path that extends back through a rich history of mentors, inspirations, and influences; a path that has been walked by philosophers and poets, priests and farmers; a path that, he seems to suggest, stretches forward through eternity, far beyond our finite mortality. It is along this path that I hope each reader will find fruit—wisdom and truth that can nourish or enrich you on your own journey through cinema, art, and life. ANCIENT WISDOM When his ninth feature film, Song to Song, premiered at the 2017 South by Southwest Film Festival in his hometown of Austin, Texas, it was no surprise that Terrence Malick was not in attendance. Dating back to The Thin Red Line (1998), Malick has avoided almost all public events surrounding his films, skipping premieres, press junkets, and award ceremonies. And yet, to the great amazement of everyone at the festival, Malick broke this tradition and made himself available for an extended Q&A the day after Song to Song’s premiere. Joined by the film’s star, Michael Fassbender, and moderated by a fellow Austin filmmaker, Richard Linklater, Malick humbly and graciously dialogued with a small crowd of festival-goers for more than an hour. By good fortune, I happened to be in the audience. As a university professor, I have had the privilege of teaching a number of classes over the years that have incorporated Malick’s work to varying degrees. As many scholars have noted, Malick’s films make frequent reference to classic works of literature and philosophy, so I would often ask my students to read some of these foundational texts that likely had an influence on the various films we were studying. That morning in March 2017, I took the opportunity to ask Malick if there were any particular works of literature or philosophy that he felt would merit study alongside his own work. As with all of the questions asked of him that day, he answered with a quiet humility and slight apprehension, downplaying his own significant academic training (a graduate of Harvard, a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, a student of Martin Heidegger and Stanley Cavell, eventually serving as a professor at MIT, yet in reference to this period, he said, “I didn’t understand what I was meant to be teaching, so I felt like I had to do something else”). After a moment of reflection, he went on to say: As for philosophy . . . as to what texts I would recommend, I had always wished that they had taught the ancients more. But in the university, they’re quite neglected and so it was only later on that I read them and found—I

Introduction

xi

wished they’d been taught—they’re actually good to teach in film school, not just a normal university setting. 1

The influence of ancient philosophy, from Plato to Plotinus, is increasingly evident in Malick’s films, and yet his suggestion that they be taught in film school is perhaps most interesting. As will be explored throughout this volume, there is much that filmmakers can learn about their craft from the art of philosophy—even from ancient philosophers who lived millennia before the invention of cinema. Elsewhere in that rare Q&A appearance, Malick and Fassbender discussed how John Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost, served as the inspiration for Fassbender’s character in Song to Song—a music producer channeling Milton’s Satan in a modern-day parable about temptation, sin, and grace. Malick and Linklater also traded stories about filmmaking, cinematic influences, and the practical challenges of production. This brief peek into Malick’s process—his philosophical foundations, poetic inspirations, cinematic innovations, and spiritual questions—provides a road map from which we may begin a thoughtful exploration of his creative work. WHITHER AND WHENCE Early in Malick’s 1978 film, Days of Heaven, the Farmer (Sam Shepard) asks Abby (Brooke Adams), “Where are you from? . . . Where do you go from here?” 2 His words echo an ancient greeting asked of travelers in the midst of their journeys. The simple questions belie the complexity of what is being asked, for upon reflection a traveler can speak not only of the external journey—the physical path they have walked—but also the internal journey: the winding contours of intellectual, psychological, emotional, and spiritual maturation that each person experiences throughout life. All of this is embedded in a temporal context—a question about the past, a question about the future, both rooted in the present place and time. It is a question that opens Plato’s Phaedrus, when Socrates greets the titular traveler saying, “Dear Phaedrus, whither and whence?” 3 This prompts the traveler to stop walking and take a seat beside his friend beneath the shade of a tree, resting long enough to discuss art, love, and the soul. Their dialogue—the dialectical method for which Socrates is famous—is rife with questions that help both men clarify, refine, and (in some cases) alter their personal ideas and beliefs. Plato—the dramatist behind this fictional philosophical narrative—does not simply tell us what he believes, but rather uses his artistic talents to draw the reader into a conversation. We find ourselves, in a way, sitting under the tree with his characters, listening as the argument ebbs and flows from one person to the other and back again. Together, with

xii

Introduction

Socrates and Phaedrus, we find ourselves challenged to ask questions and to clarify, refine, and (in some cases) alter our own personal ideas and beliefs. Writing in the fourth century BC, Plato’s dialogues most often featured his mentor, Socrates. Plato’s student, Aristotle, would continue their legacy. Six hundred years later, Plotinus would carry on their philosophical torch. By the fifth century, Saint Augustine of Hippo would bridge this Western philosophical tradition with Western Christianity. And some fifteen hundred years after that, Terrence Malick would find himself seated beside mentors and friends like Martin Heidegger, Stanley Cavell, and John Womack, chatting about philosophy, filmmaking, history, and faith. The context is important, not because one can draw a simple line between Malick and Heidegger or Augustine or Plato (although the influences abound), but because Malick is simply one more part of an ongoing chain, an ongoing dialogue, that began when the first humans looked to the heavens with their questions, and will continue—as Malick depicts in Voyage of Time—until the end of all things, when “time goes back to her source.” 4 Malick has walked before us—charting a course that arcs back through the history of humanity, and clearing a path ahead, making it easier for each of us to find our way forward through this life. Where have we come from and where are we going? It is, in a sense, the question that frames each and every one of Malick’s films, whether the characters are on a literal cross-country journey (Badlands, Days of Heaven), or travelers inhabiting new spaces (The New World, To the Wonder), or confronting mortality and the hereafter (The Thin Red Line, A Hidden Life), or on an existential pilgrimage through memory (The Tree of Life, Knight of Cups, Song to Song), or contemplating the past, present, and future of the entire cosmos (Voyage of Time). FOUR PATHS AND A WAY FORWARD This book offers a comprehensive and detailed study of the ten currently completed films of Terrence Malick. This volume takes a reflective and retrospective approach, considering new interpretations and frameworks for understanding Malick's unique creative choices. Drawing from a range of diverse academic disciplines, the following chapters explore the groundbreaking qualities of his cinematic style and the philosophical underpinnings that permeate his work. Across all thirteen chapters, the methodology is primarily academic, but a few of the contributors also draw from distinctly non-academic experience, including a few professional filmmakers and an Anglican priest. In each case, the chapters are rigorously researched and contribute clear, unique arguments that shed new light on Malick and the cinematic medium.

Introduction

xiii

Divided into five parts, the chapters are organized around several different ways of thinking about Malick’s films. Placing the work in the context of different intellectual and artistic traditions, the first four parts trace backward, connecting his present work to I. A Path of Philosophy, II. A Path of Poetry, III. A Path of Cinema, and IV. A Path of Faith. The final part maps a potential way forward—a way of thinking of Malick’s filmmaking as a promising model for working and living in the twenty-first century. *** The first section, A Path of Philosophy, reflects on Malick's initial pursuits in the field at Harvard and Oxford, under the tutelage of Stanly Cavell and Martin Heidegger. The first chapter, by David LaRocca, explores the relationship between Malick's philosophical training under Cavell, and their subsequent cinematic pursuits—Malick's as a filmmaker and Cavell's as a noted film theorist. LaRocca collaborated with Cavell at Harvard and is an acknowledged expert on Cavellian studies, making this a particularly interesting chapter to open the book. The second chapter, by Adam Daniel, explores these philosophical influences across Malick’s films, from Badlands (1973) to Song to Song. Daniel draws on the work of Ian McGilchrist to consider how Malick's cinematic approach reframes spectatorship as an ongoing process of reciprocity between body and image, which can ultimately dislodge us from a sort of “ontological amnesia” and awaken us to moral, historical, metaphysical, and spiritual visions. This awakening leads into the third chapter, by David J. Gilbert, in which he uses The Thin Red Line (1998) as a case study to explore how Malick may be making an explicit philosophical argument in favor of a kind of supernaturalism. Building off of the analyses of Daniel Calhoun, Gilbert considers Malick's kaleidoscopic use of dialogue and montage to prompt the viewer to see beyond the naturalistic world and consider a compelling argument for something more transcendent. The second section connects these philosophical foundations to A Path of Poetry by way of Heidegger's phenomenological approach, which serves as the foundation for the fourth chapter, by Kip Redick. Redick considers Heidegger’s attention to the interplay between manifestation and concealment, then explores the poetic implications of this in Days of Heaven and The New World (2005), with regard to Jean-Luc Marion’s distinction between idol and icon, Emmanuel Levinas’s analysis of counter-intentionality, and MerleauPonty’s examination of embodied waiting. Out of this context, Timothy E.G. Bartel looks closely at the groundbreaking editorial approach used in The Thin Red Line, arguing that it is interacting with a poetic tradition stretching from Homer through Walt Whitman and the American lyric poets of the mid-twentieth century. Through his

xiv

Introduction

quotation of and interaction with Homer, Malick explores the early Greek tension between the glory of battle and the loyalty to one’s beloved. Bartel also provides a taxonomy of the ways that images and words can be combined and juxtaposed in order to create in film an approximation of poetic figuration. Finally, Joshua Russell deconstructs Malick's narrative approach in The New World and The Tree of Life (2011) in order to reveal the psychological mechanisms of determinism and free will that demonstrate a theory on the nature of narrative itself. In doing so, he illuminates a process by which human beings gain or lose faith in their own inherent value, purpose, and morality. The third section explores A Path of Cinema, beginning with Dean Yamada’s study of Malick's career as an independent filmmaker, exploring the unique opportunities and struggles of an American auteur. Yamada examines Malick alongside Francis Ford Coppola and Orson Welles, considering how each filmmaker navigated early success, periods of exile from the industry, and artistic rebirth. In the eighth chapter, film editor Anthony Parisi explores the way Malick’s filmmaking mirrors the cinema of Russian filmmaker and theorist Andrei Tarkovsky, in which images are not used as symbols to decipher, but express and embody being itself in a way that challenges the viewer to be a participant in the process of discovering life itself. This section concludes with a chapter by the editor, in which I explore the cinematic nature of confession and memory in Knight of Cups (2015), Voyage of Time (2016), and A Hidden Life (2019), drawing further connections to Tarkovsky and linking in Augustine’s neo-platonic arguments for the renovating power of recollection on both a personal and cosmic scale. This leads to the book's fourth section, A Path of Faith, focusing on the religious allusions and theological implications prevalent in Malick's films. In the tenth chapter, Naaman Wood explores a theological framework by which to interpret The Tree of Life, drawing particularly from Catholic theologian Henri de Lubac’s account of nature and grace, and the theodicy articulated in the biblical book of Job’s reflection on evil and suffering. Vernon Cisney follows this by engaging with the themes of sacrifice and suffering found in The Tree of Life and Knight of Cups through the lens of philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. Exploring ancient traditions and stories of sacrifice, this chapter considers whether a kind of “dying” is necessary in order to open each person to the potential of grace in the world. This section concludes with Fr. Matthew Aughtry’s chapter arguing that Malick consistently shows us a world in need of priests—mediators between the divine and natural worlds. Aughtry compares the explicit struggle of Father Quintana in To the Wonder (2011) with the dying Farmer in Days of

Introduction

xv

Heaven, suggesting that both serve as universal images of priests, a notion that has implications beyond any individual religious tradition. Finally, this book concludes with A Way Forward, featuring a special extended chapter by Reno Lauro, who worked with Malick during the production of The Tree of Life and Voyage of Time. Lauro weaves together personal recollections of Malick’s process with in-depth research into Malick’s education at the American Film Institute (AFI). There, Malick learned from renowned and groundbreaking filmmakers and studied a wide array of filmmaking styles. Lauro synthesizes these recollections into a thoughtful and inspiring exploration of what it means to be an artist in the twenty-first century. Reflecting on changing notions of work and the economic constraints of film production, Lauro suggests that Malick’s filmmaking models a way of living that can orient our path toward the good life. *** Throughout this volume, it has been my honor to curate these thirteen unique essays, each of which dialogue between Malick’s films and an array of essential touchstones in philosophy, poetry, filmmaking, and theology. Each author has masterfully explored unique aspects of Malick’s filmography and then pushed beyond the cinematic work to create bridges to related fields and ideas. The hope—beyond an increased understanding and appreciation of the work of Terrence Malick—is that this book may serve as a starting point for further exploration; that our investigations do not begin and end with Malick’s films but that each of his works might draw us to other artists and thinkers; and that in following these threads backward, we might—in the spirit of Malick’s films—find our way forward to the mysterious source of truth, goodness, and beauty. NOTES 1. Terrence Malick, “Made in Austin: A Look into Song to Song with Terrence Malick, Michael Fassbender, and Richard Linklater,” South by Southwest Film Festival & Conference, (March 11, 2017). 2. Days of Heaven, dir. Terrence Malick (Hollywood: Paramount Pictures, 1978). 3. Modern versions fully translate the Greek as “Phaedrus, my dear friend! Where have you been? And where are you going?” Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995), 1. 4. Voyage of Time, dir. Terrence Malick (Los Angeles: Broad Green Pictures, 2016).

REFERENCES Augustine of Hippo. Confessions. Translated by Henry Chadwick. Oxford University Press, 1991. Benson, Eric. “The Not-So-Secret Life of Terrence Malick.” Texas Monthly, April 2017. https:/ /www.texasmonthly.com/the-culture/the-not-so-secret-life-of-terrence-malick. Accessed February 15, 2020.

xvi

Introduction

Days of Heaven. Directed by Terrence Malick. Hollywood: Paramount Pictures, 1978. Hintermann, Carlo, and Daniele Villa, eds. Terrence Malick: Rehearsing the Unexpected. London: Faber & Faber, 2015. Malick, Terrence. “Made in Austin: A Look into Song to Song with Terrence Malick, Michael Fassbender, and Richard Linklater.” South by Southwest Film Festival & Conference, Austin, TX. March 11, 2017. Maher, Paul. One Big Soul: An Oral History of Terrence Malick. Brooklyn, NY: Upstart Crow Publishing, 2014. Marantz, Andrew. “The Terrence Malick–Lil Peep Connection.” The New Yorker, December 9, 2019. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/16/the-terrence-malick-lil-peep-connection. Accessed February 15, 2020. Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Edited by Gordon Teskey. New York: Norton, 2005. Lauro, Reno. “Terrence Malick and the Tao of the Sojourning Soul, Part 1: Spiritual Voices.” Mubi, August 3, 2015. https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/terrence-malick-and-the-tao-of-thesojourning-soul-part-1-spiritual-voices. Accessed February 15, 2020. Plato. Phaedrus. Translated by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995. Song to Song. Directed by Terrence Malick. Los Angeles: Broad Green Pictures, 2017. Voyage of Time. Directed by Terrence Malick. Los Angeles: Broad Green Pictures, 2016.

Part One

A Path of Philosophy

Chapter One

Thinking of Film What Is Cavellian about Malick’s Movies? David LaRocca

Investigating instances in the critical literature in which Stanley Cavell addresses the film work of Terrence Malick—and in which other scholars have discussed Cavell in association with Malick—I seek to ask after a long-term and lingering question: What is the relationship between a training in philosophy—namely, the sort of training Malick had at Harvard under Cavell’s tutelage—and the kind of filmmaking he went on to create? In reply to some version of such a question, we have in hand studies that begin with Cavell but often rather quickly turn to, for example, Martin Heidegger, or simply depart from Cavell’s work and its presumed pertinence. 1 In this chapter, I would like to place the question of the philosophical register of Malick’s films in the context of the question of the subtitle, hoping along the way to reveal the ways in which an understanding of Cavell’s work in particular—including Cavell’s appreciation of Malick (e.g., why Cavell cares about Malick’s films)—may be helpfully revelatory for our ongoing inheritance of Malick’s work. The project is, in some sense, a meta-analysis of a certain strain of what might be called “an intellectual move”—namely, to cite Cavell (and usually also Heidegger) on the way to saying something about Malick. My aggregation of, or allusion to, these select instances as well as my pondering of their meanings has, I think, the benefit of revealing what may be salient and abiding about Cavell’s thinking for our thinking about Malick’s films. If, for example, we are already convinced—because of the existing scholarship on Malick—that such topics as the transcendental, the everyday, and the ordinary (and their inter-relationship) are essential to Malick’s creative approach to cinematic art, then Cavell’s work is of obvious significance. That Cavell 3

4

David LaRocca

was Malick’s teacher, that Malick read and wrote about Heidegger in Cavell’s company, that Cavell has written extensively on Heidegger, and that Cavell has written about Malick’s work only make more striking the relevance of Cavell's thinking for Malick studies. Famous in part for his aversion to fame, Terrence Malick’s biography is regularly invoked as part of an explanation of his cinematic work: put tersely, a person who lives out of the glare of intense media scrutiny is the sort of person who might offer us a more poetic cinema. Part of the potted biography are details that would support—indeed, fertilize and nurture—such a characterization of the creator and thus such an outlook from the audience for his work. In what might be thought of as the pre-history of Malick as cinematic auteur (viz., details of his life pre-Badlands, 1973), we could note (as so many film-philosophers tend to do) that Malick was a student at Harvard College from 1961 to 1965, a time that overlapped with Stanley Cavell’s return to the campus in 1963, after teaching at Berkeley. Before Malick graduated summa cum laude in 1965, he worked with Cavell, most particularly on the philosophical writings of Martin Heidegger. Simon Critchley describes Malick’s honors thesis, supervised by Cavell: “Against the deeply ingrained prejudices about Continental thought that prevailed at that time, Malick courageously attempted to show how Heidegger’s thoughts about (and against) epistemology in Being and Time could be seen in relation to the analysis of perception in Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore and, at Harvard, C. I. Lewis.” 2 Harvard’s philosophy department then, as now, retains a reputation as a stronghold of the Anglo-analytic tradition, so Cavell’s attunement to Heidegger would have stood out to young minds interested in a broader sweep of philosophy; that Cavell was thinking and writing about film—his first book on film, The World Viewed would be published in 1971—would also, no doubt, have marked him and his philosophical preoccupations as strikingly distinct, indeed alien, from his colleagues (among them W. V. Quine, who said “philosophy of science is philosophy enough” 3). When Cavell continued to agitate and expand his eclecticism—adding opera and Emerson, psychoanalysis and cinema, Shakespeare and Thoreau—he would become that much more salient as a figure who offered an alternative to the way philosophy was being taught in one of America’s oldest and most elite universities. Malick found in Cavell a mentor who took seriously texts and questions (such as those written by Heidegger) that would have seemed out of step, indeed, out of bounds in professional philosophy such as it was practiced at the time. Upon graduating from Harvard, Malick became a Rhodes Scholar and headed for Magdalen College, Oxford University—again, not a place to avoid analytic philosophy; indeed, he seemed to cross an ocean only to get closer to its origins and the particular cast of its outlook. His advisor at Oxford was Gilbert Ryle, among the most influential in the classical tradition

Thinking of Film

5

of ordinary language philosophy (and a central figure in Cavell’s response to the history of skepticism in his The Claim of Reason). Having spent time in company with Cavell, Malick wished to write a doctoral thesis at Oxford, with Ryle, on Heidegger and Wittgenstein, perhaps also Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. 4 Needless to say, this selection of subject matter forced an unpropitious match of mentor and mentee: Ryle reportedly said to Malick “he should try and write on something more ‘philosophical,’” whereupon Malick abandoned his studies at Oxford after a year—and altogether in formal graduate training in philosophy. 5 Before returning to Boston, where he taught a course on Heidegger at MIT (pinch-hitting for Hubert Dreyfus) and contributed to The New Yorker and Life magazine, Malick traveled to meet Heidegger, and in 1969 published with Northwestern University Press a bilingual translation of Vom Wesen des Grundes (The Essence of Reasons). 6 That same year, Malick overshot a possible life as an academic philosopher in the Boston area, and enrolled in the just-founded film school AFI Conservatory in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles. 7 The school, run out of the Greystone Mansion, had a first entering class that included Malick as well as cinematographer Caleb Deschanel and screenwriter-director Paul Schrader. Over the course of a decade—from the early sixties to the early seventies— Malick went from a gifted undergraduate studying philosophy with Cavell to a formidable founding figure in the growing constellation of New Hollywood narrative moviemakers (among the crowd of peers, we could emphasize Altman, Coppola, Hopper, Lucas, Pollack, Scorsese, Spielberg—and Arthur Penn, who mentored Malick 8). This quick sketch of a mere segment of Malick’s biography is certainly auspicious, but it still takes some work to go from this assembly of persons, places, institutions, texts, and related influences to an account of the nature of the films he started making in the early 1970s. Perhaps not surprisingly, given this pre-history of filmmaking, the critical literature emerging from scholars attuned to film-philosophical readings of Malick’s work are often keen to point up and develop the Heideggerian credentials of his work. Since Malick studied Heidegger with Cavell, it is furthermore not surprising that Cavell’s own interest in Malick’s films relates to this strain of impact. In short, we are encouraged to conclude that Malick has created, and perhaps continues to create, “Heideggerian cinema.” 9 I wish to rehearse how this has come to be a dominant, indeed now standard, way in which to read Malick’s work; but on this occasion, I wish also to supplement that awareness by trying to keep pace with the ways that this Heideggerian reading is coordinate with and complementary to a Cavellian one, thus replying in some satisfactory measure to the question of the subtitle: what is Cavellian about Malick’s movies? Film-philosopher Robert Sinnerbrink invokes Cavell early in his skeptically titled article “A Heideggerian Cinema?: On Terrence Malick’s The Thin

6

David LaRocca

Red Line.” “As Cavell observes,” writes Sinnerbrink, “the relationship between Heidegger’s philosophy and Malick’s films seems to challenge both philosophers and film-theorists. The film-theorists struggle to show how Heidegger is relevant to the experience of cinema, while the philosophers grapple with the question of cinema and aesthetics.” 10 Sinnerbrink is highlighting the way in which Malick’s multiple, or at least dual, competencies (e.g., philosophy and filmmaking) require something parallel for those who would try to write about his work (e.g., a familiarity with philosophy and film theory—as well as film history and film criticism). Sinnerbrink’s diagnosis is apt, if presenting a tall order that very few are equipped to fulfill. The difficulty is illustrated, for example, by the range of methodological approaches we find in those who write about film philosophically. Drawing from a signature schematic, laid out by Jerry Goodenough, we can ask of various categories for arranging film’s relationship to philosophy: is film meant to be (1) an investigation of the medium (as we find it in experimental, avant-garde, and formal metacinematic works) and hence the performance of the medium per se; (2) an illustration of philosophical ideas (e.g., ethical conundrums in The Insider (1999) or The Emperor’s Club (2002); memory in Memento (2000); the nature of dreams and delusions in the films of Werner Herzog; ways in which films express philosophical ideas—say, Nietzschean notions revealed in Charlie Kaufman films 11); (3) featuring philosophers (e.g., a nonfiction documentary with interviews; or the dramatization of ideas in fictional accounts of biographical or historical proceedings); or, lastly, (4) “doing philosophy” itself (say, performatively in terms of its content)? 12 Navigating such a list of options is not always straightforward as there are overlaps and inconsistencies; film’s capacity to hybridize, for example, as in genre theory, makes for some choppy waters. Moreover, I do not wish to draw or defend normative claims about the relative correctness of one approach over or against another; to my eye, they all seem profitable, especially when pursued in concert. For his labors, Sinnerbrink sets himself the task of asking whether we should describe The Thin Red Line (1998) as “Heideggerian cinema.” 13 And he concludes that the film “can be regarded as ‘Heideggerian cinema,’ not because we need to read Heidegger in order to understand it, but because Malick’s film performs a cinematic poesis, a revealing of world through image, sound, and word.” 14 Thus, Sinnerbrink’s claim for The Thin Red Line is in keeping with the fourth methodological alternative above—namely, that Malick’s movie is not so much expressing Heideggerian thought (the second approach) as it is itself a work of philosophy; Heidegger is a relevant point of reference, but is in no way necessary for comprehending the philosophical achievement of the film. Indeed, Sinnerbrink’s claims for Malick’s 1998 film are anticipated in some measure by Simon Critchley in his study: “Calm: On Terrence Ma-

Thinking of Film

7

lick’s The Thin Red Line.” 15 Appearing in Rupert Read and Jerry Goodenough’s edited volume, Film as Philosophy: Essays on Cinema After Wittgenstein and Cavell, Critchley advocates for bracketing not just Heidegger, but also Cavell, from our appreciation of The Thin Red Line. Read glosses the accomplishment of the essay: “Critchley reads Malick’s . . . film as yielding an existential ‘message’ concerning calm in the face of death, but a message not accessible through reading the film simply through any preexisting philosophical text (e.g., Heidegger’s), nor through the philosophical influences on Malick (e.g., Stanley Cavell, his Harvard teacher).” 16 I don’t know about “simply,” but Critchley himself says the same in even more dramatic and definitive ways: Clearly, then, Malick’s is a highly sophisticated, philosophically trained intellect. Yet the young philosopher decided not to pursue an academic career, but to pass from philosophy to film, for reasons that remain obscure. Given these facts, it is extremely tempting—almost overwhelmingly so—to read through his films to some philosophical pre-text or meta-text, to interpret the action of his characters in Heideggerian, Wittgensteinian or, indeed, Cavellian terms. To make matters worse, Malick’s movies seem to make philosophical statements and present philosophical positions. Nonetheless, to read through the cinematic image to some identifiable philosophical master text would be a mistake, for it would be not to read at all. 17

Given these conditions, Critchley asks, “So, what is the professional philosopher to do faced with Malick’s films?” He then offers a reply with respect to Malick’s films: “It seems to me that a consideration of Malick’s art demands that we take seriously the idea that film is less an illustration of philosophical ideas and theories—let’s call that a philoso-fugal reading—and more a form of philosophizing, of reflection, reasoning, and argument.” 18 Given the taxonomy noted above, Critchley, like Sinnerbrink after him, eschews the second option (viz., illustration—adding a provocative annotation on the “fugue”-state of such readings, fugue being a term of art in both music and psychiatry) and opts for the fourth and final approach: film as philosophy in the way its content offers a performance. Critchley presents a manifesto-inflected hard line: we are not meant (allowed?) to watch a Malick film and reply, “Oh, I see how this scene is an illustration of a point made by Heidegger, or reveals something about film as medium noted by Cavell.” Rather, we are to behold, that is, to read. And what are we reading? Film as “a form of philosophizing, of reflection, reasoning, and argument.” 19 Yet articles and books, including the ones that Critchley writes (and to be sure, the present study and its companions in this volume), are fully invested in citation—in the marking out of the pedigrees of intellectual traditions and specific instances as we find them in lines of prose—so why not afford the viewer the chance to think about Malick in

8

David LaRocca

company with such references? We needn’t commit ourselves to the intentional fallacy and say that Malick intended to create a film as illustration or embodiment of Heideggerian thought, and yet we could nevertheless articulate the grounds, indeed, reasons and arguments, for making such a claim about the film’s final form and its effects. Critchley seems worried about the strength of associations—as if Malick’s intimate knowledge of Heidegger and of making films—must compel (coerce?) us to think of a causative relationship, when, in fact, no such thing is necessary. Critchley, for example, in writing about The Thin Red Line quotes lines from Wallace Stevens’s “The Death of a Soldier,” but that invocation doesn’t mean that its relevance for Critchley’s interpretation is predicated on, say, Malick having read Stevens, much less James Jones, author of the eponymous book that served as source material for Malick. Thus, the professional philosopher—or any critic or theorist, for that matter—“faced with Malick’s films” has some deciding to do. Working our way backward, we find that Sinnerbrink’s use of quotation marks around “Heideggerian cinema” derives from his reading of Marc Furstenau and Leslie MacAvoy’s “Terrence Malick’s Heideggerian Cinema: War and the Question of Being in The Thin Red Line.” 20 In their chapter, like Sinnerbrink, Furstenau and MacAvoy invoke Cavell’s remarks on Malick, but mostly as a way to motivate an analysis of Heidegger, which is understandable given their thesis. By this point, evidence is mounting that it is Cavell who is providing a platform for considering the Heideggerian credentials of Malick’s cinema. In this respect, Cavell is a (the?) source of these thoughts that bring together—as Sinnerbrink wrote above—that rare, difficult braid of philosophy and film theory. To be sure, Cavell is one of very few scholars to bring this coupling to a new and exceptional standard, one that leaves us in awe and thus continually returning to his work for illumination and counsel. That said, there are but a few pages across Cavell’s expansive oeuvre in which he directly addresses Malick’s films, and yet, those “brief, suggestive remarks” (as Robert Silberman puts it) are sufficiently compelling that many articles, chapters, and even books have taken flight from them. 21 So it is in the present case. If we have seen Furstenau and MacAvoy advocate for understanding Malick’s work as Heideggerian cinema, and Critchley and Sinnerbrink pushing back against that appellation, there is a need, at last, to ask after the kinds of notions that Cavell found appealing in Malick’s work. At this juncture, given what has been said about ways of taking up film for (or as or in) philosophy, it may be worth emphasizing that we need not, in fact, claim that there is anything Cavellian about Malick’s movies (e.g., that they “contain” an illustration or representation of his thought—in keeping with the second approach noted above) even as we retain an attunement to the attributes in those same films that Cavell was drawn to discuss and digest. What is Cavel-

Thinking of Film

9

lian about Malick’s movies, we might conjecture, is the kind of provocation for philosophical thought they enable, in particular, about the medium of film itself. Certainly Cavell was agitated to thoughts about cinema as medium long before he ever watched a film by Malick, so we are not arguing for a special case; rather, the interest lies in what Cavell sees and hears in select Malick films and how they may be considered allies for a certain kind of approach to cinematic thinking—what Cavell has called variously “the thought of movies” and “the good of film.” 22 The year after Malick’s third feature film was released, Cavell was prompted by its appearance to say that we can appreciate—indeed, we can know—“that at any moment a new film can reclaim an untold measure of the history of film’s discoveries, or self-revelations. In Terrence Malick’s astonishing The Thin Red Line (1998), when a pair of soldiers running through a field of waving grass, away from us, are shot and fall, they are hidden by the tall grass which becomes, almost all at once, brilliant with emerging sun, promising at once retribution and redemption, what there is of these.” Cavell calls this scene—and others like it that he finds in Rohmer’s The Green Ray (Le rayon vert; also in English as Summer, 1986) and Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958)—“moments of transcendence.” 23 Some thirty years before, Cavell had occasion to thank Malick, in the same line as his own wife, in the Preface to The World Viewed (1971). When Cavell came to write a foreword to the enlarged edition of the book, at the end of the same decade, Malick figured more largely in the discussion. And it is here, in these pages, that we might draw our focus when thinking what it is Cavell finds in the particular “moments of transcendence,” “self-revelations,” and “discoveries” that Malick’s cinema affords. When Cavell writes that the “facts of a frame, so far as these are to confirm critical understanding, are not determinable apart from that understanding itself,” 24 he glosses himself by saying I am picking up a theme of The World Viewed that is explicit and guiding in all my subsequent thinking about film, namely that giving significance to and placing significance in specific possibilities and necessities (or call them elements; I sometimes still call them automatisms) of the physical medium of film are the fundamental acts of, respectively, the director of a film and the critic (or audience) of film; together with the idea that what constitutes an “element” of the medium of film is not knowable prior to these discoveries of direction and of criticism. This reciprocity between element and significance I would like to call the cinematic circle. Exploring this circle is something that can be thought of as exploring the medium of film. 25

The relationship between element and significance (that forms a circle, or perhaps a circuit) presents a picture for thinking about what Cavell calls “‘the immediate and tremendous burden’ on one’s capacity for critical description

10

David LaRocca

in accounting for one’s experience of film.” 26 These two portions, element and significance, require that “description must allow the medium of film as such and the events of a given film at each moment to be understood in terms of one another.” 27 To illustrate how such description might take place, what Cavell calls a “prescription of a such a reading,” he draws Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978) into service. 28 Cavell, in some measure, tries to say what exactly the subject of Days of Heaven might be. As an indication of his unique orientation to the film, he decidedly does not begin with a recitation of the film’s plot, nor mention of its actors, or even selected bits of dialogue. Rather, he wonders aloud what the “extremities of beauty” and “successions of beauty” in cinema “are in the service of.” 29 Thus, Malick’s film has called us to think generally about the aesthetic potentialities and effects of film—call this “extracting beauty from nature” as predicted by nature’s and film’s “capacities to provide it.” 30 Intriguingly, it is precisely the confidence, indeed the “ranging of confidence,” Malick exhibits in Days of Heaven for attempting and making such extractions that Cavell suggests “must somehow be part of the subject of the film.” 31 Perhaps we are familiar with films or filmmakers being described as ambitious, but this is often related to the scope of the film’s production (think of Griffith or Welles or Lean), or perhaps in terms of the difficulty of its content (think of Cronenberg or Lynch or Haneke), but Cavell seems to be saying something different about Malick’s ambition (his confidence), namely: that Malick is returning us to an intimacy with our “interest in film,” in “film’s capacities” to embody and convey beauty to us as an audience for its revelations. 32 Cavell focalizes his pursuit of Malick’s particular art when he presses on with a question about the subject of a film such as Days of Heaven: “Shall we try expressing the subject as one in which the works and the emotions and the entanglements of human beings are at every moment reduced to insignificance by the casual rounds of earth and sky?” Let us not be caught up in the tension, or even paradox, of the fact that Cavell has selected for emphasis that, in this case, the subject “giving significance to and placing significance” in Days of Heaven concerns insignificance. 33 One of Malick’s “discoveries” for film is the significance of our insignificance, and not merely as a subject of the movie we call Days of Heaven (e.g., as part of what is identifiable in its plot, surely, traits of which can be found in other works), but also in its uses of the medium of film. As Cavell puts it, “I think the film does indeed contain a metaphysical vision of the world; but I think one feels that one has never quite seen the scene of human existence—call it the arena between earth (or days) and heaven—quite realized this way on film before.” 34 Thus, Malick’s film may offer, at least up to this point in film history, a unique or unprecedented case of the “reciprocity between element and significance.” 35

Thinking of Film

11

Thus, “a new film can reclaim an untold measure of the history of film’s discoveries, or self-revelations”—for example, the way Badlands and Days of Heaven are tremendously violent and yet occupy space as fairy tales (e.g., in their allegorical structures, in the opposition of familiar binaries—young/ old, city/country, powerless/powerful—and in their use of music and voiceover). Moreover, these two works remind us just how violent a given literary-philosophical-religious patrimony is, for example, in the western tradition, among others. Malick’s achievement of the strange balance of hyperviolence and the dreamy (as we find it more recently in Joe Wright’s Hanna, 2011, and Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, 2013) may leave us, like so many of the characters in these works, stunned to inexpressiveness. The radical beauty of the natural world is shown by Malick often as a cover for its reality as “Nature, red in tooth and claw”—one that we share but do not necessarily recognize ourselves in. 36 Truly, as we consider our violence to one another (and toward the natural world itself, of which we must be a part—not apart), we ask continually: are we “higher or lower” than the animals? Early in The Thin Red Line, Private Train (John Dee Smith) asks, “What is this war in the heart of nature?” 37—a sentiment that is profound enough and sufficiently adaptable to find studied expression in blockbuster cinema, from World War Z (2013) to Jurassic World (2015). 38 These popular entertainments put before us, respectively, parables of infection (and immigration) and of genetic manipulation (and self-generated extinction). The answer to the question, from Malick (and the others), seems to be that we are certainly implicated in this “war”—both as victim and as agent; that is, we are subject to the world’s violence in matters of will as well as accident. Malick himself makes the point with a lighter touch when he re-animates dinosaurs in The Tree of Life (2011). Meanwhile, Malick’s early trilogy— Badlands, Days of Heaven, and The Thin Red Line—provides a clinic on the human meditation of presence and impermanence, and thus cycles us back, as viewers, to their status as films—that is, as the kinds of artworks (along with photography) that signal in the self-same gesture that their presence is (also) a representation of absence. We could draw together Cavell’s two points—about the “subject” of Days of Heaven—as summative in a certain sense, namely, that Malick’s films stir us to an experience of beauty and (human) insignificance. Yet, the films do so not merely in their subject matter but also in their author’s command of the medium (something we are not similarly called to consider in, say, World War Z and Jurassic World). Given that in his foreword, Cavell digresses flamboyantly in the direction of Heidegger—gathering not one or two but four display quotations from his What Is Called Thinking?—it may be that all the evidence one needs to understand how the “Malick as Heideggerian cinema” reading commenced and has been reinforced ever since. 39 Heidegger wrote: “The first service man can render is to give thought to the Being of beings,” to which Cavell

12

David LaRocca

replies: “If Malick has indeed found a way to transpose such thoughts for our meditation, he can have done it only, it seems to me, by having discovered, or discovered how to acknowledge, a fundamental fact of Film’s photographic basis.” 40 Which is what? That objects participate in the photographic presence of themselves; they participate in the re-creation of themselves on film; they are essential in the making of their appearances. Objects projected on a screen are inherently reflexive, they occur as self-referential, reflecting upon their physical origins. Their presence refers to their absence, their location in another place. 41

These sentences of Cavell’s offer us a remarkable concentrate of many pages, indeed books-worth of remarks on the ontology of film, especially as they remind us of the photographic substrate of the medium—and thus our encounter with it. To illustrate these points, consider for a moment some specific photographs (and their role in a motion picture), in a scene from Badlands: while Holly (Sissy Spacek) and Kit (Martin Sheen) are in their reverie by the river (a liminal space we see repeated in Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, The New World, and The Tree of Life), she studies a collection of her father’s stereograms. We hear this voice-over while looking at the photographs with her (though we do not see the images in stereo): One day, while taking a look at some vistas in Dad’s stereopticon, it hit me that I was just this little girl, born in Texas, whose father was a sign painter, who had only just so many years to live . . . 42

As we listen to Holly, we attend to the presentation of photographic slides she too is meant to be looking at. In our point-of-view position, we are not just making a connection, such as it might be, between her remarks and these specific images (i.e., identifying with her), but between our accounting for human existence in the world and the existence of the world as we find it represented in still photographs (viz., the ones Holly sees in three dimensions, as we do in our daily life, but we only see here in two) and in moving pictures (viz., the ones we see in two dimensions on the big screen but projected into relationship with our 3D world). Holly shares her response to her own insight, one filled with profound counterfactuals: It sent a chill down my spine, and I thought “Where would I be this very moment if Kit had never met me? . . . Or killed anybody? This very moment . . . if my Mom had never met my Dad? If she’d never died? . . . And what’s the man I’ll marry going to look like? What’s he doing right this minute? . . . Is he thinking about me now, by some coincidence, even though he doesn’t know me? Does it show on his face? 43

Thinking of Film

13

As Holly asks the last run of questions, the camera locks on a sepia photograph of a young girl looking to the ground that spreads out before her, holding a bit of wheat, while a young soldier, rifle in hand, sidles up to her for a kiss—the brim of his hat pushing her hat away, inverting the intimacy that he seeks. As the shot begins, we can still discern the curved edges of the photograph’s perimeter (assuming we are looking at one side of a stereograph), and as it lingers, a slow zoom tracks in. The young couple—with an eager young man holding a gun and a passive, pensive young girl, holding her gaze—parallel our young couple on the run: in each other’s company but not quite in each other’s world. 44 The object known as a photograph is a potent figure in any film (a kind of emblem of cinematic origins), but here, in Malick’s first feature, stereographs are put to use as talismans for further thoughts on the temporality and embodiment of human existence. “Then if in relation to objects capable of such self-manifestation,” Cavell remarks on the objects in films (i.e., the objects that are photographed), “human beings are reduced in significance, or crushed by the fact of beauty left vacant, perhaps this is because in trying to take dominion over the world, or in aestheticizing it (temptations inherent in the making of film, or of any art), they are refusing their participation in it.” 45 Using Cavell’s vernacular, can we say this is a case of the “avoidance of love” of the world, a failure to acknowledge its beauty—which is why the beauty of Malick’s film (Days of Heaven) strikes us as so potent, a forceful reminder, a point of resistance? 46 My question finds an answer above, when Cavell commends to our shared experience of the film that Malick has, in fact, “discovered, or discovered how to acknowledge, a fundamental fact of film’s photographic basis.” 47 This time italics are added to point up the particularity of Malick’s discovery of certain attributes of film’s nature along with his gift for (again, in an especially Cavellian register) acknowledging those traits. Cavell’s reading of Days of Heaven carries with it a customary attunement to film (like much art) as at once individually received (and thus personal, say, idiosyncratic) and shared—as when Cavell wonders “whether I am right or wrong in my experience of the film.” 48 Cavell’s worry about “the unpredictability of the audience” for film is, even (or especially) in the late seventies, something that is complicated by the various degrees of receptivity and allergy it met in the academy. Despite the (contemporary) flourishing of film-philosophy, we may still wonder if presenting Malick’s film as a “realization of some sentences” of Heidegger’s may, at last, have not done favors for Malick or for Heidegger, since asking “those inside the subject [of the study of film], attempting to make it academically or anyway intellectually respectable, to think about Heidegger is to ask them to become responsible for yet another set of views and routines that are inherently embattled within English-speaking intellectual culture and whose application to the experience

14

David LaRocca

of film is hard to prove.” 49 These and related matters were trying in 1979 and remain so in 2019, leaving us to ask if these are, in fact, reasonable, much less welcome, conditions for thinking. I think the repetition of a call or claim—“to ask those inside the subject,” “to ask those outside the subject,” “to ask them to become,” “to ask them to grant”—is, despite all disciplinary practices, settled and contested, to take heed of the kinds of relationships at hand. 50 Thus not just one medium and another (film and the printed word), or one discipline and another (philosophy and filmmaking), or one tradition and another (American transcendentalism and Heideggerian phenomenological ontology), etc., but also to fathom what happens to film’s form and content in the process of deliberating on these overlapping magisteria. Malick’s early trilogy, and works to follow, appear to provide us with an especially gratifying manifestation of precisely this confluence. If we have been speaking of the significance of Malick’s work in Cavell’s estimation, we have also marked out for our interest the way the films themselves catalyze our thoughts on the very notion of significance: what does it mean to matter? And how might meaning be shown to us in the course of a life—in those small moments and gestures (in colors, fragrances, flashes of light, and other fragments of a day) and also in those grand, terrible punctuations (in births and deaths, unions and breakups)? Thus, in Cavell’s parlance and from his perspective, it is for the director to give significance, while it is the duty of the audience (or critic) to place significance. 51 In Days of Heaven, such giving (say, of the beauty of the natural world) is met by Cavell’s reading of its implications—not just for the characters who live in such a world, but for us, the viewers, who seem to share the world the same way, but differently (to paraphrase Cary Grant’s Jerry in The Awful Truth). 52 It may be that Malick has provided the “first service man can render,” in Heidegger’s hierarchy, and that in Days of Heaven, Malick has given “thought to the Being of beings,” but the sentiment seems very much in keeping with the ancient forebears Heidegger relied upon, such as Parmenides and Plato. 53 Still, the achievement of a film that conjures a thought of how humans are “reduced to insignificance” (as Cavell first says), or somewhat less direly, “reduced in significance” (as Cavell says a few pages later), would appear to ratify the claim that Malick has captured and created “moments of transcendence.” 54 In a provocatively titled review of Read and Goodenough’s collection invoked above, and pace Wittgenstein, “If a Film Did Philosophy We Wouldn’t Understand It,” Daniel Barnett wonders about the kinds of films and filmmaking that are left out of the critical discussions in Film as Philosophy: All of this of course is coming from someone with his own heavy bias—one that wonders why Back and Forth (1969) or La Region Centrale (1971) by

Thinking of Film

15

Michael Snow was not discussed, or Tom, Tom The Piper’s Son (1969) or The Nervous System (1970s-present) by Ken Jacobs or any of the experiments in ontology and epistemology of Owen Land, Kurt Kren or Taka Iimura or Ken Kobland, or the experiments in language structure by Hollis Frampton, A. K. Dewdney or Peter Greenaway. These artists actually do what Cavell claims to be doing—examining what is most obvious in the medium. I would claim that they have penetrated the veil of bewitchment with film that Cavell believes he has, whereas in fact, to me, he seems more trapped in his bewitchment with the superficial flash of movies, while ignoring the hard films that are doing the hard work. 55

Though Cavell has been called out again, more recently, for neglecting other kinds of cinema—for example, Scott MacDonald has said that Cavell ignored the films of Ernst Lubitsch and the work of documentarians, experimental, and avant-garde filmmakers: “for Cavell, commercial narrative cinema is cinema—all else is peripheral” 56—we could note Cavell’s abiding interest in Malick as a special case of compensation, of unintended atonement. Entering the fray of this debate, I would say that Malick brings traits familiar to experimental and avant-garde cinema—long takes; documentary footage befitting a nature film; montage and juxtaposition put to purposes out of keeping with standard continuity editing; innovative cinematography; meditative, plaintive voice-over; contrapuntal music, etc.—into (somewhat more) mainstream cinema. I realize that a narrative film with a girl, a boy, a car, and a gun might not pass muster as experimental or avant-garde, but then look at Breathless (À bout de souffle). (And Cavell does have much to say about Godard’s 1960 film.) 57 Indeed, I would suggest that Cavell’s interest in Malick may be the closest he comes to theorizing about experimental and avant-garde cinema, since the elements of the film medium that Cavell points up in Malick are precisely those that might also interest him in the catalogue of experimentalists Barnett cites above (and including many others, such as Stan Brakhage, Ernie Gehr, and Larry Gottheim). Cavell has theorized about the core preoccupations of the experimental and avant-gardists, we might say inadvertently—and obviously not as directly as some, such as Barnett and MacDonald, would prefer. Given Cavell’s cogent analysis of Malick (and Godard and their kin in what might be called oxymoronically “the experimental mainstream”), we could profitably wonder about an extended analysis of “traditional” experimental and avant-garde cinema in the light of Cavell’s remarks; one imagines it would be a productive interaction. When we now ask “what is Cavellian about Malick’s movies?,” we may have several compelling replies: not just that Cavell recognized in his former philosophy student’s films some translation of Heidegger’s ideas to the big screen, and not just in Malick’s innovations that unleashed the power of film to (in Arthur Danto’s phrase) transfigure the commonplace, but, also in Cavell’s discovery—or argument for—how Malick’s films illuminate some-

16

David LaRocca

thing essential about the possibilities of and for the medium itself. And on this last point, we may appreciate how the qualities that Cavell found significant—and arrestingly realized—by Malick are, in fact, to be found also in the work of other worthy experimental filmmakers. NOTES 1. See Simon Critchley, Film-Philosophy, Vol. 6, No. 38, December 2002, http:// www.film-philosophy.com/vol6-2002/n48critchley. Reprinted in Film as Philosophy: Essays on Cinema After Wittgenstein and Cavell, ed. Rupert Read and Jerry Goodenough (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 133–48. Robert Sinnerbrink, “A Heideggerian Cinema? On Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line,” Film-Philosophy, 10.3, 2006, 26-37. 2. Critchley (2002). 3. Stanley Cavell, Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), 8. 4. Malick’s biographical details are scattered in various sources, among them Critchley (2002) and Bernard G. Prusak, “Seeing as God Sees: Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life,” https://search.proquest.com/docview/1496059346?pq-origsite=gscholar, and Paul Anderson, “Agee After Cavell, Cavell After Agee,” in Stanley Cavell, Literature, and Film : The Idea of America, ed. Andrew Taylor and Áine Kelly (New York: Routledge, 2013), 132–51. 5. Critchley (2002). 6. Martin Heidegger, Vom Wesen des Grundes (The Essence of Reasons), A Bilingual Edition, Incorporating the German Text; Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, tr. Terrence Malick (Evanston: Northwest University Press, 1969). 7. The American Film Institute (AFI) was itself only founded in 1965. 8. Jay Cocks, “Gun Crazy,” Time, April 8, 1974. 9. Marc Furstenau and Leslie MacAvoy, “Terrence Malick’s Heideggerian Cinema: War and the Question of Being in The Thin Red Line,” in The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America, ed. Hannah Patterson (London: Wallflower Press, 2007), 173–85, and Sinnerbrink (2006). 10. Sinnerbrink, 26. 11. See, for example, Daniel Shaw, “Nietzschean Themes in the Films of Charlie Kaufman,” in The Philosophy of Charlie Kaufman, ed. David LaRocca (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2011, with a new preface, 2019), 254–68. 12. See Jerry Goodenough, “Introduction I: A Philosopher Goes to the Cinema,” in Film as Philosophy, 1–3. For a continuation of such schematizing, see also Shawn Loht’s chapter on Sinnerbrink and Stephen Mulhall, “Film Exists in a State of Philosophy: Two Contemporary Cavellian Views,” in The Thought of Stanley Cavell and Cinema: Turning Anew to the Ontology of Film a Half-Century after The World Viewed, ed. David LaRocca (New York: Bloomsbury, 2020). 13. Sinnerbrink, 26. 14. Ibid., 27. 15. Critchley (2002). 16. Rupert Read, “Introduction II: What Theory of Film Do Wittgenstein and Cavell Have?” in Film as Philosophy: Essays on Cinema After Wittgenstein and Cavell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 34. 17. Critchley (2002). 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Furstenau and MacAvoy, “Terrence Malick’s Heideggerian Cinema,” The Cinema of Terrence Malick. 21. Robert Silberman, “Terrence Malick, Landscape, and ‘What is this war in the heart of nature?’” The Cinema of Terrence Malick, 172.

Thinking of Film

17

22. See Stanley Cavell, “The Thought of Movies,” in Themes Out of School: Effects and Causes (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981), 3–26; and “The Good of Film,” in Cavell on Film, ed. William Rothman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 333–48. 23. Stanley Cavell, “Concluding Remarks Presented at Paris Colloquium on La Projection du monde,” in Cavell on Film, 282–83. 24. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971, Enlarged Edition, 1979), 224. 25. Ibid., xiii–xiv. 26. Ibid., xiv. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid., xiii–xiv. 34. Ibid., xiv, xv. 35. Ibid., xiii–xiv. 36. Alfred Lord Tennyson, “In Memoriam A.H.H.,” 1849. 37. Robert Pippin helpfully clarifies that the famous question is posed not by Private Witt (Jim Caviezel), but by Private Edward B. Train (John Dee Smith). See Robert Pippin, “Vernacular Metaphysics: On Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line,” in The Philosophy of War Films, ed. David LaRocca (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2014), 392–93. 38. In Jurassic World (2015), Hoskins (Vincent D’Onofrio) says to Owen (Chris Pratt): “War is part of nature. Look around, Owen. Every living thing in this jungle is trying to murder the other. Mother Nature’s way of testing her creations. Refining the pecking order. War is a struggle. Struggle breeds greatness. Without that, we end up with places like this, charging seven bucks a soda.” In World War Z (2013), Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) asks Fassbach (Elyses Gabel): “You think we’re gonna find anything” and Fassbach replies: “Mother Nature is a serial killer. No one’s better. More creative. But like all serial killers, she can’t help the urge to want to get caught.” Along the same lines, but in a very different milieu, Werner Herzog’s remarks on the state of nature in Burden of Dreams (1982, dir. Les Blank and Maureen Gosling) are not to be missed; for more on this line of Herzog’s thought, see David LaRocca, “ ‘Profoundly Unreconciled to Nature’: Ecstatic Truth and the Humanistic Sublime in Werner Herzog’s War Films,” in The Philosophy of War Films, 437–82; and “Hunger in the Heart of Nature: Werner Herzog’s Anti-Sentimental Dispatches from the American Wilderness (Reflections on Grizzly Man),” in Dark Nature: Anti-Pastoral Essays in American Literature and Culture, ed. Richard J. Schneider (Lanham: Lexington Books of Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), 227–40. 39. Cavell, The World Viewed, xv. 40. Ibid., xv–xvi. 41. Ibid., xvi. 42. Badlands, dir. Terrence Malick (Burbank: Warner Bros., 1973). The stereographs, which we see as single images, begin to appear at 00:35:45 and conclude not quite a minute later at 00:36:41. 43. Ibid. 44. More can be said about the nature of expressiveness in Badlands, and has been, for example, by Cavell, who wrote: “It is a film that invokes the medium’s great and natural power for giving expression to the inexpressive, in everything from the enforced social silence, or shyness, of Chaplin and Keaton to the enforceable personal silence, or reserve, of Bogart and Cooper,” The World Viewed, 245n62. Cavell has in mind “the mismatch . . . between the depth to which an ordinary life requires expression and the surface of ordinary means through which that life must, if it will, express itself” (180). For more on the topic of expression (including how it relates to these passages from The World Viewed and Cavell’s reading of Malick), see Richard Moran, “Stanley Cavell on Recognition, Betrayal, and the Photographic Field of Expression,” The Harvard Review of Philosophy, Volume XXIII (2016), 29–40. Moran’s remarks

18

David LaRocca

at “Le Pensée du cinéma: en hommage à Stanley Cavell” (convened at Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, June 2019) further enriched the scene of encounter between Cavell’s writing and Malick’s films. 45. Cavell, The World Viewed, xvi. 46. Among other places, see Stanley Cavell, “The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear,” in Must We Mean What We Say: A Book of Essays (New York: Scribner, 1969; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976 and 2002), ch. 10. 47. Cavell, The World Viewed, xv-xvi. Italics added. 48. Ibid., xvi. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid., xiii–xiv. 52. LUCY (Irene Dunne): You’re all confused, aren’t you? JERRY (Cary Grant): Aren’t you? LUCY: No. JERRY: Well you should be, because you’re wrong about things being different because they’re not the same. Things are different except in a different way. You’re still the same, only I’ve been a fool . . . but I’m not now. LUCY: Oh. JERRY: So long as I’m different don’t you think that . . . well maybe things could be the same again . . . only a little different, huh? from The Awful Truth, dir. Leo McCarey (Culver City: Columbia Pictures, 1937). 53. Cavell, The World Viewed, xv. Not incidentally, Cavell hears in Jerry Warriner’s remarks, cited in the previous endnote, resonances from Plato’s Parmenides, which Cavell describes in Cities of Words. One takeaway: “that the thoughts of one of the most complex pieces of philosophy ever composed are recognizably recapturable in contemporary conversation, or in the representation of such conversation by a clever writer who may or may not have studied Plato in college,” and another: “that there is something in the sublimest philosophy that can strike one as comic” (378). 54. Cavell, “Concluding Remarks Presented at Paris Colloquium on La Projection du monde,” in Cavell on Film, 282–83. 55. Daniel Barnett, “If a Film Did Philosophy We Wouldn’t Understand It,” Film-Philosophy, vol. 11, no. 3 (2007) 138–46. http://www.film-philosophy.com/2007v11n3/barnett.pdf 56. See Scott MacDonald, “My Troubled Relationship with Cavell: In Pursuit of a Truly Cinematic Conversation,” in The Thought of Stanley Cavell and Cinema: Turning Anew to the Ontology of Film a Half-Century after The World Viewed, ed. David LaRocca (New York: Bloomsbury, 2020). 57. See, for example, Cavell, The World Viewed, 78, 84, 96–98.

REFERENCES Anderson, Paul. “Agee After Cavell, Cavell After Agee.” In Stanley Cavell, Literature, and Film: The Idea of America, edited by Andrew Taylor and Áine Kelly, 132–51. New York: Routledge, 2013. The Awful Truth. Directed by Leo McCarey. Culver City: Columbia Pictures, 1937. Badlands. Directed by Terrence Malick. Burbank: Warner Bros., 1973. Barnett, Daniel. “If a Film Did Philosophy We Wouldn’t Understand It.” Film-Philosophy 11, no. 3 (2007): 138–46. Burden of Dreams. Directed by Les Blank and Maureen Gosling. El Cerrito: Les Blank Films, 1982. Cavell, Stanley. “The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear.” In Must We Mean What We Say: A Book of Essays. New York: Scribner, 1969; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976 and 2002. ———. Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004. ———. “Concluding Remarks Presented at Paris Colloquium on La Projection du monde.” In Cavell on Film, edited by William Rothman, 282–83. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005.

Thinking of Film

19

———. “The Good of Film.” In Cavell on Film, edited by William Rothman, 333–48. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. ———. “The Thought of Movies.” In Themes out of School: Effects and Causes. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981. ———. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971, Enlarged Edition, 1979. Cocks, Jay. “Gun Crazy.” Time, April 8, 1974. Critchley, Simon. Film-Philosophy, Vol. 6, No. 38, December 2002. http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol6-2002/n48critchley. Reprinted in in Film as Philosophy: Essays on Cinema After Wittgenstein and Cavell, ed. Rupert Read and Jerry Goodenough (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 133-48. Days of Heaven. Directed by Terrence Malick. Hollywood: Paramount Pictures, 1978. Furstenau, Marc, and Leslie MacAvoy. “Terrence Malick’s Heideggerian Cinema: War and the Question of Being in The Thin Red Line.” In The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America, edited by Hannah Patterson, 173–85. London: Wallflower Press, 2007. Goodenough, Jerry. “Introduction I: A Philosopher Goes to the Cinema.” Edited by Rupert Read and Jerry Goodenough. Film as Philosophy, 2005. Heidegger, Martin. Vom Wesen Des Grundes (The Essence of Reasons), A Bilingual Edition, Incorporating the German Text. Translated by Terrence Malick. Evanston: Northwest University Press, 1969. Jurassic World. Directed by Colin Trevorrow. Universal City: Universal Pictures, 2015. Loht, Shawn. “Film Exists in a State of Philosophy: Two Contemporary Cavellian Views.” In The Thought of Stanley Cavell and Cinema: Turning Anew to the Ontology of Film a HalfCentury after The World Viewed, edited by David LaRocca. New York: Bloomsbury, 2020. MacDonald, Scott. “My Troubled Relationship with Cavell: In Pursuit of a Truly Cinematic Conversation.” In The Thought of Stanley Cavell and Cinema: Turning Anew to the Ontology of Film a Half-Century after The World Viewed, edited by David LaRocca. New York: Bloomsbury, 2020. Moran, Richard. “Stanley Cavell on Recognition, Betrayal, and the Photographic Field of Expression.” The Harvard Review of Philosophy XXIII (2016): 29–40. The New World. Directed by Terrence Malick. Burbank: New Line Cinema, 2005. Pippin, Robert. “Vernacular Metaphysics: On Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line.” In The Philosophy of War Films, edited by David LaRocca, 392–93. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2014. Prusak, Bernard G. “Seeing as God Sees: Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life.” Commonweal, 10 (January 2014). https://search.proquest.com/docview/1496059346?pq-origsite=gscholar. Read, Rupert. “Introduction II: What Theory of Film Do Wittgenstein and Cavell Have?” Edited by Rupert Read and Jerry Goodenough. Film as Philosophy, 2005. Shaw, Daniel. “Nietzschean Themes in the Films of Charlie Kaufman.” In The Philosophy of Charlie Kaufman, edited by David LaRocca, 254–68. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2011, with a new preface, 2019. Sinnerbrink, Robert. “A Heideggerian Cinema?: On Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line.” Film-Philosophy 10.3 (2006): 26–37. The Thin Red Line. Directed by Terrence Malick. Century City: 20th Century Fox, 1998. The Tree of Life. Directed by Terrence Malick. Los Angeles: Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2011. World War Z. Directed by Marc Forster. Hollywood: Paramount Pictures, 2013.

Chapter Two

Here and There Malick’s Cinema and McGilchrist’s “Divided Brain” Adam Daniel

The cinema of Terrence Malick has been the site of much scholarly analysis and, in particular, reflection on the meeting point of philosophy and cinema. In these reflections, a spectrum of interrelations between film and philosophy has been posited, from the films operating as illustrations of philosophical concepts, to the combination of sound and image encouraging the audience to think philosophically, to the films themselves being interpreted as philosophical thought in and of itself. 1 In their edited collection on the relation between Malick and philosophy, Thomas Deane Tucker and Stuart Kendall contend that “the greatest films arguably often engage in subtle and complex ways with the most challenging questions of human life and thus tread willfully into territory traditionally occupied by philosophers and theologians,” and the films of Malick are a privileged location for this kind of inquiry. 2 Shifting to a metatextual approach, Martin P. Rossouw interrogates the specific appeal of Malick to philosophers and catalogs the various approaches of scholars who he argues belong to the “theoretical project” known as “‘film-philosophy,’ ‘film as philosophy,’ or ‘cinematic thinking’” in terms of their analytical approaches. 3 Rossouw identifies various “stylistic devices” and “stylistic effects” in the films that these theorists have identified as vital to the “contemplative style” of Malick’s cinema: among the devices, the photography of landscape and nature; first person voice-over monologue; juxtaposition of image and sound; discontinuous editing; repetition of devices; music; camera movement; and episodic, elliptical narrative; and among the stylistic effects, elliptical, fragmented, or impressionistic aesthetic qualities; experience of incongruity or disorientation; questioning or interrogative modes of presentation; experience of awe, wonder, and sublimity; 21

22

Adam Daniel

expressions of perspectives, points of view, or ways of seeing. 4 In this chapter, I will also locate the particular power of Malick’s cinema in the application of several of these devices and their effects on the viewer, philosopher, and non-philosopher alike. However, in doing so, my specific contention is that these devices and effects are qualities of the filmic medium that can work to generate a spectatorial experience that is more akin to a particular “howness” of the world: one that recalibrates spectatorship not purely as the site of identification or meaning making, but as a process of reciprocity between body and image. Malick’s distinctive approach to the construction of sound and image, with its accentuation of texture, rhythm, sensory intensification, and the gestural body of the performer, often subjugates those aspects that are commonly thought to be at the basis of film’s strength as a representational medium—causal logic, narrative, and characterization. Drawing on the theory of Martin Heidegger in a reflection on The Tree of Life (2011), Peter Leithart writes the following of the human interaction with the world at large: “We are ontological amnesiacs, and what we have forgotten is the wonder of Being.” 5 Leithart makes this observation as part of an argument that the cinema of Malick may function as a challenge to this dictum, and in this chapter I seek to bolster this contention, by presenting both an argument for how this “ontological amnesia” has been propagated in the modern world, through an analysis of the work of Iain McGilchrist, and a proposition for how Malick’s films may re-open us to the “wonder” to which Leithart refers. In the act of watching any Malick film it becomes clear that a type of embodied and sensuous immersion is part of the director’s raison d’être. A notoriously reticent filmmaker who has largely shunned interviews since the late 1970s, Malick did however reveal in one of his earliest interviews a “secret intention to make the film experience more concrete, more direct. And, for the audience, I am tempted to say, [to] experience it like a walk in the countryside. You’ll probably be bored or have other things in mind, but perhaps you will be struck, suddenly, by a feeling, by an act, by a unique portrait of nature.” 6 This sudden presence Malick refers to may also be described as an irruption of cinematic affect; an intensification of experience that belies the viewer’s attempt to classify it, and in doing so, may frustrate the conventional experience of cinematic narrative, wherein the viewer typically places the sound and image in a chain of causal logic. What emerges instead of this conventional experience is a potential awakening to the affective ontological core at the heart of human experience: the excessive intensities and multiplicities of the body as it is “lived,” which affect theorist Brian Massumi labels “the unbiddenness of qualitative overspill.” 7 It is in these moments that our “ontological amnesia” can be upturned. Although he does not use this specific term, in his seminal work, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World,

Here and There

23

psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist makes a case for an ontological shift in how we experience the modern world. In the book, McGilchrist explores the structural and functional differences of the hemispheres of the brain and contends that since the Industrial Revolution the manner of experiencing the world presented by the brain’s left hemisphere is colonizing our experience as a whole. 8 To briefly summarize, the central argument he posits is that the “divided” and “asymmetrical nature” of the bihemispheric structure of the brain indicates that the hemispheres perform different functions. 9 While acknowledging that both hemispheres “seem to be involved in one way or another in almost everything we do,” McGilchrist focuses on the different modes of apprehending the world that each hemisphere produces, and how these modes can operate either in reciprocity or conflict. 10 The most fundamental difference he identifies between each hemisphere is of “the type of attention they give to the world.” 11 At the level of common experience, the world we understand typically emerges from an indivisible synthesis of the two cerebral hemispheres. However, through a study of split-brain patients (those whose hemispheres have been “split” by surgical intervention) and patients with brain lesions, certain knowledge has emerged regarding the lateralization of brain function. 12 The customary understanding is that language functions such as grammar, vocabulary and literal meaning are predominantly located in the left hemisphere. The studies McGilchrist draws on, however, reveal some compelling insights into the functions of the right hemisphere. For example, the right hemisphere is responsible for all types of attention except for local, narrowly focused attention: it performs the kind of broad and flexible attention to the world that allows for the apprehension of novel experience. In this way, the right hemisphere is also capable of “frame shifts” in relation to problems presented, and is responsible for the implementation of new and novel solutions to such problems. 13 While the left hemisphere seeks to divide experience into parts, the right hemisphere integrates individual components into a contextual whole. Along similar lines, the hemispheres respond differently to context and abstraction: the right hemisphere seeks to understand the information presented to it holistically, while the left hemisphere operates in a decontextualized manner, separating the information presented to it into literal components that can be categorized and labeled. 14 McGilchrist makes further observations about the right hemisphere’s concern for living versus man-made objects, and its vital role in the perception of music, time, depth, and emotional expressivity and receptivity—observations that this chapter cannot fully explore but which no doubt play an important role in the experience of cinema spectatorship. 15 It is vital, however, to recapitulate that both hemispheres contribute to the construction of experience, and that McGilchrist is reticent to establish unfounded dualisms between the hemispheres’ importance. While some pop psychology has oversimplified the science

24

Adam Daniel

about lateralization, McGilchrist draws on a strong foundation of scientific research and is cautious to contextualize the evidence for each of his points of analysis. The larger scope of his argument, however, is an interrogation of the consequences of the primacy of a left-hemispheric understanding of the world. McGilchrist contends that, although there is an intrinsic cooperation between the cerebral hemispheres, within the last five hundred years they have been operating in a heightened “state of conflict.” 16 This conflict emerges in what he identifies as some of the core features of modernism: “an excess of consciousness and an over-explicitness in relation to what needs to remain intuitive and implicit; depersonalisation and alienation from the body and empathic feeling; disruption of context; fragmentation of experience; and the loss of ‘betweenness.’” 17 Invoking the work of psychologist Louis Sass, McGilchrist makes a comparison between the detached way the left hemisphere attends to the world and the mental world of the schizophrenic. For the schizophrenic, the world and the people within it become somewhat objectified, made alien through a lack of context and the solipsistic gaze bestowed upon them. 18 Borrowing from Heidegger, Sass describes this denuded apprehension of experience as an “unworlding” of the world: with the lack of an encompassing context to give coherence to it, the world becomes fragmented and devoid of meaning. 19 Returning to Malick as a counterpoint, scholars have previously drawn attention to how his films enact a Heideggerian “worlding.” The connections between Malick and Heidegger, and indeed much of the philosophical undercurrent that informs Malick’s cinema, may well originate in the filmmaker’s academic history: Malick studied philosophy at Harvard under the tutelage of noted film philosopher Stanley Cavell, and later attended Oxford, where he turned his attention to the work of Heidegger, including a translation and critical introduction to a previously untranslated work. Scholars such as Steven Rybin, Robert Sinnerbrink, Robert Clewis, and Marc Furstenau and Leslie MacAvoy have examined Heidegger’s influence in the work of Malick, although Sinnerbrink rightfully suggests that a consideration of the relationship between Malick and Heidegger should remain a question that can enlighten but should not limit an experience of his films. 20 The concept of worlding in relation to art, as explicated by Rybin’s reading of Heidegger, is the active verb process through which a meaningful world “reveals itself through the activity of an interpreting, historically situated individual in relation to an interpretable, historically situated artwork.” 21 Worlding is processual, and involves “an open, ongoing, and indeterminate relationship with an artwork, rather than an objective knowledge about the aesthetic object.” 22 Rybin contends that poetic cinema such as Malick’s reminds us that viewers have the power to image—or to “world”—a world. This contention is echoed by Furstenau and MacEvoy, who argue that Malick

Here and There

25

reveals “the presencing of Being through the use of evocative, poetic imagery,” thus performing Heidegger’s valorized role of the artist during “destitute times,” when language, thought, and representation are put to merely instrumental ends. 23 Malick’s specific engagement with the most complex and challenging questions of human life sees his cinema grapple with implications that would most often be the domain of philosophers and theologians: who we are, our purpose, and our place within the world. Cinema has a pivotal role in putting us in touch with the transcendent, due to how cinema may unveil aspects of the world that are at times occluded by other aesthetic domains. Maurice Merleau-Ponty directly addresses this concept, writing that “the movies are peculiarly suited to make manifest the union of mind and body, mind and world, and the expression of one in the other. . . . If philosophy is in harmony with the cinema, if thought and technical effort are heading in the same direction, it is because the philosopher and the moviemaker share a certain way of being, a certain view of the world which belongs to a generation.” 24 The intensely sensuous aspects of Malick’s cinema may testify to his view of the world as one that requires that we reintegrate bodily with the world and with other bodies. As Steven Shaviro proposes, this may occur when the cinematic image works with the body on-screen not merely as “an object of representation,” but as “a zone of affective intensity.” 25 This understanding challenges some aspects of the scholarship that emerged from the cognitivist branch of film theory in the late twentieth century, which places a greater emphasis on the viewer’s decoding of the semantic content of the image. Scholars such as Noël Carroll and David Bordwell suggest that affective responses are akin to an emotional reaction to the protagonist, narrative, or image, and that this emotional response is predicated primarily on cognitive evaluation. 26 Alex Neill, in Post-Theory, argues that viewer engagement emerges from empathy as an “imaginative activity”; Neill refers to Carroll’s contention that we respond to fictional protagonists and situations with a form of imaginative “assimilation” of the event or emotional response. 27 What this conceptual approach largely discounts, however, is the presence of the body and the primacy of affect, two foundational aspects of the “howness” of the world we are presented with, both in the cinema and outside the cinema, as elaborated by McGilchrist. Conceptual approaches that elide this “howness” of experience in favor of deconstructing the “whatness” of representational content are echoed within popular film criticism, particularly in relation to Malick’s cinema. An underlying drive in much of film criticism to employ the tools of literary analysis to cinema often misunderstands the sensory-affective capacities of the form. Critic David Denby, for example, snidely asserts that in To The Wonder (2012), “a Malick sequence has now become a collection of semi-disconnected shots, individually ravishing but bound together by what feels like the

26

Adam Daniel

trivial narcissism of Caribbean-travel ads on TV.” He complains that “nothing in it adds up” and that viewers “wait for the handsomely photographed, high-powered sex because there’s not much else going on.” 28 Claudia Puig argues that the viewer of To The Wonder begins to “despair that anything of interest will ever happen,” while A.O. Scott, on a more even keel, contends that the film is “no more concerned with the psychology of heterosexual relationships than it is with standard dramatized action,” the unstated implication that an engagement with either of these would improve the film. 29 Critics have particularly struggled with the increasingly abstract qualities of two of Malick’s most recent films, Knight of Cups (2015) and Song to Song (2017). Eric Kohn, for example, argues that the stylistic technique used by Malick in these later films “regularly lingers on the cusp of self-parody.” 30 Recent Malick scholarship has often noted the polarization of critical response to his work. In reviewing the response to The New World (2005), Lloyd Michaels, for example, identifies a “mocking tone that informed several reviews.” 31 Sinnerbrink, similarly, notes that the critical responses to The Tree of Life repeat “the reception history of Malick’s other films” and diverge between “rapturous celebration and sarcastic ridicule.” 32 He also separately notes that it is a perceived “romantic naivety” in Malick’s work that critics and scholars often find troubling. 33 This often-reductive consideration of Malick shares resonances with the conceptual subordination that McGilchrist contends is occurring from a lefthemispheric colonization of experience: a movement from abstract to concrete, from metaphor to symbol, from contextualized wholes to decontextualized parts. Thinking about film in this manner diminishes its capacities. It neglects to consider the potential of cinema, as of art more broadly, to speak to viewers in a manner that goes beyond their cognitive evaluation of its surface elements; for cinema, that of character psychology, plot, and narrative. This potential, when acknowledged, extends cinema from a narrative that needs to be grasped to be sensible, to the sensual and sensible properties of the image perhaps exceeding the viewer’s grasp in a manner that is productive of depth; depth in the manner that McGilchrist presents it: as “the sense of a something lying beyond” (italics his). 34 The notion of “grasp” is central to the left-hemispheric apprehension of the world. McGilchrist describes how the physical act of grasping is located in the left hemisphere and is closely linked to acts of language. He describes grasp as a “unidirectional, instrumental gesture,” and explains that the agendas of mental grasp and physical grasp correlate. Language, he argues, provides the “precision and fixity” that make the world “available for manipulation and possession.” 35 In doing so, however, it wrests the thing away from its context—it isolates it to hold it, control it, and manipulate it. However, in this act of grasping via language McGilchrist reminds us that “every word, in and of itself, eventually has to lead us out of the web of language, to the lived

Here and There

27

world, ultimately to something that can only be pointed to, something that relates to our embodied existence.” 36 It is language’s synthesis with the righthemispheric apprehension of the world that brings fullness to experience. It is only the right hemisphere which has the ability to comprehend metaphor, a process which is vital because, as McGilchrist contends, metaphoric thinking is “the only way in which understanding can reach outside the system of signs to life itself. It is what links language to life.” 37 Where can this take us to in an understanding of Malick’s cinema? The expanded conception of how audiences process cinematic metaphor offered by Cornelia Müller, Hermann Kappelhoff, Sarah Greifenstein, et al., accords more fully with the type of spectatorial experience offered within Malick’s cinema. Following Vivian Sobchack’s neo-phenomenological understanding of cinema, they conceive of the narrative of cinema not as “the startingpoint,” but as “the product of metaphorical thinking”; narratives, in this sense, are “done” by the spectators in the act of viewing. 38 This is a type of sense making that emerges from the dynamics of embodied intersubjective experience between viewer and “movement-images,” an affective entanglement that is the basis of spectatorship. Müller, Kappelhoff, Greifenstein, et al., specifically employ the Deleuzian term “movement-images” in order to stress that audiovisual images “are not a succession of isolated, immobile pictorial representations, but rather generate temporal gestalts. These gestalts are created in a similar way to hand gestures, as a changing flow of shapes, positions, and movement qualities. The movement of audiovisual moving images is, along with its temporality, constitutive of the media mode that brings audiovisual representations into existence, in the first place.” 39 This approach to cinema concurs with Rybin’s reading of Malick; Rybin draws attention to how film for Malick is more than merely an illustrative instrument for pictorially constructing the causal chains of narrative and the psychological comportment of characters. Rybin writes, “The sensual world of image and sound—the worlds of Malick’s films—exceeds any single interpretation, diegetic or otherwise, that might be ascribed to it, even as its rhythms, compositions, and gradations enable those interpretations.” 40 The excess Rybin identifies emerges in corporeal experience; the spectator, finding it difficult to grasp the work through “single interpretation” is nonetheless affectively imbricated with the sound and image. Vivian Sobchack’s phenomenological film theory provides a basis to more fully comprehend how this excess may be generated through the intersubjective meeting of film and viewer. Wrestling with the difficulty of what she sees as a vacillating corporeal response between the “as-if-real” sensual experience and the direct sensual experience of the spectator, Sobchack identifies how much of contemporary film theory has struggled with the comprehension of human bodies being “touched” or “moved,” not only in the figurative sense, but also in the literal sense. 41 Arguing that “we see and comprehend and feel films with

28

Adam Daniel

our entire bodily being, informed by the full history and carnal knowledge of our acculturated sensorium,” Sobchack posits a primary engagement with the sensory qualities of the image, with its materiality on a sensible level. 42 This is body and image as Elena Del Rio describes them, as “surfaces in contact, engaged in a constant activity of reciprocal realignment and inflection,” not “discrete units.” 43 Sobchack writes in reaction to descriptions of cinema spectatorship that suggest the presence of bodily engagement but that bracket it as either “phantasmatic psychic formations, cognitive processes, [or] basic physiological reflexes” (relatedly, this process of bracketing is very much in line with a left-hemispheric decontextualization of experience). 44 Her response is a conception of spectatorship as consciousness and flesh amalgamated, wherein off-screen and on-screen bodies subversively function “both literally and figuratively”—what Sobchack terms the “cinesthetic subject.” 45 This understanding reconceives the dominating senses of sight and hearing in the cinematic experience as able to be transmuted to the other sensory modalities. In clinical synesthesia, there is the involuntary stimulation of one sense in the perception of another: for instance, literally seeing the sound of a horn as red. In coenesthesia, there is perception of one’s whole sensorial being: Sobchack uses the example of the general and diffuse sensual condition of the child at birth, before the hierarchical arrangement of the senses through cultural immersion and practice. Integrating these concepts allows Sobchack to conceive a way of commuting seeing and hearing to touching, and back again “without a thought”: or as Merleau-Ponty writes in Phenomenology of Perception, seeing the lived body as “a ready-made system of equivalents and transpositions from one sense to another. The senses translate each other without any need of an interpreter, and they are mutually comprehensible without the intervention of any idea.” 46 In doing so, Sobchack bridges the gap between the literal body of the spectator and the figural representation of the image, transforming spectatorial bodies into “matter that means” and on-screen images as “meaning that matters,” each informing the other in the co-creation of experience. 47 This presence of the literal and the figural vacillates, both concurrently present within the spectrum of spectatorial experience; they are not, as the left hemisphere would likely conceive of them, separate entities, but are, in Sobchack’s terms, reciprocal and reversible. 48 It is easy to see how this consideration challenges any fundamental premise of cinema as the cognitive decoding of a progression of narrative events used to generate emotion—instead we are presented with cinema as a multisensory engagement wherein the spectatorial body is brought to the fore. Anne Rutherford argues that cinema in this conception is about “creating an affect, an event, a moment which lodges itself under the skin of the spectator.” 49 By lodging itself “under our skins,” Malick’s cinema also draws the

Here and There

29

viewer into a relationship with the image that encourages an ecological and holistic consciousness. This ecological consciousness is akin to Timothy Morton’s understanding of ecology, when he writes, Ecology isn’t just about global warming, recycling, and solar power—and also not just to do with everyday relationships between humans and nonhumans. It has to do with love, loss, despair, and compassion. It has to do with depression and psychosis. It has to do with capitalism and with what might exist after capitalism. It has to do with amazement, open-mindedness, and wonder. It has to do with doubt, confusion, and skepticism. It has to do with concepts of space and time. It has to do with delight, beauty, ugliness, disgust, irony, and pain. It has to do with consciousness and awareness. It has to do with ideology and critique. It has to do with reading and writing. It has to do with race, class, and gender. It has to do with sexuality. It has to do with ideas of self and the weird paradoxes of subjectivity. It has to do with society. It has to do with coexistence. 50

The interconnectivity of all things is at the heart of Malick’s cinema; however, it is also accompanied by a very human grappling with the boundlessness of this interconnectivity, and how we are situated in relation to it. An example can be found in To The Wonder, where the titular passage refers to both an explicit and implicit journey: the explicit “wonder” is the island abbey of Mont Saint-Michel, off the coast of Normandy, the location where the film’s central characters, Neil and Marina, meet and fall in love; the implicit passage “to the wonder” is the very real human desire to perhaps transcend ourselves, to come to an understanding of our place in the universe while also acknowledging the human limitations of any such pursuit. Matt Zoller Seitz writes perceptively that Malick’s films acknowledge that “we are not the centers of the universe . . . but at the same time the storehouse of human experience is a given universe unto itself. This may be the essence of [the cinema of] Terrence Malick: human beings are infinitely small and yet infinitely significant. Why? Because we ask why; because we wonder.” 51 This sense of wonder that is ever present in Malick’s work concurs with Howard L. Parsons’s description of wonder as “the spark of excitation leaping across the gap between man and the world.” 52 Wonder is presented not in the manner that the wonderment be decoded or “read,” but in the sense that both the characters and the audience must give themselves over to it, in much the same way viewers must surrender themselves to the unique rhythms and forms of Malick’s films. The hemispheric approaches to newness that McGilchrist details would accord this wonder as an outcome of the right hemisphere’s “patient openness to whatever is, which allows us to see it as if for the very first time”; McGilchrist notes that this type of experiencing “leads to what Heidegger called radical ‘astonishment’ before the world.” 53

30

Adam Daniel

Malick’s construction of a “cinesthetic subject,” whose consciousness within the spectatorial experience synchronizes more with a right-hemispheric approach to the world, is aided by the use of several stylistic techniques that McGilchrist identifies as significant qualities of art in the movement of Romanticism, emerging at the end of the eighteenth century. McGilchrist contends that the aesthetics of Romanticism demonstrate “its affinity for everything we know from the neuropsychological literature about the workings of the right hemisphere.” 54 Among these affinities is a consideration of depth, not purely in the dimensionality of the image, but depth in terms of a spatial and temporal relationship with the world, and depth in terms of the operation of light, color, and texture in the image. The movement away from the surface of the image and its explicit content, to depth as a spatial and temporal relationship, assists in the construction of metaphor, which proliferated in artworks of the Romantic period in an attempt to express the inexpressible. Comparing this to the right hemisphere’s tendency toward the implicit over the explicit, McGilchrist cites Isaiah Berlin, who describes the drive of the Romantic artist thusly: I wish to convey something immaterial and I have to use material means for it. I have to convey something which is inexpressible and I have to use expression. I have to convey, perhaps, something unconscious and I have to use conscious means. I know in advance that I shall not succeed, and therefore all I can do is to get nearer and nearer in some asymptotic approach. 55

McGilchrist also describes the specific type of light common to Romantic art as “transitional” or “half-light,” and notes that in terms of the hemispheres, these states of light have “a multitude of affinities with complexity, transience, emotional weight, dream states, the implicit, and the unconscious, rather than clarity, simplicity, fixity, detachment, the explicit, and full consciousness.” For McGilchrist, Romantic artists were also keenly aware of the power of embodiment, of synesthesia, and of constructing art which used a sensory logic which understood the body as the root of experience. Longing and melancholy were two central emotional impulses of Romanticism. Lastly, he concludes his thoughts on Romanticism by noting its “attraction to whatever is provisional, uncertain, changing, evolving, partly hidden, obscure, dark, implicit, and essentially unknowable in preference to what is final, certain, fixed, evolved, evident, clear, light, and known.” 56 While there are myriad ways to illustrate how Malick’s films catalyze this similar conceptual frame, I will focus on the following four aspects from those mentioned above: ambiguity and incongruity in relation to the “essentially unknowable,” states of light that intensify the qualities listed above, the presence of longing and melancholy, and the accentuation of the sensory logic of bodies within the filmic world.

Here and There

31

Malick’s cinema is not averse to ambiguity, from setting, to character psychology and emotion, to narrative progression, and beyond. His films revel in incongruous pairings, both thematically and within the image itself. 57 Thematic ambiguity can be evidenced in the explicit question of “nature” versus “grace” in The Tree of Life; in the questions of intimacy and estrangement, eros and agape love in To the Wonder; and in the combination of natural beauty and human violence in The Thin Red Line and The New World. Within the image itself, Malick often pairs a naturalistic setting or moment with a formalistic performance, or vice versa. Ambiguity also emerges in the stylistics of montage Malick employs. Tom Gunning, writing about The New World, observes the challenge to classical Hollywood editing in Malick’s oeuvre. Gunning notes that “shots rarely interlock seamlessly; the editing does not systematically maintain a coherent space or continuous time”; this technique destabilizes the viewer’s mastery of the image and opens a space for an examination of the contingency of space and time within it. 58 The ambiguity of Malick’s characters also allows them to function as more than simply representational entities. Adrian Martin notes how Malick’s characters “are never wholly there in their story, their history, their destiny: they float like ghosts, unformed, malleable, subject to mercurial shifts in mood or attitude, no more stable or fixed than the breeze or the stream.” 59 Martin also describes in Malick’s work a “poetic ambition” to “film the things of the world (people, animals, flora, and fauna) before they acquire their names, before they coalesce into firm shapes, objects, identities” (italics his). 60 This lack of specificity is overcome by the contextualization of a right-hemispheric approach to the world; the parts, despite their lack of names or labels, can still contribute to a gestalt whole. We can apply the same understanding to the decontextualized use of voice-over which often disrupts the image it accompanies in Malick’s films, sometimes through the positing of philosophical questions that are in excess of what the image (or any image) can offer. Rybin notes how typically Malick’s characters’ voices are “destabilized in relation to their precise temporal, spatial, narrative, and even cultural coordinates.” 61 An acceptance of the ambiguity or incongruity that emerges from this disjunction between image and voiceover would echo a right-hemispheric approach to the world, one that is not “grasping” but is patiently attending to the indivisible nature of experience. Given the philosophical nature of the questions posed by many of Malick’s films, ambiguity is often a necessary response. In To The Wonder, for example, Neil (Ben Affleck) and Father Quintana (Javier Bardem) each grapple with the different dimensions of the conflict between eros and agape love. While it seems that Neil comes to an unspoken understanding of his necessity to love unselfishly through the events of the film, the story ends with his wife Marina (Olga Kurylenko) leaving him, contradicting the notion

32

Adam Daniel

that this (or any) self-knowledge allows for estrangement to be transcended. In The Thin Red Line, Witt (James Caviezel) asks through voice-over: “What’s this war in the heart of nature? Why does nature vie with itself, the land contend with the sea? Is there an avenging power in nature, not one power, [but] two?” 62 It would be difficult if not impossible for a filmmaker to pose an explicit answer to questions such as these; however, that does not negate the importance of posing the question, both within the diegesis (as Witt struggles with his place, both literally and figuratively, in the battle between the Americans and the Japanese at Guadalcanal in World War II) and for the viewer to ruminate on. Intentional ambiguity of character, narrative, and theme encourages the viewer to become comfortable with indeterminacy and the ephemeral and transitory nature of experience. The cinematography of Malick’s films is driven by a similar provocation. While often lauded for their beauty, Malick’s images do not simply operate as aesthetically pleasing spectacles, but as states of light that may attend to “complexity, transience, emotional weight, dream states, the implicit, and the unconscious,” as McGilchrist argues of the use of light in Romanticism. 63 A critique of this heightened aesthetic goes as far back as Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978); Ben McCann, for example, contends that the cinematography in these films fetishize “nature to such an extent that the images threaten to engulf the narrative, turning the films into exercises in ‘film painting.’” 64 Rather than fetishizing nature, I would contend that Malick and his most frequent collaborator Emmanuel Lubezki are instead seeking to capture its transitional dimensions. Discussing The New World, Lubezki offered the following notes on their motives: This is basically a sunlit movie. When we were shooting, we were extra aware of how everything in nature is constantly shifting. We became aware of the earth moving, the shadows changing, the color temperature constantly shifting, the rivers changing color, and the tide shifting, and all of that happens really fast. . . . Shooting studio movies, you tend to want to control the elements, but on this picture we didn’t . . . we wanted to capture life. 65

The twilight of both dusk and dawn are favored times for Lubezki and Malick, yet this aesthetic can also be traced back to Malick’s earlier films, Badlands and Days of Heaven. The shots in these films, while often beautiful, are also imbued with a sense of liminality or transition; the shifting textures and colors of these images may work metaphorically to draw the spectator into an awareness of the contingency of the spatial and temporal depth of a “lived body’s” relationship with the world; time (and our passage within it, through movement) is fleeting. An awareness of the transitory nature of existence may be obscured by our “ontological amnesia”; however, once brought to the fore, this awareness often produces an intensified emo-

Here and There

33

tional consideration of the world. Longing and melancholy, two central emotional drives of Romanticism, are evident throughout Malick’s cinema. While rarely explicitly asserted, Malick’s characters gaze at the world, and at each other, with apparent longing. McGilchrist delineates “longing” from “wanting,” stating that the latter is “clear, purposive, urgent” while the former is a desire for union or reunion, rather than acquisition. 66 In The New World, we see this in the face of John Smith (Colin Farrell) on his arrival in Virginia, walking through the fields, seeking accord with his new home. Unlike wanting, longing is, as McGilchrist asserts, a more “diffuse and reverberative” relation between the person and the object or person they seek to connect with. 67 When longing occurs between people in Malick’s films, it is with this apparent desire to unify; in The Tree of Life, there is, in the character of Jack (played as a child by Hunter McCracken, and as an adult by Sean Penn) an expression of many variations of longing; longing for his deceased brother, longing as the desire for a better relationship with his father, and longing for the maternal care of his mother. Melancholy emerges through the frustrations of this longing. In Song to Song, longing emerges in Faye’s (Rooney Mara) desire for knowledge of herself and the world: as she says, “I told myself: any experience is better than no experience.” While she desires fame and success as a musician, what she truly longs for is freedom and authenticity. In Days of Heaven, Bill (Richard Gere) must live with the consequences of the duplicitous marriage between his lover Abby (Brooke Adams) and the farmer (Sam Shepard). Before the wedding, Bill gazes at the farmer’s house with desire, for the promise of the financial security it offers; after the wedding, the house becomes a site of longing, for a reunification with Abby that seems less and less likely as her affection for the farmer grows. Longing also manifests in the outstretched hand that is a common Malick motif: as previously mentioned, the outstretched hand is not a grasping hand, in the left-hemispheric sense, but one that is extended toward the tactile world, placing the world into relation with the body, which is a right-hemispheric function. I will expand on this notion in the final section of this chapter, as I address how the accentuation of the sensory logic of bodies within the filmic world both presents a right-hemispheric “howness” in its experience of the world, and underpins the embodied experience of Sobchack’s “cinesthetic subject.” The performative engagement of the actor’s body is central to Malick’s cinema. He utilizes the actors’ bodies in a manner that privileges gestures, postures, and attitudes over development of character or plot. These gestures are often incongruous with psychological interpretations. While bodily movements may be translated into figurative interpretations of movement— Jane’s (Rachel McAdams) inability to balance in To the Wonder as a metaphor for falling in love, for example—they are perhaps better understood as

34

Adam Daniel

sites for the generation of what Elena Del Rio labels “expression events of unassimilable affect” 68; that is to say, the manner in which the bodily gestures counter or exceed the expectations of the viewer produces an erratic circulation of affect between the performer’s body and the spectator’s. Malick moves his characters through their filmic worlds in a manner that appeals to sensory logic over narrative logic. He rarely uses establishing shots, preferring instead to leap into the next moment and space as the performers’ bodies are already moving through them. In moments between couples, such as John Smith and Pocahontas (Q’orianka Kilcher) in The New World, or Neil and Jane in To The Wonder, the emphasis is placed specifically on bodies and their connection to the environment, in contrast with a lack of emphasis on their facial expressions, dialogue, or chronology of experience. This emphasis on the sensory aspects of the environment, and the way bodies are fully implicated with them, often runs counter to narrative progression; in its place is a type of stasis which has the capacity to reveal the presence of an affective primacy that the viewer’s common recourse to narrative structure may perhaps obscure. Of Malick’s use of environment, Rybin writes that “despite their sensual immersion in it, the characters’ environment is not a willing stage for their drama and their emotions. It stands over and, at times, even against them.” 69 He notes how “the human figure does not determine the visual composition of every shot. Nature, and the beauty of nature, frequently stands autonomous relative to human beings.” 70 While I would agree that the environment is not a “stage” for the characters, I would disagree with the contention that nature is autonomous relative to them. Instead, I would propose that nature as environment and the human performer within it are placed in a contextual relation; the world they inhabit is equally as important as the details of their inhabitation. Malick’s films are notable in their emphasis on tactility: sheets on skin, bare feet on the ground, the ripple of wind on hair and clothes, hands on grass. While some of these images facilitate narrative coherence, there is an excess, or to again borrow Massumi’s term, a “qualitative overspill” that magnetizes the sense of touch in an almost palpable way. 71 Although viewers cannot literally sense the grass passing through their fingers, there is what Sobchack describes as “an unthought carnal movement” of “tactile desire,” where the sense of touch is generally intensified by the ongoing partial fulfilment of this desire, on and by the screen and in and by the viewer’s body. 72 If Malick’s cinema is designed to dislodge us from what Leithart describes as our “ontological amnesia,” it does so by frustrating a mechanistic view of the cinematic world, and by bringing our bodies to the fore as a bridge between the “here” of the spectatorial experience and the “there” of the on-screen event. In the production of the cinesthetic subject, cinema becomes not simply a site for abstract contemplation, but a meeting point

Here and There

35

between image and body that creates new and potentially revolutionary meanings in each lived-body experience. Sinnerbrink argues that the fusion of “moral, historical, metaphysical, and spiritual visions” in The Tree of Life and its exploration of “love and belief” defy a persistent cultural skepticism toward “religion, mythology, or the aesthetic possibilities of cinema.” He further contends that Malick’s cinema may operate as “a poetic machinery for the creation of revelatory images capable of offering ‘reasons to believe in this world,’” a term borrowed from Gilles Deleuze to argue for cinema’s capacities to reunite us with the world. 73 This understanding shares several affinities with McGilchrist’s conception that art has the capacity to restore balance and counter the left brain’s colonization of experience. While the left hemisphere attempts to cut off or “ironize” the pathways out of what McGilchrist terms the “the hall of mirrors,” where reality that cannot be rationalized or expressed in language does not exist, these pathways still operate to challenge the attempted coup of the “emissary” over the “master.” 74 Among these pathways are “the natural world,” “the history of a culture,” “the body,” “spirituality,” and “art.” 75 It is apt that each of these pathways appear vital to Malick’s interests as a filmmaker. Yet his cinema itself also acts specifically as one such pathway: as a location that presents a right-hemispheric experience of attending to the world—searching, rather than grasping—and, in doing so, one that may successfully dislodge us from our “ontological amnesia.” NOTES 1. Stanley Cavell, for example, directly linked Malick’s films to Heidegger’s concepts of Being, arguing that Malick’s films elicited “thoughts for our meditation,” see Cavell, The World Viewed, xv; For a summary of the concept of film as philosophy, see Sinnerbrink, “FilmPhilosophy.” 2. Thomas Deane Tucker and Stuart Kendall, Terrence Malick: Film and Philosophy (Continuum, 2011), 2. 3. Martin P. Rossouw, “There’s Something about Malick: Film-Philosophy, Contemplative Style, and Ethics of Transformation,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 15, no. 3 (2017): 281. 4. Ibid., 284–85. 5. Peter Leithart, Shining Glory (Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2013), 39. 6. Malick, cited in Yvonne Baby, “Terrence Malick Interview,” Le Monde (1979). 7. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Duke University Press, 2002), 218. 8. Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale University Press, 2019), 127–32. 9. Ibid., 16–31. 10. Ibid., 2. 11. Ibid., 4. 12. Patients who had gone through the process of callosotomy, which divides the corpus callosum, became subjects for many of the research findings McGilchrist draws on in his work. 13. McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, 40. 14. Ibid., 46–51.

36

Adam Daniel

15. Ibid., 32–93. 16. Ibid., 14. 17. Ibid., 397. Maintains original spelling. 18. Ibid., 393–98. 19. Sass, cited in McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, 395. 20. Robert Sinnerbrink, “A Heideggerian Cinema? On Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line,” Film-Philosophy, Vol. 10, no. 3 (2006): 26–37; see also Furstenau and MacEvoy, “Terrence Malick’s Heideggerian Cinema: War and the Question of Being in The Thin Red Line”; Rybin. Terrence Malick and the Thought of Film. 21. Steven Rybin, Terrence Malick and the Thought of Film (Lexington Books, 2012), 15. 22. Ibid., 15. 23. Marc Furstenau and Leslie MacAvoy, “Terrence Malick’s Heideggerian Cinema: War and the Question of Being in The Thin Red Line,” in The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America, ed. Hannah Peterson (Wallflower Press, 2007), 177. 24. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-sense (Northwestern University Press, 1964), 59. 25. Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 267. 26. David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Taylor & Francis, 2013); David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, eds. Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (University of Wisconsin Press, 1996); Noël Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge University Press, 1996). 27. Alex Neill, “Empathy and the (fiction) film,” in Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, eds. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll (University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 185. 28. David Denby, “Commitments,” The New Yorker, April 8, 2013. 29. Claudia Puig, “To the Wonder is a beautiful blunder,” USA Today, April 11, 2013; A. O. Scott, “Twirling in Oklahoma, a Dervish for Love.” New York Times. April 12, 2013. 30. Eric Kohn, “Berlin Review: Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups Pushes the Director’s Style to Its Limits,” Indiewire, February 8, 2015. 31. Lloyd Michaels, Terrence Malick (University of Illinois Press, 2009), 84. 32. Robert Sinnerbrink, “‘Love Everything’: Cinema and Belief in Malick’s The Tree of Life,” Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy, “Varieties of Continental Philosophy and Religion,” 20 no. 1 (Spring 2016): 94; see also Jon Baskin, “Conversion Experience: Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder,” Los Angeles Review of Books (May 12, 2013). 33. Robert Sinnerbrink, “Song of the Earth: Cinematic Romanticism in Malick’s The New World,” in Terrence Malick: Film and Philosophy, eds. Thomas Deane Tucker and Stuart Kendall (Continuum, 2011), 181. 34. McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, 181. 35. Ibid., 115. 36. Ibid., 116. 37. Ibid., 115–16; McGilchrist explains that the word “metaphor” implies “something that carries you across an implied gap (Greek meta- across, pherein carry).” 38. Cornelia Müller et al., Cinematic Metaphor: Experience—Affectivity—Temporality (Boston: De Gruyter, 2018), 2. 39. Ibid., 22. Italics in original. 40. Rybin, Terrence Malick and the Thought of Film, 18. 41. Vivian Sobchack, “What My Fingers Knew: The Cinesthetic Subject, or Vision in the Flesh,” in Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (University of California Press, 2004), 59. 42. Ibid., 63. 43. Elena del Río, “The Body as Foundation of the Screen: Allegories of Technology in Atom Egoyan’s Speaking Parts.” Camera Obscura, no. 38 (1996), 101. 44. Sobchack, “What My Fingers Knew,” 60. 45. A neologism Sobchack derives from “cinema,” “synesthesia,” and “coenesthesia.” 46. Sobchack, “What My Fingers Knew,” 65; Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-sense, 71. 47. Sobchack, “What My Fingers Knew,” 74–75. 48. Ibid., 60. 49. Anne Rutherford, “Cinema and Embodied Affect.” Senses of Cinema (March 2003).

Here and There

37

50. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Harvard University Press, 2010), 2. 51. Matt Zoller Seitz, “Terrence Malick’s Cathedrals of Cinema,” RogerEbert.com, February 16, 2015, https://www.rogerebert.com/mzs/book-excerpt-faith-and-spirituality-in-mastersof-world-cinema-vol-3. 52. Howard L. Parsons, “A Philosophy of Wonder,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 30, no. 1 (1969): 85. 53. McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, 173. 54. Ibid., 379. 55. Isaiah Berlin, cited in McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, 374. 56. McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, 380. 57. See Carl Plantinga, “Affective Incongruity and The Thin Red Line.” Projections, 4 no. 2 (2010): 86–103. 58. Tom Gunning, “The New World: Dwelling in Malick’s New World.” Criterion, (July 25, 2016). 59. Adrian Martin, “Things to Look Into: The Cinema of Terrence Malick.” Rouge, (December 2006), http://www.rouge.com.au/10/malick.html. 60. Ibid. 61. Rybin, Terrence Malick and the Thought of Film, 136. 62. The Thin Red Line, dir. Terrence Malick (20th Century Fox, 1998). 63. McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, 361. 64. Ben McCann, “‘Enjoying the Scenery’: Landscape and the Fetishization of Nature in Badlands and Days of Heaven.” The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America, ed. Hannah Patterson (Wallflower Press, 2007), 79. 65. B. Benjamin, “Uncharted Emotions,” American Cinematographer 87, no.1 (January 2006), 50. 66. McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, 308. 67. Ibid., 308. 68. Elena del Río, Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance: Powers of Affection (Edinburgh University Press, 2012). 69. Rybin, Terrence Malick and the Thought of Film, 75. 70. Ibid., 138. 71. Massumi, Parables of the Virtual, 218. 72. Sobchack, “What My Fingers Knew,” 78–79. 73. Sinnerbrink, “Love Everything,” 92. 74. McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, 229–30. 75. Ibid., 428–62.

REFERENCES Baby, Yvonne. “Terrence Malick Interview.” Le Monde, May 17, 1979. Badlands. Directed by Terrence Malick. Burbank: Warner Bros., 1973. Baskin, Jon. “Conversion Experience: Terrence Malick’s To The Wonder.” The Los Angeles Review of Books. May 12, 2013. Accessed June 30, 2019, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/conversion-experience-terrence-malicks-to-the-wonder. Benjamin, B. “Uncharted Emotions.” American Cinematographer, 87, no.1, January 2006. Berlin, Isaiah. The Roots of Romanticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Bordwell, David. Narration in the Fiction Film. New York: Taylor & Francis, 2013. Bordwell, David, and Noë l Carroll, eds. Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996. Bradshaw, Peter. “Review of To the Wonder.” The Guardian. September 2, 2012. Accessed June 15, 2019, http://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/sep/02/to-the-wonder-review. Carroll, Noë l. Theorizing the Moving Image. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Cavell, Stanley. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979.

38

Adam Daniel

Clewis, Robert. “Heideggerian Wonder in Terence Malick’s The Thin Red Line.” Film and Philosophy 7 (2003): 22–36. Coplan, Amy. “Form and Feeling in Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line.” In The Thin Red Line, edited by David Davies, 65–86. London: Routledge, 2008. Davies, David. “Terrence Malick.” In The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, edited by Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga, 569–580. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2009. Days of Heaven. Directed by Terrence Malick. Hollywood: Paramount Pictures, 1978. del Río, Elena. “The Body as Foundation of the Screen: Allegories of Technology in Atom Egoyan’s Speaking Parts,” Camera Obscura, no. 38 (1996), 92-115. ———. Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance: Powers of Affection. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. Denby, David. “Commitments.” The New Yorker. April 8, 2013. Accessed September 30, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/04/15/commitments. Furstenau, Marc and Leslie MacAvoy. “Terrence Malick’s Heideggerian Cinema: War and the Question of Being in The Thin Red Line.” In The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America, edited by Hannah Patterson, 179–191. New York: Wallflower Press, 2007. Gunning, Tom. “The New World: Dwelling in Malick’s New World.” Criterion. July 25, 2016. Accessed June 8, 2019, https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/4161-the-new-world-dwelling-in-malick-s-new-world. Kendall, Stuart. “The Tragic Indiscernibility of Days of Heaven.” In Terrence Malick: Film and Philosophy, edited by Tucker, Thomas Deane and Stuart Kendall, 148–164. New York: Continuum, 2011. Knight of Cups. Directed by Terrence Malick. Los Angeles: Broad Green Pictures, 2016. Kohn, Eric. “Berlin Review: Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups Pushes the Director’s Style to Its Limits.” Indiewire. February 8, 2015. Accessed September 30, 2018, http:// www.indiewire. com/article/berlin-review-terrence-malicks-knight-of-cups-pushes-the-directorsstyle-to-its-limits-20150208. Leithart, Peter. Shining Glory: Theological Reflections on Terrence Malick’s “Tree of Life”. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2013. Martin, Adrian. “Things to Look Into: The Cinema of Terrence Malick.” Rouge. December 2006. Accessed June 20, 2019, http://www.rouge.com.au/10/malick.html. Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. McCann, Ben. “‘Enjoying the Scenery’: Landscape and the Fetishization of Nature in Badlands and Days of Heaven.” The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America, edited by Hannah Patterson, 75–85. New York: Wallflower Press, 2007. McGilchrist, Iain. The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Sense and Non-sense. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964. Michaels, Lloyd. Terrence Malick. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009. Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2010. Müller, Cornelia, Hermann Kappelhoff, Sarah Greifenstein, Dorothea Horst, Thomas Scherer, and Christina Schmitt. Cinematic Metaphor: Experience—Affectivity—Temporality. Boston: De Gruyter, 2018. Neill, Alex. “Empathy and (film) fiction.” In Bordwell, David, and Noë l Carroll, eds. PostTheory: Reconstructing Film Studies, 175-94. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996. The New World. Directed by Terrence Malick. Burbank: New Line Cinema, 2005. Parsons, Howard L. “A Philosophy of Wonder.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 30, no. 1 (1969): 84–101. Plantinga, Carl. “Affective Incongruity and The Thin Red Line.” Projections, 4 no. 2 (2010): 86–103.

Here and There

39

Puig, Claudia. “To The Wonder is a beautiful blunder.” USA Today. April 11, 2013. Accessed June 6, 2019, https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/movies/2013/04/11/to-the-wonder-review/2024937/. Rossouw, Martin P. “There’s something about Malick: Film-philosophy, contemplative style, and ethics of transformation.” New Review of Film and Television Studies, 15 no. 3 (2017): 279-98. Rutherford, Anne. ‘Cinema and Embodied Affect.’ Senses of Cinema. March 2003. Accessed June 7, 2019, http://sensesofcinema.com/2003/feature-articles/embodied_affect/. Rybin, Steven. “Voicing Meaning: On Terrence Malick’s Characters.” In New Takes in FilmPhilosophy, edited by Tuck, Greg and Havi Carel, 13–39. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. ———. Terrence Malick and the Thought of Film. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012. Sass, Louis A. The Paradoxes of Delusion: Wittgenstein, Schreber and the Schizophrenic Mind. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. Scott. A. O. “Twirling in Oklahoma, a Dervish for Love.” New York Times. April 12, 2013. Accessed June 7, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/12/movies/terrence-malicks-tothe-wonder-with-ben-affleck.html. Shaviro, Steven. The Cinematic Body. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Silberman, Robert B. 2007. “Terrence Malick, Landscape and ‘What Is This War at the Heart of Nature?’” In The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America, edited by Hannah Patterson, 164–78. New York: Wallflower Press. Sinnerbrink, Robert. “Film-Philosophy.” In The Routledge Encyclopedia of Film Theory, edited by Branigan, Edward and Warren Buckland, 207–213. London: Routledge, 2013. ———. “A Heideggerian Cinema? On Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line.” Film-Philosophy. Vol. 10, no.3 (2006): 26–37. ———. “‘Love Everything’: Cinema and Belief in Malick’s The Tree of Life.” Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy, “Varieties of Continental Philosophy and Religion” 20, no. 1 (Spring 2016). ———. New Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images. New York: Continuum, 2011. ———. “Song of the Earth: Cinematic Romanticism in Malick’s the New World.” In Terrence Malick: Film and Philosophy, edited by Tucker, Thomas Deane and Stuart Kendall, 179–196. New York: Continuum, 2011. Sobchack, Vivian. “What My Fingers Knew: The Cinesthetic Subject, or Vision in the Flesh.” In Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, 53–84. Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 2004. Song to Song. Directed by Terrence Malick. Los Angeles: Broad Green Pictures, 2017. The Thin Red Line. Directed by Terrence Malick. Century City: 20th Century Fox, 1998. To the Wonder. Directed by Terrence Malick. New York: Magnolia Pictures, 2012. The Tree of Life. Directed by Terrence Malick. Los Angeles: Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2011. Tucker, Thomas Deane., and Stuart Kendall, eds. Terrence Malick: Film and Philosophy. New York: Continuum, 2011. Zoller Seitz, Matt. “Terrence Malick’s Cathedrals of Cinema.” RogerEbert.com. February 16, 2015. Accessed June 7, 2019, https://www.rogerebert.com/mzs/book-excerpt-faith-and-spirituality-in-masters-of-world-cinema-vol-3.

Chapter Three

The Beautiful Light The Supernaturalist Argument of The Thin Red Line David J. Gilbert

At exactly the half-way point of The Thin Red Line (1998), the night before the planned taking of a Japanese defensive position on the island of Guadalcanal, Sergeant Welsh (Sean Penn) and Private Witt (Jim Caviezel) have their second of three dialogues. None of these dialogues is extended, heated, or even conclusive. But they establish the philosophical fault lines on which the entire film centers. Throughout the film, Welsh and Witt are debating one big idea: whether or not there is another world, or if there is, in Welsh’s phrase, “just this rock.” 1 Through the use of dialogue, photography, voiceover, and the juxtaposition of key pairs of characters, director Terrence Malick guides his viewers on a careful journey of philosophical speculation on one of the most important questions facing the human race. And despite offering many distinct and interesting possibilities, the film lands firmly on the side of Private Witt. There is indeed another world, one Witt has seen, and one that necessarily changes his experience of the world they are in. The idea of an “other world” suggests a supernatural world. The film offers a variety of supernatural options, and interpreters have seized on a multiplicity of supernatural options best defended by the film: God, pantheism, Emersonian pan-psychism, etc. The variety of supernatural options does not imply that each option is as good as another, or that they are all the same. Taken seriously, the supernatural options themselves are mutually exclusive: a God separate from his creation, who creates all other things is mutually exclusive from a single One that all things partake in. But identifying the specific nature of the supernatural does not seem to be the point of The Thin Red Line. Rather, what these supernatural options have in common is their 1) other-worldliness, in the sense that something non-physical is the primary 41

42

David J. Gilbert

metaphysical reality, 2) their ability to provide meaning (or a ground for goodness or other ethical realities), 3) their purported objectivity and universality, and 4) their denial of philosophical naturalism. And this, I posit, is the philosophical argument of The Thin Red Line. David Davies lists twelve distinct philosophical interpretations of The Thin Red Line, and develops his own thirteenth interpretation. 2 Among the interpretations, he includes Christian interpretations, Emersonian Transcendentalism, variations on Heideggerian themes, and naturalistic interpretations. 3 It would be extremely surprising that a film, even a philosophically potent film, would garner this range of philosophical interpretations were it not for the complexity of The Thin Red Line and the extraordinary richness of Malick’s filmmaking in general. Russell Manning calls Malick “a dialectical film maker par excellence,” 4 and says, “Here is Malick’s cinematic philosophy. The weaving together of viewpoints and attitude, the juxtaposing of images and counterpoints allows us to think through the scene as an argument that contains multiple sides, perspectives, and inputs.” 5 The multiple sides, perspectives, and inputs alone allow for various interpretations, but the job is complicated further by Malick’s cinematic techniques and his own personal history with philosophy. 6 In addition to the characters and their voices as Manning notes, there are also cinematic techniques Malick employs, 7 such as masterful and innovative use of voice-overs, photography, pacing, and sound design, and how these factors interrelate. Adapted from a novel, The Thin Red Line is also a war film, adhering to its genre’s tropes and structure in surprising ways. And the film is by Terrence Malick, an idiosyncratic and reclusive filmmaker with a background in academic philosophy and Heidegger translation. Each element needs to be taken into consideration and fit together in providing a plausible interpretation of the film. With all these interpretive elements at play, and many plausible philosophical interpretations available, David Calhoun’s work is helpful in culling down what may appear as an overwhelming interpretive task. Calhoun acknowledges the various interpretive elements and notes how Malick intentionally emphasizes characters with multiple perspectives and conflicting subjective claims about the world. These characters are not tropes, but fullblooded people whose perspectives maintain an “inherent plausibility.” 8 Unlike a film like Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950), where the inability to sift through various perspectives seems to be the intended takeaway, for Malick the point is not skepticism. Rather, a “weighted hermeneutic” is at play, “in which the superior plausibility of one interpretive outlook is justified precisely because it interpretively accommodates the complex detail of human experience, both as we live it and as it is portrayed in the universe created cinematically by Malick.” 9 Under a weighted hermeneutic, characters are presented with opposing viewpoints, and without straw-manning their viewpoints or demonizing the characters, a film leans to (or even argues) one

The Beautiful Light

43

particular perspective. The film itself can make judgments against some of its characters, even when portraying those characters empathetically. This judgement against a character can be seen distinctly with Lt. Col. Tall (Nick Nolte). 10 It would be simplistic to characterize Tall as merely a cartoon war-monger or ladder-climber, as he seems deeply aware of the sacrifices he has made to bring himself to the position of command. His early voice-over communicates this, saying, “All they sacrificed for me. Poured out like water on the ground. All I might have given for love’s sake. Too late.” His desperation to execute command rightly is conflicted by his own interests and his despair once he has gotten what he wanted. Tall sits, whittling a stick, listening to his orders of leave read by Welsh, and sees a toe tag on a dead body in the burning shanty village he has conquered. Here is not the booming Agamemnon of earlier battle scenes, but an old man moved to withhold tears, alone and unfulfilled. Tall is a deeply sympathetic character; nevertheless, the film takes a position against him, and the pragmatism he has chosen. Tall is left alone, while the man he bests, Capt. Staros (Elias Koteas), knows the men he leaves behind as “sons.” The judgment against Tall is a point that even critics like Steven Rybin—who believes that the film does not take a side on its central question—cannot ignore, conceding, “It is clear that Malick himself does not support Tall’s vision.” 11 Though he believes the film offers no subject as singularly true, he acknowledges that it at least offers one as singularly false. Calhoun’s weighted hermeneutic allows us to acknowledge the rich display of “various points of view that different people take towards the world,” 12 without stopping there. It also allows us to see that the film may come down on one side of a dispute. If there were a character or debate that we could regard as significantly central, and perhaps even unifying, then that would guide how we read the voice-overs, photography, and character arcs in order to find the argument that the film is making. Such a debate occurs between Welsh and Witt. The dialogues of Welsh and Witt occur at key structural moments of the film, at the beginning, the middle, and the end. Through wonderfully economical dialogue, awe-inspiring camera work and musical score, and remarkably subtle (and still, expressive) performances by Jim Caviezel and Sean Penn, the characters of Welsh and Witt develop a deep relationship. We see that the relationship between Welsh and Witt has a history, is nuanced by care, disagreement, forthrightness to say what they believe, rational consideration and hearing of each other, doubt, a reluctant respect on the part of Welsh for Witt, and a specific love for Welsh by Witt. These functions and textures enhance the philosophical import of these dialogues. The emergent beauty in the characters, their relationship, and what we as viewers see directs us back to these characters’ philosophical points of departure. In the second dialogue, right at the film’s half-way point, Welsh says,

44

David J. Gilbert I feel sorry for you. . . . This army’s gonna kill you. If you were smart, you’d take care of yourself. There’s nothing you can do for anyone else. Just running into a burning house where nobody can be saved. What difference you think you can make, one single man, in all this madness? If you die it’s gonna be for nothing. There’s not some other world out there where everything’s gonna be okay. There’s just this one. Just this rock. 13

Welsh quickly moves from fairly particular concerns to general ones. By the end of the monologue, Welsh asserts claims about humans and meaning in general. And it is significant that Welsh’s general view of the world is a blend of ethical and metaphysical beliefs, where the metaphysical description of the way the world really is directly informs the ethical, telling an individual what he should do. “A single man” cannot make a difference. The smart thing to do is to “take care of yourself.” These ethical pronouncements are justified by Welsh because of his metaphysical view: “There’s not some other world out there. . . . There’s just this one. Just this rock.” Welsh asserts a philosophical naturalism that results in an ethical nihilism, or at the most charitable a pragmatism skeptical of the benefits of helping others. Welsh articulates this same idea in their first dialogue, when he says, “In this world, a man, himself, is nothing. And there ain’t no world but this one.” Whereas in the first dialogue, Witt responds, “You’re wrong there, Top. I’ve seen another world. Sometimes I think it was just my imagination,” in the second dialogue, Witt is silent. In silence, Witt reacts with his eyes. Indeed for a large section of Welsh’s monologue, the camera stays on Witt. And it remains on Witt until Welsh completes his monologue. After Welsh says, “Just this rock,” Witt looks down at the grass, or presumably the rock underneath. After a moment he returns eye contact with Welsh. Something in Witt’s gaze affects Welsh, because Welsh maintains an unsteady poker face before laughing to himself. The camera cuts again to Witt, his eyes on Welsh and the slightest peaceful smile on his face. He then looks up. The camera cuts to a faraway moon, waxing gibbous—a literal “other world”—foregrounded by Welsh and Witt’s silhouetted jungle environment. We know that Witt believes in the other world. Witt tells Welsh in their first dialogue, “I’ve seen another world.” And in their final dialogue, in what appears to be a dialectical non sequitur, Welsh asks Witt, “You still believing in the beautiful light, are ya? How do you do that? You’re a magician to me.” And Witt responds with the tacit affirmation, “I still see a spark in you.” Witt’s supernaturalism also has an ethical component. Not only does the supernatural reality ground ethical ideas, if a supernatural reality exists it also directs one how to live. Witt’s interaction with others seems both infused with care, and inspired by the other world he has seen. Davies emphasizes the way Witt “reach[es] out to touch others”—he shakes hands, he reaches out to a Japanese soldier, he holds his mother’s hand in a memory. In

The Beautiful Light

45

the “leave” sequence, Witt, “reaches out to touch and acknowledge each person he passes.” Indeed, once aware of this feature of Witt, you begin to see it all over the film, anytime Witt is on screen. He lovingly touches, and thereby, acknowledges the other person. 14 The other two central conflicting pairs of characters—Tall and Staros; Pvt. Bell (Ben Chaplain) and his wife, Marty (Miranda Otto)—supplementally support and point to ideas relevant to those in the dialogues of Welsh and Witt. Tall’s upward-rising mentality, and his ruthlessness in battle culminate in a position near to Welsh’s beliefs, when he tells Staros, “Nature is cruel.” Staros’s concern for his men, and his dependence on his faith for that concern nearly mirror Witt’s beliefs and actions. Also similar to Witt is Bell. In talking about his wife, Bell raises his mind to supernatural things, and sees love as central to the character of the supernatural. The wife, Marty, does not seem concerned with these philosophical matters in her presentation through Bell’s memories, nor in her letter. So we do not get a stated belief parallel to Welsh’s, but we do see an action and justification that follows his imperative, “If you were smart, you’d take care of yourself. There’s nothing you can do for anyone else.” She leaves Bell for an Air Force officer, out of loneliness, and in order to take care of herself. Calhoun notes, “In each of the pairs, one of the characters is hard, pragmatic, and what we might call relationally closed, while the other is in an ethical, aesthetic, and spiritual sense open to shimmering glory outside of the self.” 15 Read this way, these conflicting pairs of relationships satellite and encircle Welsh and Witt’s conflict. If the dialogues between Welsh and Witt are central to the film, then the questions raised in these dialogues are central. The world is either naturalistic, such that there is “just this rock,” and there exists no non-rocks beyond it, or the world is supernaturalistic in some significantly metaphysical way. Moreover, how humans ought to live follows directly from the at-bottom metaphysical constitution of the world. Glimpses of the supernatural are constantly discussed, pointed toward, and suggested throughout the film. Three different times the supernatural breaks through the natural world: with the angel who welcomes Witt’s mother, through the voice of the dead Japanese soldier, and in a sequence suggesting immortality after Witt’s death. Through a number of cinematic techniques, The Thin Red Line argues that nature and love point toward another world. Seeing the beauty residing in nature, or seeing the dignity in others and acting out of love for them, draws the individual toward the source of things, the supernatural. The recognition of the other world has the effect that it infuses the present world with glory. The denial of the other world closes the individual to both nature and others. As played out in the film, a Wittian supernaturalism is able—where a Welshian naturalism is not—to see nature as gloriously reflective of something beyond it, inviting one to see the glory in nature and others.

46

David J. Gilbert

In The Thin Red Line, multiple voices constantly hover above the action of the film. All of these voice-overs speak to the nature of metaphysical or ethical realities. The voice-overs by Pvt. Train (John Dee Smith), however, frame the film, opening and closing it with his thoughts. The film is also punctuated by his voice-overs. Though there are voice-overs from nine other characters, none of these hold the priority of place as Train’s. Much like the centrality of the Welsh/Witt dialogues, Train’s voice-overs occur frequently, at significant points in the film, and themselves refer to the ideas raised by Welsh and Witt. His thoughts circle around a few specific ideas. He considers the source of all things, the thing beyond. He considers evil and how men break apart. These two ideas—the metaphysical and the ethical—are also interrelated. One question about metaphysics leads him to another about how individuals relate, what accounts for their disparity. Immediately following Welsh and Witt’s final dialogue, after Witt says he still sees a spark in Welsh, Welsh walks through the camp at evening as Train’s voice-over says, “One man looks at a dying bird and thinks there’s nothing but unanswered pain. That death’s got the final word. It’s laughing at him. Another man sees that same bird feels the glory. Feels something smiling through it.” The voice-over recalls the shot, during the first attempt to take the hill, of a dying bird, blood-soaked, stumbling at the base of a tree. Presently, the action during this voice-over follows Welsh. The camera cuts to Witt sleeping once Train’s voice-over says, “another man sees that same bird.” It cuts back to Welsh who continues through camp. He finally observes two soldiers stomping out a fire, sparks flying. The sequence ends and leads into Witt’s sacrifice. In following Welsh as the voice-over describes the first man who “thinks there’s nothing but unanswered pain” and cutting to Witt, who “feels the glory,” the audience receives a reaffirmation of the central philosophical division of the film. Welsh must be the first man, and Witt the second. And that matches what we have seen before. It is tempting to see the voice-over as merely offering the distinction between the two men as two ways people see the world, without providing an evaluation or judgment on either. Steven Rybin thinks so. He says, “Train’s voice-over here reminds us that . . . we can never reach a point where nature’s mystery is foreclosed—finally worlded—by human experience. Earth is, rather, open to multiple readings, or our own expressions of a world.” 16 There is a suspicion of our ability to speak and understand nature in Rybin’s words that I find too easy. The gulf between observing the world and accurately understanding the world strikes Rybin as impassable. But, even if it is difficult to determine whether the dying bird suggests “death’s got the final word” or “glory,” these two options are not fanciful, irrelevant, or absurd. Where there are difficulties or mysteries, even a long-standing disagreement, it does not follow that resolution is

The Beautiful Light

47

hopeless. It is always possible for new reasons to surface, or old ones to win the day. Furthermore, Rybin’s interpretation is a misreading of Malick. Calhoun argues that nature, for Malick, is not only knowable, but revelatory. 17 He says of Train’s voice-over about the dying bird, “Essentially, Train’s point is that nature presents us with a question: what do you see? what will you see? . . . one must choose how to orient oneself to nature, to our experience of, and placement in, nature. In order best to do so, one must allow nature to speak, and be open to its ‘glory.’” 18 The orientation toward nature that sees glory is one of openness. One is not projecting glory onto nature, but seeing it. Train orients himself toward nature by adopting a posture of wonder, almost prayer, to his voice-overs. There is a freedom to inquire and seek out in his questions. In his second voice-over he says, “Who are you that lives in all these many forms?” And Train’s wonder leads to a reasoning about the characteristics of this “you” that “lives in many forms.” He says, “Your death that captures all. You too are the source of all that’s going to be born. Your glory. Mercy. Peace. Truth. You give calm a spirit. Understanding. Courage. The contented heart.” Train refers to this source as “you” and sees in the source life, both in itself and transmitting toward every living creature. This suggests a personal and, thus, theistic supernatural source. The statement about the source that “your death that captures all” introduces a strikingly pointed and direct, though not explicit, reference to the Christian theology of Jesus. This is all the more pointed as Train adds “you too are the source of all that’s going to be born.” The idea of a single, personal source of all things, that dies, and in that death “captures all” fits directly with Christian theology which describes the Word as the source of all things, 19 becoming a man, 20 whose death enlivens all. 21 It is significant that Train adopts a wondering and reverential tone and theological language to describe this source. Train’s voice-overs consider evil and its nature. He asks, “This great evil, where’s it come from? How’d it steal into the world. What seed, what root did it grow from? Who’s doing this? Who’s killing us? Robbing us of life and light. Mocking us with the sight of what we might have known. Does our ruin benefit the earth?” This line of questioning leads him to ask of the source, “Is this darkness in you too? Have you passed through this night?” In the closing voice-over, he says, “Darkness and light. Strife and love. Are they the workings of one mind? The features of the same face?” Suggesting that “this darkness [is] in you too” or that darkness and light, strife and love, are the features of the same supernatural source suggests an unsettling notion if the supernatural is supposed to be good and loving. Nevertheless, there are a number of implications from Train’s thoughts on evil which bear mentioning, as they contribute to the wider supernaturalist argument of the film. 1) Evil is real and meaningful, in a way that it could not

48

David J. Gilbert

be if naturalism or ethical nihilism were true. 2) Evil implies goodness is real and meaningful. 3) Evil draws us toward the supernatural, as the reality of evil and goodness cannot be reduced to mere physical phenomena. And 4), evil things can be redeemed with “glory”—as in the case of the dying bird and the deaths of Witt’s mother, Sgt. Keck (Woody Harrelson), and Witt himself. In this sense, there is redemption through evil, or the recognition of glory present despite the evil. At the end of the film, Train’s voice-over speaks again in prayerful language, “Oh my soul, let me be in you now. Look out through my eyes. Look out at the things you made. All things shining.” Train’s concluding voice-over reaffirms the supernatural in light of the evil he has witnessed and puzzled over. Through these evils, he sees something smiling through it. Malick also uses his camera to recall the viewer to the supernatural. The opening sequence contains six shots lasting a little over ninety seconds. It begins with a long shot of an alligator submerging into a bog, zooming into the alligator’s eyes until it is fully underwater. This is followed by a series of shots contrasting the image of trees with the sky behind, gradually showing a clearer background of sky behind the jungle trees. After the alligator, the second shot of the film shows the base of a tree—roots spread out like arthritic fingers—silhouetted, yet still somewhat visible, because of the light shining behind and above. The third shot is the key shot. This is the extreme low-angle shot, looking up at the jungle canopy, with light bicycle-spoking through the trees. The spokes of light do not quite create a Euclidean circle, as the penetrating light is obscured in places by the jungle foliage. The effect is that the light takes on a quality distinct from the foregrounded trees. The light itself is the focus, and the glares through the trees draw the eye to its source. But the sun, the source of this light, is also obscured. Because of the draw of the eye to the light, and to the source of light, the eye is drawn up to the obscured source of light. This shot is interrogatory, as the viewer wants to see the source of light, but cannot given the objects of obscuration. This transcendent shot will be repeated multiple times throughout the film. In these first three shots, the camera has slowly moved from the ground to the sky, leaving a question mark at the highest point. The fourth, fifth, and sixth shots each echo the movement already seen, but in single shots. Taking individual trees—one tree encircled in a single large vine, another draped in roots like a billowing skirt, a third a crisscross network of trunks with leaves only at the top in clusters, like a balding man’s head—the camera tilts upward from lower on the trunk to the height of the tree, with light only emerging from the shadowy base the higher the camera peers. The sky is almost always visible in The Thin Red Line. This could be attributed to merely an accidental feature of shooting outdoors, or a beautiful way to bring out the foregrounding image, were it not for the attention

The Beautiful Light

49

Malick and his cinematographer, John Toll, give to the sky. There are dozens of shots throughout the film where the light of the sky is the focus, or becomes the focus as the camera tilts up. 22 This is what happens when Witt’s mother dies and the camera moves from the walls to a visible sky where the ceiling should be. Or as Witt walks around the abandoned house during his third dialogue with Sgt. Welsh, the camera follows Witt to a room with no roof, and the camera pans up to the sky. Characters look up, and the camera cuts to the sky, as with the Melanesian mother who looks away in her conversation with Witt, and the camera cuts to the sky enveloping—almost sculpting—the palm tree before it. The morning of C-Company’s first attempt to take Hill 210, Tall quotes Homer’s “rosy-fingered dawn” as the camera stays on the morning sky. The key shot, the transcendent shot, reoccurs at significant moments throughout the film. During key voice-overs from Train—“What is this war in nature?” and “Who are you that lives in all these many forms?”—the transcendent shot lingers. In these moments, the voice-over is asking questions of and about the source, and naming the source. He calls it, “you,” “power,” and “source.” Variants of the transcendent shot occur through the smoke of the burning Japanese village, and the fog of the raid on the Japanese. Something like the transcendent shot happens in each of Bell’s memories of his wife: light, which cannot be fully blocked out, pours through the windows and curtains of his memories. Malick cuts to the transcendent shot when Pfc. Beade (Nick Stahl) dies, 23 again briefly from the perspective of Keck as he also dies, and (most tellingly) when Witt dies at the end of the film. With the echo of the gunshot that kills Witt still resounding, we once again see the canopy of trees with light breaking through the jungle. This time the yellow of the sun partially—ever so partially—unobscured as the camera looks up, the spokes of light again remain the focus. After cutting to an underwater shot of Witt swimming with the Melanesian boys, a cut returns us to an extreme low-angle shot at the base of a tree with the open sky behind it. 24 The use of images that draw the eye toward the light of the sky plays into Malick’s use of montage to draw the viewer to the supernatural. After Welsh’s speech in their second dialogue, Witt looks up at the moon. A montage sequence begins as the camera cuts to the moon. It begins by affirming Welsh’s view of the world. We see wild dogs tearing at the bodies of dead soldiers, and the devastated Sgt. McCron (John Savage) stands at an open position, wondering why his men died. He yells to the sky, “This is futile!” This sequence turns to emphasizing Witt’s view, as Bell remembers his wife, Marty, and his voice-over says, “We. We together. One being, flow together like water, till I can’t tell you from me.” The camera cuts to Staros praying, “You’re my light. My guide.” Finally, we see the moon again— bigger, closer, and this time full. This sequence is significant “intellectual

50

David J. Gilbert

montage,” to borrow Sergei Eisenstein’s concept. 25 We are given a far-away moon—another world—but it is overtaken by the repulsive and the painful. Bell’s love for his wife transitions the sequence to a posture of openness to the world, which prepares the viewer for Staros’s prayer. This movement from romantic love to worship is a movement of pointing, finally pointing, once again, to that which is beyond. By concluding with the moon—a changed moon from which the sequence began—the sequence suggests that the other world is always present, even amidst the repulsive and painful. The character arcs in the film echo the camera and montage movements toward a recognition of the supernatural nature of the world. Witt is the antagonist who shapes Welsh’s protagonist character. Just as Witt’s mother is the instrument of change in Witt, Witt is the instrument of change in Welsh. Welsh’s character arc, though protracted, is also subtler, and not as complete as Witt’s. Where Witt transforms in the space of a monologue and a memory, Welsh’s change is more nuanced and takes the whole film to occur. His change is the spark inside him that Witt sees. Witt is the unstoppable force that causes Welsh to change, becoming more open to the supernatural. Though Witt is a dynamic and compelling character, the major character change we see in Witt occurs on the other side of a single monologue while on the Melanesian island. Witt says, I remember my mother when she was dying. All shrunk up and grey. I asked her if she was afraid. She just shook her head. I was afraid to touch the death I seen in her. I couldn’t find nothing beautiful or uplifting about her going back to God. I heard people talk about immortality, but I ain’t seen it. . . . I wondered how it’d be when I died. What it’d be like to know that this breath now was the last one you was ever gonna draw. I just hope I can meet it the same way she did, with the same . . . calm. Cause that’s where it’s hidden: the immortality I hadn’t seen. 26

At the beginning of the monologue, Witt’s reflection admits fear. He denies seeing immortality, or beauty in his mother’s death. His face is unsettled, brow furrowed. By the end of the monologue, Witt affirms the immortality he has seen. His affirmation is marked by hope and calm. 27 The change occurs in the sequence that follows Witt saying, “I ain’t seen it.” The camera dissolves to a memory of Witt’s mother dying. In an old bedroom, light pouring through the windows, he holds her hand as she strokes his. The only other occupants are two birds behind his mother, and, significantly, an angel. The angel is a little girl all in white, holding her hand in welcome to the mother. We see the calm breathing and swaying of the little girl, followed by the little girl touching the mother’s chest. It is as if this gesture completes a ceremony of transition to immortality, because the little girl hugs the mother with a contented smile. The final cut of the sequence moves up the bedroom wall—decorated with floral wallpaper, a clock tick-

The Beautiful Light

51

ing, and an extinguished lamp—to where a ceiling should be, but instead there is only sky. The sky of the memory matches the sky of the waters by the island where Witt resumes his monologue, this time as a voice-over. His tone and face have changed. Now his face is open and relaxed in appreciatory wonder as he notices the world around him, the children of the island, and the seashells and crabs. What is significant about the flashback in the middle of Witt’s monologue is that the mother’s face is hardly visible and Witt’s own is entirely obscured. The emphasis is on the birds and, especially, the little girl. The angel. This again is an example of Malick using images and montage to point beyond to something supernatural. She looks toward the angel as she looks toward the afterlife. The close-up of the birds occurs after we have seen the angel welcoming the mother, because once the angel is seen—the thing representing the supernatural—the present surroundings receive a new attention. Witt changes because in looking at his mother as she dies, his mother looks toward the other world. In looking at the other world, her present world is changed, and she responds to death with calm. Even though Witt’s own death is met with a calm acceptance, a change of character does not happen at the moment of his death. The moment of his death is the realization that the death he has always known will come is here. He has already become the type of person who looks beyond and sees the glory of the present—in, say, the dying bird—and so is prepared to meet his death appropriately. Witt’s mother is the antagonist of the story of Witt’s change, and Witt the protagonist. In the film as a whole, Witt is the antagonist, and Welsh is the protagonist. Welsh’s stated ethical beliefs—“just take care of yourself. There’s nothing you can do for anyone else”—is implied by his metaphysical beliefs that there is “just this rock.” This set of philosophical beliefs is challenged by Witt. In their first dialogue, the challenge is overt through direct disagreement. In their second dialogue, Welsh is challenged by Witt’s silence—there is the slightest unsteadiness to Welsh’s face, followed by a laugh. 28 In the final dialogue, Witt challenges Welsh by asking about their friendship. Welsh opens the final dialogue by asking Witt, “Who you making trouble for today?” When Witt asks what he means, Welsh clarifies, “Well, isn’t that what you like to do? Turn left when they say ‘go right?’ Why are you such a trouble-maker, Witt?” It is striking that Welsh views Witt as a trouble-maker, as Witt is depicted throughout the film as warmly engaged with everyone he meets. But it does make sense that Witt is a trouble-maker for Welsh if Welsh’s philosophical naturalism is challenged by Witt. Witt responds to the question with a conversational redirect, asking, “You care about me, don’t you, Sarge? I always felt like you did. Why do you always make yourself out like a rock? One day I can come up and talk to you. By the next day, it’s like we never even met. Lonely house now. You ever get lonely?” When Welsh

52

David J. Gilbert

responds, “only around people,” Witt repeats it under his breath as the camera turns to look at an empty birdcage hanging in the empty house. That is when Welsh asks the apparent non sequitur, “You still believing in the beautiful light, are ya? How do you do that? You’re a magician to me.” Welsh looks visibly affected by Witt’s words throughout the dialogue, almost humbled, but when he asks about “the beautiful light” there is an attempt to protectively cover himself against this humbling. But Welsh again looks softened as Witt says, “I still see a spark in you.” Seeing Welsh as the film’s protagonist resolves three anomalies of his character: running onto no-man’s-land to help the medic; his response to Sgt. Storm’s (John C. Riley) “I don’t care about nothin’ anymore” by saying, “sounds like bliss”; and Welsh’s final voice-over, which ends with this: “If I never meet you in this life, let me feel the lack. A glance from your eyes and my life will be yours.” Each of these instances violates the ethical position he articulates to Witt, so if he is not undergoing change as the protagonist, these instances are difficult to square with his beliefs. But, if Welsh is being challenged by Witt and Witt is correct that there is a “spark” in Welsh, then Welsh’s philosophical beliefs are in conflict with this spark. The spark is here manifested in the recognition of the dignity of others, which is the denial of his ethical nihilism. If Welsh holds to his ethical nihilism because it follows from his philosophical naturalism, then the denial of ethical nihilism implies the denial of his philosophical naturalism. So if there is a spark in Welsh—however small—these instances are moments in which he blows on the spark inside him, encouraging himself to see the glory. When Welsh runs onto the no-man’s-land, he is performing a selfless act. Staros recognizes the selflessness and recommends him for the Silver Star. Welsh tells him, “Captain, if you say one more word to thank me, I’m gonna knock you right in the teeth. . . . Property, the whole fucking thing’s about property.” This response is consistent with Welsh’s philosophical beliefs. Only, Welsh’s response does not fit with the selflessness he exhibits. This is a strange scene if Welsh is to remain the ethical nihilist or pragmatist he proclaims himself to be. It is in no way beneficial to himself, and he forcefully rejects the ways in which the Silver Star could benefit him. Equally strange is Welsh’s reaction to Sgt. Storm talking about the boy dying in the field hospital. Storm ruminates on the randomness of death and concludes, “I don’t care about nothin’ anymore.” Welsh responds, “Sounds like bliss. I don’t have that feeling yet. That numbness. Not like the rest of you guys. Maybe ‘cause I knew what to expect. Maybe I was just frozen up already.” This is strange because Welsh hears his own philosophical beliefs told back to him, and yet cannot relate. Welsh does care. This scene presents Welsh in turmoil. It is not that someone who holds to Welsh’s philosophical beliefs cannot love or care for others. It is that Welsh desires that detachment and cannot get it. Something stops him.

The Beautiful Light

53

Welsh’s final voice-over monologue follows him, asking “Where’s your spark now?” over Witt’s grave. His voice-over begins reasserting his stated beliefs, but ends with an anomaly. He says, Everything a lie. Everything you learn. Everything you see. So much to spew out. They just keep coming, one after another. You’re in a box, a moving box. They want you dead or in their lie. Only thing a man can do. Find something that’s his. Make an island for himself. . . . If I never meet you in this life, let me feel the lack. A glance from your eyes and my life will be yours. 29

There is tragedy in Welsh’s voice-over, but there is also hope. The beginning of this monologue may be the strongest articulation by Welsh of his views in the film. If the film ended there, then Welsh’s arc would be the tragic story of an ethical nihilist who might have seen the glory around himself as pointing toward a greater reality, but who, in the end, digs himself deeper in his isolation and nihilism. But his voice-over concludes saying “let me feel the lack,” and a willingness to give his life for a glance. The “lack” is the lack of not “meeting you in this life.” Whatever the reference to “you” may be— something supernatural, another human?—the posture he takes toward the end is an openness to the world, God, or others, that is inconsistent with “mak[ing] an island for himself.” It is significant that during Welsh’s voice-over we see exhausted soldiers walking past a graveyard, and Malick chose Pvt. Dale (Arie Verveen) to focus on as he looks out on the graveyard. Dale is the character in the film who renders the strongest cruelty toward another human. He taunts the Japanese prisoners, saying “I’m gonna sink my teeth into you,” and his voiceover asks and answers, “What are you to me? Nothing.” Then he uses pliers to remove prisoners’ teeth to keep in a bag. Later, in the rain, Dale is overcome with regret at the memory and throws the bag away. Dale has acted out his belief that these Japanese soldiers are nothing to him (recall Welsh’s “In this world, a man, himself, is nothing”). But, in his cruelty and the memory of it, he has been faced with the reality of his actions. After his acts of moral horror, he has seen the dignity of the individuals he has violated, and the reality of the line he has crossed. He throws away his trophies, and his demeanor changes, as if the awareness of his own evil act pulls him out of his nihilism. It is this character that Malick emphasizes as Welsh’s monologue concludes—someone, who in a very different way than Welsh, parallels Welsh. Philosophers commenting on The Thin Red Line often miss Welsh’s role as a protagonist to the effect that these instances of Welsh in the film’s conclusion have to be explained in accordance with Welsh’s initial philosophical naturalism in ways that stretch a natural reading of the film’s arc. Dreyfus and Prince comment on Welsh’s cynicism and nihilism as protecting

54

David J. Gilbert

him from “‘world collapse’ because he has no meaningful world that can collapse.” 30 They see his philosophical naturalism as consistent with running on the open battlefield, because, “the act of risking his life to ease the soldier’s pain shows he has nothing to lose.” 31 In an attempt to read Welsh’s words, “let me feel the lack” as consistent with his previous statements in the same voice-over, Davies interprets the “lack” as “the welcome absence of the demands of others that will imperil his defensive strategy.” 32 According to Davies, Welsh knows he is caught up in everybody’s lie and sees himself as susceptible to following their lie. If he wishes for the feeling of “lack” he wishes to remain an island. These explanations ultimately fail to do justice to Welsh’s inner tension and character change, subtle though it may be. In saying that Welsh has nothing to lose, and that is why he runs to help the medic, Dreyfus and Prince ignore both the spark that Witt sees in Welsh, and also Welsh’s own stated concern for himself. Welsh’s action is motivated by care, as seen in his interaction with Pvt. Tella (Kirk Acevedo), not recklessness. Similarly, Davies does a good job in charitably reading Welsh’s words as consistent, but in doing so, he too must ignore the tension inside Welsh. In seeing Welsh as the film’s protagonist, we can make sense of these instances where his character acts or speaks inconsistently with his stated beliefs, because opposed by Witt, he is moved to see beyond himself. Welsh’s movement is igniting the spark that Witt talks about. Thus, Welsh is able to move ethically, contrary to his ethical nihilism. Welsh’s character arc is not a conversion, or a change as drastic as the one Witt undergoes in recalling his mother’s death, but it is a spark not yet stomped out. That urge to move beyond himself remains in his closing voice-over that allows him to move toward—ever so subtly—seeing the glory. When Witt tells Welsh that he still sees a spark in Welsh, Welsh has just asked, “You still believing in the beautiful light, are ya?” There is a connection between the spark in Welsh, and all individuals, and belief in the beautiful light. Terrence Malick constantly employs his filmmaking resources to show this connection. Through dialogue, voice-over, single images, the colliding of images and characters through montage, character arcs, and much else besides, Malick repeatedly points to a supernatural source in The Thin Red Line. Without ever reducing itself to mere propaganda, this Socratic, cinematic dialogue rejects certain interpretations of nature like a philosopher rejecting false ideas. By attending so closely to nature and human relationships, an argument emerges. Behind the objects that obscure our vision—like dense jungle foliage, war, or pain—we see a glimpse of the beautiful light; and seeing the beauty in nature and the dignity in others—and loving these others—fan the spark and show all things shining.

The Beautiful Light

55

NOTES I want to thank Joshua Sikora for his tireless efforts organizing and editing this project, my fellow contributors for their dedication to this project, and David Calhoun, Andrew Cogburn, Shane Martin, and John Mark Reynolds for graciously and thoroughly responding to my inquiries. Timothy Bartel, Jonathan Mueller, Kristopher Yee, Lucas Gaddam, and my twin brother, Galen Gilbert, read previous drafts and their feedback and discussions about The Thin Red Line have been invaluable. I especially want to thank my extraordinary wife, Cate Gilbert, for her ruthless compulsion to say, “cut that, you don’t need it.” Her inexhaustible support, patience, and love made this essay possible. 1. The Thin Red Line. Directed by Terrence Malick. Los Angeles: Fox 2000, 1998. DVD. 2. David Davies, “Vision, Touch, and Embodiment in The Thin Red Line,” in The Thin Red Line, ed. David Davies (New York: Routledge, 2009), 46–48. See also David Davies, “Terrence Malick,” in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, ed. Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga (New York: Routledge, 2009), and Steven Rybin, Terrence Malick and the Thought of Film (Lanhan: Lexington Books, 2012), ix–xxxiv, for overviews of the critical interpretations of Terrence Malick’s films. 3. Davies, “Vision, Touch, and Embodiment,” 46–48. 4. Russell Manning, “Darkness from Light: Dialectics and The Thin Red Line,” in Terrence Malick: Film and Philosophy, ed. Thomas Deane Tucker and Stuart Kendall (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011), 167. Italics in original. 5. Ibid., 172. 6. Davies, “Vision, Touch, and Embodiment,” 48–50. 7. Amy Coplan notes, “Before we begin theorizing at a high level about philosophical themes, meanings, and messages in a film, we must get clearer about the film’s form and how it influences viewers’ attention, perception, and feelings.” Amy Coplan, “Form and Feeling in Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line” in The Thin Red Line, ed. David Davies (New York: Routledge, 2009), 65–66. 8. David H. Calhoun, “Who Has Eyes to See, Let Him See: Terrence Malick as Natural Theologian,” in Theology and the Films of Terrence Malick, ed. Christopher B. Barnett and Clark J. Elliston (New York: Rutledge, 2016), 70. 9. Calhoun, “Who Has Eyes to See,” 78. 10. And it is Tall to whom Calhoun appeals as clear evidence of a “wrong or misguided” character to whom the audience “creates an empathetic emotive connection.” Calhoun, “Who Has Eyes to See,” 71. 11. Rybin, Terrence Malick and the Thought of Film, 109. 12. Calhoun, “Who Has Eyes to See,” 70. 13. The Thin Red Line, 1998. 14. Davies, “Vision, Touch, and Embodiment,” 51. 15. Calhoun, “Who Has Eyes to See,” 70. 16. Rybin, Terrence Malick and the Thought of Film, 23. Italics in original. 17. David H. Calhoun, ““Imagined Cosmologies: Nature and the Unveiling of Nature in Malick’s The Tree of Life and Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey,” Film and Philosophy 21 (2017): 125–28. 18. Calhoun, “Imagined Cosmologies,” 123. Italics in original. 19. Jn 1:3–5 ESV, “All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” 20. Jn 1:14 ESV, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.” 21. 1 Cor 15:22 ESV, “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.” 22. I count twenty-eight shots in which the light of the sky is directly the focus. These twenty-eight do not count shots where the sky illuminates individuals, or actions, as it does in battle scenes, or when the American G.I. and the Melanesian boys run down the fallen tree on the beach. In these instances, the sun and sky are not the focus, but the background, placing the individual in an illumined world. In the case of the battle sequence shots where the sky places

56

David J. Gilbert

the individuals in an illumined world, the chaos strongly suggests a perversion of some kind, though the sky and sun remain constant. 23. Two transcendent shots occur in Beade’s death: first while he is dying and the second at his death. In the second shot here, the obscuring object is a group of leaves splattered with tiny holes, and the backgrounding light is out of focus. 24. This tree most resembles the tree in the sixth shot of the film, where the trunks intertwine with patches of leaves at the top. In this shot, however, the tree is thicker and more lush with branches and leaves, and there appear to be more trunks intertwined at the base. 25. Sergei Eisenstein, “A Dialectic Approach to Film Form,” in Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda (San Diego: Harcourt 1977), 62. 26. The Thin Red Line, 1998. 27. For a fascinating reading of this monologue, that locates the immortality Witt describes as only in the moment of death, see Simon Critchley, “Calm—On Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line” in The Thin Red Line, ed. David Davies (New York: Routledge, 2009). Critchley’s reading of this scene problematically imposes a naturalist interpretation with tenuous support from the film. His concept of an “immortality” in a naturalistic world occurring before death is ultimately incoherent. 28. In an interesting parallel, when Tall tries to convince Capt. John Gaff (John Cusack) to push up to the next Japanese position instead of waiting for water, Gaff’s use of silence allows Tall to talk himself into absurdity. As Tall presses his point, Gaff does not say anything. But in saying a lot, and not receiving a response, Tall exposes his own desire for self-aggrandizement, and it is found empty; Tall yields and orders water for the soldiers. Though Welsh does not yield to Witt in Witt’s silence, he is affected. 29. The Thin Red Line, 1998. 30. Hubert Dreyfus and Camilo Salazar Prince, “The Thin Red Line: Dying without Demise, Demise without Dying,” in The Thin Red Line, ed. David Davies (New York: Routledge, 2009), 35. 31. Dreyfus and Prince, “Dying without Demise,” 35. 32. Davies, “Vision, Touch, and Embodiment,” 54.

REFERENCES Calhoun, David. “Imagined Cosmologies: Nature and the Unveiling of Nature in Malick’s The Tree of Life and Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.” Film and Philosophy 21, (2017): 113–137. ———. “Who Has Eyes to See, Let Him See: Terrence Malick as Natural Theologian.” In Theology and the Films of Terrence Malick, edited by Christopher B. Barnett and Clark J. Elliston, 66–98. New York: Rutledge, 2016. Carroll, Noel. “Narration.” In The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, edited by Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga, 196–206. New York: Routledge, 2009. ———. “Narrative Closure.” In The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, edited by Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga, 207–216. New York: Routledge, 2009. Coplan, Amy. “Form and Feeling in Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line.” In The Thin Red Line, edited by David Davies, 65–86. New York: Routledge, 2009. Critchley, Simon. “Calm—On Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line.” In The Thin Red Line, edited by David Davies, 11–27. New York: Routledge, 2009. Davies, David. “Vision, Touch, and Embodiment in The Thin Red Line.” In The Thin Red Line, edited by David Davies, 45–64. New York: Routledge, 2009. ———. “Terrence Malick.” In The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, edited by Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga, 569–80. New York: Routledge, 2009. Dreyfus, Hubert and Camilo Salazar Prince. “The Thin Red Line: Dying Without Demise, Demise Without Dying.” In The Thin Red Line, edited by David Davies, 29–43. New York: Routledge, 2009. Eisenstein, Sergei. “A Dialectic Approach to Film Form.” In Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, edited and translated by Jay Leyda, 45–71. San Diego: Harcourt, 1977.

The Beautiful Light

57

———. “The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram.” In Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, edited and translated by Jay Leyda, 28–44. San Diego: Harcourt, 1977. MacDonald, Iain. “Nature and the Will to Power in Terrence Malick’s The New World.” In The Thin Red Line, edited by David Davies, 87–110. New York: Routledge, 2009. Manning, Russell. “Darkness from Light: Dialectics and The Thin Red Line.” In Terrence Malick: Film and Philosophy, edited by Thomas Deane Tucker and Stuart Kendall, 165–78. New York: Bloomsbury, 2011. Plantinga, Carl. “Emotion and Affect.” In The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, edited by Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga, 86–96. New York: Routledge, 2009. Rybin, Steven. Terrence Malick and the Thought of Film. Lanhan: Lexington Books, 2012. The Thin Red Line. Directed by Terrence Malick. 20th Century Fox, 1998. Wartenberg, Thomas E. Thinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 2007.

Part Two

A Path of Poetry

Chapter Four

Saturated Meaning, Poetic Portrayal Phenomenology in the Films of Terrence Malick Kip Redick

The opening scene of Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line presents the audience with a dark screen and the sound of a sustained organ chord from Arvo Pärt’s Annum per annum. Slowly a shape emerges out of the darkness, a large crocodile covered with green moss, filling the screen and crawling into a body of water. It slowly sinks, eyes just above the surface for a moment, and then the reptile leviathan submerges. The next shot shows the base of a large, corrugated tree trunk, beams of sunlight stream in from above and illuminate a few tropical plants, their greenery standing out in painted light. The third image shows the canopy of the forest viewed from the perspective of a person laying on the ground and looking up into the treetops, sunlight breeching the thick mass of leaves. The sun itself, obscured by the trees, penetrates the canopy with a halo. Such images of flora, fauna, river, ocean, mountain, sky, and weather appear throughout Terrence Malick’s films and comprise more than background or setting. These extra-human elements have agency. Though highly recognizable actors, playing a variety of types, appear in all of his films, they are not really the stars, the focus of the overarching story. Rather, films such as The Thin Red Line (1998), Days of Heaven (1978), The New World (2005), and The Tree of Life (2011), present what Martin Heidegger termed “the fourfold,” wherein earth, sky, divinities, and mortals mirror each other and “none of the four insists on its own separate particularity.” 1 Though Thin Red Line depicts the story of the Battle of Guadalcanal, the battle itself appears in the context of a cosmic struggle, a “war in the heart of nature,” human beings as mortals being measured in the worlding of the “mirror-play.” In The Tree of Life, the intimate relations of a family are 61

62

Kip Redick

saturated by a manifestation of “nature and grace.” Days of Heaven could be a midrash of love triangles going back to Abraham, Sarah, and Pharaoh, played out on the vast wheat fields of the American Great Plains. These films can be interpreted as contemporary myth making wherein Malick the poetic bard spins the age-old stories, and his audience explores meaning as it unfolds on the screen. Rather than “history,” The New World, sets forth a mythic account of worlds colliding. Paul Ricoeur, the French philosopher and hermeneutic phenomenologist, writes that myth has “more meaning than a true history” and that “the meaning resides in the power of myth to evoke speculation.” 2 Hans-Georg Gadamer, a German philosopher focusing on hermeneutics and phenomenology, writes, “the language of art means the excess of meaning that is present in the work itself. The inexhaustibility that distinguishes the language of art from all translation into concepts rests on this excess of meaning.” 3 Malick’s poetic images communicate this excess. His films will also be explored through Jean-Luc Marion’s distinction between idol and icon; Emmanuel Levinas’s analysis of the face which “summons me, calls for me, begs for me, and in so doing recalls my responsibility, and calls me into question,” 4 or, as Marion describes, addresses me in counter-intentionality. 5 I will also dialogue with Maurice Merleau-Ponty and his examination of embodied waiting before paintings, and Martin Heidegger’s attention to the interplay between manifestation and concealment wherein a measuring unfolds. 6 We find a perfect exemplar in the scene wherein Private Witt (Jim Caviezel) looks into the face of Sergeant Keck (Woody Harrelson), watching as death makes itself manifest. The camera remains fixed on Witt’s face as it becomes an icon, communicating the mystery of what remains invisible. EVENT In all four films there is an event that, as Marion articulates, “shows itself from itself, starting from itself.” 7 The event in each film “attests therefore also to the self of the phenomenon.” 8 Also, “it does not proceed from our initiative, or respond to our expectations, and could never be reproduced . . . it affects us, modifies us, almost produces us . . . it produces us in giving itself to us.” 9 In Days of Heaven, the event shows itself through the interplay of a family of migrant workers and a wealthy farmer unfolding upon the wheat fields of the American prairie in the early twentieth century. Bill (Richard Gere), Abby (Brooke Adams), and Linda (Linda Manz) migrate to the fields seeking fortune. Upon finding out that the farmer (Sam Shepard) will die within a year, they elaborate on the original plan and work toward bringing

Saturated Meaning, Poetic Portrayal

63

Abby and the farmer into a romantic union. But as Marion points out, the event has its own autonomy and does not proceed from their initiative. In The Thin Red Line, a myriad of unexpected happenings manifest themselves, as the case unfolds so often in a battle. Private Witt, afraid of death, does not respond to the battle as one would expect. Captain Staros (Elias Koteas) cannot throw his men to their death as demanded by his superior officers. First Sergeant Welsh (Sean Penn) is unable to fathom the soul of Private Witt. In The New World, both the English and the Powhatan are modified in the event of their meeting, which plays out in juxtaposition with the liminality of a love between Pocahontas (Q’orianka Kilcher) and John Smith (Colin Farrell), and along a river just inland from a tidal estuary. The Powhatans, British, Pocahontas, and John Smith undergo a transformation as the world changes and the event unfolds. An opening quote attributed to “Capt. John Smith” reads, “How much they err, that think every one which has been at Virginia understands or knows what Virginia is.” The quote opens the audience to the coming saturation of meaning pouring forth as the event produces persons and place in “giving itself.” We think we know what happened at Jamestown for it is written in our history books. But Malick’s art brackets our preconception, if we open ourselves to it. As the film unfolds, we realize we too were changed by that event; we too are subject to the same self manifestation of the event and continue to be changed. In The Tree of Life, the death of a son becomes the central event that attests, that gives itself from itself. In confrontation with death, our sense of autonomy is called into question. Death interferes with our objective framing of life, shatters an alienated projection that we are a center. In “the approach of death,” writes Levinas, comes “a certain moment we are no longer able to be able. . . . It is exactly thus that the subject loses its very mastery as a subject.” 10 Death as a power stands before me and brings into being an ultimate end to “my project.” Levinas goes on to write, This approach of death indicates that we are in relation with something that is absolutely other, something bearing alterity not as a provisional determination we can assimilate through enjoyment, but as something whose very existence is made of alterity. My solitude is thus not confirmed by death but broken by it. 11

Just before a telegram informs Mother (Jessica Chastain) of the death of her son, her voice-over says, “I will be true to you whatever comes.” But to whom is she announcing her faithfulness? Death announces itself and breaks her unknowing solitude. After several scenes of family grief and reflection, Mother is praying, her voice resounds, “Lord, why? Where were you?” A unique light returns to the screen as she continues in prayer. 12 “Did you

64

Kip Redick

know? Who are you? Answer me?” Does anyone really know? The mystery gives itself in Mother’s distress after death shatters her world. Khôra provides another way of understanding the event in each of Malick’s films covered in this essay. In Plato’s Timaeus, khôra is that space out of which the created order emerged—the space, Plato writes, that “provides room for all things that have birth.” 13 Or, another translation reads, “providing a situation for all things that come into being.” 14 Theologian Belden C. Lane contrasts khôra with topos to distinguish between ways humans interact with space and place. He writes that the Greeks used topos to mean “a mere location, a measurable, quantifiable point, neutral and indifferent,” whereas khôra meant “an energizing force, suggestive to the imagination, drawing intimate connections to everything else in our lives.” 15 The event as khôra in each of the films I am exploring is more than an historical or personal situation. Each event is rooted in a particular place and a particular time. The place and its constituents have agency. In Days of Heaven, the American prairie—its vast expanse of space extending unobstructed to the horizon—appears at the time of a technological expansion of steam engines. Trains bring workers from cities such as Chicago to the prairie in order to harvest wheat. They exit the train and are hired by farm bosses. A train of horse-drawn wagons carries the soon to be laborers further into the prairie. The sun is low on the horizon yet off screen to the right, painting the sky a pale blue and the clouds purple and yellow. They arrive at a particular farm, and as the caravan passes through an elaborate wood-framed gate, the camera pans right and a house appears in the distance, almost at the horizon. The gate serves as a modified frame; rather than encompassing the landscape, it is itself framed by the prairie, creating the spatial scene. In the distance, the singular house seems swallowed up by an ocean of grasslands. The next shot brings the three-story mansion into close relief. A man in white shirt, tie, and suspenders stands on the porch. Some kind of wind turbine sounds out a rhythm from the rooftop. We are introduced to the farmer. The place further manifests during the harvest. Large steam-driven tractors and harvesting machines mingle with horse-drawn mowing machines. Workers follow these machines through the fields and pile up bundles of wheat, then throw the bundles into the combines which separate wheat from chaff. The imagery interposes workers and fields, machines and prairie. After the harvest and throughout the rest of the film Malick lets the place have voice. A full moon witnesses the first snow as laborers hunker down in the straw. Geese fly in a great flock, overseeing the marriage of Abby and the farmer. New wheat sprouts from beneath the surface as the next year’s laborers arrive via train, and antelope look on, marking the season. So it is that the unfolding event on this particular farm will provide a human harvest, exposing wheat and chaff in the mingling of intentions.

Saturated Meaning, Poetic Portrayal

65

Guadalcanal, a tropical island and its people located in the South Pacific, finds itself in the crosshairs of the Second World War in The Thin Red Line. The steamy jungle presents the American soldiers with exotic animals, mangrove swamps, large leaf plants, and a peaceful native population. Both the Japanese Empire and America contend for this small island that presents itself as strategic for the warring parties. The landscape magnifies encounters that soldiers from both sides have, one with another and also with the extrahuman constituents of the place. In the dense forest the soldiers fight face to face, discover intimacy in both violence and empathy. Along the grassy slopes of the mountains they fight from a distance and remain a mystery to each other, just as the battle itself reveals another kind of mystery. One voice-over asks, “what is this war in the heart of nature?” In The New World, the tidal rivers, marshlands, and forests of the Algonquian people are transformed when three ships filled with British entrepreneurs arrive. The British had defeated the most powerful navy in Europe less than twenty years prior to their excursion to the place they would name Jamestown and experience as a new world, calling the indigenous people, “naturals.” Britain was still a small island nation operating in the shadow of greater European powers but ready to flex and spread its influence across the globe. Captain Newport (Christopher Plummer) and his men decide to make their colony on an island, itself in the shadow of another empire, that of the Powhatan people and their ruler Wahunsenacawh (August Schellenberg). The entrepreneurs name the colony Virginia, after their late “Virgin Queen.” Their act of colonizing, of creating a plantation, is also understood as an invasion. The very naming of the place and establishing a colony within the territory of the Powhatan Nation becomes a cornerstone of the event that would involve land and people, leaving both nations changed, helping to birth a new nation, and extending up to the present day. A middle-class neighborhood in mid-twentieth-century Waco, Texas, provides the situation for a particular family to discover life and death, nature and grace, joy and defeat, love and hate, mother, father, and brother in The Tree of Life. The house, garden, yard, and fronting street provide the locus of becoming. Mother reflects on her young days with nuns and farm life, bringing these to inform her nurturing practices in the place. Her voice-over is a paraphrase of Saint Paul’s sermon on love in his first epistle to the Corinthian Church: “Grace doesn’t try to please itself.” 16 Father (Brad Pitt) interacts with factory, piano, organ, garden, and lawn as he seeks his role in life. Malick uses voice-over in contextualizing Father, “Nature wants to please itself. . . . Likes to lord it over them.” Brothers are born, play and work in the garden and yard, ramble through the neighborhood, frolic along the river, and discover themselves as members of a family. Malick inserts a lengthy sequence depicting the unfolding of the universe and the beginnings of life on earth. This “creation” sequence situates the house and neighborhood in Waco

66

Kip Redick

in juxtaposition to the unfolding universe. Out of the vastness of time and space, this particular family in this unremarkable place becomes the focus of deep existential questions. In addition to the “creation” Malick also depicts an eschaton wherein the characters meet each other, appearing both as young and mature, on a beach. The way to this beach is depicted as a liminal place, a desert. Here the older Jack (Sean Penn) is escorted through a door frame, a limen, and as they pass through we see the escort’s body, wind blowing her dress but not in her face. Both the “creation” account and the eschaton serve to magnify the role of the house in Waco. It is truly the khôra from which this family becomes. Another way of understanding the event “giving itself” in Malick’s films comes through Martin Heidegger’s poetic description of the mirror play of the fourfold. In his essay “The Thing,” we find a way of approaching Malick’s phenomenological focus on “the things themselves.” Heidegger, in unconcealing “the thing” uses a common jug as a way to explore “things.” Malick depicts common people, particular human beings who can’t be reduced to universal symbols and whose becoming happens in particular events “giving” themselves. He focuses attention on the constituents surrounding and subjectively interacting with these characters. These constituents also have agency: the river in Waco, Texas, that witnesses young Jack (Hunter McCracken) and his brothers in their becoming; the forest and creatures therein that interact with both American and Japanese soldiers; the river and marshlands in Powhatan’s territory that become integrated into the culture of British entrepreneurs; the prairie, river, and creatures who also witness the love triangle of Bill, Abby, and the farmer, not to mention the machines used to bring the industrial age to that prairie. Malick’s storytelling, like Heidegger’s phenomenological description of the jug, counter a scientific method of determining what is real. Heidegger writes, “Science makes the jug-thing into a nonentity in not permitting things to be the standard for what is real.” 17 Owen Barfield shows us another facet, writing that science “insists on dealing with ‘data,’ but there shall be no data given, save the bare percept. The rest is imagination. Only by imagination therefore can the world be known.” 18 Gadamer further elaborates on the theme writing, “It is imagination [Phantasie] that is the decisive function of the scholar. Imagination naturally has a hermeneutical function.” 19 Malick’s phenomenological narratives are neither social or psychological scientific explorations. Nor are they metaphysical. They are imaginative and poetic. Like Heidegger and other phenomenologists, Malick sets forth a poetic and concrete account, a thick and artistic description of the things themselves as they appear in the happening of particular events. Heidegger, in focusing on the jug to unconceal the thing, describes an event wherein the gift of pouring water and wine reveals the thing as it manifests in the happening of its pouring. He writes, “In the gift of the

Saturated Meaning, Poetic Portrayal

67

outpouring, mortals and divinities each dwell in their different ways. Earth and sky dwell in the gift of the outpouring . . . earth and sky, divinities and mortals dwell together all at once.” 20 The fourfold and language both precede everything. Gadamer writes that “in truth we are always already at home in language, just as much as we are in the world.” 21 We are also always already at home in the mirroring of the fourfold, which is “enfolded into a single fourfold.” 22 All are united with one another in their manifestness. Malick’s imagery always includes the interplay of the fourfold, the mirroring. Heidegger writes, “each of the four mirrors in its own way the presence of the others.” 23 In this mirroring the event is given, “Mirroring in this appropriating-lighting way, each of the four plays to each of the others.” 24 Pocahontas prays, “You are our Mother, we rise from out of the soul of you.” The camera shows water reflecting sky. The river grass appears under the surface, yet the sky makes itself visible in the thin veil of the river’s face. Pocahontas again speaks, “Dear Mother, you fill the land with your beauty. You reach to the end of the world.” Malick shows her swimming, the camera shooting from underneath and looking to the surface. Her body is buoyed up in the current. The fourfold is all here in mirror play. Heidegger describes the earth as building bearer, nourishing with its fruits, tending water and rock, plant and animal. . . . The sky is the sun’s path, the course of the moon, the glitter of the stars, the year’s seasons, the light and dusk of day, the gloom and glow of night, the clemency and inclemency of the weather, the drifting clouds and blue depth of the ether. 25

Bill and Abby lie in the mown wheat, a light snow falls on them under the evening sky. Captain Staros chats with Lt. Col. Tall (Nick Nolte) on the radio under a dawning day. Tall describes the sky in the words of Homer, rhododáktulos Ēṓs, “rosy-fingered dawn.” The earth becomes the soldiers’ bed during the night, and the sky enfolds them. In each of the films discussed, with the exception of Days of Heaven, we see images of tree canopies, sunlight streaming in through leaves and branches. Light is sometimes diffused and paints the atmosphere golden. The angle of the camera gives the audience a point of view wherein they look straight up through the overarching trees. In some shots, the wind blows, its invisibility made visible in the moving of the trees. In Days of Heaven, the earth and sky mirror play using a different point of view. Here the camera aims at the distant horizon. The wind is made visible in the shifting grass. The same golden atmosphere becomes present as the sun sinks low on the horizon. Clouds drift across the sky just above the vast prairie. As the migrants ride the train toward the fields of wheat, the smoke billows from the

68

Kip Redick

engine and trails behind the moving cars, just above their heads as they ride on the rooftops. Heidegger writes, “The divinities are the beckoning messengers of the godhead.” 26 The young girl in the white dress (Marina Malota) escorts Witt’s mother (Penelope Allen) into death. We are called mortals because we face death. All living beings die, but mortals face their own death. When a boy drowns in a local swimming hole in Waco, the voice-over asks, “Was he bad?” The child asks his mother if she will die. We see a glass casket in the forest, mother inside. The voice-over asks, “Where were you?” “You let a boy die. You let anything happen.” Heidegger writes, “This appropriating mirror-play of the simple onefold of the earth and sky, divinities and mortals, we call the world. The world presences by worlding.” 27 This cannot be explained; it is unfathomable. The audience hears the voice-over of a soldier on Guadalcanal, “Where were you? Who are you?” Things appear not through thinking or making. They appear as the world worlds. We as mortals and in dwelling “attain to the world as world.” 28 Each thing such as “tree and pond,” “brook and hill,” “heron and roe, deer, horse and bull” thinging “are mirror and clasp, book and picture, crown and cross.” 29 In the mirror play of earth and sky, beneath tree canopies, mortals dwell and encounter divinities. The event in this way unfolds in Malick’s forests, jungles, rivers, and prairies presencing the world worlding. In the event of presencing, mortals find meaning through their embodied placement. Heidegger writes, “Man, as man, has always measured himself with and against something heavenly.” 30 The heavens refer to the sky, the presence of transcendence always already there in our embodied placement. Malick’s sky varies from the great canopy over the prairie to points of light piercing the treetops. These varied skies both unconceal and conceal; they presence an excess of being, appearing as some of the most saturated phenomena. They arc overhead and extend into a beyond, making the invisible visible—Rudolf Otto’s “Wholly Other.” 31 Heidegger continues, “The measure consists in the way in which the god who remains unknown, is revealed as such by the sky. God’s appearance through the sky consists in a disclosing that lets us see what conceals itself, but lets us see it not by seeking to wrest what is concealed out of its concealedness, but only by guarding the concealed in its self-concealment. Thus the unknown god appears as the unknown by way of the sky’s manifestness.” 32 The event is not fate or some theological notion of predestination. The event of givenness interacts in the appearing. Marion refers to this as appearing “from the side of consciousness,” and that which appears “from the side of the thing,” or the event. 33 The context of Job should not be interpreted as though God and the devil were playing the characters of The Tree of Life on a puppet string. Mortals respond to the event of death and out of their response

Saturated Meaning, Poetic Portrayal

69

comes an intersubjective relation and appropriation. Martin Buber writes, “Extended, the lines of relationships intersect in the eternal You.” 34 It is only when philosophers and theologians have attempted to dissolve mystery that fate or predestination become fixed in the imagination. Rudolph Otto writes, “Both imaginative ‘myth,’ when developed into a system, and intellectualist Scholasticism, when worked out to its completion, are methods by which the fundamental fact of religious experience is, as it were, simply rolled out so thin and flat as to be finally eliminated altogether.” 35 John Macquarrie, who with Edward Robinson, translated Heidegger’s Being and Time into English, writes concerning Heidegger’s contribution to this, “God or Being or whatever name we use is not just a tyrannous destiny but One who has called humanity into the light of truth to be the shepherd who cares for the world, so that God and the human race must work together, sharing the risks and the possibilities of a world.” 36 Macquarrie further elaborates on the point, noting that Dasein and Sein “both generate time because they need time to project a future that will continue to expand.” 37 Malick’s portrayal of the family living in the unfolding world framed by beginning and end of time, of creation and eschaton, dramatizes this intersubjective and mutual generation and shepherding. Buber writes, “Men have addressed their eternal You by many names. When they sang of what they had thus named, they still meant You: the first myths were hymns of praise. Then the names entered into the Itlanguage.” 38 Malick’s films resemble those myths as hymns of praise prior to names entering the It-language, but they are myths and hymns clothed in contemporary garb. RELIGION These four selected films do not have a focused religious content, but religion does appear in each. I will go so far as to say that the religious pervades these films, though not with a nod to a particular religion. There are scenes of religious ritual, such as the blessing of the harvest by a priest in Days of Heaven, or a procession of worshippers singing beautiful Christian chants in The Thin Red Line. There are scenes of prayer, such as Pocahontas lifting her voice in the forest or Captain Staros offering his petition to God before the battle begins. But these examples do not fully represent the way the religious makes itself manifest in these films. The Dutch phenomenologist of religion, Gerardus Van der Leeuw, writes that “church music is not the same thing as religious music.” In the same way, these are not “church” films, but communicate religion. William James, in his The Varieties of Religious Experience, helps us understand the religion that Malick’s films communicate. James writes that religion means “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation

70

Kip Redick

to whatever they may consider the divine.” 39 Just because something happens in the context of religion and within a building dedicated to religious worship does not make it religious. James writes in this regard, “Churches, when once established, live at secondhand upon tradition; but the founders of every church owed their power originally to the fact of their direct personal communion with the divine.” 40 Van der Leeuw describes this in the context of music: “It can be filled with holiness, and not be church music.” 41 He clarifies this by elaborating, “Spiritual music is music which is not only a revelation of the beautiful, but also of the holy, not through the subject matter of the text or the occasion for which it was composed, but through the fact that holiness and beauty have mutually interpenetrated.” 42 In Malick’s art, we discover this interpenetration of beauty and holiness. How does holiness appear when the subject matter of the film centers on a love triangle, the invasion and colonization of an already occupied land by conquerors and entrepreneurs, a battle between two world powers, or the relations of a single family in Waco, Texas? Of course, the Bible is filled with such stories, and they are clearly religious. The love triangle of Abraham, Sarah, and Pharaoh, the myriad of wars, and the focus on particular families fill the pages of sacred scripture. The difference is that the stories in the Bible explicitly highlight God, and Malick is much more subtle. His films are more akin to the book of Ruth or Esther. Yet, holiness does manifest in Malick’s art as the invisible is revealed in the visible. Marion calls attention to the eschatological parable of Jesus found in the Gospel of Saint Matthew in order to discuss invisibility manifesting in the visible. 43 According to the Gospel, a question will be asked in the eschaton, “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink?’” 44 To this, Jesus answers, “Just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” 45 Clearly, those who gave to the least of these were unaware that they were face to face with holiness. Marion’s distinction between “idol” and “icon” further elucidates the interplay of visibility and invisibility. He writes that the idol “acts as a mirror” reflecting the “gaze’s image,” or “the image of its aim and of the scope of that aim.” 46 The icon, in contrast, is said to provoke a vision, “the icon is not seen, but appears, or more originally seems, looks like.” 47 The icon, writes Marion, “summons sight in letting the visible be saturated little by little with the invisible.” 48 Malick’s images sometimes provoke a vision, summon our sight to the saturation of the visible with the invisible. Rather than a mirror, wherein we gaze upon ourselves through the given images, our gaze is disrupted by the unexpected. In The Thin Red Line, in the middle of a fierce battle while attacking a machine gun–enforced hill, a lull in the action sweeps over the landscape. The audience sees tall grass waving in the wind, a snake moves from its

Saturated Meaning, Poetic Portrayal

71

hiding place, some invisible presence hovers and the terrible scene seems beautiful and tranquil. In another scene, soldiers cautiously walk in single file through tall grass and trees, ready for an ambush. A native Solomon Islander walks past in the opposite direction. The camera shows his face in close-up. He is at peace in contrast to the soldiers who are anxious and ready to face death. In The Tree of Life, young Jack flees from the scene of his violating a neighbor’s home and stealing a garment. He runs along the river, trying to hide the loot and his guilt. The camera pans from his face to the flowing river. The river does not act as a mirror to young Jack, but an invisible presence gazes back at him. He is not able to look back, but flees. In a following scene, he finds his mother in the front yard. She, like the river, looks at him and he is unable to face the vision. He says, “I can’t talk to you, don’t look at me.” He is unable to face the face that stands before him. He is unable to discover his responsibility, to be called into question; he only lashes out. 49 The clearest example of the visible being saturated by the invisible happens in a scene referenced in the opening of this essay. Sergeant Keck inadvertently pulls the pin from his grenade while trying to access it from his belt. The result is a horrible explosion that leaves Keck mortally wounded. His comrades attend to his wounds and Private Witt stoops over Keck to comfort him. While other soldiers shy away from the dying sergeant, Witt looks directly into the face of Keck and attempts to bring comfort. In the opening scenes of the film Witt had been AWOL, hiding in a village of native Solomon Islanders and afraid to confront death. A voiceover communicates his aversion to death, “I was afraid to touch the death I seen in her,” referring to the time of his mother’s dying. The voice-over of Witt continues, “I couldn’t find nothing beautiful or uplifting about her going to God.” He couldn’t find any sign of immortality in the death of his mother. The scene depicts his mother lying in her death bed. Witt views his mother in the way Marion describes an idol. Marion writes, “the idol always must be read on the basis of the one whose experience of the divine takes shape there.” 50 At the foot of his mother’s bed a young girl in a white dress appears. His mother rises and presses her head against the breast of the young girl. The camera pans upward and the ceiling of the room is invisible, revealing the blue sky. Witt voices his hope that he could face death like his mother at his last breath, meet it “with the same calm. Cause that’s where it’s hidden, the immortality I hadn’t seen.” The calm of his mother’s face becomes the icon of the invisible immortality. Now Witt’s face, looking down at Keck, lying on the ground that will become the soldier’s death bed, communicates a calm. Witt’s face becomes the icon as the camera remains fixed in close-up. Slowly a subtle smile breaks out on Witt’s face, manifesting the invisible mystery of the immortality that he hadn’t seen. Marion writes, “Whereas the idol results from the

72

Kip Redick

gaze that aims at it, the icon summons sight in letting the visible . . . be saturated little by little with the invisible.” 51 In the death of Keck an excess of being slowly saturates the face of Witt. Another scene communicating the magnitude of the icon also happens to Private Witt. After the battle, he looks down at the ground and sees the face of a dead Japanese soldier protruding from the soil. Just the soldier’s face is visible. His eyes are nearly closed in death and—like so many religious icons—he gazes back at Witt. Marion writes, “Such a gaze here belongs to the icon itself, where the invisible only becomes visible intentionally, hence by its aim. If man, by his gaze, renders the idol possible, in reverent contemplation of the icon, on the contrary, the gaze of the invisible, in person, aims at man. The icon regards us—it concerns us, in that it allows the intention of the invisible to occur visibly.” 52 The invisibility of the dead man’s life calls forth to Witt, draws him to listen, summons him to pay attention. Marion continues: “The icon opens in a face that gazes at our gazes in order to summon them to its depth.” 53 The dead man draws Witt to mystery as he gazes at that which envisages him. The voice of the dead soldier asks, “Are you righteous? Kind? Does your confidence lie in this? Are you loved by all? Know that I was too. Do you imagine your sufferings will be less because you loved goodness? Truth?” The image shifts from the face to a burning hillside, and fire consumes the grass that had hours before been green and radiant in the sun’s light. MYTH, POET, BARD Some of my colleagues in history have expressed their opinions of The New World, not finding it “true” and less than “historical.” A reading of Giambattista Vico’s study of history shows that Malick’s retelling of the Jamestown settlement and ensuing interaction with the Powhatan people may give us a meaningful narrative that reveals truths that remain hidden in other than poetic descriptions. Ernesto Grassi writes, “Vico believes that through the poetical word we unveil the human world and that in the clearing, in the light of the poetic, metaphorical world—clearing a path through the originary forest of man’s life—the stage of history opens.” 54 Poetic narrative and myth open us to the existential situation wherein, as the constituents of the mythic account feel the call of Being, we who listen, watch, or read feel the call as well. Grassi writes, “What is, the Da-sein, is identifiable exclusively with the context of a ‘situation’ which implies a concrete call seeking fulfillment.” 55 Poetry has the unique power to reveal this to us: “Poetry unveils originally the calls of the Being that emerge within the various existential situations.” 56 History itself becomes real phenomenologically through poetic description

Saturated Meaning, Poetic Portrayal

73

because, as Grassi writes, “The historicity of history consists in Being which is in the process of becoming.” 57 Marion writes that “the painter renders visible as a phenomenon what no one had ever seen before.” 58 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in reference to encountering a painting, writes, “I do not look at it as one looks at a thing, fixing it in its place. My gaze wanders within it as in the halos of Being. Rather than seeing it, I see according to, or with it.” 59 Art has a power to communicate what would otherwise remain unknown and then to open us to the face of the other, the alterity that cannot be conveyed in a rational account. C. S. Lewis writes, “In the enjoyment of a great myth we come nearest to experiencing as a concrete what can otherwise be understood only as an abstraction.” 60 In abstraction we remain trapped with our own conceptions and cut off from the “things themselves.” Lewis elaborates, “what flows into you from the myth is not truth but reality (truth is always about something, but reality is that about which truth is), and, therefore, every myth becomes the father of innumerable truths on the abstract level.” 61 Vico pointed to this in myth. We must have access to the real before we can determine the truth. Art has an integral role in communicating the real. Joseph Mali’s The Rehabilitation of Myth, a study of Giambattista Vico’s New Science, situates Vico’s alternative to Cartesian philosophy in highlighting “the poetic logic,” which Vico termed coscienza, “by setting it over against the rational logic of the experimental-mathematical knowledge, or scienza of the new sciences of nature.” 62 Mali goes on to write that Vico “regarded the archaic myths as the ‘true narrations’” of history because “the fictions of mythology illuminate the ‘real world’ by constituting or ‘prefiguring’ all its human actions and institutions.” 63 The problem with the Cartesians, which continues today, rests on the assumption “that the world consists of facts, and that knowledge of the world rests in ideas and propositions which represent these facts.” 64 In uncovering truth through art, and particularly the art of storytelling, the Jewish hermeneutic tradition of midrash has been employed since ancient times. After the Jews returned from their Babylonian diaspora, midrash was used to discover the relevance of ancient laws to contemporary life. Midrash minimizes a literal interpretation and helps the reader struggle with meaning, to discover the existential import of the text. Jesus employed midrash as he set forth his teachings in parables. Malick’s telling of the story of Bill, Abby, and the farmer could be viewed as a midrash of at least part of the Abraham myth. The narrative does not have to map directly to the myth and works better when it does not. As we are drawn into the account, Bill, Abby and Linda exit Chicago during an existential situation akin to a famine. They take refuge with a wealthy landlord, Bill and Abby pretending to be siblings. Abby enters the harem of Pharaoh and becomes the wife of the farmer. The fortunes of the farmer suffer in the wake of the marriage. Malick, just like a

74

Kip Redick

storyteller of midrash, takes the story in a different direction and thrusts viewers into a situation where they must wrestle with the meaning of the myth. The Tree of Life could also be approached as a midrash of Job; the voice-over of the mother says that the nuns taught her that no one who loves the way of grace ever comes to a bad end. Malick the bard also spins stories that are post mythic. Saint Augustine’s “pear story,” told in his autobiographical account, Confessions, has an episode in The Tree of Life. Augustine desires to do what his fellow conspirators liked, stealing pears from an orchard, because law-abiding citizens did not like it. The young Jack and other friends range around the neighborhood doing malicious harm, breaking windows and setting a frog off on a firework. Later, after shooting his brother’s finger with a BB gun, young Jack paraphrases Saint Paul’s lament, written in his epistle to the Romans: “What I want to do I can’t do.” 65 Malick as poetic bard retells established stories but gives them new life. Gadamer refers to such as “genuine speaking, which has something to say and hence does not give prearranged signals, but rather seeks words through which one reaches the other person.” 66 Malick’s range for including myth is global. In The Thin Red Line, the dialogue between Captain Staros and Lt. Col. Tall alludes to the Bhagavad Gita, wherein the soldier Arjuna surveys the battleground and the two armies drawn to the coming destruction. He sees his kin on both sides and is filled with fear and dread, not wanting to kill. His charioteer manifests as Krishna and berates the fearful Arjuna, telling him it is his duty to go into battle and kill. Captain Staros sets forth his complaint, consistent with Arjuna, “I have lived with these men for two and a half years and I will not order their deaths.” Lt. Col. Tall responds, “Are you prepared to sacrifice the lives of any men in your company?” Finally, Malick’s use of voice-over can also be understood as a poetic device alluding to ancient Greek drama. As the chorus in these dramas provided the audience with a frame of interpretation for the unfolding story, Malick’s character voice-overs communicate this interpretative frame. Many voice-overs have already been mentioned in this essay. They draw viewers into situations unfolding on the screen from a particular standpoint. They highlight intentionality. Young Jack, after sinking deep into depravity, swims in the river near a cavern, a passage into the underworld. His voice-over asks, “How do I get back?” He reaches up from the river into a waterfall, crashing down from above and his voice-over says, “Where they are.” In the next frame we see shots of swimmers free of gravity. River grass appears dancing in the current. While Captain John Smith is with Pocahontas at the Powhatan village, his voice-over says, “I was a pirate and lived to steal what I could. I am a free man now. Lawless, I was a dead man and now I live.” The two lovers live in liminality, between both worlds and within their love. Smith is

Saturated Meaning, Poetic Portrayal

75

eventually drawn out of liminality via a call from this world’s glory. Pocahontas also exits this liminal love, but transitions to the British world. SACRAMENTALS Malick’s art provokes an encounter with a world behind the external world. Van der Leeuw writes that what appears as “blind nature” to the “unbelieving eye” can be encountered sacramentally, “a spiritual world in and behind the external world. And art, too, in which the form of creation can be recognized, bears this sacramental character.” 67 However, just as Christians acknowledge the incarnation of God in Christ as a manifestation of the Holy—a sign of the world beyond the external world—the sign itself is not negated as a mere pointer, but becomes the given of that transcendent world. Malick’s sacramental use of images of our world—of wind-blown trees, curtains dancing in the breeze that enters an open window, a sky painted gold by a dipping sun, or water flowing along a river track—also manifest transcendence, but maintain a beauty given in creation. Malick’s evocation of transcendence is consistent with a Christian rather than Platonic understanding of spirit and body as clearly articulated by Van der Leeuw: “A generation like ours, which has been brought up in the doctrine of psychophysical dualism, or at least parallelism, finds it difficult to get used to the fact that this was unknown to the Old Testament. Neither in the Old Testament nor in the New Testament is man a soul which resides in a body, or a spirit which has the use of a body, but a living person, a ‘living soul.’” 68 As a sacramental, the image is both an element of creation and a manifestation of the Creator. The element of creation comes to the foreground as meaningful and draws what is behind it into relief. The image is set before the viewer by an artist as a symbol. Van der Leeuw writes, What does not appear before our eyes as an image we do not perceive within this world as powerful. . . . We experience things twice, first directly in actu, the second time in an image, as form; the first time as uninterpreted life, the second time as transformed life. Only what stands before our eyes as image, as form, as figure, has meaning for us, only that confronts us as power. 69

Concerning this power, Van der Leeuw writes that art sets forth “a second world in which all the components of the first live, but never as likeness, always on the basis of a new power inherent in them.” 70 One of Malick’s most haunting images repeats during the course of The Tree of Life. It is a light, but very difficult to describe. It is as though a single dancing flame, burning on a candle, were viewed through some glass that distorted it so that the singularity of the light split itself into several lights. We are left without direction in interpreting the light, except that it appears in

76

Kip Redick

a context wherein we see it as a hierophany—a manifestation of the sacred. In the film’s context, this light could be an image of perichoresis, an icon symbolizing the three persons of the Trinity. They dance in Holy hospitality and eternal relationship, making room for creation. The Russian icon painter Andrei Rublev has given us an image where the three persons sit at a table in fellowship. There is an open space left for the one gazing at the icon, an opening wherein the viewer is invited to join and participate in the conversation. Malick’s films also invite us to participate, to fellowship by being drawn into the event that unfolds. He does not thrust a particular doctrinal view of religion, but exposes the audience to mystery, to questioning Being. He is a master bard, spinning stories rooted in human consciousness and history, yet clothed in garments that contemporary audiences understand. His films depict sacramentals being given, the transcendentals of truth, goodness, and beauty set forth. Van der Leeuw writes, We must also search within ourselves, to see whether we experience the beauty which is thus revealed to us as the wholly other. This we shall only know when beauty not only attracts us, but also repels us; not only enchants us, but also disturbs us in a way we never knew before. We seek in beauty both the friendly countenance of God and the terror of the Lord; we seek the Comforter who calls to us when we are weary and heavy-laden, but also the terrible one who repels us from himself with, “What have I to do with you?” 71

We encounter an alterity that breaks our self-derived interpretation but asks us to contribute to the meaning as it unfolds. One of the final scenes in The Thin Red Line depicts the soldiers leaving the island on a boat. The wake fans out from the stern, and the island slowly recedes. The voice-over of one of the soldiers asks, “Darkness and light, strife and love, are they the workings of one mind? The features of the same face?” In the wake of this film, the audience is asked to participate in this questioning. Both the soldiers and the audience are leaving the destruction behind, but a terrible wake spreads out to encompass an ever-increasing area of the sea. We are all living in the disturbance of that wake. In one of the final scenes of The Tree of Life, Jack is shown in the city, and the audience sees tall buildings, glass reflecting the sky and a bridge across the water. The mirror play continues, and we must attempt to make sense of it. In one of the final scenes in The New World, Pocahantas is living in England. She sees her uncle walking through a sculptured French garden, a “natural” surrounded by an architecture of plants. We hear her voice asking Smith, “Did you find your Indies, John?” He answers, “I may have sailed past them.” We who watch these films are living in the wake of these characters’ choices, but we must also find meaning as the waves continue to ripple across the ocean. Malick evokes the participation of the fourfold in a sol-

Saturated Meaning, Poetic Portrayal

77

dier’s prayer just after looking back at the island from the boat: “Oh my soul, let me be in you now. Look out through my eyes. Look out at the things you made. All things shining.” The perichoresis of the distorted flame shines upon us as we discover saturated meaning while dialoguing with the poetic bard. NOTES 1. Martin Heidegger, “The Thing,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, Trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Perennial Library, 1971), 178–79. 2. Paul Ricœur, The Symbolism of Evil, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 236. 3. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. David E. Linge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 102. 4. Emmanuel Levinas, The Levinas Reader, Ed. Seán Hand. Blackwell Readers (Oxford, UK: B. Blackwell, 1989), 83. 5. Jean-Luc Marion, In Excess: Studies in Saturated Phenomena, Trans. Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 78. Marion is a French philosopher and theologian, student of Jacques Derrida, and phenomenologist. Levinas was a Lithuanian Jew who studied in France and is best known for his existential ethics and phenomenology. 6. Merleau-Ponty was a French phenomenologist who explored embodied meaning making. Heidegger was a philosopher who elaborated on the original phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. 7. Jean-Luc Marion, In Excess, 33. Italics added. 8. Ibid. Italics added. 9. Ibid., 34. Italics added. 10. Emmanuel Levinas, The Levinas Reader, 42. Italics in original. 11. Ibid., 43. 12. This light will be explored further later in the essay. 13. Plato, Timaeus, Trans. R. B. Bury (Loeb Classical Library 234. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929), 52b. 14. Plato, The Timaeus of Plato, Trans. Francis M. Cormford (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957), 52b. 15. Belden C. Lane, Landscapes of the Sacred: Geography and Narrative in American Spirituality (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 39. 16. See 1 Corinthians 13. 17. Heidegger, “The Thing,” 170. 18. Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry, 2nd ed. (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 28. 19. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, Trans. David E. Linge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 12. 20. Heidegger, “The Thing,” 173. 21. Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, 63. 22. Heidegger. “The Thing,” 173. 23. Ibid., 179. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid., 178. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., 179. 28. Ibid., 182. 29. Ibid. 30. Martin Heidegger, “Poetically Man Dwells,” Poetry, Language, Thought, 221.

78

Kip Redick

31. See Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational (Oxford University Press, 1966). 32. Ibid., 223. 33. Marion, In Excess, 21. 34. Martin Buber, I and Thou, Trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970), 123. 35. Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational (Oxford University Press, 1966), 26. 36. John Macquarrie, Heidegger and Christianity: The Hensley Henson Lectures, 1993–94 (New York: Continuum, 1999), 107. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. 39. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: a Study in Human Nature (London: Collier Books: 1961), 31. Italics in original. 40. Ibid., 30. Italics in original. 41. Gerardus Van der Leeuw, Sacred and Profane Beauty: The Holy in Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 270. 42. Ibid., 270–71. 43. Jean-Luc Marion, The Visible and the Revealed (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 91. 44. Matthew 25:37 (NRSV). 45. Matthew 25:40 (NRSV). 46. Jean-Luc Marion, Thomas A Carlson, and David Tracy, God Without Being: HorsTexte, Second Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 12. https://0-ebookcentral-proquest-com.read.cnu.edu/lib/cnu/detail.action?docID=951112. 47. Ibid., 17. 48. Ibid. 49. Emmanuel Levinas writes, “The Other becomes my neighbor precisely through the way the face summons me, calls for me, begs for me, and in so doing recalls my responsibility, and calls me into question.” The Levinas Reader, 83. 50. Ibid., 28. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid., 19. Italics in original. 53. Ibid. 54. Ernesto Grassi, “The Originary Quality of the Poetic and Rhetorical Word: Heidegger, Ungaretti, and Neruda,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 20 (4), 1987, 248. Italics in original. 55. Ibid., 249. Italics in original. 56. Ibid., 253. 57. Ibid. 58. Marion, In Excess, 51. 59. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Galen A. Johnson, and Michael B. Smith, “Eye and Mind,” The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, (Evanston, Illinois, Northwestern University Press, 1993), 126. 60. C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, Ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1970), 66. 61. Ibid. 62. Joseph Mali, The Rehabilitation of Myth: Vico’s New Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 3. Italics in original. 63. Ibid. 64. Ibid., 63. 65. See Romans 7:15. 66. Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, 17. 67. Van der Leeuw, Sacred and Profane Beauty, 330. 68. Ibid., 309. 69. Ibid., 306. 70. Ibid., 278.

Saturated Meaning, Poetic Portrayal

79

71. Ibid., 333.

REFERENCES Augustine of Hippo, Saint. Confessions. Translated by Sarah Ruden. Modern Library Edition. First ed. New York, N.Y.: Modern Library, 2017. Badlands. Directed by Terrence Malick. Burbank: Warner Bros., 1973. Barfield, Owen. Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry. 2nd ed. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1988. Buber, Martin. I and Thou. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970. Days of Heaven. Directed by Terrence Malick. Hollywood: Paramount Pictures, 1978. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Philosophical Hermeneutics. Translated by David E. Linge. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977. Grassi, Ernesto. “The Originary Quality of the Poetic and Rhetorical Word: Heidegger, Ungaretti, and Neruda.” Philosophy & Rhetoric 20 (4), 1987. 248–60. Heidegger, Martin. “The Thing,” in Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by Albert Hofstadter. New York: Perennial Library, 1971. ———. “Poetically Man Dwells,” in Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by Albert Hofstadter. New York: Perennial Library, 1971. James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. London: Collier Books: 1961. Lane, Belden C. Landscapes of the Sacred: Geography and Narrative in American Spirituality. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Lewis, C. S. God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics. Edited by Walter Hooper. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1970. Lévinas, Emmanuel. The Levinas Reader. Edited by Seán Hand. Blackwell Readers. Oxford, UK: B. Blackwell, 1989. Macquarrie, John. Heidegger and Christianity: The Hensley Henson Lectures, 1993–94. New York: Continuum, 1999. Mali, Joseph. The Rehabilitation of Myth: Vico’s New Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Marion, Jean-Luc. In Excess: Studies of Saturated Pheomena. Translated by Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud. New York: Fordham University Press, 2002. ———. The Visible and the Revealed. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Marion, Jean-Luc, Thomas A Carlson, and David Tracy. God without Being : Hors-Texte, Second Edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. https://0-ebookcentral-proquest-com.read.cnu.edu/lib/cnu/detail.action?docID=951112. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Galen A. Johnson, and Michael B. Smith. “Eye and Mind.” The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting. Evanston, Illinois, Northwestern University Press, 1993, 121–49. The New World. Directed by Terrence Malick. Burbank: New Line Cinema, 2005. Otto, Rudolf. The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational. Oxford University Press, 1966. Plato. Timaeus. Critias. Cleitophon. Menexenus. Epistles. Translated by R. B. Bury. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929. ———. Plato’s Cosmology: The Timaeus of Plato. Translated by Francis M. Cormford. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957. Ricœur, Paul. The Symbolism of Evil. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969. The Thin Red Line. Directed by Terrence Malick. Century City: 20th Century Fox, 1998. The Tree of Life. Directed by Terrence Malick. Los Angeles: Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2011. Van der Leeuw, Gerardus. Sacred and Profane Beauty: The Holy in Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Chapter Five

How Can a Film Be Poetic? The Case of The Thin Red Line Timothy E.G. Bartel

When critics desire to communicate that a film is more than mere entertainment, more than just a “movie,” they often reach for the descriptor “poetic.” It seems to be a catch-all word for a vague host of qualities that render a film genuinely artistic, and, beyond this, genuinely worthwhile, worth sustained critical and aesthetic attention. But what does it mean to call a film poetic? Can this term be used in a coherent and definite sense, a sense that respects poetry as a proper art in its own sense, or must “poetic” remain a mere, vague sign of general aesthetic merit? Terrence Malick’s 1998 film, The Thin Red Line, for example, has been dubbed “poetic” by many critics, but too often it has been called so in the vague and general sense. 1 This is unfortunate, for The Thin Red Line is a film that is genuinely engaged with the art of poetry in a definite, coherent, and definable sense, and an investigation of the Hill 210 sequence in the second act of the film can serve as a guide to those who wish to rescue the descriptor “poetic” from critical ambiguity. In her introduction to The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America, Hannah Patterson writes, “Again and again, writers use the word ‘poetic’ to describe Malick’s work.” 2 However, Patterson says, “the term itself is slippery, particularly within the context of film criticism. Taking many forms and educing multiple meanings, historically it has been used most often in relation to ‘avant-garde’ or ‘art house’ cinema.” 3 Here we can see the first indication that the word “poetic” serves as a general indicator of artistic merit, even artistic self-consciousness on the part of a filmmaker. Patterson points to John Madden, a film theorist who defines the poetic in cinema—particularly European cinema—as a series of interrelated aesthetic elements: “1. Open forms, 2. Ambiguity, 3. Expressionism, 4. Non-linearity, 81

82

Timothy E.G. Bartel

5. Psychology, 6. Digressions, 7. Subjectivity, 8. Revision of a genre.” 4 Patterson agrees that Malick’s films do contain many of these elements, especially “open forms, ambiguity, [and] revision of genre.” 5 Still, citing John Orr, Patterson points out that Malick’s films are poetic in more distinctly American ways as well: “Malick’s handling of myth and his rendering of time and place—of the sublime—is intrinsic to his poetry.” 6 Finally, Patterson sees in the work of Marc Furstenau and Leslie MacAvoy a third and final way in which Malick may be seen as poetic in his filmmaking, namely his “preoccupations with existence beyond the material world.” 7 In summing up those elements that critics see as rendering Malick’s films “poetic”—open forms/ambiguity/revision of genre; mythos/sublimity; and transcendence/spirituality—Patterson has uncovered an overall laxity in the critical discourse concerning the poetic with regard to Malick. There are three interrelated problems with using the word “poetic” to describe the above elements of Malick’s films. First, all three groupings of elements that Patterson mentions belong to all major art forms, not exclusively poetry. Is Michelangelo’s statue of David less mythic than Dryden’s Davidic poem, Absalom and Achitophel? Is Caravaggio’s painting of Christ calling St. Matthew less concerned with the spiritual than Milton’s poem, Paradise Regained? Are Beckett’s prose dramas less ambiguous or open than Eliot’s free verse? To take the last example, of Beckett and Eliot, if we wish to call up a whole art form to help us describe the ambiguity in a Malick film, would it not do just as well to call the film “dramatic” as it would be to call it “poetic,” given that both drama and poetry can admit of ambiguity, not to mention transcendental concerns, mythos, and the like? I suspect that, as I alluded to above, what critics really mean when they call a film “poetic” is that they mean it is “artistic,” it is self-consciously a piece of “art,” with all the connotations and valuations that the word implies. Perhaps there is nothing inherently wrong with employing a synecdoche wherein “poetic” stands for “artistic” as a whole, but such a verbal figure does seem to highlight those elements poetry shares with all other art forms and—arguably unfairly— elide those elements of poetry that are unique to it as an individual art form. But second, it could be retorted that poetry has, in the recent past, been more associated with those elements of openness of form, ambiguity, etc., than have other art forms. Indeed, the last century of verse in English has seen the rise of free verse, and the open, ambiguous, genre-revising poems of T.S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and their inheritors. Still, free verse is a very small blip in the grand history of poetry. To universalize the limited concerns of a single century of Anglo-American poetry is not entirely responsible, given the very long history of poetry the world over. “Poetic” cannot justifiably be reduced to meaning “how Plath and Ginsberg wrote, but not how Sappho, Virgil, Li Po, Juana Inez De La Cruz, Milton, or Wheatley

How Can a Film Be Poetic?

83

wrote.” To pick the few formal revisionists as indicative of their art and ignore the more numerous formal traditionalists is to misunderstand the history of the art. None of this is to say that being a formal traditionalist is any better than being a formal revolutionary. It is simply to say that most poets at most times in most places would not have recognized John Madden’s list of poetic elements in art as having much to do with poetry (or art for that matter) at all. Third, while Malick’s films are often ambiguous, open, mythic, and transcendental, they are also engaged with poetry as a distinct verbal art form with a definite history containing discernible formal traditions, classics, movements, and masters. The Thin Red Line in particular is a film that is engaged with the poetic tradition that begins in Homer and Virgil, and passes through Walt Whitman to the twentieth century American lyric poets. To take the poetic seriously in The Thin Red Line is not to focus on those elements that poetry shares with all art, but to explore those elements that belong more exclusively to poetry as a verbal, historical art form. We will focus on three major elements of the poetic in The Thin Red Line and see how these elements are involved in the Hill 210 sequence: first, individual poets that are referenced, quoted, or otherwise imitated in Malick’s dialogue; second, Malick’s various usages of and variations on the verbal figuration of metaphor; and third, Malick’s employment of the lyric voice in his oftdebated voice-overs. THE HILL 210 SEQUENCE The central sequence of The Thin Red Line is the Hill 210 sequence, in which C-Charlie company, under the command of Captain Staros (Elias Koteas), is tasked by Lt. Colonel Tall (Nick Nolte) to take a hill that is held by the Japanese. Before the assault, Tall surveys the hill from a distance and tells Staros, “We’re going straight up that hill.” “We can’t do that, Colonel,” Staros immediately retorts. Instead, he urges the Colonel to get water up to the soldiers: “My men are passing out, sir.” Tall dismisses Staros’s “bitching” and insists on the frontal assault on the hill, which C-Charlie company reluctantly attempts. 8 As his men try and try again to take the hill with mounting casualties, Staros repeats the same argument with Tall—Tall insists they attack the hill and Staros insists that all his men will die trying and he will not do that to them: “I’ve lived with these men, sir, for two and a half years, and I will not order them all to their deaths.” Tall is depicted as brash and unsympathetic to Staros’s concern for his men, and Staros is depicted as deeply conscientious and even pious in his concern: on the night before the taking of the hill, he prays before a candle: “Let me not betray you, let me not betray my men.”

84

Timothy E.G. Bartel

REFERENCES TO POETRY AND POETS The most oft-commented-upon reference to poetry in The Thin Red Line comes immediately after Staros’s prayer and just before the protracted battleon-the-hill argument between Tall and Staros. Relaying instructions to Captain Staros, Tall remarks on the dawn: “Eos Rhododactylos. Rosy-fingered dawn. You’re Greek, aren’t you, Captain? Did you ever read Homer? We read Homer at the Point. In Greek.” 9 In his review of the film, Colin MacCabe uses this Homer reference to argue that Malick sees his protagonists as involved in “a modern version of the Trojan War.” 10 Following MacCabe, Sean Easton writes: “The Thin Red Line . . . explicitly alludes to Homer’s Iliad . . . its Homeric template is the Iliad.” 11 Robert Silberman sees a threefold significance in Tall’s reference to Homer: That sequence is at once a statement about the epic poetry of war, a display of the beauty of the landscape as ironic counterpoint to the horrors soon to appear in the combat, and an indication of Tall’s background and status. Staros is a Greek-American (not the Jewish Stein of the novel, target of anti-semitism), but he is not a career officer, did not attend West Point and does not know classical Greek. 12

The class dimensions Silberman mentions lend an interesting shading to the connections that Silberman, Easton, and MacCabe all make between the World War II conflict and the Trojan War conflict. Homer’s Iliad is, after all, the earliest epic in European literature, a poem that depicts war in all its tragedy and brutality in a poetry whose sublimity has seldom been matched. Tall seems to be the Homeric man par excellence, the one whose quotations of Homer are matched by his relish for victory in battle at the expense of much life. But the The Iliad also depicts characters who search for meaning and purpose beyond victory in war. If Lt. Col. Tall has a character analogue in The Iliad it is Agamemnon. Agamemnon is the most powerful of the Greek kings, and is depicted by Homer as domineering to the point of impiety. The major conflict of The Iliad is not, in fact, the Trojan War as a whole, but an argument between Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles over whether Agamemnon, who outranks Achilles, has a right to take Achilles’s slave girl for himself. In Book 1 of The Iliad, Achilles rails against Agamemnon’s presumption thus: Armored in shamelessness—always shrewd with greed! How could any Argive soldier obey your orders . . . or fight your enemies, full force? Not I, no. 13

In his speech of condemnation of Agamemnon, Achilles sides with the common soldiers against the king, who he depicts as out of touch and, frankly, lazy. It is Achilles and the soldiers who “sail” and “fight . . . full force” for

How Can a Film Be Poetic?

85

Agamemnon, and he in turn threatens to take away what they “fought so long and hard” for. Agamemnon does not take kindly to Achilles’s rebukes and takes the slave girl for himself; in response, Achilles refuses to fight until the climax of the poem. While the disagreement between Staros and Tall is not over a slave girl, it does involve questions of ownership to some degree; later in the Hill 210 sequence, Sergeant Welsh (Sean Penn) remarks in disgust that the battle is “about property. Whole fuckin’ thing’s about property.” Further, the Tall/ Staros debate shares with The Iliad a fundamental conflict between an entitled commander insisting on his way, and a defiant underling who sides with his men against his commander to the point of refusing to fight. Like Agamemnon, Tall insists on obedience to his commands, even when they appear to everyone else unreasonable. Like Achilles, Staros does not see his primary loyalty to his superior. Indeed, Staros’s prayer shows where his true loyalties lie: to God (“Let me not betray you”) and to the men he commands (“Let me not betray my men”). There is, in Staros’s prayer, perhaps another allusion to the poetic tradition, namely to Shakespeare’s Henry V. On the eve of an outnumbered battle against the French, Shakespeare’s protagonist King Henry prays: O God of battles, steel my soldiers’ hearts; Possess them not with fear; take from them now The sense of reckoning, if th’opposed numbers Pluck their hearts from them. Not today, O Lord, O not today, think not upon the fault My father made in compassing the crown! 14

While King Henry does not focus on the fear of betrayal, he does share with Staros a concern for his soldiers and his own potential faults. We never see such concern from Tall until repeatedly entreated by the captains under his command. When we do hear Tall’s internal voice, it is one of discontent and, once again, entitlement. The final, most explicit, reference to poetic tradition in the Hill 210 sequence is after Staros has given his final refusal to attack the hill, incurring first Tall’s fury, and then Tall’s begrudging agreement to come have a closer look at the situation. As Staros waits for Tall—and likely his own censure due to refusal to obey orders—he comforts a dying solider (Nick Stahl). This dying soldier, hardly more than a boy, looks from Staros up into the sunlight filtering down through the trees, then back to Staros. The soldier then whispers his last words: “Oh . . . Oh Captain.” Now, there is a critical tradition of associating Malick with the nineteenth-century American transcendentalists; Ron Mottram lists Emerson, Whitman, and Melville among the transcendentalist influences on Malick, 15 and Michel Chion, in his book on The Thin Red Line, writes, “I have never read any interview with Malick, or any accounts from those who have

86

Timothy E.G. Bartel

worked with him, that establishes a knowledge of and like for Thoreau, Emerson, or Whitman. But it is hard not to think of them.” 16 In the scene of Staros and the dying soldier, however, we have a direct quotation from one of Whitman’s most famous poems. Composed to memorialize the recently assassinated President Abraham Lincoln, Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!” allegorizes Lincoln’s death into the story of a ship captain who, returning from a dangerous but successful voyage, dies on the deck before reaching land: O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done, The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won, The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting, While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring; But O heart! heart! heart! O the bleeding drops of red, Where on the deck my Captain lies, Fallen cold and dead. O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells; Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills, For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding, For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning; Here Captain! dear father! This arm beneath your head! It is some dream that on the deck, You’ve fallen cold and dead. My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still, My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will, The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done, From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won; Exult O shores, and ring O bells! But I with mournful tread, Walk the deck my Captain lies, Fallen cold and dead. 17

The emotional heart of the poem is the surprise and lament of the Captain’s son over the cruel irony of the situation: all of the community is rejoicing over the captain’s success and victory, but he is dead; further, the celebration of the Captain’s success makes the son’s lament all the more tragic: he is alone in his mourning, in his tragic knowledge. Though Whitman is most remembered for being the first major American poet to find success writing free verse, “O Captain! My Captain!” shows him at his most formal, employing iambic meter, rhyme, and even a repeating final chorus, “Fallen cold and dead.” Often Whitman is thought to have primarily influenced American poetry, and art more generally, by inspiring American artists to eschew traditional formal rules and traditions and to embrace open forms and free, stream of consciousness style. If Madden and

How Can a Film Be Poetic?

87

Patterson were right about Malick’s poetic bent lying in openness of form, we might expect him to invoke one of Whitman’s free verse poems, especially “Song of Myself.” Instead we find Malick invoking Whitman at his most formal and patriotic. What is the significance of this poem being put in the mouth of a young, dying soldier? It is, after all, spoken in the voice of a youth in both scenarios, but the situation of who is dying has been reversed: Whitman’s youth mourns the death of his father/captain, but in the Hill 210 sequence, a dying youth cries out to his living, remarkably uninjured captain. Indeed, the irony of the Hill 210 sequence which plays over and over is that of the young and innocent dying, and the old and compromised living to see another day. One might see the Hill 210 sequence as Malick’s updating and transforming of Whitman’s Civil War tragedy into a World War II tragedy: there are no more Lincolns, but there is still untimely death. But there may be another reason to put Whitman’s poem in the young soldier’s mouth: Whitman’s poem, published in 1865, became something of a national treasure, and would have been a required text, along with other patriotic classics, like Longfellow’s “Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” and Emma Lazarus’s “New Colossus,” in the American literature curriculum of the mid-twentieth-century American classroom, where these young soldiers were educated. We must not pass over this reading too quickly, for it provides not just a handy poetic reference in Malick, but a whole picture of an American relationship to poetry. As this soldier dies, he reaches for a poem of mourning—a distinctly American poem of distinctly American mourning—to mourn not the death of his captain or president, but his own death. Here, real life has become understood, has become almost bearable, through art; but of course, the taking of Hill 210 is also a piece of art—it is only in the genius of Malick that we forget, for a moment, that it is so. Through these three major references to the poetic tradition in the Hill 210 sequence, we see Malick portray poetry, particularly that of Homer and Whitman, as valuable to his characters. Malick’s characters know and love and quote poetry, and draw us into their lives, and their interpretations of life, through their relationships with that art. VERBAL/VISUAL METAPHORS The second major element of the poetic tradition that we may discern in the Hill 210 sequence is Malick’s usage of metaphor and verbal figuration in general. Metaphor has a long history of importance in poetry, dating back to Aristotle, who in his treatise On Poetry, classifies the metaphors that poets use into three main types: Metaphor is the application of an alien name by transference either from genus to species, or from species to genus, or from species to species, or by analogy,

88

Timothy E.G. Bartel that is, proportion. Thus from genus to species, as: “There lies my ship”; for lying at anchor is a species of lying. From species to genus, as: “Verily ten thousand noble deeds hath Odysseus wrought”; for ten thousand is a species of large number, and is here used for a large number generally. From species to species, as: “With blade of bronze drew away the life,” and “Cleft the water with the vessel of unyielding bronze.” . . . Sometimes too we qualify the metaphor by adding the term to which the proper word is relative. Thus the cup is to Dionysus as the shield to Ares. The cup may, therefore, be called “the shield of Dionysus,” and the shield “the cup of Ares.” . . . There is another way in which this kind of metaphor may be employed. We may apply an alien term, and then deny of that term one of its proper attributes; as if we were to call the shield, not “the cup of Ares,” but “the wineless cup.” 18

We can discern several instances of metaphor as Aristotle describes it in Malick’s Hill 210 sequence. First, there are basic verbal metaphors used in dialogue. After losing “all twelve” of the men in his squad, a sergeant (John Savage) wanders the battle field in a daze. Twice he reaches down and picks up things on the ground: first grass, saying “that’s all we are,” and then dust, saying “we’re just dirt.” Grass and dirt here act as Aristotle’s “alien name” by which the species “dirt” is applied through transference to the species “we”/humans. Such metaphors, and the direct pronouncement of them by a character, is rather conventional, but their placement in the sequence is interesting: it is through the trauma of war and loss that characters are led to directly make verbal figures, to craft words as poets do, according to Aristotle. Malick is perhaps most characteristically himself when he uses words as one half of a metaphor and images as the other half. As Staros stares up the hill that Tall has just commanded him to attack, a cloud moves out of the way of the sun and the hillside changes in color from a dull gray-green to a bright golden-green. Later, after Staros has refused to try attacking the hill again, Tall comes to investigate the causes of Staros’s maddening refusal, and looks up the same hill into the same grass and sees Staros’s soldiers ascending it unmolested. Incredulous, he asks what has happened. “Situation’s changed,” Staros remarks. The initial image of the changing light can be read as the first “species” of a metaphor which is applied to the “species” of battle: just as light on a hill changes, so the possibilities of battle change. 19 One of the most powerful of the verbal/visual metaphors in the sequence is the juxtaposition of a command that Tall yells into the telephone at Staros, and an image of a baby bird. Incredulous that Staros cannot tell how successful his soldiers’ last, blood-spattered assault on the hill has been, Tall yells: “Come to life, Staros. Out!” The next image is of a baby bird, wings wet, feathers thin and matted, scooting along the ground between the roots of a tree. There appears to be patches of wet blood on the bird’s neck and back, and the bird flaps its wings several times as it scoots. The camera then cuts to

How Can a Film Be Poetic?

89

Staros, his head pointed in the same direction the bird’s was. It is difficult to tell whether the bird is bloody because it is injured and dying, or if it has just hatched and is beginning to breathe and move for the first time. The former interpretation is suggested by the many images of Staros’s bleeding, crawling men, while the latter is suggested by Tall’s “Come to life” order. In fact, the bird creates a wholly cinematic figuration when considered in relation to the shots of bleeding soldiers, and a half-verbal, half-visual figuration when considered in relation to Tall’s order. Of course, Malick wants us to consider both relationships, and perhaps the further relationship between Tall’s words and the dying men: that dying is, in a mystery, also a coming to life. While less obviously connected to the art of poetry than his references to poets and poems, Malick’s usage of metaphor, especially in those instances where he creates obvious transferences between verbal species and visual species, stand as another instance of his direct engagement with poetry as an art form with distinct rules and traditions. Malick also imitates verbal figuration with his camera without the usage of words. This is what I think is sometimes meant when Malick’s filmmaking is called poetic: instead of using visual juxtapositions and cuts to show chronological movement, he uses them to create wholly cinematic metaphors: applications of alien images to one another through visual transference, resulting in moments of insight, even wonder. THE LYRIC VOICE (OVER) Of all the polarizing elements of Malick’s film, his ubiquitous and ambiguous voice-overs rank, perhaps, supreme. From the opening to the closing images of The Thin Red Line, Malick overlays softly spoken, meditative monologues in a myriad of voices. Such an overt presence of inner monologue might lead the viewer to believe that the source novel upon which Malick’s film is based is equally meditative and filled with such introspective verbal style. It is not. Let us compare the opening sentences of each. First, here are the opening sentences of the novel by James Jones: The two transports had sneaked up from the south in the first graying flush of dawn, their cumbersome mass cutting smoothly through the water whose still greater mass bore them silently, themselves as gray as the dawn which camouflaged them. Now, in the fresh early morning of a lovely tropic day they lay quietly at anchor in the channel, nearer to the one island than to the other which was only a cloud on the horizon. To their crews, this was a routine mission and one they knew well: that of delivering fresh reinforcement troops. But to the men who comprised the cargo of infantry this trip was neither routine nor known and was composed of a mixture of dense anxiety and tense excitement. 20

90

Timothy E.G. Bartel

Now, here are the opening sentences of the film, narrated by Pvt. Train (John Dee Smith) and Pvt. Witt (Jim Caviezel): What’s this war in the heart of nature? Why does nature vie with itself, The land contend with the sea? Is there an avenging power in nature, Not one power, but two? I remember my mother as she was dying. Looked all shrunk up and gray. I asked her if she was afraid. She just shook her head. I was afraid to touch the death I seen in her. 21

Whereas Jones’s opening sentences are long, descriptive, and written in a third-person, omniscient perspective, Malick’s opening sentences are relatively short, simple, mostly interrogative, and spoken from a limited firstperson perspective, which employs personal reminiscence and even regional dialect. From the outset, then, Malick establishes that his film will be in a different linguistic register of language than Jones’s novel. Jones is writing prose fiction of a straightforward, sometimes florid type. Malick’s writing approximates something different: poetry, in particular the linguistic register of twentieth-century American lyric poetry. Let us look at a few more examples of lyric voice-over from the Hill 210 scene. As Private Bell (Ben Chaplin)—who has been established in flashbacks as a man involved in a passionate relationship with a woman back home—surveys the horrors of the attack on the hill, his voice narrates: We, we together, one being, Flow together like water Till I can’t tell you from me. I drink you. Now, now. You’re my light, My guide.

A few minutes later, as Lt. Col. Tall stalks among the soldiers, his voice takes over: Shut up in a tomb, Can’t lift the lid, Played a role I never conceived. 22

Rather than only give the more sympathetic characters these lyric monologues, they are given to many characters of various virtues and vices, and— when the soldiers have taken the hill from the Japanese—the monologues are even given to the Japanese soldiers.

How Can a Film Be Poetic?

91

I would like to point to three possible points of contact between Malick’s voice-overs and the American lyric tradition. The first is perhaps the most influential free verse lyric of the twentieth century, T. S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” In this 1915 poem, Eliot introduced the world to a new approach to lyric poetry: limited in perspective, irregular in rhyme and meter, and pitifully vulnerable in its exploration of an anxious modern psyche: I should have been a pair of ragged claws Scuttling across the floors of silent seas. 23

Such a vulnerable, anxious, questioning lyric voice developed into a dominant register for mid-century American poets, especially male poets. Robert Lowell employs this lyric style in several influential poems of the 1960s. In “Skunk Hour,” a troubled protagonist explores his neighborhood at night: My mind’s not right. . . . I myself am hell; nobody’s here— 24

The disaffection that borders on self-disgust that one can distinguish in Lowell and Eliot is discernible in Tall’s lyric voice-over as well. Like Eliot, Lowell also highlights an existential questioning discernible in Malick’s monologues: Dear figure curving like a question mark, how will you hear my answer in the dark? 25

The search for ultimate answers about the universe in the context of private introspection and common experience: this is the terrain of both the American lyric and Malick’s voice-overs. Without the American lyric poets as precursors, Malick may not have had a verbal form in which to render his monologues, and to recognize this is to see, once again, how Malick is involved in and influenced by poetry as a historical art form, not merely a set of vaguely aesthetic elements. MALICK, HEIDEGGER, AND POETRY It could be countered that the existential questioning found in Malick’s monologues are more obviously attributable to Malick’s well-documented study of philosophy (in particular the philosophy of Martin Heidegger) than the American Lyric tradition. Furstenau and MacAvoy have in particular pointed to Malick’s poetic-ness being influenced by Heidegger’s essay “What are Poets for?” and its conclusion that perhaps the poet is the one who “gathers men and things” back together in the way that God once did. 26 According to Heidegger, the poet can perhaps rediscover for people the

92

Timothy E.G. Bartel

“divine radiance” that “has become extinguished in the world’s history.” 27 I do not deny the influence of Heidegger, but I would point to another work of Heidegger, “The Thinker as Poet,” as perhaps a more obvious influence not just on the philosophical concerns of the voice-overs, but on their literary style as well. “The Thinker as Poet” (Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens) is a short collection of lyric poems written in 1947. The second poem in the collection begins: The world’s darkening never reaches to the light of Being. 28

Malick’s voice-overs share this concern with darkness and light in nature, as well as a clear figurative reading of darkness and light as images of the ethical in human behavior. Further, Heidegger’s lyrics consider the place of poetry itself in the search for Being: The splendor of the simple. Only image formed keeps the vision. Yet image formed rests in the poem. 29

Heidegger, while never as personally self-revealing as Eliot or Lowell, nevertheless considers in this poem the deeply personal matter of pain and sadness, and sees them as inextricably tied to cheerfulness and healing. In the first two stanzas, he gives a hint into his theory of poetry: the poem is the place of “image formed.” We have already seen that in referencing The Iliad and “O Captain! My Captain!” Malick directly interacts with traditionally formal poems. To corroborate this with Heidegger’s own preferences in “What Are Poets For?” we find Heidegger championing the highly formal poets Hölderlin and Rilke. 30 Even Eliot and Lowell—often seen as champions of free verse and iconoclastic “open form”—flit back and forth between form and free verse in their lyric poems (see especially the quoted rhyming couplets of Lowell’s “The Flaw”). If we are to look for a twentiethcentury theory of poetry in Malick, we could do worse than seeing Heidegger’s “The Thinker as Poet” as an influence, with its lyric voice, its focus on nature, ethics, and Being, and its description of poetry as a place for “the image formed.” Finally, is there a better description of Malick’s verbal and visual style in The Thin Red Line than Heidegger’s line “The splendor of the simple”? Malick has managed in his work to show precisely the splendor of the simple: in Witt’s meditations, in Bell’s memories, in the small beauties of the island, even in the relatively simple plot of the film: all these gain a splendor, an often terrible splendor, through the poetic elements of Malick’s filmmaking. In this essay, I have argued that these elements include specific interactions with poets and poems from history, with purely verbal and mixed verbal/visual metaphors, and with the employment of the lyric voice as found

How Can a Film Be Poetic?

93

in the American tradition and Heidegger. There is much more, of course, to say about poetry in The Thin Red Line, but with these present meditations I have sought to reorient the possible terms and sites of investigation into the “poetic” in Malick’s work, both in The Thin Red Line, and beyond. NOTES 1. Roger Ebert, for instance, twice refers to Thin Red Line as a work of poetry, first calling Malick “a dreamy poet,” and then clarifying that Malick is “more poetic and less worldly” than the characters in his film. https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-thin-red-line-1999. Accessed February 1, 2020. 2. Hannah Patterson, “Introduction: Poetic Visions of America,” in The Films of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America, ed. Hannah Patterson (New York: Wallflower, 2003), 2. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. The Thin Red Line (Directed by Terrence Malick. 20th Century Fox, 1998). 9. Ibid. 10. Colin MacCabe, “Bayonets in Paradise,” in Sight and Sound 9.2: 13. 11. Sean Easton, “Abstract: Terrence Malick’s New World and Homer’s Odyssey.” https:// camws.org/meeting/2008/program/abstracts/07/c3.Easton.html. Accessed February 1, 2020. In his exploration of Malick’s The New World, Easton also points to the influence of Sappho’s early Greek poetry on Malick’s characterization of Pocahontas in that film. See Sean Easton, “Sappho and Pocahontas in Terrence Malick’s The New World,” in Screening Love and Sex In the Ancient World, ed. Monica Cyrino (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 69–84. 12. Robert Silberman, “Terrence Malick, Landscape, and ‘This War at the Heart of Nature,’ ” in The Films of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America (New York: Wallflower, 2003), 164. 13. Homer, The Iliad. Translated by Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin, 1990), I.175–192. Italics in original. 14. William Shakespeare, “Henry V,” in The Oxford Complete Shakespeare (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), IV.1.270–275. 15. Ron Mottram, “All Things Shining: The Struggle for Wholeness, Redemption and Transcendence in the Films of Terrence Malick,” in The Films of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America (New York: Wallflower, 2003), 13. 16. Michel Chion, The Thin Red Line. Translated by Trista Selous (London: British Film Institute), 13. 17. Walt Whitman, Memories of President Lincoln and Other Lyrics of the War (Portland, ME, Thomas Mosher, 1906), 19–20. 18. Aristotle, Poetics, translated by R. H. Butcher (London: MacMillan, 1936), 77–79. 19. There is another, perhaps overly “on the nose” metaphorical moment in the first charge up the hill where a bullet rips through a soldier’s skin, and spatters a thin, red line of blood across a grass blade. 20. James Jones, The Thin Red Line: A Novel (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1962), 1. 21. The Thin Red Line (1998). 22. Ibid. 23. T. S. Eliot, Selected Poems (New York: Harcourt, 1964), 14. 24. Robert Lowell, Collected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 191–192. 25. Ibid., 374. 26. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, and Thought . Translated by Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 91. See also Marc Furstenau and Leslie MacAvoy, “Ter-

94

Timothy E.G. Bartel

rence Malick’s Heideggerian Cinema: War and the Question of Being in The Thin Red Line,” in The Films of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America (New York: Wallflower, 2003), 173–185. 27. Ibid., 91. 28. Ibid., 4. 29. Ibid., 7. 30. Ibid., 142.

REFERENCES Aristotle. Poetics. Translated by R. H. Butcher. London: MacMillan, 1936. Chion, Michael, The Thin Red Line. Translated by Trista Selous. London: British Film Institute, 2004. Easton, Sean. “Terrence Malick’s New World and Homer’s Odyssey,” 2008. https://camws.org/ meeting/2008/program/abstracts/07c3.Easton.html . Ebert, Roger. Review of The Thin Red Line, January 8, 1999. https://www.rogerebert.com/ reviews/the-thin-red-line-1999. Eliot, T. S. Selected Poems. New York: Harcourt, 1964. Furstenau, Marc and Leslie MacAvoy, “Terrence Malick’s Heideggerian Cinema: War and the Question of Being in The Thin Red Line,” in The Films of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America (New York: Wallflower, 2003), 173–185. Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, Language, and Thought. Translated by Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. Homer, The Iliad. Translated by Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin, 1990. Jones, James. The Thin Red Line: A Novel. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1962. MacCabe, Colin. “Bayonets in Paradise.” In Sight and Sound 9.2. Lowell, Robert, Collected Poems. New York; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. Mottram, Ron. “All Things Shining: The Struggle for Wholeness, Redemption and Transcendence in the Films of Terrence Malick.” In The Films of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America. New York: Wallflower, 2003: 13–23. Patterson, Hannah. “Introduction: Poetic Visions of America.” In The Films of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America. New York: Wallflower, 2003: 1–12. Shakespeare, William. The Oxford Complete Shakespeare. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Silberman, Robert. “Terrence Malick, Landscape, and ‘This War at the Heart of Nature,’” in The Films of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America. New York: Wallflower, 2003: 160–172. The Thin Red Line. Directed by Terrence Malick. 20th Century Fox, 1998. Whitman. Walt. Memories of President Lincoln and Other Lyrics of the War. Portland, ME: Thomas Mosher, 1906.

Chapter Six

Fractal Reader-Response Structure A New Narrative Theory in the Work of Terrence Malick Joshua Russell

Few academics, filmmakers, or cinephiles would disagree that the work of Terrence Malick defies current models of cinematic narrative structure. Nevertheless, despite his unorthodox approaches, his work commands significant audiences, consistently wins accolades from top festivals, and attracts the most in-demand talent in Hollywood. For the vast majority of filmmakers, such a departure from traditional narrative structure would spell critical and commercial doom. So how does Malick achieve this feat? Careful analysis of Malick’s work reveals something as sophisticated as one might expect from a Harvard-trained Rhodes Scholar: an approach to story that upsets the Aristotelian model of narrative structure and replaces it with a model for human epistemology. In order for this argument to be clear, we must first contextualize the more common view of Malick’s work. For example, film pundit Thomas Flight’s video essay titled “Malick’s Obsessions,” begins with the following: For me, Terrence Malick is a filmmaker that almost defies discussion. Analysis of his recent work almost seems antithetical to the work itself. . . . His exploratory, existentialist style, seems not to state, but only to search, only to ask. He’s not insisting but inciting. . . . Working without a script, these films cast aside story to become meditations on existence. 1

Flight’s analysis is not uncommon, as fans of Malick have little narrative critique to hang their praise upon, apart from a gut-level sense of reverence for the “exploratory, existentialist style” that seems to defy the common narrative structure, and therefore the common critical talking points. This 95

96

Joshua Russell

often leaves pundits with no choice but to retreat to the safety of superlativeridden praise for his visual aesthetics. Many fans justify this by arguing that Malick’s visual “exploratory” style is fundamental to his genius, but this conclusion avoids the hard work of real critical analysis and should therefore be held suspect. To be clear, Malick himself has inferred that his script-less style is exploratory in nature. In a visit to Princeton, Malick contextualized his return to a more scripted approach to production in A Hidden Life (2019) by pointing out that “often you wouldn’t have any good ideas or the actors wouldn’t have any good ideas” on the day of production. 2 It is therefore easy to conclude that Malick’s production process utilizes exploration as an essential attribute. While this is certainly correct on one level, to stop there is to overlook the larger picture—i.e., the end result of his work, which utilizes a controlled environment of exploration to generate a very specific and codified narrative structure. 3 This codified narrative structure is every bit as consistent as it is unusual. It is a “Malickian” narrative design that digs up the topsoil of story structure in order to expose it at one of its deepest subsets of analysis: faith. Malick’s work offers a specific faith construct as the very foundation of the human psyche, where three interlocking presuppositions neurologically animate the behavior of human beings: inherent value, purpose, and moral code. While this Malickian narrative design is a critical scaffolding to Malick’s own work, we will also see the degree to which it is transferable to motion picture narratives in general. Three questions emerge that must be addressed in order for this argument to be clear: 1) In what way does Malick defy narrative structure? 2) In what way does Malick’s work demonstrate a unique narrative structure? 3) In what way is the narrative structure in Malick’s work more elemental than current theories? IN WHAT WAY DOES MALICK DEFY NARRATIVE STRUCTURE? In order to understand how Malick’s work disagrees with current theories of narrative structure, we must define “current theories of narrative structure.” To my point, contemporary models for cinematic narrative structure are not uniform in construct, nor are they all equally sophisticated, but arguably all published, well-circulated, contemporary models are built upon the foundations laid out by Aristotle in Poetics. I will name this model the “contemporary western narrative lens.” In order to understand the contemporary western narrative lens, we must first consider the “triangle” of narrative structure that Aristotle outlined as “complete action”—i.e., action that is connected through cause and effect

Fractal Reader-Response Structure

97

relationship and therefore has a necessary beginning, middle, and end. As Aristotle states, “Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is complete, and whole, and of a certain magnitude. . . . A whole is that which has a beginning, middle, and end. A beginning is that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be.” 4 There is a lot to unpack in Aristotle’s concept of complete action, including chronological, nonlinear, and media res plot structures—but it is not necessary to unpack these plot structures here. What is important to note is that Aristotle’s “unified plot structure” is a prescriptive structure. Contemporary story pundits generally accept the following three-act outline, as the twenty-first-century equivalent to Aristotle’s complete action: Act One: Setup Act Two: Confrontation Act Three: Resolution Aristotle’s “complete action” or “unified plot structure” is often presented by educators in the shape of a triangle. Novelist and critic Gustav Freytag altered Aristotle’s triangular concept of complete action in the nineteenth century, generating “Freytag’s pyramid.” Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) described a spiritual journey with a series of unique stages that was adapted into a twelve-point circular model of plot structure by Christopher Vogler in The Hero’s Journey (1998). Syd Field uses a linear model to represent his three-act story paradigm in Screenplay (1979). In his book Into the Woods (2013), John Yorke uses a circular, fifteen-point “roadmap of change” model to outline the necessary arc a character takes through a “five-act journey,” which Yorke argues fits neatly into the three-act structure. To be clear, these story pundits are only a small representation of the published whole. Regardless, apart from complete action, there is one through-line that unites them all: the attempt, on some level, to unify plot and character. This prerequisite also stems from Aristotle, who laid out an axiom in Poetics which he called “the first principle”: Dramatic action, therefore, is not with a view to the representation of character: character comes as a subsidiary to the actions. Hence the incidents of plot are the end of a tragedy; and the end is the chief thing of all. Again, without action there cannot be a tragedy; there may be without character. The tragedies of most of our poets fail in the rendering of character; and of poets in general this is often true. . . . Again, if you string together a set of speeches expressive of character, and well finished in point of diction and thought, you will not produce the essential tragic effect nearly so well as with a play which, however deficient in these respects, yet has a plot and artistically constructed incidents . . .

98

Joshua Russell Plot, then, is the first principle, and, as it were, the soul of tragedy: Character holds the second place. 5

To clarify, Aristotle saw “character” as “that which reveals moral purpose.” 6 Therefore, Aristotle’s linkage between character and plot is essentially actions within the plot that incite characters within the plot to make choices that reveal moral purpose. Most narrative theorists generally agree with Aristotle and many have generated arguments supporting his premise. From Flight’s video essay to Yorke’s circular roadmap and five-act structure, twenty-firstcentury story pundits almost unanimously frame narrative structure through an Aristotelian lens. Regardless, Flight’s assertion that Malick’s films “cast aside story to become meditations on existence” requires the presupposition that plot is the first principle of dramatic action, and that character is separate, or secondary. In other words, it requires the assumption that story cannot exist without plot, and Flight does not see plot in Malick’s work, because “his exploratory, existentialist style, seems not to state, but only to search, only to ask. He’s not insisting but inciting.” Plot, for Flight, requires statements and insistence. This is not an uncommon viewpoint; in fact, it is almost ubiquitously held by both practitioners and pundits. For example, Yorke’s harmonious weave of plot and character in Into the Woods: A Five-Act Journey Into Story requires authorial decisiveness (decisiveness in plot and character), as he likens dramatic structure to Hegel’s dialectical thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Yorke, like many story pundits, sees desire as the key to unlocking decisiveness in character: “If a character doesn’t want something, they’re passive. And if they’re passive, they’re effectively dead.” Yorke points to several authoritative practitioners, such as Aaron Sorkin, whose famous line is, “Somebody’s got to want something, something’s got to be standing in their way of getting it.” 7 While desire resulting in conflict is the recipe for a dramatic plot, Yorke’s concept of desire is always packaged in a specific character goal. He even goes so far as to say that “all archetypal stories are defined by this one essential tenant: the central character has an active goal. They desire something.” 8 While Yorke does not reject primal drives as necessary for a successful story, in an almost direct rebuke of Malick, he argues that “it’s not always enough for a character to want love or happiness; it’s too nebulous, too intangible. The most popular works embody desire in an object.” 9 To be clear: Yorke is not the exception to the rule here. John Truby, in his seminal The Anatomy of Story writes, “The hero decides to go after a goal (desire) but possesses certain weaknesses and needs that hold him back from success.” 10 McKee, Field, Booker, Vogler, Walter, Egri, Howard, and Mabley, to name a few, are all proponents of decisive, goal-oriented characters as central to a dramatic plot structure.

Fractal Reader-Response Structure

99

In summation, there are three maxims that compose the contemporary western narrative lens: A) divided plot and character, B) prescriptive plot structure, and C) decisive, goal-oriented characters. Aristotle’s character-asmoral-virtue is notably absent from most popular contemporary theories, having been replaced with “decisive, goal-oriented characters,” though the concept of a “moral arc” has had a resurgence over the last ten years with both academics and practitioners, and is a noteworthy component in the work of Campbell, Truby, Yorke, and Egri, among others. So how does Malick’s work match up against the maxims of the contemporary western narrative lens? Commenting on Malick’s seminal return from obscurity, The Thin Red Line (1998), critic Roger Ebert called the film “schizophrenic,” stating that it “has no firm idea of what it is about.” 11 Critic Joe Morgenstern from the Wall Street Journal said, “Stunning images couldn’t make Days of Heaven a coherent dramatic whole, and they can’t do it for The Thin Red Line.” 12 Critic Gary Thompson from the Philadelphia Daily News wrote, “Malick certainly attunes the viewer to his themes, but he really keeps us at a frustrating distance from his characters and his story.” 13 Each critic, in their own way, is criticizing Malick’s work from the contemporary western narrative lens. Of course, they are correct that it does not fit that lens. This is also evidenced in the substantial positive reviews from film critics. David Ansen of Newsweek called The Thin Red Line, “A film of brilliant pieces and dazzling shots!” 14 Richard Schickel from Time said, “The film is a gorgeous garland on an unknown soldier’s grave.” 15 Rob Humanick from Slant Magazine wrote, “The Thin Red Line’s hallucinatory blend of images defines the very essence of cinema.” 16 Commenting on Malick’s much less appreciated To the Wonder (2012), Matthew Lucas called it “a mesmerizing, haunting work of immense beauty and insight, a film that is constantly alive, pulsing with feeling and emotion in every frame.” 17 Paul Byrns of the Sydney Morning Herald said of Malick’s The Tree of Life (2011), “The tone of the film is mesmeric, transcendent, awe-inspiring.” 18 Kate Rodger of Newshub said The Tree of Life was “a poetic work of art and will be worshipped by many.” 19 Rebecca Cusy at World called it “a fragmented but beautiful kaleidoscope of a film that is closer to a prayer set to music than to a story.” 20 Therefore, Flight appears to be correct in his analysis that Malick casts aside story to create “meditations on existence,” as Malick’s work does in fact avoid the division of plot and character, a prescriptive plot structure, and goal-oriented characters. For example, let us take a look at The Thin Red Line. While the film roughly centers around the character Army Pvt. Witt, played by Jim Caviezel, Malick’s lack of plot structure thwarts Aristotle’s argument for plot as the first principle. Critics Ebert, Morgenstern, and Thompson argue this exact point. Likewise, Malick’s Thin Red Line defies a clear goal-oriented protagonist. In fact, very few people, including Malick,

100

Joshua Russell

seemed to even know who the protagonist of the film was until well after production was completed. 21 One could argue that the separation of plot and character is impossible if A) there is no plot and B) there is no protagonist. To argue that Malick’s The Thin Red Line is in any way an outlier in this respect would be farcical. Suffice it to say, while many critics love Malick’s work, Thomas Flight is not alone in his opinion that Malick’s films “cast aside story to become meditations on existence.” As noted above, even critics who love Malick’s films have no codified story paradigm with which to critique them. Nevertheless, this absence of language is not the result of a lack of sophistication or insight; rather, it is a result of westernization. Contemporary critics lack the language to critique Malick because they are viewing his work through the contemporary western narrative lens. Despite this poverty of language, Malick’s work is highly structural—even to the point that it demonstrates narrative structure on a new level of analysis: one that reveals a new model for narrative structure. IN WHAT WAY DOES MALICK’S WORK DEMONSTRATE NARRATIVE STRUCTURE? In order for us to see the structure in Malick’s work, we must first change the lens through which we view structure. As alluded to earlier, even the most accomplished critics lack a codified language to articulate Malick’s approach to narrative. As noted, this lack of language comes from a poverty of philosophy. Because cinema is both art and commerce, presuppositions about narrative structure are hardly discussed or considered in applied-learning settings, leaving critics and audiences quite literally speechless when a Terrence Malick shows up and inverts some of the most basic assumptions that filmmakers, critics, and academics hold as self-evident. Therefore, a new framework must be constructed—but where to begin? In the 1970s, a school of textual criticism emerged from academia called reader-response criticism. This theory shifted focus away from a text as the primary source of meaning in a work of literature, to the reader of the text as the primary source of meaning. Stanley Fish, one of the most prominent voices among reader-response critics, went so far as to say, “It is not that the presence of poetic qualities compels a certain kind of attention but that the paying of a certain kind of attention results in the emergence of poetic qualities. . . . Interpreters do not decode poems; they make them.” 22 While this assertion has some value, taken literally, it is prone to a certain kind of abuse. Nevertheless, consider Louise Rosenblatt’s transactional reader-response theory, which accounts for the subjectivity of individuals in their interpretation of a text:

Fractal Reader-Response Structure

101

As we read a text, it acts as a stimulus to which we respond in our own personal way. Feelings, associations, and memories occur as we read, and these responses influence the way in which we make sense of the text as we move through it. Literature we’ve encountered prior to this reading, the sum total of our accumulated knowledge, and even our current physical condition and mood will influence us as well. 23

Broadly speaking, the influences outlined in transactional reader-response theory are also influences on the individual audience member when watching a movie. Let us swap the above literary language with cinematic language to see if the exchange works out: As we [watch a film], it acts as a stimulus to which we respond in our own personal way. Feelings, associations, and memories occur as we [watch], and these responses influence the way in which we make sense of the [film] as we move through it. [Films] we’ve [watched] prior to this [viewing], the sum total of our accumulated knowledge, and even our current physical condition and mood will influence us as well. 24

The idea of taking cinematic plot structures as a serious scientific artifact with real scientific value is not unheard of, and is becoming more widely accepted. In fact, cognitive scientists have started to study cinematic plot structures in order to discover clues as to how the brain creates meaning and generates logic, 25 so the implementation of cinematic narrative structure into reader-response theory is worthy of exploration. Another approach helmed largely by Fish, often referred to as social reader-response criticism, demonstrates how “interpretive communities” influence the meaning of a text. Tyson explains: By interpretive community, Fish means those who share the interpretive strategies we bring to texts when we read, whether or not we realize we are using interpretive strategies and whether or not we are aware the other people share them. These interpretive strategies always result from various sorts of institutionalized assumptions (assumptions established, for example, in high schools, churches, and colleges by prevailing cultural attitudes and philosophies). 26

Both Rosenblatt and Fish’s arguments that personal experiences and prevailing cultural beliefs provide frameworks for interpretation have become a given in contemporary thought. This applies effectively to a broad range of creative artifacts, including motion pictures. Further, it is well established that prevailing cultural beliefs are both generated and revised through cultural narrative constructs. If this basic assumption is true, the application of approaches in reader-response theory to the work of Terrence Malick is uniquely worthy of analysis. Consider the following three-part analytical structure grafted from a blend of Fish’s “actively mediating presence” of the

102

Joshua Russell

reader in his affective stylistics and Rosenblatt’s “construction of meaning” in transactional theory: 27 1. Subject: the text reader or movie watcher and their subjective experiences, which frame their initial interpretive assumptions—i.e., the “thesis.” 2. Revision: the revision of the interpretive assumptions (or beliefs) of the text reader or movie watcher through conflict with the content of the text or motion picture itself—i.e., the “antithesis.” 3. New subject: the resulting interpretation of the text or motion picture—i.e., the “synthesis.” This basic process can equally reflect the experience of reading a piece of literature as well as watching a movie. Furthermore, this process can be applied not only to the text reader or movie watcher, it can be applied to the fictitious characters within a movie or piece of literature. The application of these three reader-response stages to Malick’s The Tree of Life are using the character of Jack (played as an adult by Sean Penn and as child by Hunter McCracken) as the subject, his existential crisis as conflict generating revision, and Jack again as the new subject at the end of the movie. Here is how it works out: 1. In the first act of the film, we meet our subject, Jack O’Brien. He is a successful architect in a large glass and steel firm, but despite his success he is unhappy. He is leading a superficial and unfulfilling life, which he is reflecting on because it is the anniversary of his brother R.L.’s death. This is Jack’s existential crisis. 2. In the second act of the film, Jack undergoes revision through conflict. Reflecting on his late brother, Jack plunges into his memories where we meet young Jack and his family. Young Jack’s brother, R.L. (Laramie Eppler), is a gentle soul, whereas young Jack is harsh and combative. Young Jack fights with the world around him, whereas R.L. harmonizes with the world around him. Young Jack’s conflict starts small but grows bigger and more severe, with both R.L. and the rest of his family, even entertaining thoughts about killing his father (Brad Pitt) at one point. This conflict reaches a culmination when young Jack betrays his brother’s trust and shoots R.L.’s finger point-blank with a BB gun. This incites regret in young Jack, who seeks his brother’s forgiveness. The conflict between young Jack and his family (and most importantly, R.L.) generates revision in young Jack. 3. In act three, R.L. forgives young Jack, causing young Jack to see the world in a different way. Young Jack makes peace with his father through vulnerability and empathy. When we return to adult Jack, memories of his brother’s grace have triggered another revision, this

Fractal Reader-Response Structure

103

time in adult Jack, resulting in a new way of thinking about the world. He lights a candle for his brother and finds his peace. This is Jack as the new subject. There is another way to apply this three-part process. If we think of the subject of Tree of Life as death, revision as creation, and the new subject as life, then the stages would look like this: 1. A quote from Job 38 and a translucent light hovering in the cosmos frames the narrative as an existential exploration of grief. We meet a successful but dejected adult Jack, pondering his brother’s death. Moving through time and space, a letter arrives at Jack’s childhood home. Jack’s mother (Jessica Chastain) gets the letter. She finds out that R.L. has died in combat. Jack’s mother and father are devastated. Jack’s mother channels Job and asks God, “Why?” This existential question (Why is there death in the world?) is the subject of the film. 2. We move through time and space to the creation of the universe, which is beautiful but full of brutal, Darwinian conflict. From within this conflict we see an interaction of grace emerge between two dinosaurs. Again, we move through time and space to Jack’s family. A series of memories exposes the conflict of creation within Jack as he grows. As a toddler, Jack strikes his baby brother, R.L. Later, he is cruel to animals and becomes jealous of his mother’s affection for his father, even coming to see his father as his enemy. As his first feelings of erotic love form, he expresses his feelings in deviant ways. As Jack manages these developmental experiences through a Darwinian-like lens of self-preservation, his brother R.L. and his mother manage conflict through grace. Jack’s revision through conflict culminates in his shooting R.L. in the finger at point-blank range with a BB gun. Jack regrets hurting R.L. and seeks forgiveness. This is revision through conflict. 3. R.L. offers Jack grace, which cements a new way of seeing the world (i.e., “the way of grace”) for Jack. Jack’s father has a similar change in perspective when he loses his job and the family is forced to move away. Their effort to manipulate and control the world for their own benefit is facile. Grace is the only way forward. From this new state of grace, we move through time and space to a place where creation has completed its transformation and grace is absolute. Adult Jack walks on a beach with his mother, father, and siblings. R.L. is alive and well in this place and the grief of R.L’s death has given way to new life, represented by a sapling growing on the beach. We return to the translucent light hovering in the cosmos. The answer to the initial question

104

Joshua Russell

is presented. Why is there death? Because only death can produce grace. This is the new subject. In this analysis, we can see how the same three stages apply to the structure of the film, but from a different perspective—one that uses the premise of the film to serve as the subject. 28 To take the reader-response structure even further, we can see the same structure in the narrative arc of other characters, such as Mrs. O’Brien and Mr. O’Brien. We can also see this structure not only in the narrative whole, but also in each act, each sequence, and each scene. For example: 1. Subject: Jack has feelings of erotic love, evidenced by following a female classmate home from school and watching a neighbor walk around in her nightgown. 2. Revision: Conflicted by his feelings and unsure how to satisfy them, Jack breaks into the neighbor’s house and steals lingerie from a bedroom dresser. 3. New Subject: Jack feels guilty and throws the lingerie in the river in order to hide his shame. In his work on reader-response criticism, Fish exposes this three-part process on an even more microscopic level, 29 suggesting that the linear, left to right reading of a sentence requires the same interpretive framework, which I have defined above as the three-part process: Subject, Revision, New Subject. The activity includes the following: 1. The reader identifies the subject of the sentence, which is subconsciously imbued with meaning via previous life experiences. 2. Conflict is generated between the reader’s assumptions about the subject and the actual predicate of the subject in the sentence being read. 3. The conflict between old-predicate assumptions and new-predicate experience produces a synthesis: the reader’s resulting conclusions about the subject. Simplified, the process looks like this: 1. Subject: Assumptions from past experiences. 2. Revision: Conflict between past experiences and present-tense experience. 3. New Subject: New assumptions. Again, we can see the same three-part process. Interestingly, these three parts of language cognition bear a striking resemblance to the three acts of a screenplay: Act One: Setup (of the subject/premise)

Fractal Reader-Response Structure

105

Act Two: Confrontation (revision of the subject/premise through conflict) Act Three: Resolution (of the subject/premise) While the application of reader-response theory to cinematic narrative structure is unique, the fractal nature of the three-act structure I am describing was also pointed out by screenwriter, producer, and academic John Yorke. In his refreshing work, Into the Woods: A Five-Act Journey Into Story, Yorke borrows from Nietzsche, pointing to the Apollonian-Dionysian dialectic as an axiom for art as a whole. 30 From there, Yorke suggests that the polarity of order and chaos in works of art are the source of observable fractal structures. He uses Jackson Pollock’s “action painting” for reference: Pollock’s Abstract Expressionism appears to be chaotic, but dig deeper and it is possible to detect an underlying structure there too. Pollock’s paintings are “fractal;” tiny sections of the work mimic the structure of the whole. . . . And so it is with drama. Stories are built from acts, acts are built from scenes and scenes are built from even smaller units called beats. All these units are constructed in three parts: fractal versions of the three-act whole. 31

As opposed to building on platitudes, as most contemporary story pundits do, Yorke reaches into dialectics and constructs a more promising and thoughtful analysis. Nevertheless, his model stops short of a more wide-reaching and impactful conclusion. For example, when viewing Malick’s “reader-response structure” through this fractal lens, a new theory on narrative structure begins to emerge, exposing a fractal structure within narrative that is more sophisticated than a model for acts, sequences, scenes, and beats—rather, it is a chemical and existential process that illuminates an underlying structure in the formation of human epistemology. IN WHAT WAY IS THE NARRATIVE STRUCTURE IN MALICK’S WORK MORE ELEMENTAL THAN CURRENT THEORIES? Malick’s work appears to “cast aside story to become meditations on existence” largely because his approach to narrative breaks Aristotle’s first principle. For Malick, having “a plot and artistically constructed incidents” is not the foremost goal. Instead, his first principle is premise (i.e., an argument) and Malick’s premises always focus on the recursive nature of faith, which he reveals through the internal moral arc of his characters. To be clear, Malick’s approach extends beyond a “technique” for narrative structure; Malick’s reader-response approach is a model for how human beings develop and revise the narrative structures that frame belief systems. Further still, Malick uses these narrative structures to expose a reader-response style process through which human beings develop and redevelop their belief in three

106

Joshua Russell

interlocking presuppositions that are perhaps among the most elemental presuppositions in the human psyche: inherent value, purpose, and moral code. 32 Nevertheless, those terms can be ambiguous, so let us first consider the following definitions: Inherent value refers to a belief in the in-born value of the self. This is the belief that western society has used to erect and curate its legal system. 33 Inherent value is the idea that all human beings have a value that is unearned/ inborn/built-in, no matter their intelligence, race, physicality, gender, sexual identity, ethnicity, or other characteristics. When applied to the self, it is the belief that one has value inherently, simply by being born as a human being. 34 While this value is certainly assigned in some measure by the individual, it is also assigned in some measure by nature. 35 In this way, belief in inherent value is non-binary. It is not that you either believe in inherent value or do not believe in inherent value. Rather, it is a sliding scale that can be measured by degrees. Notably, this process does not function for the benefit or detriment of the individual alone. The expansion of the individual’s belief in inherent value extends from self to family, to community, to world. As much as this is the case, purpose and moral code will follow suit to account not only for the self but subsequently for family, community, and world. 36 Purpose is the intermediary between belief in inherent value (conscious and unconscious) and the individual’s system of beliefs (conscious and unconscious) known as a moral code. Purpose, in this context, refers to lived behaviors, as it is only through the verification of lived behaviors that the individual’s real beliefs are expressed. 37 Dogma, for example, exists largely within the individual’s cognitive dissonance, allowing for the ardent and sincere verbal commitment to a system of beliefs that are not authentically expressed in lived behaviors (i.e., the “kind of things a man chooses or avoids”). 38 It is more so an individual’s sense of purpose (as opposed to their stated ideological or dogmatic “belief”) that directs their behavior. Purpose is also non-binary, as it can be measured by degrees. Individuals with a strong sense of purpose exhibit more specifically regulated behaviors than humans without a strong sense of purpose. Conversely, it can be argued that if humans come to see their purpose as “to be without purpose,” then the result is less specifically regulated behaviors. Regardless, so long as individuals eat, drink, sleep, love, etc., then they are expressing specific behaviors that represent a basic measure of human purpose (i.e., the purpose of which is to be human). Therefore, the ultimate rejection of purpose would be the rejection of their most basic human functions—in other words, suicide. Moral code refers to the system of beliefs (conscious and unconscious) that guide and defend the individual’s lived behaviors—i.e., their purpose. Think of the moral code as the “outward facing” expression of purpose, which is the most personal expression of inherent value. A moral code is individuald’ most socially oriented and publicly articulated representation of

Fractal Reader-Response Structure

107

their purpose and inherent value. A moral code is constructed from the interpretation and meaning applied to specific narrative events in the individual’s own timeline. 39 In this sense, the moral code is not a professed system of beliefs, such as a dogma or creed, but rather emotional milestones that result in moral axioms (which are often unconscious). The framework of these moral axioms create a uniquely tailored sense of purpose for each individual. Finally, let us review the linkage between a moral code, purpose, and inherent value. Again, a moral code is a system of beliefs generated through the interpreted value of specific events in the individual’s timeline. These interpreted values are judgments of right and wrong, the formation of beliefs about virtue and vice, and correct or incorrect behavior—i.e., moral code. This moral code creates a paradigm for the individual’s sense of purpose, which should be thought of as lived behaviors (as opposed to verbally articulated statements of purpose). These lived behaviors generate a sense of meaning and importance for the individual, which results in an increase or decrease in their sense of inherent value. Individuals express a stronger or weaker sense of purpose, as well as a reevaluation of their purpose, through conflict within any of the three basic presuppositions: purpose, inherent value, or moral code. The same is true for all of the three presuppositions. Conflict that causes a change in the individual’s sense of purpose will strengthen or weaken the individual’s belief in their own inherent value and trigger a revision of their moral code. This is one of the most the essential functions of story for human beings, and one of Malick’s most unique and insightful structural contributions to motion picture narrative. It is worth examining how reader response is used by Malick in ways that are unique from most other popular western filmmakers. 40 The following studies Malick’s film The New World (2005) through the lens of readerresponse criticism, using John Smith (Colin Farrell) as the subject. Smith begins the film as a colonialist in bondage (literally). He arrives in the New World in chains for “mutinous remarks.” Through his romantic relationship with Pocahontas (Q’orianka Kilcher), he is revised and comes to see a “new world” spiritually. This new way of seeing the world generates conflict which results in new behaviors. The new behaviors, once adopted through habitual action, represent John Smith, the new subject. 41 The same process can be applied to the subject Pocahontas. Through her romantic relationship with John Smith, she is revised and comes to discover a “new world” (literally and figuratively). By the end of the film, she has developed a transcendent view of love, with a corresponding change in behaviors, making her a new subject. Notably, neither Smith nor Pocahontas are pursuing a singular, wellarticulated, external goal throughout the second act of the film. Malick’s work fails Yorke’s litmus test. Likewise, there is not a “plot and artistically constructed incidents” of the kind Aristotle references in Poetics. Instead, both Smith and Pocahontas are pursuing internal, existential fulfillment

108

Joshua Russell

through a parade of ever-changing events (political, social, personal). Furthermore, the pursuit of existential fulfillment is not always the primary objective/goal/desire for the characters, though it is consistently the primary need. Therefore, we can see how The New World thwarts the contemporary western narrative model, but fulfills the reader-response model. Now let us consider this same reader-response approach to viewing The New World, but this time through a fractal reader-response lens. For example, in the sequence in which Smith is captured by Algonquian Native Americans, Smith (subject) starts the sequence disoriented—a combatant against the Algonquian. Captured, Smith (revision) is about to be executed, but Pocahontas intervenes and rescues him. As Smith and Pocahontas learn about each other and their cultures, Smith begins to see a different version of the world. He thinks to himself through voice-over: “The words denoting lying, deceit, greed, envy, slander, and forgiveness have never been heard. They have no jealousy. No sense of possession.” Smith and Pocahontas fall in love, but he is released back to the colonists where he experiences a sort of culture shock when he realizes that his colonial identity is founded on deceit, greed, envy, and slander. Overcome with the familiarity of his old self, Smith thinks in voice-over, “It was a dream. Now I am awake.” In other words, Smith comes to believe that his experience with Pocahontas and the Algonquian was not realistic. He allows the conflict to push him deeper into a cynical worldview, which will ultimately generate a new version of Smith in act three (new subject). 42 At this point, we can see that Malick’s use of reader response is not necessarily in direct tension with Aristotle’s first principle. Smith’s basic three-part process is 1) a reversal of fortune, 2) which leads to romantic love, 3) which results in fear and doubt and can be applied to any number of films that obey Aristotle’s first principle, including Disney’s animated feature Pocahontas (1995). Nevertheless, it is Malick’s technique, most obviously represented by his use of the floating camera and voice-over, which redirects the audience away from the mechanisms of plot in exchange for the inner workings of character. Likewise, Malick’s sequences are not grounded in an objective that serves a superobjective. 43 In other words, the sequence is not used to serve a formal plot function in the Aristotelian sense. 44 This commitment to pointing the camera directly at the human psyche represents Malick’s unique commitment to character over plot and is among his most noteworthy contributions to the cinematic form. If we look even closer, to the level of the scene, we can again see the fractal reader-response structure. In the scene in which Smith plays a game with the Algonquian men, Smith is initially in the center of the circle, an outsider trying to keep up with the game play (subject). Smith is a good sport and is given an ornamental staff with a dead bird decorating the top. He plays along, squawking like a bird, and wins the affection of the men (revision).

Fractal Reader-Response Structure

109

Thereafter, an Algonquian man blows smoke on Smith, in a sort of ceremony: a sign of acceptance (new subject). In this way, we can see Smith moving from outsider to insider through the same three-part process of revision. 45 Once again, this three-part process is comparable to films with an Aristotelian plot structure. An outsider protagonist who utilizes vulnerability to win the respect of a community and gain insider status is hardly unique. The primary distinctiveness in Malick’s work, as depicted through Smith’s process of change, is that the structure does not serve an external, goal-oriented plot with “artistically constructed incidents”; rather, it serves the internal arc of the character. In other words, it serves Malick’s premise-based plot structure. Even more elemental than the scene, we can see the fractal reader-response stages in Smith’s most basic thought processes. For example, after Smith is returned to the colonial settlement, he is reeling from the stark contrast between the Algonquian way of life and the colonial way of life, and he thinks to himself: “Tell her. Tell her what? It was a dream. Now I am awake.” 46 What does this mean? “Tell her. Tell her what?” The subject is Smith as he is in that moment in time: desiring to share his feelings and experiences with Pocahontas, even before he can articulate what they are; the subject is Smith in a state of love with Pocahontas. Stated another way, his state of being is Romanticism. “It was a dream.” Smith is now in a state of revision. He is attempting to reconcile his other-worldly experiences with Pocahontas (love) 47 with his colonial-world reality (fear) 48 and cannot harmonize the two. His conclusion is cognitive dissonance: his time with Pocahontas and the Algonquian was a dream. The revision of Smith includes conflict between his state of love and his state of fear. His state of being is cognitive dissonance. “Now I am awake.” Smith, the new subject, is now divorcing himself from his transformative experiences with Pocahontas and the Algonquian. As a new subject, Smith rejects his transformative experience with love. His new state of being is cynicism. Through Fish and Rosenblatt’s reader-response theories, we can see how readers inflect the interpretation of a sentence in the actual process of phonetic decoding. Moving from left to right, readers interpret through a three-step process. In effect, readers: 1) read the subject, 2) subconsciously imagine a predicate and revise their imagined predicate with the predicate in the text, 3) contextualize the subject with its new definition, effectively creating a “new subject.” In this case, we can see this same process through our vicarious experience as audience members inhabiting the subject/protagonist Smith. For example, in the sentence “Tell her.” the subject of the sentence is You. As in “(You) tell her.” Revision takes place when readers contextualizes “you” with their preconceived feelings and beliefs they have about

110

Joshua Russell

themselves, then revises those feelings and beliefs with “tell her” (remember, in this case, they are experiencing themselves through the character John Smith, though their real life personal thoughts and feelings also inflect this process). In essence, this process of revision dialectically pivots “you” (a colonialist bewildered in love) against “tell her,” i.e., confess that your love for her and her way of life is incongruous with who you are. This process results in the new subject—in other words, a man (John Smith) being in love with someone (Pocahontas) and something (the Algonquian way of life) that are incompatible with his real life (colonial identity). It is here, in the microcosm of the fractal reader-response process, that we can see the emergence of faith. For example, John Smith’s faith in his colonial identity (that he is in his essence a colonialist) and in Pocahontas’s love for him (that he should therefore be vulnerable with her) prompts his desire to share his doubts with her. Said another way, Smith’s faith-based confidence that he can share his feelings with Pocahontas causes him to speak to himself through the voiceover “Tell her.” His inner dialog is evidence that he desires to be vulnerable with her and has some measure of faith that he can and should be vulnerable with her. But Smith’s vulnerability provokes a new faith-based decision: “Tell her what?” Smith now must make a new internal declaration of faith. What will he decide to be his truth? “It was a dream. Now I am awake.” His new declaration of faith embraces the sense of fear that provoked his doubts in the first place. Smith places his faith in their incompatibility. Said another way, by the end of this brief inner monologue, John Smith has put his faith not in love but in fear. Namely, the fear that his sincere feelings for Pocahontas were born in a dream-state and cannot align with his reality. His faith has been reinvested into his identity as a colonist. Yet it must be clarified that John Smith’s recommitment to fear (leading to selfish ambition) is not evidence that he is the same as he was before he met Pocahontas, because Smith has now overcome a new and greater challenge to his colonialist ideology: love. By putting his faith into fear and rejecting love, Smith advances a negative character arc. As we can see, Smith’s faith shaped his moral code because his faith guided his decisions regarding what was the right choice for him to make and what was the wrong choice for him to make. His choices resulted in a different sense of purpose: While the first evidence of these new behaviors is his acceptance of a governorship over the settlement, Smith ultimately abandons Pocahontas (a second time) for material gain when he takes a commission from the king to chart a new expedition of his own, exposing a weakening sense of inherent value within himself. 49 While through most of act two Smith makes more and more significant commitments to faith, purpose, and value as defined by the colonial ideological belief system, in act three he comes to see that his faith was misguided because it steered his behaviors

Fractal Reader-Response Structure

111

(i.e., his purpose) away from “the only truth:” love. The result of Smith’s colonial purpose was a life lived void of love, as love is a critical prerequisite for faith in the inherent value of human beings. Therefore, by dismissing love, Smith diminished his own sense of inherent value. Once again, I will reiterate that while all character arcs in all stories depend upon the reader-response paradigm, Malick’s unique contribution is found in how he draws that paradigm up to the surface of his work and exposes the existential inner workings of human epistemology. John Smith is not only navigating love, value, and identity, he is recursively curating his own working paradigm for that which he knows to be true. He is developing a matrix through which he will make knowledge-based decisions. He is cultivating an epistemological process. Malick is exposing that it is through faith that knowledge forms and guides human behavior. No decisions are purely logical because no human has absolute knowledge. Nor is that how the brain makes decisions and triggers chemicals. Instead, humans use a combination of guesswork, logic, and emotions to make faith-based decisions that result in a matrix of beliefs called a moral code. Malick is humbling humanity by undressing and exposing the naked human soul. 50 This same reader-response structure that results in the generation of faith belief systems in John Smith can be seen in all of Malick’s work. In The Tree of Life, Jack is revised through conflict and comes to a renewed faith in grace, which changes his moral code, resulting in a new purpose, and increasing his faith in his own inherent value. Pvt. Witt undergoes the same process in The Thin Red Line, leading to a faith so strong it births the ultimate act of self-sacrifice. Neil (Ben Affleck) and Marina (Olga Kurylenko) undergo change through revision and develop new faith beliefs about the nature of love in To the Wonder (2012). Nevertheless, it is Malick’s unique choice to elevate the formation and progression of the character’s faith beliefs that exposes this process and offers an altogether new paradigm for narrative structure. CONCLUSIONS Those familiar with Malick’s work should be able to see the almost universal consistency of his unique reader-response approach. Furthermore, it is worth spending a moment here in the conclusion to review and expand on what is ultimately gained and what is ultimately lost in Malick’s structure. To recap, the work of Terrence Malick defies current models of cinematic narrative structure because current models are fundamentally Aristotelian. While Flight’s belief that Malick’s work “defies discussion” is a reasonable assertion from the contemporary western narrative lens, the application of readerresponse criticism to Malick’s work exposes a clear three-part structure that

112

Joshua Russell

emphasizes the curation of faith-based presuppositions. With this in mind, Malick’s work should incite not only “meditations on existence,” but also vigorous debate. Malick’s nuanced template for the development and curation of the individual’s moral code, lived purpose, and sense of inherent value is a demonstration of a living epistemology and a rebuke of secularists who live under the illusion that they make decisions informed by logic as opposed to faith. Malick’s work instead demonstrates that logic and faith are interdependent functions worth careful analysis and consideration. A short clarification and recap is due here. While the reader-response structure modeled in this chapter is not uniquely applicable to Malick’s work, it is a structure that suits Malick’s work in a unique way. Malick’s narrative approach models the recursive (repeating and revising) nature of life by zeroing in on premise, expressed through character. 51 Said another way, Malick states a thesis, zeroes in on a character, observes the process of change through conflict, and then discovers and illuminates the synthesis— which is his premise. A specific goal or plot is not required for this structure, and, even more to the point, a specific goal or plot would subvert the ascension of character over plot and thwart Malick’s exposé of the existential human experience. For filmmakers who would like to utilize Malick’s unique approach in their own work, there are some advantages, including the unparalleled access his model creates for a rich and immersive existential experience that explores the inherently existential underbelly of human character. Malick’s approach is also uniquely collaborative, especially between director, actors, production designer, production sound mixer, editor, post sound designer, composer, and cinematographer. Disadvantages include a far narrower audience, the discomfort of upsetting the contemporary western narrative lens (including the inevitable, wide-ranging, negative reviews), and increased challenges to production, including the logistical pitfalls of an informal script as well as the need for unquantifiable resources, including time, money, and talent. Despite the challenges, Malick’s work should serve as a signpost for twenty-first-century storytellers. As westernization ebbs under the pressure of globalization, the hidden forces that frame individual and cultural identities by shaping moral code, purpose, and inherent value must remain an active global discussion (a platform unique to the motion picture format) in order to help curtail the ideology of conquest that has plagued civilization with increasing severity over the last century. Instead of judging Malick’s work as pretentious or inaccessible, filmmakers would be wise to extract Malick’s unique narrative approach and use it to discover and illuminate a variety of premises. Furthermore, critics, pundits, and academics should judge Malick’s work not only on the content of his narratives, but on the groundbreaking insight of his narrative technique.

Fractal Reader-Response Structure

113

In summation, Malick’s use of reader-response structure allows him to avoid a goal-driven narrative structure that relies on plot as the first principle of story structure. Instead, Malick is able to build his narrative around a clearly stated idea: the premise. Furthermore, because the premise is housed in the character’s interlocking presuppositional vertebrae—inherent value, purpose, and moral code—Malick is able to make character his first principle. This liberates Malick from the predictable plot structure that has increasingly plagued western cinema ever since Christopher Vogler first passed around his Hero’s Journey memo at Disney during the development of the original Lion King (1994). 52 Furthermore, Malick’s unique use of the readerresponse structure opens a window into a different kind of drama: one that “seems not to state, but only to search, only to ask.” Instead of insisting, his structure allows the filmmaker to incite. Instead of providing trite conclusions, his structure offers a cogent vulnerability. Terrence Malick defies current models of cinematic narrative structure and replaces those models with a structure for meditating on the development and curation of human epistemology through the hidden precepts of faith. NOTES 1. Thomas Flight, Malick’s Obsessions, YouTube video, 4:51, February 22, 2018. http:// youtube.com/watch?v=5f6rpDlfX5A. Accessed August 20, 2019. 2. Christopher Bruno, “Terrence Malick talks filmmaking at a rare public speaking event,” Little White Lies, October 27, 2016. https://lwlies.com/articles/terrence-malick-live-appearance-digital-filmmaking/. Accessed January 14, 2020. 3. There is a wide body of public literature supporting the assertion that Malick uses a “controlled environment,” though the format of his controlled environment changes to some degree. For example, while shooting Song to Song (2017), Malick used an ensemble of actors and full access to the Austin Music Festival as one of his controlled environments. While shooting The Tree of Life, Malick shut down several square blocks of a neighborhood in Waco, Texas, pre-lit the interior house location with practicals, and was then free to roam and record footage spontaneously. Both the neighborhood and the music festival serve as controlled environments in which Malick is able to engage spontaneous ideas centered around the story and characters. 4. Aristotle, Poetics (London, Dover Publications, 1997), 14. 5. Ibid., 12. 6. Ibid., 13. 7. John Yorke, Into the Woods: A Five-Act Journey Into Story (New York, Overlook Press, 2015), 9. 8. Ibid., 7. 9. Ibid., 9. 10. John Truby, The Anatomy of Story (New York, Farber and Farber, 2007), 58. 11. Roger Ebert, review of The Thin Red Line, RogerEbert.com, January 8, 1999. https:// www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-thin-red-line-1999. Accessed August 19, 2019. 12. Joe Morgenstern, “The Good, the Bad and the Sappy,” Wall Street Journal, December 24, 1998. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB914460326629895500. Accessed August 19, 2019. Italics added for titles. 13. Gary Thompson, Philadelphia Daily News, January 1, 2000. Republished on RottenTomatoes.com. https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1084146-thin_red_line/reviews?type=& sort

114

Joshua Russell

=&page=3. Accessed August 19, 2019. 14. David Ansen, Newsweek, January 1, 2000. Republished on RottenTomatoes.com. https:/ /www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1084146_thin_red_line. Accessed August 19, 2019. 15. Richard Schickel, “Ho Ho (Well, no)” Time, June 24, 2001. http://content.time.com/ time/magazine/article/0,9171,140837,00.html. Accessed August 19, 2019. 16. Rob Humanick, “DVD Review: The Thin Red Line,” Slant Magazine, September 28, 2010. https://www.slantmagazine.com/dvd/the-thin-red-line/. Accessed August 19, 2019. Italics in original. 17. Matthew Lucas, “Review: Malick Triumphs Again with To the Wonder,” The Dispatch, May 15, 2013. https://www.the-dispatch.com/lifestyle/20130515/review-malick-triumphsagain-with-to-the-wonder. Accessed August 19, 2019. 18. Paul Byrns, “Going Out on a Limb,”Sydney Morning Herald, July 2, 2011. https://www .smh.com.au/entertainment/movies/going-out-on-a-limb-20110630-1gri5.html. Accessed August 19, 2019. 19. Kate Rodger, “Tree of Life review,” Newshub.co.nz, June 16, 2011. https://www .newshub.co.nz/entertainment/tree-of-life-review-2011061615. Accessed August 19, 2019. 20. Rebecca Cusy, “The Tree of Life,” World Magazine, May 20, 2011. https:// world.wng.org/2011/05/the_tree_of_life. Accessed August 19, 2019. 21. Peter Biskind, “The Runaway Genius,” Vanity Fair, December 1998. https:// www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2010/04/runaway-genius-199812. Accessed August 20, 2019. 22. Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? (Cambridge. Harvard University Press, 1980). 326-27. 23. Lois Tyson, Critical Theory Today. (New York. Routledge, 2015). 165. 24. Ibid. 25. For more on this, see Vera Tobin’s research on plot twists. There are a number of interviews with Tobin available at large. Also see her work: Elements of Surprise: Our Mental Limits and the Satisfactions of Plot. 26. Tyson, Critical Theory Today. 176. 27. In Fish’s Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics, he dissects a series of given sentences as a way of demonstrating how the reader goes through three stages when reading: (1) expectations and hypothesizing, (2) upset expectations and doubt, (3) confusion and meaninglessness. While this is accurate for the sentences Fish provided, his left-to-right “ticker tape” analysis of the reader is telling. When we apply this linear “ticker tape” reader analysis with Rosenblatt’s transactional theory, we can see the following three stages emerge within the reader: subject (the subjective reader to date), revision (upset and revised interpretive beliefs), and new subject (a resulting synthesis and “updated” subjective reader). 28. By this I mean premise as defined by Lajos Egri in How to Write a Play. Egri defines premise using Webster’s International Dictionary: “Premise: a proposition antecedently supposed or provided; a basis of argument. A proposition stated or assumed as leading to a conclusion.” Egri expounds by offering language often used interchangeably with premise: “theme, thesis, root idea, central idea, goal, aim, driving force, subject, purpose, plan, plot, basic emotion.” Egri goes on to offer a premise for Romeo and Juliet: “Great love conquers even death.” Egri’s premise is the core moral truth that the narrative discovers and lays bare for the audience to see, to feel, to know. 29. Tyson, Critical Theory Today. 167-69. 30. Yorke, Into the Woods. 77. 31. Ibid., 78. 32. For more on this, see The Worm at the Core: The Role of Death in Life by Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski. In an interview with Shankar Vedantam on NPR’s Hidden Brain, Solomon expounds on Terror Management Theory, “The uniquely human awareness of death gives rise to potentially debilitating existential terror that we manage . . . by embracing culturally constructed belief systems that give us each a sense that life has meaning and we have value.” In a study of municipal court judges in Tucson, Arizona, Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski found that judges who were reminded of their mortality set bail for hypothetical prostitution cases nine times higher than judges from the control group, suggesting that even a reminder of their mortality caused judges to cling to their culturally

Fractal Reader-Response Structure

115

constructed moral beliefs far more aggressively than they would have if they were less conscious of their mortality. This suggests that the existential dread of nonexistence incites individuals to shield themselves against this fear through the construction of moral codes, which in turn generates a sense of purpose and personal value. Variance in the individual’s culturally constructed moral beliefs as well as the shifting of these beliefs over time, suggest that value, purpose, and moral code are interlocking presuppositions. This means that changing one presupposition will cause the other two presuppositions to change in corresponding ways. 33. There is no shortage of well-researched and easily accessible literature on this. For starters, see Hegel, Hobbes, Locke, Payne, and the U.S. Declaration of Independence. 34. See the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” 35. See Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. 36. See the April 2019 debate between philosopher Slavoj Žižek and psychologist Jordan Peterson, in which Peterson articulates a response to “the greater good” with individual behaviors that also benefit the family, community, and world. This concept of mutual/balanced benefit is seen across disciplines, as reflected in the Nash equilibrium by American mathematician John Forbes Nash, mutual-aid theory by economist and sociologist Peter Kropotkin, and religious studies such as in the work of first-century historian N. T. Wright. 37. This is Aristotle’s idea of character as actions which reveal moral purpose. See Poetics, section VI. 38. Ibid., 36. 39. The work of researcher Lisa Feldman Barrett demonstrates how the brain generates emotions through guesswork, based on previous life experience. See Barrett’s TED Talk, You Aren’t at the Mercy of Your Emotions, as a starting point. Another resource demonstrating how “moral code is constructed from the interpretation and meaning applied to specific narrative events in the individual’s own timeline” comes from an interview with Dr. Jonathan Vlahos, M.D., who explains a condition called Transient Global Amnesia, in which affected individuals lose their ability to form new short-term memories: “What everybody does is struggle over and over again with where am I and when am I.” The individual’s need to figure out their where and when suggests the need to orient one’s self according to their own memory-based timeline. In other words, it is the individual’s interpreted memories that anchor identity. 40. As it should be clear by now, all films are to some degree dependent on the readerresponse model. Subject–revision–new subject can be applied just as easily to the traditional three-act structure and plot-driven films as to the work of non-traditional western filmmakers such as Malick, Linklater, and Fricke. 41. Smith’s habitual behavior leads him to a state of cynicism, which better sets him up to recognize love as “the only truth” at the end of the film, because it is so obviously what he lacks in his life. 42. The New World, dir. Terrence Malick (USA: New Line Cinema, 2005). 43. David Mamet, On Directing Film (London, Penguin Books, 1991). 22–23. 44. This is not to say Malick does not have a specific structure to his work. He does have a very specific structure, but it does not obey Aristotelian plot structure. His plot structure obeys a character-based existential “plot” structure focused on internal truths, not external accomplishments. 45. The New World (2005). 46. Ibid. 47. Malick uses Smith’s experience with Pocahontas to sketch a gestalt that frames love as a way of being. This is not only a romantic love, but a fraternal, platonic, social, natural, and spiritual love. When Smith is a captive of the Algonquian in the first act, he falls in love with the way in which the Algonquian think and their moral virtue, before he falls in love with Pocahontas. In act three, Pocahontas’s love transcends Smith and is applied to John Rolfe (Christian Bale). Malick’s love is not the subjective, intoxicating love between individuals but a transcendent and romantic love that supersedes the individual. The love Malick constructs in The New World is more akin to a philosophy or even a religion, in the purest sense of the word. 48. In accord with Malick’s depiction of love as a way of interacting with the world (i.e., a philosophy or religion), Malick sketches fear as a philosophy opposing love. Smith arrives in

116

Joshua Russell

the new world in bondage (literally in shackles) due to “mutinous remarks”—emblematic of the colonial, authoritarian paradigm of the colonialists. Later, we find the colonist’s settlement poisoned by competition and greed. A man is executed arbitrarily in a squabble and Smith accepts governorship over the settlement out of fear. After Pocahontas is brought to Jamestown and their love is rekindled, Smith abandons Pocahontas in exchange for material gain when he accepts a charter from the King of England. In other words, Smith chooses career (fear of lack) over relationship (value of love). 49. Smith’s choice to abandon love and human intimacy in exchange for material wealth is an obvious form of this. Also see Peterson’s concept of “the greater good” (note 36) as individual behaviors that also benefit the family, community, and world. This idea of tiered benefit is echoed in Pocahontas and Smith’s love relationship, which has the ability to transcend the limits of culture and offer a potential solution to isolationism and conquest as the de facto human socio-political condition. 50. The soul, or the psychological illusion of the soul, is based on a projection of moral code, purpose, and inherent value. 51. Specifically, Aristotle’s definition: “Character is that which reveals moral purpose, showing what kind of things a man chooses or avoids.” 52. Christopher Vogler, “How The Lion King Got the Hero’s Journey Treatment: Thanks to Synchronicity and Some Help from a Plagiarist,” Chris Vogler’s Writer’s Journey Blog, August 7, 2019. Accessed January 30, 2020.

REFERENCES Ansen, David. Newsweek, January 1, 2000. Republished on RottenTomatoes.com. https:// www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1084146_thin_red_line. Accessed August 19, 2019. Aristotle, Poetics (London, Dover Publications, 1997). Barrett, Lisa Feldman. You Aren’t at the Mercy of Your Emotions, Ted Talk, 18:29, December 2017, https://www.ted.com/talks/lisa_feldman_barrett_you_aren_t_at_the_mercy_of_your _emotions_your_brain_creates_them. Accessed August 20, 2019. Biskind, Peter. “The Runaway Genius,” Vanity Fair, December 1998. https:// www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2010/04/runaway-genius-199812. Accessed August 20, 2019. Byrns, Paul. “Going Out on a Limb,” Sydney Morning Herald, July 2, 2011. https://www .smh.com.au/entertainment/movies/going-out-on-a-limb-20110630-1gri5.html. Accessed August 19, 2019. Bruno, Christopher. “Terrence Malick talks filmmaking at a rare public speaking event,” Little White Lies, October 27, 2016. https://lwlies.com/articles/terrence-malick-live-appearancedigital-filmmaking/. Accessed January 14, 2020. Cusy, Rebecca. “The Tree of Life,” World Magazine, May 20, 2011. https://world.wng.org/ 2011/05/the_tree_of_life. Accessed August 19, 2019. Ebert, Roger. Review of The Thin Red Line, RogerEbert.com, January 8, 1999. https:// www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-thin-red-line-1999. Accessed August 19, 2019. Egri, Lajos. How to Write a Play (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1946). Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in This Class? (Cambridge. Harvard University Press, 1980). ———. Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics. New Literary History, Vol 2, No. 1, A symposium on Literary History. (Autumn, 1970). Flight, Thomas. Malick’s Obsessions, YouTube video, 4:51, Feb 22, 2018. http://youtube.com/ watch?v=5f6rpDlfX5A. Accessed August 20, 2019. Humanick, Rob. “DVD Review: The Thin Red Line,” Slant Magazine, September 28, 2010. https://www.slantmagazine.com/dvd/the-thin-red-line/. Accessed August 19, 2019. Lucas, Matthew. “Review: Malick Triumphs Again with To the Wonder,” The Dispatch, May 15, 2013. https://www.the-dispatch.com/lifestyle/20130515/review-malick-triumphs-againwith-to-the-wonder. Accessed August 19, 2019. Mamet, David. On Directing Film. (London, Penguin Books, 1991).

Fractal Reader-Response Structure

117

Morgenstern, Joe. “The Good, the Bad and the Sappy,” Wall Street Journal, December 24, 1998. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB914460326629895500. Accessed August 19, 2019. The New World. Directed by Terrence Malick. USA: New Line Cinema, 2005. Peterson, Jordan. Marxism: Zizek/Peterson: Official Video, YouTube video, 02:45:32, May 15, 2019.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsWndfzuOc4. Accessed August 20, 2019. Rodger, Kate. “Tree of Life review,” Newshub.co.nz, June 16, 2011. https://www .newshub.co.nz/entertainment/tree-of-life-review-2011061615. Accessed August 19, 2019. Schickel, Richard. “Ho Ho (Well, no)” Time, June 24, 2001. http://content.time.com/time/ magazine/article/0,9171,140837,00.html. Accessed August 19, 2019. The Thin Red Line. Directed by Terence Malick. USA: Fox 2000 Pictures, 1998. Thompson, Gary. Philadelphia Daily News, January 1, 2000. Republished on RottenTomatoes.com. https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1084146-thin_red_line/reviews?type=&sort= &page=3. Accessed August 19, 2019. Tobin, Vera. Elements of Surprise: Our Mental Limits and the Satisfactions of Plot. (Cambridge. Harvard University Press, 2018). To the Wonder. Directed by Terrence Malick. USA: Redbud Pictures, 2012. The Tree of Life. Directed by Terrence Malick. USA: Cottonwood Pictures, 2011. Truby, John. The Anatomy of Story (New York, Farber and Farber, 2007). Tyson, Lois. Critical Theory Today. (New York. Routledge, 2015). Vedantam, Shankar. “Interview with Sheldon Solomon,” Hidden Brain, podcast audio, September 16, 2019,https://www.npr.org/2019/09/13/760599683/were-all-gonna-die-how-fearof-death-drives-our-behavior. Accessed January 30, 2020. Vogler, Christopher. “How The Lion King Got the Hero’s Journey Treatment: Thanks to Synchronicity and Some Help from a Plagiarist.” Chris Vogler’s Writer’s Journey Blog, August 7, 2019. Accessed January 30, 2020. Yorke, John. Into the Woods: A Five-Act Journey into Story (New York, Overlook Press, 2015).

Part Three

A Path of Cinema

Chapter Seven

Auteurs and Movie Brats Placing Malick’s Extraordinary Career in Context Dean Yamada

No one in the history of motion pictures has had a career quite like Terrence Malick. In an industry that relies on formulas to earn revenue and accolades, he is an enigma. During the 1970s—often referred to as the Second Golden Age of Hollywood—Malick wrote and directed two beloved films, Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978), and then did not direct another film for twenty years. When he returned to the director’s chair as a fifty-four-yearold, A-list actors from George Clooney to Sean Penn clamored for a role in the most star-studded war movie ever produced, The Thin Red Line (1998). The mystique and excitement around this movie director was palpable when his first film in two decades was finally released. To put this into context, imagine if Quentin Tarantino had made Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994) and then had not made another film for twenty years. His return in 2014 would have been highly anticipated amongst cinephiles and industry insiders alike. Had Paul Thomas Anderson made Hard Eight (1996) and Boogie Nights (1997) and then waited two more decades to make another film, A-list actors would have taken bit parts just for the opportunity to be in a P.T. Anderson picture. The long-awaited production of The Thin Red Line was a piece of film history—the cinematic equivalent of seeing Halley’s Comet. The great film critic Roger Ebert said Badlands and Days of Heaven were two of the best films he had ever seen. With only two films, Malick had achieved auteur status—his lyrical imprint was as identifiable on his films as Hitchcock’s suspense or Kubrick’s eye for perfection—and accumulated countless fans who eagerly awaited his next release. In 1998, The Thin Red Line would only be Malick’s third feature film in a nearly thirty-year career. 121

122

Dean Yamada

When Malick’s Palme d’Or-winning The Tree of Life debuted in 2011, it would be only his fifth film in a nearly forty-year career at that point, proving one does not have to be prolific to be an auteur. In more recent times, Malick’s legend seems to have only grown as his films have become more personal and more experimental. This has rarely been seen in Hollywood; once a filmmaker’s window of relevance closes, a singular voice is usually forced to transition into a work-for-hire, if one wants to continue to find work in the industry. Hollywood is a machine, whose film-by-committee approach profits off young talent and then spits them out with no regard once they can no longer spin straw into gold. Yet, Malick, now in his mid-seventies, continues to carve out his own path on his own terms and is celebrated as an artist and an auteur because of it. As a filmmaker, Malick is something of an outlier. To better understand his uniqueness, it would help to contextualize his career by comparing it to one of his contemporaries—a 1960s film school brat and fellow auteur— Francis Ford Coppola. Both Malick and Coppola helped define the 1970s as one of the greatest decades in American cinema, and both still desire to create personal films in their twilight years, though they took two distinct paths to get to this place. In America, the 1970s was one of the most meaningful eras of moviemaking for a few key reasons. Generations of American filmmakers had been highly influenced by post-World War II European film movements. Specifically, Italian Neorealism and the French New Wave introduced a looser style of filmmaking, free from the confines of the studios. Movies like Rome Open City (1945), The Bicycle Thief (1948), The 400 Blows (1959), and Breathless (1960) showed a more authentic way of telling stories, one that did not rely on standard production procedures, one that was true to the world in which it was made, and one that did not need a happy ending to make audiences feel good about themselves. International filmmakers succeeded in breathing life into a new way of storytelling by smashing simple rules to test the medium’s limits. Scenes did not have to open with an establishing shot to orient the viewer. The establishing shot, followed by a medium shot, then reverse close-ups of each character had grown stale. Instead, they often used jump cuts, which lacked regard for continuity as well as the 180M line. In many ways, these film movements were stylistically closer to documentaries and newsreels than traditional movies. Secondly, the content of Hollywood movies was quickly changing with the times. American audiences had craved edgier material after decades under the grip of the Production Code (also known as the Hays Code), which mandated that movies not pollute the minds of their audiences. When this system crumbled in the late 1960s due to the influx of lucrative foreign films—which could be exhibited in American theaters without the Produc-

Auteurs and Movie Brats

123

tion Code’s stamp of approval—grittier movies like Bonnie and Clyde (1967) could be released for the first time. Suddenly, American audiences found themselves rooting for the “bad guys;” characters who were on the wrong side of the law. It was exhilarating and refreshing for these new moviegoers, who were also younger and more educated. Then there was the turmoil and transition of the 1960s. The American people had grown cynical of the white picket fences that had tried to project an idyllic image of the American dream. Politicians and leaders were being assassinated like never before. The Civil Rights Movement was turning centuries of institutionalized racism on its head, and America had entered a war in Vietnam that it would not win. At the same time, a generation of students was graduating from film schools in Los Angeles and New York. A few notable film school graduates are as follows: Francis Ford Coppola received his masters from UCLA. George Lucas graduated from USC. Steven Spielberg was at Long Beach State (but dropped out a year shy of graduating). Martin Scorsese came out of New York University. And Terrence Malick studied at the American Film Institute. These educated filmmakers had something to say as they began to make films in the late 1960s and 1970s. It was an era rich with young auteurs who were not afraid to push the envelope in both form and content. They had a voice and were equipped with a fresh way to use it. With that, a new film movement was born called the American New Wave. At no other point in history could a filmmaker like Malick have thrived. In 1969, a thirty-year-old Francis Ford Coppola released a small, personal film called The Rain People. It would be the last time he would make a small, personal film for another three-and-a-half decades as his next film would be The Godfather in 1972. The Godfather changed the trajectory of Coppola’s career overnight because it put him on the map as a serious director. Not only did it receive the highest acclaim from film critics, audiences flocked to theaters to be captivated by a mafia story that had never been seen in this light (or lack of light, thanks to cinematographer Gordon Willis, also known as the “Prince of Darkness”). From that point on, Coppola made “Hollywood” films. With larger budgets came loftier expectations. According to Coppola, “The Godfather changed my life, for better or worse. It definitely made me have an older man’s film career when I was 29.” 1 By the time Coppola was thirty-five years old in 1974, he had been nominated for nine Academy Awards and won five. Five Oscars by the age of thirty-five. This type of success at that age had not been seen before or since. He was the ultimate auteur in one of the greatest decades of cinema, and by the end of the 1970s, he had collected twelve Oscar nominations for his work—all as writer, director, or producer. His was a career any aspiring filmmaker dreams about having.

124

Dean Yamada

In contrast, Terrence Malick was completing his graduate thesis film at AFI in 1969. It would be a few years before he would go into production on his first feature film, Badlands, which he also wrote. Badlands was a small, independent film—reportedly shot with a privately financed budget of about $450,000—that takes place in the Midwest. Reminiscent of Bonnie and Clyde, it also was inspired by a true story about a real-life killing spree by two young lovers in the late 1950s. Though not a commercial success, Badlands announced the arrival of a thoughtful, young voice in American cinema. The New York Times called it “a most important and exciting film” and commented on Malick’s “immense talent.” 2 Many critics believe Badlands was not only one of the best films of the 1973, it was also one of the best debut films ever by an American director. What set this film apart was Malick’s stunning visuals, the distinct slice of 1950s Americana it portrayed, and the poetic storytelling for which Malick has come to be known. Starring Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek in breakout roles, it was given the honor of closing the eleventh New York Film Festival, which led to its purchase by Warner Bros. Incidentally, Martin Scorsese, a contemporary of Malick, announced his own arrival with his third feature film, Mean Streets (1973), at that same festival. It would be another five years until Malick released his next film, Days of Heaven. To give context to the years between 1973–1978, Coppola would write and direct The Conversation (1974) and The Godfather Part II (1974), Scorsese would direct three narrative features and achieve the most critical acclaim for Taxi Driver (1976), Spielberg would set the stage for the summer blockbuster with Jaws (1975) in addition to directing two other movies, and George Lucas would direct two enormously successful films, American Graffiti (1973) and Star Wars (1977). Similar to Badlands, Days of Heaven was a period piece set in the Midwest. It was with his second film that Malick solidified the auteurial traits that would captivate audiences and produce fans who would sustain his twenty year absence. Whereas Badlands was a bit more conventional in its shooting style, Days of Heaven took risks and creative liberties that an older generation never would have attempted. It is not the type of film that uses an overabundance of reverse shots, where close-ups of actors cut back-and-forth as we listen in on a conversation. In fact, dialogue is secondary to the feelings portrayed on the actors’ faces in many of the scenes, and some—including the film’s star Richard Gere, to his own dismay—have said the film plays more like a silent movie. Throughout much of Days of Heaven, Malick prefers the use of the “two shot,” in which two actors interact within the same composition. He does not have much regard for the eyelines of the actors or even the 180M line in some cases. His cinematography had an ethereal quality and was more ex-

Auteurs and Movie Brats

125

pressive than most Hollywood releases. He was creating his own aesthetic, one that was less fabricated and more authentic to his cinematic tastes. Sound familiar? Similar to his peers, it appears Malick was inspired by the post-World War II European film movements of Italian Neorealism and the French New Wave that had freed cinema from the confines of the studios. However, Malick took this influence and ran with it further than most of his peers. His loose shooting style was unconventional by Hollywood standards, but produced a visual style that has become all his own. His film technique continues to subvert the very foundation of Hollywood movies even four decades later. Mark Yoshikawa, a frequent Malick collaborator who has edited a number of his films, shares insight into Malick’s process: “He wanted to feel as if things were found and not presented. We ended up just cutting out anything that felt false, and that gave way to the jump cuts, which give the movie its elliptical feeling. Terry said, ‘If it’s a 10-second shot and five of the seconds feel false, then just take it out and see what happens.’ “ 3 It was with Days of Heaven that Malick first committed to this vision of where he believed he could progress cinema and made a stylistic leap that would resonate with generations of future audiences. In addition to the visual poetry, Malick’s first two films were characterized by his portrayal of an America of the past, his use of rambling narration to give voice to female characters unique to cinema, and a spirituality that was ever-present yet far from didactic. With only two films, Malick had left a lasting impression on the moviegoing public of the 1970s. J. Hoberman, film critic at the Village Voice, wrote, “Where other movies have fans, Malick’s produces disciples.” 4 And these disciples kept Malick’s torch lit until his return in 1998. For most directors, more money means more toys to play with and more options for production. But it was German director Wim Wenders who sagely and shrewdly said, “The more money you have the more you can do with it, sure. But the less you can say with it.” 5 With studio budgets comes studio interference. It is the rare director who gets final cut written into his or her contract because, in doing so, no studio head (or anyone else for that matter) would be able to tell a director with final cut what to edit out. This is where Malick’s path began to diverge from Coppola’s. A cinematic darling in what was one of the greatest eras of visual storytelling, Malick had established his legacy with his first two movies. However, he would move at his own pace, only telling the stories he wanted to tell, even if it meant not making any movie at all. Coppola, on the other hand, had one of the greatest decades of any director past or present. He capped off the 1970s with Apocalypse Now (1979), his bold vision of the Vietnam war that would win the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival (the same year Malick would beat him out for the Best Director award at Cannes for Days of Heaven) and pick up eight Academy Award

126

Dean Yamada

nominations. It was an unmitigated success both commercially and critically, but the experience of making Apocalypse Now—with the incredible pressure of living up to larger than life expectations while having his entire life’s savings on the line—led Coppola to have a nervous breakdown and become suicidal. Both Apocalypse Now and Days of Heaven took an inordinately long time to finish. A typical Hollywood film may take a year or less to get through post-production, but Coppola and Malick took two to three years to complete their films. It would pay off for both films as well as the filmmakers, but the next decade would not be so fruitful for either director. Coppola had visions of starting his own studio, American Zoetrope, and sunk much of his personal fortune into his next film, a musical titled One from the Heart (1982). It was a gamble that failed miserably at the box office, crushing his dreams of starting a studio and forcing him to pay off his debtors by taking a series of directing jobs that led him down a path he did not want to go. He directed one film after another in the 1980s, all as a workfor-hire. The directing gigs never dried up because of his stature as a celebrated auteur, but every film he made brought him further away from the small, personal films he longed to direct. “I did feel frustrated,” Coppola admits, “but it was a more personal artistic frustration. I just thought, ‘What kind of career can I have at this point?’ I didn’t want to be a Hollywood director. I don’t think anybody wanted me. I had done, for 10 years, to pay off the debt, one movie after another—from age 40 to 50. I wanted to make personal films, but nobody particularly wanted to sponsor me to do that. I didn’t know where my place was.” 6 There is a lament in Coppola’s voice. He had hit the highest of the highs in the 1970s and then experienced the lowest of the lows in the 1980s. He had originally imagined himself as an auteur who makes small, personal films a la Woody Allen, but instead found himself closer to being a journeyman like Joel Schumacher (director of such studio films as The Client, 1994, and Batman Forever, 1995). Coppola directed twelve films during Malick’s twenty-year absence. He was prolific, but not necessarily auteurial. In 2007, he said, “I always wanted to be a personal filmmaker, to be inspired by the European movies we saw when we were 18 or 19. . . . But in a funny way I became an important studio director when I was very young, and I always wondered what happened to the director I wanted to be. Maybe I can go back and be him now.” 7 In another interview, Coppola’s reflections seem to point toward Malick’s philosophy on filmmaking: “I wanted to be like those great European filmmakers of the ‘50s and ‘60s. . . . So I just want to get back to what I was doing when I was first falling in love with films.” 8 While Coppola struggled for two decades as a work-for-hire director, Malick made no films. Malick had the opportunity to become an important studio director. Hot off the Best Director win at the Cannes Film Festival,

Auteurs and Movie Brats

127

with two critically acclaimed films to his name, it would not have been difficult for Malick to find meaningful work in Hollywood. Charles Bluhdorn, the chairman of Gulf+Western (which owned Paramount Pictures), loved Days of Heaven and is quoted as saying, “I don’t care if your movies make a nickel; you’ll always make movies for me.” 9 Malick had a patron in Bluhdorn—a sponsor as Coppola called it—who gave him the financial freedom to work on his next project, just as French artist Paul Cezanne found a supporter in Ambroise Vollard, who believed in his potential as a painter. It has been reported that Paramount set up a $1 million trust fund that would pay Malick $100,000 installments to guarantee ownership of his next movie. 10 That movie never materialized, Bluhdorn died of a heart attack in 1983, and the studio eventually grew impatient with Malick and moved on. No one but Malick and those closest to him really know what transpired between 1978 and 1998, the period between the releases of his second and third films. There are rumors he taught philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris, lived in a garage and perhaps even worked as a hairdresser. It is one of the most overly-romanticized periods in the life of any filmmaker, leaving much to the imagination. What is known is that Malick did rewrites for hire and continued to work on various scripts and treatments for future projects, which included a biopic on Che Guevara and a project tentatively titled “Q.” Investigative journalists have uncovered as much as they can about this twenty-year absence. In 1985, David Handelman tried to get to the bottom of Malick’s exile by speaking with many people close to him for an insightful California Magazine article titled “Absence of Malick.” Peter Biskand, author of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, wrote a piece for Vanity Fair called “The Runaway Genius” ahead of the Christmas day release of The Thin Red Line in 1998. In it, he details a decade of efforts by two producers to woo Malick back into the director’s chair. It is not just that Malick disappeared for twenty years that makes him so intriguing to film lovers; it is also that he refuses to be photographed (first stipulated in his contract for The Thin Red Line) and does not do any press to promote himself. In this age of social media and shameless self-promotion, Malick is perhaps the only film director who does not talk about his movies with the press. People have compared him to J.D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon, as a reclusive artist who went into hiding. It is one thing for a novelist to shun the public eye and write in secrecy; but for a movie director in a collaborative medium, who has to rely on a crew to realize his vision, Malick is an anomaly. In reality though, he is not reclusive. Malick is just an intensely private person. He can regularly be seen on the streets of his hometown, Austin, Texas. Even when The Tree of Life won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2011, though he was not at the award ceremony to pick up the prestigious award, he was spotted around Cannes having dinner with various

128

Dean Yamada

groups of people. He is an A-list movie director in his mid-70s, whose every new film release is considered to be an event by cinephiles around the world, and yet he has eschewed the public eye for the duration of his career. In 1998, not just one, but two epic World War II movies with ensemble casts were released within months of each other to American audiences. Both were highly anticipated because each was directed by a cinematic legend who had helped define 1970s cinema. Both would go on to receive Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Best Screenplay, and Best Director. These two films were The Thin Red Line by Terrence Malick and Saving Private Ryan by Steven Spielberg, who would take home the Oscar for Best Director. As expected, Malick did not attend the awards ceremony. Whereas Spielberg had directed hit after hit for over two decades, Malick was on just his third film. Yet, upon Malick’s return to the director’s chair, both he and The Thin Red Line were celebrated with open arms as if he were Hollywood’s prodigal son. (Considering The Truman Show, 1998, was snubbed of a Best Picture nomination, though Peter Weir was nominated for Best Director, it shows that the Academy had fully embraced Malick and The Thin Red Line.) The year before, Coppola had released The Rainmaker (1997), a John Grisham adaptation that continued his string of studio films for which he was paid to direct someone else’s material. The ever-candid Coppola had his own take on Spielberg’s career, as well as that of Martin Scorsese: Steven Spielberg is . . . very fortunate because he can do the things he naturally likes the best, and he’s been very successful. Martin Scorsese, I think, is different. If Exxon went to Martin and said, “Martin, we feel you’re one of the best artists in the world today and we’re going to finance any movie you want to make because we believe that at the end of your life those will be very valuable movies,” he would be making very different movies from what he’s making now. I think he probably has scripts that he’s trying to get someone to enable him to make and then another one comes on and they say, “Look, we have Jack Nicholson and so on and so on. Would you do it?” And of course, he says, “Okay.” Not that he doesn’t like it or they’re not good movies, but I think that his heart is maybe in more personal filmmaking. 11

This quote is as much a reflection on Coppola’s tastes as it is insight into the types of movies Spielberg and Scorsese make. According to Coppola, “Steven Spielberg is unique. I feel that the kinds of movies he loves are the same kinds of movies that the big mass audience loves.” 12 In other words, Spielberg’s tastes are very commercial whereas Scorsese would prefer to direct personal projects (like his 2016 film, Silence) but is offered star vehicles (like The Departed, 2006, or The Wolf of Wall Street, 2013). In Scorsese, Coppola saw bits of himself. Coppola pushed the boundaries of cinema in the 1970s, but he also longed to be a writer-director in the vein of his heroes like Ingmar

Auteurs and Movie Brats

129

Bergman, Akira Kurosawa and Federico Fellini. His career was hijacked by one failed film in the early 1980s, and he never fully recovered. He tries to articulate this feeling: There’s something in my heart that isn’t yet fulfilled. Maybe it’s a sickness. But I’m definitely not satisfied. It’s not due to money—I’m richer than I ever thought I would be. It’s not fame—I’m more famous than I’ve ever been. It’s something else. Something personal. I would like to leave ten films that I have written, original work. That would satisfy this itch. I wanted to make films like Youth Without Youth and the one I’m doing next in my 20s. Instead, I made The Godfather. In a way, Youth Without Youth is a natural continuation of what I was doing with The Rain People and The Conversation. I made The Godfather and it just totally changed my life. Suddenly I was an important director. I wasn’t this young, experimental filmmaker that I’d hoped to be. 13

It would be another ten years before the 2007 release of Coppola’s next film, the long-planned Youth Without Youth. This would be the first of three selffinanced films that marked Coppola’s return to his independent roots. All three films were shot with minimal crews and budgets; and sadly, all three films went largely unnoticed. Malick never had the hit that changed the course of his career. Even if he had, he most likely could not be pushed into being the “important” director that Coppola was. Malick made the films he wanted to make in the style that suited him best. Was he the “young, experimental filmmaker” who Coppola had hoped to be? It seems so. Now four decades later, Malick appears to be enjoying the career that Coppola had longed for. Malick is still experimenting with each movie he makes. In a 2012 interview in The Rumpus, Coppola says, “Malick’s movies are a new way of telling a story that I never thought of before.” 14 At the time of this writing, Terrence Malick is seventy-six years old. He just premiered his most recent film, A Hidden Life, at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival. It vied for the coveted Palme d’Or, just as Days of Heaven did forty years ago. In the past seven years, he has directed five films, matching the output of his first forty years. There is no end in sight for this beloved director as he is already in production on his next film, tentatively titled The Last Planet. Hollywood is not an easy place to thrive, especially as one ages. There is only a small sampling of Hollywood directors who have been allowed to direct films in their seventies and eighties. Most of these are auteurs, who have earned a place in the pantheon of legendary directors. It takes a lot more for Hollywood to back an elderly director than it does to trust a hot, young talent. In order to gamble millions of dollars, the studios need to love him or her, in addition to their work. Renowned auteur Robert Altman could only be

130

Dean Yamada

hired to direct A Prairie Home Companion as an eighty-year-old if Paul Thomas Anderson came on board as a backup. “Because I am so old and ancient,” Altman explained at the Berlin Film Festival in 2005, “in order to get insurance we had to have a stand by director—they thought they’d have a better picture if I croaked and P.T.A., Paul Thomas Anderson, took over.” 15 Almost every director in Hollywood who is not considered one of the greats has been forced into retirement. Coppola is now eighty years old and has not directed a film for over eight years. He says, “I’m in a unique situation. I’m like now an elderly retired guy who made a lot of money, and now I can just, instead of playing golf, I can make art films.” 16 Other current directors who continue to stay relevant into their seventies and eighties are Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and Clint Eastwood. Of course, there are a handful of other American directors in their seventies and eighties, but none who find their way back to the director’s chair more frequently than these three. Spielberg, Scorsese, and Eastwood have built equity as treasured directors over the past forty years, and they are the few whose celebrity rivals their box office successes. It is important to note that none of these three directors write their own scripts. They may collaborate with screenwriters during the writing process, but none of the three can take ownership of the scripts they direct. Coppola longed to go back to writing his own scripts: “From now on I’m always going to be writing the scripts, and every film will be personal. I’m going to be the kind of filmmaker I wanted to be when I was beginning.” 17 With the exception of The Thin Red Line, which Malick adapted from the James Jones novel of the same name, every one of Malick’s films is an original screenplay. This is an impressive feat, one that only Woody Allen could match before his past transgressions caused actors to distance themselves from him and his movies. What is it that allows this private seventy-six-year-old to tell his own stories on his own terms in cineplexes dominated by sequels and rehashes? It defies Hollywood logic. Obviously, Malick’s movies have resonated with both the gatekeepers who continue to back his films as well as the audiences who pay money to see them. His ability to examine the human condition, to explore the meaning of life, to dig deeper at the things that make us human are reasons his films are still celebrated by his fans. If you ask any film critic which living filmmaker is dealing with the metaphysical and the existential wrapped in an impressionistic vision of cinema, Malick’s name would come up every time. It is not so gimmicky as to call a brand; it is more like a genre of its own that some refer to as “Malickian.” He is an artist, the likes of whom has not been seen on this side of the Atlantic, and his films continue to draw as much criticism as they do praise from around the world. How one feels about his films, particularly his

Auteurs and Movie Brats

131

last five films, might say more about one’s notions on what cinema should be than it does about the films themselves. Hollywood has always been about entertainment and business. Art is tertiary. It almost makes complete sense as to why an artist like Malick shuns celebrity. In the battle between art and commerce, his films—specifically their form and content—are forced to speak for themselves. There is nothing outside of the movies themselves that upstage his art. Who ever heard of the greatest artist of the twentieth century, Pablo Picasso, doing press tours for his newest work of art? Having Picasso explain his latest work is ridiculous to say the least. A-list actors, from Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain to Christian Bale and Natalie Portman, have wanted the chance to work with a genuine artist like Malick. This may be where commerce meets Malick’s art. As long as his films have star power, he should be able to secure financing for his films for years to come. And even without major players, he seems to be having no problem continuing to tell his stories, as his most recent productions, A Hidden Life and The Last Planet, prove—both films lack American stars, which may point to a new chapter in Malick’s increasingly prolific career. To be fair, Coppola has had a wildly successful career as a Hollywood director. He is one of the titans of cinema, a Hall-of-Famer if you will. It is just that when you direct four of the greatest films of the 1970s, it is difficult to swallow anything less in the following decades, especially when your heart is telling you one thing, but your body of work is exhibiting another. Any filmmaker in their right mind would take Coppola’s career, but would you choose to direct The Godfather Part I & II, The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now, knowing you would struggle more or less over the next few decades? Or would you rather have Badlands and Days of Heaven on your resume, not direct another film for twenty years, but then finish your career with a series of personal, experimental films that have the potential to push the medium of cinema forward? This is a difficult question to answer. Certainly, Coppola would not trade his career for Malick’s or that of anyone else, but it is difficult to deny the lament in his voice when he says that the success of The Godfather forced him to have an important career rather than an experimental one. Malick, on the other hand, has seemingly marched to the beat of his own drum. During his twenty-year hiatus, he lived life on his own terms. Fans of Malick received a peek into this time in his life through one of his more recent films, To the Wonder (2012). One gets the feeling that Malick did not toil or sell his soul to an art form that has broken the hearts of millions of willing participants. Even Orson Welles—the ultimate wunderkind of cinema, who at age twenty-five created one of the greatest films of all time, Citizen Kane

132

Dean Yamada

(1941)—spent the twilight years of his career desperately trying to find funding for his films. According to Welles: I would have been more successful if I’d left movies immediately, stayed in the theater, gone into politics, written, anything. I’ve wasted the greater part of my life looking for money and trying to get along, trying to make my work from this terribly expensive paint box which is a movie. And I’ve spent too much energy on things that have nothing to do with making a movie. It’s about two percent moviemaking and ninety-eight percent hustling. It’s no way to spend a life. 18

The defeat in Welles’s voice is reminiscent of the lament in Coppola’s voice. It is a brutal industry, one in which cinematic geniuses such as Welles and Coppola are not allowed to make films on their own terms. As Welles stated, making movies—at least movies on the scale that he and Coppola were accustomed to making them—is a terribly expensive endeavor. Unlike paintings and sculptures which can be made alone for a fairly minimal amount of money, movies like Citizen Kane and The Godfather require hundreds of people and millions of dollars. It is as much a business as it is an artform, which is why one might hear a producer spout the cliché, “It’s called show business, not show art.” Interestingly, both Citizen Kane and The Godfather were created at an early stage in each director’s career, and both films are considered to be masterpieces. While Malick’s early films received the highest acclaim, neither Badlands nor Days of Heaven became household names, the kinds of movies that break through public consciousness. Did the expectations that were placed on Welles and Coppola after their immense critical success hurt their careers in the long run? And could Malick’s twenty-year exile have benefited his career? Instead of being sucked into the Hollywood machine, he retreated. This is what makes Malick so intriguing. Despite his success, he eschewed the spotlight. He has never given us insight into his inner life to know whether he has experienced the same frustrations that Coppola and Welles so freely speak of. Instead, he has been uncompromising in his pursuit to tell his story in his style, and he has succeeded in carving out a singular career on his own terms. Over the years, Coppola has shared a great deal of wisdom and vulnerability as he reflects on five decades of making movies, some grand and some personal in nature. Sharing his regrets, his accomplishments and even his aspirations towards the end of his career is a gift to a younger generation of filmmakers. Coppola says, “I always was trying to learn about cinema by approaching it experimentally and trying to uncover what it was that really connected with me. And I’m still doing it at age 77. I’m still trying to look at it from the standpoint of: What can I learn?” 19 He may have grown weary of

Auteurs and Movie Brats

133

an industry who measures the worth of artists in dollars, but he has shown there is never any quit in filmmakers who love the art form. He goes on to say, “I just feel that at a certain point you have to go back to the beginning again. . . . The best thing for me at this point in my life is to become a student again and make movies with the eyes I had when I was enthusiastic about it in the first place.” 20 His insights also speak into the enigmatic career of Malick and how rare Malick’s journey as an enduring auteur has been. At the end of Hearts of Darkness (1991), a documentary that details Coppola’s travails during the making of Apocalypse Now, the audience is left with this quote from Coppola that is filled with tremendous foresight: To me, the great hope is that now these little eight-millimeter video recorders . . . have come out and some people who normally wouldn’t make movies are going to be making them. And suddenly, one day some little fat girl in Ohio is going to be the new Mozart, and make a beautiful film with her little father’s camera recorder. And for once, the so-called professionalism about movies will be destroyed, forever, and it will really become an art form. 21

In my mind, Malick has captured the spirit of this young artist Coppola is hoping for. Malick may not be the Mozart of cinema, nor is he this young girl with a camcorder from the Midwest, but his whole career has fought against the made-up rules of movies and pushed for cinema as an art form. He has inspired a legion of filmmakers who want to explore humanity with a similar depth and honesty and looseness of style. With American cineplexes crowded with sequels and rehashes, we need filmmakers to take up his mantle and bring cinema into another Golden Age. NOTES 1. “Francis Ford Coppola” IMDb.com. https://m.imdb.com/name/nm0000338/quotes. Accessed February 1, 2020. 2. Vincent Canby, “Malick’s Impressive ‘Badlands’ Screened at Festival” (The New York Times, October 15, 1973). 3. Benjamin B, “Cosmic Questions” (American Cinematographer, August 2011). 4. J. Hoberman, “Paradise Now” (The Village Voice, February 28, 2006). 5. Wim Wenders, “Things I’ve Learned: Wim Wenders’ 50 Golden Rules of Moviemaking” (MovieMaker Magazine, July 17, 2013). 6. James Mottram, “Interview: Francis Ford Coppola on the Film He Couldn’t Refuse.” (The Independent, November 16, 2007). 7. John Hiscock, “Francis Ford Coppola: I Never Wanted to Be a Legend” (The Telegraph, November 23, 2007). 8. Iain Blair, “Director’s Chair: Francis Ford Coppola—Youth Without Youth” (Post Magazine, February 1, 2008). http://www.postmagazine.com/Publications/Post-Magazine/2008/ February-1-2008/directors-chair-francis-ford-coppola-youth-witho.aspx. Accessed February 1, 2020. 9. Days of Heaven, dir. Terrence Malick (Hollywood: Paramount Pictures, 1978). Billy Weber Commentary, Criterion Collection. 10. Drew Taylor, “Who the Hell Is Terrence Malick?’ (Total Film, January 2006).

134

Dean Yamada

11. Ibid. 12. “Francis Ford Coppola.” IMDb. 13. Ibid. 14. Anisse Gross, “The Rumpus Interview with Francis Ford Coppola” (The Rumpus.net, August 17, 2012). https://therumpus.net/2012/08/the-rumpus-interview-with-francis-ford-coppola-2/. Accessed February 1, 2020. 15. “Daily Dispatch from Berlin: Altman’s Latest, Prairie; Strand Gets Sky; Manson’s Movie; and Parti” (IndieWire, February 14, 2006). https://www.indiewire.com/2006/02/dailydispatch-from-berlin-altmans-latest-prairie-strand-gets-sky-mansons-movie-and-parti-77167/. Accessed February 1, 2020. 16. Xan Brooks. “Xan Brooks Meets Film Director Francis Ford Coppola.” (The Guardian, May 17, 2009). 17. Larry Rohter, “Family Dynamics, Without the Bullets” (New York Times, June 3, 2009). https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/movies/07roht.html. Accessed February 1, 2020. 18. Joseph McBride, What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?: A Portrait of an Independent Career (Lexington, KY: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 2006), 86–87. 19. Jake Coyle, “Coppola, Eternal Film Student, on His Robust Life in Cinema” (Associated Press, April 26, 2016). 20. “Francis Ford Coppola Returns to Directing” (Today, September 23, 2005). https:// www.today.com/popculture/francis-ford-coppola-returns-directing-wbna9456407. Accessed February 1, 2020. 21. Hearts of Darkness—A Filmmakers Apocalypse, dirs. Fax Bahr, George Hickenlooper, Eleanor Coppola (San Francisco: American Zoetrope, 1991).

REFERENCES B, Benjamin. “Cosmic Questions.” American Cinematographer, August 2011. Blair, Iain. “Director’s Chair: Francis Ford Coppola—Youth Without Youth.” Post Magazine, February 1, 2008. http://www.postmagazine.com/Publications/Post-Magazine/2008/February-1-2008/directors-chair-francis-ford-coppola-youth-witho.aspx. Accessed February 1, 2020. Brooks, Xan. “Xan Brooks Meets Film Director Francis Ford Coppola.” The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, May 17, 2009. Canby, Vincent. “Malick’s Impressive ‘Badlands’ Screened at Festival.” The New York Times, October 15, 1973. Coyle, Jake. “Coppola, Eternal Film Student, on His Robust Life in Cinema.” Associated Press, April 26, 2016. Days of Heaven. Directed by Terrence Malick. Hollywood: Paramount Pictures, 1978. (Billy Weber Commentary, Criterion Collection). “Francis Ford Coppola.” IMDb.com. https://m.imdb.com/name/nm0000338/quotes. Accessed February 1, 2020. “Francis Ford Coppola Returns to Directing.” Today, September 23, 2005. https:// www.today.com/popculture/francis-ford-coppola-returns-directing-wbna9456407. Accessed February 1, 2020. Gross, Anisse. “The Rumpus Interview with Francis Ford Coppola.” The Rumpus.net, August 17, 2012. https://therumpus.net/2012/08/the-rumpus-interview-with-francis-ford-coppola-2/ . Accessed February 1, 2020. Hearts of Darkness—A Filmmakers Apocalypse. Directed by Fax Bahr, George Hickenlooper, Eleanor Coppola. San Francisco: American Zoetrope, 1991. Hiscock, John. “Francis Ford Coppola: I Never Wanted to Be a Legend.” The Telegraph. Telegraph Media Group, November 23, 2007. Hoberman, J. “Paradise Now.” The Village Voice, February 28, 2006. Indiewire. “Daily Dispatch from Berlin: Altman’s Latest, ‘Prairie’; Strand Gets ‘Sky’; Manson’s Movie; and Parti.” IndieWire, February 14, 2006. https://www.indiewire.com/2006/

Auteurs and Movie Brats

135

02/daily-dispatch-from-berlin-altmans-latest-prairie-strand-gets-sky-mansons-movie-andparti-77167/. Accessed February 1, 2020. McBride, Joseph. What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?: A Portrait of an Independent Career. Lexington, KY: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 2006. Mottram, James. “Interview: Francis Ford Coppola on the Film He Couldn’t Refuse.” The Independent, November 16, 2007. Rohter, Larry. “Family Dynamics, Without the Bullets.” New York Times, June 3, 2009. https:// www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/movies/07roht.html. Accessed February 1, 2020. Taylor, Drew. “Who the Hell Is Terrence Malick?’ Total Film, January 2006. Wenders, Wim. “Things I’ve Learned: Wim Wenders’ 50 Golden Rules of Moviemaking.” MovieMaker Magazine, July 17, 2013.

Chapter Eight

The Search for Time Terrence Malick and Andrei Tarkovsky in Dialogue Anthony Parisi

The cinematic styles of filmmakers Terrence Malick and Andrei Tarkovsky are greatly divergent, seemingly even opposites, with Malick’s rapid flow of images in marked contrast to the long stretches of time favored by Tarkovsky. One director immerses the viewer in movement and music, while the other is slow and quiet. One is energetic and sweeping, the other austere. Yet their aims are strikingly similar, with both pursuing contemplative film experiences summoned by the call of beauty. As two of cinema’s foremost spiritual filmmakers, finding points of connection is instructive for the evolution and development of religious film styles. As a distinct art form, how can cinema portray the soul? How can cinema shape it? Both men seek to know. This essay proposes to demonstrate how the films of Terrence Malick enlarge the possible applications of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film theory as expounded in Tarkovsky’s 1986 book, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema. Unlike conventional montage cinema, so despised by Tarkovsky, Malick’s distinct type of montage, while often fast-paced, nonetheless represents an alternative way to immerse audiences in the phenomenon of life through the same kind of poetic logic that most interested the Russian filmmaker. 1 Plot-driven narrative is discarded for more internal, existential visions, as if through prayer or a dream. Malick also shares Tarkovsky’s disinterest in a rationalistic use of cinema, rejecting thematic puzzles. Images are not used as symbols to decipher, but manifest and embody being itself. 2 While there are rich possibilities for analysis, the primary mode of these films is in sense experience, with open-ended meditation more important than some objective interpretation for the intellect. A new viewer is often told to surrender and “let it wash over you.” 3 Malick famously comments 137

138

Anthony Parisi

little on his own films, instead placing primacy on the personal reactions of others. This too mirrors Tarkovsky’s approach to film form, which continues on through Malick: “Through poetic connections feeling is heightened and the spectator is made more active. He becomes a participant in the process of discovering life.” 4 The metaphysical intensity of Malick and Tarkovsky’s work is rare and notable. Both developed new cinematic language to express it. Although not limited to or reducible to such categories, theological readings are crucial. Themes of nature, suffering, and beauty predominate in both filmographies. The question of God haunts everything. While Tarkovsky’s Russian Orthodox context may be more obvious, I also believe Malick’s films—especially the later entries—cannot be fully understood without engaging Christian theology. However, neither man is an ideologue and their films are not didactic. A generosity of spirit invites viewers to search out difficulty and paradox alongside them. In keeping with the true nature of faith, they offer devoted wonder instead of hard certainties, resulting in new kinds of film experiences that bring us deeper into the mystery of life. THE TRANSCENDENT IN FILM How can the spiritual be expressed in cinema? In his 1971 book, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, Paul Schrader—the writer of Taxi Driver (1976) and The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and a classmate of Malick’s at the American Film Institute—analyzed three directors: Yasujiro Ozu in Japan, Robert Bresson in France, and Carl Dreyer in Denmark. Films considered include The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), Day of Wrath (1943), Diary of a Country Priest (1951), Tokyo Story (1953), and Ordet (1955). Schrader believed these films demonstrated austere techniques that could be termed a transcendental style and was the “proper method for conveying the Holy on film.” 5 This style uses audience’s expectations about established techniques and inverts them for effect. As he explains: By delaying edits, not moving the camera, forswearing music cues, not employing coverage, and heightening the mundane, transcendental style creates a sense of unease the viewer must resolve. The film-maker assists the viewer’s impulse for resolution by the use of a Decisive Moment, an unexpected image or act, which then results in a stasis, an acceptance of parallel reality— transcendence. 6

Schrader himself would eventually direct a film in this style, First Reformed (2018). In a recent re-introduction to his book, Schrader now sees these expressions as part of a larger movement away from narrative, which evolved into a branch that is called “slow cinema.” 7 In a diagram, he maps

The Search for Time

139

out possible extremes that cinema can veer into, using Andrei Tarkovsky to mark the boundary from art house theaters to the art gallery. 8 Slow, nonnarrative films of this kind are, of course, not popular. He notes: Motion pictures have two essential qualities: pictures and motion. Photographed reality through time. Empathy and action. . . . The advances in early film-making were designed to emphasize one or the other. Hollywood specialized in action (the chase), the Soviets in empathy (montage). These were the innovations of early cinema. This was what movies did best. Slow cinema works against the grain of cinema itself. It turns its back on what movies do best. It replaces action with stillness, empathy with distance. 9

Why would anything spiritual have come to be connected to such forms? Following the thought of Catholic theologian Jacques Maritain, Schrader agrees that there is no single religious technique in art. 10 However, he sees austere film styles developing out of a need to counterbalance prevailing cinematic norms and challenge the audience. From the beginning, cinema had easily made use of the more pleasurable, abundant means of art, and needed to reclaim the sparse means for higher contemplation. These are two categories Maritain describes in his book Religion and Culture (1930), which Schrader extends to refer to two general artistic forms. 11 Sacred art uses both. The abundant means are “sensual, emotional, humanistic, individualistic. They are characterized by soft lines, realistic portraiture, three-dimensionality, experimentation; they encourage empathy.” 12 The sparse are “cold, formalistic, hieratic. They are characterized by abstraction, stylized portraiture, two-dimensionality, rigidity; they encourage respect and appreciation. These opposing means are not segregated categories; they are both present and interwork in any piece of art, particularly sacred works of art.” 13 The measure of spirituality in a cinematic work can be found in the ratio between the two. Schrader notes that while most major art forms are thought to originate in religious practice, cinema uniquely, did not. “Motion pictures were not born in religious practice, but instead are the totally profane offspring of capitalism and technology. If a religious artist in cinema attempts to go back to his origins, he will find only entrepreneurs and technocrats.” 14 Additionally, where most art is interested in realism as a challenge, realism is what cinema begins with and takes for granted. Therefore, this new medium may even be the ultimate artistic threat to spirituality because of its essential ability to duplicate mere physical reality and stay there, serving only to delight and amuse an audience. Sex and violence quickly triumph. While classical art forms might have begun religious and then progressed into secular arenas, cinema has the opposite story. Schrader writes:

140

Anthony Parisi This peculiar historical perspective of cinema—its profane origins—can produce a sense of “chronological reverse.” In the case of filmmakers like Ozu and Bresson, cinema did not become progressively profane, it became progressively sacred. . . . Spiritual cinema had to continually draw away from its potentials; being “abundant” at birth, it had to discover the “sparse.” 15

Even beyond transcendental style specifically, this may explain why much of spiritual cinema can be esoteric and difficult, and is associated with unconventional, non-narrative modes of filmmaking. It stems from a desire to break up the consumerist habits that Hollywood studios have always cultivated and relied upon. Over many decades now, film and television audiences have been habituated to consume passively. Unless actively resisted, this is the dominant reception. This means for filmmakers interested in deeper spiritual reflection, they see a need to jolt viewers into other frames of mind. A need to reshape not just what cinema is about but how to receive it. Without being attentive to form, even films with intentionally religious or biblical storylines may not escape these patterns. 16 SHAPING THE SOUL Andrei Tarkovsky directed seven films from 1962 to 1986, resulting in some of the most profoundly religious cinema to date. He was deeply concerned about the problem of consumerism, and saw great peril in a modern humanity capable of material mastery but collapsing spiritually, with scientific knowledge outpacing spiritual maturity. Unless tempered by true purpose, greed and technology would not just distract but destroy us. Nuclear war and ecological disaster loomed. 17 With the institutional Church so often compromised by social and political power, Tarkovsky put his hope in art to lift the spiritual health of humanity. His interest in exploring cinema was not just artistic, but a spiritual mission he felt burdened to pursue. Questions of form were interrelated to this calling. He had an intense drive to understand what cinema was capable of as distinct medium. “What are [cinema’s] potential, means, images—not only formally, but even spiritually?” 18 While his work shares some of the techniques of transcendental style and could be austere (he was an ardent admirer of Robert Bresson 19 ), Tarkovsky developed a spiritual style all his own. His films were a source of great tension with the officially atheistic Soviet Union of the time. Andrei Rublev (1969) and its story of a fifteenth century Orthodox icon painter put such an emphasis on Russia’s Christian history that it was censored and edited by state officials, unreleased domestically for years. Solaris (1972) triggered a battle with Soviet censors who sought to remove all references to God and religion. 20 It was often difficult to receive state approval for his

The Search for Time

141

productions, and he eventually spent the last years of his life making films outside Russia. In his book, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema, Tarkovsky repeatedly presses on the moral responsibility of filmmakers. He believed that “art acts above all on the soul, shaping its spiritual structure.” 21 Because of cinema’s immediacy and emotional power, he felt a director’s responsibility was gravely important, warning that filmmakers have a unique responsibility. “The methods by which cinema affects audiences,” he explains, “can be used far more easily and rapidly for their moral decomposition, for the destruction of their spiritual defences, than the means of the old, traditional art forms.” 22 He believed many mainstream movies did just that. “Because of its easy, irresistible effect,” he writes, popular cinema “extinguishes all traces of thought and feeling irrevocably. People cease to feel any need for the beautiful or the spiritual, and consume films like bottles of Coca-Cola.” 23 This was especially tragic for him because cinema was capable of so much more. It was a young medium that had barely begun to be explored, artistically stunted by its market origins. He theorized that as cinema developed it would become more autonomous and less dependent on other influences like theater and literature. These early crutches had diminished its potential, preventing cinema from “realising its own specific character.” 24 What is the specific character of cinema? Through his writing and public remarks, there are three categories of form that Tarkovsky emphasizes, which I will trace through the films of American director Terrence Malick. Unlike Tarkovsky, who spoke about his filmmaking at great length, Malick has spent his career in almost total silence, eschewing interviews and public appearances. Due to his early academic studies in philosophy, much of his work was initially read through a heavily philosophical and Heideggerian framework. Although Heidegger is certainly one key influence, these readings are proving incomplete in light of his later output. The increasingly overt religious ideas in Malick’s recent work are increasingly specific to Christianity, and a more theological understanding of his films has become necessary. 25 And, like Tarkovsky, Malick’s spiritual interest is connected to developments in cinematic form. As his films evolve, we can see his techniques applied in more dramatic ways, matching an increase in theological questions. Philosophical complexity expands alongside experiments in cinematography and editing. His most explicitly Christian-themed films, such as The Tree of Life (2011), To the Wonder (2012), and Knight of Cups (2015) are also the most extreme formally. We will see how the style of Malick’s films evolves around some of the same insights Tarkovsky had about cinema’s potential.

142

Anthony Parisi

POETIC LOGIC Malick made his debut with Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978), with the latter winning an Academy Award for Best Cinematography. Compared to his later films, both are more conventional narratively, with clear characters to follow through relatively straightforward plot progression. This is similar to the starting point of Tarkovsky’s work, with Ivan’s Childhood (1962) and Andrei Rublev (1969) being more traditional in their construction. However, the seeds of later style can be clearly identified and there is a consistency of creative impulses even here. Both directors show an emerging poetic approach that goes beyond linear storytelling, drawing together fragmented images of objects and nature, associatively linking them for a more internal, subjective impression of events, as if from memory or a dream. Badlands is a period crime drama based loosely on a real-life murder spree in the Midwest. The simple plot is easy to describe but what leaves an impact is its lyrical quality. This is announced from the first shot of the film, in a dreamy camera move around a bed, where a young girl (Sissy Spacek as Holly) sits holding her dog, accompanied by a listless voice-over that will grow more haunting as the film unfolds. It is remarkable how little the ideas of the story advance through dramatic character moments or dialogue. Most scenes are clipped off abruptly or given a quick impression before being interrupted with sequences of music and montage that skip over and narrate what might otherwise be crucial turning points. Moments of violence are quiet and feature no music. More through the voice-over than through the images, we are told that Holly falls in love with the disaffected Kit (Martin Sheen). Where one would usually emphasize a character turn for dramatic impact, Malick shrugs them off. Major plot advancements are suggested obliquely, or a character’s spoken perspective is set at odds against what is seen visually. In one sequence, after Kit murders Holly’s father and sets the family house ablaze, they drive off as Carl Orff’s whimsical, child-like music kicks in. The new outlaws frolic and build a treehouse in the forest. They dance to “Love Is Strange.” Then abruptly, the song cuts out and we see Kit fishing, with Holly’s voice-over suddenly saying she wishes “he would drown so she could watch.” This is a major development for the perspective of the character, but here it is jarringly tossed off, detached from the development of the sequence up unto that point. Next, Holly’s voice-over tells us “Mostly though we got along fine and stayed in love,” but the images present us with a dull morning of them getting ready, with Kit shaving and Holly blankly informing him one of the chickens died. Emotional distance like this is a key technique that is used by Malick, and we will see it consistently throughout his work. In Badlands, there is clear thematic intention, owing to both its fairy tale influences and spiritually detached characters. “The day was quiet and serene, but I didn’t notice,”

The Search for Time

143

Holly says at one point, “The world was like a faraway planet to which I could never return.” However, there is also a formal intention that creates introspection for viewers. We are not forced into a specific way of relating to the film or manipulated into one kind of response. Where some scenes immerse us, others keep us at a distance from the characters, so we have space to emotionally stay above what is happening and bring our own perspective to bear. There are elements of dissonance that we are asked to consider as viewers, so that we come to our own conclusions about how they make us feel. Throughout all of Malick’s films, associative links are created between images, characters, and moments, but they are not explicitly interpreted for the audience. Tarkovsky believed this kind of construction would make a viewer more active and provoke a more meaningful response, allowing for “an affective as well as a rational appraisal.” 26 It prompts a viewer to become more participatory. “The alternative,” Tarkovsky warns, “is for the audience to be presented with a final deduction, for no effort on their part, and that is not what they need.” 27 After Badlands was released, Malick spoke to this dynamic in one of the only interviews he has ever given: “I hope that the voice over and cinematography create some distance without alienating the viewer too much. They should distance you, and then make you participate, then distance you again, in a back-and-forth movement.” 28 This is the approach we will see through all of Malick’s work. His second film, Days of Heaven, functions similarly, with another voice-over that comments obliquely, distancing us emotionally from the central drama. What we take away from the experience is openended and even likely to change with additional viewings. In Malick’s work, perspective is multifaceted and is always being widened, ranging from the intimate to the cosmic. Days of Heaven features significant digressions into the beauty and violence of nature, which Malick will lean into more with each film. These scenic detours cannot be justified in terms of strict “plot,” but they convey important impressions about the world of the characters (and our own) that cannot be expressed otherwise. We must attend to the images themselves. Days of Heaven cinematographer Néstor Almendros recalls that Malick wanted “a very visual movie. The story would be told through visuals. Very few people really want to give that priority to image. Usually the director gives priority to the actors and the story, but here the story was told through images.” 29 This explains why if watched merely as a sequence of events for the melodramatic plotline, a viewer will quickly become bored, as a sampling of any negative reviews quickly reveals. 30 But to focus on this literary aspect misses what is happening cinematically. The landscapes and natural textures that the characters encounter are more than just beautiful—they are critical to the meaning of the film.

144

Anthony Parisi

All of this is linked to a poetic approach, which Tarkovsky believed was best suited for an experiential medium like cinema. He disliked traditional theatrical writing and plot development, seeing them as too rigid and artificial, “arbitrarily forcing [events] into sequence in obedience to some abstract notion of order.” 31 For Tarkovsky, it is only by relating to reality through poetry that cinema can evoke the full complexity of life. “Poetic reasoning” was “closer to the laws by which thought develops, and thus to life itself.” 32 Malick’s work follows this same instinct, with his narratives moving away from linear plot progression and toward poetic construction. At times frustrating his bewildered actors, 33 long dialogue scenes are stripped down to brief lines or fleeting gestures. We glimpse the impression of a series of moments instead of seeing them fully play out, emphasizing subjectivity and interiority. This style comes to greater fruition twenty years later in Malick’s third film, The Thin Red Line (1998), which depicts a fictionalized World War II battle with unique poeticism. Beauty and violence are juxtaposed as a group of soldiers wrestles with the nature of evil and violence in light of the war. Where Tarkovsky used long monologues to frame philosophical questions, Malick expands voice-over techniques and begins to feature multiple narrators, letting us into the thoughts and prayers of the soldiers. Differing outlooks are considered, creating an open discourse for viewers to enter into, without one definitive perspective to control interpretation. The anguished questions from the soldiers invite us to find our own. The film flows back and forth from the external world to the internal, linking together stretches of uninterrupted battle with prayerful, non-linear montage. In one lengthy sequence, we are immersed in the difficult struggle for U.S. troops to capture a key Japanese hill position. The fighting takes place in real-time with deafening sound design. Afterward, when the hill is captured, the film drifts into the poetic. As the soldiers round up their new prisoners, diegetic sound drops off and we hear only music and voice-over. “This great evil. Where’s it come from? How’d it steal into the world?” 34 External action prompts internal questions of meaning. Notably, this interiority also proves to be distinctly cinematic. The polyphonic soundscape foregrounds existential questions while also prioritizing the image over plot and dialogue. In typical screenplay-writing wisdom it is common for voice-over to be derided as a cheap method of exposition. Yet Malick’s poetic approach to narration actually begins to free his films from the tedious restrictions of conventional mis en scene and allows his camera to roam and linger on new kinds of imagery, untethered from the common visual impositions of heavy dialogue. Images can be used for something more than just illustrations of people talking. We enter into the mind’s eye with its collage of lived experiences: kids at play, birds, sunlight through trees, romantic memories from the past. By connecting images poetically,

The Search for Time

145

cinema is able to go beyond the physical world and better express the inner life of the soul. OBSERVING LIFE Another major theme in Tarkovsky’s thought is recognizing cinema’s essential ability to directly observe, recreate, and incarnate life. Cinema is able to capture time itself and generates what Tarkovsky calls a “second reality” for an audience to enter into. 35 He notes, “For the first time in the history of the arts . . . man found the means to take an impression of time.” 36 This becomes key to thinking about the art form. Tarkovsky believed that art generally was not useful for asserting ideas and concepts. Artistic power is not found in argument but in “emotional persuasiveness.” 37 This holds even more true for cinema. The experiential aspect is critical and is the main difference between word and image. Literary works use the word as a symbol to communicate a concept, “but cinema,” he writes, “like music, allows for an utterly direct, emotional, sensuous” experience. 38 Attention to this idea can be seen in the evolution of Tarkovsky’s work. Solaris (1972) and Stalker (1979) begin to favor long shots, allowing viewers to feel the passing of time and settle into the scene’s environments. For him, expressing the very presence of life becomes important and is interconnected with poetic filmmaking. He writes, “A film is born of direct observation of life . . . the observation of a phenomenon passing through time.” 39 The events in Stalker even take place in real-time, with infrequent cuts used only to stitch together the action. The journey into the mysterious region called “The Zone” is not meant to be received as a metaphor or a symbol, but experientially. By watching the film, we enter into the Zone ourselves. An emphasis on observing life also characterizes Malick’s work. Starting with The New World (2005), Malick begins collaborating with cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, whose lively Steadicam heightens Malick’s ability to attend to the natural environment and his characters within it. Together, they developed an unusual production process where spontaneity is encouraged. Many scenes are filmed outside with natural lighting. Wide angles are favored. Although scripted scenes still form the foundation for production, they become a mere starting point. By the production of The Tree of Life, wide latitude is allowed and improvisation is prioritized, establishing an initial context for filming while letting the cast and crew create within it, with freedom to literally chase down butterflies. New scenes are conceived. Dialogue is reinvented and removed. Thematic goals are in place but are meant to be rediscovered authentically. Lubezki quotes Malick as urging him to “act like a documentary filmmaker and come onto the locations and capture these ideas we’ve been talking about.” 40

146

Anthony Parisi

Western Christianity, especially iconoclastic Protestantism, has theologically emphasized word over image, perhaps contributing to a lack of religious artists in Western cinema. As counterpoint to this, Tarkovsky explicitly (and Malick implicitly, or perhaps intuitively) holds to the Eastern Christian emphasis that the creation of artistic images is a spiritual endeavor. As in Eastern practices of iconography, the image is seen as capable of more than just illustrating an idea but is itself a source of revelation. Through the incarnate Christ, God made flesh, the eikon, the image of the invisible in space and time, humanity approaches the creation as it was meant to be: as sacrament. Everything is charged with the presence of God. Tarkovsky writes that the cinematic image sustains “an awareness of the infinite: the eternal within the finite, the spiritual within matter, the limitless given form.” 41 Beauty is closely related to this ontology. In his book, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth, philosopher and Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart writes, “In the experience of the beautiful, one is apprised with a unique poignancy of both the ecstatic structure of consciousness and the gratuity of being. Hence the ancient conviction that the love of beauty is, by its nature, a rational yearning for the transcendent.” 42 These words could also be used to describe Malick’s work, which actively searches out beauty, a seeming signifier of the divine. To the Wonder even explicitly explores this and may be the most densely theological of his films to date. Following the biblical poem “Song of Songs,” erotic love is an analogue of God’s love, and the film juxtaposes the drama of a couple’s romance and a priest’s spiritual relationship to God. At times the voice-over could refer to either thematic layer. “You lifted me from the ground. Brought me back to life.” “My hope.” “If you love me, there’s nothing else I need.” “What is this love that loves us? That comes from nowhere.” “Where are we when we’re there? Why not always?” 43 In To the Wonder, we see the ecstasies of early passion but also its halting ability to grow into something higher. Marina (Olga Kurylenko) falls in love with Neil (Ben Afleck) in Paris but his inability to commit to her with marriage and children keeps causing the relationship to falter and break down. Father Quintana (Javier Bardem), has been going through the motions at his parish but finds his heart empty and God distant. He wanders through the poor neighborhoods in his ministry, wanting to help the suffering while caught in a crisis of his own. It is a film about our powerful but unsteady affections, romantic and spiritual. To convey this, Malick relies almost entirely on observed moments instead of narrative or psychology. Much of the film is nearly wordless. Where his earlier films came in and out of montage, now the entire duration is a swirling flow of images. A glance. A laugh. Running through fields. Buffalo. Church windows. The prayerful voice-over

The Search for Time

147

is sparse, and the camera movement and characters within its gaze are more like icons, or figures in a dance. The goal is to push cinema closer to its essence, toward something that observes life in a more authentic way. Editor Keith Fraase describes how “Terry’s more about reacting to what he’s seeing onscreen and so it’s not about ‘this character needs to be doing this’ in this scene, it’s more about seeing what’s there.” 44 It is during this period that Malick begins to experiment with even less of a script. Olga Kurylenko’s audition was completely silent. 45 In preparation for filming, actors were provided character descriptions and books to study. Yet this free-form process is not arbitrary or random. Malick has very specific thematic ideas he is interested in exploring. The method is used as a way for prioritizing cinematic language over the verbal. Sounding like Tarkovsky, Lubezki describes how he felt Malick “was trying to separate To the Wonder from all the moviemaking that’s still connected to theater—from movies that feel acted, prepared and rehearsed. We were trying to find a more cinematographic approach to filmmaking and a way of using film language that was less connected to theater and literature and other art forms. Terry wants this art form to have its own way of expressing ideas and emotions, and that’s what was very exciting about the movie.” 46 As in Tarkovsky’s work, this approach opens a wider contemplative space than the more emotionally directed habits of conventional narrative filmmaking. Malick does not force viewers into a narrow psychology to relate with, and because of this we are better able to bring our own reflections and associations to bear on the images. As in more traditional worship liturgies, frame of mind is shaped by the overall movement and structure, while distance is preserved for a range of personal, emotional responses. It is a stream to enter into, where different words, melodies, images may resonate at different times, depending on the subjectivity of the participant. Increasingly, Malick’s films are likened to a kind of prayer. 47 It is an apt description of both the style and viewing experience. In his book on Christianity and modern art, art historian and critic Daniel Siedell’s words are instructive: “The experience of art is best understood not from the perspective of ‘reading’ or ‘decoding’ but in contemplation and communion, metaphors that derive from the veneration of icons, which is itself grounded in prayer, in communion with God, the ultimate goal of our lives.” 48 TIME PRESSURE The third link in Tarkovsky’s film theory concerns the editorial process and is the most significant area of stylistic departure between the two filmmakers. Tarkovsky’s focus on cinema’s ability to present the experience of time

148

Anthony Parisi

pushed him toward greater extremes in order to let time play out in long, uninterrupted shots. He referred to this principle as “time pressure” and believed that the time flowing through each shot “makes the rhythm of the picture; and rhythm is determined not by the length of the edited pieces, but by the pressure of the time that runs through them.” 49 In other words, life’s rhythm captured within a shot is more central to the construction of a film than rhythm made by combining shots together in editing. In Tarkovsky’s final films, Nostalghia (1983) and The Sacrifice (1986), entire scenes are made up of single, lengthy shots. Wide framing is favored and music is nearly eliminated. In the famous ending of Nostalghia, Tarkovsky stages a nine-minute long shot of a man walking across an empty pool from one end to the other, his hand shielding the flame of a candle from being extinguished. Finally, the man achieves his goal and collapses. Experienced with no interruption, the viewer has walked this delicate path with him, directly feeling the presence of time and the fragility of life within it. The opposite editorial trajectory is seen with Terrence Malick. Where Tarkovsky’s shots grew longer, Malick moved toward increasing fragmentation in the editing, with shorter cuts and even bolder impressionism and disconnected events. Knight of Cups may be the most extreme to date, offering a restless stream of imagery with minimal diegetic sound. Christian Bale’s screenwriter character, Rick, barely speaks, blankly wandering Los Angeles in a cyclical series of episodes that never seem to conclude. Yet it is also not abstract. Through the editing, we tumble through the sensual delights of celebrity and excess: parties, mansions, studio backlots, museums, beaches, buzzing freeways. It is a potent depiction of the city. In line with Tarkovsky’s goals, we are still immersed in life, but instead of elevating time-pressure, the images are organized like a piece of music, around repeated movements and refrains. The perspective becomes even more internal. Classical Polish composer’s Wojciech Kilar’s “Exodus” serves as a recurring motif, rhythmically pulling the viewer through the wilderness with Rick in a hypnotic soundscape. He is drowning in wealth and women, searching for true purpose in the rootless spirituality of California, among divinatory practices like astrology, crystals, and tarot. Spiritual chaos stems from the noise of modern life, especially here in Hollywood, ingrained into the splintered structure of the film itself. Rick’s father whispers, “I suppose that’s what damnation is. The pieces of your life never to come together, just splashed out there.” 50 The narrative dead-ends, heightened by fragmented editing, follow an internal spiral. Distracted attention, so characteristic of our modern life, has cut Rick off from his soul. Following the categories of sacred art established earlier, we can now see how Malick has rearranged where the “abundant” and the “sparse” principles interact. Distancing devices are used, but in different areas than the specifics of Schrader’s transcendental style. Malick’s filmmaking is austere in its lack

The Search for Time

149

of plot, character psychology, and dialogue. This introduces difficulty that requires greater participation from viewers in an area they would normally take for granted. These are the “sparse” techniques, which are meant to prompt higher contemplation. Yet unlike transcendental style and other slow cinema like Tarkovsky, Malick’s choice for the “abundant” means embracing action, motion, and empathy. His films are fast-paced and bursting with life, excitedly exploring the world in all its beauty and wonder. In his work, Malick has achieved an approach to montage that avoids what Tarkovsky feared most from Soviet film director and theorist Sergei Eisenstein, whose techniques he believed cut audiences off from their personal feelings. Tarkovsky was “radically opposed” to Eisenstein because of the overemphasis on ideas and symbols, which risked clinical detachment instead. 51 But as we have seen, Malick’s montage is linked poetically, which preserves emotional distance while emphasizing the experiential. Far from an artificial, imposed construct, his process is radically open to spontaneity in both the capture of his images and their editorial assembly. Indeed, one cannot help but picture Malick’s roaming camera crew (and editors) at play when reading Tarkovsky’s words about shaping a scene not theoretically but “spontaneously in a film, in response to the director's innate awareness of life, his search for time.” 52 Malick has found an alternative way to “sculpt in time” around some of the same principles. Consider Tarkovsky’s warmest film, Mirror (1975), which is about childhood and memory. It is stylistically closest with The Tree of Life, featuring just the kind of oblique, dream-like editing that aligns with the trajectory the American director will ultimately take. Interestingly, Tarkovsky believed that “through sense of time, through rhythm,” a director most reveals his or her individuality. 53 Comparing the styles of these two men, there does seem to be a connection. Tarkovsky’s tormented spirit, exacerbated by the political tragedies in Russia, can always be felt in his slower, heavy films. In Terrence Malick’s work, there is a spirit of generosity that seems to come through, which matches how he has been described personally. 54 The rapid flow of images are propelled by curiosity and playfulness. The tragic notes in his films always seem to flow into grace and empathy, a kind of steady joy. On Knight of Cups, production designer Jack Fisk notes, “I think [Christian Bale is] really playing Everyman. We all get lost. . . . [Terry] always found importance in people that are suffering, and I think that’s part of the spiritual side of him.” 55 Notably, To the Wonder concludes in a swell of mercy only after the final breakdown of Neil and Marina’s relationship. Christ’s identification with the broken and the suffering is the resolution of the film’s final movement. Over a montage of images we see Father Quintana visiting the poor and the sick, praying St. Patrick’s Lorica: “Christ on my right, Christ on my left, Christ in my heart, Thirsty. We thirst.” 56

150

Anthony Parisi

Mercy is also the resolution of Song to Song (2017). After a period of wandering and betrayal, the broken relationship of musicians Faye (Rooney Mara) and BV (Ryan Gosling) is slowly restored. The final scenes are images of them tenderly reconnecting, finally finding peace and stability. “It was like a new paradise. Forgiveness.” As in To the Wonder, we see glimpses of children on the horizon. Despite everything, everyone is finding their way forward. The last song has Patti Smith singing lyrics from William Blake’s poem “The Divine Image,” which Faye also recites in voice-over: For Mercy has a human heart Pity, a human face: And Love, the human form divine, And Peace, the human dress. 57

In the opening Knight of Cups voice-over, we hear the full title of John Bunyan’s classic Christian allegory “The Pilgrim's Progress from This World, to That Which Is to Come,” but by the end of the film, it is unclear whether the “burden on his back” has been lifted or if Rick’s “dangerous journey” has been resolved. What is the meaning of all that has been shown? Is Rick changing? Are we? The true answer lies in the goal of Malick’s spiritual style: in the viewer’s own response and contemplation of the images. Whether or not the film leads to any kind of revelation is up to us. We are the true pilgrims, the knights who must discern and discover the answers. We must complete the film. The final image is the open road. The final word spoken is a call to “Begin.” NOTES 1. Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1986), 1835. 2. Ibid., 72–73. 3. This phrase is common from both film reviewers and Malick’s own collaborators, including producers like Nicolas Gonda: “The best advice is to watch the movie with your heart. . . . You’re really encouraged to experience the film emotionally and let it wash over you. It’s like experiencing nature or listening to a beautiful song—you don’t necessarily have to understand every lyric.” (“Terrence Malick Producers raise their glasses to “Knight of Cups.” The Chronicle, Columbia College Chicago, March 14, 2016. https://columbiachronicle.com/ e0fe294a-e7f1-11e5-becf-ffbd79290aa6. Accessed February 1, 2020.) 4. Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, 20. 5. Paul Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018), 169. 6. Ibid., 3. 7. Ibid., 3–19. 8. Terrence Malick is also referenced briefly in this section. Schrader places him in a branch of “Dream Cinema” on a path to “The Art Gallery” of pure imagery, as in the abstract light and color seen from experimental filmmakers Stan Brakhage and Nathaniel Dorsky. 9. Ibid., 17. 10. Ibid., 171–74. 11. Ibid., 173.

The Search for Time

151

12. Ibid., 173. 13. Ibid., 174. 14. Ibid., 175. 15. Ibid., 177. 16. As in the contemporary “faith-based” genre in the United States, there is even a risk of cheapening spirituality into just another kind of commodified entertainment to be packaged and sold to a loyal fanbase. 17. Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, 234. 18. Ibid., 62. 19. Bresson is referenced multiple times in his book and in numerous interviews. Other filmmakers praised include Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman, Luis Buñuel, Carl Dryer, Akira Kurosawa, and Kenji Mizoguchi. 20. Vida T. Johnson and Graham Petrie, The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), 108. 21. Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, 41. 22. Ibid., 187–88. Maintains original spelling. 23. Ibid., 179. 24. Ibid., 22. Maintains original spelling. 25. For one excellent text that makes this case, see: Christopher B. Barnett and Clark J. Elliston, eds. Theology and the Films of Terrence Malick (New York, NY: Routledge, 2016). 26. Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, 20. 27. Ibid., 21. 28. Lloyd Michaels, Terrence Malick (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 112 29. Visions of Light: The Art of Cinematography. Directed by Arnold Glassman, Todd McCarthy, Stuart Samuels. Kino International, 1992. 30. Jonathan Brant has an interesting exploration of negative reactions to the film in his essay “The Unique Difficulty of Days of Heaven” and makes a compelling argument from Anglican theologian Rowan Williams for difficulty being an intentional spiritual goal of Malick’s work. (eds. Barnett and Elliston, Theology and the Films of Terrence Malick) 31. Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, 20. 32. Ibid., 20. 33. Frustration with actors was more common before Malick’s techniques were widely established and understood. Richard Gere: “We shot a much more richly verbal movie, with much more high emotions, much more dramatic. And when I came to loop the movie and I saw that it wasn’t that, I clearly was not too happy about that because all of us could have saved a lot of brain cells in the process.” (Richard Gere, bonus features, Days of Heaven, dir. Terrence Malick, New York, NY: The Criterion Collection, 2010, Blu-Ray). 34. The Thin Red Line, dir. Terrence Malick (20th Century Fox, 1998). 35. Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, 176. Italics in original 36. Ibid., 62. Italics removed. 37. Ibid., 51. 38. Ibid., 176. 39. Ibid., 67. 40. Bill Desowitz, “Immersed in Movies: Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki Climbs The Tree of Life,” IndieWire, February 10, 2012. https://www.indiewire.com/2012/02/immersed-inmovies-cinematographer-emmanuel-lubezki-climbs-the-tree-of-life-182992. Accessed February 1, 2020. 41. Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, 37. 42. David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2003). 43. To the Wonder, dir. Terrence Malick (Magnolia Pictures, 2012). 44. Bonus features. To the Wonder, dir. Terrence Malick (Magnolia Pictures, 2012, BluRay). 45. Ibid. 46. Jim Hemphill, “Lyrical Images,” American Cinematographer, April 1, 2013. https:// theasc.com/ac_magazine/April2013/TotheWonder/page1.html. Accessed February 1, 2020.

152

Anthony Parisi

47. Roger Ebert notably wrote about The Tree of Life as “a form of prayer.” “It created within me a spiritual awareness, and made me more alert to the awe of existence. I believe it stands free from conventional theologies, although at its end it has images that will evoke them for some people. It functions to pull us back from the distractions of the moment, and focus us on mystery and gratitude.” (Ebert, Roger. “A Prayer Beneath The Tree of Life.” RogerEbert.com, May 17, 2011. https://www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/a-prayer-beneath-the-treeof-life. Accessed February 1, 2020.) 48. Daniel A. Siedell, God in the Gallery: A Christian Embrace of Modern Art (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2008). 49. Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, 117. Italics added. 50. Knight of Cups, dir. Terrence Malick (Broad Green Pictures, 2015). 51. Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, 183. 52. Ibid., 120. 53. Ibid., 120. 54. “Malick’s friends describe him as a generous and humble man with a capacious intellect and a child’s insatiable curiosity.” (Eric Benson, “The Not-So-Secret Life of Terrence Malick.” Texas Monthly, April 2017. https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-culture/the-not-so-secret-lifeof-terrence-malick/. Accessed February 1, 2020.) 55. Michael Sragow, “Studies in Light and Place,” Film Comment, March 1, 2016. https:// www.filmcomment.com/article/interview-jack-fisk. Accessed February 1, 2020. 56. To the Wonder, 2012. 57. Song to Song, dir. Terrence Malick (Broad Green Pictures, 2017).

REFERENCES Andrei Rublev. Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. 1969; New York, NY: The Criterion Collection, 2018. Blu-ray. Badlands. Directed by Terrence Malick. Warner Bros Pictures, 1973. Barnett, Christopher B., and Clark J. Elliston, eds. Theology and the Films of Terrence Malick. New York, NY: Routledge, 2016. Bunyan, Paul. The Pilgrim's Progress. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003 Days of Heaven. Directed by Terrence Malick. Paramount Pictures, 1978. Desowitz, Bill. “Immersed in Movies: Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki Climbs ‘The Tree of Life’.” IndieWire, February 10, 2012. https://www.indiewire.com/2012/02/immersed-inmovies-cinematographer-emmanuel-lubezki-climbs-the-tree-of-life-182992/. Ebert, Roger. “A Prayer Beneath the Tree of Life.” RogerEbert.com, May 17, 2011. https:// www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/a-prayer-beneath-the-tree-of-life. Gianvito, John, ed., Andrei Tarkovsky: Interviews. University Press of Mississippi, 2006. Johnson, Vida T. and Graham Petrie. The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue, (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), 108. Hart, David Bentley. The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2003. Hart, David Bentley. The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss. Grand Rapids, MI: Yale University Press, 2013. Hemphill, Jim. “Lyrical Images.” American Cinematographer, April 1, 2013. https:// theasc.com/ac_magazine/April2013/TotheWonder/page1.html. Ivan’s Childhood. Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. 1962; New York, NY: The Criterion Collection, 2013. Blu-ray. Knight of Cups. Directed by Terrence Malick. Broad Green Pictures, 2015. Mirror, The. Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. 1975; New York, NY: Kino Video, 2000. DVD. New World, The. Directed by Terrence Malick. New Line Cinema, 2005. Nostalgia. Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. 1983; New York, NY: Kino Lorber, Inc., 2014. Bluray. Norris, Richard Alfred. The Song of Songs: Interpreted by Early Christian and Medieval Commentators. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2003.

The Search for Time

153

Pearson, Peter. A Brush with God: An Icon Workbook. Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse Publishing, 2005. Roark, David. “Terrence Malick and the Christian Story.” RobertEbert.com, March 20, 2016. https://www.rogerebert.com/balder-and-dash/terrence-malick-and-the-christian-story. Sacrifice, The. Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. 1986; New York, NY: Kino Lorber, Inc., 2018. Blu-ray. Sragow, Michael. “Studies in Light and Place.” Film Comment, March 1, 2016. https:// www.filmcomment.com/article/interview-jack-fisk/. Schrader, Paul. Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018. Siedell, Daniel A. God in the Gallery: A Christian Embrace of Modern Art. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2008. Solaris. Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. 1972; New York, NY: The Criterion Collection, 2011. Blu-ray. Song to Song. Directed by Terrence Malick. Broad Green Pictures, 2017. Stalker. Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. 1979; New York, NY: The Criterion Collection, 2017. Blu-ray. Tarkovsky, Andrei. Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema. Translated by Kitty HunterBlair. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1986. Thin Red Line, The. Directed by Terrence Malick. 20th Century Fox, 1998. To the Wonder. Directed by Terrence Malick. Magnolia Pictures, 2012. Tree of Life, The. Directed by Terrence Malick. Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2011. Visions of Light: The Art of Cinematography. Directed by Arnold Glassman, Todd McCarthy, Stuart Samuels. Kino International, 1992. Voyage of Time: Life’s Journey. Directed by Terrence Malick. Broad Green Pictures, 2016. Voyage of Time: The IMAX Experience. Directed by Terrence Malick. IMAX, 2016.

Chapter Nine

The Journey Home A Unity of Memory and Cosmology in Cinema Joshua Sikora

Simplicity. There is a longing in the films of Terrence Malick for the simplicity of another time, another place. A peaceful home that is now beyond reach; a home with loved ones united together. In the opening minutes of A Hidden Life (2019), Fani (Valerie Pachner) thinks back on the earliest memories she has of her husband, “Remember the day when we first met? . . . I remember that motorcycle, my best dress. You looked at me and I knew. How simple life was then. It seemed no trouble could reach our valley. We lived above the clouds. . . . We had our home. . . . Our family. Our village.” 1 This recollection of paradise is cut short as Nazi war planes fly overhead, bringing the evil of World War II into their peaceful village of St. Radegund. Soon, her husband, Franz (August Diehl), will be imprisoned and eventually executed. Their simple past becomes a fading memory for them and the film’s viewers. In the final minutes of Song to Song (2017), Faye (Rooney Mara) and BV (Ryan Gosling) finally find their way out of the labyrinth they’ve made of their passions—sex, music, success—seeking renewed purpose in hard work, family, and forgiveness. Leaving behind the chaos they both were submerged in, Faye says to BV, “You want to go back to a simple life. I want the same.” 2 The world they are occupying is broken and they feel drawn back to something in their past, back to a way of life they have lost. In the last sequence of the film, BV takes a job at a drilling rig; caked in dust and mud, he lays himself down in a freshly planted field. In a memory, he rests on a mountain with Faye, washing her skin with water. In this cinematic imagery, Malick draws us back to elemental things—the earth, new crops, water, flesh. The simplest of things. They are reminders that beckon the viewer out of the 155

156

Joshua Sikora

manmade illusions of the cinema and towards the real, tangible, visceral world. This is echoed in the closing scenes of Knight of Cups (2015), when a father (Brian Dennehy) reminds his prodigal son (Christian Bale) how to find the way home: “Find the light you knew in the east, as a child. The moon. The stars. They serve you. They guide you on your way. The light in the eyes of others. . . . My son, remember.” 3 The path homeward, back to the simple life, is found in memory—truths once known and now forgotten. Knight of Cups opens with a quote from John Bunyan’s 1678 allegory, The Pilgrim’s Progress. Bunyan’s hero—like so many Malick protagonists—begins his tale with a great burden on his back. He departs from “this world,” described as a “City of Destruction,” on a “dangerous journey” toward the “Celestial City” in the mountains, his true home. 4 This archetypal pilgrimage has permeated Malick’s work from the very beginning, from the tale of fugitives fleeing across the desolate Badlands (1973) to the glimpses of paradise in Days of Heaven (1978) and The New World (2005). While much attention is rightly paid to the impact of modern philosophers like Heidegger on Malick’s work, his films also clearly show the influence of an older tradition of thinkers. Dating back to Plato, and continuing through Plotinus and Augustine, Malick’s films illustrate the ancient philosophical concepts of recollection, wonderment, and purification. Woven together, these three ideals serve as a fundamental basis for the unique content, form, and process of Malick’s filmmaking, especially within his most recent films. ANAMNESIS: RECOLLECTION AND CONFESSION Beginning with The Tree of Life (2011) and proceeding through a trilogy of confessional films—To the Wonder (2012), Knight of Cups, and Song to Song—many of Malick’s later works exhibit a distinctly autobiographical quality. The Tree of Life does so perhaps most overtly, with well-established commonalities between Malick’s childhood and the film’s central family, but this approach continues in each of the three narrative films that follow (albeit in progressively more oblique ways). This sets these four films in sharp contrast with the fictionalized narratives in his early work (Badlands and Days of Heaven) and the historical films that make up the rest of his oeuvre. In crafting these four autobiographical films, Malick is exploring the value and consolation of engaging directly with one’s own memory. His approach first resembles that of Romantic poet William Wordsworth, whose own autobiographical work, The Prelude (1805) describes the “renovating virtue” of our memories: There are in our existence spots of time, Which with distinct pre-eminence retain

The Journey Home

157

A renovating virtue . . . Such moments worthy of all gratitude, Are scattered everywhere, taking their date From our first childhood: in our childhood even Perhaps are most conspicuous. As far as memory can look back, is full Of this beneficent influence. 5

Like Malick’s films, Wordsworth focuses on the fleeting moments that find themselves stuck in the deep recesses of our memories. These “spots of time,” Wordsworth suggests, “[lift] us up when fallen” and “give the profoundest knowledge.” 6 In Wordsworth’s poetry, this knowledge comes by way of nostalgia—the Greek concept of a heartache or pain felt for a home (or a time) we have lost. Like others in the Romantic tradition, Wordsworth uses childhood and nature as nostalgic images of the idealized home to which we can never return—memories, serving as icons that point back to a mythic Garden of Eden. Malick crafts similar images in The Tree of Life, both on a personal and a cosmic scale. Just as Wordsworth offers the reader a textual explanation for his nostalgic “spots of time” to help contextualize his unique approach, Malick also cleverly frames The Tree of Life for the viewer. Driven by the recollections of adult Jack (Sean Penn), the childhood memories that comprise most of the film are placed in a clear context for the audience, which helps us to understand the chronology of the story and also prompting us to simultaneously dip into our own memories. This interplay between Malick’s memories, his character’s memories, and the viewer’s memories is central to the enduring success of this masterfully crafted cinematic experience. The memory-driven content of the film finds a source of truth in Malick’s own life. The very structure of the film—flitting effortlessly between different time periods— means that the cinematic form is mirroring the internal, nonlinear process that each of us experience when floating back through our own memories (or in the case of certain non-literal sequences, the film operates like a dream or a product of imagination). As successful as this memory-driven framing device is in The Tree of Life, Malick does not carry it forward into the subsequent films. Despite an even heavier embrace of the fleeting, impressionistic vignettes in place of traditional narrative film editing, To the Wonder, Knight of Cups, and Song to Song lean on a slightly different justification for their unique cinematic presentation. Malick’s ever-present, introspective voice-overs continue, but they are increasingly directed toward an unseen presence. In these three films, it is fitting to describe these voice-overs not simply as recollections, but as prayers of confession. The word “confession” can take on different meanings, and these films directly embrace this multifaceted concept. The films serve as acknowledgements of past mistakes, admitting to faults and sins.

158

Joshua Sikora

They also serve as statements of belief, potential testimonies of Malick’s faith and convictions. Finally, they serve as a place of reflection and honest wrestling through doubts, fears, and confusion. Three kinds of confession, offered to the viewer—and perhaps to God—as prayers. This approach finds clear inspiration from the philosopher and theologian, Saint Augustine of Hippo, and his fittingly titled autobiographical work, Confessions, written in Latin between 397–400. Augustine is referenced directly or indirectly throughout several of Malick’s films, such as in the priest’s sermon in The Tree of Life, which quotes a passage from Augustine’s The City of God, 7 or when Della (Imogen Poots) muses in Knight of Cups, “ ‘Love, and do what you want.’ A saint said that.” 8 Augustine’s literary style, driven by question after question in pursuit of truth, closely resembles the steady stream of inquiries throughout Malick’s voice-overs. In Confessions, Augustine directs his one-sided dialogue toward God, letting the reader follow along as an observer. Augustine’s confessions sound much like the characters in Malick’s recent films, as he recounts his personal sins, “It was foul, and I loved it. I loved the self-destruction, I loved my own error—not that for which I erred, but the error itself.” 9 The arc of Augustine’s story carries us through his temptations, his mistakes, and his time in the “wilderness” before finding his way home to God. In both structure and mode, To the Wonder, Knight of Cups, and Song to Song resemble Augustine’s Confessions. Moreover, these three films each intersect with key points in Malick’s personal history, such as his time as a screenwriter in Hollywood, which serves as partial inspiration for the central character in Knight of Cups. That said, viewers should resist speculating whether the specific errors Malick’s characters make in these films are drawn from his own life or his observations of others. Preferring privacy, the filmmaker has long avoided speaking about his work or his past. While these films seem to stem from a deeply personal place, they should not serve as proxies to fill in gaps in his biography. And in keeping with the confessionalstyle of these films, the anonymity and ambiguity actually seem appropriate. In a letter to a friend after writing Confessions, Augustine tried to encourage potential readers to not become distracted with him or his story: Here see me as I am and do not praise me for more than I am. Here believe nothing else about me than my own testimony. Here observe what I have been in myself and through myself. And if something in me pleases you, here praise Him with me—Him whom I desire to be praised on my account and not myself. . . . Indeed, we were ourselves quite lost; but he who made us, remade us. 10

This elucidates Augustine’s theological objectives in sharing his own experiences with others—not for his own glory or absolution, but to show a picture of the workings of divine grace in his life. Malick’s recent films certainly

The Journey Home

159

follow this pattern, with direct appeals to God and strong invocations of Christian imagery and practice serving as capstones in each. However, it appears that Malick is engaging in something deeper and more complex than simply crafting religious parables. Malick and Augustine’s use of memory in their confessions draw them both back to an earlier philosophical influence as they employ Plato’s unique epistemological concept of anamnesis. The Greek word anamnesis is often translated as “recollection,” but has a richer meaning than we tend to ascribe to that word. It is not simply a reminiscing about the past, but a more active process of raising up memories from the deep recesses of our mind and bringing them to bear on the present moment—usually with some transformative impact. For Plato, this is how we truly learn. Knowledge is innate and present in our soul from before birth, but it has been forgotten, scattered, and lost until something external can remind, recover, and bind it. In Confessions, Augustine echoes Plato’s argument: The process of learning is simply this: by thinking we, as it were, gather together ideas which the memory contains in a disperse and disordered way, and by concentrating our attention we arrange them in order as if ready to hand, stored in the very memory where they previously lay hidden, scattered, and neglected. . . . By recollection these things are brought from the memory. 11

As Augustine continues to explain this process, his example resonates with the “simple life” for which Malick’s characters frequently long. Augustine asks, “Is not the happy life that which all desire, which indeed no one fails to desire? But how have they known about it so as to want it? Where did they see it to love it? . . . If it is there, we had happiness once.” 12 Elsewhere, he writes, “We do not say we have found the thing which was lost unless we recognize it, and we cannot recognize it if we do not remember it.” 13 Like Wordsworth’s nostalgia for childhood, Plato and Augustine see our present pain and longing as a pointer back to a deeper, forgotten truth. A truth, Plato reasons, that the immortal soul must have learned before birth, but then suppressed upon entry into our material world. 14 For Augustine, it is sin that corrupts the soul and leads to our initial ignorance. Plato suggests that it is due to the trauma of childbirth—the soul taking on flesh. In Knight of Cups, Malick quotes Plato directly, incorporating a key passage from Phaedrus in which this process is pictured as a soul once capable of flight: Once the soul was perfect and had wings and could soar into heaven as only creatures can. But the soul lost its wings and fell to earth, there it took an earthly body, and now while it lives in this body no outward sign of wings can be seen, yet the roots of its wings are still there and the nature of these is to try to raise the earthbound soul into heaven. When you see a beautiful woman or a

160

Joshua Sikora man, the soul remembers the beauty it used to know in heaven and the wings begin to sprout and makes the soul want to fly. 15

Plato sees anamnesis as a restorative process. Learning, by way of recollection, is how the soul is healed and brought back to its intended state. It “recollects” that which was broken and scattered. As Augustine suggested above, that which has been dispersed is now brought back together, reunified into a new whole. Interestingly, this has direct significance within cinema, a medium which is fundamentally formed by capturing events from the past and “re-collecting” those past events as a unified, shared present experience. Prior to our modern age of photography, the past was memorialized in paintings, words, and other indirect expressions of history. Yet with the advent of the camera and cinema, a new artistic power was discovered. Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky picks up on this thread in his treatise on art and cinema, Sculpting in Time (1986), when he writes, “For the first time in the history of the arts . . . man found the means to take an impression of time. And simultaneously the possibility of reproducing that time on screen as often as he wanted, to repeat it and go back to it.” 16 This, importantly, means that cinema is a revolutionary mechanism for generating common memories—a way for an artist to take something from the past and prompt an audience to remember, reflect, and reckon with that event which is no longer present. This is possible, at least in part, because cinema is a medium that finds its structure within time. As a temporal medium, it grapples in direct ways with past, present, and future—a microcosm of our lived experience in actual time. In crafting a film, the artist works outside of the cinematic time, seeing the unity of the complete experience from start to finish, just as a painter surveys the entirety of her canvas. It is a god-like perspective. Augustine suggests, “In the eternal, nothing is transient, but the whole is present.” 17 French philosopher Gilles Deleuze considers this fascinating characteristic of the medium in his landmark analyses, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1983) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985). In Cinema 2, Deleuze examines the unique properties of imaging time itself, exploring a wide spectrum of possibilities, from the instinctual immediacy of movement to the generative possibilities of images framed as memories or dreams. In each kind of cinematic image, Deleuze considers what is prompted in the viewer. For example, movement-images—that is, shots that are focused primarily on basic action in time—often focus the viewer on the material world. This occurs without thought to emotional, intellectual, or spiritual qualities unless a kind of “gap” is introduced which prompts a different sort of engagement. In Cinema 2, he describes how a memory-driven film can help induce such contemplation, explaining, “The recollection-image comes to fill the gap . . .

The Journey Home

161

in such a way . . . which is no longer motor or material, but temporal and spiritual: that which ‘is added’ to matter.” 18 Recollection moves us past the material and toward the spiritual because it is an immaterial process. Physical reality is translated into spiritual reality when the material present is transformed into an immaterial memory. The event no longer exists and yet it can be returned to, not in space or time, but in the spiritual act of recollection. Augustine writes, “In the soul there are these three aspects of time, and I do not see them anywhere else. The present considering the past is the memory, the present considering the present is immediate awareness, the present considering the future is expectation.” 19 In Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky also argues that “memory is a spiritual concept,” and that without it, we would become prisoners to illusions. 20 Memory is not matter, but it is formed from material experience and has bearing on the material present. Memory, then, is something of a bridge between the present and the past (or future), a bridge between the material and spiritual. Tarkovsky once again ties this back to nostalgia in suggesting that, “As a moral being, man is endowed with memory which sows in him a sense of dissatisfaction. It makes us vulnerable, subject to pain.” 21 According to Tarkovsky, this is the bedrock for cinema—what he describes as “sculpting in time.” The art of re-collecting scattered bits of past time and shaping them into a unified whole—a unified present experience that provides a viewer something that would be otherwise unattainable. Tarkovsky explains “that what a person normally goes to the cinema for is time: for time lost or spent or not yet had. He goes there for living experience; for cinema, like no other art, widens, enhances, and concentrates a person’s experience—and not only enhances it but makes it longer, significantly longer.” 22 Film condenses hours, days, months, and years of past experience into a closed, temporal container that is then poured out upon the viewer in a concentrated present moment, like a rush of past memories flooding back into one’s mind. In the case of his four semi-autobiographical films, Malick shares a version of his own memories with the audience, but one of his recent films draws from a different well and covers (or collects) a much broader spectrum of time. Chronicling the entire history of the universe—from its past birth to its imagined end—Malick’s experimental documentary, Voyage of Time (2016), seems to take Tarkovsky’s charge quite literally; gifting the viewer with a “significantly longer” personal experience and perspective of time. In doing so, this unique film moves past anamnesis, prompting noesis and wonderment.

162

Joshua Sikora

NOESIS: COSMOLOGY AND WONDER Terrence Malick began work on Voyage of Time in the late 1970s, known then as “The Qasida Project” or simply “Q.” 23 Conceived as a non-narrative, feature-length celebration of the universe, Malick set about crafting a comprehensive, multi-faceted, aesthetically beautiful journey through the cosmic evolution of the heavens and the earth. With many false starts and roadblocks throughout its nearly forty-year gestation, the film combines decades of documentary footage captured by Paul Atkins (Earth, The Blue Planet) with groundbreaking digital and practical visual effects spearheaded by Dan Glass (The Matrix, The Tree of Life) and Douglas Trumbull (2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind). Much of the development on the project initially found a home in the twenty-minute creation sequence in The Tree of Life, but Malick continued to work with Glass, Atkins, and his editors to craft a longer stand-alone feature, which would become Voyage of Time: Life’s Journey. When finally released in 2016, the film was presented in three different formats. A ninety-minute version featuring a voice-over narration by Cate Blanchett premiered at the Venice International Film Festival and screened throughout Europe. Simultaneously, a forty-minute version was produced for an IMAX release in the United States. This shorter cut was initially released with a narration by Brad Pitt, and subsequently re-released briefly without any narration. The feature-length cut is presented with a standard theatrical 1.85:1 aspect ratio, while the initial U.S. release used the taller 1.33:1 full IMAX ratio. Interestingly, the IMAX re-release, presented with just music and sound effects, used a significantly cropped “ultra widescreen” 3.6:1 aspect ratio, which was described as “Malick’s vision as he hoped it to be seen . . . a purely experiential film presented in the widest aspect ratio possible.” 24 During post-production, director of photography Paul Atkins, a veteran nature and wildlife documentarian, was persuaded by Malick to consider the ultra widescreen presentation, saying, “We were stunned at how it affected you emotionally and how immersive it was.” 25 This sense of immersion had roots in the earliest days of development, when Malick was exploring various theatrical projects with Broadway producer Bobby Geisler in the late 1970s. The two collaborated on an unproduced stage adaptation of The Elephant Man, which Malick described as a “multimedia event” with a fusion of “theatre and of the movies, of Vaudeville and the Chautauqua. It will be like an electronic circus, with sound and projection techniques beyond the capability of any movie theatre or concert hall.” 26 At this same time, Malick was collaborating with effects artists on the earliest tests for “Q,” exploring the potential of incorporating live theatrical effects in the presentation, such as lasers emerging from the “primordial chaos.” 27 Recalling Malick’s objectives, conceptual artist Ed Verraux ex-

The Journey Home

163

plains, “He had the idea that the evolution of the earth and the cosmos was like the dream of a god,” 28 while special effects designer Richard Taylor II remembered Malick’s “fascination with nature. . . . Symmetries in nature and patterns in nature. . . . The way things move and flow. He’s fascinated like any brilliant human being about the nature of our existence.” 29 This language points us to Plotinus, a third-century neoplatonic philosopher central to much of Malick’s work. Although Malick extensively studied philosophy at Harvard and Oxford, he says that it was not until later in life that he discovered ancient philosophy and its potential connections to cinema. 30 In Plotinus’s treatise on beauty, he suggests that “in visible things, as indeed in all else, universally, the beautiful thing is essentially symmetrical, patterned.” 31 To find this pattern in nature, Plotinus proposes making “a mental picture of our universe,” a dynamic image in which “all things of the universe moving or in repose” are contained. 32 This vision, which Plotinus crafts in words, is the same picture of the universe that Malick brings to life in Voyage of Time. Plotinus also sees a movement and flow to everything, from the cosmos to the human soul, all of which are connected and rooted in the “One”—the source of all things. It is complete, singular, without division or distinction, and from this One, all else emanates. He writes, “The leading principle of the universe is a unity. . . . [The soul] has its sources in the First and thence, along an unhindered path, it flows into a total of things, conferring grace.” 33 Mind, soul, and matter all emanate from the One, and in doing so, take on distinct shapes. In this outward dispersion, separation occurs, the One giving birth to many. Plotinus suggests that “Multiplicity is a falling away from The Unity. . . . [A thing] flows outward and by that dissipation takes extension: utterly losing unity it becomes a manifold since there is nothing to bind part to part; when, with all this outflowing, it becomes something definite.” 34 In Voyage of Time, Malick depicts this “outflowing” at every level of the universe, from the macrocosmic origin of the heavens to the microcosmic division of cells into new life. When Paul Atkins took on the role of cinematographer for the film in the 1990s, he found Malick’s direction to be very precise, but also distinctly metaphorical. He explains, “Terry is interested in the repetitive ebb and flow of life’s energy through the natural world. . . . If you learn to see it, you can see it everywhere. This eternal sort of tao of nature is something we were always on the lookout for, and I loved it because he allowed you to interpret it and find it yourself.” 35 In capturing this “tao of nature,” Voyage of Time not only visually expands the creation sequence from The Tree of Life, but also echoes one of that film’s central themes, the “way of nature,” which was juxtaposed and synthesized with the “way of grace.” These juxtapositions continue in the various versions of Voyage of Time, in both the editorial structure and the content of the voice-overs. The shorter U.S. cut of the film

164

Joshua Sikora

plays similarly to other IMAX nature documentaries with a generally objective, somewhat scientific point-of-view expressed in the visuals and in Brad Pitt’s somewhat clinical narration. While a young midwestern girl serves as a brief emotional anchor point in the millennia-spanning arc of the universe, most of the focus of this cut seems to be on the natural evolution of life as seen in the history of our planet. By contrast, the feature-length cut—which was never distributed in North America—offers a more contemplative and spiritual outlook on the cosmos. Cate Blanchett’s narration takes the form of a prayer, directed toward “an unknowable force of creation and destruction she calls ‘Mother.’ “ 36 With this more sacred framing, the longer, slower version of the film takes the beautifully depicted scientific, evolutionary process, and imbues it with a sense of divine order and purpose. In doing so, Malick synthesizes science, philosophy, and religion. Within the same cinematic sequences, he visualizes the cosmic big bang of an evolutionary cycle, which—in its emanation and dissipation—pictures Plotinus’s philosophical theories about the universe. And he also evokes the biblical Genesis, where creation occurs through separation—light from dark, earth from heavens, land from water, woman from man. Malick’s depiction takes what are often seen as competing, disparate concepts of origin and unifies them, finding the common patterns and cycles in each. This, Plotinus suggests, is how beauty takes form in both art and the universe: “It has grouped and co-ordinated what from a diversity of parts was to become a unity: it has rallied confusion into co-operation: it has made the sum one harmonious coherence.” 37 From the words of his collaborators, it is clear that Malick was seeking this “harmonious coherence” in the patterns and symmetries flowing through nature. Much of Atkins’s photography, as well as the finely crafted visual effects, beautifully illustrate this. However, at key points throughout the feature-length edit of Voyage of Time, this beauty is jarringly juxtaposed with additional footage—raw, shaky contemporary home video from around the world, depicting a wide array of pain, joy, destruction, and life. These inserted shots—overexposed and low in resolution—seem deliberately ugly in comparison to the IMAX-quality nature photography throughout the rest of the documentary. The first time the film cuts to these shots, it is to show the destitute and homeless wandering the streets of a modern city. This is followed by images of the elderly and infirm, the impoverished, small children, and finally buildings being consumed by a fire. Blanchett asks in the narration, “Mother, where are you? Where have you gone? I fear. Full of trouble. A riddle to myself. Am I not your child?” 38 From this context, Malick then takes us to the dawn of time, artfully imagining light first emerging from the darkness—the formation of stars in the heavens. Blanchett continues, “Who are you? Life giver. Light bringer.” 39 Slowly, the film progresses through history, flying through nebulae and asteroids and planets, eventually arriving

The Journey Home

165

on an ancient, prehistoric Earth rife with volcanoes, storms, and barren landscapes. All of this is revealed slowly and patiently, visualized with incredible photography from the most remote corners of our globe. The film’s second act begins as the documentary cuts away from the natural environments and focuses on microscopic imagery of biological cells dividing and colliding—the miracle of life. The cells swim like plankton, attack like viruses, explode into new shapes and forms. And then, suddenly, amidst this inspiring, phenomenal dance, the film cuts back to the rough, raw home video footage. This time, we’re shown shaky, plain-looking images of water, markets, celebrations, religious festivals, and people swimming. Whenever Malick inserts these shots, it is immediately sobering, fundamentally re-contextualizing and coloring the glorious images of nature that make up most of the film. This pattern of intercutting between the cosmic and the mundane, the beautiful and the ugly, continues throughout the film’s entirety. It is a pattern that once again creates distinctions—clear juxtapositions of image, content, and theme. In image, even to the most casual viewer, there is an obvious, marked contrast in picture quality. In content, the IMAX footage artfully visualizes the high points of past and future, while the home video crudely captures the commonplace present. In theme, the film contrasts a sense of a divinely ordered, miraculous cosmos with the inescapable pain, ugliness, and frailty of our brief human lives. And yet, as the film progresses, these disparate parts begin to find commonalities—the two rivers begin to flow as one. By the film’s third act, Malick depicts the first prehistoric humans foraging for food and shelter, loving and fighting each other. Presented in the higher quality filmic images, Malick offers the first glimpses of human births and deaths, joys and struggles. And when he returns to the rough home video footage at the end, he shows us actions charged with qualities of the transcendent—a wedding, people resting, a warm embrace, children smiling. One of the final images is of a shepherd guiding his flock. An ancient human task, but the kind of task that brings order and purpose to the chaos. Although these images are still crudely photographed, the content that is captured is of a higher, more glorious kind. In this weaving together of different types of footage—a dance of contrasting themes finding harmony—Malick and his editors have sculpted these apparent differences into a unified whole, a single, cohesive cinematic experience. That is, a dense, comprehensive temporal image of our universe in all of its distinct parts, just as Plotinus had first proposed. This, as Andrei Tarkovsky suggested, is the work of the filmmaker, the work of the artist. When Tarkovsky describes “sculpting in time,” he imagines gathering raw “lumps of time,” that are then shaped and formed by a filmmaker who is “inwardly conscious of the features of his finished piece . . . leaving behind only what is to be an element of the finished film,

166

Joshua Sikora

what will prove integral to the cinematic image.” 40 Plotinus describes the work of all artists using the same image: Now it must be seen that the stone thus brought under the artist’s hand to the beauty of form is beautiful not as stone—for so the crude block would be as pleasant—but in virtue of the Form or Idea introduced by the art. This form is not in the material; it is in the designer before ever it enters the stone; and the artificer holds it not by his equipment of eyes and hands but by his participation in his art. 41

In order to craft the beautiful object, the artist must have a vision in mind of what the final work will be. Plotinus suggests that this vision can draw from above or below—from the highest ideals of heaven, or from the ugliness of those things which have emanated farthest away from the source. 42 The artist who looks only at the surface of the material world around him fails to capture the higher ideals. The painter, the sculptor, or the filmmaker that attends only to the physical surface creates art that is impotent—or, when fully separated from the higher ideals, Plotinus fears that this kind of art may even be evil. In Confessions, Augustine interacts directly with Plotinus’s argument, suggesting that it is this carnal art that contributed in part to his sins of depravity: To entrap the eyes men have made innumerable additions to the various arts and crafts. . . . Outwardly they follow what they make. Inwardly, they abandoned God by whom they were made, destroying what they were created to be. . . . For the beautiful objects designed by artists’ souls and realized by skilled hands come from that beauty which is higher than souls. 43

Plotinus and Augustine agree that to create something truly beautiful requires the artist to be able to see the higher ideals—those concepts, qualities, and virtues that are hidden from the material senses. “This, then, is how the material thing becomes beautiful,” Plotinus writes, “by communicating in the thought that flows from the Divine.” 44 This struggle between the material and the divine is at the heart of Malick’s confessional trilogy. In To the Wonder, Knight of Cups, and Song to Song, Malick shows characters who are caught up in the physical and sensual world, captivated and entrapped by their senses. As Della says of Christian Bale’s character in Knight of Cups, “You don’t want love. You want a love experience.” 45 As he flits from one sexual partner to the next, he seems drawn to body, flesh, sensation, as opposed to love, relationship, or community. This inert, material cosmology is echoed in Song to Song when Rooney Mara’s character says, “I never knew I had a soul. The very word embarrassed me.” 46 In To the Wonder, Ben Affleck’s character tests toxins in the soil—his existence is rooted in the dirt, focused on the broken sickness of the

The Journey Home

167

earth, never looking heavenward. In each character’s case, their narrow corporeal focus leads toward a kind of death—an existence devoid of love, life, and joy. They are, to use Plato’s image, prisoners in a cave, entranced by shadows of things, blind to the richer reality that might grant them freedom. In Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” the prisoners find their attention affixed on a wall where flickering firelight brings to life shadowy projections. Essentially, Plato provided us the first description of a movie theater some twenty-four hundred years ago. Yet, for the filmmaker, the image is not an encouraging one—a dark cave, a prison, with a puppet show of deception and confusion. In this allegory, escape is a complicated process, rooted in philosophy, for only a true philosopher can make the ascent out of the cave. 47 For Malick—who began his career as a philosopher before turning to film— this raises the question, why abandon the academic world of philosophy for a world of artifice and shadows? Of course, a survey of Malick’s work shows that he has never truly abandoned philosophy—but rather worked to synthesize it into his cinematic pursuits. Once again the unifier, Malick has taken a material art form commonly used to depict the carnal world and has ennobled it with the art of philosophy. In doing so, he may be using the flickering light on the cave wall as a way of helping the audience begin to see their world as it truly is. Not a flat, soulless world, but something much richer and more wondrous than they have imagined. Plotinus says, “All that one sees as a spectacle is still external; one must bring the vision within and see no longer in that mode of separation but as we know ourselves.” 48 This is Plotinus’s goal of noesis—a true inner understanding of the nature of reality. This intellection cannot occur simply through our material senses—sight, touch, hearing—because, for Plotinus, reality is not limited to materiality. He argues that beauty helps us understand that there is more to our universe than the physical world. “Beauty addresses itself chiefly to sight,” he writes, but “minds that lift themselves above the realm of sense to a higher order are aware of beauty in the conduct of life, in actions, in character, in the pursuits of the intellect.” 49 Since this kind of higher beauty is embedded in the immaterial, it cannot be apprehended directly through the senses, but rather, “such vision is for those only who see with the Soul’s sight.” 50 This is the challenge that Malick confronts. How can he use this material medium of cinema—a medium of light and sight, of physical action, of bodies in motion—to prompt his viewers to see not only with their eyes, but also with their souls? The kind of sight that opens us to the higher ideals and draws us back to the source—to the One. Plotinus explains that the soul is enlivened to sight when it is touched by the beauty—that is, the order, the pattern, the outflowing—of heavenly things. He says, “This is the spirit that Beauty must ever induce, wonderment and . . . longing and love and a trembling that is all delight.” 51 And this seems to be what guides Malick in

168

Joshua Sikora

his filmmaking—seeking to induce in his viewers a sense of wonder, longing, and love in a way that grips us and delights us. Following Plotinus’s framework, the wonder is found whenever Malick can prompt our vision to rise above simple perception to true intellection. In Cinema 1, Deleuze explains that this can occur in film when an audience is pressed out of instinctual recognition. If an image is immediately identifiable and comprehensible, the audience remains in a lower, simple state of perception, with the intellect disengaged. House, field, man, woman, war, storm, fire—there are plenty of instinctual perception-images in Malick’s films that we read immediately, symbolically, like Egyptian hieroglyphs—just as the prisoners in Plato’s cave gave names to the flickering shapes on the wall, without giving further consideration to the potential depth or source of those forms. In cinematic terms, Deleuze suggests that this intellection is initiated whenever a gap is formed between our perceptive expectation and what actually unspools in the film. This can occur in many ways, such as when our point-of-view shifts unexpectedly, a shot is held longer than anticipated, or an action is presented without explanation. Once these gaps are introduced, the intellect is engaged in order to make sense of the abnormality. In other words, we find ourselves “wondering” about what we are seeing on screen. This wonderment can be generated by a beautiful new sight—the cosmos taking form as never before depicted in cinema—or it can be prompted by something much more ordinary—a glance, a gesture, a fleeting unexplained moment. In this moment, Plotinus says the beholder “will rejoice, and awe will fall upon them and a trouble deeper than all the rest could ever stir, for now they are moving in the realm of Truth.” 52 CATHARSIS: PURIFICATION AND HOMECOMING In his second volume on film theory, Cinema 2, Deleuze expands upon the ideas he first introduced about perception, instinctual reaction, and intellection. In Cinema 1, Deleuze defines cinema as a means for creating motionimages, identifying the primary element of the medium as movement. But in Cinema 2, he suggests that an alternate framework has developed, rooting much of modern cinema not in movement, but in time. This he calls the “time-image.” One of the markers of a time-image is that what the audience perceives in a shot is not simply the present moment that is captured, but the cinematic frame also somehow contains within it another time simultaneously. As an example, Deleuze points to the films of Italian Neorealism—a scene in the ruins of a European village in the wake of World War II not only shows a present action occurring in the village street, but also prompts the viewer to recall what this village might have looked like before the destructive force of the war. As we watch the scene play out, we are simultaneously

The Journey Home

169

contemplating the immediate present, the past destruction, and the idealized past before the war. In some cases, we may also find ourselves imagining a future time, in which the village is rebuilt and restored. Often, the time-image creates within us a sense of longing—as Tarkovsky described, humanity is “racked with longing to acquire, and become one with, the ideal which lies outside him. . . . Art is born and takes hold wherever there is a timeless and insatiable longing for the spiritual, for the ideal.” 53 While there are many different ways that the time-image can create this longing, one form that Deleuze offers is his “recollection-image”—the image that draws us back into our own memory. This returns us to the start of the chapter, where we looked at how Malick’s films engage our personal recollections. Now we have a context to understand why it would be important for a film to pull us into this state of reflection and remembrance. Just as wonderment created an opening for beauty to take root in our soul and enliven us to the possibility of immaterial truths, so also our longing for these forgotten truths can reawaken us to a spiritual reality. Contemplating his own memories of the past, Augustine writes, “I am scattered in times whose order I do not understand. The storms of incoherent events tear to pieces my thoughts, the inmost entrails of my soul, until that day when, purified and molten by the fire of your love, I flow together to merge into you [God].” 54 Augustine echoes Plotinus here, in describing this process of purification—the reversal of the original outflowing away from the source. When awakened by beauty, the soul can begin its upward ascent back toward the source—the path of love, where that which was once separate is joined back together. The two becoming one. Malick pictures this in a romantic relationship in The Thin Red Line: “We. We together. One being, flow together like water, till I can’t tell you from me.” 55 In cosmic terms, there is a pattern here—when two come together as one, life is conceived. Physically, emotionally, intellectually, spiritually—this life can be born at any level. Even in art, a work becomes enlivened when the separate, distinct elements come together, finding a cohesive unity. A film becomes effectual and beautiful when the cuts no longer create division, but the cinematic images flow smoothly one to the next, like a river, unified and complete. To achieve this unity, purification or purgation is required—the Greek catharsis. Plotinus offers the image of gold contaminated by other earthly materials. In order to purify the gold, it must be purged and refined until it is gold and nothing else. And so with humanity, he says “to win back his grace it must be his business to scour and purify himself and make himself what he was . . . emancipated from all the passions, purged of all that embodiment has thrust upon it.” 56 Elsewhere, Plotinus connects this purgation directly to memory, explaining that “the lower soul must be always striving to attain to memory” the activities of the higher, heavenly realm, while forgetting the things it learned in the lower, earthy realm. 57 In Augustine, this purification

170

Joshua Sikora

of our mind comes through God’s divine grace: “My entire hope is exclusively in your very great mercy.” 58 And then, directly echoing Plotinus, Augustine submits that we are granted the strength to be “collected together and brought to the unity from which we disintegrated into multiplicity.” 59 The alternative is “damnation,” Malick suggests in Knight of Cups, “the pieces of your life never to come together, just splashed out there.” 60 In the midst of a deep spiritual malaise, Martin Sheen—the star of Malick’s Badlands—sought out his old friend in Paris. Feeling lost, without direction or purpose, Sheen recalls this brief time visiting with Malick. “It was the turning point of my life. He told me that the seeds of the future are sown in the past. That to become yourself, you have first to go back.” Malick gave his friend a copy of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, which Sheen says had “a very profound effect on my spiritual life.” Although he had not been to a church in years, the classic novel inspired Sheen to seek out a priest in France. “I told him I’d stayed away from the faith for a long time, and I’d like to make a confession. . . . That was for me the journey home.” 61 In whatever shape it takes, this journey homeward remains an everpresent longing in humanity. In concluding his treatise on beauty, Plotinus asks the central question: “But what must we do? How lies the path? How come to vision of the inaccessible Beauty?” 62 His answer naturally points to our past—to a recalling and returning. “Let us flee then to the beloved Fatherland,” he says, in reference to Homer’s Odyssey. “For Odysseus is surely a parable to us . . . not content to linger for all the pleasure offered to his eyes and all the delight of sense filling his days. The Fatherland to us is There whence we have come, and There is The Father.” 63 Similarly, Augustine speaks of God as not just waiting for us to return, nor simply beckoning us, but actively seeking our homecoming, “He who for us is life itself descended here and endured death and slew it by the abundance of his life. . . . He did not delay, but ran crying out loud by his words, deeds, death, life, descent, and ascent—calling us to return to him.” 64 Augustine’s reply—and Malick’s, as well—is to confess. An act of purgation of the past, an act of realignment for the future, and an acknowledgement of our present state. Augustine writes, “To him my soul is making confession and he is healing it.” 65 Contrary to the Gnostics—who saw the goal of catharsis as the purgation of all matter to purify the spiritual and incorporeal—Augustine describes a restoration that reunites the material and immaterial, healing both body and soul. A restoration that is made possible, he suggests, through Logos—the immaterial Word of God that took on mortal flesh in the incarnation of Christ, “the mediator between God and men. . . . Mortal like humanity, righteous like God.” 66 Through this unity of humanity and divinity, earth and heaven are reunited. Scripture describes a wedding feast, where humanity is re-joined with its Creator, leading to new life. This ancient story echoes the

The Journey Home

171

patterns of nature, the shape of things observed in our corporeal world. It is, in one sense, how we draw together the scattered, confusing questions surrounding our own mortality and give coherence and understanding to that great mystery. Tarkovsky recognizes this when he states, “The aim of art is to prepare a person for death.” 67 If we are to make sense of this future reality, we must look for the patterns—in nature and in our memory—that show us the way forward. We must recall those moments where we have caught a glimpse of earth and heaven joined together, the mortal and the divine flowing together like two streams forming one river. To aid in this recollection, Malick has spent his career gathering for us these “spots of time”—glimpses of paradise in the fields of a thriving farm, children playing in an island village, a tribe at one with nature, a family restored on the shores of a beach, a wondrous cathedral overlooking the ocean, a road pointed toward an easterly sun, two lovers washing each other clean. It is also this vision that Franz, the martyr of A Hidden Life, carries with him as he approaches his own death. A death that he sees not as an end, but simply a temporary parting. Franz writes to his wife and children, “Don’t forget me in your prayers. I pray for you from the other side.” And although death will separate him from his family, he looks ahead to a time when that which is broken apart may be drawn back together, saying, “Through God’s grace, we will soon meet again.” 68 A Hidden Life ends as it began, with Fani working in the fields of their village. The setting is sublime, with the majestic Austrian Alps surrounding this beautiful valley. Her husband is gone, but she is not alone. The village’s community—fractured and torn apart by the war—has begun to mend again, tending to the crops and gathering at the local parish. “We lived above the clouds,” she had said of this idyllic home in the mountains. Now widowed, separated from her love, Fani longs for the past, yet also waits expectantly for the future. “The time will come when we will know what all of this is for,” she says in voice-over. “And there will be no mysteries. We will know why we live. We’ll come together. We’ll plant orchards, fields. We’ll build the land back up. Franz, I’ll meet you there, in the mountains.” The film ends with two final images. First, a shot of a fenced-off garden, the gate swung open—the path to Eden, once barred, now clear. And the final shot, the mountains stretching high up to the clouds—earth and heaven joined as one. Images, now in our memory, that point a way home. NOTES 1. A Hidden Life, dir. Terrence Malick (Los Angeles: Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2019). 2. Song to Song, dir. Terrence Malick (Los Angeles: Broad Green Pictures, 2017). 3. Knight of Cups, dir. Terrence Malick (Los Angeles: Broad Green Pictures, 2015). Italics added.

172

Joshua Sikora

4. John Bunyan, The Pilgrims Progress: from This World to That Which Is to Come: Delivered under the Similitude of a Dream, Wherein Is Discovered the Manner of His Setting out, His Dangerous Journey, and Safe Arrival at the Desired Country (Ulrichsville, OH: Barbour Pub., 1998). 5. William Wordsworth, “The Prelude,” 1805, Book XI, lines 258–278, in William Wordsworth: The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000). 6. Wordsworth, “The Prelude”, 1888, Book XII, lines 218–221. 7. “Is the body of the wise man, or the just, exempt from any pain? From any disquietude, from the deformity that might blight its beauty, from the weakness that might destroy its health?” This part of the sermon, from The Tree of Life, dir. Terrence Malick (Los Angeles: Fox Searchlight, 2011) is a paraphrase from Augustine’s City of God. 8. Malick, in Knight of Cups, is referencing a famous statement by Augustine, drawn from his “Tractate on the Gospel of John,” in which he says, “Love and do what you will. If you should be silent, be silent out of love; if you should cry out, cry out out of love. If you should correct, correct out of love; if you should spare, spare out of love. Let the root of love be within; from this root only good can emerge.” In Fathers of the Church, trans. John W. Rettig (CUA Press, 1988), 588. 9. Augustine, Confessions, Book II, iv (9), trans. J.G. Pilkington (United Kingdom: T & T Clark, 1876). 10. Augustine, “Letter to Darius” in Confessions, trans. Albert C. Outler (Dallas: Southern Methodist University, 1955). 10. 11. Augustine, Confessions, Book X, xi (18) and xiv (22), trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford University Press, 1991), 189, 192. 12. Ibid., Book X, xx (29). 196. 13. Ibid., Book X, xviii (27), 195. 14. See Socrates dialogue with Simmias and Cebes in Plato’s Phaedo. 15. Quoted from Plato’s Phaedrus, translated by Christopher Isherwood, read by Charles Laughton in Knight of Cups. 16. Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1987), 62. Italics in original. 17. Augustine, Confessions Book XI, xi (13), Chadwick, 228. 18. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 47. 19. Augustine, Confessions, Book XI, xx (26), Chadwick, 235. 20. Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, 57. 21. Ibid., 58. 22. Ibid., 63. Italics in original. 23. Paul Maher, All Things Shining: An Oral History of the Films of Terrence Malick (4th Edition, 2017), 105. 24. Kristopher Tapley, “ ‘Ultra Widescreen’ Version of Terrence Malick’s Voyage of Time Set for Release,” Variety, December 5, 2016. https://variety.com/2016/film/in-contention/terrence-malick-ultra-wide-voyage-of-time-re-release-1201933834. Accessed February 15, 2020. 25. Ibid. 26. Maher, All Things Shining, 105. 27. Ibid., 108. 28. Ibid., 109. 29. Ibid., 110. 30. In a rare appearance at the South by Southwest Film Festival in 2017, Malick stated, “As for philosophy . . . as to what texts I would recommend, I had always wished that they had taught the ancients more. But in the university, they’re quite neglected and so it was only later on that I read them and found—I wished they’d been taught—they’re actually good to teach in film school, not just a normal university setting.” Terrence Malick, “Made In Austin: A Look Into Song to Song with Terrence Malick, Michael Fassbender, and Richard Linklater,” South by Southwest Film Festival & Conference, (March 11, 2017). 31. Plotinus, The Enneads, I.6.1, trans. Stephen MacKenna (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 46.

The Journey Home

173

32. Ibid., V.8.9, p. 419. 33. Ibid., IV.4.10, p. 295. 34. Plotinus, The Enneads, VI.6.1, trans. Stephen MacKenna (United States: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1975). Original spelling maintained. 35. Tapley, Variety. 36. “Voyage of Time: Life’s Journey,” New Zealand International Film Festival, May 12, 2017. https://www.nziff.co.nz/2017-autumn-events/archive/voyage-of-time-lifes-journey. Accessed February 15, 2020. 37. Plotinus, The Enneads, I.6.2 (Penguin Books), 47. Original spelling maintained. 38. Voyage of Time: Life’s Journey, dir. Terrence Malick (Los Angeles: Broad Green Pictures, 2016). 39. Ibid. 40. Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, 63–64. 41. Plotinus, The Enneads, V.8.1 (Penguin Books), 410–11. 42. Ibid. 43. Augustine, Confessions, Book X, xxxiv (53), Chadwick, 210. 44. Plotinus, The Enneads, I.6.2 (Penguin Books), 48. 45. Knight of Cups, 2015. 46. Song to Song, 2017. 47. See Plato, The Republic, Book VII. 48. Plotinus, The Enneads, V.8.10 (Penguin Books), 421. 49. Ibid., I.6.1, p. 45. 50. Ibid., I.6.4, p. 49. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid. 53. Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, 37–38. 54. Augustine, Confessions, Book XI, xxix (39), Chadwick, 244. 55. The Thin Red Line, dir. Terrence Malick (Century City: 20th Century Fox, 1998). 56. Plotinus, The Enneads, I.6.5 (Penguin Books), 51. 57. Ibid., IV.3.32, p. 285. 58. Augustine, Confessions, Book X, xviii (40), Chadwick, 202. 59. Ibid. 60. Knight of Cups, 2015. 61. Maher, All Thigs Shining, 111. 62. Plotinus, The Enneads, I.6.8 (Penguin Books), 53. 63. Ibid., 54. 64. Augustine, Confessions, Book IV, xii (19), Chadwick, 64. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid., X, xliii (68), p. 219. 67. Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, 43. 68. A Hidden Life, 2019.

REFERENCES Augustine. Confessions. Translated by Henry Chadwick. Oxford University Press, 1991. ———. Confessions. Translated by Albert C. Outler. Dallas: Southern Methodist University, 1955. ———. The Confessions of St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo. Translated by J.G. Pilkington. United Kingdom: T & T Clark, 1876. Badlands. Directed by Terrence Malick. Burbank: Warner Brothers Pictures, 1973. Bunyan, John. The Pilgrims Progress: from This World to That Which Is to Come: Delivered under the Similitude of a Dream, Wherein Is Discovered the Manner of His Setting out, His Dangerous Journey, and Safe Arrival at the Desired Country. Ulrichsville, OH: Barbour Pub., 1998. Days of Heaven. Directed by Terrence Malick. Hollywood: Paramount Pictures, 1978.

174

Joshua Sikora

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. ———. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. A Hidden Life. Directed by Terrence Malick. Los Angeles: Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2019. Knight of Cups. Directed by Terrence Malick. Los Angeles: Broad Green Pictures, 2015. Maher, Paul. All Things Shining: An Oral History of the Films of Terrence Malick, 4th Edition. Printed by the author, 2017. Malick, Terrence. “Made In Austin: A Look Into Song to Song with Terrence Malick, Michael Fassbender, and Richard Linklater.” South by Southwest Film Festival & Conference, Austin, TX. March 11, 2017. The New World. Directed by Terrence Malick. Burbank: New Line Cinema, 2005. Plato. Complete Works. Edited by John M. Cooper. United Kingdom: Oregan Publishing, 1997. Plotinus. The Enneads. Translated by Stephen MacKenna. London: Penguin Books, 1991. Song to Song. Directed by Terrence Malick. Los Angeles: Broad Green Pictures, 2017. Tapley, Kristopher. “ ‘Ultra Widescreen’ Version of Terrence Malick’s Voyage of Time Set for Release,” Variety, December 5, 2016. https://variety.com/2016/film/in-contention/terrencemalick-ultra-wide-voyage-of-time-re-release-1201933834. Accessed February 15, 2020. Tarkovsky, Andrei. Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1987. The Thin Red Line. Directed by Terrence Malick. Century City: 20th Century Fox, 1998. To the Wonder. Directed by Terrence Malick. New York City: Magnolia Pictures, 2012. The Tree of Life. Directed by Terrence Malick. Los Angeles: Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2011. Voyage of Time: The IMAX Experience. Directed by Terrence Malick. Ontario: IMAX Corporation, 2016. Voyage of Time: Life’s Journey. Directed by Terrence Malick. Los Angeles: Broad Green Pictures, 2016. “Voyage of Time: Life’s Journey,” New Zealand International Film Festival, May 12, 2017. https://www.nziff.co.nz/2017-autumn-events/archive/voyage-of-time-lifes-journey. Accessed February 15, 2020. Wordsworth, William. William Wordsworth: The Major Works. Edited by Stephen Gill. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000.

Part Four

A Path of Faith

Chapter Ten

Disputing Henri de Lubac’s Nature and Grace and Job’s Ending The Tree of Life as Theological Discourse Naaman Wood

Much scholarly interest in filmmaker Terrence Malick has focused on the ways that philosophy and religion offer an enriched understanding of his work. Much of the warrant for philosophical readings derive from Malick’s autobiography. Malick studied philosophy at Harvard University with Stanley Cavell and later at Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar. Although he left Oxford, Malick planned to write a dissertation on Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein. Malick also lectured on Heidegger at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and he translated Heidegger’s Essence of Reason into English. Given Malick’s background in Heidegger, various scholars have claimed that Malick’s films work with Heideggerian concepts 1 or are instantiations of Heideggerian cinema. 2 Others have claimed that Malick’s films themselves function as philosophical discourse, even refuting Heideggerian philosophy. 3 More recently, authors have incorporated works from the continental phenomenological tradition into readings of Malick’s films. 4 In addition to philosophical inquiry, scholars have noted how his work expresses an interest in religious matters. Authors have attended to the cosmos, 5 the Bible, 6 transcendence, 7 religious myths and saints, 8 pantheism, 9 and Asian spirituality. 10 These works make a compelling case that Malick’s films show the influence of complex philosophical sources, and they also display an interest in a potentially wide range of religious matters. While I affirm that philosophy and religion are terms appropriate to Malick’s corpus, I suggest that a particular mode of religious reflection—Christian theology—is also a term appropriate to The Tree of Life (2011). While 177

178

Naaman Wood

other scholars have attended to the intersection of Christian theology and Malick’s film, 11 I aim to extend the claim. Similar to “film as philosophy” arguments, I suggest that The Tree of Life can be understood as theological discourse, or “film as theology .” My claim proceeds in four stages. First, I suggest three theological themes that can prove helpful in reading The Tree of Life : “nature and grace,” particularly Catholic theologian Henri de Lubac’s account; “theodicy,” as the biblical book Job reflects on evil and suffering; and the scriptural practice of “disputation,” as evident in multiple retellings of creation stories. Second , after a brief summary of the film, I use de Lubac’s account of anthropology and ways of life to analyze the film’s architecture . Third, I argue that The Tree of Life performs acts of disputation, particularly in Malick’s use of Job’s theodicy to critique de Lubac’s treatment of evil and suffering. Furthermore, the film’s retelling of the creation story offers its own disputation to Job’s ending. Finally, by drawing on conversations regarding the relationship of film to philosophy, I argue that The Tree of Life should be understood as theological discourse that can also contribute to conversations outside of theology. The film’s insight regarding “affect” has the potential to affirm and expand upon conversations about the “ontology of interrelationality” with feminist and Indigenous philosophers. NATURE AND GRACE, THEODICY, AND DISPUTATIONS Within the long history of Christian reflection on nature and grace, French Jesuit priest and theologian, Cardinal Henri de Lubac, used nature and grace in two specific ways: as anthropology and ways of life. In an anthropological sense, nature describes sinful human nature. Grace names both a human orientation to God and God’s call out of sin. De Lubac affirms that humans are created or grounded in grace and experience a natural desire for God. 12 However, humanity “ cannot pursue [grace] naturally” on its own, in part, because of human sin. 13 While graced humanity possesses an allergy to sin, humans are also inextricably bound to it. 14 The human lives in a tension, a paradox, or an ambiguity, caught between nature and grace. As a result, humans can only experience grace when God calls humanity out of nature into grace. The theologian also describes nature and grace as heterogeneous ways of life and insists that God uses eschatological transformation to bring the human completely from the way of nature into grace. 15 Nature, as a way of life, expresses how humans fashion a self-defeating order of self-sufficiency and absolute mastery. 16 Nature creates a self-made order where the self is the “center” and the “final reason” for all things. 17 With the self at the center, de Lubac suggests that humans attempt to create an autonomous, self-sufficient self, dependent on no one else. Humans also aim to become the “absolute

Disputing Henri de Lubac’s Nature and Grace and Job’s Ending

179

master over nature” and the world around them. 18 Inside of this way of life, he argues, humans become victims of the order they created, and the way of nature eventually becomes a self-defeating way of life. 19 Because sinful humans construct the order of nature against the order of grace, “a heterogeneity [exists] between two orders of being.” 20 The way of grace, by contrast, describes a blessed life attached to God and to God’s ultimate, eschatological reality. De Lubac uses terms like “beatitude” (or blessing) and “union with God” to describe a graced life. 21 He suggests that the blessed human lives a life of humility, both a pouring one’s self out for others and a radical dependence upon or openness to others. 22 Additionally, a grace lived can only be “explained . . . by love,” 23 or a desire for another. 24 If nature desires selfsufficiency and absolute mastery as means of self-centeredness, love and humility express an other-centeredness, a non-destructive embrace of the other. The transformation from the way of nature into grace is a partial or incomplete process in the human’s lifetime, but one, de Lubac argues, that will become complete in God’s final, eschatological future, 25 when God will transform the old heaven and earth into new heaven and earth. 26 In that final moment, humanity will also be finally and completely transformed. The new human will find that the “ocean of being is the ocean of liberty,” for God “is also the ocean of love. He [God] is love.” 27 In addition to de Lubac’s account of nature and grace, theodicy is also a biblical theme appropriate to The Tree of Life. Philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz coined the term “theodicy,” comprised of theos (or God) and dike (or justice). In his 1709 text, Theodicy, Leibniz sought to defend God’s goodness and mercy in the face of suffering. In contrast, the Bible takes up so-called theodicy as a communicative event addressed to God; for example, in the complaints of the psalmist or the lamentations of Jeremiah. 28 The book of Job is, perhaps, the most notable biblical account on suffering. The book begins with Job as a wealthy, blameless, God worshipper; however, in one day, the God whom Job worships allows for his children, his livestock, and his servants all to die. He also becomes infected with terrible sores on his body. Poetic speeches between Job and his friends comprise the majority of the book. Job’s friends try to explain why Job suffered, but Job thwarts every attempt, maintains his blamelessness, and continually questions God. At the end of the book, God finally arrives and speaks to Job, not with answers to Job’s queries but with God’s own set of questions, which situates Job’s weakness against God’s power. “I will question you. . . . Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” 29 While the book concludes with the return of Job’s fortunes, it offers no explanation concerning his suffering. Finally, the biblical practice of disputation as evidenced in creation stories proves helpful in understanding The Tree of Life as a theological work. In using the word “dispute,” biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann describes the underlying structure of the Bible as a metaphorical courtroom trial. Like a

180

Naaman Wood

trial, portions of the Bible make theological claims by way of testimonies that are “open to review” by counter-testimonies. 30 Brueggemann describes the interaction between testimonies and counter-testimonies as “dispute.” 31 Jewish scholar Michael Fishbane makes a similar observation. While not employing the term “dispute,” he examines the manner in which biblical authors and scribes interpreted received texts. Like Brueggemann, Fishbane describes scripture as a collection of voices, “complexly compacted of [received] teachings and their subversion, of [received] rules and their extension, of [received] topoi and their revision.” 32 Taken together, the Jewish Scriptures can be understood as a dispute that preserves vital matters of theological importance in the assembly of multiple agendas and points of view. The final form of the Bible constitutes a record of those disputations. While there are numerous creation stories in the Bible, a brief account of a few passages should suffice to illustrate how dispute can take shape. On his comparative reading of Genesis 1 and Proverbs 8, biblical studies scholar George Landes claims that Genesis 1 portrays creation primarily in terms of good ordering. 33 Old Testament scholar John Painter adds detail to the notion of good ordering with the example of the creation of light. When God creates light in the midst of darkness, the good order bears a specific character: “a harmony of light and darkness.” 34 This harmony, he continues, is also reflected in the creation account in Psalm 104. The term, “the Priestly tradition,” attempts to identify the shared characteristics of Genesis 1 and Psalm 104. 35 Differing from the Priestly tradition, the creation account in Proverbs 8 reflects an alternative, Wisdom tradition. Proverbs personifies wisdom as Lady Wisdom and places her as present with God in creation. As an alternative to the Priestly tradition, Lady Wisdom rejoices and delights in creation. 36 The passage emphasizes joy rather than order or balance. 37 The creation account in John 1 responds to both traditions. Reinterpreting the Wisdom tradition, the author of John replaces Wisdom with Logos. Instead of Wisdom being present with God, it is the Logos (the divine Word) who was “with God” and “was God.” 38 Countering the Priestly tradition’s use of harmonious light and dark, John situates the light (also representing the divine Logos) against the dark (or, human sin) in conflict. “The light shines in the darkness,” the author of John writes, “and the darkness did not overcome it.” 39 The differences between these passages suggest how dispute can look: the offering of testimonies, alternative counter-testimonies, and the possible revision of both. DE LUBAC’S NATURE AND GRACE IN THE TREE OF LIFE Before turning to an analysis of the film, a summary is in order. While The Tree of Life is an immensely complicated text, I take the film to proceed in

Disputing Henri de Lubac’s Nature and Grace and Job’s Ending

181

three large movements. The beginning movement of the film introduces the main characters at various points in their lives. The film opens on the Mother as a child, and then as an adult (Jessica Chastain) married with three children. She describes the ways of nature and grace. The film then shows her a bit older, living in a different house, and learning of the death of her middle son, R.L. (Laramie Eppler). The film then turns to her oldest son as an adult, Jack (Sean Penn). He wakes on the anniversary of his brother’s death and, in his grief, he meditates on how he has come to be estranged from God. The first movement turns to its conclusion when the Mother, in lamenting R.L.’s death, asks God in voice-overs: “ Was I false to you?” “ Lord, why?” and “ Where were you?” The film sets these questions against the backdrop of the creation of the universe. The middle movement of the film centers on how 12-year-old Jack (Hunter McCracken) first experienced God’s call. This movement develops the characters and themes articulated in the beginning movement, namely the problem of suffering and the ways of nature and grace. Young Jack struggles with the evil and suffering he witnesses around him, in the experience of other children who are suffering and in the evil his Father (Brad Pitt) enacts against Jack and his family. These observations coincide with Jack’s attraction to the way of nature, for example in Jack’s sexual attraction to his neighbor and in his abuse of others. His struggle climaxes with the physical abuse of his middle brother, R.L. Jack, however, comes to know God in the forgiveness R.L. extends to him. He understands forgiveness as his first awareness of God’s call. The final movement of the film returns to adult Jack on the anniversary of his brother’s death. While he rides an elevator, Jack has an eschatological vision, one that brings resolution to his struggle to return to God and to his struggle with the death of his brother. Jack witnesses the destruction of earth and then finds himself at the ocean’s shore, gathered with those who have died. He finds his father, mother, and youngest brother and reunites them with R.L. He witnesses his mother giving R.L. back to God. Once the vision ends, Jack finds himself back in the elevator and then suddenly in front of the building in which he works. As he realizes what has happened, Jack smiles. I submit that elements of The Tree of Life ’s architecture can be explained with de Lubac’s rendering of nature and grace, particularly Jack’s anthropology and the ways of nature and grace. In the opening movement of the film, the Mother states: “ The nuns taught us there are two ways through life: the way of nature and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you will follow.” 40 The film not only assumes these orders as heterogeneous, but instantiates them in two characters, Jack’s Father and Mother respectively. The film associates grace with the Mother’s virtues and beatitude. Similar to de Lubac’s insistence that grace involves the virtues of humility and love, the Mother describes grace as that way of life that that is other-centered. By

182

Naaman Wood

way of humility, the Mother claims that grace pours itself out for others: “Grace doesn’t try to please itself. It accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepts insults and injuries.” She also exhorts her children to engage in a non-destructive embrace of the world, saying, “Love everyone. Every leaf. Every ray of light.” In a mode of humility and love, the Mother blesses others. For the boys, she marks their life with motion, playfulness, and rest. In one exemplary montage, the boys and the Mother chase each other and run across the boys’ beds. The Mother chases the boys through the yard and through fields in gratuitous play and exuberance. François Couperin’s Les Barricades Mystérieuses accompanies the montage. Because the piece deploys major tonalities, sounds in the piano’s lower register, and lilts in its rhythmic performance, it endows the visual motion with a gentleness and warmth. When the sequence finally presents the boys at rest with their mother, the music similarly comes to rest in a perfect authentic cadence (V7-I), perhaps the most reassuring harmonic conclusion in Western tonal music. The film also associates the Mother with care for the marginalized. While on an outing, the boys and the Mother come upon prisoners, who are handcuffed, tired, angry, and hurt. The Mother gives one of the men a drink from her thermos. The Mother gently holds the cup to the prisoner’s mouth. The Mother is not just a blessing to the boys, but a blessing to the outcast. Humility, love, and blessedness are all not for the sake of the Mother but always for others. Of all the brothers, the film associates R.L. with the way of grace and his Mother’s virtues and blessedness. In contrast to the Mother, the film associates the way of nature with the Father. The Mother claims, “ Nature only wants to please itself. Get others to please it too. Lords it over them, to have its own way.” Throughout most of the film, the Father exemplifies not only these traits, but also those of de Lubac’s account of nature. The Father is deeply invested in achieving a life lived for himself, through self-defeating mastery and self-sufficiency. The film embodies this mastery in his unrelenting criticism and perfectionism. Throughout the film, the Father remains critical of Jack. At family meals, the Father criticizes Jack’s ineptitude at taking care of the yard, the way he speaks, when he speaks, and how he spends his time. During one meal, R.L. defends Jack against his Father criticisms. The Father abuses the family in response. He forcibly grabs Jack and R.L., locking the former in a closet and ejecting the latter from the house. While no one is physically hurt, the emotional harm is evident in the reactions of the Mother and the youngest brother, Steve (Tye Sheridan). This unbending spirit of mastery over his children might be, in part, the result of the Father’s past as a failed musician. “Don’t do like I did,” he says to Jack, “Promise me that. I dreamed of being a great musician. I let myself get sidetracked.” Related to criticism, the Father imposes perfectionism onto Jack’s character. For example, the Father tells Jack, “Toscanini

Disputing Henri de Lubac’s Nature and Grace and Job’s Ending

183

once recorded a piece sixty-five times. You know what he said when he finished? ‘It could be better.’ Think about it.” Perfection, abuse, and criticism leads Jack to question in a voice-over, “Why does he hurt us? Our Father?” Ultimately, Jack articulates how he experiences his Father, “It’s your house. You can kick me out whenever you want to,” and concludes, “You’d like to kill me.” Jack experiences his Father’s mastery over him as an expression of a desire to end Jack’s existence. The Father also displays a desire for self-sufficiency by way of fierceness, trickery, and a concern with money. To his sons, the Father actively undermines their Mother’s way of grace. “Your Mother’s naïve,” he says to his sons, “It takes fierce will to get ahead in this world.” He has also surmises, “The world lives by trickery. If you want to succeed, you can’t be too good.” In showing his sons how to fight, the Father teaches the boys self-sufficiency through fierceness and trickery. He tells them, “You act like you’re scared, you act like you’re in trouble. You don’t want to fight. You don’t want any trouble. And the minute you see him blink,” the Father punches his hand, “crack him.” A concern for money becomes the Father’s path to self-sufficiency, or as he says to “get ahead” and gain “success.” The Father praises a friend, “He owns half the real estate in town. Started out as a farmer. He built something big. Now you think he’s the fourth person of the Holy Trinity. They never talk about their money.” Aspiration moves the Father to obtain financial self-sufficiency through his own intellectual prowess. “Twentyseven patents your father has,” he tells the boys, “That means ownership. Ownership of ideas.” The purpose of these patents is to, “Get rich. You make yourself what you are. You have control of your own destiny.” The Father embarks on an extensive business trip as his means to get rich and take control. He tells the family, “I’m confident the deal is going through.” However, none of the Father’s fierceness, trickery, deals, or patents ever materialize into fiscal self-sufficiency. He is eventually faced with a troubling choice: he must lose his job or take a demotion. The humiliating choice illuminates for the Father his self-defeating way of life. He admits, “I wanted to be loved because I was great. A big man. I’m nothin’. Look at the glory around us. Trees and birds. I lived in shame. I dishonored it all and didn’t notice the glory. I’m a foolish man.” While he does not offer an apology to Jack, the Father explains the motivation for all his mistreatments as a misguided attempt to make Jack into a person formed in the way of nature. “You know Jack, all I ever wanted for you was to make you strong and grow up and be your own boss. Maybe I’ve been tough on you. I’m not proud of that.” If the way of grace represents a life lived for others in humility and love, the family experienced the Father’s way of life as a way of death. Through humiliation, the Father realized something similar. Next, much of the film’s three narrative movements can be understood with de Lubac’s anthropology, as God’s call to Jack and his ambiguous

184

Naaman Wood

relation to the ways of nature and grace. In the first movement, Jack’s has four voice-overs that point to his spiritual crisis as an adult; his voice-overs are, in effect, addressed to God from who he is estranged. The opening lines of the film belong to adult Jack: “Brother. Mother. It was they who brought me to your [God’s] door.” These opening lines suggest that Jack understands that his brother, R.L., and his Mother functioned as mediators through which Jack experienced a call to union with God. Jack continues, “How did you [God] come to me? In what shape? What disguise?” Jack’s words suggest that, as a child, he experienced God’s grace—perhaps some form of union with God—but did not fully understand it as such. Articulating his present state, Jack pines his disunion with God saying, “How did I lose you? Wandered? Forgot you?” Adult Jack believes that he no longer experiences God grace, at least not like he once did. Jack’s fourth voice-over begins the middle movement of the film, “You spoke to me through her [the Mother]. You spoke with me from the sky, the trees. Before I knew I loved you, believed in you. When did you first touch my heart?” The final question functions as the driving force of the middle movement of the film and points to the climax of that movement, when he experiences God’s grace through his brother’s forgiveness. Through the middle movement of the film, Jack feels the ambiguous pull between nature and grace, in part through his stalking of his neighbor, Mrs. Kimball (Savannah Welch), and his abuse of others. Jack first notices Mrs. Kimball as she hangs her clothes to dry. She also shows a kindness to him. She gives him a drink of water. Eventually, Jack stalks her. Outside her home, he watches her from room to room, and in the evening, he sees her in a white night gown. Later, he waits until she leaves the house. He slips in and finds the white nightgown in a drawer. He lays it on the bed and stares at it, but he soon experiences shame. He steals the nightgown and sets it adrift in a rushing river. In the midst of his shame and his Father’s abuse, Jack also abuses others. He kills a frog with the neighborhood kids and picks fights with R.L. Jack ruins one of R.L’s paintings, speaks harshly to his Mother, and then desperately wonders, “What have I started? What have I done?” and “How do I get back where they are?” to the place of blessedness his brothers and Mother inhabit. As an attempt to exert mastery over his brother, Jack convinces R.L. to engage in a trust game. He tells his brother to stick a wire coat hanger into a lamp socket. R.L. is not electrocuted and tells Jack, “I trust you.” His life of nature, however, climaxes when he abuses R.L. Having established the trust game, Jack convinces R.L. to put his finger over the barrel of a BB gun. Jack pulls the trigger, shoots his brother, and R.L. flees in pain. Voicing his lowest emotional state and his paradoxical relationship to nature and grace, Jack says in a voice-over, “What I want to do I can’t do. I do what I hate.” 41 While he desired grace (“How do I get back to where they are?”), Jack found himself inextricably bound to sin (“I do what I hate”).

Disputing Henri de Lubac’s Nature and Grace and Job’s Ending

185

Like de Lubac claims, Jack seems allergic to the sins of lustful and violent mastery of others, but he is unable to resist them. The resolution to both young Jack’s distress and adult Jack’s question, “When did you first touch my heart?” comes in the form of the forgiveness he experiences from R.L. After shooting his brother in the finger, Jack finds himself with R.L. and quietly apologizes, “I’m sorry. You’re my brother.” The moment of forgiveness is wordless and is incarnated in a gesture: R.L places his hand on Jack’s shoulder and his head. This gesture is the first time he understands God’s call to grace. In response to this forgiveness, Jack rounds off this climax in a voiceover, “What was it you [God] showed me? I didn’t know how to name you then. But I see it was you. Always you were calling me.” This moment of forgiveness answers the question, “When did you first touch my heart?” While this moment confirms God’s call to grace, it is, as de Lubac claims, an incomplete process, in light of the eschatological transformation of all things. The film reveals both incompleteness and eschaton in the final movement of the film. As the middle movement comes to an end, Jack names his incomplete processing as an ongoing struggle between nature and grace. Where R.L. most closely reflects his Mother’s way of grace, Jack self-consciously understands his proximity to his Father and the way of nature. “I’m as bad as you are,” he says to his Father, “I’m more like you than her.” Nevertheless, he concludes that his anthropology is not one-sided, “Father. Mother. Always you wrestle inside me. Always you will.” Having made this admonition, Jack wanders through a metaphorical wasteland and hovers at a doorway in the desert—God’s door to which his Mother and brother have brought him. Jack slips through the doorway, and his vision begins. He witnesses the end of the cosmos, as he prays, “Keep us, guide us, till the end of time.” Returning to the wilderness, adult Jack reaches the seashore, perhaps, as de Lubac describes, the ocean of “liberty” and “love,” who is God. A host of others soon arrive on the shore. He soon reunites with his family and engages in acts of forgiveness, instantiated in the repeated gesture of R.L.’s forgiveness and grace to him, a hand placed on another. If de Lubac’s theological treatment of nature and grace helps explain the film’s architecture, the language of counter-testimony also helps explain how The Tree of Life engages in “disputation.” DISPUTING DE LUBAC AND JOB’S ENDING While the film’s portrayal of the Father affirms that evil and suffering are a result of sinful human nature, the film offers two counter-testimonies to the implication that evil can be eliminated through attachment to grace. Noting the similarities between the teaching of the nuns in the film and de Lubac’s

186

Naaman Wood

brief account of evil and suffering, the film first offers a response to the nuns (and by extension, de Lubac). With the nuns functioning as a testimony, The Tree of Life draws inspiration from Job to offer a counter-testimony by way of underserved suffering, the priest’s sermon, and questions directed to God. Second, it responds to Job’s ending, offering another creation story. Against Job’s silence, the Mother questions God. Against Job’s account of creation as a site of joy, the film imagines creation as a site that is “full of tears.” While de Lubac only briefly addresses evil and suffering, his statements bear similarities to the teachings of the nuns, which serve as a testimony for the film. At the beginning of The Tree of Life, the Mother’s description of nature and grace includes this statement, “They [the nuns] taught us that no one who loves the way of grace ever comes to a bad end.” De Lubac’s treatment of evil and suffering is confined to only a few pages, in which he focuses primarily on a critique of Marxism and scientism’s tendency toward “totalitarian claims.” 42 In this context, humanity claims itself innocent of sin, and in so doing, perpetuates the evil it so desperately wants to eliminate. Put in terms of nature and grace, “evil and the way to deliverance from it,”—that is, the way of grace—is only possible when we, “become aware of our own sinfulness.” 43 Once aware of sin, the way of grace enables humans to come into “greater solidarity with those who have been crushed,” thereby reversing the sinful mechanisms of evil. 44 I take de Lubac’s optimism regarding grace’s power to reverse sin to correspond to the good end to which the nuns so confidently describe. I also take his “deliverance” and “solidarity” as the means by which the lover of grace might “avoid a bad end” or at least mitigate badness in the world. While, de Lubac’s language is not identical to the nuns, the optimism and means of the statements bear similarity. Therefore, I take the nuns and de Lubac together to function as testimony, as one account of evil and suffering. The film disputes the testimony of the nuns and de Lubac with a countertestimony from Job. In the same way that blameless Job suffers for no reason and receives no explanation, The Tree of Life recapitulates Job’s experience in the death of R.L. and the impact his death has on Jack and his Mother. As the Mother speaks the lines, “They [the nuns] taught us that no one who loves the way of grace ever comes to a bad end,” the camera lingers on R.L. Where Jack associates himself with his Father and the way of nature, the film associates R.L. with his Mother, as two people who exemplify love and humility. R.L., like his Mother, loves the way of grace. As the Mother finishes the line, the screen goes black, and then cuts to her reception of a telegram. R.L. has died, and the Mother enters an intense period of pain and suffering, not unlike Job. R.L. has, contrary to the position of the nuns, come to a bad end. The Mother’s attachment to the way of grace has not kept her from this bad end. “Very quickly,” as philosopher Bertha Alvarez Manninen notes, the film

Disputing Henri de Lubac’s Nature and Grace and Job’s Ending

187

“refutes” or disputes the nuns’ (and de Lubac’s) assessment on evil and suffering. 45 The disputation continues with the sermon preached at the family’s church, which takes the story of Job as its focal text. As some writers have pointed out, 46 the sermon includes quotations from Søren Kierkegaard’s Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses 47 and Augustine’s City of God, 48 and the quotations come from passages in which the authors address evil and suffering. Like the death of R.L., the sermon can be taken to speak directly to the testimony of the nuns and de Lubac. The priest says, “Job imagined he might build his nest on high—that the integrity of his behavior would protect him against misfortune.” Like the nuns and de Lubac, Job can be said to follow the way of grace. He is, like the Mother and R.L., a good person of integrity, blameless of the suffering they experience. “But, no,” the priest continues, “misfortune befalls the good as well. We can’t protect ourselves against it. We can’t protect our children.” The sermon then turns to a critique of what de Lubac might call, “union with God.” “Do you trust in God?” the priest asks, “Job, too, was close to the Lord.” While the sermon implies that union with God is laudable, intimacy with God is no guarantee that suffering will not befall the human. “The very moment everything was taken away from Job,” the priest reminds his congregants, “he knew it was the Lord who’d taken it away.” In fact, it is, as Job knows, God who brings Job suffering. The way of grace, it seems, will not keep anyone, even those most intimate with God, from suffering. In addition to the sermon, Jack and his Mother engage in Job-like questions to God. While swimming with his family, a boy drowns, and Jack watches him die. At first he wonders, “Was he [the boy] bad?” Then he sees another boy with severe burns from a house fire and changes his demeanor. Like Job, Jack places responsibility of these instances of suffering on God. “You [God] let a boy die. You let anything happen.” He ends the reflection asking, “Why should I be good if you [God] aren’t?” The Mother, too, queries about suffering, particularly the death of R.L. In a Job-like register, she asks, “Was I false to you?” She inquires directly about the purpose and proximity of God to his death, “Lord, why? Where were you? Did you know?” She also wonders if R.L.’s death signifies some change in God’s relations to humans saying, “Who are we to you?” Taken together, the death of R.L., the sermon, and these questions, serve as counter-testimony to the veracity of the earlier assertion on suffering and evil by the nuns and de Lubac, implying that their testimony cannot account for all suffering, especially R.L.’s death. The Tree of Life also offers a counter-testimony to the ending of Job. Where the book portrays creation as full of joy and Job as silent before the God who creates, The Tree of Life imagines creation as a site of mourning and a God of creation who does not silence. The epigraph to the film brings

188

Naaman Wood

the ending of Job, and the Wisdom tradition to which it is heir, into the world of the film. After Job challenges, questions, and insists on his innocence, the God who permitted Job’s sufferings finally responds to Job. God puts accusative questions to him, beginning with the one that opens the film, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? . . . When the stars sang and the sons of God shouted for joy? Job 38:4, 7.” Since Job is considered part of the Wisdom tradition that includes Proverbs, the “joy” here is consistent with the joy from Proverbs 8. While the book portrays creation as a site of joy, the emphasis is on God’s power versus Job’s weakness. God asks Job, “Have you commanded the morning since your days began, and caused the dawn to know its place?” 49 And, “Have you entered the storehouses of the snow, or have you seen the storehouses of the hail, which I have reserved for the time of trouble?” 50 Under the weight of God’s questions, Job promises silence before God, “I lay my hand on my mouth. I have spoken once . . . but I will proceed no further.” 51 When God places Job’s question in the context of creation, Job can only respond with silence. To the testimony in Job’s ending, The Tree of Life counters with creation as a site of mourning and a Mother who dares to question God at the site of creation. The film’s creation sequence begins as the Mother struggles with R.L.’s death. The screen cuts to black and fades in on a floating glimmer of light. 52 The sounds of waves and low strings accompany the image. She prays, “Lord, why? Where were you?” Her question almost certainly alludes to the film’s epigraph, God’s question to Job, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” Where Job remained silent, the Mother responds to God with her own, “Where were you?” albeit without God’s accusative inflection. She pleads as if to say, “Where were you when my son died?” After her question, the film follows the verbal link to Job with a visual one—it places her question in the context of creation, in the laying of the foundations of the earth. As the image fades out to black, a soprano sings in Latin, “lacrimosa,” literally, “full of tears.” 53 The Mother’s pleading continues, “Did you know? Who are we to you? Answer me.” Light appears and coalesces into galaxies, and as the stars come into being, a choir joins the soloist in mourning, repeating, “lacrimosa” twenty times before fading out. The film’s creation sequence takes the singing stars from the epigraph; however, the stars do not sing for joy. Creation is filled with lamentation, with weeping. The stars are “full of tears” over the death of R.L. Although creation’s lamentation comes to an end, the Mother continues. Her weeping outlasts the stars. As volcanoes erupt, the Mother pleads for God to acknowledge her and her son’s tears, “We cry to you. My soul. My son. Hear us.” Countering Job’s joy and silence, creation exists as a site “full of tears,” where a suffering human speaks. The film’s dissimilarity to the epigraph highlights the work of disputation, which I submit as potentially Christological in character. Where Job

Disputing Henri de Lubac’s Nature and Grace and Job’s Ending

189

imagines a God who silences the one who suffers, The Tree of Life imagines a God who would bring a grieving mother from Waco, Texas to the site of creation and let her challenge and question the God who creates all things. Similarly, the film imagines a creation capable of weeping along with the Mother. This counter-testimony might very well reflect a more Christological understanding of God. It is as if the film transposes the Jesus from John 11 into a cinematic enactment of Job 38. In John 11, Jesus’s friend Lazarus has died and the dead man’s sister, Mary, weeps over his death. The sight of Mary weeping so disturbs and moves Jesus that he also succumbs to tears. His weeping is such that bystanders can only surmise that Jesus must have loved Lazarus. 54 The Tree of Life imagines a God who is like this Jesus, a creator God who hears the Mother mourning over her son’s death and is, in response, “lacrimosa,” a God “full of tears.” This moment invites us to think of God’s “lacrimosa” as not only a creative and responsive act that reveals God’s character, but it asks us to consider the affective response of weeping as internal to the very being of the God who laid the foundations of the Earth. In these two ways—imagining a God who lets the wounded speak and a God who, in response, weeps—the film, I submit, offers counter-testimonies that engage in disputation. THE TREE OF LIFE AS THEOLOGY AND ITS POTENTIAL CONTRIBUTION TO PHILOSOPHY I have argued that a de Lubacian account of nature and grace can explain architectural features of The Tree of Life. Furthermore, the film not only reflects the theme, but it also offers counter-testimonies, disputing both the nuns’ and de Lubac’s account of suffering and the ending of Job. I suggest that this reading points to the film as an example of “film as theology,” and, as theology, the film has the potential to contribute to wider conversations, particularly feminists and Indigenous philosophical reflections. Before turning to the potential contribution, a bit of ground clearing is in order regarding two relationships between film and philosophy: theme and conversation; these two relationships explain how scholars might navigate the relationship between film and theology. In his book Film as Philosophy, American culture scholar Bernd Herzogenrath articulates two possible relationships between film and philosophy. 55 First, scholars can offer readings of films as illustrations of philosophical propositions. This interaction takes the form of analyzing a pre-existing philosophical theme or source that appears in films. When it comes to film and theology, this mode is quite common. Taking The Tree of Life as an example, many writers attendant to theology proceed in this thematic mode. For example, in Christopher B. Barnett’s fine essay, “Spirit(uality) in the Films of Terrence Malick,” the theologian creates

190

Naaman Wood

a composite definition of “spirit” from Scripture, the Eucharist, and other theological sources as an “absent presence” or a “present absence.” 56 With that theme established, he turns to a reading of Malick’s films, especially The Tree of Life, as embodying that understanding of the term “spirit.” Similar procedures are present in Elisa Zocchi’s brilliant insight regarding “glory” (which she takes indirectly from Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar) 57 and Peter M. Chandler Jr.’s wonderful Christological reading of the film. 58 Likewise, my own de Lubacian reading of the film traces the similarities between the theologian and The Tree of Life. 59 There are some in film and philosophy, however, who conceive of “film as philosophy,” in which philosophy is conceived of as a conversation in which films may participate. When scholars conceive analogously of “film as theology”—as a few do about The Tree of Life—they often make the same assumption. Scholars engaged in “film as philosophy” continue the tradition of philosophers Stanley Cavell and Gilles Deleuze. Working within this tradition, philosopher Stephen Mulhall submits that philosophy should not merely be imagined as discourse that deploys “logic,” “calculus,” or the “offering of reasons.” 60 Philosophy should be understood as a “critical dialogue” or conversation between proponents of various positions, a conversation that “will never end.” 61 Furthermore, when developing material to bring to the discussion, philosophers should not “permit their preconceptions” about philosophy to dictate the conversation; rather, they should allow “their experience of particular films to teach them what ethics, art, imagination, emotions and thinking might be.” 62 When scholars conceive of “film as theology,” they assume theology to also be a conversation, as several writers commenting on The Tree of Life illustrate. New Testament scholar Luke Timothy Johnson claims that the film’s performance of theology has precious little to do with the religious life of the characters. The “true theological dimension enters through the means Malick employs to subvert the traditional Jewish and Christian choice between the ‘two ways.’ ” 63 Johnson implies that the film enters a conversation about the “two ways,” by way of subversion. Humanities scholar George B. Handley uses The Tree of Life as a Christian response to certain tendencies within anthropocentric environmentalism. In this context, he submits that the film functions as “ecotheology.” 64 Handley also implies that the film counters certain assumptions within ecological conversations. I want to make explicit what Johnson and Handley imply. The Tree of Life should be thought of as theological discourse to the extent that it can participate in theological conversations. 65 I submit that my reading of The Tree of Life as offering counter-testimonies confirms its ability to make such critical contributions and demonstrates exactly how that participation takes place. The film disputes de Lubac’s account of evil and suffering and disputes the ending of Job. Which is to say, the work of offering counter-testimonies in the form of

Disputing Henri de Lubac’s Nature and Grace and Job’s Ending

191

dispute is, by definition, the work of theology; therefore, the film functions as theological discourse or “film as theology.” By way of conclusion, I suggest that this reading of The Tree of Life not only has the potential to contribute to theological conversations; as theological discourse, it also has the potential to participate in feminist and Indigenous conversations regarding the “ontology of interrelationality.” 66 Feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz wants to resist a hierarchy of being that positions the white, male, capitalist subject in a “position of superiority over others.” 67 As a means of resisting the reality of damaging hierarchies, she takes philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of “flesh” as an “inherent intertwining of subject and world.” “Flesh” is an alternative ontology, “one which supercedes the ontological distinction between the animate and the inanimate, between the animal and the human, scientist and object of investigation.” 68 If all things share “flesh,” then there is no solidified hierarchy between the human, the tree, the dinosaur, the stars, etc. Rather, all things exist in a deep network of interrelationality, which affirms each being’s implicated existence with all other beings. Indigenous reflections on ontology offer related observations. For example, Native American studies scholar Leroy Little Bear argues that “existence consists of energy. All things are animate, imbued with spirit, and in constant motion. In this realm of energy and spirit, interrelationships between all entities are of paramount importance, and space is more important than time.” 69 If all things share movement, then philosophical reflection might reject dichotomies and embrace a more holistic account of the world. Holism would trace the ways differing beings encounter each other in and through their energy, spirit, or movements. Handled with care, The Tree of Life’s theological discourse has the potential to affirm and extend these conversations with the notion of “affect.” As such, use of the film should function in a way analogous to Grosz’s use of Merleau-Ponty. Grosz both critiques the male-centric nature of MerleauPonty’s work and affirms that feminists can carefully resource ideas like “flesh.” I submit that a similar move exists with a detail of the film’s countertestimony. Particularly, the film’s “lacrimosa” posits the possibility that— against hierarchical distinctions between humans, the inanimate, and the Divine—there is an affective energy that has the potential to touch many other forms of “flesh.” Like the Mother, the movement of any person’s tears has the potential to touch not only other humans but also creation and the Divine. In fact, the film presents a reality where the Mother’s mourning spirit reaches beyond time to the space God and the stars inhabited at creation, bringing both to tears. In this more holistic register of movements, “affect” might be an insight that The Tree of Life’s theology could make to these philosophical conversations.

192

Naaman Wood

This contribution should also be made with the utmost care but done so in hopes that a new future is possible. Both feminists and Indigenous scholars rightfully contend that Christian collaboration with colonialism helped build and sustain the damaging hierarchies that Grosz and Little Bear have in mind. A similar critique can be made of Malick. While occasionally giving voice to women and people of color, Malick tends to focus on the white, male subject, and his work should be interrogated along the lines Grosz and Little Bear suggest. Indeed, American culture scholar Christine April Finley offers just such a feminist-Indigenous reading of Malick’s The New World (2005). In presenting Pocahontas (Q’orianka Kilcher) as an Indigenous woman who “willingly gave” her land to settler-colonialists for the sake of preserving romantic love, the film obscures that hierarchies of heteropatriarchy and exploitation of land were central to the colonial vision of the so-called new world. 70 “Conquest,” insists Finley, “was not all about love.” She continues, “It was (and is) a violent and ongoing attempt to engulf . . . Native lands and bodies in the colonial machine.” 71 The Tree of Life’s counter-testimony might be a way of affirming and extending Finley, Grosz, and Little Bear and might serve as a witness that Christian theology need not necessarily perpetuate in violence and destruction. Rather, the film’s “lacrimosa” gestures to the possibility that white, male Christian theology can abandon damaging hierarchies and help contribute to a new, healed social reality. NOTES 1. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film , Enlarged Edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971, 1974, 1979), xv–xvi. Kaja Silverman, “All Things Shining” in Loss: The Politics of Mourning , edited by David L. Eng and David Kazanjian (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 326. 2. Marc Furstenau and Leslie MacAvoy, “Terrence Malick’s Heideggerian Cinema: War and the Question of Being in The Thin Red Line,” in The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America, 2nd edition, edited by Hannah Patterson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 187–90. Martin Woessner, “What Is Heideggerian Cinema? Film, Philosophy, and Cultural Mobility,” New German Critique, 113 (Summer 2011), 129–57. John Rhym, “The Paradigmatic Shift in the Critical Reception of Terrence Malick’s Badlands and the Emergence of a Heideggerian Cinema,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 27 (2010): 255–66. 3. Steven Rybin, Terrence Malick and the Thought of Film (L anham MD: Lexington Books, 2012), xi, xxix. Simon Critchley, “Calm—On Terrence Malick The Thin Red Line ,” Film-Philosophy , 6 no 38 (December 2002). http://film-philosophy.com/vol6-2002/ n48critchley. Accessed May 10, 2013. Robert Sinnerbrink, “A Heideggerian Cinema? On Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line ,” Film-Philosophy , 10, no 3 (December 2006), 36. http:/ /film-philosophy.com/2006v10n3/sinnerbrink.pdf. Accessed May 10, 2013. 4. M. Gail Hamner, “Filming Reconciliation: Affect and Nostalgia in The Tree of Life ,” Journal of Religion & Film , 18, no 1 (2014):1–40. http://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/ vol18/iss1/43, accessed May 10, 2013; Julie Hamilton, “What Is This Love That Loves Us?: Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder , Kierkegaard’s Works of Love , and Jean-Luc Marion’s Phenomenology of Givenness ,” Faith and Film Baylor Symposium on Faith and Culture , Baylor University, Waco, TX, October 23–25, 2014.

Disputing Henri de Lubac’s Nature and Grace and Job’s Ending

193

5. S. Brent Plate, “Visualizing the Cosmos: Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life and Other Visions of Life in the Universe,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 80 no 2 (June 2012): 527–36. 6. Hubert Cohen, “The Genesis of Days of Heaven,” Cinema Journal, 42, no 4 (Summer 2003): 46. Gregory Allen Robbins, “ ’Aftertones of Infinity’: Biblical and Darwinian Evocations in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life and To the Wonder,” Journal of Religion & Film 20 no 1 (2016): 1–22. http://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol20/iss1/17. Accessed June 14, 2019. 7. Ron Mottram, “All Things Shining: The Struggle for Wholeness, Redemption and Transcendence in the Films of Terrence Malick,” in The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America , 2nd edition, edited by Hannah Patterson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 18. 8. Lloyd Michaels, Terrence Malick (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009) , 88, 4, 73. 9. Ben McCann, “ ’Enjoying the Scenery’: Landscape and the Fetishisation of Nature in Badlands and Days of Heaven ,” in The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America , 2nd edition, edited by Hannah Patterson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 85, 82. 10. Robert Silberman, “Terrence Malick, Landscape, and ‘What is this war in the heart of nature?” in The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America , 2nd edition, edited by Hannah Patterson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 171. 11. There has been a considerable proliferation of scholarly work that attends to themes I consider in the spirit of Christian theology and/or Christian religion in The Tree of Life. See Natasha Hay, “Cosmic Mourning: The Birth of Transcendence in Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life,” TRANS, 18 (2014), http://journals.openedition.org/trans/1065, accessed June 14, 2019; Albert Paretsky, “The Persistence of Memory: The Quest for Human Origins and Destiny in Andrey Bely’s Kotik Letaev and Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life,” New Blackfriars, 98, no 1073 (2017): 73–89; Christopher B. Barnett, “Spirit(uality) in the Films of Terrence Malick,” Journal of Religion & Film, 17 no 1 (2013): 1–29, http://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/ vol17/iss1/33, accessed June 14, 2019; Bertha Alvarez Manninen, “The Problem of Evil and Humans’ Relationship with God in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life,” Journal of Religion & Film, 17, no 1 (2013): 1-23, http://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol17/iss1/34, accessed June 14, 2019; Pat Brereton and Robert Furze, “Transcendence and The Tree of Life: Beyond the Face of the Screen with Terrence Malick, Emmanuel Levinas, and Roland Barthes,” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, 8, no 3 (2014): 329–51; Sherry Coman, “The God-Camera of Theology and Memory in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life,” Consensus, 37 no 2 (2016): 1–8, http://scholars.wlu.ca/consensus/vol37/iss2/5, accessed June 14, 2019; Peter M. Candler Jr., “The Tree of Life and the Lamb of God,” Theology and the Films of Terrence Malick, edited by Christopher B. Barnett and Clark J. Elliston (New York: Routledge, 2017), 205–217; Joshua Nunziato, “Eternal Flesh as Divine Wisdom in The Tree of Life,” Theology and the Films of Terrence Malick, edited by Christopher B. Barnett and Clark J. Elliston (New York: Routledge, 2016), 218–231. I take these pieces as identifying Christian theological themes in The Tree of Life. There are, however, only a small number of pieces that broach the possibility that Malick’s film performs theology. I will attend to some of these in the final part of this chapter. 12. Henri de Lubac, The Mystery of the Supernatural, translated by Rosemary Sheed (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1998), 110. 13. Ibid., 228. 14. Henri de Lubac, A Brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace, translated by Richard Arnandez (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1980), 128. 15. Ibid., 102, 157. Between nature and grace in this mode, de Lubac’s primary concern is grace. What I take here to represent nature is borne out the implications of: his account of modern philosophy’s desire for self-made morality, his account of human sinfulness, and a limited (but what I take as fair) mirror reading of his account of grace. 16. Ibid., 59, 95, 196. 17. Ibid., 263. This language comes from one of the Appendices to De Lubac’s A Brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace. The majority of the Appendices address technical matters

194

Naaman Wood

regarding his theory of nature and grace, many of which intersect with Vatican II. Supporters of de Lubac often read portions of Vatican II as largely vindicating his theory. This quotation comes from a speech Pope Paul IV delivered at the conclusion of Vatican II, a speech which some Catholics criticize and a speech which de Lubac defends in the Appendix. The language Paul IV uses here bears similarity to the manner in which de Lubac discussed modern philosophy. De Lubac claims that modern philosophies resist Christian humility (which I mention below) and aim to “invent the world” and create human “values out of nothing.” Ibid., 59. While de Lubac restricts his own discussion of self-made orders to philosophers, his defense of Paul IV’s language here suggests, I think, that careful generalization is not out of order when reading de Lubac generously and charitably. 18. Ibid., 196. 19. Ibid., 263. 20. Ibid., 119. 21. De Lubac, Mystery , 198. 22. De Lubac, Brief, 59. 23. De Lubac, Mystery, 229. 24. Ibid., 167, 169, 235. De Lubac never clearly defines love in relation to nature and grace. These descriptors are suggestive of what he assumes when he writes about love. 25. De Lubac, Brief , 82. 26. Ibid., 81–84. As theologian Joseph S. Flipper rightly notes, de Lubac never developed a full-blown eschatological theology. Rather, the eschatology is assumed and implied throughout his theological corpus. For more on this implication in de Lubac’s nature and grace theology, see particularly Joseph S. Flipper, “Eschatology in the Theology of the Supernatural,” in Between Apocalypse and Eschaton: History and Eternity in Henri de Lubac (Minneapolis MN: Fortress Press, 2015), 257–300. 27. De Lubac, Mystery , 228. 28. While space prohibits a full exploration of this topic, Sweeney’s Reading the Hebrew Bible after the Shoah: Engaging Holocaust Theology offers a biblical approach. While he never uses the term theodicy, his work maps the various ways in which biblical characters engage God and others regarding evil and suffering. Where traditional theodicies often abstract suffering from the actual lives of those who suffer, Sweeney’s account of the Bible points in the opposite, more particular direction. See Marvin A. Sweeney, Reading the Hebrew Bible after the Shoah (Minneapolis MN: Fortress Press, 2008). 29. Job 38:3–4 NRSV. 30. Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis MN: Fortress, 1997), xvi. 31. Ibid. 32. Michael Fishbane, The Garments of Torah: Essays in Biblical Hermeneutics (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1989), 18. 33. George M. Landes, “Creation Tradition in Proverbs 8:22–31 and Genesis 1,” in A Light unto My Path: Old Testament Studies in Honor of Jacob M. Myers, edited by Howard N. Bream, Ralph D. Heim, and Carey A. Moore (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1974), 282. 34. John Painter, “Rereading Genesis in the Prologue of John,” in Neotestamentica et Pilonica: Studies in Honor of Peder Borgen, edited by David E. Aune and Torrey Seland, Jerl Henning Ulrichsen (Boston: Brill, 2003), 195. 35. Yung-Suk Kim, “A Lesson from Studies of Source Criticism: Contradicting Stories and Humble Diversity in Creation Stories (Gen 1-2),” SBL Forum (Sept 2007).http://sbl-site.org/ Article.aspx?ArticleID=728. Accessed June 14, 2019. 36. Proverbs 8:30–31 NRSV. 37. Landes, “Creation Tradition,” 289. 38. John 1:1 NRSV. See John Levinson, Filled with the Sprit (Grand Rapids MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2009), 399. 39. John 1:5 NRSV. See Painter, “Rereading Genesis,” 196. 40. The Tree of Life, dir. by Terrence Malick (Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2011).

Disputing Henri de Lubac’s Nature and Grace and Job’s Ending

195

41. This line likely references Romans 7:15, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (NRSV). 42. De Lubac, Brief, 145. 43. De Lubac, Mystery, 214. Italics added. 44. De Lubac, Brief, 139. 45. Manninen, “The Problem of Evil,” 4. 46. “Malick’s Quotations of Augustine and Kierkegaard,” Any Eventuality, April 19, 2012, http://anyeventuality.wordpress.com/2012/04/19/malicks-quotations-of-augustine-and-kirkegaard. Accessed May 13, 2013. Nicholas Olson, “They Who See God’s Hand: The Tree of Life as an Upbuilding Discourse,” Filmwell @ The Other Journal, May 11, 2012. http://theotherjournal.com/filmwell/2012/05/11/they-who-see-gods-hand-the-tree-of-life-as-an-upbuildingdiscourse. Accessed May 13, 2013. 47. Søren Kierkegaard, Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, Kierkegaard’s Writings V, edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 121. This discourse takes as its focal text Job 1:20–21, “Then Job arose, and tore his robe, and shaved his head, and fell upon the ground, and worshiped, saying: Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return; the Lord gave, and the Lord took away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” Ibid., 109. 48. Saint Augustine, City of God, translated by Marcus Dods (New York: The Modern Library, 1993), 676. 49. Job 38:12 NRSV. 50. Job 38:22–23 NRSV. 51. Job 40:4–5 NRSV. 52. The light sequences are passages from light artist Thomas Wilfred’s lumia composition, “Opus 161.” See Gregory Zinman, “Dept. of Optics: Lumia,” The New Yorker (June 27, 2011), 25–26. 53. This piece is from the “Lacrimosa” movement of film composer Zbigniew Preisner’s Requiem for My Friend. It is his only concert work and was written for his friend and long-time collaborator, Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski. Kieślowski died in 1996. 54. John 11:32–36 NRSV. 55. Bernd Herzogenrath, “Introduction: Film and/as Philosophy: An Elective Affinity?” in Film as Philosophy, edited by Bernd Herzogenrath (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), xi–xii. 56. Barnett, “Spirit(uality),” 17. 57. Elisa Zocchi, “Terrence Malick Beyond Nature and Grace: Song to Song and the Experience of Forgiveness,” Journal of Religion & Film, 22 no 2 (2018): 7 and n11. http://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol22/iss2/3. Accessed on June 19, 2019. 58. Candler, “The Tree of Life,” 214. 59. The de Lubacian similarities are not shared with others in the tradition, including Augustine or Neo-Thomist Catholic thought. Chandler also notes that Malick’s conception of nature and grace does not correspond to that of Aquinas. Chandler submits, “Grace presupposes nature,” which many take as a de Lubacian insight on the nature and grace discussion. Against Neo-Thomists, de Lubac argues that nature does not exist independent of God’s grace. See Candler, “The Tree of Life,” 212. 60. Stephen Mulhall, On Film, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2001), 140. 61. Ibid., 145. 62. Ibid. 63. Luke Timothy Johnson, “‘The Use of Cinema to Do Theology:’ Seeing as God Sees: Malick’s The Tree of Life,” Commonweal, (December 18, 2013), http://commonwealmagazine.org/use-cinema-do-theology, accessed June 14, 2019. While Johnson makes the claim, on my reading, he does not unpack precisely how the film subverts the tradition. Although I would quibble with the term “subvert,” my work in this essay can be read as an extension of his basic assertion, detailing how the film offers a counter-testimony to parts of the Christian tradition of nature and grace. It must also be said that the “two ways” tradition appears early in the Christian tradition without reference to nature and grace. See for example the account of the “two ways” in the early Christian document The Didache.

196

Naaman Wood

64. George B. Handley, “Faith, Sacrifice, and the Earth’s Glory in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life,” Angelaki, 19, no 4 (2014): 79. 65. This conversational model bears similarities to Christopher Deacy’s more general account of theology and film in dialogue. He submits that films can enable us “to (re)-examine, critique, and challenge the efficacy of the works of a number of prominent twentieth-century theologians.” Christopher Deacy, “From Bultmann to Burton, Demythologizing the Big Fish: The Contribution of Modern Christian Theologians to the Theology-Film Conversation,” in Reframing Theology and Film: A New Focus for an Emerging Discipline, edited by Robert Johnston (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2007), 239. He uses Tim Burton’s film Big Fish (2003) to critique theologian Rudolf Bultmann’s demythologization of Scripture. He also develops theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s notion of the “world come of age” with a reading of Christmas with the Kranks (2004). Deacy insists that these are not illustrations. “Films themselves can facilitate quite sophisticated theological activity.” Ibid. 66. I learned this language of interrelatedness from feminist theologian Julie Morris. Julie Morris, personal conversation, November 11, 2019. For her contribution to the conversation, see her forthcoming Salvation from Self-Improvement: A Feminist Theology (PhD diss., Duke University, 2020). 67. Elizabeth Grosz, “Merleau-Ponty and Irigaray in the Flesh,” Thesis Eleven 36 (1993): 54. 68. Ibid. Maintains original spelling. 69. Leroy Little Bear, “Jagged Worldview Colliding,” in Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision, edited by Marie Battiste (Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press), 78. 70. Christine April Finley, Decolonizing Sexualized Cultural Images of Native Peoples: ‘Bringing Sexy Back’ to Native Studies (PhD diss., The University of Michigan, 2012), 118. 71. Ibid., 130.

REFERENCES Augustine. City of God, translated by Marcus Dods, New York: The Modern Library, 1993. Barnett, Christopher B. “Spirit(uality) in the Films of Terrence Malick,” Journal of Religion & Film, 17 no. 1 (2013). http://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol17/iss1/33. Accessed June 14, 2019. Brereton, Pat and Robert Furze. “Transcendence and The Tree of Life: Beyond the Face of the Screen with Terrence Malick, Emmanuel Levinas, and Roland Barthes,” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, 8, no. 3 (2014). Brueggemann, Walter. Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy, Minneapolis MN: Fortress, 1997. Candler, Peter M., Jr. “The Tree of Life and the Lamb of God,” Theology and the Films of Terrence Malick, edited by Christopher B. Barnett and Clark J. Elliston, New York: Routledge, 2017. Cavell, Stanley. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, Enlarged Edition, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971, 1974, 1979. Cohen, Hubert . “The Genesis of Days of Heaven ,” Cinema Journal , 42, no. 4 (Summer 2003). Coman, Sherry. “The God-Camera of Theology and Memory in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life,” Consensus, 37 no. 2 (2016): 1–8. http://scholars.wlu.ca/consensus/vol37/iss2/5. Accessed June 14, 2019. Critchley, Simon . “Calm—On Terrence Malick The Thin Red Line ,” Film-Philosophy , 6 no. 38 (Dec 2002). http:// film-philosophy.com/vol6-2002/n48critchley . A ccessed May 10, 2013. Deacy, Christopher. “From Bultmann to Burton, Demythologizing the Big Fish: The Contribution of Modern Christian Theologians to the Theology-Film Conversation,” in Reframing Theology and Film: A New Focus for an Emerging Discipline, edited by Robert Johnston, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2007.

Disputing Henri de Lubac’s Nature and Grace and Job’s Ending

197

Finley, Christine April. Decolonizing Sexualized Cultural Images of Native Peoples: ‘Bringing Sexy Back’ to Native Studies, PhD diss., The University of Michigan, 2012. Fishbane, Michael. The Garments of Torah: Essays in Biblical Hermeneutics, Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1989. Flipper, Joseph S. “Eschatology in the Theology of the Supernatural,” in Between Apocalypse and Eschaton: History and Eternity in Henri de Lubac , Minneapolis MN: Fortress Press, 2015. Furstenau , Marc and Leslie MacAvoy . “Terrence Malick’s Heideggerian Cinema: War and the Question of Being in The Thin Red Line ,” in The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America , 2nd edition, edited by Hannah Patterson , New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Grosz, Elizabeth. “Merleau-Ponty and Irigaray in the Flesh,” Thesis Eleven 36 (1993). Hamilton, Julie. “What Is This Love That Loves Us?: Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder , Kierkegaard’s Works of Love , and Jean-Luc Marion’s Phenomenology of Givenness ,” Faith and Film Baylor Symposium on Faith and Culture , Baylor University, Waco, TX, October 23–25, 2014. Hamner, M. Gail . “Filming Reconciliation: Affect and Nostalgia in The Tree of Life ,” Journal of Religion & Film , 18, no. 1 (2014). http://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol18/iss1/43. Accessed May 10, 2013. Handley, George B. “Faith, Sacrifice, and the Earth’s Glory in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life,” Angelaki, 19, no. 4 (2014). Hay, Natasha. “Cosmic Mourning: The Birth of Transcendence in Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life,” TRANS, 18 (2014). http://journals.openedition.org/trans/1065. Accessed June 14, 2019. Herzogenrath, Bernd. “Introduction: Film and/as Philosophy: An Elective Affinity?” in Film as Philosophy, edited by Bernd Herzogenrath, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Johnson, Luke Timothy. “ ’The Use of Cinema to Do Theology:’ Seeing as God Sees: Malick’s The Tree of Life,” Commonweal, (December 18, 2013). http://commonwealmagazine.org/ use-cinema-do-theology. Accessed June 14, 2019. Kierkegaard, Søren. Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, Kierkegaard’s Writings V, edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton University Press, 1990. Kim, Yung-Suk. “A Lesson from Studies of Source Criticism: Contradicting Stories and Humble Diversity in Creation Stories (Gen 1–2),” SBL Forum (Sept 2007).http://sbl-site.org/ Article.aspx?ArticleID=728. Accessed June 14, 2019. Landes, George M. “Creation Tradition in Proverbs 8:22–31 and Genesis 1,” in A Light unto My Path: Old Testament Studies in Honor of Jacob M. Myers, edited by Howard N. Bream, Ralph D. Heim, and Carey A. Moore, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1974. Levinson, John. Filled with the Sprit, Grand Rapids MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2009. Little Bear, Leroy. “Jagged Worldview Colliding,” in Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision, edited by Marie Battiste, Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press. de Lubac, Henri. A Brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace, translated by Richard Arnandez, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1980. ———. The Mystery of the Supernatural, translated by Rosemary Sheed, New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1998. “Malick’s Quotations of Augustine and Kierkegaard,” Any Eventuality, April 19, 2012, http:// anyeventuality.wordpress.com/2012/04/19/malicks-quotations-of-augustine-and-kirkegaard. Accessed May 13, 2013. Manninen, Bertha Alvarez. “The Problem of Evil and Humans’ Relationship with God in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life,” Journal of Religion & Film, 17, no. 1 (2013). http:// digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol17/iss1/34. Accessed June 14, 2019. McCann, Ben . “ ’Enjoying the Scenery’: Landscape and the Fetishisation of Nature in Badlands and Days of Heaven ,” in The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America , 2nd edition, edited by Hannah Patterson , New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Michaels, Lloyd . Terrence Malick , Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009.

198

Naaman Wood

Morris, Julie . Salvation from Self-Improvement: A Feminist Theology, PhD diss., Duke University, 2020. Mottram, Ron . “All Things Shining: The Struggle for Wholeness, Redemption and Transcendence in the Films of Terrence Malick,” in The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America , 2nd edition, edited by Hannah Patterson , New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Mulhall, Stephen. On Film, 2nd ed., New York: Routledge, 2001. The New World. Directed by Terrence Malick. Burbank: New Line Cinema, 2005. Nunziato, Joshua. “Eternal Flesh as Divine Wisdom in The Tree of Life,” Theology and the Films of Terrence Malick, edited by Christopher B. Barnett and Clark J. Elliston, New York: Routledge, 2016. Olson, Nicholas. “They Who See God’s Hand: The Tree of Life as an Upbuilding Discourse,” Filmwell @ The Other Journal, May 11, 2012. http://theotherjournal.com/filmwell/2012/05/ 11/they-who-see-gods-hand-the-tree-of-life-as-an-upbuilding-discourse. Accessed May 13, 2013. Painter, John. “Rereading Genesis in the Prologue of John,” in Neotestamentica et Pilonica: Studies in Honor of Peder Borgen, edited by David E. Aune, Torrey Seland, and Jerl Henning Ulrichsen, Boston: Brill, 2003. Paretsky, Albert. “The Persistence of Memory: The Quest for Human Origins and Destiny in Andrey Bely’s Kotik Letaev and Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life,” New Blackfriars, 98, no. 1073 (2017). Plate, S. Brent. “Visualizing the Cosmos: Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life and Other Visions of Life in the Universe,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 80 no. 2 (June 2012). Rhym, John. “The Paradigmatic Shift in the Critical Reception of Terrence Malick’s Badlands and the Emergence of a Heideggerian Cinema,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 27 (2010). Robbins, Gregory Allen. “ ’Aftertones of Infinity’: Biblical and Darwinian Evocations in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life and To the Wonder,” Journal of Religion & Film 20 no. 1 (2016). http://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol20/iss1/17. Accessed June 14, 2019. Rybin, Steven . Terrence Malick and the Thought of Film , L anham MD: Lexington Books, 2012. Silberman, Robert . “Terrence Malick, Landscape, and ‘What Is This War in the Heart of Nature?” in The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America , 2nd edition, edited by Hannah Patterson , New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Silverman, Kaja . “All Things Shining” in Loss: The Politics of Mourning , edited by David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Sinnerbrink, Robert . “A Heideggerian Cinema? On Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line ,” Film-Philosophy , 10, no. 3 (December 2006). http://film-philosophy.com/2006v10n3/sinnerbrink.pdf. Accessed May 10, 2013. Sweeney, Marvin A. Reading the Hebrew Bible after the Shoah , Minneapolis MN: Fortress Press, 2008. The Tree of Life. Directed by Terrence Malick. Los Angeles: Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2011. Woessner, Martin. “What Is Heideggerian Cinema? Film, Philosophy, and Cultural Mobility,” New German Critique, 113 (Summer 2011). Zinman, Gregory. “Dept. of Optics: Lumia,” The New Yorker (June 27, 2011). Zocchi, Elisa. “Terrence Malick Beyond Nature and Grace: Song to Song and the Experience of Forgiveness,” Journal of Religion & Film, 22 no. 2 (2018): 7 and n11. http://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol22/iss2/3. Accessed on June 19, 2019.

Chapter Eleven

The Gifts of Death Visions of Sacrifice in the Worlds of Terrence Malick Vernon W. Cisney

Since his return to filmmaking two decades ago, the films of Terrence Malick have each, in some way, reflected deeply upon the ways in which human beings make meaning of suffering—whether in the chaos and destruction of war, the loss of cultural innocence and the human estrangement from the natural world, the death of a child, the anemia of religious faith in the face of seemingly interminable anguish, or the betrayal of marital infidelity. Each film explores what Hubert Dreyfus and Camilo Salazar Prince aptly refer to as “world collapse”—”the loss of what gives meaning to one’s world” 1 —as well as the question of the restoration of that meaning; and each film holds out the earnest hope that such restoration is possible. Each of Malick’s posthiatus films poses a question: In the face of this, is it still possible to say “yes” to life? And each film (not to say every character) ultimately answers in the affirmative. Given this hope, I have argued elsewhere that Malick espouses in his films (in particular in The Tree of Life, 2011) an affirmative worldview, a philosophical outlook that, as I define it, embraces the beauty and glory of life in its immanent entirety, of which suffering and death are necessary components. 2 In The Tree of Life, for instance, the driving question is, is it possible to restore sense to the world, to restore the world itself, when one has lost a child? The film answers this question in the affirmative when, in the symbolic gesture of the release of her son, Mrs. O’Brien’s loss ceases to be passive, and becomes active, and she indeed answers “yes” to that question: “I give him to you; I give you my son.” 3 Mrs. O’Brien (Jessica Chastain) affirms her release, in order to restore a sense to her world. But it also seems that Malick pushes the envelope on this philosophical issue, progressively making the primary questions in his films not only more 199

200

Vernon W. Cisney

relatable, but by that very relatability, also more difficult to respond to affirmatively. This is certainly the case in his 2015 film, Knight of Cups. The film focuses on a spiritual or philosophical crisis on the part of a Hollywood screenwriter named Rick (Christian Bale). Between the suicide of Rick’s brother and the strained relationships with his father and surviving brother, Rick indulges in the Bacchanalian life of the Hollywood aesthete, seeking to quell his anguish through sensuous experiences, which only produces the converse effect of intensifying Rick’s perceptions of his own internal emptiness. He drifts through various types of erotic relationships, ranging from the purely physical to the well-worn trope of the unhappy marriage. But none of these relationships endows his life with any significance, as they are merely attempts at physical or emotional anesthesia meant to superficially occlude a crisis that stems from a much deeper part of Rick’s nature; as Della (Imogen Poots), one of his love interests, says to him, “You don’t want love, you want a love experience” 4 —the surface effect of emotional gratification without the transformative depth and commitment of the real thing. Unable to block out his brokenness through erotic means, Rick suffers. This suffering is the philosophical focus of the film. In one of the final soliloquies in the film, Father Zeitlinger (Armin Mueller-Stahl) addresses the theme of suffering in the following way: “To suffer binds you to something higher than yourself, higher than your own will. Takes you from the world, to find what lies beyond it. We are not only to endure patiently the troubles He sends. We are to regard them as gifts, as gifts more precious than the happiness we wish for ourselves.” 5 The driving question of Knight of Cups is, Is it possible to say “yes” to this? Notice, this question—is it possible to say thank you for our sufferings?— ups the ante of Malick’s project significantly. It is one thing to hold the view—as in The Tree of Life—that suffering and death do not constitute defeating objections to the beauty and value of life—that it is still possible and desirable to aim at the affirmation of life itself, of which suffering and death are components, thereby restoring the sense to the world. But it is another thing entirely to say that we ought not merely slog through our periods of suffering, nor even simply seek to overcome them or transfigure them into joys, but rather, that we are to be thankful for our sufferings, in themselves. As they say, the devil seems to be in the details, which is to say that the difference between these two types of affirmation is in the extent to which the individual moments and experiences of suffering themselves are to be affirmed. While both edicts can be seen as embracing what I have called an affirmative worldview, it seems as though the Tree of Life version points toward what we might call a secondary affirmation of suffering—one that affirms suffering only insofar as it is a necessary and inextricable component of life itself. The version of the affirmative worldview offered by Father Zeitlinger in Knight of Cups, on the other hand, points toward a primary

The Gifts of Death

201

affirmation of suffering, expressing gratitude for the suffering itself. This seems to constitute a difference in degree so great as to amount to a difference in kind. Admittedly, while this primary version of the affirmative worldview is certainly more robust, its robustness concomitantly makes this type of affirmation seem utterly impossible. How, after all, are we to be thankful for our suffering? This chapter will therefore analyze the connection between these two modes of the affirmative worldview. It seems that what unites the secondary affirmation found in The Tree of Life and the more robust primary affirmation found in Knight of Cups is a meditation on death, and in particular, on the notion of death as gift. That is to say, these two films offer profound reflections on various modes of the sacrificial. Furthermore, when we analyze the structure of the sacrificial, we will discover that without this seemingly impossible primary affirmation, the secondary affirmation is not possible. My exploration will hinge on the double genitive in the phrase, “the gifts of death.” I will argue in this paper that the philosophical path outlined between The Tree of Life and Knight of Cups moves from the sense of death offered as a gift, to the sense of gifts made possible or given by a certain kind of death—the kenotic 6 self-emptying described by the Christian apostle, Saint Paul, as a dying of the self. 7 The structure of this kenosis demands that we willingly and joyfully sacrifice every temporal, impermanent aspect of our lives, everything that matters to us, which thereby enables the everrenewed receiving of the temporal. This sacrificial act enables the potential saturation of each moment with grace. We can only receive as a gift, with gratitude, what we do not already possess as an entitlement. And thus, our comportment toward the temporal must undergo an ongoing act of sacrifice. My touchstone thinker for this analysis will be the Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard. 8 THE DOUBLE MOVEMENT: INFINITY AND TEMPORALITY For the structure of the sacrificial, we will look to Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. 9 Besides being arguably the cornerstone text of twentieth century existentialism, Fear and Trembling is likely the single most famous extended philosophical analysis of the Hebrew story of the Akedah—Abraham’s sacrifice of his son, Isaac. 10 According to the biblical account, Abraham—the credited progenitor of the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions—had been called forth from his family and from his homeland by the Hebrew God Yahweh, and had been instructed to settle in the land of Canaan in the ancient Near East. Numerous times along the way, Yahweh or one of his emissaries promises to Abraham that his descendants will one day constitute a powerful nation. It is furthermore promised that the lineage of these descendants will

202

Vernon W. Cisney

come from a child to be born to Abraham and his wife, Sarah. This promise is met with skepticism bordering on mockery by both Abraham and Sarah, as Sarah is not only infertile (and has been her entire life), but she is also drawing close to a hundred years old, and is hence well past child-bearing years. But the scriptural account claims that Sarah does in fact give birth to a son, naming him “Yitzak” or “Isaac,” a word with etymological origins in the Hebrew word for “laughter,” commemorating the laughter of Sarah and Abraham. The next significant event recounted in the life of Isaac is the Akedah, the moment when Abraham offers him up as a sacrifice. In the Genesis account, God says to Abraham, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.” 11 It is crucial to recognize the magnitude of this demand on the part of God. Not only does it require of Abraham that he sacrifice his son (which would be horrifying under any circumstances), but moreover, Isaac had been conceived under miraculous circumstances, based upon a promise made to Abraham and Sarah by Yahweh himself—the promise that Isaac was to be the wellspring of God’s people. As Kierkegaard says, “Thus everything was lost, which is even more frightful than if it had never happened!” 12 Nevertheless, in response to this command, Abraham, along with two of his servants and Isaac, saddle up and head toward Moriah, a three-day journey, according to the story. When they approach the site, Abraham and Isaac proceed up the hillside alone, where Abraham builds the altar, binds Isaac to it, and extends his hand—bearing the knife—to commit the sacrificial act (of murdering his son). But at the decisive moment, an angel appears to Abraham, saying, “Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.” 13 At this point, Abraham sees a ram tangled in a thicket, and offers the ram as a substitute sacrifice. Afterwards, Yahweh once more affirms to Abraham that his descendants will be “as numerous as the stars of heaven,” 14 that they will be blessed and powerful, the envy of other nations. This story raises as many questions as it answers. Yahweh does not explain in the story why such a horrifying trial is demanded of Abraham, and Abraham, interestingly enough, does not ask. It seems strange to modern sensibilities that a God who purportedly knows the hearts and minds of human beings would require a test of fidelity, especially one so agonizing for the examinee who has already sacrificed a great deal, leaving his home and his family, for this god. The story recounts no objections on the part of Abraham, unlike the Exodus accounts of the calling of Moses, and in no way addresses any response or any lingering effects on the part of Isaac. It is not clear on the basis of the story whether Abraham at some point told Isaac what he was planning to do and Isaac willingly submitted, or if Abraham overpow-

The Gifts of Death

203

ered and forcibly bound Isaac. The former seems difficult to accept, but the latter seems physically implausible, given that Abraham is well past the age of one hundred years old by this point. Furthermore, there is no discussion of any fallout from the sacrificial act, as no more is said of the later relationship between Abraham and Isaac. Thus, it is an extremely difficult story to digest. Nevertheless, some version 15 of this story is the cornerstone of the three major, monotheistic religions. Kierkegaard’s interest in this story lies in its human dimensions, which are almost always overlooked, he argues, in modern recountings. According to Kierkegaard, post-Enlightenment thought has, arguably for good reasons, attempted to completely rationalize religious belief and practice, but in so doing has sterilized it of its “passion.” 16 Modernity, at least by its proclamations, honors “faith” and as such, many modern religious leaders and even politicians honor Abraham, if only in word. 17 Yet in honoring Abraham’s act of sacrifice, we frequently, conveniently forget the uncomfortable fact that the “ethical expression for what Abraham did is that he intended to murder Isaac.” 18 We honor a man who is, by every single existing ethical framework we hold, a murderer, and not just any ol’ run-of-the-mill murderer, mind you; Abraham wills, in his heart, the murder of his own son. By any ethical standard, Abraham is a monster, not a hero. The Akedah is a horrifying story on multiple levels; so our tendency is to water the story down, and attenuate the horror. With the benefit of hindsight, looking at the story from the tail end, we assume that the moral is, just trust God, and everything will be alright. Abraham, however, did not have the benefit of hindsight, and as such, whatever hope Abraham might have had—hope that everything was going to somehow turn out all right—was nothing short, Kierkegaard says, of “madness” 19 —rooted in a decision made in the face of excruciating existential anxiety, an anxiety that Abraham carried with him from the moment of the command to the moment of the reprieve. This anxiety abides in the structure of “double movement” 20 proper to what Kierkegaard calls the “paradox” that he associates with faith, “that there is an inwardness that is incommensurable with the outer, an inwardness that, mind you, is not identical with that first one [of the ethical sphere] but is a new inwardness.” 21 This inwardness is reached only by way of the sacrifice. That it is a sacrifice requires the dimension of faith, without which the sacrificial act is merely murder or termination (i.e., not sacrifice). The sacrificial also entails that the immolator love the offering absolutely. One can easily dispense with an object of disregard or of lukewarm affection. But strictly speaking, for the act to be a sacrifice requires love—the loss, whether perceived or real, of what one relinquishes in the offering must hurt. Most obviously, the sacrifice further requires the renunciation of the love object. Then finally (and most uniquely), on Kierkegaard’s account, the faith aspect

204

Vernon W. Cisney

entails the belief in the return of the love object—the hope of a return, not in some future existence, but rather, in this life. This final element is likely the most difficult to accept, particularly for many of those individuals who would consider themselves persons of faith. Why, after all, must faith be for this life, especially when so many forms of religious thought emphasize the next life? According to Kierkegaard, placing one’s emphasis on the afterlife amounts to a paltry, anemic understanding of the notion of faith, in that there is not really a hope of return, but rather, the belief in the logically entailed continuation of the banal, but in the immaterial realm. On this paltry understanding of faith, Kierkegaard holds, the immolator is merely removing the love object from a physical world to which it does not properly belong, and sending it to a spiritual world where it does properly belong. Moreover, the individual is, in a sense, maintaining some conviction of power to regain that which one has sacrificed, insofar as one could, presumably, remove themselves from the world at any given moment, at which point the immolator would, through a voluntaristic effort on their own part, regain the sacrificed love object. For Kierkegaard, there is nothing miraculous about any of this. “But Abraham believed and believed for this life. To be sure, had his faith been only for a future life, he could indeed more easily have cast everything away in order to hurry out of the world to which he did not belong.” 22 On Kierkegaard’s understanding, we see the double movement identified as one of renunciation and return. Without renunciation, we remain servile, at the mercy of the transiency of temporality. Only in the mode of renunciation do we come to the awareness of the eternal: “Infinite resignation is the last stage before faith, so that whoever has not made this movement does not have faith. For only in infinite resignation do I become transparent to myself in my eternal validity, and only then can there be talk of laying hold of existence by virtue of faith.” 23 But the movement of faith is the hope for and awareness of the return of the temporal, and, this cannot be overstated, it is by virtue of this double movement—renunciation and return—that one truly gains the temporal for the first time, receiving it now as gift, rather than perceiving it as entitlement. The meaning of this gift can be illuminated by way of a quick joke. One day a spouse, bored and dispirited in their marriage, says to their partner: “Why don’t you ever do anything unexpected for me?” The partner, who prides themselves on making frequent and ongoing efforts to stoke the fires of romance in the marriage, confusedly responds, “What do you mean? I do unexpected things for you all the time! I surprise you with flowers at work; I leave you love notes in your car; I even buy you little gifts just because. I don’t understand!” To this, the complainant responds, “I know, but as my partner, I expect you to do those things!”

The Gifts of Death

205

When we live our lives with a sense of entitlement, it becomes impossible to ever truly receive anything at all. Whatever we get, we feel we are owed, and as a result, we cannot rejoice in the receiving of it, (for, after all, it is expected). Gratitude is impossible. But we suffer on account of what we do not get, because it, too, is owed to us; it, too, is expected. In the worst modes of this existential comportment, we live life blind and indifferent to the glory in our lives, and acutely aware of all of the faults and insufficiencies. The same is true when it comes to those we love. Our tendency, indeed, an almost unavoidable propensity when it comes to love, is to cling, jealously and possessively, to those we love. But to the extent that the beloved becomes possession or entitlement, they are in that same measure not the beloved. Kierkegaard’s sacrificial structure, constituted by the ongoing double movement of renunciation and return, makes possible the continually renewed attentiveness to the upsurge of grace in one’s life, making it possible to receive our lives and our loves as gifts in every moment, as cause for joy. As Clare Carlisle writes, “Insofar as a gift is given to me it does become mine; but insofar as I continue to regard it as a gift, I continue to regard myself as someone who receives it—and receiving something is different from possessing it.” 24 It is in this way that, as Kierkegaard writes, Abraham “received Isaac more joyfully than the first time.” 25 I GIVE YOU MY SON Having now laid bare the sacrificial structure, let us see it at work in The Tree of Life. At the outset of the film, we are presented with an apparent dichotomy, one that will function throughout the remainder of the film, a distinction between the way of nature on the one hand, and the way of grace on the other: The nuns taught us there were two ways through life—the way of nature and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you’ll follow. Grace doesn’t try to please itself. Accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepts insults and injuries. Nature only wants to please itself. Get others to please it too. Likes to lord it over them. To have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it. And love is smiling through all things. They taught us that no one who loves the way of grace ever comes to a bad end. 26

We are here presented with a choice, between our nature, which we are given to understand is an expression or extension of the world of nature itself, and the way of grace. The way of nature is concerned with self-assertion, domination, and the praise and recognition of others. It is violent, deceptive, domineering, and utterly amoral. The way of nature is never satisfied with

206

Vernon W. Cisney

anything it has, ever striving for more, and as such, it fails to take notice of or express gratitude for any of the goodness in its life. The way of grace, on the other hand, loves and gives selflessly, recognizing and seeking to mirror and act as a conduit for the glory with which the world is saturated. It responds, often unreflectively and unselfconsciously, to the suffering of others. It does not seek or measure the public image of its acts of grace, never letting the left hand know what the right is doing. 27 The apparent struggle between these two ways dominates the entirety of the film. Moreover, the film blatantly tries to pull the viewer into the recognition of a clear hero and a clear villain, with Mrs. and Mr. O’Brien respectively embodying the ways of grace and of nature. Mrs. O’Brien exudes a soft, loving, good-humored demeanor throughout the film. She kisses the children lovingly on their heads each night before bed, wakes them playfully in the mornings, dances joyfully in the front yard, reads stories to them, and advises them to forgive each other and to love everyone, lest their lives flash by them, to love every leaf and every ray of light. By contrast, Mr. O’Brien (Brad Pitt) wakes the children forcefully, demands their unambiguous respect, insists that the boys owe him love, and that the children call him “father” and “sir.” He declares to the boys that their mother is “naïve” and that one cannot be too good, lest the world take advantage of them, a view signified most saliently by the fight instruction in the front yard. The lesson that Mr. O’Brien sees as most valuable to the children’s upbringing is that the world is cruel and lives by trickery, and that the only way to make something of oneself is by sheer force of will. We the viewers are meant to see this cosmic conflict—between nature and grace—in the individual person of Jack (Hunter McCracken, Sean Penn) himself who embodies the conflict between his father and mother, grace and nature, in his own person: “Mother. Father. Always you wrestle inside me. Always you will.” 28 But as I have elsewhere argued, it seems that this distinction between the ways of nature and of grace is ultimately unsustainable. Each of the purported two ways succumbs, finally, to the contamination and indiscernibility of its other. For the way of nature, this manifests in an inability to be weak, a weakness when it comes to weakness itself. The way of nature, in its purest mode, lacks the strength that it takes to be weak. This is laid out very clearly in a few key scenes in the film. First, on at least two occasions, we see Mr. O’Brien, as he is leaving the presence of his children—once in their bedroom, once in their front yard—turn to them with a look on his face as if to say something (“I love you,” perhaps), but he freezes, unable to speak, before finally resuming his path of exit. His desire to express his love (a word that we only hear Mr. O’Brien use toward himself) for his children, is evident in his bodily mannerisms, but in the end, he is unable to bring himself to do it. He is so strong that he is too weak to allow himself to be weak. The second clear example of the weakness of the way of nature is made quite explicit in

The Gifts of Death

207

Mr. O’Brien’s soliloquizing about how one becomes something great. The words he uses are: “You can’t say I can’t.” The psychological, emotional, and philosophical inability to allow oneself to express an inability is still, at the end of the day, an inability. Mr. O’Brien’s is a strength that is too weak to be weak. Something similar happens with the way of grace. It is important to note that the way of nature thrives on its own assertion of self. It seeks to manifest itself and to satisfy its desires. Strictly speaking, the way of nature has no dialectical other, nothing against which it must first define itself. The same cannot be said of the way of grace. The way of grace only posits itself as such in contradistinction to the way of nature, which is its spiritual antipode. Grace’s criticism of the way of nature is that the way of nature seeks domination in the name of self-assertion. But in point of fact, so too does the way of grace, considered in its abstract and philosophical formulation. In the name of “acceptance” and “submission,” the way of grace creates for itself—in the way of nature—an opposing force, an enemy that must be overcome. What I have called the “collapse of the two ways” in The Tree of Life occurs in two distinct moments that more or less bookend the narrative. Each putatively distinct way ultimately faces its own crisis. For Mr. O’Brien, this occurs when, despite his very best efforts as a husband, father, religious devotee, and above all else, as a worker, his plant closes, forcing him to choose between, as he says, “no job, or a transfer, to a job nobody wants.” 29 Like the biblical account of Job, a quote from which prefaces the film, Mr. O’Brien had believed that, if only he did everything right in his life, he could curry favor with God, overpower the external forces of nature, and thus, he could master fate. Despite the fact that he had never been late to or missed a day of work, despite the fact that he went to church and tithed every Sunday, his efforts at self-assertion and the mastery of the natural world ultimately collapsed, at which point he comes face to face with the way of grace: “I wanted to be loved ‘cause I was great—a big man. Now, I’m nothing. Look. The glory around. Trees. Birds. I dishonored it all and didn’t notice the glory.” 30 But Mrs. O’Brien’s way of grace meets with a similar collapse, and it is indeed this collapse in particular that structures the narrative of the film. In the opening moments of the film, as Mrs. O’Brien utters the voice-over, “I will be true to you, whatever comes,” she receives a Western Union telegram, informing her of the death of her middle child, R.L. (Laramie Eppler). It is this death that causes her “world collapse,” 31 provoking her crisis of faith, and it is this death that has forged the rupture in the older Jack’s sense of identity, and so it is this death that Jack must come to terms with. In the voice-overs that follow the news, we hear Mrs. O’Brien saying to God: “Was I false to you?” “What did you gain?” and even commanding, “Answer me.” It becomes clear through this ongoing inquiry that Mrs. O’Brien, just like Mr.

208

Vernon W. Cisney

O’Brien, had made assumptions about her ability to master fate. She has allowed herself to believe that, by being faithful to God, by living her life in accordance with the way of grace, by loving everyone, forgiving acts of wrongdoing, and appreciating the glory in the world around, she could somehow stop the natural order of things, that the causal order of the cosmos could somehow be suspended for those that she loved, that the necessary connections of cause and effect would be interrupted by the God whom she had so dutifully served, so as to work things according to her plans, that she could overcome nature through grace. Mrs. O’Brien’s freedom is attained when she at last recognizes the identity of the ways of nature and of grace, that she affirms her act of release of R.L., and thereby, the passion of her suffering becomes active, with her recognition that the glory of God is revealed in the whole of the natural world, and that the natural world would not be so without suffering and death. In a way, Mrs. O’Brien’s act of release seems to be a sacrificial act. She lifts her hands to the heavens, saying, “I give him to you; I give you my son,” 32 almost directly invoking Yahweh’s words to Abraham, “You have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.” 33 Like Abraham, Mrs. O’Brien was asked to make the ultimate sacrifice, to renounce her child. It is abundantly clear that Mrs. O’Brien loves R.L. deeply. We are even given evidence that perhaps R.L. is Mrs. O’Brien’s favorite child. In one scene, as the boys are going to bed and Mrs. O’Brien is tucking them in, Jack asks her, “Who do you love the most?” Sitting on R.L.’s bed beside him, she looks at R.L., smiles, gently strokes his belly, and says, in response to Jack’s question, (while maintaining focus on R.L.), “I love you all the same.” But her body language seems to suggest a preference. The moment of Mrs. O’Brien’s sacrificial act is immediately preceded by the “heavenly” beach scene, to which Leslie MacAvoy refers as “by far the strangest and most ambiguous section of the film.” 34 The beach scene is the dramatic resolution of the film, wherein an adult Jack wanders a shoreline, apparently signifying some sort of spiritual reconciliation with his family members who, despite Jack’s current mid-life appearance, all present themselves in the younger ages and stages of life at which the younger Jack had first felt himself ruptured from them. Along this beach, we see Mrs. O’Brien exuberantly grab hold of her husband and kiss him, with an obvious love that we did not once see during the family’s dramatic narrative in Texas. We see the parents, both mother and father, embrace the child R.L. again. Moreover, in light of our explication above of the sacrificial structure—involving the double movement of renunciation and return, by which one truly gains the temporal for the first time, as gift—it is very interesting to note the way in which these scenes juxtapose images of return and release. Immediately following the beach scene of Mrs. O’Brien’s embrace of R.L. is her sacrificial scene, in which she lifts her hands to heaven and offers him up. This juxtapo-

The Gifts of Death

209

sition suggests that Mrs. O’Brien’s restoration of R.L. is simultaneous with her sacrifice of him, suggesting, perhaps, that only here, in this imagined paradise contemporaneous with her sacrifice, does she receive R.L. for the first time. Admittedly, the distinctions between this narrative and that of Abraham are obvious. Abraham was asked to make the sacrifice, while Mrs. O’Brien was not given a choice. In addition, Isaac did not actually die, while R.L. did. So it may seem strange to say that she gains R.L. for the first time, only after he has passed; but then again, perhaps not. Perhaps the gaining or the receiving entails only the full recognition that R.L. was never hers to begin with. This sacrificial act would then be accompanied by the ability to love him for the gift that he was, as opposed to the perceived property that she has lost. The question, then, becomes, how does one make this movement? For that, I will turn to Malick’s 2015 film, Knight of Cups. THE PIECES OF YOUR LIFE Like most of Malick’s later films, Knight of Cups divided professional film critics from, “There’s a line between artful and arty, and Malick has crossed it,” 35 to “The sheer freedom of it is intoxicating if you meet the film on its own level.” 36 Knight of Cups, however, provides a unique component of Malick’s philosophical development in that it is the first of Malick’s films to deeply and extensively explore the question of selfhood as a journey through the lens of a single individual’s spiritual/philosophical development. 37 As David Davies notes, “It is often remarked that Malick’s films prescind from what is normally a central concern for narrative cinema, namely, the presentation of characters who are psychologically ‘thick’ in that the motivations for their actions are made clear, usually through the dialogue in the diegesis.” 38 Knight of Cups is his most sustained counter-effort to this principle to date. Like most of Malick’s films, the epigraphic words to Knight of Cups provide a contextual lens that can be illuminative for thinking through the rest of the film. Knight of Cups begins with a paraphrase, narrated by Ben Kingsley, of the opening words from the 1678 novel, The Pilgrim’s Progress, by John Bunyan: “The pilgrim’s progress, from this world to that which is to come, delivered under the similitude of a dream, wherein is discovered the manner of his setting out, his dangerous journey, and safe arrival at the desired country.” 39 Bunyan’s religious allegory, “something like an early novel,” 40 tells the story of a young man named Christian on a journey from this world to the next. The text describes his progressive “ascent” by way of the realization and rectification of the obstacles on his path. From this we can surmise that Knight of Cups is a film about a journey. But the ontological status of these “worlds”—whether from an earthly life to a

210

Vernon W. Cisney

heavenly afterlife, or the immanent “Christian experience of conversion leading to salvation” 41 —is an open question. Indeed, in Knight of Cups, the journey seems to entail a transformation of oneself within this world, such that the so-called “other world” becomes visible, via what Lloyd Michaels refers to as an “ecstatic perception,” 42 within the everyday. The first time we hear Rick speak, we see him descending a desert hillside toward what appears to be an oasis that, upon closer inspection, turns out to have been a mirage. Through voice-over, Rick utters the words: “All those years, living the life of someone I didn’t even know.” 43 The mirage image signifies the direct inversion of the beach scene in The Tree of Life, where the water— signifying spiritual sustenance, surrounds the characters and even saturates the areas of land that emerge from the ebbing and flowing water. In Knight of Cups, on the other hand, the source of nourishment is an illusion; this, coupled with Rick’s words, indicate that what Rick had spent his life pursuing could never make him whole, and indicate that the journey Rick is on is one of self-discovery, or perhaps more appropriately put, it is a journey of becoming a self in the first place. Like the O’Brien family in The Tree of Life, Rick comes from a family of three boys, of whom Rick appears to be (like Jack in The Tree of Life) the oldest. Like the O’Brien family, the relations between the children and the father in Knight of Cups are severely strained, as the father (played masterfully by Brian Dennehy) is a stern and unyielding man who demonstrates a great deal of bitterness toward the sacrifices he has had to make in order to provide for his family. Finally, like the O’Brien family, Rick’s family is marked by the absence of a middle child, but while R.L.’s death in The Tree of Life is left unexplained, the death of Rick’s brother is explicitly referred to as a suicide. However, where The Tree of Life explores the crisis of religious faith that is provoked by what philosophers of religion refer to as the “existential problem of evil” (the close-to-home experience of suffering so unbearable as to provoke a sense of the loss of the divine), Knight of Cups is concerned with the fracturing of selfhood and the longing for self-identity, understood now through the desire for love. We get a clearer sense of the problem of the film through two scenes in which Rick’s father describes, through voice-over, the “pieces of one’s life”: My son, you’re just like I am. Can’t figure your life out, can’t put the pieces together, just like me—a pilgrim on this earth, a stranger. . . . You think when you reach a certain age, things will start making sense. Then you find out you’re just as lost as you were before. I suppose that’s what damnation is—the pieces of your life never to come together, just splashed out there. 44

In these scenes, the theme of damnation is explicitly invoked, and it is tied directly to the notion of selfhood. Bringing these ideas together, Rick’s jour-

The Gifts of Death

211

ney is one toward selfhood, and if damnation is understood as the pieces of one’s life never coming together, then it seems that salvation would be understood, conversely, as the attainment of selfhood. Rick has pursued this wholeness through the pursuit of love, perhaps in an effort to correct the damages done by his father’s sternness and rigidity. But his continued brokenness and failure in this pursuit results from the fact that his efforts in the direction of love are all motivated by some version of self-gratification. In some encounters, this takes the form of purely aesthetic, purely sensuous concerns. In one of the most revelatory lines in the film, Della, one of Rick’s many partners, says to him, “You don’t want love; you want a love experience.” 45 In others, it takes the form of romanticized ideals of what love is, as signified by Helen’s equally revelatory lines, “Dreams are nice, but you can’t live in them.” Still other times it is rooted in what looks like genuine commitment, but a commitment that is also filtered through the aesthetic, as in the case of Rick’s marriage; or when Rick has an affair with and impregnates a married woman, attempting to convince her to leave her husband with him. With each relationship, Rick seems to become more self-aware. But nevertheless, each relationship, motivated as it is by his own desires for whatever sense of satisfaction is his going concern at that time, is ultimately doomed to fail. Rick’s realization, as in the case of Mrs. O’Brien, amounts to a sacrificial act. But where Mrs. O’Brien’s sacrifice involved R.L.—the external object of her love—in Rick’s case, it is he himself who must be sacrificed. It is he himself, in his aesthetic self-concerns, who must be renounced, and in so doing, it is he himself who is gained. This is revealed most clearly in the soliloquy of Father Zeitlinger: It seems you are alone; you are not. Even now, He’s taking your hand and guiding you by a way you cannot see. If you are unhappy, you shouldn’t take it as a mark of God’s disfavor; just the contrary. It might be the very sign He loves you. He shows His love, not by helping you avoid suffering, but by sending you suffering, by keeping you there. To suffer binds you to something higher than yourself, higher than your own will. Takes you from the world to find what lies beyond it. We are not only to endure patiently the troubles He sends; we are to regard them as gifts, as gifts more precious than the happiness we wish for ourselves. 46

To be able to welcome suffering as a gift, more precious even than our own happiness, is to elevate oneself, to lift oneself up, as the object of sacrifice. And just as the structure of the sacrificial dictates that one only really receives the temporal in the mode of sacrifice, likewise, Rick only opens the possibility of becoming a self, in the mode of self-sacrifice, the kenotic emptying of the self of which Saint Paul speaks. It is through suffering that one is pulled from the immediacy and the entitlement of the world to the

212

Vernon W. Cisney

eternal, and it is only through this moment that faith, as Kierkegaard understands it, becomes possible. And this brings us back to Kierkegaard, who writes, “And what will help him is precisely the anxiety and distress in which the great are tried.” 47 In Works of Love, Kierkegaard writes of the act of selfrenunciation that results in the higher form of self-love: “And self-renunciation, which presses in as a judge to try self-love, is therefore double-edged in that it cuts off both sides equally. It knows very well that there is a self-love which one may call faithless self-love, but it knows just as well that there is a self-love which may be called devoted self-love.” 48 For Kierkegaard, the proper self-love is the love of God within oneself that abolishes all the aesthetic categories of “faithless” self-love. And precisely in sacrificing the temporal in this way, one becomes capable of gaining the temporal, by way of the transfiguration of the temporal, “the enlivening vision of a great expectation.” 49 It is perhaps no accident that the priest who utters these words on suffering is named “Zeitlinger,” which translates literally to “time-linger.” Moreover, we note that this same sort of self-emptying self-renunciation is required in any act of sacrifice, including that of Abraham and of Mrs. O’Brien. In sacrificing the object of her most intense love, Mrs. O’Brien is simultaneously sacrificing that aspect of herself. She is committing an act of self-sacrifice, without which her sacrifice of R.L. would not be possible. CONCLUSION In a letter from Johann Georg Hamann to Johann Gotthelf Lindner, dated May 2, 1764, Hamann writes, “Periissem nisi periissem”—”I would have perished had I not perished.” 50 This formulation appears strange at first blush, but its strangeness begins to dissipate when we think about it in light of the discussion of this chapter. Hamann seems to be suggesting that a certain type of death was necessary in order to avoid a different kind of death. The death of the self, the death of the “I,” in particular the death of the aesthetic, sensuous mode of the “I,” is a necessary pre-condition on the journey of becoming a self. With this in mind, we can pose to ourselves again the question we posed at the outset of the paper. We asked, Is it possible to say “thank you” to the receiving of suffering as precious gifts? It seems, however difficult it may be, that this type of sacrifice of the self is a necessary act in the constitution of a richer notion of self, one capable of the attentiveness to the ever renewed upsurge of grace in the world. It moreover seems to be the case that this theme of sacrifice ties together the questions and responses of The Tree of Life and The Knight of Cups. Malick seems to push us ever closer to the dictum uttered by Rick as the final line of Knight of Cups: “Begin.”

The Gifts of Death

213

NOTES 1. Hubert Dreyfus and Camilo Salazar Prince, “The Thin Red Line: Dying Without Demise, Demise Without Dying,” in ed. David Davies, The Thin Red Line (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 29. 2. See Vernon W. Cisney, “All the World is Shining, and Love is Smiling through All Things: The Collapse of the ‘Two Ways’ in The Tree of Life,” in ed. Jonathan Beever and Vernon W. Cisney, The Way of Nature and the Way of Grace: Philosophical Footholds on Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2016), 213–32. 3. The Tree of Life, dir. Terrence Malick (Los Angeles: Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2011). 4. Knight of Cups, dir. Terrence Malick (Los Angeles: Broad Green Pictures, 2016). 5. Ibid. 6. “Kenosis” as an ethos stems from the Greek word meaning “emptying,” and is typified in Christian theology by the death and resurrection of Christ, which is imitated in the ongoing self-emptying and rebirth of the believer, as celebrated in the sacrament of baptism. The emphasis stems from the book of Philippians, chapter 2, verses 5–8: “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross” (NRSV). See also Kevin M. Cronin, Kenosis: Emptying Self and the Path of Christian Service (New York: Continuum, 1992); and John B. Lounibos, Self-Emptying of Christ and the Christian: Three Essays on Kenosis (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2011. 7. See 1 Corinthians 15:31: “I die every day! That is as certain, brothers and sisters, as my boasting of you—a boast that I make in Christ Jesus our Lord” (NRSV). 8. As is well-known, Malick for a time undertook graduate study in philosophy at Oxford, working with Gilbert Ryle. His initial goal was to write a thesis on the concept of world in the work of Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Kierkegaard. That academic partnership was ultimately ill-fated, and Malick left Oxford, returning to the United States where he soon began studying filmmaking. Other works exploring connections between Malick and Kierkegaard include: Robert Sinnerbrink, Terrence Malick: Filmmaker and Philosopher (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2019); Peter J. Leithart, Shining Glory: Theological Reflections on Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2013); and James Batcho, Terrence Malick’s Unseeing Cinema: Memory, Time, and Audibility (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 9. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, ed. C. Stephen Evans and Sylvia Walsh, trans. Sylvia Walsh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 10. This story appears in Genesis, chapter 22. 11. Genesis 22:2 (NRSV). 12. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 16. 13. Genesis 22:12 (NRSV). 14. Genesis 22:17 (NRSV). 15. Islam, by and large, holds that it was Ishmael, Abraham’s first son with Hagar, rather than Isaac, who was offered up. See Bruce Feiler, Abraham: A Journey to the Heart of Three Faiths (New York: William Morrow and Company, 2002), 102. 16. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 27, 59. 17. It is worth noting the dark underside of this post-Enlightenment rationalization, when it extends to the public and political valorization of “faith.” When the belief in the truth-telling capacities of logos attempts to drown out all other forms of meaning-making, there can result the translation of the mythos dimensions of life through the framework of logos, resulting in the sort of faith that we frequently refer to as “blind faith,” the fideistic literalizing of aspects of religious life, resulting in the outright rejection of reason and the senses. This is salient when, for instance, the American religious right rejects the evidence for evolution or, more dangerously, for climate change, despite the overwhelming evidence in support of them. For an excellent account of this phenomenon, see Karen Armstrong, The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism (New York: Random House, 2000).

214

Vernon W. Cisney

18. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 24. 19. Ibid., 14. 20. Ibid., 29. 21. Ibid., 60. 22. Ibid., 17. 23. Ibid., 39. 24. Clare Carlisle, Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling: A Reader’s Guide (London and New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2010), 87. 25. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 29. 26. The Tree of Life, 2011. 27. Matthew 6:3. 28. The Tree of Life, 2011. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. This quotation is a paraphrase of a passage from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880), in the passage where Father Zosima reflects on the way in which his brother led him to faith: “The windows of his room looked out into the garden, and our garden was a shady one, with old trees in it which were coming into bud. The first birds of spring were flitting in the branches, chirruping and singing at the windows. And looking at them and admiring them, he began suddenly begging their forgiveness too, ‘Birds of heaven, happy birds, forgive me, for I have sinned against you too.’ None of us could understand that at the time, but he shed tears of joy. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘there was such a glory of God all about me; birds, trees, meadows, sky, only I lived in shame and dishonored it all and did not notice the beauty and the glory,’ “ Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, Second Norton Critical Edition, ed. Susan McReynolds Oddo, trans. Constance Garnett, rev. Ralph E. Matlaw and Susan McReynolds Oddo (New York and London: Norton, 2011), 250. 31. Dreyfus and Prince, “The Thin Red Line: Dying Without Demise, Demise Without Dying,” in ed. Davies, The Thin Red Line, 29 32. The Tree of Life, 2011. 33. Genesis 22:12 (NRSV). 34. Leslie MacAvoy, “Suffering and Redemption: A Nietzschean Analysis of The Tree of Life,” in ed. Beever and Cisney, The Way of Nature and the Way of Grace: Philosophical Footholds on Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, 198. 35. Peter Travers, review of Knight of Cups, Rolling Stone, March 2, 2016. https:// www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-reviews/knight-of-cups-91815. Accessed July 2, 2019. 36. Matt Zoller Seitz, review of Knight of Cups, RogerEbert.com, March 4, 2016. https:// www.rogerebert.com/reviews/knight-of-cups-2016. Accessed July 2, 2019. 37. I do not mean to suggest that this has never been a theme in any of Malick’s films, naturally. But in many of his other films, the question of selfhood is secondary to some larger philosophical question driving the project. In The Thin Red Line (1998), for instance, the question is, “What’s this war in the heart of nature?”, while in The Tree of Life, the question is, “How did she bear it?” It is only in Knight of Cups that the question of selfhood takes center stage. 38. David Davies, “Vision, Touch, and Embodiment in The Thin Red Line,” in ed. Davies, The Thin Red Line, 54. 39. Knight of Cups, dir. Terrence Malick (Los Angeles: Broad Green Pictures, 2016). John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress: Norton Critical Edition, ed. Cynthia Wall (New York and London: Norton, 2009), 3. Note: page 3 of the Norton edition reproduces the title page for the Second part, erroneously referring to it as the first. The second part chronicles the journey of Christian’s wife and child. The wording of Malick’s opening is a verbatim quotation from the title page of the First part. 40. Cynthia Wall, “Preface,” in Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, xiv. The Pilgrim’s Progress has for over a century been widely considered the “first” novel in the English language: “In this sense Defoe is properly called ‘the father of the modern English novel,’ but the title is more native to Bunyan, who first essayed to analyse character, and to depict the workings of heart and conscience.”; Charles James Billson, “The English Novel,” in The Westminster Review, Vol. 138 (July–December 1892), 602-620; 610.

The Gifts of Death

215

41. W. R. Owens, “Introduction,” in John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Oxford World Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), xx. 42. Lloyd Michaels, Terrence Malick: Contemporary Film Directors (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 70. 43. Knight of Cups, 2015. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid. 47. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 56–57. 48. Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, trans. Howard Hong and Edna Hong (New York: HarperCollins, 1962), 68. 49. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 231. 50. Ed. Friedrich Roth, Hamann’s Schriften, Teil 3 (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1821–1843), 151, 224. This is a constant refrain in Kierkegaard’s notes and letters, and it even serves as a epigraph in one part of Kierkegaard’s Stages on Life’s Way. Søren Kierkegaard, Stages on Life’s Way, Kierkegaard’s Writings, Vol. XI, ed., trans. Howard Hong and Edna Hong, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 194.

REFERENCES Armstrong, Karen. The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism. New York: Random House, 2000. Beever, Jonathan and Vernon W. Cisney, Ed. The Way of Nature and the Way of Grace: Philosophical Footholds on Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2016. Billson, Charles James. “The English Novel.” The Westminster Review. Vol. 138. July–December 1892, 602–620. Bunyan, John. The Pilgrim’s Progress: Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Cynthia Wall. New York and London: Norton, 2009. ———. The Pilgrim’s Progress, Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Carlisle, Clare. Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling: A Reader’s Guide. London and New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2010. Cronin, Kevin M. Kenosis: Emptying Self and the Path of Christian Service. New York: Continuum, 1992. Davies, David, Ed. The Thin Red Line. London and New York: Routledge, 2009. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov, Second Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Susan McReynolds Oddo. Trans. Constance Garnett. Rev. Ralph E. Matlaw and Susan McReynolds Oddo. New York and London: Norton, 2011. Feiler, Bruce. Abraham: A Journey to the Heart of Three Faiths. New York: William Morrow and Company, 2002. Kierkegaard, Søren. Fear and Trembling. Ed. C. Stephen Evans and Sylvia Walsh. Trans. Sylvia Walsh. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. ———. Stages on Life’s Way, Kierkegaard’s Writings, Vol. XI. Ed., Trans. Howard Hong and Edna Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. ———. Works of Love. Trans. Howard Hong and Edna Hong. New York: HarperCollins, 1962. Knight of Cups. Directed by Terrence Malick. Los Angeles: Broad Green Pictures, 2016. Lounibos, John B. Self-Emptying of Christ and the Christian: Three Essays on Kenosis. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2011. Michaels, Lloyd. Terrence Malick: Contemporary Film Directors. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009. Roth, Friedrich, Ed. Hamann’s Schriften, Teil 3. Berlin: G. Reimer, 1821–43. The Tree of Life. Directed by Terrence Malick. Los Angeles: Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2011.

Chapter Twelve

A Universal Priesthood The Vocation of Being Human in Days of Heaven and To the Wonder Matthew Aughtry

“Therefore shall you lay up these my words in your heart and in your soul . . . That your days may be multiplied, and the days of your children, in the land which the Lord swore to your fathers to give them, as the days of heaven upon the earth.”— Deuteronomy 11:18 and 21, AKJV “Thou . . . hast made us unto our God kings and priests: and we shall reign on the earth.”—Revelation 5:10, KJV

Somewhere in the Texas Panhandle, the Farmer pulls at the stalk of wheat. He rubs the kernels between his fingers and blows away the chaff before bringing it to his mouth. He chews. He is a man in thought, delving the depths of his own knowledge. He is the judge. He must decide if the time has come. The harvest is plentiful. The workers are ready. Is it time? Only he can give the word. He nods. The fullness of time has come. This moment in Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978) is immediately followed by a wide shot of a Catholic priest flanked by two acolytes standing in the same wheat fields as Sam Shephard’s character (simply named the Farmer). The decision has been made, the anticipated moment has been discerned, and now the visiting priest will pray a blessing before the work begins in earnest. For the observant viewer, however, this transition seems to be more than a simple cut made to illustrate the passage of time or mere cause and effect. It is not simply that the Farmer has given the word and the priest has come as a result. This editing decision suggests an even more fruitful connection. It 217

218

Matthew Aughtry

implies that their work belongs together. Their calling is intertwined, this Farmer and this priest. Their vocation is not just similar, it is the same. The curator of the land and the priest of the temple are one. In another film, set almost a century later and a few hundred miles away from this scene, the author of the Farmer’s tale tells another story—or is it the same? In Bartlesville, Oklahoma a parish priest wanders through a rundown neighborhood. He lingers in doorways. He is unable to enter in. His voice floats through the air, calling out to God but receiving no answer. He seems lost. Whatever calling he once had has now grown distant. Perhaps he fears that he simply dreamed it up himself. The world seems broken beyond repair and whatever vision the priest once had for its healing is now faded. He preaches sermons about the power of divine love while his own parishioners speak openly to him of his lack of joy. His priesthood is consumed with the ever-present realities of sin and death. Although he does not have as much time on screen as the two main characters, his struggles mirror theirs, invoking the deeper reality inherent in both their troubles and triumphs. For they also are priests or, at the very least, that is their calling. This chapter will focus on the Christian concept of humanity’s priesthood as it is seen in the work of Terrence Malick. Unlike the Trinity or the Virgin Birth, this doctrine may be unfamiliar to many readers regardless of their relationship towards Christianity. The priestly role has often been understood as being primarily concerned with forgiveness of sin. Yet peeling that veneer back reveals a view that all human beings are created for this priestly task. The human being as priest is the creature who stands in the liminal space between heaven and earth to offer creation up to God in thankful praise and to offer the presence of God to creation through cultivation and order. In doing so, the priest prepares for the ultimate union of heaven to earth, mixing together the roles of matchmaker and midwife in preparation for the new creation borne from marriage of the celestial to the terrestrial. It is my contention that Malick’s films are especially attuned to this concept and can even greatly elucidate this oft-obscured doctrine. We will pay special attention to how this concept of human beings as priests manifests itself in Days of Heaven and To the Wonder before turning our attention to the idea of Malick himself as cinematic priest. A SCRIPTURAL SKETCH OF HUMANITY’S PRIESTLY CALLING From the outset of the biblical narrative, the priestly calling belongs to all humanity. As Alexander Schmemann writes in his classic treatise on the Christian understanding of human beings, “The first, the basic definition of man is that he is the priest. He stands in the center of the world and unifies it

A Universal Priesthood

219

in his act of blessing God, of both receiving the world from God and offering it to God—and by filling the world with this eucharist, he transforms his life, the one that he receives from the world, into life in God, into communion with Him.” 1 It is possible to miss this particular focus in the biblical texts, especially in a post-Reformation and post-Enlightenment world that eschews most forms of church authority. As a rallying cry against perceived Roman abuse, “the priesthood of all believers” 2 became a popular phrase amongst Protestant Christians. However, this was usually taken to mean simply a rejection of clerical power and not an embrace of humanity’s ultimate identity as priests. This Reformation understanding—that those who believe in Jesus Christ and belong to the church function as priests—has its basis in scripture. Yet this relatively recent perspective actually does not go as far as the biblical texts originally intended. A close reading of the Christian scriptures insists that not just Christians, but all human beings should be understood as possessing a foundational priestly calling. From the moment that the first human being appears on the scene he is invited to carry out priestly tasks—namely the offering of creation to God and, concurrently, of God to all of creation. G.K. Beale argues for a reading of the first chapters of Genesis that views Eden as none other than the site of the original temple. He writes, “Israel’s temple was the place where the priest experienced God’s unique presence, and Eden was the place where Adam walked and talked with God.” 3 For Beale, this is more than a merely metaphorical relationship. Eden is truly the temple, just as Adam is truly a priest. Foundationally, the priest first offers creation to God in thanksgiving. Human beings are literally invited to take concrete bits of the cosmos, to cultivate these portions of creation, and to then offer up these specific objects to God. Baked bread, boats, basketball, bridges, bassoons—all of these bear the possibility of being offered to God in thanksgiving. Robert Capon, in his book An Offering of Uncles, takes the argument even further by insisting that we are even capable of offering each other up to God. In this paradigm, every relationship is seen primarily as participating in the priestly call. Wives offer husbands to God, fathers their children, children their siblings (or perhaps even their uncles!) and so on. Yet there is a second kind of offering that is crucial to our understanding of human beings as priestly agents. Men and women also have the unique task of offering God back to creation. As Beale writes: “Ancient kings would set up images of themselves in distant lands over which they ruled in order to represent their sovereign presence. . . . Likewise, Adam was created as the image of the divine king to indicate that earth was ruled over by Yahweh.” 4 The biblical story imagines human beings as creatures made in the image of God so that God is present wherever humanity is found. Humans are unique

220

Matthew Aughtry

in this understanding of the cosmos. Whereas angels are understood as purely spiritual beings who dwell in the heavens and animals are earth-bound creatures whose only reality is material, human beings are both spiritual and material. They are the convergent creatures who exist as a sort of overlap between heaven and earth. According to Beale, Adam and Eve were placed in Eden and given the charge to exercise dominion. The language is decidedly regal. Beale writes, “Not only was Adam to serve as a priest-king in the initial stage of the Edenic sanctuary, but . . . Adam and Eve were to subdue and rule ‘over all the earth’ . . . to extend the geographical boundaries of the Garden until Eden covered the whole earth.” 5 The first man and woman were created to bear the image of God throughout the world in their very nature as priests. Both the priestly and regal vocation are not meant to be compartmentalized, but to fit together. Beale writes, “Adam should always best be referred to as a ‘priest-king,’ since it is only after the ‘fall’ that priesthood is separated from kingship.” 6 In the very beginning, Adam and his wife were placed into Eden to serve as priests in this temple paradise and to extend this outpost of the heavenly kingdom across the whole earth. Yet they failed. Beale reads their failure fundamentally as a breakdown of the priestly task. He writes, “Adam did not guard the Garden but allowed entrance to a foul snake that brought sin, chaos, and disorder into the sanctuary and into Adam and Eve’s lives. He allowed the Serpent to ‘rule over’ him rather than ‘ruling over’ it and casting it out of the Garden. Rather than extending the divine presence of the garden sanctuary, Adam and Eve were expelled from it.” 7 Yet the priestly task of humanity is not discarded altogether. Instead, this gift given to humanity is perverted and warped. Schmemann also discusses this pivotal moment in the biblical text in light of the priestly calling. He describes how, “The fruit of that one tree . . . was not offered as a gift to man. Not given, not blessed by God, it was food whose eating was condemned to be communion with itself alone, and not with God. It is the image of the world loved for itself, and eating it is the image of life understood as an end in itself.” 8 This inward-turned life of humanity makes the priestly task all but impossible. In another chapter he states that the fact that, “man prefers something—the world, himself—to God, this is the only real sin, and in it all sins become natural, inevitable.” 9 Clouded by self-interest, all potential offerings go up in flames. Robert Capon is equally interested in examining this moment. He insists that humanity has “missed the point of creation twice for every time he has caught it once; and hovels, ruins, and wars are the record of his failures. But . . . culture—civilization—is the sum of his priestly success, the evidence of the fulfilment of his vocation. . . . Though an unjust king, he is a king still; though he has failed his priesthood, he remains a priest forever.” 10 The calling remains, even if it is haunted and hindered by the constant reminder

A Universal Priesthood

221

of past mistakes and threat of future failures. Capon pinpoints the source of this failure in “the old riddles of Sin and Death.” 11 He calls these “the twin results of Adam’s fall, and the immemorial destroyers of the history he always seeks and so seldom gets right.” 12 As we will see, Malick’s films do not shy away from these forces and the damage they cause. The concept of the priestly calling of humanity remains in the foreground, but we must also be ready to spot these twin powers of Sin and Death that constantly loom around the edge of the frame ready to break in and wreak unpriestly havoc. Always they seek to turn awe-filled wonder into hopeless wandering and transform every outpost of heaven into a colony of hell. DAYS OF HEAVEN From the very beginning of Malick’s first film, Badlands (1973), it is possible to see the priesthood of humanity pressing against the surface. Like Adam and Eve exiled from Eden, Kit (Martin Sheen) and Holly (Sissy Spacek) are two young lovers who take off into the badlands of South Dakota, leaving death and destruction in their wake. Their failure to find connection—to each other, to fellow human beings, to the world around them, to God—is what traps them in their eternal flight. Sin leads to this closed-off life and the natural end of such a life resides in the ultimate closure of Death. This description of Kit and Holly in Badlands could just as easily be applied to Bill (Richard Gere) and Abby (Brooke Adams) in Days of Heaven. Bill is on the run for a murder and drags his girlfriend Abby with him as he flees the scene. There are, of course, important differences in their stories— perhaps most importantly the inclusion of Bill’s sister, Linda (Linda Manz). It is Linda’s dreamy voice-over that moves us through the story. Linda’s narration is similar, although not identical, to the form and function of Holly’s voice-over in Malick’s first film. Linda and her fellow exiles find their way onto a train which leads to an offer of work. They end up on a farm, where the Farmer described in the opening of this chapter dwells in a house on top of a hill overlooking his vast estate. A gate marks their entrance into this mysterious and majestic land where most of the film is set. There is no fence to encircle the land, simply the gate. Entrance into this paradise is demarcated, but its boundaries have no discernible limits. Could this be the Eden that Beale describes? Is this the place from which Adam and Eve were meant to launch their mission to partake in God’s presence and then propagate this great gift over the whole earth? The very title of the film makes it possible to intuit such an interpretation. Taken from the Deuteronomy passage found at the opening of this chapter,

222

Matthew Aughtry

there is a given promise that the “days of heaven” will be multiplied on the earth should Israel keep God’s commandments upon entering into the Promised Land. Israel, God’s people, were called to be a holy nation and a priestly people. The land they entered was to become a kind of new Eden from which God’s blessing would spread across the entire earth. Astute readers of the biblical texts might argue that this may actually be a false Eden. It could even be inferred that this may, in fact, be Egypt. The similarity of this story of Bill, Abby, and the Farmer to the tale of Abram, Sarai, and Pharaoh in Genesis 12:10-20 is undeniable. Yet this is hardly the sole connection to a biblical narrative in the film. The very action which sets the film in motion is Bill’s seemingly accidental murder and subsequent flight to a faraway land. Certainly, it would be safe to also draw a line between this piece of plot and Moses’s story in Exodus 2:11-22. Even so, it is possible to argue that the Farmer remains Pharaoh, regardless of whether Bill is Abram or Moses, or whether Abby is Sarai or a standin for the whole people of Israel. Would not the thrust of the narrative remain the same? Should Bill not rightly cry out, “Let my people go!” After all, is he not the film’s protagonist? Does the attack of the locusts at the end of the film not confirm the Farmer as the antagonist and his land as the focus of God’s wrath? Yes, the Farmer does seem to allow stern taskmasters to oversee the work on the farm. Certainly, Bill’s love for Abby seems genuine. However, the film never seems to give in to the easy distinction between antagonist and protagonist. In fact, none of Malick’s films feature clear-cut heroes and villains. Instead the stories focus on human beings who can be both heroic and villainous. 13 Even the most despicable characters seem more like lost souls turned towards deviance than malefactors of pure evil. They remain priests with real power—the results of which, as Capon puts it, produce “disasters [which] are due to its perversion, not its use.” 14 Such a view of human beings, of course, adds interesting shades to the aforementioned biblical narratives. 15 For, whatever else he is, Pharaoh remains a human being and thus a potential priest. 16 The Farmer may be cut from similar cloth as Pharaoh, but he is also a sort of Adam. Like both, he is certainly a king. Early in the film, he reclines in an ornate chair as the workers come in from the field for lunch. He watches as he sits enthroned above the field of wheat, sipping wine from his cup. Then something catches his eye—Abby walks by. Later, in what appears to be a repetition of this Davidic motif, 17 he lounges on a couch in the field beneath a large umbrella as his accountant tells him that he has become the richest man in the Texas Panhandle. He should be overjoyed and yet he seems distant. He wanders over to a telescope and gazes through the eyepiece only to find Abby at the other end.

A Universal Priesthood

223

Upon hearing the doctor tell him he likely only has a year left to live, the Farmer lies on the floor, despondently stroking his hat. It is almost as if the bowler is a crown and he is recognizing the uselessness of possessing wealth and power in light of his own mortality. As he stares into the distance, this shot dissolves to a shot of Abby walking through the field with Linda. One can almost hear the words of Genesis about the solitary Adam, “It is not good that the man should be alone.” 18 There are several reasons that the Farmer’s desire—even need—for Abby is important to our exploration and to Malick’s films as a whole. First, it should be noted that the thrust of the scriptures suggests that man and woman share equally in the priesthood of humanity. More than that, the two of them constitute this vocation together—always together. 19 According to this concept of the priestly vocation, men and women were intended from the outset of creation to make offerings not only to one another but also of one another. Brother offering sister, wife offering husband, niece offering uncle, mother offering son—all to God. The final example literally happens in The Tree of Life (2011) when at the end Mrs. O’Brien (Jessica Chastain) proclaims with her hands opening in a kind of prayer, “I give him to you, I give you my son.” Such offerings do not suggest ownership, but instead a self-giving that leads to sacrifice. Attempts at possession, as we shall explore later, actually serve as an overwhelming impediment. Second, for the Christian scriptures, the concept of marriage expresses more than a contractual union between two people who are motivated by romantic feelings. Saint Paul ends his exploration of marriage in Ephesians by writing, “This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church.” 20 Viewing marriage as a signpost of the mystery of Christ’s union with the church extends to other areas as well. Theologian N.T. Wright argues that marriage acts as a sign of the divine realities. He writes, “We in the Western world have often thought of heaven and earth as radically separate . . . but in Genesis it’s not like that. Heaven and earth are supposed to be the twin interlocking spheres of God’s good creation.” 21 Just as the land in the scriptures and in the film really participates in the days of heaven, so too at last does the biblical image envision a day in which all the earth will be joined to heaven in a kind of marriage. Through this theological lens, we come to see that the union of the Farmer with Abby has far more significance than mere romantic desire. Jonathan Brant argues, in fact, that the days of heaven come to pass in the film during “the periods immediately before and after the wedding, when the harvest is over and work is light.” 22 This claim adds weight to the argument that the marriage of Abby and the Farmer participates in a larger reality, namely the marriage of earth and heaven. Finally, the Farmer’s longing for Abby is indicative of his own situation as a man marked for death. His despondency springs, ironically, from the

224

Matthew Aughtry

wealth he has amassed. He is like the preacher in Ecclesiastes lamenting over the vanity of a full bank account because he does not know who will inherit the land and whether or not the heir will be full of wisdom or a folly. 23 The Farmer is haunted by such a prospect following his death. Death for this sick Farmer with no apparent heir will ultimately mean the end of his priestly ministry. Capon describes how terrible death is by calling it “the unfrocking of Adam the priest.” 24 The Farmer’s childlessness also haunts him. Children embody the promise of a kind of bulwark against the destruction of a man or woman’s priestly successes. Surely the Farmer must have learned of his own priestly powers from a parental figure (perhaps even Robert J. Wilke’s unnamed foreman). For the Farmer to pass on what he himself received would in some ways push back against death’s power over him, even if it would not eliminate its dominion entirely. The Farmer pursues a romantic relationship with Abby, and Bill even urges her to return the dying man’s affection. This is clearly Bill’s scheme to get rich. In this moment, and arguably throughout the entire film, he sees Abby primarily as a possession. In his mind, he can either keep her for his own comfort or utilize her for his own advancement. In the case of the Farmer, she becomes his “ticket” to a better life. Whereas Death is the enemy that will end the Farmer’s priestly powers, Sin is the obstacle for Bill. He does not desire the knowledge to rightly offer the farm up in oblation but merely to possess it for himself. Neither does he wish to fully offer himself to Abby or to marry her and thus enable her to offer him as husband. He is affectionate towards her but in a way that falls short of sacrifice. Bill murders two people in the film, one at the very beginning (the factory boss) and the other (the Farmer) as the film draws to its close. Both of these men oversee Bill’s work and are set as an authority over him. There are other motivations at work in these killings, but Bill is also driven by a wrathful jealousy. In one scene he admits his envy of successful men to the Farmer. He always imagined that he would “come up with a big score,” he tells him. His failure to do so has robbed him of all joy. His work at the factory, which he tells the Farmer was once lifegiving to him, slowly rotted into a source of hatred. He is like Cain who, seeing the success of his brother Abel, seeks to slay him. He has become the frustrated priest who, unable to make a proper offering himself, seeks to rid the world of a true priest, even if that means killing his own brother. This character trait shows up repeatedly in Malick’s filmography. Kit from Badlands is both enamored with and incredibly envious of the rich man whose house he and Holly invade. Mr. O’Brien (Brad Pitt), in The Tree of Life, is hounded by his inability to find success in either his patents or his musical abilities. Instead he is a frustrated father and husband. Even more tellingly, in certain moments throughout the movie he is an exasperated gardener, unable to make the world work out toward his advantage. His son,

A Universal Priesthood

225

Jack (Hunter McCracken), shares this trait. Jack looks at his brother, R.L. (Laramie Eppler), with envy for the musical ability which garners Mr. O’Brien’s affection. Jack even goes so far as to attack his brother with a BB gun in a clear allusion to Cain’s assault on Abel. Even Ben Affleck’s Neil, from To the Wonder, fits firmly into this category of embittered priests who are unable to carve something out of this world for themselves. Tragically, all of these men are blind to the possibility that their pursuit of possession is what keeps them from making a proper priestly offering. This motif of men with failed priesthoods is visualized in a particularly poetic way by a certain prop in Days of Heaven. After Abby and the Farmer are married and leave on their honeymoon, Bill enters the Farmer’s house to move his things in. He places his bag down by the door and walks around, as if imagining what it would be like to belong in such a place—or to have such a place belong to him. The scene lingers on a shot of a decanter of wine and two crystal wine glasses by the window. It is worth noting that we already know that the Farmer is linked with bread—his power and wealth is, after all, bound up in his field of wheat. Yet the priest in the Christian tradition also requires wine to fulfill his function as the one who offers Christ to the world in the Eucharist. As Bill stares down the decanter, it is almost as if he is contemplating the priestly power of the Farmer. Later, once Abby has returned, Bill invites her to sneak out with him before the sun is up. They drink wine from stolen wine glasses—perhaps the same glasses we see earlier, perhaps not. This detail is unimportant. What is important is what the glass signifies. It is the priestly cup, the vessel which makes communion with God possible. It ought to elicit respect, reverence, and actions fitting of its ritual nature. Yet Bill clumsily drops it in the river. Later, the film returns to the river and a shot of the glass submerged underwater as fish swim by. This cup, which ought to be able to hold water in itself, is instead imprisoned here beneath the surface because of Bill’s fumble. Creation—which was given to priestly humanity to be lifted upward and joined with the heavens—is instead shown falling back into chaos. Bill has no interest in rightly ordering and offering the world in the way the film shows the Farmer doing. He merely wants to possess all he can for himself. For this reason, he risks the total destruction of the cosmos. This foreboding vision of the sunken glass gives way to terror by the end of the film. As the movie draws to a close, it moves at a swift space into a hellish landscape. Contorted by Sin and Death, both Bill and the Farmer fail to exercise their priestly power. Chaos enters this once-heavenly colony in the form of locusts. The invading enemy threatens to devour all the crops. At this time, envy has also infected the Farmer who has finally learned the full truth of Bill and Abby’s relationship. He too becomes ensnared by Sin and so his ability to hold back the chaos is compromised. As the laborers continue to

226

Matthew Aughtry

fight the insect invasion overnight, the Farmer looks hopeless. This is the moment when his knowledge and power is needed most and yet his heartbreak over the betrayal of his bride clouds his mind. Bill comes on the scene in an attempt to help, but the Farmer lashes out at him, seeking to strike him with his lamp. His fury literally gives way to wildfire as the lamp breaks and flames spread throughout the wheat field. “Let it burn!” he shouts. The Farmer, who was once a priest of creation, becomes the source of its annihilation. The world returns to the chaos from which it was made. At the end, it all leads to death. Bill is able to best the Farmer in a fight amidst the ashes of the once-beautiful wheat fields. Yet even he cannot outrun fate. Just as the Farmer came to share in the Sin which so clearly controls and contorts Bill, so too does Bill become subject to the forces of Death which had dominion over the Farmer. On the run with Linda and Abby, the trio is found out at last. As Bill flees from the police toward the river, he is shot in the back and falls face forward into the water. He joins the cup in the swirling chaos of the flowing water. The bullets defrock him and strip his priestly vocation away. The ending of the film is indeed a sad one. It seems to ask difficult questions of the viewer: Are all such days of heaven made to end in failure? Must humanity be barred from every Eden? Will every Promised Land sojourn lead at last to exile? Does every triumphal entry lead to a cross? Or, to quote the sermon from The Tree of Life, “Is there some fraud in the scheme of the universe? Is there nothing which is deathless? Nothing which does not pass away?” Malick is a master of leaning into mystery. Like many Christian theologians, he is unafraid to embrace paradox. It is easy to see the grisly end of these two men as a picture of the futility of humanity’s priesthood. Yet Bill and the Farmer are not the only priestly characters. Two remain. Abby, for her part, seems destined to repeat the same mistakes. The last time that we see her, she is boarding a train filled with soldiers who, were the film set a few decades later, may very well be heading into Malick’s The Thin Red Line. Regardless of the time period, however, they seem destined to join the war in the heart of nature. They, like Bill before them, will likely become killers fighting over a land of ash. What part she will play in this story remains unknown. However, the film does not end with Abby just as it did not begin with her. Even before the film introduces Bill toiling away in the hellish factory, we are first introduced to Linda. The opening credits lead us through a cavalcade of historic imagery. This montage of black and white pictures certainly exists to set the period of the film but, given our exploration of the priesthood of humanity, it does more than that. We glimpse men, women, and children. We see manufacturers, explorers, and factory workers. We gaze upon a president, a bride, and baseball players. And at last we end on a shot

A Universal Priesthood

227

of Linda. Who is she amidst this glorious priesthood? She is, of course, the storyteller. It is Linda who has been telling this story the entire time. Linda whose voice floats over the beautiful images. Linda whose innocent meditations are offered for understanding. She is a priest offering this story to the world. Perhaps the Farmer made the wrong decision—instead of seeking a wife he ought to have sought out a daughter. Early in the film, during the first harvest, we see Linda removing a locust from a stalk of wheat. She acts in this moment as a priestly protector over the land. Although she is present at the start of the locust sequence as she fights the invaders in the kitchen, she disappears afterwards. Perhaps she would have been of use once the Farmer had lost control over his own wrath and even more so if the Farmer had been interested in giving Linda proper priestly instruction throughout the movie. Regardless, the days of heaven are in some way preserved through Linda’s priestly vocation. We learn about them through her. This is important not just because it provides a record of the past. Her words also serve as a promise of a possible future. For if there were, even once in this world, such days of heaven, then perhaps there could be again. Even such a radical possibility that such a time will return and never again depart persists thanks to this story. In a world without end where the Farmer is no longer alone and where Bill at last receives a cup which he will not lose. The fulfillment of this possibility is not realized in Malick’s filmography until the final section of The Tree of Life, and echoed in the closing words of A Hidden Life (2019), “There will be no mysteries. . . . We will come together; we’ll plant orchards, fields, we’ll build the land back up.” While clearly depicted in these later films, the possibility remains distinctly possible throughout all of Malick’s movies, especially Days of Heaven. The film ends with Linda’s voice-over about a girl she’s only recently met. Her musings about this girl seem a pertinent priestly reflection regarding all humanity, “This girl, she didn’t know where she was going or what she was going to do.” Yet Linda’s final words are powerful and full of promise. She has been offering this world up into the heavens until now, at last, she offers the heavenly realities back to this world. Earnestly she proclaims, “I was hoping things would work out for her. She was a good friend of mine.” Though seemingly simple, this is nothing less than the Christian understanding of God’s desire, “not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.” 25 Linda’s desire is the longing of the one who befriends humanity in the certain hope that all things shall be well. For Christian theology, there is no higher priestly call than to join Linda in speaking this reality into the world.

228

Matthew Aughtry

TO THE WONDER The connections between To the Wonder and Days of Heaven are obvious from the start. Characters meander through fields of wheat, a young girl is dragged across the world by wandering adults, and a love triangle threatens to unravel the lives of all involved. The marriage of heaven and earth remains in view. The priestly vocation of male and female together is central to the story. In fact, an interview with the film’s producer, Sarah Green, makes this connection more explicit. She states that in casting Malick sought actors who “really could stand in for the male and female of the species—who seemed iconic in that way.” 26 The connections between the films are rich, yet the differences are also important. For instance, Olga Kurylenko’s Marina plays a role similar to Abby, from Days of Heaven, but functions as the more central focus of the film. Marina’s priesthood seems to be frustrated by her divorce and the reticence of Ben Affleck’s Neil to commit himself to her. She attends a local Roman Catholic parish but is unable to receive the Eucharist due to her divorce. 27 Moreover, she is unable to flourish and curate the flourishing of others due to her lack of stability. The Farmer from Days of Heaven did not oversee every wheat field in the Texas Panhandle, let alone the country or the world. In part, this is because he did not know every wheat field. His knowledge was limited and yet this limitation led to flourishing. Similarly, Adam and Eve were called to a specific garden. Certainly, as we saw in the beginning, the purpose of this garden was that it might spread over the face of the whole earth. Yet both the absence of Death and, undoubtedly, the presence of children would be required for such a task to be accomplished by human beings. The priestly task requires a commitment to a particular place. Throughout much of the film, Neil refuses to offer this commitment to Marina as a possibility. Not only does this mean that Marina cannot commit to the mundane particularities of her priesthood (i.e., living in a certain house which can be found on a particular street) but Neil’s withholding also means that Marina cannot even remain in the country since she is a citizen of France. Marriage—a true and lasting marriage—is the answer to the film’s primary problem. Repeatedly, the film returns to language and imagery associated with the union of husband and wife. When Javier Bardem’s character, Father Quintana, is introduced twenty minutes into the film, he is in the middle of preaching a homily rooted in the aforementioned Pauline letter to the Ephesians. Quintana proclaims almost verbatim, “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for [her].” 28 The next time we see him, Quintana has just finished officiating a wedding in his parish. As the wedding guests linger outside the church, he watches the bride. Her radiance

A Universal Priesthood

229

stands in direct contrast to his dour appearance. Though they are both clothed in white, his vestments act only as a curtain to the growing darkness beneath. The bride reminds him of his own calling and simultaneously serves to show him what he lacks. Moments later in the scene, an older parishioner approaches Quintana and tells him that she is praying for him to receive the gift of joy. He acts surprised but is only thrown off by the fact that she sees through his thinly veiled act. Quintana’s voice-overs reveal that he knows something is missing. 29 Just as Marina is herself a frustrated priest, so is Quintana an exasperated bride in search of the groom. Certainly, the Christian priest is often understood as functioning as a representation of Christ towards the Church (often referred to as the Bride of Christ 30 ). However, as we have already discussed, every priest exists in the overlap. In the liminal space of the priestly vocation, Quintana represents not only Christ towards the Church but also stands in for the fullness of the Church, the Bride, in his offerings to heaven. The vows that a priest makes at ordination share much in common with wedding vows. The priest acts and speaks as a husband to the church by participating in the life of Christ. Yet he is also in part the Bride, offering the Church up to Christ the bridegroom. In fact, it is only through the latter that the former is possible. If Quintana has truly lost the joy of bridehood then his priesthood is compromised. The world is full of frail and failing priests. This does not only form the central conflict in To the Wonder, it is the primary problem in all of Malick’s cinema. To use Capon’s language, people are unable to make an offering out of one another. This is because, like Neil, they are unwilling to be offered themselves. It is not only Marina whom Neil rejects, he also fails to commit to Rachel McAdams’s Jane. His refusal to be with Jane means not only the end of their relationship but potentially the end of her family’s ranch which she is obviously struggling to keep afloat by herself. Another outpost of the heavenly garden dies due to his inability to commit and to risk sacrifice. Likewise, Neil himself wanders through a dying land which he seems to have a desire to save, but is unable to. He is like Adam, who daily hears the echoes of the verse, “Cursed is the ground for thy sake.” 31 He spurns Marina and Jane, not because he does not need them, but more out of fear it seems. At last, of course, Neil does give himself to Marina and she returns to Oklahoma to be with him. Yet, as Father Quintana’s plight makes clear, initial vows alone are not enough to sustain the joy of one’s vocation no matter how sincere the vows once were. As the film goes on, the problems persist and even grow. Images of children abound throughout the film. Yet it is telling that Mariana’s daughter, Tatiana, does not return with her mother to America (and thus disappears from the film altogether). Perhaps Neil shares the Farmer’s lack of vision for having children inherit in his priesthood. Neil and Marina fight, he acts

230

Matthew Aughtry

abusively toward her, she threatens suicide, he tears their house apart, she cheats on him, he meets with a lawyer to talk divorce. At last, Neil comes to Father Quintana. At first, he seems to be visiting him for counsel. Then a series of scenes follows (the closest thing the film offers to a climax) where Quintana meets with people and listens to them. As he does so, we hear his voice-over of a whispered prayer inspired by Saint Patrick’s Breastplate, “Christ behind me. Christ in me. Christ beneath me. Christ above me. Christ on my right. Christ on my left. Christ in the heart.” Suddenly and inexplicably, Neil shows up beside Father Quintana throughout some of these scenes. Perhaps Neil is seen with Quintana because he is still receiving counseling that just happens to be interrupted by the latter ministering to others as well. Yet the scenes feel less narratively motivated and more poetic—as if Neil is examining his own priestly calling by watching an ordained priest living into his vocation. After this montage has ended, Neil returns to Marina and gets on his knees. At first it seems that the two may reconcile their marriage but almost immediately we see them bidding each other farewell at an airport. We hear Marina’s voice-over, “I want to keep your name.” They have failed to exercise their priestly vocation together, but all is not lost. Neil, it seems, has learned to repent. Marina finds a way to forgive. As for Father Quintana, he is also leaving Oklahoma—he is being sent to a parish in Kansas. Yet has he recovered his calling? Did he receive the gift of joy? Again, Malick offers mostly mystery. Yet the fact that he is no longer hiding from those in need seems to suggest he has. Listening to the needs of others, he remembers how to offer the world up to God. In his voice-over he proclaims both to himself and to the audience that all these men and women share in the life of Christ. In doing so, he discovers God again and offers this treasure he has found back to the world. The film ends on a shot of Mont Saint-Michel, the location that Neil and Marina visited at the beginning of the story and the place that provides the title to the film. Here, at a monastery named for Saint Michael the Archangel, the two lovers “climbed the steps to the wonder” as Marina says. It is a truly majestic location, at time surrounded by waters. The tide rolls in and the waters reflect the sky above. The world below mirrors the one above, they converge and overlap until finally earth reflects all things as they are in heaven. MALICK THE PRIEST In conclusion, I want to suggest a means by which all of Malick’s filmography can be explored. It is not an exhaustive strategy and certainly a myriad of approaches is possible for studying the director’s work. Yet the more I return

A Universal Priesthood

231

to Malick’s cinema the clearer it becomes that this medium is the way he expresses his priestly calling. Of course, the same could be said for other filmmakers as well. Yet Malick’s unique approach sets him apart. In the documentary film Thy Kingdom Come (2018), Javier Bardem visits real men and women in Bartlesville, Oklahoma while wearing his character’s clergy attire. It was during filming for To the Wonder that Malick hired legendary photographer Eugene Richards to capture real-life stories from these Bartlesville locals interacting with Bardem’s priest. Taking the form of confessions and recollections, excerpts from these gripping, true stories were sprinkled throughout To the Wonder, but several years later, Richards returned to the footage he had gathered and assembled a new documentary solely out of this material. It is truly a magnificent little film—both heart wrenching and uplifting. As a member of the clergy myself, I can certainly attest to its visceral authenticity. Although the people being filmed knew Bardem was an actor playing a part and not an ordained pastor, the scenes suggest that this did not actually matter. The film opens on a black screen. Bardem speaks through voice-over, “Is this a true story? Yes. I would say so. Is the priest a real priest? No. But it’s as if they were waiting for him.” Eugene Richards wrote to me in an email about the making of the film saying, “Javier and I also discussed the fact that in my experience with priests, social workers, and the finest physicians, their primary task, at least, is to listen.” 32 I would agree with his assessment and offer that this is Malick’s greatest gift. He is a storyteller to be sure, but he is also one of cinema’s finest listeners. Malick hears the voices shaped by brokenness and pain, entangled in Sin and Death. He listens to the wind. He sees the trees. He watches the birds— soaring high above the sea, waiting patiently for their mother’s return in the grassy lawn, or bleeding to death amidst the horrors of war. His listening involves more than just paying attention to the heightened human drama that dominates most movies. He listens to creation. He makes the audience listen to it as well. Many find this unnerving, others find it fascinating, but almost all can perceive that it is something different. Why does Malick do this? So that his audiences will recognize their own proclivity to participate in Sin or to wrestle with the idea that they are nothing less than Death’s accomplices? Perhaps. Yet certainly not only that. Maybe Malick prompts us to listen so that we might remember our high and holy calling. So that we, as human beings, might recover our discarded priesthood, our forgotten royalty. If so, then his priestly ministry is also a prophetic one. Malick’s films invite the viewer to encounter a world where the landing of the Plymouth Colonists, the Guadalcanal Campaign, and the Starkweather murders are neither more or less important than the breeze floating through the trees, a bug crawling down a leaf, or the gentle sounds of the rolling river. In fact, Malick’s films seek to remind us that they are the

232

Matthew Aughtry

same story: The creation of the cosmos, prehistoric conflicts between dinosaurs, and the life of a family in Texas in the mid-twentieth century are all bound together. Malick, as a priest, listens to humanity, offering the prayers of the people up to the heavens in the form of scattered whispers. Malick the priest also speaks in return. Not through interviews, of course, but through the medium of film. Is he a real priest? Yes. And he tells these stories as if the people were waiting for him. As if the audience was asking to be told a story from before they can remember. Of Woman and Man, Sin and Death, Nature and Grace, Earth and Heaven. He shows us the world as he sees it so that we might not be blind to the glory but might, instead, attain a vision of the marriage between the celestial and the terrestrial. Malick’s priestly calling, it seems, is to awaken this priestly calling in others. Perhaps he thinks of his work in these terms; perhaps he does not. Perhaps he makes these films in the hope that the days of heaven may reign over the earth. Perhaps he simply finds joy in journeying to the wonder time and again. Here, as in his films, Malick remains a mystery. NOTES 1. Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004), 15. Italics in original. 2. Largely taken from 1 Peter 2:5, “Ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house, an holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ” (KJV). 3. Gregory K. Beale, The Temple and the Church’s Mission: A Biblical Theology of the Dwelling Place of God (Apollos, 2005), 66. 4. Ibid., 82. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid., 70. 7. Ibid., 82. 8. Schmemann, 16. 9. Ibid., 78. 10. Robert Farrar Capon, An Offering of Uncles: The Priesthood of Adam and the Shape of the World (Crossroad, 1982), 27–28. 11. Ibid., 61. 12. Ibid. 13. This is not to say that there are not people who are mostly heroic or primarily villainous but almost every character who has significant screen time seems to be a complicated figure. Even Michael Fassbender’s character Cook in Song to Song (2017), who was apparently told to embody Satan from Milton’s Paradise Lost, seems genuinely distressed when his actions lead to the death of Natalie Portman’s Rhonda. 14. Capon, 57. 15. Of course, the narratives are complicated enough on their own. It is Abram who conceals the fact that Sarai is his wife and thus puts her in this difficult and dangerous situation. In Genesis 47, Joseph (often seen as a more straightforward hero in the text) is implicated in helping Pharaoh amass slaves in a way that seemingly feeds straight into the Exodus narrative. 16. The common problem of kings is not that they fail to recognize their connection to divinity but that they often seek to place themselves above all authority. Priest-kings are replaced by (false) god-kings who fail to rightly execute their authority and who are then confronted by prophets who seek to remind them of their true vocation.

A Universal Priesthood

233

17. In particular it is David’s own lounging that leads him to notice Bathsheba in 2 Samuel 11, setting him into similar trouble when he falls for another man’s wife—not unlike how the Farmer falls for Bill’s beloved. 18. Genesis 2:18, KJV. 19. “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” Genesis 1:27, KJV. It is possible to argue from this text that humanity’s share in God’s image is tied in some mysterious way to the diversity present in the division between men and women. 20. Ephesians 5:32, KJV. 21. N.T. Wright, “From Genesis to Revelation: An Anglican Perspective,” in Not Just Good, but Beautiful: the Complementary Relationship between Man and Woman, by Steven Lopes (Plough Pub. House, 2015), 85–96. Kindle Edition. Location 851. 22. Jonathan Brant, “The Unique Difficulty of Days of Heaven.” In Theology and the Films of Terrence Malick, ed. Christopher B. Barnett and Clark J. Elliston (Routledge, 2018), 138–58. 23. Ecclesiastes 2:18–19, KJV. 24. Capon, 63. 25. 2 Peter 3:9, KJV. 26. Bilge Ebiri, “Radiant Zigzag Becoming: How Terrence Malick and His Team Constructed To the Wonder,” Vulture (April 18, 2013). http://www.vulture.com/2013/04/how-terrence-malick-wrote-filmed-edited-to-the-wonder.html. 27. The practice of denying the sacraments to divorced men and women is part of an ongoing debate amongst Roman Catholics. In general, however, it is common for such members to be barred from the Eucharist. 28. Ephesians 5:25, KJV. 29. The very words, “Something is missing” are spoken by Marina’s daughter Tatiana regarding the situation with Neil and her mother. 30. This particular phrase is not found in the New Testament but allusions to the idea are found throughout, such as the aforementioned Ephesians passage. Reference to Christ as a bridegroom are also made repeatedly and the book of Revelation reaches its climax in the “Marriage of Supper of the Lamb” (Revelation 19:9). 31. Genesis 3:17, KJV. 32. Personal Email Correspondence with Eugene Richards, “Thy Kingdom Come (New Book on Terrence Malick),” June 6, 2019.

REFERENCES Beale, Gregory K. The Temple and the Church’s Mission: a Biblical Theology of the Dwelling Place of God. Apollos, 2005. Brant, Jonathan. “The Unique Difficulty of Days of Heaven.” Theology and the Films of Terrence Malick, edited by Christopher B. Barnett and Clark J. Elliston, Routledge, 2018. Capon, Robert Farrar. An Offering of Uncles: The Priesthood of Adam and the Shape of the World. Crossroad, 1982. Ebiri, Bilge. “Radiant Zigzag Becoming: How Terrence Malick and His Team Constructed To the Wonder.” Vulture, April 18, 2013. http://www.vulture.com/2013/04/how-terrence-malick-wrote-filmed-edited-to-the-wonder.html. Accessed February 1, 2020. Richards, Eugene. Personal correspondence. “Thy Kingdom Come (New Book on Terrence Malick).” June 6, 2019. Schmemann, Alexander. For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy. St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004. Wright, N.T. “From Genesis to Revelation: An Anglican Perspective.” In Not Just Good But Beautiful: the Complementary Relationship between Man and Woman, by Steven Lopes, Plough Pub. House, 2015. Kindle Edition.

Part Five

A Way Forward

Chapter Thirteen

The Smile of Life Recollections on Malick and the Work of Cinema Reno Lauro

On a brisk Friday evening in October 2016, Terrence Malick made a surprise appearance at the Garden Theater in Princeton, New Jersey to discuss Roberto Rossellini’s A Voyage to Italy (1954). The only other such appearance Malick had made like this was in Italy in 2005. Several months earlier, I had received a text saying that Terry would be in town and would love to see me. While I had been in contact with him over the years, the last time I had seen him was at the wrap party for The Tree of Life (2011) some years earlier. The Garden is an unassuming theater that has been in use since the 1920s on the corner of Washington and Nassau streets—a stretch of the old King’s Highway between Charleston and Boston laid out in the 17th century and traversed from time immemorial. That evening, Malick had spent the screening eating gelato and walking the streets of Princeton with the evening’s moderator, documentary filmmaker Pacho Velez (The Reagan Show, 2017) and arrived as the film’s miraculous resolution played out—where the miracle of a restored life and the victory of love are one and the same. Maybe in honor of Rossellini’s notoriously improvised production of Voyage to Italy, the evening was dominated by discussion with the audience—many of whom were Velez’s students at the Lewis Center for the Arts—about the creative potentials digital technology affords a filmmaker, as well as the benefits and difficulties of improvised filmmaking. Years earlier, producer Sarah Green set up a similar Q&A for the interns of The Tree of Life in the small post-production offices on Bee Caves Avenue in Austin, TX. Malick was generous but very uncomfortable. There, Malick told the room of young aspirants that all you needed to make a film was an HD flip camera, magic hour lighting, and a good script that can be written on 237

238

Reno Lauro

the chassis of great literature. This impulse was possibly still on Malick’s mind ten years later when he agreed to shoot a commercial for Google’s new Pixel 3 which was made entirely with footage from the phone itself. As the evening in Princeton concluded, Malick turned his attention one last time to the screening. He marveled at the final scene of the film and unrepentantly confessed his admiration for Rossellini’s ability to seemingly extract “the smile of life” from the screen. That night, this simple description immediately sunk in like the wheels of a cart in wet earth. The smile of life. It is a notion as evocative as the fruitful moment. Rossellini’s film is a reminder, Malick continued, that “it’s not just death,” but understanding “how precious love is” that is so convincing for him. My own time spent during the making of The Tree of Life (2011) and Voyage of Time (2016), in which I was an apprentice, was thirty years removed from Malick’s own formative years. Indeed, after years of personal experience and extensive research the horizon of documented and undocumented recollections about Malick have permanently fused with my own subjective recollections of the man. As such, it is likely that nothing that follows ever quite happened the way I will recount and just as quickly as it is proposed, we should also allow it to recede back into the mysteries of the past. A recurring theme surrounding Malick is this notion of properly presenting an idea, a place, a mood, or even a person (like Malick) in a way that frees it to truth and life rather than smothering it and condemning it to oblivion in the vain hopes of capturing it, like an asphyxiated firefly torn from the mysterious fabric of the summer dusk. Ultimately, simply reconstructing Malick’s past and supposing his intentions will fail to help us to understand him or his films with any greater degree of certainty—if “understanding” is a thing he would even hope for us to do after watching his films. Our natural inclinations to find and overlay the proper framework on the past, on the man, or on his films—like some sort of secret decoder of the ineffable—flies in the face of everything Malick has worked towards over the past half century. In the late-spring of 1969, somewhere coming and going in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Terrence Malick met his friend Paul Lee. Lee was a future prominent leader in the founding of Earth Day and Malick’s former Harvard classmate—both men taught philosophy at MIT at the time. More than likely, Malick was on his way to or on his way back from the Brattle Theater where he was known to take in a lot of movies when he was not reading philosophy (and these days it was more films than philosophy). He had already pilgrimaged to Germany to visit Heidegger and had translated two of his works, publishing one. But to what end? Whatever his experience with the renowned philosopher entailed, Heidegger no doubt told the young student with a strange plains drawl that in order to respond to this new epoch, philosophy had to come to an end and a new age of “thinking Being” was required.

The Smile of Life

239

Having made a translation of Heidegger’s collection of essays Holzwege (Pathmarks) by 1965—which included What Are Poets For?, The Origin of the Work of Art, Anixemander’s Sayings, and The Age of the World Picture— meant that Malick was in possession of the core of Heidegger’s views on art and technology at least five years before most scholars and a decade before the majority of the English-speaking world. Malick returned to America with an autograph from Heidegger and a sense that something new was required to summon truth. That spring day in 1969, Malick reluctantly confessed to Lee that he was turning his back on philosophy and was going to California to learn to make films. This was no small decision since Malick was arguably the most promising philosopher of his generation. While teaching at MIT, however, he had shot a short film for a cinema course he was auditing and had already begun experimenting with writing scripts the year before. To Malick, film was as unlikely a profession as any. Since his meeting with Heidegger, Malick had a growing frustration with his inability to “properly present” Heidegger’s philosophy in the classroom—particularly his inability to feel anxiety when teaching about Heidegger’s notion of anxiety. Malick had withdrawn from philosophy once before, when his Oxford PhD proposal was ungraciously rebuffed by British philosopher Gilbert Ryle as not being “philosophical” enough. Ryle assumed his post at Oxford after the untimely passing of the much loved J.L. Austin. The university, recalls Hubert Dreyfus, was experiencing an ordinary language philosophy movement that still had great suspicion of Heidegger, who was not taken seriously by academics at the time. Malick had proposed writing on Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Kierkegaard and the concept of “World.” He had already spent time as a magazine writer through connections with former classmates, as well as many long days and weeks since his undergraduate days lunching with his undergraduate philosophy professor and senior thesis advisor, Stanley Cavell, discussing the possibilities of art, literature, and film doing the work of philosophy. By spring 1969, Malick completed his retreat from the world of propositions, in the modern theoretical sense, and was seeking new ways of affirming life. Since the release of his first films in the 1970s, and well before, the thread that binds the life and work of Terrence Malick over the decades has been an attempt to overcome a skepticism of life. Malick’s skepticism is the embrace of our inability to know or say something of value about existence and is a fundamental ethical problem to be addressed. The material world, however elusive and strange, is the substance by which our skepticism is overcome and truth is made known . . . even if only for an instant. It seems apparent, then, that Malick’s own life-affirming “post-philosophical” work—philosophically informed by Spinoza, Wittgenstein, late Heidegger, and the influence of his advisor and friend, Stanley Cavell—endeavors to sieve the obfus-

240

Reno Lauro

cated landscape of the material world for the glorious inheritance of the soul. What Malick has called, “the smile of life.” Our concerns should, then, turn to what we can glean for the here and now—concerns for living the good life. Any other speculative endeavor would be bound to mere academic concerns and ostensibly betray the messenger in pursuit of vainglorious hopes of owning some form of the message. Although we might say that the films of Terrence Malick are meditations on the divine call of Being on the human soul in and through the body’s manifold encounters with the natural world—imaginable monuments to the soul’s sojourn, continually enveloping and enfolding, from the finite to the infinite—it is, however, when we look at his work as simply a work, and only then, that we begin to see something far more complete and profound. That is, Malick the filmmaker, tethered by the complicated economics and mores of studio production finance, is truly elevated to Malick the philosopher—of “nature,” “craft,” and “knowing”—and his practice stands (freed from art theory) as a primer for those working to make visible “the smile of life” in any medium. While there is much scholarship on Malick’s films, broader considerations are still required to examine Malick’s work as being a work in service of revealing the smile of life from (motion picture) technology. To accomplish this we should consider such questions as, What happens when our consideration of work and the technological nature of work are bracketed out from the economy of cinema? What are the demands of technology, technological work, and film production on being human? How did Malick’s training at the American Film Institute and experience making cinema during the New American Cinema movement in the 1970s affect his work as filmmaker? Finally, what do these things imply more broadly for making in a technological age? This last question is important because, ultimately, these questions are larger than Malick. They point beyond the man as an object of consumer entertainment, as he would no doubt want, toward that which is good, true, and real. These questions are at the heart of being human and, more specifically, at the heart of truthful explorations of what it means to be human in the twenty-first century. This is the cinema of Terrence Malick. TO THE WONDER Malick’s 2012 follow up to The Tree of Life was a semi-autobiographical drama entitled To the Wonder. The film is a deceptively simple drama about the struggles of relationship, work, and world set to the backdrop of the great medieval marvel of the Western world, Le Mont-Saint-Michel. The ancient monastic fortress is the result of work and world caught up in the pursuit of the good, the true, and the beautiful. A mere humble work meant to imitate

The Smile of Life

241

“the spectacle of the celestial dance.” 1 Its stone and glass is beaded with the dew of the supernatural. Caught up in the marvel’s embrace, the film’s main characters Neil (Ben Affleck) and Marina (Olga Kurylenko) leave no footprints in the sand and bounce as though freed from the laws of nature and the burdens of existential existence. Suspended between the roughhewed earth and the cloister spire piercing heaven, climbing the steps together “to the wonder,” their love for each other is made known. The film’s narrative shift to the plains of Oklahoma is an abrupt and radical return to earth and ordinary everydayness. Here, Malick references the dislocated architecture of suburban American non-spaces to shed light on our alienation from nature and each other. Unmoored, the move triggers a growing sense of homelessness in Marina and her daughter, Tatiana (Tatiana Chiline), which exacerbates the growing rift between the lovers. Passion becomes a crushing avalanche that overwhelms Marina and Neil. But, like characters from a Cassavetes’ film, no one is seemingly at fault; everyone is complicit in a systemic disorder. There is far more at work in the film, however, than a commentary on psychological, sociological, or cultural alienation. The introduction of Neil’s profession as an “environmental inspector” and the subplot of Father Quintana’s (Javier Bardem) crisis of faith, also echoed in his investigation into a people poisoned by the land, all point toward a foreboding sense of alienation from others, nature, and life itself. Both subplots are spheres of concern that complicate the world of the film and embed the characters’ cares in proximal relations. Rather than a simulacrum, Malick crafts a model of world and existence for the viewer to explore. The possibilities and fragility of human eros in To the Wonder—of which Neil’s work is at the center—is revealed to be a veil shadow of the soul’s longing for the infinite divine. Malick, too, brings more than dignity to the plot device of Neil’s profession. Through the lens, Neil’s work is re-inscribed with a meaning beyond its simple use value of testing water and soil for toxins, but is caught up in a totality of concerns and is the activity by which a far richer reality is made known. Neil’s work is caught up in a model of the world that is both natural and wondrous. And here we must begin: What is meant by work in a work that makes cinematic art? In considering what is made known about work and artistic craft in Malick’s filmography, it is necessary and right to first indulge in a brief orientation to what is explicitly meant by “work” and “art” when we talk of “work that makes art” in the twenty-first century West. At the time of writing To the Wonder, I remember Malick was reading the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams’s new book on Dostoevsky, in which Williams links the activity of the artist—specifically Dostoevsky—to the activity of the divine. Because we are so accustomed to casually deploying references to “work” and “labor” we are generally unaware that the notion is fettered by a long,

242

Reno Lauro

complicated history. This is not a question of merely semantics; any characterization of work is both a characterization about the nature of work and about the nature of being human and a human maker, and ultimately reality itself. This question takes on even greater importance in what Walter Benjamin called an “age of mechanical reproducibility,” of which cinema is its enfant terrible. 2 In order to suspend judgment and to understand what Malick is doing in both his film and also as a maker, then, requires a bracketing of the word and activity of “work.” The modern Western characterization of work was shaped by two significant turns in human history: the advent of the clock, and two centuries of capitalist production counterpoised by Marxist struggle. The effect of this double move was to both abstract time and distance the human worker from the process of work. Anthropologist Tim Ingold notes that this (long) shift in human history has played a part in significantly reformulating the relationship between the worker, the worker’s tools, and the matter worked with. While there are significant philosophical factors at play (such as Cartesian dualism, the metaphysical and anthropological presuppositions of the New Science, and Darwinian evolutionary theory), this reformulation led to the mechanistic cosmology we now inhabit—a model of world that extracts the making of things from both everyday life and the mystery of Being. 3 A study of ancient and contemporary, non-Western work practices reveal two important features: “technical” does not equate to the modern notion of “mechanical;” and the shift from hand tools to machines is not a story of “complexification,” but rather a story of rationalization, abstraction, and “externalization.” 4 As Ingold observes, in the pre-industrial world, work is caught up in deeply rooted social relations. Tooled work, born from the land and those rooted social relations, is about drawing the natural world into those spheres of life to revel in and reveal the mysteries of the natural world rather than control and commoditize. “In short,” Ingold writes, “the world opens itself out to the traditional artisan or farmer, in both its form and its temporal rhythms, through his or her actions in it.” 5 This modern divorce of work and social relations, making and doing, labor and mystery is famously described by German Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper as an all-encompassing utility culture of “total work.” In a world of total work, human industriousness—or “hard work”— achieves the Cartesian ideal and overcomes the constraints of nature. Held up as an ethical good, it also becomes the moral antithesis of idleness. The logic of the planned worker state, says Pieper, subordinates work “to the necessities of an absolute economic process of production,” a division of work and the social is formalized, and “workers” are perpetually “fettered to the process of work.” 6 This order is all encompassing. Because time and work are abstracted, the idea of rest as a deliberate activity is also caught up in the culture of total work and is only ever experienced in service of work.

The Smile of Life

243

What is at stake here is that human beings, in toto, are defined by their functional role as workers within the economy—an “economy” in its most expansive cosmological sense of the order of the house (οἰκονόμος). In this model of the world, the utility of work and the demands of fealty to the material world are elevated to the highest good, while the acts of being open to mystery and beauty are relegated to the margins or, in a way not anticipated by Pieper, commoditized and peddled in the marketplace. This, warns Pieper, is the rub. How we define human work also makes an ontological claim on what it means to be human and a metaphysical claim about reality. The world of total work asphyxiates the inner life. Pieper laments that “The ‘total work’ State needs the spiritually impoverished, one-track mind of the ‘functionary;’ and he . . . thereby achieves the illusion of a life fulfilled, which he acknowledges and willingly accepts.” 7 What then is the alternative to this model of work? Pieper seeks to retrieve a notion of work that is characterized by “the good” rather than the “difficult” and is nourished by— and in the service of—the Classical and Medieval characterization of leisure. To contextualize Pieper’s appeal to leisure it is important to understand that the ancient Greeks further divided their characterization of work into ergon (ἔργον) and ponos (πόνος). Ergon was used for the common work that sustains life, the process or action of work; the toil that produces the work is ponos—from the god of hard, laborious work and toil. Pieper does not desire to diminish laborious toil when he notes that the ancient Greeks did not have a word for “work,” only a notion of the absence of “leisure”—”we are unleisurely [a-scholia] in order to have leisure,” 8 writes Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics. 9 To the contrary, Pieper rather desires to recover a notion of work that is tied to a larger moral and cultural project. 10 His call for a return to the originary embrace of leisure—not as the absence of activity or as a refreshment in the Veblenian or Situationist sense, but as a surrender as unto sleep—is ultimately in order to restore the soul’s attentiveness to Being. 11 Properly understood, leisure is a tuning of the senses toward Being. It is a condition of the Soul. Quoting Aristotle, Pieper notes, “A man will live thus, not to the extent that he is a man, but to the extent that a divine principle dwells within him.” 12 This notion of leisure, as a listening to and reflection on Being, is felt in the Classical and Medieval tradition of leisure as liberal learning and the adoption of the Greek schole (σχολή) into English as school, a place of learning. It is important, however, to continue to articulate that Pieper is not describing leisure as a possible cataloged choice available to us instead of other options, like work or play or even servile learning. Behind the deployment of “work” and “leisure” is a condition of the soul, a state of being-in-the-world that is open to Being. Embracing leisure is fundamentally the only correct and truly human disposition, without which our relationship to all other aspects of human life will be truncated and contorted.

244

Reno Lauro

Ultimately, what Pieper and the question of work discloses is the struggle of Western philosophy since Plato: What is the nature of reality and how can it be known? How are things made present and known to human beings, truthfully? Rather than the reduction of Being (and all of its manifestations, including work and being human) into a cataloged inventory, work as a response to both an openness and receptiveness to the mysteries of Being is the only proper way of being in the world. But what does this look like? In terms of examining Malick’s work, as a work that reveals the smile of life from technology, how are we to understand this relationship? Here we will draw on Martin Heidegger, with whom Malick is well familiar, in order to continue to explore this new characterization of work. Fundamental to better understanding what is at work in Malick’s work is Heidegger’s own evolving attempt to articulate human-being-in-the-world as a way of listening to and for Being—in other words, being open to the manifold mysteries of Being— and making as a way of facilitating a “clearing” that makes present, if only fleetingly, this truth. While significant, it also prepares a place to understand both Deleuze’s claim and D.N. Rodowick’s later and far more expansive claim (via Malick’s philosophical mentor Stanley Cavell) that cinema “thinks” philosophically. In his later work, Heidegger hoped to reattune the modern world towards an understanding of truth as that which is revealed to us, rather than that which we posit through frameworks and propositions in our head. To prosaically will meaning to materialize into a graspable and understandable thing has been the principal erroneous feature of Western philosophy since Plato. Central to understanding Heidegger’s turn in his philosophy, is his 1949 note at the end of On the Essence of Truth. In it, he curiously writes that “the essence of truth is the truth of essence.” 13 Here, we might say, begins Heidegger’s turn away from Modern Humanism—a turn which deemphasizes Dasein as a subject that discloses Being, toward an understanding of Being that is characterized by showing itself or hiding itself by its own accord. What Heidegger means in the 1949 note is that the Being of truth—the nature of truth—is the unconcealment or the disclosure of Being. Simply put, nature and the world are shrouded in mystery and we are made to wait for something akin to a lighted clearing to illuminate our understanding, rather than force nature and world to give up their secrets. Further, the task of any philosophy that privileges the human subject as triumphant agent of meaning-making has proven itself to be bankrupt. Therefore, Heidegger implies that any attempt to talk about Being that deploys the propositional language of traditional Western philosophy, logic, or science must be abandoned. Now, because Being is equivalent to nothing, or literally “no-thing,” propositional or representational language has to artificially “presence” Being—it packages it and reduces it to an inventory—in order to demonstrate truth and, in so doing, obliterates Being and the possibility of knowing reality

The Smile of Life

245

truthfully. In his essay, The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking, Heidegger observes that a civilization modeled on and built up by science, technology, and information technology—or cybernetics—actually is the fulfilment of the project of metaphysics because it grounds and presences (makes tangible and present) Being and thereby obliterates its mystery by projecting onto presence our “idea” and “concept.” This is crucial because, according to Heidegger, by both our mode of inquiry and our mode of making, we in the modern world no longer experience Being as it has been disclosed in other epochs of human history. Similar to Ingold and Pieper’s observations, something has gone awry in modern existence! Interestingly, Heidegger shows that in German, to speak of the verb “to work” (wirken) and “the realm of working” (das wirkenden), one is necessarily speaking of what we think of as “the real” (das wirkliche). We have forgotten that the activity of work—the “to do” of work—is not reserved for human hands. The activity of work is a principal part of nature. “Growth also,” writes Heidegger in Science and Reflection, “the holding-sway of nature (physis), is a doing . . . from out of itself to lay something before, to place it here, to bring it hither and forth, that is, into presencing. That which ‘does’ in such a sense is that which works; it is that which presences, in its presencing.” 14 It is the doing of nature that the orange blossom comes forth in later winter and just as suddenly recedes into nothingness. It is the doing of nature that the orange comes forth into presence in its stead, is picked or falls, and then is no more. In regrounding human work into the workings of nature and recapturing a more originary thinking about it in those terms, Heidegger brings us closer to Malick’s own way. But questions still remain: What do we do with what is made present? And how is this of a different kind from contemporary considerations of work? Rather than a “causal” reading of the operation of work that produces an “effect” (which fully blossomed at the dawn of the New Science), Heidegger calls forth Aristotle’s unique language of energeia and entelecheia. Rather than “energy” and “capacity,” says Heidegger, these words are properly understood as “the presence [presencing] of that which actually presences.” 15 Hidden within the seemingly impenetrable syntax is Heidegger allowing nature and work to play their part in making the mysterious operations of nature be both seen and felt. The payoff here is that the work of nature and “work,” energeia, is properly translated in German as “reality” (wirklichkeit). The proper posture towards this kind of work—the work of a free, liberally educated human being, in the language of Josef Pieper—is “the way of life of the beholder, the one who looks upon the pure shining-forth of that which presences.” 16 Heidegger is keen to note that this way of life (bios), is a way of life built up from the Greek verb theorein (to look at) from which we get the English word “theory.” He is keen on connecting the origin of the word to the compounding of horao (to look or view closely) and Thea (the Greek god-

246

Reno Lauro

dess of unconcealment)—”from out of which and in which that which presences, presences, appears to the early thinker Parmenides.” 17 The implication here is that, as with Pieper, there is room to conceive of reality as the work and watchful safeguarding of what is made present, even fleetingly. Understanding the essence of truth as aletheia—that truth is not propositional, it does not correspond, but is revealed to us—is central, then, to our reorientation of work. This change in our questioning, says Heidegger, “is intrinsically the way of a thinking which, instead of furnishing representations and concepts, experiences and tests itself as a transformation of its relatedness to Being.” 18 This thinking is an activity that applies to the arts of the craftsman, the mind, and the fine arts—to how and what we make. It is both something poetic and a way of knowing. Heidegger explores this thinking of technology in The Question Concerning Technology (1955), which itself is its own updated thinking about making, which Heidegger began in The Origin of a Work of Art (1935). Crucial here is his excavation of a notion of techne that precedes a commonly held division between fine and utilitarian arts, where we become open to the notion that Being allows itself to be obliterated by the making of human hands as much as it allows for Being to make itself known, even for only a moment, by that same power. Work is fundamentally caught up in this struggle. Work is “the fighting of the battle in which the unconcealedness of beings as a whole, or truth, is won.” 19 Because we make of “stuff,” the being of all that is made struggles to be truly known. The worker—in both the fine and utilitarian arts—can become a “passageway,” allowing Being to be made known through the worker’s work. This work is complicated in our technological epoch, however, because our use of technology and scientific modes of thinking impose a framework that embalms Being and reduces things into a kind of warehouse “inventory.” This is the very essence of technology. The challenge we face, then, is to make in a technological age in a manner where Being is freed to reveal its mysteries to us and where we remain mere passageways, rather than imposing meaning by making all things known and easy to consume. Malick’s intimate To the Wonder, then, is precisely this bundling of work, beholding, and reality. The film not only presents the fragile interdependence of things in the world as a way of knowing, but is a work that is made in the same manner. Rather than renting things from the illusive relationship and framing it for inspection, Malick’s work and the work of the work allow the truth of Being to retreat once more. Like the lines of a Rilke poem, its meaning is at once graspable and fleeting from breath to breath. The film frees itself, then, to “think Being,” or as Stanley Cavell has said in reference to Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978), “one has never quite seen the scene of human existence—call it the arena between earth (or days) and heaven— quite realized this way on film before.” 20 As Marina wakes in the far country in the closing minutes of the film, unmoored and adrift in the place where the

The Smile of Life

247

mysteries of Being recedes, we are offered one last glimpse back—it is Le Mont-Saint-Michel. The shot is uncharacteristically monochrome. The sky, the stone, the rock, the sea, the sand all coming forth at once, both bundled and yet in strife as though embossed at varying degrees. The shot does not settle for a postcard aesthetic, as Bresson shunned (echoing Andre Bazin’s warning of the embalming tendencies of photography); like a mosquito captured in amber, the “postcard” photograph collects the photons of a time and place in order to presence a thing and put it on our wall. 21 Instead, the coda of To the Wonder lasts for but a moment and then returns to the nothing. It is a thing, built by the work of humans, that gathers the earth, the sky, the mysteries of the divine, and human beings in such a way that creates a space for Being to be known—even for a fleeting moment. And while Malick would no doubt recoil from such a suggestion with sincerest humility, we should understand his films and his work as doing the same. The necessary elements that now remain are: What inherent challenges Malick’s work faces in eliciting the smile of life from the technology of cinema? Was there anything unique in Malick’s own cinematic training that freed him to overcome those inherent challenges? And, what can we glean from firsthand accounts of his own work that can bring these considerations together? A CLEARING Sometime between 1968 and September 1969, Terrence Malick was a guest lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT). During that same time, Malick, an avid fan of cinema, audited documentary filmmaker Ed Pincus’s “Introduction to Filmmaking.” The hands-on film course was designed to examine “the potentialities of the motion picture as documentary and as a means of personal and political expression.” What must have been of particular interest to Malick was the opportunity to explore how film works as an instrument of revealing the concerns of being in the world. The course description promised explorations in theory and the viewing and discussion of films and, most significantly, “ample opportunity for students to experiment with various film techniques.” 22 One might imagine that Malick would be drawn to such a course after having spent time in Latin America researching a long article on Che Guevara for Life magazine and then writing a massive, unpublished essay for The New Yorker on philosopher Regis Debray, who was imprisoned for associating with the Communist revolutionary. 23 Malick must have been fascinated by the complex collision of worlds and concerns in those essays, the notion of the doctor-turned-activist who sacrificed his life in the belief of a better world for those living closest to the earth and the activist-philosopher living philosophy rather than writing it.

248

Reno Lauro

Debray incidentally—though certainly not tangentially—makes an appearance in Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch’s complex documentary Chronique d’un été (1961), which questions the possibility of capturing the reality of living concerns in French society on film. Both Morin and Rouch were anthropologists. Malick would later write an intricate script on the life of Che Guevara, which was to star Benicio del Toro. After the film was delayed for The New World (2005), del Toro took the script to Steven Soderbergh (it is unclear if this version of the film had Malick’s blessing). So, sometime in 1969, having already translated Martin Heidegger’s Holzwege, translated and published Heidegger’s The Essence of Reasons, and written for Time Magazine, The New Yorker, and Life Magazine, Malick shot a forty minute short film about a man who decided to commit a crime to prove his existence to himself, which Malick subsequently submitted in application to the inaugural class of the newly established American Film Institute (AFI) in Beverly Hills, CA. A brainchild of George Stevens Jr., the nascent film studies program was an experiment in filmmaking education designed to “serve as a bridge between film scholarship and the filmmaker profession” and specifically cited as an answer to the technically-driven courses of film study at the University of Southern California (USC) and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). 24 The endeavor was high-minded. Stevens’s hope was to create “a new tutorial tradition in film on par with that of architecture, medicine and law” with the goal to “train ‘the filmaker’ [sic] rather than specialized craftsmen or technician [sic]” and its students would be selected based on their “humanistic background” and “potential qualities” as filmmakers. Ever concerned with pedantic discussions about his own films, we can only imagine that Malick was one of the students suspicious of getting caught up in more academic studies. Stevens mentions in his opening remarks in September of 1969 that he has “assured many of you who have expressed concern about any unnecessary academic detours from your filmmaking careers. We are on [the tennis court], in the words of Robert Frost, ‘not to see if the lines are straight but to play tennis.” 25 Though not a trade school, which the programs at USC and UCLA had become, the course of study at AFI was also not a “cinema studies” program. In the ruins of a collapsing Hollywood studio system, Malick found a unique clearing where he could learn the skills necessary—not simply to contemplate—but to become the passageway for the true concerns of life to be glimpsed, and to craft an ontological poetry that could move people in new ways. 26 One year earlier, in the summer of 1968, Stevens outlined the course of studies for the new institute in a report to its trustees. The curriculum was built up from four core principles: to view and study great works of motion picture art; associate with and learn from the finest artists, craftsmen, and theoreticians in the filmmaking realm; practice through internship(s); and the

The Smile of Life

249

space to make films. Stevens was certain that at the heart of this new tutorial tradition would be access to great works of the cinematic tradition to view and to discuss. In a stunning moment, where the formula for the French New Wave begins to be codified into the New American Cinema movement, Stevens writes to the Trustees of the AFI, “One example of the effectiveness of this approach is in France where the emergence of the new wave of critics and directors can be traced to their hours of film viewing and the Cinematheque Francais. The opportunity to view films and study them is notably absent from even the best of the American universities where film is taught.” 27 It should be noted that the nightly screening series in year one was then affectionately referred to as “Cinematheque.” The hope with these viewings was to, whenever possible, have people who participated in the productions present. This access to practitioners then would carry over into demonstrations and hands on work with all varieties of equipment and the latest techniques. The list of visiting speakers in year one is astounding, not so much for the names of screen legends—though they are impressive and numerous—but also for the unlikely artists and thinkers who would still be absent from the most thoughtful of programs. So, not only did year one bring Elia Kazan, silent filmmaker Harold Lloyd, King Vidor, Howard Hawks, John Huston, Haskell Wexler (who Terry would team with on part of Days of Heaven), Costa-Gavras, Roger Corman, Alfred Hitchcock, Jean Renoir, and Federico Fellini—many of whom and more can be found in Conversations with Great Filmmakers, edited by Stevens—but that year also saw unlikely guests such as physicist Richard Feynman, industrial designer Charles Eames, Hungarian born designer and art theorist György Kepes (who founded the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT), science fiction and fantasy novelist Ray Bradbury (who discussed his adaptation of Moby Dick for director John Huston), and a young graphic artist named Doug Trumbull, who had recently worked with Stanley Kubrick on the special effects for 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and would later spearhead the naturalistic effects for Malick’s magnum opus, The Tree of Life, and Voyage of Time some forty years later. When the first year fellows were asked to compile a list of people and subjects of interest for future visits, the list was even more expansive: poet Gary Snyder; Alan Watts; Frank Zappa; underground cartoonists Crumb, Coat, Griffin, Muller, Van Hamersveld, Mouse, Morocco, and Gilbert Sheldon; sculptor and painter Theodore Roszak; polymath Buckminster Fuller; Norman Brown, the lead researcher in human consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz; W. Ross Adey from UCLA, who was known to be working on human brain telemetry and attributed by conspiracy theorists as helping the CIA with “mind control;” Linus Pauling; Norman Mailer; historian Arthur Schlessinger Jr.; and philosopher Herbert Marcus. Stevens’s

250

Reno Lauro

message was clear: To make great filmmakers, one needs to create a clearing for a broad and richly populated horizon in which to work and reveal. Along these same lines, Stevens was resolute that the new program had to be “responsive to the particular requirements, interests, and talent of the individual fellows” through an attentiveness to private guidance and access to independent curricular exercises. 28 These would include: cross-registration and cross-linkages such as with “music and sound; painting and sculpture; still and more developed techniques; with architecture; design of various kinds; psychology and physiology; radio and television; mechanics, chemistry, and physics; dance; literature and poetry; optics; history and so on.” Stevens continued to be adamant that there would also be extensive film showings, which would include visitations by and time with foreign, avantgarde, and “independent” filmmakers. Stevens also wanted to ensure that the graduates were not simply broadly informed, but had the opportunity to be well-grounded with “intensive, accurate, disciplined studies in the history of film—both in ideas and techniques.” 29 Finally, the program would give each student the opportunity for broad interdisciplinary research into all aspects of cinema—historical, biographical, physiological, psychological, literary, technical, and aesthetics. 30 Malick seems to have had what might seem surprisingly pragmatic concerns in his first year, though many of his signature traits rise to the surface on occasion. We know that he was held in high esteem by Stevens. In the AFI archives for year one of the program, there is only one mention of a student: “Terry Malick,” Stevens has said, “who had been a Rhodes Scholar and philosophy student, was a more appealing candidate. . . . Those were the kinds of ideals they wanted to encourage at the time.” 31 In a letter to Jim Silke from Michael Barlow regarding possible summer speakers, there is an attached letter from Malick to George Stevens. The letter is a fascinating document in that it reveals two of Malick’s great characteristics—a concern for cinematography and the practical moxie to get a film made. Malick requested a symposium on cinematography with James Wong Howe (one of the fathers of deep focus cinematography), Haskell Wexler (who had worked for Howe on Picnic, 1955, and would take over cinematography duties for Nestor Almendros on Malick’s second feature, Days of Heaven), and William Fraker (who had recently worked on Rosemary’s Baby, 1968, Bullitt, 1968, and the western musical mashup Paint Your Wagon, 1969). Malick notes that he found Howe “fascinating” 32 Howe’s story is tremendous. 33 Born in China in 1899, Howe came to America when his father acquired work on the Northern Pacific Railway. For a time he was a boxer with a secret love for photography. He got into the movies working on a Max Sennett short, then joined the Famous PlayersLasky Studio’s film lab, then worked as an assistant clapper, eventually becoming an assistant to Cecil B. DeMille. One of the great cinematogra-

The Smile of Life

251

phers of the classical Hollywood era, Howe pioneered the use of the wideangle lens, deep-focus photography in the 1930s (a decade before Greg Toland and Wells made it famous), and low-key or chiaroscuro lighting (which would become synonymous with film noir) earning him the nickname “lowkey Howe.” 34 He was also an early adopter of hand-held cinematography, famously using roller skates and a hand-held camera to get authentic boxing footage in Body and Soul (1947). One can not say enough about the way in which Howe’s deep-focus photography in Transatlantic (1931) and in sequences of Viva Villa! (1934) were prescient, innovative anomalies in classical Hollywood storytelling, or how the documentary-like texture of Howard Hawks’s Air Force (1943) in many ways anticipates the immediacy of Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers (1966), and the decaying texture of Sweet Smell of Success (1957) makes the gritty social realism of the late noir film possible. Along with Howe’s moxie—both personal and professional—his pioneering of cinematic realism through tone, texture, depth, and naturalistic lighting must have made him a model of particular interest to a young Malick, who was no-doubt looking for techniques that might “world” his interests properly. 35 Malick, however, had more than aesthetic considerations in mind. Malick’s note to Stevens finished with two very practical requests. Offering to moderate, Malick requested an entertainment lawyer be invited. He also asked that a previously offered, though presumably cancelled, conversation with production managers and makeup artists take place in spring 1970. Indeed, the records from AFI year one indicate a focused and fastidious Terrence Malick who was not weighed down by film theory but with the practical requirements of translating his concerns into film. Even though his short film, An Unlikely Story (1969)—made for Ed Pincus’s class at MIT— clocked in at forty minutes during a “fellows’ films” showing in fall 1969 (thirty-five minutes longer than the next longest fellow film), a progress report on April 30, 1970 reveals that his first AFI short, Old Age (1970)—a 16 mm black-and-white film shot in the LA area—was only estimated to have a runtime of ten minutes. What might be the most revealing is that Malick, ever concerned with saving on production expenses in favor of artistic freedom and control, has $870 listed for the film’s budget. Onetime Malick personal assistant Sandhya Shardanand told me a story of how she was tasked to call film scholar and firebrand Ray Carney to find out how John Cassavettes kept his production costs so low. Needless to say, Malick’s budget was on the low-end of the spectrum for the fellows that year. Some fellow productions were actually listed at several thousand dollars. In typical Malick fashion, the production progress report also reveals that Terry had been working on the film since January 26, 1970 with an estimated “completion” date of June 1970—a full six months for a ten minute film—and was already in pre-production for a second 16 mm color short, The Cincinnatus Hiner of Texas.

252

Reno Lauro

Malick’s Cinematheque choices and interactions with guest speakers at the Seminar also show a very practical concern with adaptation and production during this period. On October 21, 1969, there was a board meeting at Greystone to discuss the upcoming screening schedule for year one. The innovative list reads like a contemporary film textbook: Fellini, Bergman, Bresson, Tati, Visconti, Lean, Bunnel [sic], Antonioni, Truffaut, Chabrol, Hawks, Von Sternberg, Hitchcock, Ford, Lang . . . Japanese cinema, French New Wave, Polish school of the ’60s, Czech school, Neo realism, French during the ’30s, Soviet cinema during the ’20s and ’30s, German New Reality, Expressionism and silent comedy. 36

The first nine weeks would be devoted to neorealism, French New Wave, and British post-war cinema, with the films of Fellini leading off. Other films related to and influenced by Fellini would be shown during Cinematheque. There would be at least one film shown a day, plus it was decided that fellows would be invited to select films for viewing as well. The screenings began the week of November 3, 1969. Fellini’s The White Sheik (1952), Il Vitelloni (1953), La Strada (1954), Il Bidone (1955), and Nights of Cabria (1957) were selected for viewing. Malick, ever concerned with how films do what they do and how a director does or does not succeed at it, selected Fellini’s first film—co-directed with Alberto Lattuda—Variety Lights (1951). The week of November 16th was neorealism week. Malick selected Elia Kazan’s Boomerang (1947) and Orson Welles’s almost masterpiece, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). Interestingly, both films are adapted from previously written material. The script for Boomerang is based on a 1945 Reader’s Digest article detailing actual events. Kazan shot the social realist noir film entirely on location in Stamford, Conneticut. Ambersons, of course, was adapted from the Pulitzer Prize-winning Booth Tarkington novel. No doubt, Malick either knew or was made aware of Ambersons’ infamy and this quite possibly precipitated his desire to invite an entertainment lawyer in the spring of 1970. The final week of November 1969 was themed “Late 40th [sic] In the American Cinema” and seemed to be programed by the fellows—and only Malick and fellow AFI student Paul Schrader seem to have selected films. Schrader, author of The Transcendental Style in Film (1972), screenwriter of Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980) and director of American Gigolo (1980), selected Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946), H.C. Potter’s Hellzoppin (1941) (possibly because of its unorthodox breaking of the fourth wall), and Ford’s My Darling Clementine (1946). Malick also chose Clementine—whose screenplay was written by Old West novelist Stuart Lake, adapting one of his own books—as well as the winner of the 1950 Academy Award for Best Cinematography, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), based on two Saturday Evening Post articles, “The War Party” and

The Smile of Life

253

“The Big Hunt.” Malick also included another literary adaptation by Elia Kazan—Gentlemen’s Agreement (1947) written by Laura Z. Hobson, who was also a former New Yorker and Time magazine writer. The first two weeks of December brought the end of Malick’s inaugural foray into this most unique clearing. Week one was dedicated to the French New Wave. This week may have been particularly impactful on Malick, as the voice-over heavy, experimental Shoot the Piano Player (1960) by Francois Truffaut was part of the scheduled program, and Truffaut’s autobiographical childhood drama, The 400 Blows (1959), was Malick’s fellow’s choice. It may also have been the first time Malick viewed Jules et Jim (1963)—a film known to be very close to his heart for those who know him—which was also screened that week as an alternate option for the fellows. While the references that inform a Malick film are no doubt manifold, the complex structure and relational dynamics of Jules et Jim is very much at the cinematic heart of his three relational films, To the Wonder, Knight of Cups (2015), and Song to Song (2017). On the set of The Tree of Life, it was not an uncommon sight to find cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki being pushed in a shopping cart filming boys running through the back alleys of Smithville, Texas and hearing Malick extol the New Wave virtues of thrifty shooting techniques. Curiously, during the next week—dedicated to JeanLuc Godard’s work—Malick chose Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957), showing that rather than learning to shoot in a particular style, his interests were in complicating the tradition in order to evoke a particular energy and in the service of a very particular end. Malick’s way of approaching work, and specifically learning the work of filmmaking, seemed to all come together when AFI hosted director Howard Hawks on February 11, 1970. Malick had just begun production on his first AFI short film, Old Age, and was no doubt eager to inquire about the intangibles of the craft. Whereas Malick had heard Kazan speak during the inaugural week of AFI and then sought out his films, meeting Hawks—a frequent collaborator with Wiliam Faulkner—came after viewing Hawks’s recent Red Line 7000 (1965) and his classic adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not (1944), which included revisions by Faulkner, in the last weeks of the fall semester, 1969. Indeed, Malick, whose questions were always succinct and ever conscious of what his inquiries were trying to accomplish, was the first to ask questions and frequently commented during the seminar. According to the AFI Archive’s transcript, he was specifically curious about the script for To Have and Have Not and what Faulkner did and didn’t do. 37 Later in the seminar, he was vocally astounded to hear that Faulkner had written the script for The Big Sleep (1946)—based on a Raymond Chandler novel—in just eight days. Malick was also curious about some of the more unorthodox production footnotes to Hawks’s career. At one point Malick asked what actor and producer George Raft—dancer and one

254

Reno Lauro

time gun handler for Owney “the Killer” Madden and Bugsy Segal—was doing at a prize fight (no doubt promoted by Madden) and seemed astounded that he had no lead acting roles before Hawks cast him opposite Paul Muni in the genre-defining Scarface (1932). When the topic of Hawks’s experiences of shooting in Mexico was raised, Malick showed keen interest in the advantages of working around union rules and the freedom such a location might afford. “Why aren’t you shooting all your pictures in Mexico?” he finally asked. 38 This would prove to be prophetic in some ways, as Malick’s production style of creating a cinema of spaces would clash in both quiet and legendary ways over the next fifty years (for my own part, as a naive doctoral student working a generously improvised apprenticeship on the set of The Tree of Life, I was astounded and often felt defensive at the amount of audible groans and complaints I would hear about Malick’s unorthodox methodologies from union workers). By the end of his first year at AFI, one gets the sense that all the points of contact between Terrence Malick the promising philosopher and Terrence Malick the director had been made. In a final instance, Malick wondered why the characters in Hawks’s Red Line 7000 were not actual Southerners and was astounded to hear that “it’s hard to get actors with Southern accents.” 39 It was this moment in particular that may have changed the course of film history. As pre-production of his first feature film began in 1972, Malick had the opportunity to cast a young, yet to be discovered actress named Meryl Streep as Holly Sargis. It was not to be, and Streep’s breakout year would be 1978 with her roles in the TV miniseries Holocaust and Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter. Instead—and possibly with Husserl’s distinction of proper and improper presenting coupled with Hawks’s words still fresh in his mind—he went with the tangible naïveté and real Southern accent of Sissy Spacek. The inaugural 1969–1970 academic year ended with a seminar featuring director Rouben Mamoulian on April 30, 1970. Mamoulian was a veteran of both stage and screen, the director of the early horror genre film Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) and remakes of the silent classics The Mark of Zorro (1940) and Blood and Sand (1941), as well as notoriously only coming up with ten minutes of usable footage in sixteen weeks of shooting the gargantuan Cleopatra (1963) at the cost of $7 million dollars. 40 Mamoulian fielded one last question from AFI host and faculty member Jim Blue that must have made a lasting impression on anyone present: “You’re looking for scripts now. . . . What might be the themes, the stories, the situations that might please you?” Mamoulian, whose career was effectively over because of one of the most colossally excessive films in Hollywood history, replied: The only thing I have in mind—and this might sound square to you, but not to me—you see, by the time I was seventeen I had subscribed to the slogan “ars gratia artis.” Art for art’s sake. To hell with morality, with decency, with

The Smile of Life

255

truth—art is something very exclusive and precious. I walked around like Childe Harold out of Lord Byron. Well, by the time I got to be twenty I outgrew this silly notion. And I firmly believe that art, like everything else, is for life’s sake. It’s not for art’s sake. It should serve life. Everything should serve life. Everything should serve to add to the goodness and the beauty of this earth, to the dignity and size of man. So he can walk proud again. 41

Filed that same day was the CAFS Production Office Progress Report listing Malick’s short film, Old Age, as a month away from completion and The Cincinnatus Hiner of Texas as being in pre-production. The work of Terrence Malick the filmmaker had begun. WHEN THE POETRY PRESENTS ITSELF Just as the filmmaking of Roberto Rossellini had the ability to examine the ephemerality and preciousness of love, like Terry described that night at the Garden Theater in 2016, so too was the making of The Tree of Life and Voyage of Time dominated by a relentless search for the source of this love. I spent the better part of two years working on The Tree of Life and what would become Voyage of Time. When editor Hank Corwin was in Austin working on a cut of Tree, he would ask Malick, “Who is this ‘You’ the characters keep referring to?” One Saturday afternoon, while looking at natural history editorial experiments in what was called the “Voyage of Time” editorial suite, Malick leaned over and whispered to me, “You know that the same vortex out of which God speaks to Job also enters the Oracle at Delphi and is also the vortex Socrates says has replaced the voice of Zeus in Aristophanes’ The Clouds.” Another time, in a brief conversation in the common area, he reminded me of the value and importance of reading Plotinus. These were not simply passing statements, but suggestions for me to make my own connections, though not necessarily to consciously keep in mind, while editing. Rather than seek out the source of this love and capture it on film, Malick’s way in—during both production and post-production—was to faithfully create a clearing that would allow that source to present itself. The filmmaker that Malick most often cited in our work to prepare a clearing was Robert Bresson (1901–1999). He was quite fond of Bresson, especially his 1967 Mouchette. I vividly remember when, upon finding out that I was reading Bresson’s Notes on Cinematography —a short notebook of aphoristic-like meditations on filmmaking—that he told me that everything I needed to know about making a film was in that book and there was no need for film school afterwards. “Boys, you need to drain the pond to catch the fish,” he might say, or, “If you let that shot linger too long it’s going to feel like a postcard.” No doubt these were ways that Malick had found voice

256

Reno Lauro

through Bresson to overcome the problem of “proper presentation” of a thing or idea. Most significant about this revelation is the influence on Malick of Bresson’s intentional practice of undermining the limitations of the technology of film in order to exploit its wholly new possibilities for life. Indeed, film was born as a techno-scientific tool of observation and came of age in the bloody military strife of World War I. The very notion of film singlehandedly undermined the conception of Art in the West. Stanley Cavell must no doubt have been aware of these implications when discussing with students, of which Malick was a part, the possibilities of using film to address philosophical issues. In the spring of 1965, Malick’s final semester at Harvard, Cavell taught Philosophy 265—a seminar on aesthetics. 42 Along with his senior thesis, Malick no doubt participated in some fashion, and the course topics were likely the fodder for their regular lunch conversations about literature and film. Earlier in the fall, Malick more than likely took the new professor’s Philosophy 137: The Later Philosophy of Wittgenstein, which would have rounded out his interests going into his ill-fated Rhodes Scholarship. It is important to remember that all of this—Cavell’s presence and Malick’s interests in Heidegger and their joint exploration of these topics—flew in the face of the prevailing analytical philosophy tradition led by William Quine and John Rawls at Harvard. Cavell would go on to publish The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film the year Malick completed his work at AFI (1971) and subsequently published an enlarged edition in 1979, the year after Days of Heaven was released (Cavell’s “fragmentary reading” of Days of Heaven is the subject of the second edition’s preface). Given the terrain on Malick’s life and concerns for work covered thus far, Cavell’s reading and its implications are no less than astounding. Cavell’s story begins with Henry David Thoreau, whose uniquely American, scientific and philosophical observations—in the tradition of Goethe—provided the title for Cavell’s first foray into film philosophy. “Why do precisely those objects which we behold make a world?” writes Thoreau in Walden. 43 Cavell seems to believe that Malick had overcome the limitations of film, which he explains through Thoreau to later Heidegger— no doubt encompassing Malick’s own instincts about “World” in the process. In invoking Heidegger’s What Calls for Thinking / What is Called Thinking, Cavell begs us to consider the ontological conundrum film invokes. Film is a part of the Cartesian presencing machine that sets its sights on and then gathers the world (in this case literally via the world’s photons) in a way that both serves to dominate the world and to set ourselves apart from it. The possibility that Cavell senses, via Thoreau and Heidegger, in the cinema of Malick is that we have the opportunity to also make worlds. “Through the initial engagement with all the particulars of his environment,” writes Laura Walls, “Thoreau learned how to see ‘new worlds,’ and he learned that in seeing—in the eye’s intention, or the eye’s side vision—he did not just see

The Smile of Life

257

but created his world, even as he was created by it.” 44 The work of film, then, not only presences and points to absence but affords us a glimpse of new ways of being in the world in ways that may and could be more true than what we have experienced and even considered. The implications are astounding. Malick’s work is not servile, it is free and—as he hoped to explore in a doctoral dissertation at Oxford—concerned with the making of true worlds and true ways of living in those worlds. Time and again, those who have worked with Malick report that he does not so much create, as he faciliatates a space for life to happen and, like a documentary filmmaker ready to “catch life on a wing,” momentarily preserve those moments in the camera. Most recently, Franz Rogowski—who plays a key character in Malick’s A Hidden Life (2019)—commented that Malick “is a director who creates spaces rather than produces scenes; his editing style is like that. A bit like music.” 45 This suggestion is reminiscent of another Bresson axiom, “Not to shoot a film in order to illustrate a thesis, or to display men and women confined to their external aspect, but to discover the matter they are made of. To attain that ‘heart of the heart’ which does not let itself be caught either by poetry, or by philosophy, or by drama.” 46 Malick does not make films a certain way or to make a point, per se. He works to free the heart of the heart of a matter in each particular film. He works to properly present life, relationships, and worlds and, if possible, allow us to momentarily partake of the smile of life. Malick’s unconventional production techniques are at once legendary and shrouded in mystery. More is certainly known now than before the release of The Tree of Life, so what seems relevant is to free the technique for the work it is intended, rather than present anecdotes to be emulated in service of reproducing a style. For my own part, I was delighted to discover when I arrived on set that on the call sheet, the last shot of each day was reserved for capturing moments “when the poetry presents itself.” What most actors who have worked with Malick respect and appreciate (and others, such as Joel Kinnaman, have resented), is that Malick’s attention can change on a dime if a rare moment presents itself. 47 Malick’s set was so open to poetic moments that it could even be momentarily steered by the least important member on the set. One day, while shooting was taking place in the O’Brien house, I came upon a robin chick that had fallen out of its nest. I promptly sent the information up the chain and the next shot of the day was with the chick. Adjustments like these might seem insensitive to the work that a trained actor is used to performing. Though the impressive special effects in The Tree of Life and Voyage of Time stand as a monumental shift in his work, Malick actually has a long history with effects. The intense house fire in Badlands (1973) was designed to cover the trail of Kit (Martin Sheen) and Holly (Sissy Spacek), but only serves to signal their passions. In Days of Heaven, there is the ambitious

258

Reno Lauro

plague of locusts, famously shot in reverse, and the devastating, climactic crop fire. The Thin Red Line (1998), by its very nature as a war film, necessarily required effects. Though, compared to Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, released the same year, it is restrained and well-tempered. When Sean Penn arrived on set in Houston for Tree of Life, first assistant director Bobby Bastarache jokingly told Penn that he missed the fun in Smithville when Malick made an improvised bonfire in the middle of the street on the last day of shooting. “Well, you missed it when Terry set a thousand acres of sugar cane on fire in the South Pacific,” replied Penn, who was in character and rancorous. While digital effects were available, The Thin Red Line is still very classical in its reliance on practical effects. It was also the last film Malick edited in analog. While shooting pickups for The Tree of Life on a late winter weekend in Austin, Texas, Terry, commenting on the cold, said that one of his rules was to never shoot in the snow or in the rain. When I mentioned that one of his most visually stunning shots—the gift of the princess to the people of the Jamestown colony in The New World —was shot in the snow, Terry chuckled. “Oh, dear no. That was a special paper that Jack [Fisk] blew around that makes it look like snow.” Though technically a practical effect, The New World does have one heartbreaking digital effect—the resurrection of the extinct American Parakeet. This fleeting scene reveals everything we need to know about Malick’s philosophy of digital effects: built on the chassis of the real to the service of the true. My post-production work began with a moving errand. Mark Spacek, Sissy’s nephew, and I picked up some furniture from the production office outside of Smithville and then made a stop at an unassuming storage facility on Airport Blvd. I don’t know how many years they had been stored there, but to my amazement we began to move fifty to a hundred cans of Kodak 35 mm film that Malick had shot in the late 1970s for “Project Q” (which would eventually form the “voyage of time” sequence in Tree of Life and the subsequent full-length film). The footage was magnificent—underwater photography, eclipses, early visual effects experiments with dinosaurs, including a majestic, high-angle shot of a pterodactyl soaring over a canyon. The most mysterious was an early experiment of a Mesozoic or Cenozoic environment as seen through, but—in a nod to William Blake—also seemed to be contained within, a droplet of water. When the first wave of effects team members arrived in Austin, the atmosphere changed immediately and more than likely Malick knew he needed to protect his vision. There were more visual effects shots than money and any change to a visual effects shot meant there was less and less to spend. Visual effect supervisor Dan Glass and his team had tried to prepare Malick for what was possible with current technology by showing him the fight scene between King Kong and the T-Rexes in Peter Jackson’s 2005 spectacular. Malick, however, and ever willing to play the

The Smile of Life

259

eccentric, would keep getting caught up in the drama of the effects spectacle. At an initial planning meeting, Malick had Albert Bierstadt’s Valley of the Yosemite (1864) projected to serve as a visual philosophy for all effects shots—the world is observed in deep focus. “Bierstadt” became mantra and to say a shot needed to be Bierstadted was a clear signal that the focus of a shot had gone soft or had veered from its chassis of reality. As the window of my tenure on Tree began to close, Malick requested dialogue experiments utilizing pages of voice-over from Jessica Chastain and a temporary track recorded by A.J. Edwards. At this point in post-production, late summer of 2009, voice-over had become quite the conundrum. The voice-over was to take the narrative framework of a dialogue between the soul and the divine that might be modeled off of the Bhagavad Gita, which would anchor the film. Several men in the office had recorded options to give Terry a better sense of what he was, and in most cases, wasn’t looking for. I was sent to a small casting studio in Austin to “supervise” auditions of local talent. At one point, after having suggested Ian McKellen and/or Cate Blanchett, a cut was produced using longtime Malick friend Martin Sheen. Eventually, this voice-over structure would evolve into the dialogue between producer Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett in the two released versions of Voyage of Time. CUT TO BLACK As Jean-Luc Goddard said of Robert Bresson, we will no doubt come to say of Malick in time: Like Dostoevsky is to Russian literature and Mozart to German music, so Malick is American cinema. It is a statement he would find awkward and embarrassing because it does exactly the opposite of what he would want when considering his films—properly experiencing a mood or a thing. What does it mean to make our labors meaningful in the grand scheme of the universe? The great struggle of working and making, especially in a technological age, is to free our endeavors and the medium we work with of their limitations, freeing them to the poetry and possibilities of the infinite. Malick has forged a way of making—not just a personal vision but, similar to the autochthonous architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, a distinctly American vision—that stands as a model for making in a technological age. Longtime Malick assistant and creative consultant, A.J. Edwards (The Better Angels, 2014), once commented that when Malick’s The Tree of Life cut to black at the end of the film, you could feel the history of cinema make a hulking lurch forward. Any consideration of Malick demands a reckoning with both the nature of cinema and the nature of work and serves as a timely legacy for those of us who stand to witness the industrial age complete its transformation into information. It is wholly possible that Malick understood,

260

Reno Lauro

fifty years ago, that cinema would run out ahead of philosophy in its ability to reveal the essence of Being, by projecting new worlds and ways of being in the world, and in so doing he might point the way to the good life. His work, then, rightly stands as a way of doing work, a way of being a worker, and a way of thinking about work that accomplishes the unimaginable— summoning the smile of life through machines, screens, and virtual algorithms. This is the cinema of Terrence Malick. NOTES I want to give special thanks to A.J. Edwards, whose notes on the first draft of this chapter, support, and friendship gave me confidence that this work should be completed. 1. C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Univ. Pr., 1964), 58. Lewis borrows the notion from Chalchidus. 2. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility,” in Illuminations: Essay and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt (London: The Bodley Head Ltd, 2015). 3. Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London: Routledge, 2011). Also cf: Lewis Mumford. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., 326. Italics in original. 6. Josef Pieper, Leisure: the Basis of Culture (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2018), 57–58. 7. Ibid., 58. 8. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, as quoted in Pieper, Leisure. 9. Similarly in Latin, negotium (business) is to be without leisure (otium). 10. Kostas Kalimtzis, An Inquiry into the Philosophical Concept of scholê : Leisure as a Political End (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018). 11. Because Pieper is being cited in an investigation of work, cinema, and a technological age, we would be remiss if we did not note critiques of cultural capitalism and the elevation of consumption to a moral good as well. Writing in 1952, it may seem that Pieper specifically has the planned Marxist state in mind—and indeed that may be wholly possible. However, after the fall of the planned communist worker state in 1989, it is evident that Pieper’s critique and the associated metaphysical implications apply to cultural capitalism as well. Here, the diverse critiques include Thorstein Veblen, The Situationists, and St. John Paul II. Veblen’s influential Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) is a prototype for the sociologically driven Frankfurt School of critical theory. Briefly, the modern notion of Leisure emerged in the rapidly industrializing economy of Victorian England. Beginning with the elite, wealth began to outpace duty to economic responsibility creating blocks of “free time” for diversionary activities. The formula of free time then passed along into the lower strata of cultural capitalism and was quickly adopted and eventually turned into its own industry. The Situationists in the 1960s rightly rearticulated leisurely “free time” as being bound to the logic of capitalism. (Situationist International #9, 1964, “Questionnaire, section 12”) All of this, however, does not distract from Pieper’s thesis that there is an ontological claim made in notions of work and leisure that must be addressed. In 1991, St. John Paul II encyclical Centesimus annus puts Pieper’s critique into context by drawing a parallel between socialism and consumerism in their predilection of a radical materialism and the reduction of the worker/consumer to mere elements of their systems that truncate a person’s physical and spiritual well-being. Slavoj Zizek has forwarded his own Marxist-Hegelian critique of cultural capitalism and its moral elevation of consumption which could and should be included but this leads this work down a different path. 12. Pieper, Leisure, 51; Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 10, 7 (1177b).

The Smile of Life

261

13. Martin Heidegger, “On the Essence of Truth,” in Existence and Being (Chicago: H. Regnery Co., 1949). 14. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays (Garland Pub., 1977), 159. 15. Ibid., 160. 16. Ibid., 163–65. 17. Ibid., 163–64. 18. Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings from Being and Time (1927) to the Task of Thinking (1964), ed. David Farrell. Krell (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1978), 138. 19. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 55. 20. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, Enlarged Edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1971, 1974, 1979, 1995), xiv–xv. 21. Robert Bresson, Notes on Cinematography (Copenhagen: Green Integer, 1997); André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What Is Cinema? vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968). 22. Course Catalog of the Massachusetts Institute for Technology, 1969–1970, 241. Italics mine. 23. Richard Brody, “Terrence Malick, the Way He Was,” The New Yorker, May 26, 2011, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/terrence-malick-the-way-he-was, accessed February 1, 2020. 24. Report to AFI Trustees, AFI Archive, August 28, 1968. 25. George Stevens Jr. Opening Remarks, AFI Archive, September 1969. 26. While Malick was certainly not the first to think philosophical concerns cinematically, it is clear that—being positioned between the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and Stanley Cavell and the cinematic time-image of Italian neorealism and the French New Wave—his work is integral in the emergence of film philosophy and the post-theory work of D.N. Rodowick. 27. Report to AFI Trustees, 1968, 4. 28. Ibid., bound copy, appendixes C2–C3. 29. Ibid., bound copy, appendix C5. 30. Ibid., bound copy, appendix C6. 31. Paul Maher, One Big Soul: an Oral History of Terrence Malick (Brooklyn, NY: Upstart Crow Publishing, 2014). 32. Letter from Michael Barlow to Jim Silke, AFI Archive. 33. See Kate Samuelson, “Who Was James Wong Howe? Oscar-Winning Cinematographer Honored With Google Doodle,” Time, May 25, 2018, https://time.com/5291413/james-wonghowe, accessed February 1, 2020. 34. “Meet the Cinematographer Who Changed Films Forever,” Google Arts & Culture, https://artsandculture.google.com/story/meet-the-cinematographer-who-changed-films-forever/ DALS5WZQPEMDKg, accessed February 1, 2020. 35. Robert Hanley, “James Wong Howe Dies; Noted Cinematographer,” New York Times, July 16, 1976, https://www.nytimes.com/1976/07/16/archives/james-wong-howe-dies-notedcinematographer.html, accessed February 1, 2020; also Richard Meran. Barsam, Looking at Movies (New York: Norton, 2010), 234–39. 36. Note Re: Meeting Concerning Screening Schdule held at Greystone, October 21, 1969, AFI Archive. 37. Howard Hawks AFI Seminar 2.11.70, AFI Archive. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid. 40. Dina Gachman, “Cleopatra,” in George Lucass Blockbusting: a Decade-by-Decade Survey of Timeless Movies, Including Untold Secrets of Their Financial and Cultural Success, ed. Alex Ben Block and Lucy Autrey Wilson (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 460–61. 41. Rouben Mamoulian AFI Seminar 4.30.70, AFI Archives. Italics added. 42. Harvard University. “Courses of instruction for Harvard and Radcliffe. Cambridge, Mass.: The University, [1962–1966]. 1964–1965,” https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/ drs:427973178$330i, accessed August 28, 2019.

262

Reno Lauro

43. Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Civil Disobedience (New York: Penguin Books, 2017), 272. 44. Laura Dassow Walls, Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 175–176. Italics in original. 45. “Franz Rogowski on Playing a Ghost in Transit, Disorienting the Audience, and Terrence Malick’s Radegund,” The Film Stage, March 9, 2019, https://thefilmstage.com/features/ franz-rogowski-on-playing-a-ghost-in-transit-disorienting-the-audience-and-terrence-malicksradegund, accessed August 29, 2019. 46. Bresson, Notes on Cinematography, 20. 47. Kevin Jagernauth, “Joel Kinnaman Says He Shot One Day on Knight of Cups and Had a 17-Page Monologue,” IndieWire, February 11, 2014, https://www.indiewire.com/2014/02/joelkinnaman-says-he-shot-one-day-on-knight-of-cups-and-had-a-17-page-monologue-89180, accessed February 1, 2020.

REFERENCES American Film Institute—The AFI Archive. With great appreciation, the author thanks Emily Wittenberg and the staff (past and present) of the AFI Archive for their generosity and meticulous record-keeping, without which, this essay would not have been possible. Barsam, Richard Meran. Looking at Movies. New York: Norton, 2010. Bazin André . “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” In What Is Cinema Vol. 1, translated by Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility.” In Illuminations: Essay and Reflections, edited by Hannah Arendt. London: The Bodley Head Ltd, 2015. Bresson, Robert. Notes on Cinematography. Copenhagen: Green Integer, 1997. Brody, Richard. “Terrence Malick, the Way He Was.” The New Yorker, May 26, 2011. https:// www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/terrence-malick-the-way-he-was. Cavell, Stanley. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, Enlarged Edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1971, 1974, 1979, 1995. “Franz Rogowski on Playing a Ghost in Transit, Disorienting the Audience, and Terrence Malick’s Radegund.” The Film Stage, March 9, 2019. https://thefilmstage.com/features/ franz-rogowski-on-playing-a-ghost-in-transit-disorienting-the-audience-and-terrence-malicks-radegund. Gachman, Dina. “Cleopatra.” In George Lucass Blockbusting: a Decade-by-Decade Survey of Timeless Movies, Including Untold Secrets of Their Financial and Cultural Success, edited by Alex Ben Block and Lucy Autrey Wilson. New York: HarperCollins, 2010. Hanley, Robert. “James Wong Howe Dies; Noted Cinematographer.” The New York Times, July 16, 1976. https://www.nytimes.com/1976/07/16/archives/james-wong-howe-diesnoted-cinematographer.html. Heidegger, Martin. “On the Essence of Truth.” In Existence and Being. Chicago: H. Regnery Co., 1949. ———. Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. ———. The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays. Garland Pub., 1977. ———. Basic Writings from Being and Time (1927) to The Task of Thinking (1964). Edited by David Farrell. Krell. London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1978. Ingold, Tim. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge, 2011. Jagernauth, Kevin. “Joel Kinnaman Says He Shot One Day on Knight of Cups and Had a 17Page Monologue.” IndieWire, February 11, 2014. https://www.indiewire.com/2014/02/joelkinnaman-says-he-shot-one-day-on-knight-of-cups-and-had-a-17-page-monologue-89180/. Kalimtzis, Kostas. An Inquiry into the Philosophical Concept of scholê : Leisure as a Political End. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.

The Smile of Life

263

Lewis, C. S. The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Cambridge: Univ. Pr., 1964. Maher, Paul. One Big Soul: an Oral History of Terrence Malick. Brooklyn, NY: Upstart Crow Publishing, 2014. “Meet the Cinematographer Who Changed Films Forever.” Google Arts & Culture. Accessed February 1, 2020. https://artsandculture.google.com/story/meet-the-cinematographer-whochanged-films-forever/DALS5WZQPEMDKg. Pieper, Josef. Leisure: the Basis of Culture. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2018. Samuelson, Kate. “Who Was James Wong Howe? Oscar-Winning Cinematographer Honored With Google Doodle.” Time, May 25, 2018. https://time.com/5291413/james-wong-howe/. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden and Civil Disobedience. New York: Penguin Books, 2017. Walls, Laura Dassow. Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995.

Index

aesthetics, 6, 13, 21, 30, 35, 45, 96, 211–212, 256 American Film Institute, xv, 5, 124, 248–255 Aristotle, xii, 87–88, 96–99, 243, 245 Atkins, Paul, 162–164 Saint Augustine of Hippo, xii, 74, 158–161, 166, 169–170, 187 Austin, Texas, x, 113n3, 127, 237, 255, 258–259

cinematography, 32, 48–49, 123, 124, 143, 145, 147, 162–165, 250–251, 253, 258. See also photography confession, 74, 156–159, 170, 185, 231 Critchley, Simon, 4, 7, 56n27

Badlands (1973), 12, 32, 124, 142–143, 221 beauty, 10–11, 34, 45, 54, 70, 76, 143–144, 146, 159–160, 163–170, 240, 255 Bhagavad Gita, 74, 259 bodies, 22, 25, 28, 30, 33–34, 75, 159, 166, 167, 170, 240 Brakhage, Stan, 15, 150n8 Bresson, Robert, 138, 140, 151n19, 247, 252, 255–257, 259 Cavell, Stanley, x, xii, 3–4, 8–9, 24, 190, 239, 244, 246, 256 Christ, 47, 70, 73, 75, 129, 146, 149, 170, 189, 213n6, 219, 223, 225, 229–230 Christianity, xii, 42, 47, 75, 138, 141, 146–147, 150, 159, 170, 178, 188–190, 201, 210, 218–219, 223, 225–229

Days of Heaven (1978), xi, 10, 32–33, 62, 64, 67, 124–127, 143, 217, 221–223, 225–232, 246, 257–258 death, 7, 47–48, 50–51, 62, 63, 68, 71–72, 103–104, 167, 170–171, 183, 187, 199–201, 212, 221, 224, 226, 231, 238 Deleuze, Gilles, 27, 35, 160, 168–169, 190, 244 dialectic, xi–xii, 42, 44, 54, 98, 105, 110, 196n65, 207, 259 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 170, 214n30, 241 dream, 30, 32, 108–110, 137, 142, 149, 150n8, 157, 160, 163, 209, 211, 218 editing, 15, 31, 46, 49–50, 89, 122, 125, 137–139, 141, 144, 146–149, 157, 163–165, 169, 217, 255, 257, 258–259 Edwards, A. J., 259, 260 environment. See nature farm, 64, 171, 217, 221–222, 242 film school, xi, 5, 122–123, 255 film theory, 6–8, 21, 25, 27, 81, 137, 141, 147, 149, 168, 247, 251

265

266

Index

fire, 43–44, 46, 49, 72, 75, 148, 164, 167, 169, 187, 202, 220, 226, 257–258 Fisk, Jack, 149, 258 forgiveness. See grace French New Wave, 15, 122, 125, 249, 252–253 garden, 65, 76, 214n30, 224, 228; of Eden, 157, 171, 219–222, 226, 228–229 Glass, Dan, 162, 258 God: and creation, 41, 146–147, 163, 208; in philosophy, 68, 138, 160, 163, 169, 255; and relationship with humanity, 50, 53, 69–71, 75–76, 103, 158–159, 170, 178–181, 184–189, 201–203, 212, 218–220, 225, 230 grace: spiritual, 65, 149–150, 158, 170–171, 181–187, 201, 205–208; forgiveness, 102–103, 111, 150, 155, 181, 185, 206, 214n30, 218, 230; nature and, 31, 62, 163, 178–179 Harvard University, x, xiii, 3, 4, 24, 95, 163, 177, 238, 256 heaven, 10, 68, 150, 155–156, 159–160, 162–164, 166–167, 169–171, 179, 208–209, 210, 217, 218, 220–223, 225–230, 232, 246 Heidegger, Martin, x, xii, 3–8, 11, 13, 22, 24, 61, 66–68, 91–93, 177, 238–239, 244–246, 256 A Hidden Life (2019), 96, 129, 131, 155, 171, 227, 257 home, 33, 49, 51–52, 65, 67, 155–156, 157, 170–171, 201, 241, 243 Homer, 49, 67, 83–84, 87, 170 icons, 62, 70–72, 75–76, 140, 146–147, 157, 228; Rublev, Andrei (icon painter), 76, 140, 142 immortality, 45, 50, 56n27, 68, 71, 159 Italian Neorealism, 122, 125, 168, 252, 261n26 Jesus. See Christ Job (biblical), 68, 74, 103, 178–179, 186–189, 207, 255

Kierkegaard, Søren, 5, 177, 187, 201–205, 212, 239 Knight of Cups (2015), 26, 148–150, 156–159, 166, 170, 172n8, 200–201, 209–212 light, 30–32, 47–49, 54, 55n22–56n23, 61, 67, 72, 75, 85, 88, 92, 156, 180 Lubezki, Emmanuel, 32, 145, 147, 253 marriage: broken, 33, 45, 146, 200, 211, 228, 230; spiritual symbolism of, 165, 170, 218, 223, 228, 232, 233n30; wedding, 33, 63, 64, 73, 165, 170, 228 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, x, 5, 238–239, 247, 249, 251 memory, 44–45, 49–51, 101–103, 115n39, 142, 144, 149, 156, 157, 159–161, 169, 171, 231, 238 mercy. See grace montage. See editing music, 61, 69–70, 142, 144–145, 148, 150, 162, 182, 188, 257 narration. See voice-over nature: and civilization, 64–65, 76, 227, 241, 242, 245; in conflict, 31–32, 34, 45, 61, 84, 90, 92, 181–182, 185–186, 192, 199, 205–208, 226, 229; cultivation of, 64–65, 218, 222, 227; glory of, 21–22, 47, 162–165, 171, 178–179, 227; photography of, 10–11, 142–146, 162–165 The New World (2005), 26, 32–34, 62–63, 65, 67, 69, 72, 74, 76, 108–111, 115n47–116n49, 145, 192, 258 nostalgia. See memory painting, 62, 73, 76, 105, 127, 132, 140, 160, 166 paradise. See heaven Paradise Lost, xi, 232n13 phenomenology, 14, 27–28, 62, 66, 69, 72, 177 philosophy: ancient, x–xii, 14, 64, 74, 156, 158, 159–160, 163, 167, 255; and film, 6, 7, 13, 21, 25–27, 35, 42, 160, 168–169, 189–190, 244; modern, x, xii, 3–9, 11, 13, 21, 24, 61, 66–68, 91–93,

Index 177, 190, 238–239, 244–246, 256 photography, 12–13, 32, 160, 231, 247, 250–251. See also cinematography The Pilgrim’s Progress, 150, 156, 209 Plato, xi–xii, 14, 75, 156, 159–160, 167–168, 244; Phaedrus, xi–xii; Socrates, xi–xii, 172n14, 255; Timaeus, 64 Plotinus, xi, 163–170, 255 poetry, 74, 81–83, 86, 90, 156–157; and cinema, 24–25, 35, 138, 142, 144, 149, 257; and philosophy, 66, 72, 91, 246, 248, 255 prayer, 47–49, 63, 67, 69, 76, 85, 99, 137, 144, 147, 149, 152n47, 157–158, 164, 171, 185, 230, 232 privacy, x, 4, 121, 124, 127, 131, 158 priests, 31, 69, 146, 149, 158, 170, 178, 180, 186–187, 200, 211–212, 214n30, 217, 241 Rhodes Scholarship, x, 4, 177, 250, 256 Richards, Eugene, 231 Romanticism, 30, 32–33, 109, 156–157, 211 Rossellini, Roberto, 237, 238, 255 Rybin, Steven, 24, 27, 31, 34, 43, 46–47 Ryle, Gilbert, 4–5, 213n8, 239 sacramental, 75–76, 146, 190, 213n6, 219, 225 Schrader, Paul, 5, 138–139, 148, 252 screenwriting, 95–97, 104, 112, 130, 144, 147, 158, 237, 248, 252–253 sermons, 65, 158, 172n7, 186–187, 218, 224, 226, 228 Shakespeare, William, 4, 85 Sheen, Martin, 170 sin, 159, 178, 180, 184, 186, 218, 220–221, 224–226, 231 Sinnerbrink, Robert, 5, 8, 24, 26, 35 sky, 48–49, 51, 55n22–56n23, 64, 67–68, 71, 171, 247 Song to Song (2017), x–xi, 26, 33, 113n3, 150, 155, 157–158, 166, 172n30,

267

232n13, 253 soul, 48, 63, 67, 75–76, 111, 137, 141, 144–145, 148, 159–161, 163, 166–167, 169, 170, 240, 241, 243, 259 Tarkovsky, Andrei, 137–150, 160–161, 165, 169, 171 teaching, x, 4–5, 73, 172n30, 180, 190, 239 The Thin Red Line (1998), 6, 9, 32, 41, 61, 63, 65, 69–71, 74, 76, 81, 99–100, 111, 121, 127–128, 130, 144, 169, 258 Thoreau, Henry David, 4, 86, 256 Thy Kingdom Come (2018), 231 To the Wonder (2012), 25–26, 29, 31, 33–34, 99, 111, 131, 146–147, 149–150, 157–158, 166, 217, 225, 228–232, 240–241, 246–247, 253 The Tree of Life (2011), 22, 31, 33, 61, 63, 65–66, 71, 74–76, 99, 102–104, 111, 113n3, 122, 145, 149, 156–158, 163, 172n7, 177, 199, 223–224, 226–227, 237–238, 249, 253–255, 257–259 Truffaut, François, 122, 253 Trumbull, Douglas, 162, 249 violence, 11, 31, 65, 74, 139, 142–144, 185, 192, 205, 221 voice-over, 11, 15, 21, 31, 41–43, 46, 54, 64, 74, 83, 89–92, 108, 125, 142, 143–144, 146, 157–158, 164, 184, 221, 230, 253, 259 Voyage of Time (2016), xii, 127, 161–165, 249, 255–259 water, 49, 74, 76, 90, 155, 164, 169, 184, 210, 225–226, 230, 241 wedding. See marriage Welles, Orson, 131–132, 252 Whitman, Walt, 83, 85–87 Wilfred Opus 161 (lumia by Thomas Wilfred), 63, 75, 103, 167, 188, 195n52 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 5, 7, 14, 177, 213n8, 239, 256

About the Contributors

Fr. Matthew Aughtry, MDiv, is a minister and filmmaker living in Texas. His education includes the University of South Carolina, Fuller Theological Seminary, UCLA, and Baylor University. He is a Brehm Scholar in theology and the arts, where he made the film Mothers of the Desert (2016). He is now an associate priest for the arts at Christ Church Waco and makes documentary videos for Baylor University. Timothy E.G. Bartel, PhD, is one of the founding faculty members of the College at the Saint Constantine School, where he helps to shape the writing and literature curriculum. He holds a PhD in divinity from the University of St. Andrews and a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from Seattle Pacific University. He has written for many periodicals, including Christianity and Literature, Pilgrimage, Saint Katherine Review, Relief, Transpositions, and Windhover. He has published two collections of poems, The Martyr, the Grizzly, t he Gold and Arroyos: Sijo and Other Poems; the latter was named a Book of 2015 by the Scottish Poetry Library. Vernon W. Cisney, PhD, is assistant professor of interdisciplinary studies at Gettysburg College. He is the author of Deleuze and Derrida: Difference and the Power of the Negative (2018) and Derrida’s Voice and Phenomenon: An Edinburgh Philosophical Guide (2014). He is also the coeditor of Biopower: Foucault and Beyond (2015), The Way of Nature and the Way of Grace: Philosophical Footholds on Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life (2016), Between Foucault and Derrida (2016), and Pierre Klossowski’s Living Currency Followed by Sade and Fourier (2017).

269

270

About the Contributors

Adam Daniel, PhD, is a member of the Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University. His research investigates the evolution of horror film, with a focus on the intersection of embodied spectatorship and new media technologies. He is vice president of the Sydney Screen Studies Network and the author of the forthcoming Affective Intensities and Evolving Horror Forms. David J. Gilbert, MA, is the dean of the Upper and Middle School at Saint Constantine School, where he teaches great books and ethics. He received his master’s in the philosophy of religion and ethics at Talbot School of Theology and his bachelor’s in philosophy from the University of North Texas. He spent several years teaching philosophy and religion to sailors on board three deployed U.S. Navy aircraft carriers with the Navy’s College Afloat Program. He was a founding faculty member and the associate director of the Academy at Houston Baptist University. David LaRocca, PhD, edited Stanley Cavell’s Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes (2003) and worked as Cavell’s research assistant during the time he was completing Cities of Words (2004) and Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow (2005). He later edited books featuring Cavell’s work, including Estimating Emerson: An Anthology of Criticism from Carlyle to Cavell (2013) and The Bloomsbury Anthology of Transcendental Thought: From Antiquity to the Anthropocene (2017), and contributed chapters to Stanley Cavell, Literature, and Film: The Idea of America (2013) and Stanley Cavell and Aesthetic Understanding (2018). He was guest editor of Acknowledging Stanley Cavell, a commemorative issue of Conversations: The Journal of Cavellian Studies (2019, no. 7), and edited The Thought of Stanley Cavell and Cinema: Turning Anew to the Ontology of Film a Half-Century after The World Viewed (2020). He is also the editor of a trilogy of books on philosophy and film: The Philosophy of Charlie Kaufman, The Philosophy of War Films, and The Philosophy of Documentary Film: Image, Sound, Fiction, Truth. He has participated in a National Endowment for the Humanities institute, a workshop with Abbas Kiarostami, Werner Herzog’s Rogue Film School, and The School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University. Contact him at www.DavidLaRocca.org. Reno Lauro received his PhD from the University of St. Andrews Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts. He spent 18 months working for Terrence Malick on The Tree of Life and Voyage of Time. Reno has taught courses on film, philosophy, and history and has written several essays over the years about Malick and film philosophy for Mubi Notebook and Senses of Cinema. He lives in Scottsdale, Arizona, with his wife, Melissa, and four

About the Contributors

271

sons, where he writes scripts and works at the intersection of humane and digital learning. Anthony Parisi is a film director, editor, and the visual effects supervisor for the creative agency Tiny Dino. He works with a postproduction team on documentaries, television series, commercials, and marketing for clients such as Paramount Pictures. He has written, directed, and edited his own films and TV series, including Manifest Destiny: The Lewis & Clark Musical Adventure (2016) and The Seventh Spectrum (2013). Kip Redick (PhD) is professor and chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Christopher Newport University. Professional interests include pilgrimage studies, spiritual journey, spirituality of place, aesthetics, media ecology; visual, religious, and environmental rhetoric; and film studies. His specific research interest centers on the study of wilderness trails as sites of spiritual journey. Among his publications are “Interpreting Contemporary Pilgrimage as Spiritual Journey or Aesthetic Tourism Along the Appalachian Trail,” International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage, vol. 6/ii 2018; and “Aesthetic Sojourning on the Appalachian Trail,” a chapter in Sensorial Trajectories, Cambridge Scholars, 2018. Joshua Russell, MFA, is an assistant professor of screenwriting and the film & television program director at Western Carolina University. He has also taught at Columbia College Chicago and DePaul University. Joshua won “Best Producer” at St. Tropez in France and “Best Picture” at Sunscreen in St. Petersburg, Florida. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and Variety Magazine. He is also co-author of the broadaudience science fiction book series Universe Eventual. Joshua Sikora, MFA, is the founder and director of the Cinema & New Media Arts program at Houston Baptist University, where he teaches cinematic theory, screenwriting, and developing technologies. An award-winning filmmaker and new media entrepreneur, Sikora is also the founder of New Renaissance Pictures, an independent production company through which he has produced a variety of feature films, TV series, and documentaries. Naaman K. Wood, PhD, is assistant professor of media and communication at Redeemer University College. His work has been published in the journals Symbolic Interaction and Jazz Perspectives and the books Words and Witnesses: Communication Studies in Christian Thought, Prophetic Critique and Popular Media, and More than “Precious Memories”: Critical Essays on the Rhetoric of Southern Gospel.

272

About the Contributors

Dean Yamada, MFA, teaches cinema and media arts at Biola University and has traveled numerous times to Tokyo, Berlin, and Jakarta with classes of students to shoot both shorts and features. His short film Jitensha (Bicycle) premiered at the 2009 Venice Film Festival, was screened in competition at the Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival, and won a handful of awards, including the Vision Award from the Heartland Film Festival and the Golden Reel from the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival. Dean’s first feature, Cicada (2014), shot in Tokyo, won eight awards, including the Grand Jury Award at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival and the Narrative Feature Award from the Heartland Film Festival.