Terrence Malick: Film and Philosophy 9781441150035, 144115003X, 9781441140272

Citation preview

Terrence Malick

Terrence Malick Film and Philosophy

Edited by

Thomas Deane Tucker and Stuart Kendall

The Continuum International Publishing Group 80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038 The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX www.continuumbooks.com Copyright © 2011 by Thomas Deane Tucker and Stuart Kendall All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Terrence Malick, film and philosophy / edited by Thomas Deane Tucker & Stuart Kendall. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-4411-5003-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-4411-5003-X (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Malick, Terrence, 1945— Criticism and interpretation. I. Tucker, Thomas Deane, 1962- II. Kendall, Stuart. PN1998.3.M3388T47 2011 791.43023’3092–dc22 2010048884 EISBN: 978-1-4411-4027-2

Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India Printed and bound in the United States of America

Contents

Notes on Contributors Chapter 1: Introduction Stuart Kendall and Thomas Deane Tucker

vii 1

Chapter 2: Voicing Meaning: On Terrence Malick’s Characters Steven Rybin

13

Chapter 3: Terrence Malick’s Histories of Violence John Bleasdale

40

Chapter 4: Rührender Achtung: Terrence Malick’s Cinematic Neo-Modernity Thomas Wall Chapter 5: Worlding the West: An Ontopology of Badlands Thomas Deane Tucker Chapter 6: Fields of Vision: Human Presence in the Plain Landscapes of Terrence Malick and Wright Morris Matthew Evertson Chapter 7: The Belvedere and the Bunkhouse: Space and Place in Days of Heaven Ian Rijsdijk

58

80

101

126

Chapter 8: The Tragic Indiscernibility of Days of Heaven Stuart Kendall

148

Chapter 9: Darkness from Light: Dialectics and The Thin Red Line Russell Manning

165

vi

Contents

Chapter 10: Song of the Earth: Cinematic Romanticism in Malick’s The New World Robert Sinnerbrink

179

Chapter 11: Whereof One Cannot Speak: Terrence Malick’s The New World Elizabeth Walden

197

Bibliography Index

211 217

Notes on Contributors

John Bleasdale is a film scholar and Professor at Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia. Matthew Evertson is an Associate Professor of English at Chadron State College in Nebraska and a scholar of American literature with a specialty in the literature of the Great Plains. He is the author of numerous articles on Stephen Crane, Willa Cather, and Teddy Roosevelt. His book Strenuous Lives: Stephen Crane, Theodore Roosevelt and the American 1890s will be published by University of Alabama Press in 2011. Stuart Kendall is an independent scholar working at the intersections of visual and critical studies, poetics and theology. In addition to numerous articles and reviews, he is the author of Georges Bataille, a critical biography, published by Reaktion Books, and the editor and translator of eight volumes of diverse writings in visual and critical studies by Georges Bataille, Jean Baudrillard, Maurice Blanchot, René Char, Guy Debord, and Paul Eluard. Russell Manning is a Postdoctorate Fellow at the Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation at Deakins University in Australia. Ian Rijsdijk teaches a variety of film studies and media courses at The Center For Film and Media Studies at University of Capetown. He is currently working in the field of ecocriticism and film. Steven Rybin is an Instructor of Film at Georgia Gwinnett College. He received an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Film Studies and Philosophical Aesthetics from the School of Interdisciplinary Arts at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, after completing his MA in Film Studies from Emory University in 2005. He has taught classes in film aesthetics, art cinema, film authorship, film history, and interdisciplinary courses on the arts.

viii

Notes on Contributors

He is the author of The Cinema of Michael Mann (Lexington Books, 2007) and Nicholas Ray in Hollywood: Cinephilia and Film Authorship (forthcoming in 2011). Robert Sinnerbrink was awarded his Ph.D. on Hegel, Heidegger, and the Metaphysics of Modernity at the University of Sydney in 2002. During his postgraduate research period he spent six months studying at the Humboldt Universitaet in Berlin. He has taught philosophy at a number of institutions, including the University of Sydney, UTS, UNSW, The College of Fine Arts, and Macquarie University. He is currently Lecturer in Philosophy at Macquarie University in Sydney Australia. He is Chair of the Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy and book review coeditor for the journal Critical Horizons: A Journal of Philosophy and Social Theory. Thomas Deane Tucker is a Professor of Humanities at Chadron State College in western Nebraska. His research and teaching interests are in philosophical aesthetics, continental philosophy, and cinema studies. His work has appeared in journals such as Studies in French Cinema, FilmPhilosophy Journal, and Enculturation. He is the author of Derridada: Duchamp as Readymade Deconstruction (Lexington Books, 2008). It is the first text to explore Duchamp’s work in the context of the theories of Derrida and deconstruction. He is currently working on a book titled The Logic of Indifférance. Elizabeth Walden is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Cultural Studies at Bryant University in Smithfield, Rhode Island. Her recent work addresses emerging notions of materiality and posthuman collectivities in film and visual culture. Thomas Carl Wall is an English professor at National Tapei University of Technology in Taiwan. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington. His interests are in the Twentieth-Century World Literature, Twentieth-Century Continental Philosophy, Film Theory, History of Literary Criticism, and History of Western Thought. He is the author of Radical Passivity: Levinas, Blanchot and Agamben (SUNY Press, 1999).

Chapter 1

Introduction Stuart Kendall and Thomas Deane Tucker

In the preface to his book The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, first published in 1971, philosopher Stanley Cavell acknowledges his gratefulness to Terrence Malick.1 Cavell thanks a number of other friends and colleagues, as well as his wife, in the same pages, so the comment is almost unremarkable. It is in fact a comment that would only become remarkable a few years later, after Terrence Malick had written and directed some of the most astonishing films produced during our times. When Cavell first published his remark, Malick was 28 years old and a recent graduate of the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. Cavell— seventeen years Malick’s senior—had been his professor in philosophy at Harvard in the mid-1960s and the two had stayed in touch as Malick sought and found his way from philosophy into film or, as this volume proposes to explore, from philosophy into a certain kind of filmmaking relevant to philosophy. In the second enlarged edition of his book, published in 1979, Cavell again references Malick, this time in connection with some passages from Martin Heidegger’s What is Called Thinking? that strike Cavell as particularly helpful to understanding Malick’s then recent second film, Days of Heaven as well as to understanding the main subject of Cavell’s work, the ontology of film. Cavell’s book links a celebrated contemporary American philosopher and an inchoate contemporary American filmmaker in a unique and paradoxical relationship: here the teacher thanks his former student and references that student’s film work as an illustration of his own philosophical ideas. But who has taught whom, what, and when? What is the relationship between the philosopher and the filmmaker? This question resonates biographically—proposing an ongoing friendship between these

2

Terrence Malick

two significant culture-makers—but also and perhaps more importantly as a question posed between film and philosophy. Cavell’s remarks signal the appropriateness of asking philosophical questions about Terrence Malick’s works as well as the aptness of exploring the philosophical themes and problems posed by and examined in Malick’s works. While it is not too much to claim that any film—no matter how derivative or aesthetically valueless—may provide fodder for a certain kind of inquiry that can be understood as philosophical, it is also not too much to claim that Malick’s films offer privileged sites for this kind of inquiry. Malick’s background in philosophy and the evidence offered by the films themselves invites this style of interrogation. It is already a philosophical question to ask if the films demand this kind of questioning. But this is not the kind of question for us to pursue here in this introduction. Our goal here is simply to sketch some of the possible relations between film and philosophy and to outline some of Terrence Malick’s biographical itineraries, particularly as they relate to his engagements with film and philosophy. The practices of film and philosophy have in fact benefited from several different kinds of relationship over the past one hundred years and more. There have been films that unfold in a philosophical register, films about philosophical problems, and films that endeavor to function as philosophy. 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. Cinema has of course also attracted the interest of a number of philosophers and been written about in a philosophical key by an even larger number of film commentators, critics, and, occasionally, filmmakers. Sergei Eisenstein arguably occupies as significant a place among aestheticians as he does among filmmakers. Since cinema has been the dominant art form of the twentieth century, it is not surprising that it should figure prominently in the works of philosophers interested in aesthetic concerns. What is perhaps more surprising is that these philosophers have so rarely agreed upon relevant questions pertaining to the relationship between film and philosophy or even the basic nature of the medium and the ways in which it might be approached. This diversity of opinion is occasionally obscured by the assured literary and intellectual style of some philosophers and even, one might observe, some philosophical approaches. Despite this apparent will to uniformity, philosophical

Introduction

3

approaches to film studies remain diverse in method, orientation, and range of concern. In his two-volume treatment of the first ninety years in the history of the cinema, Gilles Deleuze observes that a philosophy of cinema operates both within and alongside cinema: “Cinema’s concepts are not given in cinema,” he argues, “And yet they are cinema’s concepts, not theories about cinema . . . Cinema itself is a new practice of image and signs, whose theory philosophy must produce as conceptual practice.”2 A philosophy of cinema, for Deleuze, endeavors to articulate the concepts at work in cinematic practice. This is different from attempting to explore philosophical questions through cinematic examples and different too from attempting to define cinema philosophically. Deleuze wants philosophy or philosophical concept making—theory—to speak for the philosophy of cinema rather than to develop or advance a philosophy about cinema. But this is just one approach among many to this relationship. Rather than embodying or illustrating a single approach to the relationship between film and philosophy, the following chapters hope, among other things, to celebrate the diversity of philosophically informed approaches to the films of one filmmaker, Terrence Malick. In this volume, you will find Malick registered with the likes of Schiller, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Kant, Gilbert Ryle, Heraclitus, Wright Morris, Wittgenstein, and, of course, Malick’s often noted companion philosopher Martin Heidegger. This diversity speaks to the richness of Malick’s films for this kind of inquiry as well as to the difficulty of defining those films through any one single approach. As will become clear, Malick’s films are at once extremely fecund and extremely reticent, and a similar comment might be made about the filmmaker himself. Terrence Malick is in fact among the most reticent of filmmakers. He has not given interviews or aided in the promotion of his films in any way since the release of his first film, Badlands, in the early 1970s. He does not permit photographs to be taken of him either on or off the set. He does not explain his films in writing or in any other form of commentary or documentation nor does he publish or release any other kind of writing—nothing, in short, that might offer his viewers a useful tool in approaching the films themselves. Aside from a brief public conversation at the Rome Film Festival in 2007, Malick’s silence about his films and about film in general has been complete.3 In our interconnected, networked, and media saturated age, this kind of reticence is remarkable. It is all the more remarkable for the depth of

4

Terrence Malick

consideration Malick both reportedly and obviously devotes to every aspect of his craft as a filmmaker. It is remarkable, in short, that such care has been left to speak for itself. Interviews with the casts and crews of his films, such as those available on the Criterion Collection DVD releases of Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line, for example, shed some light on Malick’s materials and working methods without fully explaining them. The bits and pieces of information they offer serve in some ways only to deepen the enigmatic nature of the objects—the films—themselves. Technical and biographical details in cases like this beg hermeneutic questions: what kind of information or insight is helpful in approaching films in general and Malick’s films in particular? How should Malick’s films be situated or contextualized most productively? These questions have proven to be very vexing for Malick’s critics, both casual and concerted. Some critics affiliate him with the New American Cinema of the 1970s—with Arthur Penn, Robert Altman, and Bob Rafelson, for example—others affiliate him more strongly with the European Art Cinema of the 1950s and 1960s. Two of the book-length works devoted to Malick—Hannah Peterson’s edited collection The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America and Lloyd Michaels Terrence Malick—adopt a “literary” approach to their subject.4 David Davies’ edited volume on The Thin Red Line, by contrast, appears in a series of works in which philosophers write on film. Undoubtedly these approaches are both valid and helpful, perhaps equally so.

Biographical Itineraries Terrence Malick was born on November 30, 1943 in either Ottawa, Illinois or Waco, Texas (according to conflicting reports).5 His father, Emil, was a geologist of Lebanese heritage (the name Malick means “king” in Lebanese). Malick’s mother, Irene, grew up on a farm outside Chicago. Malick is the oldest of three boys. Both of his brothers would encounter tragedy. The middle son, Chris, would be badly burned in an automobile accident that killed his wife. The youngest son, Larry, would become depressed when studying guitar with Andrés Segovia in Spain in 1968. Larry broke both of his hands and ultimately took his own life. Well before these events, when Malick was young, his father Emil got a job with Phillips Petroleum that moved the family to Texas and later Oklahoma. In one of the only two interviews Malick has ever granted, he

Introduction

5

observed: “I was raised in a violent environment in Texas. What struck me was how violence erupted and ended before you really had time to understand what was happening.”6 He also describes being trained in civil defense against a nuclear attack. As a student at St. Stephen’s Episcopal High School in Austin, Malick performed in plays, played football, and was an excellent student. During the summers through high school and college, he worked the wheat harvests north from Texas into Canada. He also worked in the oil fields and in a railyard. After high school, Malick went on to study philosophy at Harvard, as we have already noted, with Stanley Cavell. Following graduation from Harvard—summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa—in 1965, Malick won a prestigious fellowship to continue his studies in philosophy as a Rhodes Scholar at Magdalen College, Oxford. His major professor there was Gilbert Ryle, but the two apparently did not agree on the direction of his work. Malick abandoned his fellowship after only one year and found employment as a journalist for the New Yorker, Life, and Newsweek. In the fall of 1967, the New Yorker sent Malick to Bolivia to cover the trial of Régis Debray, the French philosopher who had been a member of Che Guevara’s revolutionary cadre, but nothing came of the story.7 The following spring Malick continued to write, contributing to the obituaries of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy for the New Yorker, among other pieces. In 1968, Malick taught philosophy as a lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and in 1969 he published The Essence of Reasons, a translation of Martin Heidegger’s Vom Wesen des Grundes with an informed and astute critical introduction and notes. The book appeared in the prestigious Northwestern University Press series Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. These endeavors would suggest that Malick intended to pursue a career as a professor of philosophy, despite having abandoned his studies in Oxford. Apparently, however, his experiences in front of the classroom were not positive ones. In his interview with Barbara Walker for Sight and Sound, Malick said flatly: “I was not a good teacher; I didn’t have the sort of edge one should have on the students, so I decided to do something else.”8 That something else was film school. In 1969, Malick enrolled in the American Film Institute’s Center for Advanced Film Studies (now the AFI Conservatory) in Los Angeles. David Lynch and Paul Schrader were there at the same time and the place seems to have been an incubator for the New Hollywood. Friendships he formed there have followed Malick through his professional career, most

6

Terrence Malick

notably perhaps his friendship with a high school friend of David Lynch, Jack Fisk.9 Fisk has been either Art Director or Production Designer on all of Malick’s films to date. While working with Malick on Badlands, Fisk met Sissy Spacek (the female lead in the film). The two were married a year after Badlands was released. Fisk has spent the majority of his career in Hollywood directing his own films and working as a production designer for friends like Malick, Lynch, and Brian De Palma. Malick is thus a member of the first generation of filmmakers substantially formed by film school. This generation had access to a wider variety of films, produced over a longer period of time in more countries than any previous generation of filmmakers. This exposure profoundly shaped the texture of their films as well as the direction of the industry. Speaking with Michel Ciment in 1975, Malick was circumspect about AFI: “Today I would certainly not be accepted [into the program], but at the time it wasn’t well known, and they accepted just about anyone.”10 Two years later, in 1971, Malick wrote, produced and directed his thesis film, an 18-minute Western called Lanton Mills starring himself, Warren Oates, and Harry Dean Stanton. The film was screened in New York after Badlands in 1974 but has been out of circulation ever since. While still at film school, through the efforts of his agent, Michael Medavoy, Malick worked as a writer and script doctor. He contributed to early drafts of Dirty Harry, directed by Don Siegel in 1971, and Drive, He Said, Jack Nicholson’s directorial debut, in the same year. In 1972, Vernon Zimmerman directed Alan Arkin in a film called Deadhead Miles written by Malick and Stuart Rosenberg directed Malick’s script for a Western called Pocket Money, a Paul Newman vehicle also starring Lee Marvin.11 Under the pseudonym David Whitney, Malick wrote The Gravy Train, directed by Jack Sharrett in 1974. Malick’s work on these films and undoubtedly others evidences the openness of the post-studio world of the New Hollywood. It is all but unimaginable that a film-school student might have access to an agent with access to productions like these today. Through his studies at the AFI, Malick seems to have entered the slipstream of the New Hollywood at both a personal and professional level. During this period, Malick was engaged to and married a woman named Jill Jakes who would later become a municipal court judge in California. While working as a writer, Malick also began writing his own debut feature, Badlands, a film loosely based on the 1958 Charles Starkweather, Caril Anne Fugate killing spree. By the summer of 1972, Malick and his friend Edward Pressman had each raised half of the money needed to

Introduction

7

produce the picture, which was filmed in about six weeks in southeast Colorado, the Dust Bowl, and South Dakota. The independent production cost around $350,000 dollars, working with a nonunion unit and relatively unknown principle actors, Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek, but the team ran out of money halfway through the shoot and Malick had to return to writing other screenplays before completing the project. Lack of funds forbid much improvisation either with the actors or with the visual elements of the film, which remains the most obviously scripted of Malick’s works. Many of the principle thematic and stylistic elements that characterize Malick’s oeuvre are already present in Badlands: a plot derived from the popular American imagination; a complex and problematic voice-over narration; the considered use of diegetic and nondiegetic sound; a contrast between nature and civilization rendered in stunning visual images; and symbolically loaded visual elements, most notably fire and rivers, among other things. The film was a critical success upon its debut at the New York Film Festival in the spring of 1974. The film ultimately cost about $950,000 to complete and Warner Brothers bought the distribution rights for around $1.1 million, but it only made its investors a slight return. Malick explored a variety of follow-up projects over the next few years, eventually agreeing to work with Bert and Harold Schneider and Paramount Pictures on Days of Heaven. Malick took great care in casting the principle actors in the film, settling with Richard Gere and Brooke Adams, when John Travolta and Genevieve Bujold were unavailable, and persuading Sam Shepard to take his first major role as an actor. None of these actors were as well known then as they are today. Days of Heaven was filmed in Alberta, Canada, over 73 days in the fall of 1976. Nestor Almendros was the cinematographer during the first part of the shoot but had to leave before filming was completed, having previously agreed to shoot François Truffaut’s The Man Who Loved Women. Haskell Wexler completed the final two weeks of shooting following the visual precedents established by Almendros.12 The shoot was a complex and challenging one, made all the more complex as Malick and Almendros experimented with different techniques for filming with natural light and different ways of working with the actors. (During this period, Malick and Jill Jakes were divorced.) Malick’s script had been highly refined, full of details of character, but as filming progressed Malick felt free to improvise, focusing on natural elements that caught his eye and asking his actors to film scenes without dialogue. Then Malick spent two full years editing down the large mass

8

Terrence Malick

of footage this process had generated. Voice-over narration was added to the final edit of what had become a largely silent film. When it was finally released, in 1978, Days of Heaven was nominated for four Academy Awards: Patricia Norris for Costume Design, Ennio Morricone for Original Score, John K. Wilkinson, Robert W. Glass, Jr., John T. Reitz, Barry Thomas for Sound, and Nestor Almendros for Cinematography. Nestor Almendros won the Oscar for cinematography. The film also won best picture at Cannes in 1979 and Malick won best director there and at the New York Film Critics Circle. Following Days of Heaven, Paramount Pictures offered Malick a production deal. Around this time Malick met a fledging producer named Bobby Geisler. In his Vanity Fair article Robert Biskind describes their working relationship in terms that shed light on Malick’s personality as well as his physical bearing: He and Geisler had hit it off and began meeting at Los Angeles restaurants little frequented by celebrities, such as the Hamburger Hamlet on Sunset and Doheny, where they sat in back batting around ideas. Malick, about 35 then, was bearish and bearded. He had the beef-eating habits of a boy raised in Texas and Oklahoma; as he talked he wolfed down hamburgers, two at a time. Malick invariably wore jeans and a seersucker sport coat a little too small for him. It gave him a slightly Chaplinesque air. Geisler kidded him that it looked like the seersucker jacket that Kit Carruthers—Sheen’s Starkweather surrogate—stole from a rich man’s house in Badlands.13 The two of them started planning a film about John Merrick, a.k.a. the Elephant Man, and Malick began work on an enigmatic and expansive film about the origins of life, with the working title Q. Malick dropped the Merrick project when David Lynch released his version of the story in 1980 and spent more time working on Q, drafting and redrafting the script and even sending a camera crew out to capture images of the Great Barrier Reef, Mount Etna, and Antarctica.14 During this period Malick was dividing his time between Los Angeles and Paris. He shared an apartment with his then girlfriend, Michie Gleason, on the rue Jacob in Paris while he was working on Q and she was directing a film called Broken English. Both his enthusiasm for Q and his relationship with Gleason seem to have foundered around the same time in the early 1980s. Within a year he had begun a new relationship, with a French woman, Michèle Morette, and begun what would be a protracted absence from the film industry. Malick and Morette married in 1985 and moved, with

Introduction

9

Alexandra, Morette’s daughter from a previous relationship, to Austin, Texas. Malick’s absence from the film industry was only partial. He continued to work on scripts, both for other directors, and for himself. He reportedly did work for Louis Malle as well as a rewrite of a script by Robert Dillon titled Countryman in mid-1980s. Malick’s old agent Michael Medavoy hired him to draft a film about Jerry Lee Lewis, eventually released as Great Balls of Fire!, though the script had been completely rewritten by then. Malick also wrote scripts based on Walker Percy’s novel The Moviegoer and Larry McMurtry’s The Desert Rose. Toward the end of the decade, around 1988, producers Bobby Geisler and John Roberdeau began courting Malick to direct a film for them. They asked him to write and direct a film based on D. M. Thomas’s novel The White Hotel, which he declined, countering with a proposal to do either Molière’s Tartuffe or The Thin Red Line, James Jones’s 1962 novel about the invasion of Guadalcanal during World War II. The producers contracted a script for The Thin Red Line, which Malick completed in May 1989. But he was also working on other projects. By the following year he had drafted a script called The English-Speaker, based on the psychoanalysis of a patient known as Anna O., a project that was proximate in its psychoanalytic content to The White Hotel. Geisler and Roberdeau also paid Malick to write a stage play based on Kenji Mizoguchi’s 1954 film Sansho the Bailiff, which he worked on for the next few years. The play eventually had its debut as a workshop performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in November 1993. Andrzej Wajda, the Polish filmmaker, was enticed to direct, but the production was nevertheless a critical and commercial failure. At this time Malick also separated from his wife. Malick’s focus turned to The Thin Red Line. Peter Biskind’s Vanity Fair article on Malick details the director’s travails finding funding for the film.15 Ultimately the production would be credited to Michael Medavoy’s new company Phoenix Pictures in association with George Stevens, Jr., and Bobby Geisler and John Roberdeau. Malick shot the film in Port Douglas, Australia, on Guadalcanal and in San Pedro, California, for a budget of $55 million. A wide range of stars fought for parts in a cast that mixed established Hollywood actors—Sean Penn, Nick Nolte—with then relative unknowns such as Jim Caviezel. Malick divorced Michèle Morette and married Alexandra “Ecky” Wallace, a high school sweetheart from Texas, during the production. The Thin Red Line was released in 1998 only one month after Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster Saving Private Ryan. The film was nominated for

10

Terrence Malick

seven academy awards—cinematography, editing, original score, sound, screenplay, best picture, and best director—but failed to win any. After The Thin Red Line, Steven Soderbergh asked Malick to work on a script for a film about Che Guevara with Benicio del Toro, informed at least in part by Malick’s 1967 trip to Bolivia during Régis Debray’s trial. But that film was not to be: Steven Soderbergh himself would ultimately rewrite and direct the project as a two-part film Che, in 2008. During this period, Malick turned to producing. He and his old friend Edward Pressman established Sunflower Productions. Between 1999 and 2007, Malick served as producer or executive producer on seven fictional and documentary films including films by Michael Apted, Zhang Yimou, Robert Redford, David Gordon Green, and Hans Petter Moland. He also wrote the screenplay for an Italian production released in 2002 as Bear’s Kiss.16 In 2005, Malick released The New World, a version of the Pocahontas story, starring Colin Farrell, Christopher Plummer, Christian Bale, and an unknown 15-year-old actress, Q’orianka Kilcher, as Pocahontas. New Line Cinema produced The New World for $40 million. Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography was nominated for an Academy Award and Kilcher’s performance was widely praised but critics were oddly lukewarm about the film. Malick’s most recent film is Tree of Life starring Brad Pitt and Sean Penn. The much-delayed project is scheduled for release in May 2011. And as of this writing Malick is already working on another picture, this one starring Ben Affleck, Rachel McAdams, and Rachel Weisz, among others. The as yet untitled film has been announced for release in 2012, but given Malick’s perfectionism and pace in the editing room, that date seems more hopeful than realistic. These biographical itineraries outline a complex and occasionally ambivalent figure, a man devoted to his craft as a filmmaker but also informed by a broad range of experiences outside the film business. Over the course of his careers—as a student and teacher of philosophy, as a journalist, and as a filmmaker—Terrence Malick has evidenced a deep and broad knowledge of history, philosophy, religion, art, music, literature, and, of course, film. He has also of course confirmed an abiding love of and devoted attention to the natural world. This combination of interests is rare among contemporary filmmakers and indeed in contemporary culture in general, where success is generally predicated on specialization. Malick by contrast appears to be a kind of compulsive generalist, keenly interested in specific but disparate threads of cultural

Introduction

11

production and capable of weaving those threads together into complexly satisfying cultural objects. Given Malick’s careful and detailed attention to his works, it is hardly surprising that he has completed only four films in thirty-seven years. What is more surprising is that Malick has remained consistently, if not constantly, active in the film industry over these same years as both a writer and a producer. While it is clear that his own films—the films he has written and directed—stand apart from these other projects, the other projects reveal a more worldly figure than Malick’s films do on their own. Over the years Malick has worked closely with a small group of regular collaborators, like production designer Jack Fisk, while consistently drawing on a wide range of talent in each new film. He has worked with established Hollywood stars and unknown actors, often skillfully using both types of actor toward different ends. Malick, in other words, radicalizes the auteur principle by creating contexts wherein collaboration is complex and vital to the finished product, the film. Partly for this reason and despite many often noted and prominent similarities, we should remember that Malick’s films are remarkably different. His handling of similar—even in some cases identical—materials from film to film, varies greatly. While it is possible to distill a worldview and general problematic from Malick’s films as an oeuvre, doing so is not as easy as many critics and commentators seem to believe. Naturally we hope that the chapters that follow provide some help in understanding Malick’s films and framing what is sure to be an ongoing discussion about them.

Notes 1

2

3

4

Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Cinema (1971) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), xiv. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 280. At the Rome Film Festival in October 2007, Malick presented a few clips of Italian films that had influenced him along with two clips from his own films, Badlands and The New World. For an evocation of this presentation see www. lavideofilmmaker.com/blog/2009/07/05/terrence-malick-interviewrome- film-festival/ (accessed October 15, 2010). See Hanna Peterson, ed. The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America (2nd ed.) (London: Wallflower Press, 2007), 2–3; and Lloyd Michaels Terrence Malick (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), xii.

12 5

6

7

8

9 10 11

12

13 14 15 16

Terrence Malick Biographical details of Malick’s life, sparse as they are, can be found in Peter Biskind’s “The Runaway Genius,” Vanity Fair 460 (December 1998), 202–20; in Michaels, Terrence Malick, 13–20; and in the two interviews with Malick reprinted in Michaels; among other sources. Biskind reports that Malick was born in Ottawa, Illinois. Malick himself seems to claim he was born in Waco, Texas (see Michaels, Terrence Malick, 105). Michel Ciment interview with Terrence Malick, Positif 170 (June 1975), 30–4; reprinted in translation in Michaels, op. cit., 105–13. See James Morrison and Thomas Schur, The Films of Terrence Malick (Westport: Praeger, 2003), 2. Sight and Sound 44.2 (Spring 1975), 82–3; reprinted in Michaels, Terrence Malick, 102–5. See Morrison and Schur, The Films of Terrence Malick, 75–9. Michel Ciment interview, op. cit., 105. A draft of the script is reportedly available in Los Angeles at the Margaret Herrick Library of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences. See Morrison and Schur, The Films of Terrence Malick, 2. See Nestor Alemendros’ autobiography, Man with a Camera (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1984). Biskind, “The Runaway Genius,” 202–20. See ibid. See ibid. Malick’s contribution is uncredited.

Chapter 2

Voicing Meaning: On Terrence Malick’s Characters Steven Rybin

The worlds of Terrence Malick’s films are vibrantly sensual, open-ended experiential frames that challenge viewers to reflect upon the ideas brought to, and inspired by, each viewing. These films perhaps strike us less as aesthetic objects—analyzable though they are through the existing frameworks of film formalism—and more as rich experiences that call for philosophical prose nimble enough to derive meaning from, rather than imposing significance to, the films in question. As film-philosophers, then, we will do well to remember that the experiences enabled by these films are not only those of viewers, but also those of another set of perceptual and existential actors: Malick’s characters. These characters are not, strictly speaking, philosophers, but in their struggle to shape meaning out of the shards of light, sound, movement, and beauty to which they are subject, they, no less than the viewer, voice their own creative interpretations of Malick’s fictional worlds. Because Malick eschews the character psychology and motivation typical of much Hollywood cinema, it is only in their fleeting attempts to voice meaning that we get to know (or, in some cases, struggle or fall short of knowing) his characters. This voicing of meaning often occurs through the ruminative, first-person voice-over, a technique that features in each of Malick’s films, in the form of either a single voice-over narration (Badlands and Days of Heaven), or as multiple voices, with none given privilege over others (The Thin Red Line and The New World). The thoughtful viewer’s effort to interpret Malick’s cinema is, in its turn, inflected by these meanings his characters, awash in affective and thoughtful experiences of their own, strive to voice. In what follows, I will endeavor to show how works in the philosophical tradition of existential

14

Terrence Malick

phenomenology may help Malick’s viewers see themselves as making meaning alongside (rather than “through,” as one recent volume posits the relationship between philosophy and the movies) Malick’s distinctive and in many respects unconventional characters.1 I will draw from filmtheoretical work on the nature of film experience and connect this body of thought to Martin Heidegger’s thinking, particularly his interrelated concepts of world, earth, and striving as they feature in the essay “On the Origin of the Work of Art” and in Malick’s own 1969 translation of The Essence of Reasons. In doing so, I seek not to use Malick’s films to illustrate these philosophical and film-theoretical concepts, but rather the reverse: to use concepts to frame how we can understand Malick’s cinema, and in particular our encounters with his characters, as the experiential site of our film-philosophy. In other words, although we bring our own conceptual preoccupations to the screen, the meanings Malick’s characters strive to make, and how they strive to voice this meaning, eventually mark who we ourselves strive to become as philosophers in watching his films.

Malick and Film Phenomenology The question of what constitutes a film character is, of course, a vast theoretical and historiographical inquiry, and can be dealt with only cursorily here.2 Nevertheless, some notion of the classical film character helps throw Malick’s fictional human beings into relief. In the classical cinema, the goal-directed protagonist forms the backbone of the story, and the narration gradually reveals the retrospective cause-and-effect chain of events resulting in the achievement of the goal. The protagonist is defined by a fairly coherent set of psychological traits, and his or her action and behavior tends to flow naturally and expectedly from this set. Even the world of the classical film seems tailor-made for the protagonist and the meanings for which the protagonist eventually comes to stand. In classical cinema, characters work to “take over the narration,” as David Bordwell phrases it, holding together the disparate and inherently fragmented pieces of celluloid through which films are constituted through a causal and psychologically plausible chain of action and effect.3 The active and accomplishing protagonist serves to join, and then hold, the world of the classical narrative film together. A concrete example from Malick’s 2005 film The New World may begin to show us the contrasts between this director’s unique film practice and the causal schemas of classical cinema. Near the beginning of the film,

Voicing Meaning: On Terrence Malick’s Characters

15

Captain John Smith (Colin Farrell) leads an expedition to meet the Powhaten King, the father of the girl history will eventually recognize as Pocahontas (Q’Orianka Kilcher). As Smith and his men travel across the water to the forest, the natural cycle of the day (dawn, day, dusk, night) passes in a series of images representing the duration of the journey compressed into just a few seconds of screen time. These images, however, are noncausal: while they suggest a linear progression through (elided) time, the jump cuts Malick uses to shift from one moment of the day to the next are unmotivated within the diegesis. The effect is not to show us a protagonist confidently responding to, acting within, and thus stitching together the filmic environment, but rather to display the sensuous affects of the environment itself, each image vibrantly standing alone apart from any intentions the European colonizers bring to the landscape. This strategy of constructing images in which “there is this, and at the same time—or then, there is that, and it’s up to the viewer who feels so inclined to create a relationship between them,” is one Michel Chion describes as parataxis.4 As Smith and his cohorts press forth in their journey to encounter the Powhaten, we see the silhouetted contours of trees carving an outline against the blue sky and water at dusk, an expanse of clouds hanging above the landscape, the peaks of the trees jutting into the blue sky during day, and the reflection of leafless trees in the water. Although depicting a linear journey in broad outline, the exact links binding these images together are discontinuous. Malick, instead of “suturing” us into the plot and the psychological makeup of his characters, prefers to immerse us in the affective environment of sensuous nature and the rapturous seeing of nature that occurs in the diegetic world, as Smith and his crew gaze out onto the landscape. Farrell’s Smith, however, does proffer an interpretation of this dispersive array of natural imagery and sound. On the soundtrack, as Smith and his crew are about to dock on land, we hear Smith’s thoughts through Malick’s technique of the first-person voice-over. He conjures for the viewer his vision of a possible democracy: We shall make a new start. A fresh beginning. Here the blessings of the earth are bestowed upon all. None need grow poor. Here there is good ground for all, and no cost but one’s labor. We shall build a true commonwealth, hard work and self-reliance our virtues. We shall have no landlords to rack us with high rents, or extort the fruit of our labor. No man shall stand above any other but all live under the same law.

16

Terrence Malick

Smith’s vision of the American landscape as a ground upon which to build a society predicated on self-reliance and equality falls somewhat short of the reality visible elsewhere in the film. Malick illuminates the contradictions between Smith’s idealistic voicing of meaning and the film’s visual track, showing us Algonquin natives shackled in European chains and, in one instance, a native stricken by a bullet in the back. This gap between Smith’s expressed meaning and the existing world of Malick’s film will in large part shape our relationship to him as a fictional character. His idealistic yearning for a democracy forms a crucial part of any empathetic bond we might have with him, yet his (and his culture’s) inability to realize this democracy in any but the most violent terms complicates our acceptance of the meaning he voices. This complex relationship to character is uncommon in most narrative cinema. A classical work of cinema—or a contemporary film that works by the still-prevalent machinations of classical narrative, such as the animated Disney film Pocahontas (1996)—would be sure to use Smith’s idealistic vision to pattern the film’s own construction of space. But in The New World John Smith—as heroic a protagonist as American myth has produced—does not “take over the narration.” His voicing of meaning strives to hold together the disparate pieces of the world Malick luminously presents to us, but its success, as the balance of the film demonstrates, is hardly assured. Far from having taken over narration, then, Malick’s Smith is more like an embodied, sensuously immersed viewer aiming at his own tentative interpretation of the filmic world. His inquiry into the fictional world in which he lives—the film world we view—operates not from a point of assured mastery and psychological clarity that holds it together (despite his privileged status as a European colonizer), but rather from a site in which these very qualities of the classical protagonist (or from Smith’s point of view, the successful colonialist), and the nature and meaning of the filmic “world” itself, are put into question. In this way, the landscapes in Malick’s films acquire an autonomous presence that opens up an interpretive question for both the character and the viewer. Malick, in this sense, is fulfilling the poetic, phenomenological promise of cinema, as Vivian Sobchack outlines it in her work on the film experience. In Sobchack’s work, film is not simply viewed by the spectator, nor its environments are not merely backdrops for character action. Instead, the film camera itself (as well as its accompanying sonic apparatus) has the potential to partake of an existential, embodied intentionality projected out toward the world. The cinema has a kind of subjective vision, a nonhuman (albeit human-enabled) being-in-the-world

Voicing Meaning: On Terrence Malick’s Characters

17

that is not determined by (even as it includes) its characters. In this the film is, for example, different than the photograph. For Sobchack, the photograph is more akin to “transcendental phenomenology,” for, like Husserl, the father of that branch of philosophy, the photograph describes only the basic structure of perceptual experience wherein consciousness already possesses the necessary means through which to mediate and negotiate phenomena.5 That is, like the abstract, static, and transcendental consciousness of Husserl’s phenomenology, the photograph never becomes: In the still photograph, time and space are abstractions. Although the image has a presence, it neither partakes of nor describes the present. Indeed, the photograph’s fascination is that it is a figure of transcendental time made available against the ground of a lived and finite temporality. Although included in our experience of the present, the photograph transcends both our immediate present and our lived experience of temporality because it exists for us as never engaged in an activity of becoming. Although it announces the possibility of becoming, it never presents itself as the coming into being of being. It is a presence without a past, present, future.6 We will do well to remember that film is, of course, mechanically enabled by the 24 photographic frames per second that generate, in the apparatus of the projector, the illusion of motion. Thus for Sobchack, although Husserl’s transcendental consciousness informs the basic structure of the cinema—that is, the individual frame in its static presence—in cinema this structure is always animated, made existential, through the existence of the filmstrip’s frames across time and in motion (both the illusory motion of the film on the screen and the very real, mechanical motion of the filmstrip along the projector track that enables the former). In Malick’s films, particularly his work since Days of Heaven, the camera’s autonomy—its “being and becoming” in film time and film space, independently although always in relation to the film character—is insisted upon. In Malick’s work the camera’s sensuous relationship to the landscape becomes salient. Examples include the shots of the natural landscape throughout Days of Heaven, images that are not always tethered to a human perspective. In particular, one striking sequence in the film uses time-lapse photography to show the sprouting of a seed as it becomes a plant, something our eyes cannot see in quite the same way without the

18

Terrence Malick

assistance of the cinema. And in the sinuous tracking shots of The Thin Red Line, which often sail above soldiers pressed to the ground during the heat of battle, we see the camera moving beyond the position of a character in order to investigate some aspect of cinematic geography that only it has the power to see. Sometimes the camera’s ability to perceive what human agents cannot is implied in a stylistically more modest manner, as in the opening image of Badlands, in which we see a shaft of light emerging through a window behind Holly (Sissy Spacek), suggesting a world of experience that exceeds her own, called to light by the cinema’s perceptual apparatus. In other sequences it is editing that assists the camera in wresting shots free of narrative articulation and character psychology, as in the sequence of jump cuts from The New World analyzed above. At other times, the camera’s autonomy is suggested through metaphors that it helps the viewer produce independently of character: In the climactic sequences of Days of Heaven, for instance, Malick dramatizes a locust plague on a farm and the ensuing attempt to burn away the destroyed crop. The motif of fire during this sequence—intensely presented by the film’s exquisitely composed cinematography—suggests biblical themes of the apocalypse that the characters, at this moment in the narrative, are hardly occupied with; it is the viewer’s privilege to infer these meanings from the camera’s luminous presentation of the filmic world. In the hands of a film poet such as Malick—whose films are paradigmatic of what Sobchack calls existentially “mature” films that tap into the complex poetic possibilities of film time and space—cinema itself becomes a different way, relative to human perception, of seeing in space and becoming through time.7 For Malick, then, film is more than merely an illustrative instrument for pictorially constructing the causal chains of narrative and the psychological comportment of characters. 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. This slight asymmetry between human perception (whether that of the spectator’s or that of the character’s) and the film camera’s perception guarantees cinema’s imagery and sounds a function beyond that of serving as the ground for human agency and action. In Malick’s hands cinematic landscapes become a rich reservoir of potential meaning, producing as his films do a surplus of visual and sonic sense to which viewer— and character—may respond.

Voicing Meaning: On Terrence Malick’s Characters

19

World and Worlding, Earth and Striving This contrast between the efficiently constructed classical narrative film and Malick’s poetic, phenomenologically “thick” cinema offers a point of entry in considering the uncertain, open-ended relationship the Malick character has to the filmic landscape. But we need not “apply” Sobchack’s theory to the director’s work; one may infer related philosophical concerns underpinning his approach to creating cinematic characters and film worlds via recourse to the director’s own biography. A teacher of philosophy and student of Stanley Cavell prior to his entrance into the cinema, Malick also produced a translation of philosophical and, in retrospect, film-historical importance during that period: the 1969 edition of Martin Heidegger’s vom Wesen des Grundes (The Essence of Reasons). The existence of this book is a fact often noted in scholarship on the director, but it is rarely employed as part of a reading strategy (although Heidegger’s other writings are frequently invoked in work on Malick). Heidegger’s thinking—which in this chapter will be gleaned from Malick’s translation of Reasons as well as Heidegger’s later essay on artwork, “On the Origin of the Work of Art”—offers concepts that suggest links between existential phenomenology and Sobchack’s later theory of film experience. However, for my purposes, Malick’s films will not be shown to merely illustrate Heidegger’s concepts. It is a too familiar move in much philosophical writing on film to use a filmmaker’s work as an illustration of an already existing idea. Instead, certain concepts from The Essence of Reasons and the artwork essay will be shown to form the philosophical ground from which our own indeterminate engagements with Malick’s characters—and their own encounters with Malick’s film worlds—might begin to take flight. As Robert Sinnerbrink has suggested, “the relationship between Malick and Heidegger”—or indeed between Malick and any philosopher or film theorist—“should remain a question” that informs—rather than determines—an experience of his films.8 Perhaps the most striking aspect of Heidegger’s concept of “world” is the extent to which it pivots around “world” as an active verb, rather than a noun. In the essay “On the Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger famously considers, as two instances of the historical phenomenon of art, a Greek temple and Van Gogh’s painting of a peasant’s pair of shoes. The philosopher suggests that the truth of the temple and the world of the Greeks, as well as the truth of the shoes and the peasant’s world, far from having been objectively and exhaustively mastered by the Greek

20

Terrence Malick

architects or the qualities of Van Gogh’s visual composition, function in ongoing and revelatory ways. Heidegger writes: Truth happens in the temple’s standing where it is. This does not mean that something is correctly represented and rendered here, but that what is as a whole is brought into unconcealedness and held therein. To hold (halten) originally means to tend, keep, take care (hüten). Truth happens in Van Gogh’s painting. This does not mean that something is correctly portrayed, but rather that in the revelation of the equipmental being of the shoes, that which is as a whole—world and earth in their counterplay—attaints to unconcealedness.9 Heidegger’s concept of the “world” of the artwork is neither representational nor precisely aesthetic. His concern is not whether the world of the peasant has been “correctly” depicted according to the current measure of sociological or historiographical knowledge regarding the actual peasants whose lives Van Gogh implied in his depiction of the shoes. Neither is Heidegger interested in aesthetics, at least insofar as “aesthetics” refers to an experience informed by knowledge of the historically prevailing formal and stylistic laws of a given artistic domain. Instead, Heidegger is intrigued, not by some knowledge that precedes the existence of the artwork, but rather with how truth happens in the historically situated work of art (and we may regard an artwork as “historically situated” so long as it continues to offer a vital experiential frame for at least a segment of humanity at a moment in and across history). As R. Raj Singh points out, it is the existence of the historical artwork “which attains and sustains around itself a unity of paths and relations . . . The world is described as a unity of various basic directions and relations which grants definition to human realities . . . The openness that governs all significances and defines all relations is the world.”10 It is the open, ongoing, and indeterminate relationship with the artwork—rather than an objective knowledge about the aesthetic object that has already been established—that intrigues Heidegger. It is crucial for Heidegger, then, that the “world” of the artwork, and indeed of humanity itself, be regarded not as an objective, already existing entity. The world does exist objectively, of course, describable, for example, through scientific means of measurement. Likewise, the artwork also offers a “unity of paths and relations,” the contours of which may be objectively described (through formalism, for example, which in film studies has been most fruitfully represented by the neoformalist

Voicing Meaning: On Terrence Malick’s Characters

21

paradigm).11 However, the meaning that might be generated through these paths and relations—a meaning that claims a world—is held forth as an “openness” that is encountered every time a historically situated self encounters a work of art. Heidegger’s curious phrase “the world worlds,” familiar from Being and Time and also present in the artwork essay, gestures toward this idea. “The world worlds,” Heidegger writes in the artwork essay, “and is more fully in being than the tangible and perceptible realm in which we believe ourselves to be at home.”12 In turn, the “worlding” of the world—the revelation of a meaningful world through the activity of the interpreting, historically situated self in relation to the interpretable, historically situated artwork—is the counterpole of what Heidegger calls “earth,” which is world concealed, or the discursively generated world existing only in a state of as-yet-unarticulated potential. “Earth” is the potential inherent in all material, sensual reality, that which forms the ground for meaningful human existence. In the creation of the artwork, material is used, but as Heidegger suggests, it is never used up: the special quality of the poetic artwork is that it lets us engage with the luminous sensuality of materiality (“earth”) at the very same time as it becomes a “world.” This is what allows the process of worlding to remain ongoing: sensuous earth never settles into rigidly constituted world. (As Heidegger discusses in another essay, to exhaustively master earth under the sign of a world would result in enframing, wherein the ongoing potential of earth is concealed through instrumental objectivity. This is the danger of all formalisms.)13 The interplay continues every time the art work is confronted by a self. What is the cinema’s earth, its materiality? The traditional arts have their own kind of “earth” that they “set up,” to use another Heideggerian phrase, through the work of the art object. As Heidegger says, “To be sure, the sculptor uses stone just as the mason uses it, in his own way. But he does not use it up . . . the painter also uses pigment, but in such a way that color is not used up but rather only now comes to shine forth.”14 In terms of film, it may be useful to confront the question of its “earth,” or potential, through those constitutive compositional properties of the medium that do not function exclusively as vehicles for narrative information. The “invisible style” of most classical narrative films tends to efface both the saliency of directorial poetic choices as well as the materiality of the film image (whether in its celluloid or digital forms) in favor of using film as a vehicle for efficiently communicated narrative information. Such films do not explore the spatial and temporal phenomenological richness that, as Sobchack has shown us, is always a possibility in

22

Terrence Malick

films. In Heidegger’s terms, the sort of cinema that wholly reduces image and sound to the vehicles of narrative information constitutes a world without earth, a world enframed; to extend his metaphor further, it is a cinema of masonry rather than sculpture. In poetic cinema, however, while stories are frequently still told, the tight join that binds narrative to image and sound is loosened. The shape of a film’s sound and vision may continue to cue us to recognize important narrative events and their development, but the “earth” of the cinema—its grounding in the sensuous luminosity of the unfolding projection of the celluloid strip or the digital display of the video disc—shines forth in a rather more indeterminate manner. Whereas many films want to show us an objectively constituted and already-imagined world (hence the frequently unsympathetic comparison of literature to cinema, wherein the former supposedly allows more imaginative space for the reader), poetic cinema reminds us that we still have the power to imagine—to “world”—a world. The aforementioned sequence from The New World is one moment in which a Malick character, awash in the affective luminosity of the earth, strives to voice—to “world”—meaning. Indeed, the water Smith and his cohorts travel on toward the forest in which the native Americans live offers a path away from the European colonizers, who project the alreadyworlded world of Europe onto the earthy American landscape; Smith envisions a better world, and his rapturous encounter with Pocahontas and the Powhaten tribe offers the potential of a new worlding. All of Malick’s films, however, feature sequences in which characters attempt to wrest together new meaning out of the sensually dispersive design of Malick’s poetic cinema. One sequence in Badlands offers a particularly telling example of both character’s and viewer’s confrontation with Malick’s filmic worlds. Holly, enjoying a respite from her journey with the serial killer Kit (Martin Sheen), looks into her father’s stereopticon, a protocinematic device in which still images are put into motion, one of the few childhood possessions this young girl has brought with her. The images she views are vistas of various historical spaces and times, some of them easier to date than others: the Sphinx, a steamboat in a lake, a mother with child, several Victorian women, and a large family gathering in front of a house. Viewed in series, there is no already articulated causal connection between this set of images; the stereopticon tells no precise story. Holly herself voices the meaning of these paratactic images, however, in a way that is not unlike our own viewing of a Malick film.15 As she looks at the images, we hear Holly say (as she looks back at this moment retrospectively, a doubling of

Voicing Meaning: On Terrence Malick’s Characters

23

the spectatorship we see within the film frame itself) the following words: “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. 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.” Holly reaches a level of self-consciousness at “this very moment”—a moment she steals away from both Kit’s murderous journey and the forward thrust of the narrative’s gradual development—that is hardly even glimpsed elsewhere in her narration. As Barbara Brickman has suggested, “In this one small interlude, we see the female teen simultaneously as spectator and as storyteller.”16 Simultaneously, too, Malick shows us both the material earth (the stereopticon and its images) and the immaterial world (the significance Holly gives to what she sees) without effacing one or the other. For Malick, as for Heidegger, earth enables world, but world does not erase earth. In turn, Malick’s film itself echoes Holly’s stereopticon; the photographs Holly animates through this protocinematic device remind us of the material of the film medium itself, prompting us to recognize the materiality that always underpins our worlding of interpretive discourse upon watching a film. Days of Heaven includes a similar sequence in which a young female narrator encounters an open-ended experiential frame that might enable her to express a world. While Holly’s viewing occurs through an old, precinematic technology, Linda confronts the moving image in the form of Charlie Chaplin’s film The Immigrant (1917). Linda is the sister of Bill (Richard Gere), who travels to the Texas Panhandle with his lover Abby (Brooke Adams) in the hopes of finding the wealth and success that has remained elusive through the backbreaking labor that has defined their lives. After Abby begins an affair with a landowner known only as the Farmer (Sam Shepard)—she and Bill all the while clandestinely masking their relationship with one another—a brief respite (the “days of heaven” of the title) from their alienated labor becomes possible. The exhibition context in which young Linda views The Immigrant is a traveling circus that has crashed on the Farmer’s land during these leisurely and short-lived “days,” and it evokes earlier practices of cinema exhibition wherein films would often be projected in a vaudeville context. In this context, the tactile, immediate qualities of particular images in the Chaplin film are emphasized over the classical narrative cinema’s standardized regulation of sensuous experience. Chaplin’s film here becomes part of Linda’s larger haptic experience with the surrounding environment: more than any other character in the film, and even more

24

Terrence Malick

than Holly throughout much of Badlands (whose interpretive efforts begin and end with viewing of the stereopticon), Linda is sensitive to the earth which surrounds her. Chaplin’s comedy, of course, is also a story, one of an immigrant facing poverty and subjected to a social hierarchy of power (echoing Linda’s own life story). Yet in Days of Heaven, as Linda watches the film, what Malick emphasizes is not Chaplin’s narrative (which would be only partially clear to the spectator of Days of Heaven who had not seen The Immigrant previously) but rather a fleeting series of images impressed upon his young narrator. The first of these is an image of Chaplin’s Tramp looking at the Statue of Liberty, seen in an eyeline match in the second image, while standing on a boat of immigrants coming to American shores for the first time. In the third image, the police tie a group of immigrants together with a rope, effectively canceling out the symbol of liberty glimpsed in the previous image. What is striking about the second image in particular is the startling appearance of a silhouetted human hand, emerging from within the diegesis of Days of Heaven, pointing at the Statue in Chaplin’s film (as if to say that the events plotted in Chaplin’s film—perhaps even American history itself—might be undone with the intervention of the spectator’s involvement, here expressed in the most physical of terms). Malick does not suggest what The Immigrant means to his characters, but insists only on the effect it seems to have on them—the way in which it moves them to physically involve themselves with the cinema screen—and on Linda in particular. While she remains in silent awe while viewing Chaplin’s film, her confrontation with the medium nonetheless remains quietly powerful here, as Malick’s use of a quick track-in shot on the young girl emphasizes the affect the film has on her. To some extent, what Linda makes of this imagery is a question answered during other moments of the film, as Linda voices her interpretation of the sensuous earth surrounding her. Her viewing of this world thus also parallels that of the viewer of Malick’s film, whose rapturous experience of the tactility and immediacy of the sensuous imagery in Days of Heaven is inflected by Linda’s voice-over throughout, particularly in those sequences in which her voice-over creatively interprets some aspect of the physical or natural world in defamiliarizing ways. This is a talent she shares with Chaplin himself. Later, enjoying another moment of respite from backbreaking work, she lowers her ear to the ground and suggests that she might one day become a “mud

Voicing Meaning: On Terrence Malick’s Characters

25

doctor,” certainly a more creative occupation than the alienated labor available to her in social world of the diegesis. In watching Linda make new imaginative use out of the dirt, one is here reminded also of Chaplin’s own ability to make the familiar objects of everyday reality “strange,” as in the famous sequence in The Gold Rush in which a pair of dinner rolls become, in Chaplin’s creative pantomime, dance shoes. Likewise, we are elsewhere occasionally reminded also of failures to make new worlds in Malick’s work, such as the pathetic stone statue Kit, who is not privileged with a voice-over in the narrative, assembles prior to his capture at the climax of Badlands. The stones—unlike Holly’s use of the stereopticon and Linda’s creative appropriation of the landscape—never come alive in Kit’s thinking. They instead form a mute testament to his ongoing inability to express significance, which has led to his recourse to violence. Both Holly and Linda here—like Chaplin throughout his oeuvre— open up a world through their creative interpretation of the earth, and their expressive creativity forms a potential intervention—a new worlding—into and of the already-worlded world that surrounds them. But unlike classical voice-over narrators, who work to clarify aspects of narrative or character psychology for the viewer, and unlike Chaplin, whose graceful and theatrical appropriation of objects comprises the primary attraction in viewing his films, Malick’s characters do not hold together or settle the meaning of imagery or efface its ongoing sensuous presence in our own experience. If anything, the interpretive work of Linda and Holly—and, as we will see in more detail in the next part of the chapter, the multiple narrators of Malick’s two later films—far from “using up” the sensuous materiality of Malick’s images, make this sensuousness stand forth even more luminously. In this respect, Malick’s narrators embody the quality of striving that Heidegger discusses in the artwork essay. Existing not as mute, dumb material, nor as an objectively enframed fictional world that might be clinically analyzed through the discursive tools of formalism, the experiential frame of Malick’s films make possible a striving wherein, as Heidegger puts it, the “work-being of the work consists in the fighting of the battle between world and earth.”17 In other words, artworks exist for Heidegger in a state of phenomenological aliveness and productive temporal tension. They exist not to settle questions of Being for us, but to open up those questions, and to dynamically set in motion an interplay between the sensuous material of the cinema and its potential philosophical significance.

26

Terrence Malick

Voicing Strife It is the first-person voice-over that offers the viewer a particularly vibrant point of entry into the dynamic and interpretively contested world of the films. Before we can even get our spatial bearings in The New World, for example, the film introduces the voice of Pocahontas praying to her Earth Mother, her arms upheld against the blue sky, as iconic and spiritual an image of existential striving as exists in this, or any other, director’s oeuvre. However, the poetics of the voice in Malick does not ultimately serve to represent Heidegger’s notion of “striving” in pictorial terms that might be described through formalist terminology. Striving instead ultimately functions in Malick’s cinema as the interplay between audible voice-over, which makes an interpretive claim about the world viewed, and visible filmic world itself, which may or may not bend to the interpreter’s will. Striving in Malick is thus a drama largely played out in the liminal, experiential relationship between the first-person voiceovers and the diegetic world of the films (although the drama, of course, extends to the spectator’s own heightened experience of Malick’s film poetry). In this sense, the voices of Malick’s first-person narrators tend more toward Michel Chion’s notion of the semi-acousmêtre, or the not-yet-seenvoice which is unmoored in a subjectivity.18 Chion suggests that in most narrative cinema, “there are not all the sounds including the human voice. There are voices, and then everything else. In other words, in every audio mix, the presence of a human voice instantly sets up a hierarchy of perception . . . the presence of a human voice structures the sonic space that contains it [italics Chion’s].”19 In most films, the voice is situated in the body of the character, and emerges from conventional dialogue scenes; such visual-aural matching ensures that we take what we see on the screen as finalized, aesthetically organized phenomena that the film as imageproducing apparatus has already mastered. The voice-over (or, to use Chion’s word, acousmêtre), on the other hand, unmoors itself from the body from which the voice emanates, and thus has more widely variegated powers to either enhance, or disturb, our epistemological mastery of the film’s visual track. Chion has termed the omniscient voice the acousmêtre, the “not-yet-seen” voice, the voice which functions, quite often, extradiegetically. For Chion, the purest sort of acousmêtre is the voice that never appears in the diegetic world or the film frame; bodiless, unmoored in the contingent realm of reality, this kind of voice—present in films Chion uses as examples, such

Voicing Meaning: On Terrence Malick’s Characters

27

as The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (Fritz Lang, 1933), The Fog (John Carpenter, 1980), and The Saga of Anatahan (Josef von Sternberg, 1953)—masters the visual world that it is heard to author, possessing “the ability to be everywhere, to see all, to know all, and to have complete power . . . ubiquity, panopticism, omniscience, and omnipotence . . . The acousmêtre is everywhere, its voice comes from an immaterial and non-localized body, and it seems that no obstacle can stop it.”20 The acousmêtre figures the voice as complicit with standardized cinema’s attempts at visual mastery (or enframing), and complements this mastery with linguistic knowledge moored in a subject whose Being is never called into question. Malick’s narrators, however, do not possess the full power of the acousmêtre; they fall in a second category mentioned above, “semi-acousmêtres,” Chion’s phrase for a voice-over which cannot fully master what is seen. This is because they are not masterful subjects; Malick’s characters are instead on a journey toward becoming subjects, and it is in their voiced articulation of meaning that their subjectivity begins to find expression. In some cases, these expressions work in and against limits. In Badlands, from the very first frames of the film depicting the character in her bedroom playing with her dog, Holly’s voice-over is associated with a body that we can see and, furthermore, a body that has already been disciplined by the space of the family home within the fictional world. There is, however, a temporal disjunction between what we see of Holly and what we hear, given that she narrates the events seen in the film from some unknown point in the near future. The gap between visible reality and voiced, retrospective meaning in Malick’s films generates thematic ambiguity rather than epistemological certainty, and suggests that Holly still possesses the potential to become something other than what her social milieu has hitherto allowed her to be. On the soundtrack, Holly’s first voice-over begins to tell us of her past: that her father kept her parents’ wedding cake in the refrigerator for a decade (or “ten whole years,” as she endearingly tells us) prior to the death of her mother, and that he only threw it out upon burying his wife (“after the funeral he gave it to the yardman”). This bizarre detail seems significant, a clue to the character of the father (as is the subsequent detail, that the father “could never be consoled by the little stranger he found in his house,” the little stranger being Holly herself) and yet the viewer of Badlands will never know her father very well. Perhaps Holly herself lacks knowledge of her emotionally distant father; at any rate, Holly often remains an enigma to us and thus the precise meaning of her relationship with her father also remains opaque. As the stereopticon sequence later in the

28

Terrence Malick

film shows, Holly’s own past gradually becomes a question for her (rather than a naturalized part of her quotidian experience), and those moments of her voice-over narration that tend toward introspection suggest a striving toward self-understanding, an interplay between embodied existence and worlded significance. In this respect, Malick does not represent the striving of Holly, or any of the other characters in his films, in straightforward terms, as an existential struggle that is resolved through the completion of the plot. He instead sets in motion an interplay between voice and visible world that is not settled by the conclusion of the film’s narrative, but remains ongoing in the viewer’s experience. A close look at the opening sequence from The Thin Red Line will be useful in order to push the relationship between the meanings Malick’s characters voice and Heidegger’s notion of striving further. After a brief title sequence, The Thin Red Line opens with the image of an alligator descending into the water. The camera, tilted at a slight high angle, moves closer to the alligator, at first tracking the forward movement of its descent, and then lingering for a few seconds, after it is submerged under the water, on the layer of moss floating on top of the water and the remaining ripples and swirls on the water’s surface. This opening shot’s emphasis on downward movement is inverted in the next two images, the first of the trunk of a tree and shafts of light shining on the ground in front of it (the mise-en-scène guides our eye upward through the light which reminds us of the sky above, out of frame), while the second is aimed upwards at the sky’s light cutting through the tree’s leaves. These three shots outline a pattern—both stylistic and thematic—which will recur throughout the film. At times The Thin Red Line will keep us firmly on the ground, near the depths toward which the alligator in the opening image submerges itself, concerned with the material, embodied experience of its soldiers (and certain of the soldiers will express a worldview that would keep us firmly on the ground, too, for some come to express that war makes them feel like nothing more than material, or “just dirt,” as one unnamed character terms it). Apart from a brief glance at a military map of the Guadalcanal wielded by a general early in the narrative, the film gives us no cartographic mastery of the land these soldiers traverse; most of the time we know only as much as they do. Yet at other times—in a way that the second and third shots discussed above indicate—both the film and certain characters within it express a yearning for something above and beyond this earthly realm, but which might nevertheless help explain their immediate experience of war.

Voicing Meaning: On Terrence Malick’s Characters

29

These images of nature also introduce an equally important motif that reverberates throughout the film, the motif of interpretation itself. In the third shot discussed above, the camera’s gaze toward the sky is coupled by a voice-over. Many critics, in their search for a central protagonist that would make the film seem more conventional than it really is, mistakenly attribute this voice to the character of Witt, who will be introduced to the film shortly after this sequence. However, the voice actually belongs to a soldier named Train, played by John Dee Smith, who does not appear on the film’s visual track for another 15 minutes. As a character, we will never know him very well. “What’s this war at the heart of nature?” Train asks on the soundtrack. “Why does nature vie with itself? The land contend with the sea?” In rhyme with this voice, posing at once both a question and an implicit interpretation of nature’s significance (the voice apparently believes in a war in nature), Malick presents us with a fourth shot, again of a tree, with a vine wrapped tightly around it, filmed by the camera in a high-angle shot that tilts further upward. It would appear as if Train’s implicit interpretation of nature is affirmed on the film’s visual track with this image of vine and tree in conflict, in war. Yet it is better to say, in fact, that what the film is affirming is only the validity of his question: Yes, war—or something we would like to name war—would appear to emerge from nature, as we see in this image of a vine choking a tree. Yet is it nature naming war, or us? It appears, Malick’s first shots seem to be telling us, that Train’s is a question worth asking; at the very least, nothing in what he says is necessarily refuted in the images we see. The images, while affirming the validity of the question, do nothing to provide closure to it through an answer. A distance exists between our language and the space of nature, and indeed the experiential space of the film world itself, for as the film’s next 3 hours will repeatedly remind us, Train’s question, and the assumptions contained within it, can only be asked of nature, never answered by it. The earth, to return to Heidegger’s concept, offers only the potential of a world for Malick’s characters; it is through their striving that the characters must unconceal a world, to perform the work of aletheia (a knowing that, for the Greeks, is the revelatory “uncovering of beings,” in Heidegger’s phrasing).21 In this way, The Thin Red Line serves not simply to illustrate or depict Heidegger’s concept of striving; it opens up the potential of strife within the experience of both character and viewer, in this case in terms which prompt us to query the nature and source of evil.

30

Terrence Malick

Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit have recognized this relation of the film’s voice-overs to its presentation of nature (and indeed to all the phenomena into which the voices inquire), writing that “the film’s response [to the questions posed through the voice-overs] will be nondiscursive. Language raises questions which, Malick’s film suggests, language may be inherently unable to answer.”22 It would appear that the characters themselves understand this. Even if their striving is never settled, some at least reach a point of contemplative acceptance of the fact of the necessity of striving itself for meaningful human existence. Near the end of the film, Train’s voice appears again on the soundtrack. This time he does not read nature as a parallel to war. Instead, he affirms that his voicing of meaning is a subjective projection, and that earth remains in play even as an individual attempts to world its meaning. “One man looks at a dying bird and sees nothing but unanswered pain,” Train’s voice tells us. “Another man sees that same bird and feels the glory— feels something smiling through it.” Train’s voice-over here reminds us that while we may always be born into a worlded world (like the newborn bird seen earlier in the film, struggling to walk on a terrain it does not know) our experience of nature need not be burdened with already articulated symbolic meaning. In other words, 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. Train’s lines here summarize, perhaps more than any other single moment in Malick’s cinema, the unique interplay of earth and world—the striving—that exists in each individual’s attempt to interpret sensuous experience. If striving is the struggle to world a world, the very title of Malick’s most recent film, The New World, suggests fulfillment in this task rather than ongoing strife. What is most striking about the connection Smith and Pocahontas develop in the first act of the film is that their attempt to forge a new world through their relationship hardly appears to be a struggle at all. In the sequences depicting the beginning of Smith’s and Pocahontas’s rapturous relationship, landscape and character seem joined in ecstatic sublimity and contemplative reverie. Smith’s voice-over appears just prior to this sequence; recalling his vision of democracy projected toward the American landscape earlier in the film, he defines the essence of the Powhaten tribe, and Pocahontas herself, in rigid and rather patronizing terms: They are gentle, loving, faithful, lacking in all guile and trickery. The words denoting lying, deceit, greed, envy, slander, and forgiveness

Voicing Meaning: On Terrence Malick’s Characters

31

have never been heard. They have no jealousy. No sense of possession. Real. What I thought a dream. In the extended cut of the film, released on DVD in North America in late 2008, Malick presents this idealization of the Powhaten as an extension of Smith’s desire to erase his old identity as a scoundrel (and perhaps erase also the less than ideal motivations of European colonialism). The director adds a voice-over in which Smith tells us that his lyrical tryst with Pocahontas functions as personal redemption: “They trust me as a brother. I, who was a pirate who lived to steal what I could. I am a free man now.” As Lloyd Michaels points out, the sequence which follows depicts Smith’s and Pocahontas’s love in a “montage of close-ups (relatively rare in Malick’s cinema) without any dialogue,” registering “the progress of their intense love, consecrated by the surrounding splendor of nature.”23 Scored to the sweeping music of Wagner’s Das Rheingold overture (which appears at several different junctures in the film), it is almost as if Malick and his characters have established a “new world” that the human figures in all of his previous films have struggled to find. The first-person voice-overs of both Smith and Pocahontas complement this idea, speaking as they do in assertive and singular terms rather than inquisitive and fractured ones. At one point Pocahontas intones, “Two no more. One.” At another Smith says, “There is only this. All else is unreal.” But as soon as this mythical romance ends, the question of its potentially illusive nature begins. The voice-overs in the film, sure of meaning in the first act, become more inquisitive and unsettled later on. Throughout the second half of the film, both Smith and Pocahontas question the reality of the love they have experienced. Malick’s extended cut makes this idea particularly salient. During their second meeting—a short interlude during one of Smith’s envois with native traders—Pocahontas speaks in a fragmented voice-over paired on the visual track with images of her and Smith enjoying each other’s presence in the wilderness: “True . . . shut your eyes. Is this the man I loved . . . there . . . so long? A ghost. Come. Where are you, my love?” One of the most acousmatic properties of the film is that Pocahontas begins speaking English in her voice-over before she learns any substantial portion of the language within the diegesis, and certainly that rupture is felt to no greater effect than in this sequence. Her voice, owing to the fact that it does not temporally match with the images we see, suggests that Pocahontas herself is not so much a participant in as a spectator of these images. Her subjectivity intervenes as a crucial component in assessing the truth of what we see. Yet like Smith’s

32

Terrence Malick

own doubts about the veracity of what he has experienced with the Powhaten, the possibility remains that Pocahontas’s memories reflect only her own desire for a new world, rather than the sure confirmation that her tryst with Smith—who she regards as something like a “ghost” as she recalls her romance with him—has indeed established that world.

The Voice’s Opportunity Malick’s voices function less as sure guides for the viewer to follow through the film’s narrative, then, and more as living and breathing existential subjects who search for openings that might allow them the opportunity to voice original and creative interpretations of the world in which they find themselves inscribed (whether this be through the retrospective narration in Badlands and Days of Heaven or the present-tense inquiries into the world that characterize the multiple voices we hear in The Thin Red Line and The New World). We can conclude this chapter by showing how this search, in fact, is itself a struggle in Malick’s cinema, one that is both enabled and limited by the social worlds depicted in the films. No other Malick film gestures toward this idea better than The Thin Red Line. The film reflects the American army’s rigidly hierarchal structure in World War II in its imaginative use of filmic space in a sequence early in the film. The soldiers in the story find themselves having to answer to the directives of their superiors, which for most of them is the fiery Colonel Tall (Nick Nolte). The camera’s revelation of space on the ship carrying the soldiers to the Battle of Guadalcanal enhances our idea of the army’s hierarchy of power: At once driven by its horizontal momentum across the water that collectively carries all of the men to the Guadalcanal, the ship is also a vertical structure, its various levels occupied by men of different ranks of power. In the first sequence on the ship, Nolte’s Colonel Tall stands looking across the ocean at the island, while below him Sean Penn’s Sergeant Welsh admonishes Witt (Jim Caviezel) for going AWOL. Also beneath the ship are Captain Staros (Elias Koteas) and the various men who answer to his authority, including Private Bell (Ben Chaplin). Each of these characters confronts death in a way unique to him, but the ranks of the characters, vividly embodied by the various levels of the ship that carry them to war, remind us that they do so from positions on a social hierarchy enabled by different degrees of agency. What is unique about Malick’s cinema, however, is its ability to insist upon this unequal social hierarchy and yet at the same time show us how

Voicing Meaning: On Terrence Malick’s Characters

33

characters can yearn to express meaning that might transcend the social strictures into which they have been both existentially and physically inscribed. The already-worlded social hierarchy in which Malick’s characters find themselves does not determine, and is not confirmed by, the meanings they strive to articulate. This insistence on uncertainty and indetermination is unusual for a director of historical films. Unlike characters in most historical films made in Hollywood, Malick’s characters, who all exist in vividly recreated visions of historical epochs in the American past, do not function to “hold together” the historical world of America under the sign of a single truth that might provide the viewer a myth for understanding the meaning of history. As Adrian Martin has written, “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.”24 In Heidegger’s terms, their existences can be understood as various searches for authentic meaning (as opposed to the familiar meanings that enframe quotidian life), or an original experience that leads to meaning that did not previously exist in the world. Voiced meaning in Malick is, in other words, never socially or historically overdetermined, even as lived lives in his films are ineluctably caught up with already established ways of doing and making and even as they are structured in narratives that tell stories that are in a certain sense delimited by what we already know of American history (this is particularly true of Badlands, The Thin Red Line, and The New World, all films based, however loosely, on real events). Instead, voicing meaning becomes for Malick’s characters the effort to imagine another world, to creatively envision how the historical world in which they find themselves might be otherwise. A passage from Malick’s own translation of Heidegger’s 1969 volume The Essence of Reasons offers one more tantalizing clue in our exploration of the philosophical underpinnings of Malick’s approach to the character’s struggle to find a space from which to voice original meaning. It is in this text that Heidegger suggests the effort to world a world requires an opportunity: There is no way that being, or nature in the widest sense, might become manifest if it could not find the opportunity to enter a world. Thus we say that being can, and often does, make an entrance into a world. “Entering a world” is not an event that takes place within (or outside) the realm of being but something that “happens with” being. And this

34

Terrence Malick

happening is the existing of Dasein which, as existing, transcends. Only if, within the totality of being, a being “is” to some greater extent because it gets involved in Dasein’s temporality can we speak of its “entering a world” having an hour and day. And being can manifest itself only if this prehistoric happening, which we call transcendence, happens, i.e., if being of the character of Being-in-the-world breaks into the entirety of being.25 Heidegger’s concept of Dasein refers to a being-in-the-world aware of its own transience and able to give meaning and significance to its experiences in the finite amount of time it has within the world. Dasein is not a guaranteed outcome of living, but rather an achievement of human beings; deriving from the capacity for choice, it results when a human being stakes out significance in and through the temporal frame of embodied existence. As such, Dasein is the product of human striving, and different social and historical contexts may enable the search for Dasein in different ways. As Heidegger shows in The Essence of Reasons, Dasein can only world another world when given—or when it finds—the opportunity to do so. The “opportunity” is that concrete moment in which Heidegger’s abstract, de-embodied notion of “Being” finds its concrete, embodied “hour and day,” its luminous opportunity to make a meaning that will hold forth the earth in the possibility of making a new world. As Klaus Held has suggested, Heidegger conceived Dasein’s experience of time as “originally experienced time,” time that yields new significance in the experience of an individual.26 In this respect, Malick’s cinematic sense of “opportunity” offers us another way to conceive how his work is somewhat different from the usual plot-driven narrative film. Events in Malick’s films are not burdened with the function of conveying the significance of shifts in narrative or character behavior because narrative suspense is eschewed in favor of contemplative reverie, sublime rapture, and thematic ambiguity. As we have seen, because Malick’s films avoid the familiar patterns of the classical narrative film and because they skirt the trappings of clear character psychology, we do not wonder what a character’s action means in the plot. Instead, we are given to contemplate what it means existentially, that is, how a particular action or moment in a character’s life works to form that character’s identity—or, in keeping with Heidegger’s phrasing, how that moment allows, or perhaps does not allow, the character an opportunity to signify new meaning out of the already worlded-world. “Opportunity,” in Heidegger’s

Voicing Meaning: On Terrence Malick’s Characters

35

sense, comes alive in Malick’s films not as a depicted fact of the story that illustrates Heidegger’s concept. Instead, the temporal qualities of the medium, in Malick’s hands, allow for the director to poetically construct the encounter between the human being and its opportunity to recognize the meaning of its self, to find its “hour and day”—its concrete, phenomenal opportunity to make new meaning. Alternatively, at certain moments in the films (particularly in Badlands), the films show human beings falling short of Dasein, that is, missing their hour and their day to voice new meaning (even as Malick shows that “hour and day” to us in his images and sounds). Given that Malick is working in a temporal medium, he is uniquely equipped not simply to show the actions that merely confirm the meaning in and of the social world, but indeed to allow the space and time to contemplate the landscapes which form the ground for the emergence of the reasons which will justify later action and transformation of the world. In The Thin Red Line, the director dramatizes the experience of war, an experience that would also appear impersonal and atomizing, given not only the already mentioned fact of the army’s hierarchal social structure, but also because World War II involved confrontations motivated by nationality and territory rather than individuality. Nevertheless, as Malick’s film makes clear, war is made up of individuals who exist in very particular times and spaces. Malick does not channel his characters’ reflections into mythical statements on the meaning of war. Like Holly’s encounter with the stereopticon in Badlands, which offers her an opportunity to ruminate on her own past, or Linda’s retrospective narration of her experiences with her now-dead brother Bill, war offers certain characters in The Thin Red Line the concrete opportunity to contemplate the meaning of their lives and past experiences, particularly where that past involves the very question of mortality which arises in war. For example, early in the film Witt goes AWOL to the Melanesian islands, a brief moment of open and contemplative reverie in stark contrast to the rigid structure of the army and the violence of battle. In one of the sequences on the island, Witt discusses, with another soldier, the death of his mother, a memory that his time on the island has apparently given rise to: “I couldn’t find nothin’ beautiful or uplifting about her going back to God. I heard of people talk about immortality, but I ain’t seen it.” The flashback which is paired with this dialogue makes clear that it is not an objective depiction of the past but rather a subjective memory of Witt’s that may have no correspondence with reality in some of its details; this memory, enabled by the opportunity to contemplate

36

Terrence Malick

his existence that the Melanesian islands give him, is a reflection in the deepest sense of the world, given that it emerges from within the reflecting human subject (in this case Witt). It begins with a long shot of an older woman lying on a bed (who we presume to be Witt’s mother) raises her hand to a young child, while a young man (possibly Witt) sits and watches; in the background of the image, a bird hops in a cage, as blue light washes out the windows (perhaps, in Witt’s memory, this blue light functions as a synecdoche for the heaven to which he believes his mother has passed). The flashback proceeds to close-ups of the bird, and of the young girl (we hear, on the soundtrack, her heartbeat). We never learn who this girl is; in the next image we see her embracing the young man we believe to be Witt, and in the final image the camera tilts upwards to the ceiling of the bedroom. It is at this point that the image of the bedroom fades into a superimposition of the blue ocean of the Melanesian paradise in which Witt sits. This brief sojourn on the Melanesian islands opens up for Witt the opportunity—“the hour and day,” presented to us by Malick in these rich images of a natural paradise—to reflect upon the meaning of death, a brute empirical fact of war that patriotism tells us finds its meaning in the nation, but which Witt attempts to define in more personal, and original, terms. Indeed, his memories remain so personal that certain motifs in his flashback (the young girl, and the bird in the cage) are never given a concrete explanation by either the director or the character. Nevertheless, Witt’s brief opportunity to reflect on the meaning of his life colors the balance of the film, for mortality (and this “immortality” which some have told him exists) remains something Witt desires to know. In large part this desire drives his interactions with others and what he calls his “love for Charlie Company,” including his calm care for wounded soldiers and his spiritual conversations with the nihilistic Welsh. His effort throughout the rest of the film is to extend his original experience of time—his reflection on his mother’s death on the Melanesian islands, and his effort to approach his own death with her sense of “calm”—into his experience of war itself. Does Witt succeed in this regard? Some commentators think so; Simon Critchley has suggested that Witt ultimately finds a “calm” in the face of death that eludes other characters in the film (and indeed most human beings).27 As illuminating as Critchley’s reading is, I would like to suggest that while it is possible for us to ascribe this meaning to Witt’s demise, the character’s own expression of what his death means remains a private fact that he takes with him to his end. Witt’s death, like all

Voicing Meaning: On Terrence Malick’s Characters

37

deaths, is ambiguous. It seems intended as a sacrifice to protect the lives, at least temporarily, of his fellow soldiers—Witt successfully leads a Japanese attack away from the rest of the company, but at the expense of his own life—and is thus a kind of social event marked by the meaning its most important participant would appear to give to it. Yet at the same time, Witt’s is a death, like all deaths, experienced alone. It is difficult to tell if Witt even believes in the sacrifice that might grant to it a larger social meaning, given that at the moment he is shot by the Japanese soldier, he also appears to be lifting his gun as if to shoot back. Could it be that this final moment of Witt’s life is not a calm moment of sacrifice for others, but a moment of doubt regarding the value of such a sacrifice or the possibility of calm in the face of death? Is Witt suddenly regretting his decision to sacrifice his own life for the life of others? And might the act of killing the Japanese soldier—which Witt is in the process of attempting to do as he is killed—in fact contradict his desire to forge a better world, one free of the violence he has fled in the film’s first sequence? In other words, Malick’s poetic cinema never identifies with character, even as it moves us to become close to characters through voice-overs that pierce their most intimate thoughts. Because Malick’s camera sees the world from a different perspective, it always remains at one remove from the meanings its characters ascribe to their experiences, even as the films put those experiences into motion. The meaning of Witt’s death only serves to open up the question of death for other soldiers: the film ends not with the resolution of the question of death (as something to be faced with “calm”) but rather frames it as an ongoing existential problem, the meaning of which is to be voiced anew by other characters (and, indeed, other films) when the opportunity of another “hour and day” arises. Interpretations of the film hinging on Witt’s death as a sacrificial gesture are too quick to read his death as a social, and thus a closed narrative, event. Malick films Witt’s “sacrifice” with a much deeper degree of ambiguity. His death is in fact nothing more or less than the “hour and day” for other soldiers in the film to begin to make their own meaning of his life (this is why Malick does not end his film with Witt’s death but includes images and voices of other soldiers who continue to voice meaning out of the experience of war they have had). We ourselves might indeed take this opportunity to read “sacrifice” as the most legible and comforting meaning Witt’s death holds for us. But given that the experience of war is ongoing in the film (although the Battle of Guadalcanal is over at the end of the film, World War II continues), the

38

Terrence Malick

meaning of The Thin Red Line—the meaning of World War II itself— remains unsettled. *

*

*

New worlds expressed by characters in Malick’s films are thus always precarious. Even as (indeed, because) they amplify Heidegger’s concepts of earth, world, and striving in the liminal relationships between film character and filmic world, the voiced meanings of Malick’s characters eventually give way to the possibility of different perceptions and expressions of the world. At the end of Badlands, Holly is, alongside Kit, arrested and put in chains, and yet we last see her flying in an airplane in the sky, perhaps the beginning of a new adventure. The last image of Days of Heaven presents Linda walking toward the composition’s vanishing point alongside a set of train tracks that guide her toward the future. The final shot of The Thin Red Line—of a coconut sprout nestled in the water—functions as both a memorial to the voiced meanings foreclosed by death but also the ongoing effort to remember old worlds through the creation of new ones. And the elation Pocahontas (and the viewer) feels at the end of The New World is palpable; one senses that the character, who rapturously roams through a cultivated English garden with her half-Powhaten, halfEnglish son as the sounds of Wagner wash over the film’s images, has indeed found a new world. At the same time, however, the viewer knows that the real Pocahontas is dead and that the promise of equality and democracy between and among natives and Europeans was not met. In all of these finales, the human effort to strive is not closed down or superficially resolved by the narrative’s end. Instead, each moment again confirms how Malick’s cinema functions as an experiential and poetic frame through which the viewer may encounter the phenomenological fact of striving itself. This encounter occurs in wresting together the meaning of Malick’s film poetry through the viewer’s effort of interpretation, but also in watching Malick’s characters make their own heroic efforts at shaping light, sound, and movement into philosophical significance.

Notes 1

2

I refer here to Thinking through Cinema: Film as Philosophy, ed. Murray Smith and Thomas E. Wartenberg (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006). For a sample of the critical literature in film theory on character, see Murray Smith, Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) and Lloyd Michaels, The Phantom of the Cinema: Character in Modern Film (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998).

Voicing Meaning: On Terrence Malick’s Characters 3

4

5

6 7 8

9

10

11

12 13

14 15

16

17 18

19 20 21 22

23 24 25

26

27

39

David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Routledge, 1985), 63. Michel Chion, The Thin Red Line: BFI Modern Classics (London: British Film Institute, 2004), 13. Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 58–63. Ibid., 59. Ibid., 255–6. Robert Sinnerbrink, “A Heideggerian Cinema?: On Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line,” Film-Philosophy 10, no. 3 (2006), 26–37. Accessible online at www.film-philosophy.com/2006v10n3/sinnerbrink.pdf Martin Heidegger, “On the Origin of the Work of Art,” Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 54. R. Raj Singh, “Heidegger and the World in an Artwork,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48, no. 3 (Summer 1990), 217. The neoformalist paradigm is represented by the work of David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson. See, in particular, Kristin Thompson, Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film Analysis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988). Heidegger, “On the Origin of the Work of Art,” 43. See Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 115–54. Heidegger, “On the Origin of the Work of Art,” 46. Adrian Martin, “Things to Look Into: The Cinema of Terrence Malick.” Accessible online at www.rouge.com.au/10/malick.html Barbara Brickman, “Coming of Age in the 1970s: Revision, Fantasy, and Rage in the Teen-Girl Badlands,” Camera Obscura 22, no. 3 (2007), 26. Heidegger, “On the Origin of the Work of Art,” 48. Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 28. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 24. Heidegger, “On the Origin of the Work of Art,” 57. Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity (London: BFI Publishing, 2008), 134. Lloyd Michaels, Terrence Malick (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 93. Martin, “Things to Look Into: The Cinema of Terrence Malick.” Martin Heidegger, The Essence of Reasons, trans. Terrence Malick (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969), 89, 91. Klaus Held, “Phenomenology of ‘Authentic Time’ in Husserl and Heidegger,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 15, no. 3 (September 2007). See Simon Critchley, “Calm: On Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line,” The Thin Red Line: Philosophers on Film, ed. David Davies (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 11–28.

Chapter 3

Terrence Malick’s Histories of Violence John Bleasdale

Fire A fire rages through the films of Terrence Malick. In Badlands, a family home is doused in petrol and set alight; the piano, the sheet music, the food, the furniture, a doll’s house and a child’s bed with its forlorn china doll are all devoured by the raging flames—as is the corpse of the murdered father, lying in the cellar, silhouetted against the fire. In Days of Heaven, the fires of industrialization are exported from the furnaces of Chicago to the oceanic farmland, fed by a feckless young worker, who is fated to spread both fire and destruction despite his best efforts. In her voice-over, his young sister, Linda reports a prophecy from “some guy named Ding-Dong,” “the whole Earth going up in flames [ . . . ] there’s gonna be creatures running ever which way; some of them burning, their wings burning” and a day of judgment will come. Sure enough later, the fields of the rich landowner will go up in flame, an apocalyptic blaze, a night of hell to contrast (and define) the days of heaven, whirling in the black night to the industrial sounds of the steam tractors. But it is also a cleansing fire, ridding the earth of one plague (locusts) by voluntarily accepting the depredations of another. In The Thin Red Line, the fires increase as the attack continues, reducing the paradisiacal grassland and verdant jungle to a charred and smoking battlefield. The enemy camp is torched by the flamethrowers of the victorious American soldiers after the battle. A moment of violence, but also a cauterizing of memory, an erasing and, as in Badlands, a strategy to rewrite the scene of a crime, or crimes. In The New World, fire is a primitive but dangerously effective weapon of war. The fire arrows of the indigenous population fight against the firearms of the European settlers and the confrontation, despite our privileged knowledge of the outcome, does not seem uneven, nor the result inevitable. A house within the stockade is set ablaze and panic spreads, the settlers desperately attempting to

Terrence Malick’s Histories of Violence

41

extinguish the flames. In their turn, and once strengthened by reinforcements, the settlers will put the native village to the torch. Fire can be both symbolic of violence and an act of violence in itself. Destructive and fascinating, fire accelerates entropy and easily (almost inevitably) gets out of control. In Malick’s films, it is used to cover tracks and destroy evidence, making everything look like it could have been an accident. Or an act of God. And fire is also a touch of the divine, a Pentecostal manifestation of the spirit, or the spiritual. “I’ve seen another world,” Pvt. Witt tells Sergeant Welsh at the beginning of The Thin Red Line. He gazes into the flame of a struck match.1 Captain Staros prays before the battle by the light of a thin, fluttering candle flame. Fire reappears in the religious vocabulary, the “spark” of Witt and Welsh’s later dialogue. Witt comments: “Everyone looking for salvation for himself. Each like a coal drawn from the fire.” In Days of Heaven, fire is also the communal locus around which the itinerant workers are briefly allowed a moment of celebration and music. The camera seems as fascinated by fire as Witt is, striking his matches in the brig. Malick’s camera lingers on the flames, following sparks flying into the sky, gazing on material curling orange and being consumed by the flames: the translation of matter into heat and light, smoke and ash. Despite its frequent vicinity to murder, the spectacle is admirable and its unreal quality is emphasized as the real world soundtrack is dropped during scenes of fire and the accompanying music turns the conflagration into a sublime montage of oranges and reds, a dance of destruction. The voice of the fire is stifled,2 and replaced by the sound of Carl Orff’s choral piece in Badlands, or Hans Zimmer’s minimalist score from The Thin Red Line. The exception to this is Days of Heaven. During the opening scene in the steelyard, the fire of the steel mill retains its beauty but the soundtrack is a jarring and violent cacophony, which, although it drowns out the actual argument taking place, goes some way to justify the violence by creating such an aggressively hostile environment. In the later fire and locusts sequence, Ennio Morricone incorporates the same pounding sound (heard in the first scene) into the score, emphasizing that the same industrial forces have been imported to the farmland, and with them the same class relationships and the same potential for violence. The repetition of fire as a motif is consistent with Malick’s systematic deployment of a symbolic vocabulary throughout his films. Just as the fire burns through every one of his films, so the river runs, achieving

42

Terrence Malick

prominence as a familiar feature of his psychic landscape. Perhaps, all rivers are the same river: all fires, the same fire. The central role of nature and landscape in his films, the almost fetishistic lingering over the details of household objects, the ornaments, the wind chimes, the toys and knickknacks, the cutlery and bird cages go together to create a coherent and consistent universe, at once tangible and mysterious, in which Malick’s films operate. Likewise the cinematic grammar is also strikingly consistent: the use of voice-over(s), prolonged sequences of images without sound, a heavy emphasis on music and the trademark magic hour photography. Yet this said, Malick’s four films each deal with very different periods in American history, tracing American violence backwards into the past, via a series of conflicts, spanning from the seventeenth-century origin story of modern America in The New World through to the apotheosis of American cultural dominance on the cusp of the 1960s in Badlands.3 These conflicts are generational, political, military, or familial. They can be significant and world-changing, or domestic and tabloid. They are always known, in some cases famous, based on real events or at least recognizable.4 The conflict is ultimately expressed, though not resolved, with violence. Although there is pyromania in the appreciation of the beauty of fire, Malick could never be accused of sadism, despite the many incidents of violence portrayed in his films. Compared to his treatment of fire, violence offers little in the way of aesthetic lingering. For Malick there is no John Woo-like ballet, nor Peckinpahesque Grand Guignol, neither are we treated to the operatic violence of Sergio Leone nor the flip dark humor of Quentin Tarantino, or the literal overkill of Oliver Stone.5 Rather, violence in his world is often sudden, almost always in real time, usually panicked and clumsy, rarely going as planned, almost accidental, seldom enjoyed and almost never beautiful: except when it co-opts (usually as a postmortem postscript) the elemental beauty of fire. Malick’s cinema is rife with conflict and portrays violence in various forms. His central characters are murderers and arsonists, soldiers and warriors; but the world itself is also perceived as violent—there is an intrinsic “war at the heart of nature” as it is characterized by Pvt. Witt. The world is a hostile place. Nature is dangerous, “red in tooth and claw” (the crocodiles and locusts) or aloof (the horses and the birds). Characters, tribes, C Company (“I love C Company,” Witt says. “They’re my people”) and nations vie with each other, fight and kill each other, for

Terrence Malick’s Histories of Violence

43

wealth, for love, for power, for sex, or for motives that aren’t themselves understood and cannot be readily articulated. Sergeant Welsh reduces everything to “property. The whole fucking thing’s about property.”6 Taken literally, Welsh’s reasoning is most fitting to the last two films which involve combat specifically related to the ownership and occupation of land. In The Thin Red Line, the ownership is of an island and ultimately of a hill, whose worth seems randomly assigned. “Nobody wants this island. The Japs just put an airfield there,” General Quintard tells Col. Tall. In The New World, the real estate seems insignificant, a fragile looking fort on an ill-chosen muddy patch of ground, but the battle is over the start of America itself. In the trailer (but not in the film), a line of dialogue from Captain Newport, played by Christopher Plummer, makes the stakes explicit: “I beg you, let not America go wrong in her first hour,” although the “going wrong” is not so much losing the battle, as fighting it in the first place. The writing of history, the telling and retelling of conflict, is also a moment of conflict, as various narrators attempt to control the sporadic violent episodes of the narrative, seeking to justify, explain, contain, or romanticize what is happening. All the films feature narrative voices. The first two films feature adolescent female voices who speak tangentially to the events and actions of the film. The latter films are choral works, featuring multiple voices, which are frequently unidentified and often willfully fusing and confusing. In Badlands, Kit (Martin Sheen) records a mendacious confession, claiming that he and his teenaged girlfriend Holly are going to commit suicide, and sets up the record player outside the house, before throwing a lit book of matches onto the petrol. Holly (Sissy Spacek) narrates that he left the record playing over and over for the District Attorney to find. “He was gambling for time,” she says in a cliché typical of her narration. It is an early attempt to control and direct the narrative of violence. And yet, with Kit and Holly long gone, the fire rages, consuming not only the evidence of murder and the scene of the crime, but also the record player and the false narrative it plays thus belying Holly’s narration. Kit is unable to control his own narrative. Rather than a rebel without a cause, Kit is a pontificator without a point of view, a philosopher without a coherent philosophy. And anyway, his violence speaks much louder than anything he wants to say. Despite the taping and recording of banal observations, the burying of artifacts and the last-minute kiln, it is Holly who has the privilege of speaking and surviving, and they are not on the same page: “In the end, the sadness

44

Terrence Malick

emanating from the film partially comes from the fact that Kit’s most well-placed biographer, Holly, is living another life. So his story dries up without leaving a trace.”7 Although, Kit’s violence remains as something loud, it is ultimately incomprehensible. When Kit kills Cato, Holly narrates: “Kit never did tell me why he shot Cato, he said even talking about it could bring bad luck.” It is something done, suddenly and there is a strong suspicion Kit not only won’t say, but actually can’t say why he killed Cato. Violence is something that takes even its perpetrators by surprise. Pvt. Doll’s revelation in The Thin Red Line: “I killed a man, the worst thing you can do, worse than rape,” is an almost stunning statement of the obvious and remarkably preserves his innocence as a young man who has been thrust into a world of conflict he barely understands. His internal verbalization, his immediate apprehension of what he has just done, is in stark contrast to the evasions and romanticizing, the prayers and philosophizing of the other characters. Doll’s realization is not of some grandiose “war at the heart of nature,” but a sudden realization of the banality of the violence around him.8 The fact that he shoots a stretcher bearer seems deliberately to set him up in direct opposition to Witt, who at that point in the film is working as a stretcher bearer. Doll says “and no one can touch me for it.” It is violence without consequence, without punishment and therefore without meaning, which is an anathema to Witt who seeks meaning constantly. This doesn’t stop Doll from understanding that it is still “the worst thing you can do.” And yet his revelation is also in contrast to what he actually says out loud: “I got me one of ’em.” This bravado is understandable and is nothing compared to the delusions of Col. Tall’s pronouncements of the same action over the sound power. The clumsy chaotic action is “Beautifully conceived, beautifully executed,” Col. Tall goes on to compliment a platoon leader (Lt. Whyte II) who we have seen killed in the first seconds of the assault: “Young Whyte led beautifully.” Any attempt to find meaning on Witt’s part has to negotiate not only Doll’s apprehension of meaninglessness but the self-serving fictions of those who stand to profit by violence, such as Col. Tall. For the Homer-quoting Tall, violence is beautiful, operating on a grandiose scale of grand narrative, but as the film moves on there is a strong possibility, what with the island-hopping wanderings of his discouraged men and the anxiety about wives left at home, that Tall and his men are in the domestic tragedy of The Odyssey rather than military epic of The Iliad. Hill 210 is a rather low-key Troy, after all. However, Hill 210 is the “property,” both the location and the

Terrence Malick’s Histories of Violence

45

apparent motive for the violence we see in the film and it is to the “property” of violence that we now turn.

War at the Heart of Nature “I was raised in a violent atmosphere in Texas. What struck me was how violence erupted and ended before you really had time to understand what was happening. Take, for instance, Lee Harvey Oswald’s murder by Ruby: it took place in a flash,” Malick says in one of his rare interviews to Michel Ciment. “Kit and Holly—and in this respect they are truly children—don’t think that death is the end. It’s a ‘crossing to the other side.’ ”9 This suddenness of violence exists in all his films. The murders seem to happen almost by accident in Badlands and Days of Heaven. Holly’s father is popped. John Smith’s tormentor, Wingfield, is dispatched with Rubylike alacrity in The New World and despite the briefing and the slow build up, the first two on-screen deaths which begin the battle in The Thin Red Line take the commanding officer and the audience by surprise. The speed of violent death, its summary quickness, drains it of cinematic gloss and romantic glamour. We know Willem Defoe’s death in Platoon is significant because it takes over a minute of screen time to happen.10 The slow motion (and the elegiac music of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings) gives us time to feel and to fully take in what has happened. For Malick, like Pvt. Doll and later Bell who repeats Doll’s sentiments, if there is something shocking about violence, it is not blood gushing from fresh wounds or bodies caught in a hail of bullets, rather, it is the banality of violence, which stands jarringly at odds with its catastrophic consequences. It is over before it has begun. Michel Chion argues that Malick’s portrayal of violence, like his portrayal of sex, is typified by restraint: “violence is at once very present [ . . . ] and unreal, both because it is hardly or never mentioned and because the director avoids any overly explicit display of its effect on bodies, such as corpses, the impact of bullets, blood flowing and wounds.”11 However, it is not so much that Malick looks away, rather he shows it in real time. He does not beautify the moment, nor does he resort to a conventional cinematic grammar of violence. Dying might be slow, as in the case of Cato and the wounded man Welsh tends, but murder is quick. In The Thin Red Line, Malick delays the violence for the opening section of the film. The first two on-screen deaths occur at 44 minutes and 42 seconds. We witness the campaign alongside the soldiers of C Company

46

Terrence Malick

as they go from ship to shore, through jungle, and from the river to the hill that they will spend most the film trying to take. In doing so, we experience the war in reverse, seeing first the tortured and executed GIs and then the wounded by the river, before we witness any actual violence. We see the consequences before we see the action. The soldiers are traumatized before they get thrown into the action. One burly soldier is seen vomiting white bile and being relieved of duty and sent down the line as the others wait for the order to advance. And yet when the violence begins, it is shocking and sudden, despite our preparation. The battles are conveyed with a mixture of Steadicam shots, running alongside the soldiers and a montage of very brief shots, which show explicit violence (bullet wounds, neck wounds, arterial spray, blood on grass, a man crawling his hands bloody and burnt) but all very briefly. Each battle is a series of very quick murders. Watching The Thin Red Line against Saving Private Ryan, something that was inevitable since the films were released within months of each other, is to see two filmmakers with diametrically opposed visions of violence.12 Spielberg, a poet whose métier is destruction, describes violence with an exhaustive completeness, with wit and fervor, making his film (especially the first- and last-half-hour sections) a visceral experience for the viewer. His camera partakes in the war, juddering and frenetic and bloodied. During the Normandy beach landings that open his film, we are subjected to what seems like a breakdown of narrative, a veritable anatomy of physical destruction, but what is actually happening is the outbreak of a series of mininarratives, vignettes as one second a man can be alive and lucky and another, he can be dead, or horribly wounded. These moments coalesce until a recognizable movement can be organized (simply getting off the beach) and the grand narrative (including that of the good war in historical terms) can be resumed, arcing, or morphing from Matt Damon’s eponymous Private Ryan, to his old age self (played by Harrison Young) and the present day, and everything making sense and, finally, being worth it. By contrast, the question of the value, purpose and politics of the conflict are almost completely absent from Malick’s film. The whole of the Pacific theater is reduced to the taking of a single hill (“three folds of ground and then the hill”—Captain Staros is explicit). The violence is instigated by men whose primary concern is not the somberly greater good, as proposed by, among others, the historian Stephen Ambrose, the war to end all wars, but promotion, as in the case of Colonel Tall, or simply survival, as in the case of Pvt. Bell, who finds himself in an infantry company and on the island by unlucky accident.

Terrence Malick’s Histories of Violence

47

Whereas memory and memorials are vital in Saving Private Ryan serving as the film’s own raison d’être, the graves and the letters of dead men of The Thin Red Line transmit nothing and are not passed on—in the case of Sergeant Keck, the letter is not even written.13 Although the confusion of battle is portrayed in both films, for Spielberg, this is a temporary, exceptional, and ultimately justifiable breakdown. In the context of grieving mothers and somber and noble generals who reach back through a textual history (letters once more) for their moral authority, the mission ultimately makes sense and justifies the violence and the sacrifice.14 The soldiers and officers of Malick’s army must go forward but they are impelled by no sense of a greater calling, or historical moment. The outside world, for Malick’s soldiers, only exists in brief flashbacks of an ultimately unfaithful wife and a dying mother. It is astonishing that these two elements are the only back story anyone gets in the film.15 The characters stripped of context are not even given a visible enemy for much of the film. They are left alone in the world, rarely talking to each other, and even when they do, they do so mainly in unanswered monologues.16 They are aware of unseen watchers who could stand in for the audience itself. General Quintard tells Col. Tall, “Someone’s always watching.” More vitally, the unseen enemy could always be watching. One of Welsh’s last observations—“you’re in a box, in a moving box”—is true both of his feelings of entrapment and his position as a character trapped in the visual field of the cinema screen. In the first half of the film, without a visible enemy, C Company appear to be attacking the hill, not so much as a military position as the actual hill itself. They are literally at war with the world and the hill, in turn, is attacking them. For a good part of the attack all we see are muzzle flashes from the hill and later, when the Japanese do appear, they emerge from camouflaged foxholes, springing from the ground, or being killed in their dens. Mostly, keeping his camera level with the men, the soldiers creep through the tall grass, hide in rivers and, in one shot, a Japanese soldier has been literally blasted back into the earth. In the psychosis of battle, “Hit the dirt” soon becomes “this is what you are—dirt—dirt.” When Bell calls in artillery coordinates at the turning point of the battle, we are given no shot of the artillery firing (as we have been given earlier), but rather a shot of the sky as if it is the sky that will now smite the hill: sky against land, fire against river, the war at the heart of nature. The beauty of the landscape is deceptive. Hills shoot back and the sky rains death. The shot of the traumatized bird during the battle might seem like a mawkish and sentimental view of nature and the bad things

48

Terrence Malick

men do to it, if it wasn’t put alongside the shot of the angry snake that rises in front of the soldiers who cringe before it. Witt is Malickian in that he is a character similarly alive to the beauty of the world around him, but it makes him no less violent. Nature (and an appreciation of nature) does not automatically equate with nonviolence. Witt can gaze soulfully at the sky, but he is keen to participate in the battle. When other soldiers notice nature, it is a violent or defensive nature that mirrors their own violence: the crocodile which the men capture or the moment when a soldier lying prone in the grass touches a plant leaf that defensively, almost magically, closes up at his touch. Indeed, Tall’s view of violence inherent in nature—“nature is cruel”—complements Witt’s view of the “war at the heart of nature.” In The New World, violence also exists in the context of what is primarily perceived as a hostile, though beautiful, environment. Here again, violence is motivated by Welsh’s “property.” Whereas the hill’s significance or otherwise is left to the pondering of in-the-know military historians (the name “Guadalcanal” is always text related, a word glimpsed on a map or read out in Col. Tall’s orders), The New World foregrounds the contested territory in its title, the animated map-drawing of its title sequence and in its rewriting of its familiar origin story. The settlers on arriving set about building a stockade, felling trees to do so. Their presence seems much more primitive than the ordered society of the “naturals” who witness their arrival with anxiety, bemusement, and curiosity. The first murder is motivated by another kind of property, or more accurately different cultural versions of property. The individual, private and finite property of the Europeans—property that can be stolen and has to be violently defended—conflicts with the communal property and relative prosperity of the indigenous population. The Europeans survive only through the generous intercession of the Princess. The tiny fort is a toehold on a massive continent; the epic (as in The Thin Red Line) lives on the ground of the trivial. The battle between the natives and the colonists when it finally takes place is a hurried series of skirmishes, sometimes breaking down into spitting and slanging matches. Gunshots echo hollowly under a vast sky. The violence is confusing and panicked and inglorious. It is also inconclusive. Further battles will take place; future massacres can be anticipated. Victory is not due to violence nor technology but rather to deceit (the seizing of Pocahontas) and the fortuitous return of Captain Newport and more colonists and equipment. European America is saved and ensured by the timely arrival of the cavalry.

Terrence Malick’s Histories of Violence

49

“[A]bout the Most Trigger Happy Person I had Ever Met” The films of Terrence Malick are populated by a series of violent innocents. In Days of Heaven, Bill (played by Richard Gere) is a sweet-faced drifter, full of fun—“he’d entertain us,” Linda says—whose occasional bursts of bad temper precipitate him into impetuous violent acts which he immediately regrets. The first crime, an attack on his foreman, at the very beginning of the film sees him flee the scene immediately with an almost childlike panic and abandon, as he will later flee the murder of the Farmer (Sam Shepherd), scaring the horse away in his panic. When he actually premeditates murder, he is unable to commit it, firing his gun into the ground rather than into the back of the Farmer’s skull as he clearly contemplates doing. Witt, in The Thin Red Line, might at first appear blessed with a Nazarene pacifism, a Saint Huck imbued with an innocence whose wide-eyed apprehension of nature seems, initially, at odds and in opposition to any act of violence and World War II that rages around him. We first see him attempting to avoid the fighting, having gone AWOL and hiding out in an apparently peaceful village, a typically temporary and fragile redoubt of peace and innocence for Malick. Later we see him serving in a stretcher outfit, tending to wounded men as part of his punishment for his former desertion, but tending to the suffering with a diligence and tearful empathy. At the river, his ministrations to a wounded man look like a form of baptism. However, Witt, despite his wistful musings, begs Captain Staros to be reinstated and given back his rifle so that he can participate in the fighting. His sacrifice at the end of the film is triggered by an act of aggression; he raises the rifle to fire at an enemy who is attempting to take him alive.17 His violence itself is curiously innocent. Even as he flees the tightening circle of enemy troops he whoops and hollers like a boy out hunting, or a child only playing at war. It would be a push to portray Captain John Smith, the mercenary of The New World, and our first male protagonist in that film, as an innocent. He is obviously a man who has seen many things, closer to First Sergeant Welsh’s matured Blakean experience than Witt’s innocence. Smith is recognized as the only “professional soldier” among the colonists. He arrives in America in chains and “under a cloud” as a mutineer and only escapes the hangman’s rope because of the patrician grace (and pragmatism) of Captain Newport. He is the armored man, in one scene almost a robot of war, and generically, as the film’s publicity misleadingly mirrored, his role initially appears to be that of the action hero, the fighter,

50

Terrence Malick

the capable man of violence. During the battle scenes, he moves through the mêlée with unusual speed, grace, and capability. However, with the casting of another innocent face, akin to Martin Sheen, James Caviezel, and Richard Gere, the troubled and vulnerable boyishness of Colin Farrell seems deliberately at odds with his fearsome reputation. Smith hovers at the edges of the venal and greedy society of the Europeans and his initial and then later disgrace, from our point of view, elevates him as that most stock of cinematic heroes, the Outsider. He is also the only colonist who comes to have a relationship with and an understanding of the “naturals.” Having been captured after a singularly suicidal foray into the territory of the natives, he is reborn through a nonact of violence. This is a highly significant moment of missing violence, a violence-shaped gap. Like the nonmurder of the Farmer in Days of Heaven when Bill fires his gun into the ground, it rehearses the moment of violence, the possibility of violence and then, at the last moment, withdraws. In Badlands, Kit will also not murder people (the rich man, the architect, and the police), but here the nonact only renders the actual murders he does commit more fickle and meaningless. There are also the missing murders of the suicidal frontal assault in The Thin Red Line, which we will discuss later. In not dying, Smith is born again and is allowed a second childhood. We see him playing games with the other men, being taught to speak, being tended by the women. Although play here (and throughout Malick’s cinema) is significantly not really a childish activity nor preparatory to life, but a fundamental expression of living.18 Through his relationship to the unnamed Pocahontas, Smith is the recipient of innocence. Like Witt, he too enjoys his brief sojourn of peace in an apparent idyll of the “natural’s” village. However, like Witt he returns to “his people,” he turns away from the peace and love promised by Pocahontas and returns to his tribe, and ultimately and deceitfully runs away, escaping the dilemma of his divided loyalties and compromised position. It is an act of moral cowardice (though a more experienced and successful escape than Bill’s in Days of Heaven) which serves perhaps to clarify Witt’s puzzling behavior as a brave embracing of both violence and innocence. He embodies the central thesis of the film, that the discovery of America was in fact a missed opportunity. “Did you find your Indies, John?” Pocahontas/Rebecca asks him at the end of the film. “I may have sailed past them,” he replies. In fact, the title of the film reverses the orthodox perspective, allowing us to see England as the “New World” and Rebecca as the true explorer.

Terrence Malick’s Histories of Violence

51

On the other end of the historical time line, Badlands portrays the Brave New World of youth, giving us perhaps Malick’s most in-depth portrait of the violent innocent. A genre-challenging piece of work, the film represents a True Romance, a road movie, a portrait of a serial killer, and a period piece. This generic ambivalence mirrors the inability of the characters themselves to decide on an identity. Kit Carruthers is the young garbage man who falls in love with Holly, a 15-year-old schoolgirl. A fabulist with an ever-ready story to tell and an opinion about everything, Kit carelessly invents his own narrative and projects a breezy indifference, as he fakes his signature and casually lies about without much hope of being believed. His insanity seems to exist in his inability to fully understand the world and his place in it. The hyperrationalism of faking his signature, for instance, shows a fundamental misunderstanding of identity and is after a moment’s reflection clearly paranoid nonsense. As he lies awake at night in a bed, which is tiny enough to have been his boyhood bed, listening to a noise which sounds like someone holding a seashell to his ear, we are aware of a fundamentally immature man whose attraction for Holly is not that of the predatory pedophile but of an undeveloped boy-man who is unaccomplished at and perhaps even uninterested in sex.19 Kit is trying out roles: the star-crossed lover, the cowboy, the guerrilla, and the well-to-do man, until his capture which seems to finally settle him in a socially recognized role with which he is satisfied: James Dean. Ultimately, he fits into the pantheon of troubled and troubling American adolescents from Huckleberry Finn to Holden Caulfield, a figure threatened by and yet compelled toward adult definitions of civilization and maturity, caught between lighting out for the territories and growing up in a world of phonies. The world he occupies seems at first as idyllic as the Americana billboard Holly’s father is painting. But there is a casual violence, mostly expressed toward animals. A few dead dogs turn up, one by the side of the road at the very beginning. Holly’s father, in a preemptive attempt to stymie the burgeoning romance, shoots Holly’s dog; Holly herself kills her fish when it gets sick and Kit’s job at the feedlot looks brutal and brings him into contact with dead animals. Kit’s killing of Holly’s father feels like a mistake, a bungled getaway. “I got it all planned,” he says, but there is a feeling of panicked improvisation. Kit’s eyes stare as widely as his victim’s, playing Holly’s father as the warning gunshot echoes louder than he anticipated. The murder is quick and unglamorous. Warren Oates, playing Holly’s father, dies on the carpet, letting himself down with one hand. This is not the blood spouting balletic fantasy of Oates’

52

Terrence Malick

final shoot-out in The Wild Bunch.20 The banality of the dialogue in the immediate aftermath underlines a disturbing normalcy of the death. “I found a toaster” Kit blandly comments to Holly as he returns from depositing her father’s body in the cellar. When she slaps him, it feels like she is fulfilling a necessary stylistic gesture, something she’s read in a magazine, rather than a genuine loss of temper. The murder allows them to enter an adult world but without having achieved emotional maturity. As if to prove this, Holly walks the rooms of the house smoking what would have been presumably a forbidden cigarette. The splashing of petrol around the house is the only moment when the camera becomes involved in the action a series of swinging handheld shots which evoke the panic and hurry of Kit as he seeks to erase what he has done. The murders which follow vary stylistically. The shooting of the bounty hunters does go according to a rehearsed plan this time and reveals a Kit who has become capable. The reason for this could well be that they occur on his turf, not only in the literal sense of occurring within the bounds of his tree-house complex, a setting which hangs uncomfortably between Tom Sawyer and anticipations of Vietnam, but also because they occur within his narrative space, delivering a more conventionally recognizable Hollywood action scene. The outnumbered hero ambushes the sneaky invaders of the Edenic hideaway. Holly tells us, “he had heard them whispering about how they were only interested in the reward money.” The bloody realization of this fantasy is, however, the exception. The other murders are more akin to the first, clumsy, panicked, fast, and banal. Kit kills people almost without meaning to and runs away (like Bill) scared of the consequences of his actions without showing remorse. He doesn’t dislike people, he isn’t angry at them, or even necessarily threatened. He chats amiably with the young couple (Holly and Kit’s more conventional doppelgangers) before he sends them into a cellar and shoots them.21 After shooting Cato, he opens the door for him to let him back into the house and chats as amiably as he did before he shot him. After disposing of the body, he seems visibly upset but it is a selfcontained childish tantrum, a petulant kicking of stones and immature gesticulating. There is no adult emotion. Adulthood is represented by the wearing of hats: Holly’s father, the police men and the architect (Malick himself in a famously unintended cameo). Kit tries a hat on himself on leaving the rich man’s house, but it signals his downfall, an overreaching moment, which will be resolved upon his capture when the deputy snatches his hat and throws it out of the car window, to reveal the true Kit, the one that looks like James Dean, an “individual.”

Terrence Malick’s Histories of Violence

53

The violent innocents of Malick’s cinema present a paradox analogous to the activity of the filmmaker himself. Just as his characters negotiate to retain innocence in a violent world, or while committing violence themselves so the films consistently analyze and tell stories of violence while tonally attempting to achieve a kind of cinematic innocence. In part, this can be seen in Malick’s tendency to clean up his source material. Badlands is based on a famous true story serial killer called Charlie Starkweather and his teenage girlfriend, Caril Fugate. Although some of the murders coincide, the killing of the teenagers with the car, for instance, the film makes the violence more economic and its character less culpable. Starkweather murdered men, women, and children, his girlfriend’s family, including her two-year-old sister, and were occasionally motiveless, whereas Kit kills mainly threatening men and usually has a justification (bounty hunters, Cato running away), however slight. Perhaps even more significantly, Holly’s real-life counterpart, Caril Fugate, was someone who, Starkweather claimed, participated fully in the crimes. In fact, the quotation from Holly’s narration that Kit was “the most trigger happy person I ever met,” and that heads the previous section, was actually uttered by Starkweather in reference to Caril Fugate. Although Days of Heaven is not based on a true story, it lifts its characters (albeit temporarily) out of the most brutal of class positions. The New World omits the violence, which included atrocities on both sides, when the settlement was subsequently attacked “from within” and a familiar vengeful cycle was unleashed.22 The Thin Red Line diverges similarly from its source material, the James Jones novel, omitting among other things Witt’s fanatical racism, the subplot of homosexuality and gruesome scenes of physical violence. Whereas Jones’ soldiers first camp in the middle of a torrential downpour, Malick allows nothing to dampen his soldier’s advance.23 These changes are not accidental nor dishonest. It is perhaps to do with the very fact that all of his films are histories of violence. They stylistically detach us from their subjects by belonging in a foreign time. However, the history is used in a very unreal way. Malick told Beverly Walker in Sight and Sound: “I don’t think [Kit] is a character peculiar to his time. I tried to keep the 1950s to a bare minimum. Nostalgia is a powerful feeling; it can drown out anything. I wanted the picture to set up like a fairy tale, outside time, like Treasure Island. I hoped this would, among other things, take a little of the sharpness out of the violence but still keep its dreamy quality. Children’s books are full of violence.”24 The dreamy

54

Terrence Malick

quality of violence is also emphasized by it existing in a world which is filmed and seen from a certain light. The famous magic hour photography presents a world which is distinctly, almost oddly, beautiful. The very title of Days of Heaven asserts an aesthetic goal which could be a subtitle to all of Malick’s films. All his films exist outside to a unique extent.25 Badlands places the murders in a beautiful series of locations, horizons are cut straight, and formalize the space. Throughout all the films, houses feature as ruined, burnt down, or derelict shells or invaded as an alien space. The characters exist in an outside world of natural forces, the long grass and jungle of The Thin Red Line, the prairie of Days of Heaven, the prelapsarian wilderness of The New World, and the badlands of, well, Badlands. The characters are for the most part unaware of the beauty around them. Holly prefers the exotic sights of the stereopticon to the world around her. The workers are too tired and worn out to appreciate the view, the soldiers and the colonials too terrified or too venal, digging in the mud for gold. But for some occasional characters, such as Witt and Pocahontas and, through her, John Smith, the beauty of the world is given as a secret, a vision which we share as an audience. Yet, it is in this world that the violence happens; it is in this beauty that murder and war take place. This beauty, Malick is careful to assert, is not in opposition with violence. The crocodile that slips under the water at the beginning of The Thin Red Line is in its own element as much as Witt and the village children swimming in the nearby sea. Witt’s initial response to the village in the opening scene is that it is a place without violence though he is told by the local woman, who seems none too comfortable talking to the soldier, that the children “fight all the time.” The soldiers might well find the village peaceful but it is unlikely that that is how the villagers see them. They are after all soldiers from a foreign land. On his return visit, he sees, as if for the first time, human skulls and skin diseases, which confirm that the village was in the world and had its own violent history. Likewise the villagers of Pocahontas’s settlement are not pacifists. Their living with nature in no way exonerates them or excludes them from violence. They have a warrior class and their threat to kill the unarmed Captain Smith is real enough. They go to war against the settlers with every intention of wiping them out. For Malick, violence is a fact of the world. It is not glamorous or noteworthy. It is not an extraordinary moment which needs to be glorified, or slowed down, or frozen. It is something which is breathtakingly banal in its ordinariness and its ubiquity. Bill’s violent death when he is gunned downed in the river is perhaps the only exception when his face in

Terrence Malick’s Histories of Violence

55

entering the water forms a kind of death mask, but the moment is over with shocking speed and he becomes just a body floating in the river. In fact, the key moments on which all of his films hinge are the pockets of nonviolence, the space where a violent act could fit but which is miraculously left open. The unusual moment when violence is there as a choice but is not taken despite the risks that that might later entail. Bill not murdering the Farmer has already been mentioned. Even Kit’s final surrender, after not having killed three or four other people in a blaze of glory, is a generically challenging and strange moment of nonviolence. The Thin Red Line might be unique among war films in placing its key moment of heroism as in an officer’s refusal to attack, when ordered.26 The New World allows for the creation of America because of the nonkilling of Smith and a failed (but credibly possible) massacre of the Europeans. In this way, Malick refigures innocence as an active choice not to commit purposeful evil, rather than a simple ignorance of evil and shows us a coherent vision of a world of violent innocence.

Notes 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

The use of matches also echoes the famous transition in Lawrence of Arabia from the extinguished match to the sunrise in the desert. Here Malick cuts to the water. The phrase is borrowed from James Wierzbicki, “Sound as Music in the Films of Terrence Malick,” Poetic Visions of America: The Cinema of Terrence Malick, ed. Hannah Patterson (Wallflower Press: London, 2003), 114. At the time of writing, The Tree of Life is yet to be released. Also note that I am commenting on The New World, extended version of 172 minutes, though this does not seriously impact on my comments as the plot remains substantially the same. Malick’s films all feature real moments in American history: the discovery of the new world, the outbreak of World War I, the Guadalcanal campaign and the Charlie Starkweather murders. Both Tarantino and Stone have obviously been influenced by Badlands in their own films on murderous young couples. Both Natural Born Killers and True Romance were scripted by Tarantino and the former was directed by Oliver Stone. Welsh’s conclusion in the novel stems from the character’s socialism. But deeper still is the idea that violence is about carving out a place in the world. Property, owning a place and also belonging to a place, is an important opposition in Malick’s first two films: the homeowners versus the rootless Kit in Badlands and the Farmer versus the itinerant Bill in Days of Heaven. Michel Ciment, interview in Positif, reprinted in Lloyd Michaels, Terrence Malick (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 109.

56 8

9 10

11 12

13

14

15

16 17 18

19

20

Terrence Malick It is not his last realization. Almost immediately afterward he will witness the death of Sergeant Keck who has his backside literally blown off when he pulls the pin out of a grenade on his own belt. The step between the ridiculous and the sublime in this situation is short indeed, as this “dumb recruit mistake” (Keck’s own summation) is refigured by Witt as an act of valiant self-sacrifice. “You didn’t let your brother down,” he comforts the dying man. Quoted in Michaels, Terrence Malick, 110. He is shot in a separate scene, but when he reappears being chased by Viet Cong, his death scene occupies approximately a minute and a half of screen time. Witt is killed in a matter of a split second. Michel Chion, The Thin Red Line (London: BFI, 2004), 16. Saving Private Ryan was released in the USA in July 1998 and The Thin Red Line was released in December 1998. Witt’s grave is a place that reveals only emptiness to Welsh and C Company march past a well-tended graveyard on their way to another boat and perhaps another island, with hardly a glance. I disagree with Michel Chion’s assumption that the end of The Thin Red Line sees the men returning home, “they’re particular war over” (33). For me, there is no indication that they might not have to fight a whole series of very similar battles. The film appears to suggest this via its very circularity. The end sees them simply back on the boat. The clattering of the typing pool, which succeeds the gut-wrenching battle scenes, mirrors the film’s own procedure of contextualizing violence, literally via text. Corpses become letters of condolence. As well as the letter which is written and rewritten and passed on through the platoon, there is the Civil War letter the general reads as justification for the mission he is proposing. The direction is two way as violence goes into text, text can also go into violence as Captain played by Tom Hanks literally sets up a textbook defense taking his ideas of sticky bombs, and so on from the General Infantry Mans’ Manual. Also, Colonel Tall makes an offhand comment about his son that is contemptuously dismissive of broader emotional context. Ironically, given that both men conflict vigorously in the film, both Col. Tall and Captain Staros are identical in perceiving kinship with the men with whom they fight. Col. Tall implies that Captain Gaff is a surrogate son, and Staros states “you are all my children.” Chion, The Thin Red Line, 58. See ibid., 61 for a translation of this moment. See also the scene of the soldiers running into the sea and Witt swimming with the native children (which later is remembered as a kind of aquatic afterlife immediately after he is killed) in The Thin Red Line. Malick makes an uncharacteristically crude joke in shooting Holly next to a sign which reads “Bait,” but Sissy Spacek is never made to look sexy in the style of Faye Dunaway, an obvious archetype in Bonnie and Clyde. She is always more of a pal than anything to Kit, who nicknames her with the asexual “Red.” Warren Oates’ Lyle Gorch in The Wild Bunch takes 2 minutes 40 seconds from first being shot to die. Much of that time is spent twirling as he is shot again and again.

Terrence Malick’s Histories of Violence 21

22

23

24 25

26

57

Whether Kit actually kills them or not is left open, but they certainly don’t try and escape and there are no further signs of life. In the real-life incident, the couple were killed. See Jack Sargeant, Born Bad: The Story of Charlie Starkweather and Caril Anne Fugate (London: Creation Books, 1996). For a full account see David A. Price, Love and Death in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas and the Heart of a New Nation (New York: Knopf, 2003). The rain pours later and is suitably dampening of the spirits as the one sadistic character of the film has a moment of emotional breakdown. Michaels, Terrence Malick, 105. See Adrian Martin, “Things to Look Into: The Cinema of Terrence Malick” www.rouge.com vol.10 (2007), www.rouge.com.au/10/malick.html This is in stark contrast to Saving Private Ryan’s insidious attack of pacifism, or even not shooting prisoners, as either cowardly or stupid. The German soldier, who is released rather than shot, is the man who kills Captain John Miller. Subsequently, he is killed in cold blood by the coward Cpl. Upham (Jeremy Davies), who thus redeems himself (?).

Chapter 4

Rührender Achtung :1 Terrence Malick’s Cinematic Neo-Modernity Thomas Wall

Es giebt Augenblicke in unserm Leben, wo wir der Natur in Pflanzen, Mineralen, Thieren, Landschaften, so wie der menschlichen Natur in Kindern, in den Sitten des Landvolks und der Urwelt, nicht weil sie unsern Sinnen wohlthut, auch nicht weil sie unsern Verstand oder Geschmack befriedigt (von beyden kann oft das Gegentheil statt finden) sondern bloß weil sie Natur ist, eine Art von Liebe und von rührender Achtung widmen.2 As preposterous (and as pretentious) as this may seem I believe that the best general commentary3 on the films of Terrence Malick is by Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), in particular his perhaps overly familiar essay “Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung” (“On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry”) published in three installments in 1795–1796 in his own journal Die Horen,4 but also his lengthier “Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen” (Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man) published at just about the same time and in the same journal. The prima facie case for my thesis is already apparent in the quotation above, the first sentence from “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,” in which the raw elements for a Malick film appear: Augenblicke in unserm Leben (“moments in our life” [and I emphasize “moments”] [Augenblicke]): Is it not true that in Malick’s films there is a primacy of shots over scenes; parataxis over narrative continuity; a gaze from an actor accompanied by a voice-over reflection as opposed to a suspenseful “what happens next?” expression or a shot-reactionshot?5 der Natur in Pflanzen, Mineralen, Thieren, Landschaften [ . . . ] nicht weil sie unsern Sinnen wohlthut, auch nicht weil sie unsern Verstand oder Geschmack

Terrence Malick’s Cinematic Neo-Modernity

59

befriedigt (von beyden kann oft das Gegentheil statt finden) sondern bloß weil sie Natur ist (“Nature in plants, minerals, animals, and landscapes [ . . . ] not because it gratifies our senses, nor yet because it satisfies our understanding or taste (the very opposite can occur in both instances), rather, simply because it is nature”): John Ford might have been enthralled by Monument Valley and John Huston by the Ulanga River, but Malick sees individual rocks (minerals), plants, and animals in their own autonomy. Ford and Huston see landscapes as iconic or dramatic settings for a story. In a Malick film, innumerable shots exist of fish swimming, buffalo grazing, wheat germinating, grass swaying, and so on, but none of these constitute a setting for anything in any classically Hollywood sense as I shall argue. They are part of a different intellectual regime. They are not shot in order to be put to work as part of a story. Are they mere “distractions”? Well, if narrative continuity is not the predominate aspect of the film then they (the shots of plants, minerals, landscapes, children, etc.) are not distractions; they are simply and suddenly “striking”: because they are simply “nature.” Something else may be at issue in a Malick film. Natur in Kindern (“nature in children”): Holly (Sissy Spacek) in Badlands, Linda (Linda Manz) in Days of Heaven, and above all Pocahontas (Q’Orianka Kilcher) in The New World are, granted, perhaps not technically children but they are childlike at least in some ways (I will come back to this). Further, there are bona fide children in idyllic scenes in both The Thin Red Line and The New World. in den Sitten des Landvolks und der Urwelt (“in the customs [habits, ways of being] of country folk and primitives [the primeval world]”): Cato in Badlands; the factory and immigrant workers in Days of Heaven; the Melanesians in The Thin Red Line as well as the ordinary GIs who have come to take (the Americans) or defend (the Japanese) Guadalcanal; and, of course, the Algonquin in The New World. Shots (as opposed to scenes); rocks, plants, animals, and landscapes (as opposed to settings); children and childlikeness, and the customs and ways of being of country people, GIs, Japanese soldiers, and “primitives” (none of whom are merely secondary characters in a narrative): are these not the elements of a Malick film? All he needs next is a story—a killer and his girl, a con artist and his weak-willed girlfriend, an historic event in a major war, a love story between an adventurer who is an integral part of the birth of a nation (an empire even) and a young woman who will witness the destruction of her nation. And yet, before we get to these stories, there is more. I will quote Schiller’s sentence in Julius A. Elias’s English translation with commentary and emphases. I apologize for splitting hairs in the

60

Terrence Malick

translation but I believe it is important. Both Schiller and Malick (if I am not mistaken) are interested in a specific experience that precedes any judgment, story, or history; an experience that would then be sentimentalized in a way that Schiller explains and that I will expand upon throughout these remarks: There are moments in our lives when we dedicate (widmen: in the sense of dedicating a book; or to devote one’s time or attention) a kind of love and tender respect (rührender Achtung: touching, moving, heartrending attention as in “to mind” or “to heed” in the sense “mind the gap!” on subway cars) to nature in plants, minerals, animals, and landscapes, as well as to human nature in children, in the customs of country folk (Landvolks) and to the primitive world (der Urwelt: the primeval, antediluvian world), not because it gratifies our senses, nor yet because it satisfies our understanding or taste (the very opposite can occur in both instances), rather, simply because it is nature [emphases mine].6 That by which we are struck with tenderness and attentiveness are not flowers, rock formations, or animals themselves but to the nature that is in them; the nature that is in children, or even, Schiller says later in the same paragraph, the nature that is in “monuments of ancient times over which we linger” (“den Denkmälern der alten Zeiten verweilet”). The word “nature” could be understood as “character” or “temperament” (it is not altogether clear, but he is clearly playing with several possible senses of the word).7 Hence we are not to think of Schiller as an ecologist; he is an idealist philosopher as well as a poet writing in the immediate wake of Immanuel Kant’s Critiques in which he had immersed himself.8 His friends at this time include Kant himself, Goethe, Hölderlin, and Hegel. The nature that Schiller speaks of throughout the entire essay will only provoke the intended effect if it is alloyed to the naïve “in the broadest meaning of the word” (here again, Schiller creates a category à la Kant only to immediately stretch its possible meanings)9 making it divine (Götterscheinung). The effect interrupts the satisfactions of both our understanding and our senses, Schiller says; it does not necessarily satisfy either mind or body (and may even be repulsive to either), but it tenderly attracts our attention; it is the naïve character in, or naïve temperament in . . . whatever. Moreover, it is quite obviously a state of tension that Schiller is pinpointing since there is on the one hand the rührender (the tender, the tranquil, the heartfelt—a state of languid attraction to . . . )

Terrence Malick’s Cinematic Neo-Modernity

61

and on the other hand the abruptness of the Achtung (the attentive respect for and distancing from . . . ). It is this divided, conflicted, unsettled state of being that—when combined with ideas—Schiller names “sentimentalisch” (which has always been translated into English as “sentimental” but which is in fact a neologism [and I would not be surprised to learn that Schiller himself coined the term]). German already has the word sentimental which corresponds neatly to the English. “Sentimentalisch” means “subjective, reflective” and is a rarely used technical term from literary study. (I find the word in my Cassel’s dictionary but not in my portable Langenscheidt.) Malick’s characters—from Holly to Linda to Witt, Welsh, Tall, and Staros to Smith, Radcliffe, Rolfe, and Pocahontas herself—are nothing if not subjective and reflective. And they are nothing if not internally divided and conflicted (Pocahontas being a special case of this internal conflict as I will explain) and also separated from the non(internally) conflicted naively natural beings which, Schiller writes, “surround us like a continuous divine phenomenon” (eine beständige Götterscheinung umgeben sie uns).10 The difference between the two temperaments, the naïve and the reflective, is nowhere more clearly visible than in poetry. There are poets who are naïve and poets who are sentimentalische. The former include among others Goethe, Molière, and Shakespeare; Dante, Tasso, and Ariosto; above all, Homer. The latter include among others Schiller himself, Hölderlin, Swift, Fielding, Kleist, and, above all, Milton. In a lengthy footnote (note “r” in the Elias translation), Schiller distinguishes between the two and subdivides the sentimentalische into three genres: Sentimental is distinguished from naïve poetry, namely, in that it [the sentimental] refers actual conditions at which the latter [the naïve] halts, to ideas, and applies ideas to actuality. Hence it has always [ . . . ] to contend simultaneously with two conflicting objects, i.e., with the ideal and with experience, between which neither more nor less than just these three following relationships can be conceived of. Either it is the contradiction (Widerspruch: opposition, conflict) with actual conditions, or it is its correspondence (Übereinstimmung: overall at-oneness of mood, feeling, tone) with the ideal, which is the preferred attitude of mind, or it is divided between the two. In the first case it is satisfied by the force of the inner conflict, by energetic movement (energische Bewegung); in the second, it is satisfied by the harmony of the inner life, by dynamic calm (energische Ruhe);11 in the third, conflict alternates with harmony, calm alternates with motion.12 This triadic state of feeling gives rise to

62

Terrence Malick

three different modes of poetry to which the customary names, satire, idyll, and elegy, correspond exactly, provided only that one recalls the mood into which the poetic species known by these names place the mind, and abstracts from the means by which they achieve it [emphases in original].13 For the sentimentalische poet (or filmmaker), there will be conflict (satire), harmony (idyll), or an alternating mixture of the two (elegy). It is part of my argument that these three temperaments of poetic mind are found (in rather different proportions from one film to the next) throughout Malick’s career. Malick in short is reviving an aesthetics of the late eighteenth century, an experience we today—we nihilistic Nietzscheans, Freudians, Marxists, post-structuralists, postcolonial-modernists; we Lacanians; we neo-Hegelians; we deconstructionists; and so on—might have thought had been lost forever except in cheap and degraded forms. Or which we may have accepted had long since been modified by and buried in Romanic or Pastoral sensibilities. I am not completely alone in thinking that Schiller, or a Schillerian aesthetics, is at work in Malick’s films. James Morrison and Thomas Schur raise the possibility in their book but only to reject it as potentially “crippling.”14 They place Malick closer to Faulkner and Brecht (but Malick’s country folk are not so grotesque as in Faulkner, and the distanciation effect he achieves is of a different order than Brecht’s). I believe that Malick fully embraces both the naïve and the sentimentalisch as elaborated by Schiller. Why Malick should be doing this is a mystery, I admit. He does not grant interviews and so nobody can ask him. I do not know if he has even ever read the Schiller essay although it is not out of the realm of possibility for the former Heidegger scholar who clearly adores European music and painting to have done so. I do claim that the elements from Schiller I am mobilizing here begin to be noticeable in his first feature film and increase in richness, detail, intensity, and complexity up to his most recent film, The New World, which I immediately saw as his most characteristic, most fully realized, and most perfect creation (without, at the time, having had any idea why I should have felt that and without, I add, feeling either that I understood the film or that I found it satisfying—putting me into precisely that conflicted (divided, contested, partitioned) state of being described by Schiller, as I would discover later on). Lèvinas scholar Simon Critchley, who esteemed The Thin Red Line, on the other hand, found this film unspeakable, writing “I say nothing here about Malick’s The New World (2006). Very sadly, I have come to the view that the less said about the latter the better.”15 Be that as it may, having introduced this

Terrence Malick’s Cinematic Neo-Modernity

63

rather antiquated, cumbersome, and quite complex (I have barely scratched the surface of Schiller’s remarkable essay) theoretical machinery from 1795–1796, I will proceed through the films briefly one-by-one always with the background question: Is there a Schillerian potential important to, or appropriate to, our era which Malick has realized and is developing?

Badlands Holly (Sissy Spacek) is a simple baton twirling country girl, Landvolk, whose handsome and deviously charming boyfriend, Kit (Martin Sheen), turns out to be a murderer who kills her father in front of her eyes, his own friend (who may have been his best or only friend), and others who are complete strangers. She is naïve and she now finds herself torn from her natural place in the world and is involved in a deadly and complicated situation. In love with Kit and apparently resigned to her fate, she reflects. Her voiced-over reflections give the film its oddly comic quality because she is not an especially insightful commentator. After the trouble begins Holly resorts to cliché: “The world was like a faraway planet, to which I could never return.” She remains quite consistently within cliché throughout. Lloyd Michaels, in his insightful book on Terrence Malick, says that Holly “lulls you into a kind of moral torpor.”16 This is precisely what ought not happen in sentimentalisch reflection. That which the presence of the naively natural ought to inspire in the energetic calm (energische Ruhe) of reflection is a “kind of satisfaction in nature [which] is not aesthetic but moral; for it is mediated by an idea, not produced immediately by observation.”17 (Let us bear in mind here that this is an eighteenth-century morality, not that morality of, say, twenty-first-century America where to be moral is to be laden with “values.” In the eighteenth century the moral has more to do with a refined sensibility, lawfulness, and a certain accord between inner and outer. Malick’s are not “value films,” which may contribute to their lack of broad appeal.) Alas for Holly (and the audience), the mediating idea which would produce a moral feeling (in her) and a moral satisfaction (in the audience) is corrupted; she is incapable of forming the refined moral accord that would enable her to gain psychological insight into herself, Kit, and their predicament. Instead she mimetically submits to her own naïve idea of how a country girl like herself should discuss herself, her life, and her fate. Terrence Malick himself, in a rare interview, says of her: “Holly’s southernness is essential to taking her right. She isn’t indifferent about

64

Terrence Malick

her father’s death, but she wouldn’t think of telling you about it. It wouldn’t be proper. You should always feel there are large parts of her experience she’s not including because she has a strong, if misplaced, sense of propriety. You might well wonder how anyone going through what she does could be at all concerned with proprieties. But she is.”18 The Schillerian aesthetic education that ought to produce a moral sense of the world when one reflects on how one has been separated from one’s childhood, from the naively natural, from the divine element that surrounds us—that breach into which ideas flow—backfires. I do not think that this is so much Terrence Malick ironically refuting Schiller as it is satire—one of Schiller’s modes of sentimentalische Dichtung which occurs when the actual and the ideal are in conflict. There is humor in Badlands but it is tender and never either derisive or nihilistic humor. Neither is Malick nihilistic about Kit, also a country person—simple, at first, but then corrupted in the most serious possible way. Malick describes him as among many in the Midwest who “get ignored there and fall into bad soil. Kit did, and he grew up like a big poisonous weed.”19 Badlands, Malick’s first “experiment” with Schillerian ideas, was a satire, as he intended. He says, in the same interview: “There is some humor in the picture, I believe. Not jokes. It lies in Holly’s mis-estimation of her audience, of what the will be interested in or ready to believe.” Schiller writes: “The poet is satirical if he takes as his subject alienation from nature and the contradiction between actuality and the ideal (in their effect upon the mind both amount to the same thing).”20 Yet, Malick remains a cinema artist interested in both the naïve and the sentimentalische, whether their complicated relation/nonrelation misfires or not. The latter (the sentimentalist), according to Schiller’s canonical definition, seeks lost nature while the former (the naïve) simply is nature. In this, his first major film, the audience is dependent on the thoughts of a child (or a young adult who retains a childlikeness) and Malick, again in the same interview, says that his influences “were books like The Hardy Boys, Swiss Family Robinson, Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn—all involving an innocent in a drama over his or her head. I didn’t actually think about those books before I did the script, but it’s obvious to me now.” Perhaps he did not think of Schiller, but it seems clear to me that Malick is, right from the start of his film career, seeking naïveté—in the childlike, the young in country folk, in animals, plants, and in the landscapes that appear throughout Badlands. Perhaps he was not reflectively seeking Schillerian ideas in the Badlands story but, naively (unreflectively), is, himself, Schillerian. I cannot say

Terrence Malick’s Cinematic Neo-Modernity

65

for sure, but it could surely be to some degree one, the other, or a combination of both.

Days of Heaven As in Badlands, a childlike narrator, this time Linda (Linda Manz), maybe 12 years old, speaks to the audience of herself, her brother, Bill (Richard Gere), and his girlfriend, Abby (Brooke Adams). Quoting Lloyd Michaels again, this narrator “stimulates you to imaginative and aesthetic alertness.”21 I grant you, her stimulating reflections do not reach the poetic elevation of a Schiller or a Hölderlin,22 but there is an element of freedom which is missing from Holly’s voice-over narrative, and it is the idea of childlike freedom that Malick is interested in. In fact, viewers of Days of Heaven must begin to become accustomed to the fact that Malick is not interested in the dramatic story or the psychology of his characters so much as the idea of . . . this or that. (This had already begun in Badlands as Malick deliberately avoided re-creating an era in American history and wanted to create a fairy-tale like feeling, a childlike idea of the places that Holly and Kit, “lost in nature,” might find themselves.)23 Having fled Chicago, Linda, Bill, and Abbey find themselves lost in nature as they (city people) ride a train along with numerous other migrant workers (again, Landvolks) into (according to the story) the Texas panhandle (but which in fact is Alberta, Canada). The locale is not so much either Texas or Canada as it is the idea of a place—any place whatever—where one might grow wheat and where such a story might unfold. And, in the course of the film the audience will be both impressed with what shows up on the screen—the dazzling shots of the train crossing the bridge in silhouette against a brilliant sky, the grazing buffalo, the wheat fields, that ominous scarecrow silently guarding the crops, Linda’s face in the firelight, Bill’s (Richard Gere’s) beautiful profile against the sky, and so on (all shot in natural light, without lens filters which is characteristic of Malick’s cinematography)—and, at the same time, the audience will be time cheated out of a full psychological understanding of what has corrupted Bill, why Abby remains with him, and what might become of Linda and Abby when it is all over. On the other hand, what more is there to understand? Bill and Abby are corrupt; the Farmer (Sam Shepard), whose name we never even learn, is deceived; and Linda is observant, imaginative, and nonjudgmental. Suffering does not necessarily enlighten a person and corruption certainly does not

66

Terrence Malick

(unless a further stage is reached). Those who suffer most may well speak only in clichés, and the morally corrupted are doubtless incapable of insightful reflection, as Malick says in the same interview.24 Abby, Linda tells us, “blamed herself” and “vowed to live a good life” after the scheme backfires. Is that not what a young woman like her might very well think to herself word for word? Even more than this, we may say that the characters in a Malick film are not only lost in nature but also astray in their own stories, otherwise than historical (this will be especially true in The Thin Red Line). Kit does not know, as it were, how a “famous” criminal should behave (and shows himself to be, Malick has said in the interviews already cited, an Eisenhower conservative as well as a glamour-boy) just as Holly miscalculates her role as the angel of history, the witness to an infamous killing spree. Linda is too young and playfully imaginative to grasp the scheming desperation of Bill (who anyways knows very little of himself except that he’s “never gonna make a big score” and that he’s “not the brightest guy in the world”) nor Abby’s despair at her own weakness caving into the vile plot. Rather than lash these character to their stories, to the history they are a part of, by means of psychology, ideology, irony, or any of the demands of dramatic structure (in theater or film) since the time of Schiller, he leaves them free to remain astray. Malick can be said to waste the historical potential of his films just as he wastes the talents of his A-list actors (again, in The Thin Red Line, especially). If he did not waste the talents of Martin Sheen, Sissy Spacek, Linda Manz, Richard Gere, Brooke Adams, and John Caviezel is was because each was relatively unknown at the time of the films and so their star quality would not interfere with Malick’s intentions to present ideas of certain “types.” His concerns are neither historical nor psychological. He could never make so hypotactic a film as The Longest Day or Double Indemnity or Bonnie and Clyde or Dances with Wolves. Instead he presents something which by comparison is, at least initially, confusing and disarming. The tension, the breach between the suddenly appearing, tenderly presented, and attention-getting shots of plants, minerals, animals, children, and migrant workers relaxing in the fields and the parsimonious presentation of dramatic scenes that would allow us to understand these characters and their fates (despite the fact that Malick has expressed his admiration for Elia Kazan, George Stevens, and Arthur Penn)25 is the essence of a Schillerian conflict. For Schiller this conflict—or the partitioning, the breaching, of the (Kantian harmony of the) faculties as a whole—is everything; for any number of critics (and many in the audience I suppose) the breach is vapid.26 There is a breach between the

Terrence Malick’s Cinematic Neo-Modernity

67

dramatic and the pictorial precisely because we get both but neither dominates the other. Mimetic fidelity to narrative location, era, and to psychological motivation are each subtracted so that we are presented with the ideas of place, nature, alienation, the drama of corruption, and reflection. Each element of the various conflicts is set free. Conflict is everything because of Schiller’s conception of the naïve work of art. At the very end of Letter XV of his Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man) Schiller describes the ancient Greek statue that had been named the “Juno Ludovici.” The statue (known today as the “Juno Ludovisi”) is both august and charming. She is indifferently, playfully, indolently at once both the womanly goddess and also the godlike woman. Schiller ends the letter as follows: “Durch jenes unwiderstehlich ergriffen und angezogen, durch dieses in der Ferne gehalten, befinden wir uns zugleich in dem Zustand der höchsten Ruhe und der höchsten Bewegung, und es entsteht jene wunderbare Rührung, für welche der Verstand keinen Begriff und die Sprache keinen Namen hat.” Roughly translated: “Irresistibly carried away and attracted by the quality (referring to her womanly charm), kept off at a distance by the same quality (referring to her godly dignity), we also find ourselves at the same time in a state of the greatest repose and greatest agitation, and the result is a wonderful sympathy (or tenderness, emotion) for which the understanding has no idea and language no name.”27 This is precisely the state of rührender Achtung which Schiller pinpoints in the first sentence to his “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry” quoted above. The statue is not a simple representation of either the divine or the human; it is a double representation in which neither the impression of the divine nor the impression of an attractive woman predominates hence the double movement (dissociation and allure): the double state of utmost attentive respect on the one hand and tender, heartfelt emotion on the other for which there is no concept, no word. This is a sort of Blanchotian Neuter, a state where competing faculties neutralize each other’s drive for satisfaction and predominance. In Malick’s films there is the splendid (to say the least) cinematography but at the same time we are kept at an emotional distance from the characters and their emotions and drives. Malick has never even filmed a kiss.28 Days of Heaven is not satire; it is rather quite elegiac: the mixed mode in which there is conflict at times (the two killings, the plague of locusts, the conflict between the Farmer and Abby, between Abby and Bill) and at other times harmony as when the migrant workers relax with their sports and their books or when they have completed the harvest and are able to

68

Terrence Malick

celebrate; or when the main characters enjoy the visit from the flying circus and later when Bill goes away, leaving Abby and Linda to enjoy their idleness. Even more elegiac and even more richly Schillerian will be his next quite broadly respected if not commercially successful film (and I will come back to this “breach” as well).

The Thin Red Line Twenty years later the theater darkens, we see a title, and we faintly hear the sounds of birds chirping followed by the great shot of an alligator but with a sinister organ playing a dark chord instead of any natural sound. It is in fact rare that in Malick we get both a shot of nature along with its diegetic sounds as we do on the Nature or National Geographic channels. Malick is not trying to “capture” the natural world but to show us glimpses (Augenblicke) of what are, for us, to be filled in with ideas. The ideas are not, or are not necessarily, metaphors. One must be cautious. The skillful, slow but resolute creeping of the alligator may be a sign for something in particular: the American troops advancing up the hill on Guadalcanal later on, the possible movements of the Japanese in the jungle; perhaps, but I doubt it. It is just much an abstract figure, or a symbol of an alligator’s style of naturalness, as it is a representation of reality. The alligator is just there on the screen, as the Juno Ludovici is just there before our eyes and just as the Americans are (or will be) there and just as the Japanese and the Melanesians already are. They all just are and they are tenderly impressive because they are—each of them is—simply nature (bloß weil sie Natur ist). Following the alligator’s submersion into the algae stained water we hear again the sounds of nature as we see a majestic tree and then hear what the subtitles name “Angelic voices” (the divine presence in natural things?) followed by a young man reflecting in a southern voice (a young man from the country?) a series of not entirely naïve questions: “What is this war at the heart of nature?” (He could be referring to a war of some sort within nature itself or to the war versus the Japanese of which he is and is not a part; that is, he could be referring to a war within his own “nature.”) “Why does nature vie with itself? The land contend with the sea?” he asks. And so on as the camera records majestic, divine light (Götterscheinung) streaming through dense, cathedral-like vegetation. The voice then begins to speculate: “Is there an avenging power in nature? Not one power but two?” This is something new for Malick’s narrators: philosophical speculation. The narrator here—Witt of course—is not the first in Western culture to speculate on a primordial dualism. Malick’s

Terrence Malick’s Cinematic Neo-Modernity

69

narrators are becoming more “educated,” in Schiller’s sense of the word. Is Malick educating us? Witt’s meditations are followed by delightful shots of little children who appear to be cracking big nuts of some kind, the “Angelic voices” return, Melanesian women are seen on the shore, followed by children playing a game of some kind: The Prelapsarian world! Malick’s Greeks! They are his ancients: They are what we were; they are what we should become once again. We were nature just as they are, and our culture, by means of reason and freedom, should lead us back to nature (Wir waren Natur, wie sie, und unsere Kultur soll uns, auf dem Wege der Vernunft und der Freyheit, zur Natur zurückführen). They are, therefore, not only the representation of our lost childhood, which eternally remain most dear to us, so that they fill us with a certain melancholy. But they are also representations of our highest fulfillment in the ideal, thus evoking in us sublime tenderness (Rührung) [emphases in original].29 Within a minute or two of the new film we have only Schillerian elements: Nature in plants, minerals, animals; we have children playing and “working” (I will come back to this), we have a reflective narrator (perhaps a simple Landvolk now trapped in a complex situation), we have the divine in natural surroundings (the Angelic voices), and we have a truly ancient people who still exist as if historical development and modern cultural complexity and conflict (World War II, or the infamous “clash of civilizations,” or, in other terms, “clash of modernities”; the Melanesian woman Witt has a conversation with speaks English very well, so, certainly she knows of the “moderns”) were irrelevant. Before I indulge in a chorus from Schiller’s An die Freude (Ode to Joy [pleasure, delight, satisfaction]) let me be clear. I believe that Malick is bringing Schillerian thinking— that is, a pre-Hegelian, pre-Marxist, pre-Freudian thinking—back, and he is doing it without a trace of irony or condescension. Again, why he should want to do this is a question, but Malick is making it a question. This is a part of, if not a defining aspect of, his uniqueness in today’s cinema. He is one of the boldest of today’s filmmakers, and he is becoming a kind of specter haunting contemporary film art. I can say that much without qualification. I want to discuss these “ancients,” the Melanesians in The Thin Red Line who will reappear as the Algonquin in The New World. Certainly, from a very sound point of view, the Melanesians will not reappear as the Algonquin. The Melanesians are the Melanesians and the Algonquin are

70

Terrence Malick

the Algonquin. The specificity of each must be respected in the postcolonial world. But, from the Schillerian categories I am employing, the Greeks, the Melanesians, and the Algonquin are the past—“our” childhood which “we” moderns, “we” nihilists, have lost—and also they are “another world” as Witt says to Welsh, or they are in fact “the new world” as Smith will imply when he will tell Pocahontas in Malick’s next film that he has “sailed past” his “Indies,” the “new world” he sought. (Smith had already found his new world and his tragedy will be that he will have lost it yet again [from a Schillerian perspective]). The place of the “ancients” in Schiller’s text and in Malick’s films is complex. Quoting from the essay again: “In them we see eternally that which escapes us, but for which we are challenged to strive, and which, even if we never attain to it, we may still hope to approach in endless progress.”30 They are “our” past, our childhood. They are nature, simple, naïve; “we” are culture, complex, reflective. When the complex is in the presence of the simple, complexity is effectively neutralized. We see the Melanesians moving seamlessly from work to play to work; both work and play are simply activities; they are not starkly differentiated. We see them together walking and singing: Is it a religious procession? A celebration? Some other type of ritual? Witt tells the Melanesian mother that the children never fight, but she objects that they always fight when they are at play. Witt is unable to make distinct and conceptual what he witnesses. Malick’s cinematic representation of the Melanesians is purely idyllic. To be sure, the Melanesians have a culture: they eat certain foods in certain ways, they have language, construct shelters, they sing and the children play structured games. Yet, as shot by Malick and as understood by Schiller, their culture has neither improved nor corrupted their natural simplicity. Nature and culture for them are not categorically distinct. They appear to Witt, to the audience, as both divinely human and humanized divinities. Finite and infinite are not distinguished as they are for “us” moderns. Hölderlin, who wished to distinguish between the Greeks and the moderns in his “Anmerkungen zur Antigone,” writes: “Für uns, da wir unter dem eigentlicheren Zeus stehen, der nicht zur zwishen dieser Erde und den wilden Welt der Totan innehält, sondern den ewig menschenfiendlichen Naturgang auf seinem Wege in die andre Welt .” Roughly translated: “For us, who stand beneath a more authentic Zeus who not only maintains limits between this earth and the savage world of

Terrence Malick’s Cinematic Neo-Modernity

71

the dead, but also the eternally misanthropic nature of the path to the other world.”31 The language is harsh and the contrast is stark because it is the very starkness of modernity itself and its regime of rigid differentiation between life and death, the divine (the infinite) and the mortal (the finite), work and play, nature and culture, war and peace, child and adult, and so on. “Ours” (Schiller’s and Hölderlin’s) is the modernity of (a certain) Kant, the categorically decided and ruled world.32 Malick’s film in the very next scene presents the regimented, differentiated, highly complex, and hierarchical world of the military as emblematic of modernity as its starkest; the film shifts abruptly from a world at one (Übereinstimmung) to a world at war (a world at odds with itself; fighting itself), and we meet something of a cynical and conflicted spokesman for modernity and its starkness: Sergeant Welsh. Welsh represents the idea of modernity in its crudest forms and its functional nihilism, yet his is a contradictory character. He speaks more or less mechanically of a world “blowing itself up as fast as anybody can arrange it,” of “looking out for yourself” as the only pragmatic ethos, and of the “this world” as the only world. Later he will repeat that the war (and everything else in the modern world) is “all about property.” And yet he is the Mother. Witt is “just another mouth to feed.” Before we meet him Welsh has arranged for Witt to avoid the stockade (or, we can imagine, worse since Witt has gone AWOL previously) and tells him that he may be his best friend, which he may well be. Why else would a sergeant risk commanding a soldier whose commitment is highly questionable at best? What is more, later on in the film it is Welsh who brings morphine to the soldier in agony even while under intense enemy fire, and he then refuses to be rewarded for it, as we can imagine an archetypical mother would do for a child (any child). On the other hand, Witt, who has just returned from the paradisiacal Melanesian village, is suspiciously confrontational and archetypically macho. He says he is “twice the man” Welsh is and can “take anything” the Sergeant “dishes out.” I mention this to note that Witt has not undergone a “conversion” experience, and I believe that is why Malick puts these words in Witt’s mouth immediately after his days AWOL. Playing with and imitating “primitives” is not the path to “our” return to naïveté. (Smith in The New World will suffer this alienation as well.) The way “back” will pass through ideas (not through mimesis alone) to the ideal. And I add that I can in this scene in fact imagine John Caviezel in the role of Welsh, caring for his men (even the most difficult of them), and Sean Penn in the role of Witt standing up to

72

Terrence Malick

him like some “tough guy.” The scene is a chiasmus and it relates to the antimetabole which, I shall argue below, structures the whole of Malick’s next film. I will close this section with discussion of Col. Tall (Nick Nolte). He is a character out of Hölderlin; he is Oedipus at Colonus, wandering alone under a godless sky, passed over for advancement. His path to the other world will be menschenfiendlichen (misanthropic), because it will not be tragic or glorious. Not tragic because we moderns, Hölderlin came to realize with his own failed Empedocles, are incapable of tragedy; or, if you like, that is our tragedy. Col. Tall reflects (in voice-over) that he is “dying as slowly as a tree” after which Malick allows him to lead his platoon up the hill and successfully accomplish the mission only to abandon him in medium long shot, exhausted and limply seated in a chair—without voice-over reflection, without diegetic sound. He is merely (i.e., to say, purely [bloß], nakedly, exposedly) the idea of “Schicksallose” (without destiny) which “unsere Schwäche ist” (“is our weakness”), as Hölderlin writes later in the same passage (already cited). The remainder of the cast—an impressive A-list of actors—are disindividualized, their potential star qualities are neutralized since their destinies are not the issue as they are ordinary GIs, common people, Landvolks, who wander in and out of scenes in the elegiac bulk of the film—an alternation between harmony (shots of plants and animals, the wandering old Melanesian man, memories of home, etc.) and conflict (the battle scenes, the dear John letter, the confrontation between Tall and Staros [Elias Koteas]).

The New World (This film is in one respect the most effective melodrama I have seen since Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life (1959) if only because the performance of young Q’Orianka Kilcher is at least as effective as that of Juanita Moore’s. We see both Pocahontas and Annie from beginning to end of their films, each film ends in the death of their characters, and the audience is tempted to think that the films are really “about” either Captain John Smith (Collin Farrell) or Lora Meredith (Lana Turner), each played by “star” actors while Kilcher and Moore were “unknowns” at the time.33 Melodrama is not a Schillerian category but it is as much a part of this film as are the idyllic and elegiac aspects. (I am not claiming that Malick is working from Schiller’s essay as if it were a cookbook!) The New World is an antimetabolean reconfiguration of Schillerian categories all of which are present here in spades: the ancient “naturals” (the Algonquin) and the moderns (the English settlers), the naïve and the

Terrence Malick’s Cinematic Neo-Modernity

73

reflective, playful childlikeness and sobriety of intention, phusis and techne, harmony and conflict, indifferentiation and rigor, tenderness and respectful attentiveness (rührender Achtung), and so on. If to Smith the “naturals” appear like a “herd of curious deer,” to the audience the English settlers appear like a colony of hairy rodents constructing their nest (or above ground burrow as in Kafka; they must be “safe” from their “enemy”). There is no “ideal” to be found in them (the “moderns,” the English settlers): no advanced way of being. Malick has not, as it were, solved the antitheses Schiller sets up; the antitheses do not dissolve nor are they lifted into an Hegelian Aufhebung. The categories are conserved and confounded in this film. For Smith, in some of his voice-over reflections, he seems to envision that this new world will indeed be ideal, will indeed be a paradise where “we shall make a new start . . . here the blessings of the earth are bestowed upon all . . . none need grow poor . . . we shall build a true commonwealth . . . hard work and self-reliance our virtues . . . we shall have no landlords to extort the fruit of our labor.” He is, to be sure, the most “educated” (in Schiller’s sense) of all Malick’s reflective voiceover narrators, excepting, again, Pocahontas. And there is some irony in the film: the noble, patient, and kind-hearted John Rolfe (Christian Bale), who will marry Pocahontas (renamed Rebecca)—only to lose a second wife to death—is a tobacco farmer, and nowadays tobacco is certainly regarded as “a big poisonous weed” as Malick had described Kit over 20 years previously. Is the tobacco plant to be symbolic of the modern, the “us,” the modern-western as a “big poisonous weed”? I do not think so. The film simply does not seem to have that sort of Brechtian intention. The idealism is Smith’s—a conflicted character—and the irony is accidental—the historical John Rolfe was in fact a tobacco farmer, not a cigarette manufacturer. Can one critique the film and make tobacco a central metaphor for—capitalism, commodity fetishism, a Freudian unconscious—a death drive? Sure. But I do not think that that is what Malick is aiming at. The ships that enter the harbor at what will become Jamestown are clearly a picturesque echo of the military boat which was to recapture Witt and his fellow deserter from their primeval hideaway. The difference is that in The New World that ancient-modern antithetical dynamic is retained, and we see how it plays out within der Urwelt (within the Prelapsarian world where the settlers and the “naturals” maintain—not a harmony—but a sort of energetic (both dynamic and satirical) “calm” (energische Ruhe) and also within the “modern” world, in London and its environs. We certainly already know how the history plays out (and we certainly know the Pocahontas myth) just as we knew that the landing

74

Terrence Malick

strip at Guadalcanal would be successfully captured and that a historical turning point would be reached. The successful establishment of Jamestown was a similarly epochal turning point. But history will not be the focus of the film. Metahistory, perhaps: the ancient versus modern conflict. But even if that were true we might see the film end with a montage sequence of a prosperous Jamestown, or of a dispirited Algonquin nation, or an ironic twist on these. John Smith is the modern reflective adventurer whose frame of mind appears to be one of rührender Achtung when faced with the “naturals” and certainly with Pocahontas herself. He is torn between tenderness (attraction) and attentiveness (mindfulness, respect, distance). But Pocahontas is no Juno Ludovico; she is a young woman every bit as reflective as he. Her attitude to him blends with her attitude to the Mother (the divine). If anything, he, Captain John Smith, is her “Juno Ludovico”: “A God, he seems to me . . . What else is life but being near you . . . Two no more . . . One . . . One . . . I am . . . I am.” It is her reflections which open the film with her invocation of the Mother; it is she who loses herself among the English, alienates her own people, and is disowned by her father. She loses contact with the Mother. She is alone. It is she who becomes “cultured,” “refined,” and becomes herself a cultural icon when she visits England as guest of the King and Queen; it is she who in the end finds the Mother again while still in England, and it is she who says “now I know where you live.” It is she who “returns” to the naïveté that she herself once was. Malick quite, quite deliberately ends the film with appealing shots of her turning cartwheels and so forth. She is a child again, but also a woman, herself a mother with the Mother “eine beständige Göttererscheinung umgebem sie uns, aber mehr erquickend als blendend” (“surrounding us like a divinity, but more exhilarating than blinding”)34 at her English estate, not in her native world. Pocahontas, alone among Malick’s “moderns” (but she is, in the end, indifferently both ancient and modern, both naïve and reflective, child and adult), is exhilarated (erquickend) rather than in a conflicted tender respect (rührender Achtung). But she cannot tell us of it in an intellectually satisfying manner. She is neither a speculative poet nor a speculative philosopher. She is not Schiller.35 She is (was) a young woman whose life is all too amply recorded in history, legend, myth, and cartoons. To be sure, as a background, Malick plays out the latent Aristotelianism of Schiller’s treatise. Namely, that the primeval people, the ancients (the Greeks, the Melanesians, the Algonquin), represent nature which when perfected by art (meaning, in Aristotle, techne or useful [as opposed to

Terrence Malick’s Cinematic Neo-Modernity

75

“fine”] art)36 or, for Schiller, by culture (by the modern ideals of Reason and Freedom)37 will become the ideal. Dutifully, Malick has one of the English settlers shout that “this land was made for such as will improve it!” as a violent confrontation begins to develop between the Algonquin and the settlers. However, the English settlers seem just as “naturally” developmental, hierarchical, differentiated, sober, divisive, and proprietary (when an Algonquin, who knows nothing of “ownership,” nonchalantly picks up a hatchet and carries it off, he is summarily—that is, immediately, without reflection, as if it were a natural reaction—shot by a settler) as the Algonquin seem “natural” to Smith: peaceful, integrated into their environment, animal (“like a herd of curious deer”), without any jealously, but willing to defend their land (Smith says that “although they live in peace they are strong and would not allow their own land to be taken away” (my? Smith’s? Malick’s? emphasis; that is, they would quite naturally [unreflectively] defend “it,” their land), and so on. The English women wear high-heeled shoes and heavy dresses without thinking about it as Pocahontas learns. In short, not all that the “moderns” do is done reflectively; much is done nonreflectively, without thinking, without inner conflict; that is to say, naïvely. Malick quite deliberately presents the English as if they too were “naturals,” antediluvian, without their knowing it, without their reflecting on it. They themselves are the naïve, just as are the Algonquin, the Melanesian, das Landvolks, children, and the childlike (as is Smith in the scenes where he learns how to fight and play and have his body decorated by the Algonquin). In the scenes in London we see the English amusing themselves, carrying on with activities, and so forth as if like a “tribe.” When the Algonquin ambassador who accompanies Pocahontas later inspects the English garden and its geometrically trimmed trees, he appears (to my eye) to be as reflective as is Smith upon his arrival in “Virginia.” Quite obviously, this equation does not lead to a jubilant reconciliation, nor to an Aufhebung, nor to a New-Age (or High Modernist) transcendental pathos. The Algonquin and the English settlers kill each other (for a time, then they stop) just as the Americans and the Japanese kill each other in The Thin Red Line. Satisfying transcendental pathos, like satisfying dramatic pathos, or like satisfying epochal pathos, is not at the center of Malick’s intentions (with the single curious exception of Pocahontas’s “return” to the Mother while she is in England which I [and filmmaker Mark Cousins] find quite emotionally fulfilling.38 I am not sure what to make of this except that, like David Lynch and his “Laura” [Sheryl Lee] from Twin Peaks, Malick may have “fallen” for his

76

Terrence Malick

Pocahontas. In any case . . . ). At the center of The New World is what I call the antimetabolean reconfiguration of Schillerian categories and which leads me to my closing remarks.

Remarks on Malick Rather than satisfying epochal, transcendental, or dramatic pathos, viewers of Malick films are offered nonspeculative intelligence. They will not get pragmatism, cynicism, nihilism, ideology, structuralism, postmodern pastiche, postcolonial critique or psychoanalysis. They will not get philosophy. They will not get a Kantian experience of the beautiful per se.39 If anything, Malick is the new guardian of nonspecific intelligence, naïve intelligence—a new intelligence? If his films are not always commercially successful and also not always critically successful (as I mention above) it is because of a “breach” that he quite deliberately leaves open, if I am not wrong. This is not to say that Malick’s films are not vulnerable to cynicism, pragmatism, ideology, and so on. On the contrary, in a certain way Malick foregrounds their vulnerability to . . . whatever critique . . . in the same way that a myth or a fairy tale might. But why? Why Schiller? Why nature and culture? Why naïve activity, tenderness, and attraction on the one hand and reflective distance on the other? Why ancient and modern, indifferentiation and divisiveness, harmony and conflict, simplicity and complexity? Why the binary, antithetical Schillerian schemata at all? I can only conclude that Malick tends to preserve the breach between the naïve and the sentimental which produces the double state of rührender Achtung, the guiding thread for my reading of the films. When the satisfactions of the intellect are neutralized (and likewise the satisfactions of the senses) then the divine play of nature (including human nature) and culture, sensation and Reason, simplicity and complexity, is possible. The divine play is not the Kantian agreement of the faculties nor is it a primordial harmony. Divine play is as inherently unsimple as is the play of the Melanesian children who are “always fighting” when they are playing. Schiller is slightly different from Kant (and Malick from his contemporary Hollywood). Malick’s films are, in a sense, playfully indecisive, which may irritate many, to be sure. But perhaps, having put Schiller’s categories into play throughout his film career, Malick really believes that we ourselves are at our most human when, divinely playing, we are simultaneously fighting the regime of categorical differentiations which all too starkly defines “our” modernity and opens the horizon of a dissatisfied Neo-Modernity where Schiller had hoped for “endless progress.”

Terrence Malick’s Cinematic Neo-Modernity

77

Notes 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

I leave these words of Schiller in their German to allow some play in the translation to English. The play is integral to my reading of Malick. Friedrich Schiller, Über naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung, 7. (I am working from the handy and inexpensive Reclam edition which preserves the antiquated spelling of the eighteenth century.) Specific commentaries on Malick are numerous. There are three book-length monographs on Malick’s works as a whole: The Films of Terrence Malick by James Morrison and Thomas Shur (2003); The Cinema of Terrence Malick edited by Hanna Patterson (now in a second edition, 2007); and Terrence Malick by Lloyd Michaels (2009). There are two books on The Thin Red Line alone by Michel Chion (2004) and a collection edited by David Davies (2009). There is an important chapter devoted to The Thin Red Line in Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit’s Forms of Being (2004). And there are a dozen or more quite fine essays available only online. There must be even more work on Malick of which I am not aware. I mention this because the unusual amount of attention and intelligence devoted to the filmmaker is a part of my thesis. Widely anthologized (at least in part), the essay sets up the familiar opposition between the naïve and the sentimental in poetry, “ancients” (for Schiller, Hölderlin and others, the Greeks) and “moderns,” and a host of other all-toofamiliar associated oppositions such as nature and culture, simple and reflective, sensation and intellect, body and spirit, and so on. Students of the history of literary criticism will recall the formula: the naïve poet is nature; the sentimental poet seeks nature. In this chapter I take Schiller’s essay seriously, formulas and all. Michel Chion, The Thin Red Line: BFI Modern Classics (London: British Film Institute, 2004), 12–13. Chion writes: “Malick’s film places diverse elements side by side, without seeking to answer the question posed by their juxtaposition” and so on (in comparison and contrast to Godard). Friedrich Schiller, “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,” German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: Winckelmann, Lessing, Hamann, Herder, Schiller and Goethe, ed. H. B. Nesbit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 180. Schiller, although a very schematic and complex thinker, nonetheless toys with, stretches, and complicates his key terms in ways that may frustrate many and that have annoyed the great systems-theorist Niklas Luhmann who writes summarily: “Schiller is no rigorous thinker” (Art as a Social System, 355 n. 46). That may be, but play, recreation, and lack of a certain kind of rigor are part of a regime of indistinction and conflict which is integral to Schiller’s (and Hölderlin’s) thought of a future modernity different from Luhmann’s for whom there exist, in effect, only “systems” and the void. The word “Nature” in Schiller (and others of that era) would require lengthy commentary (as does the word “moral”; it may well be that the best specific commentators on Malick may be specialists of that era that separates Kant from Hegel). The word in Hölderlin has received an unprecedentedly virtuoso commentary by Martin Heidegger in his essay on “As when on holiday” in Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, 67–99 as well as in Maurice Blanchot’s detailed response to Heidegger in his essay “The ‘Sacred’ Speech of Hölderlin” from The Work of Fire, 111–31.

78 8 9

10

11

12

13

14

15 16 17 18

19

20 21 22

23

24 25 26

27 28

Terrence Malick H. B. Nisbet, “Introduction” to German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism, 20–4. Schiller, “in weitester Bedeutung des Worts,” Über naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung, 7 (“On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,” 180). He does not then proceed to specify the possible “breadth” of the word. He leaves the comment at play. Schiller, “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,” 181; Über naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung, 9. Simon Critchley in his essay “Calm” (in David Davies, ed., The Thin Red Line, 11–27) has identified the mood of calm as fundamental to our understanding of Malick’s The Thin Red Line. In the essay he places the calm in proximity to Wallace Stevens’ poetry and to Heideggerian Angst. In my chapter I am arguing that the calm is part of a Schillerian poetics which I believe more nearly corresponds to Malick’s overall project. Note well that in this third genre (elegy) there is no overall satisfaction. Instead we must presume an “alternation” between the satisfaction of harmony (idyll) and the satisfaction of conflict (satire). Hence we must imagine that in the elegiac (which I believe governs the bulk of Malick’s films) there is a dissatisfaction, bisatisfaction; a competition of satisfactions, or a split (undecided) satisfaction, or perhaps a double satisfaction. At any rate, Schiller leaves it open. Schiller, “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,” 294; Über naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung, 67. James Morrison and Thomas Shur, The Films of Terrence Malick (Westport: Praeger, 2003), 53. See pp. 52–8 for their full discussion of Malick’s “self-conscious” modernism. Critchley, “Calm,” 27 n. 1. Michaels, Terrence Malick, 42. Schiller, “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,” 181. This is from the interview with Beverly Walker from Sight and Sound, reprinted in Michaels, Terrence Malick, 103–4. Ibid. Note, if it is not already obvious, Malick’s equation of Kit with a bit of ecological debris, rather than as psychologically complicated. Schiller, “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,” 196. Michaels, Terrence Malick, 42. Pocahontas’s invocations of “the Mother” throughout The New World, on the other hand, do (to my ear) naively approach something of the idea of the sublime simplicity of language (in the presence of the “sacred”) that Hölderlin strives for especially in his “Wie wenn am Feiertage” (“As when on holiday”), in Werke (München Wien: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1990), 88–90. From the interview with Michel Ciment from Positif, reprinted in Lloyd Michaels, Terrence Malick, 105 and 109. Ibid. Ibid., 111. Lloyd Michaels records many of the negative reviews of Days of Heaven in his Terrence Malick, 39–45. Friedrich Schiller, Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen, Briefe XV. But he comes oh so satisfyingly close in a scene in The New World between Smith and Pocahontas. This scene is not so much a tease as a deliberate

Terrence Malick’s Cinematic Neo-Modernity

29 30 31 32

33

34 35

36

37 38

39

79

strategy with regard to the psychologically satisfactory visuals of classic cinema. Dissatisfaction is an element of his cinematic art. Michel Chion notices this in his book, The Thin Red Line. He writes the following of Days of Heaven: “The main story, a classic love triangle (Abby, Bill, the farmer) is treated in a repetitive, confused and distant way, without generating any interest in the feelings of Abby or Bill. On the other hand, every time the character of the little girl— the extraordinary Linda Manz—or the local people—workers, farmhands and priests—appear, the film becomes more expansive” (18). Likewise, in his very fine essay, “Things to Look Into: The Cinema of Terrence Malick,” Adrian Martin writes that “[i]t is hard to define the decisive, dramatic moment when things happen in Malick’s films. When exactly does the relationship between Bill (Richard Gere) and Abby (Brooke Adams) fall apart in Days of Heaven (1978)?” The same may also be said for the lovers in Jean- Luc Godard’s Le Mepris (1963) except that the omission is rather more foregrounded in his film. In Malick, it is rather more incidental (in my opinion). Schiller, “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,” 181. Ibid. Hölderlin, Werke, 664. I emphasize “a certain Kant” since Kant was also the way out of this impasse as Schiller, Hölderlin, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and others would (or would hope to) realize. Kant would be “reinvented” by each (and others including Gilles Deleuze (before “reinventing” Nietzsche) in his Kant’s Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties (trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam). In any case, again, specialist of the era would be better suited to untangling this “knot.” Filmmaker and author Mark Cousins reports that he cried when viewing the film, even repeatedly: “Praising The New World” (in Peterson, ed., The Cinema of Terrence Malick), 192–8. Schiller, Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, 9. But her speech, as previously noted, is, I believe, genuinely evocative of Hölderlin (see note 22 above). Aristotle, Physics, trans. R. P. Hardie and R. K. Gaye, The Complete Works of Aristotle, Volume One (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), Bk. 2. See note 29 above. Mark Cousins, “Praising The New World” (in Peterson, ed., The Cinema of Terrence Malick), 192–8. It is certainly obvious that the rührender Achtung experience I have discussed throughout is as close as possible to Kant’s analysis of the beautiful and the sublime from his Critique of Judgement. Schiller is working from a Kantian template and he refers to Kant in his notes to “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry.” However, it is clear that he is interested in a different potentiality, something other than the regime of taste that interests Kant. For both men understanding and sensation are neutralized. For Kant this allows one to experience a harmony of the faculties; for Schiller it allows one to experience the breach itself (and whatever that might mean).

Chapter 5

Worlding the West: An Ontopology of Badlands Thomas Deane Tucker

A specter haunts the films of Terrence Malick. We can beckon it generally as “metaphysics,” but it properly answers to the name of Martin Heidegger. It is well known that before he ventured into the world of filmmaking Malick’s first vocation was philosophy with a special avocation for Heideggerian ontology. After graduating from Harvard in 1965, he studied philosophy as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford’s Magdalene College. There he ambitiously tried to convince his perhaps ill-matched advisor, Gilbert Ryle, to allow him to write his doctoral thesis on the concept of “world” in the writings of Heidegger, Kierkegaard, and Wittgenstein. Ryle—being a good dyed in the wool English ordinary language philosopher—would have none of that continental nonsense and Malick left Oxford, without taking his degree. He next took a short stint at MIT teaching Hubert Dreyfus’ Heidegger course while Dreyfus was on sabbatical leave. Malick eventually enrolled in the inaugural class of the Center for Advanced Film Studies in Los Angeles, graduating with an MFA in 1969, but not before he had visited Heidegger in Germany and translated Vom Wesen des Grundes as The Essence of Reasons published by Northwestern University Press that same year. In 1973 he completed his first feature film, Badlands, and thus his transition from a Heideggerian philosopher to a Heideggerian film-philosopher began. In a career spanning forty years, he has made a total of only five feature films, all of them explicitly metaphysical in tone and each implicitly evoking the spirit of Heidegger in some way or another.1 It is Stanley Cavell, Malick’s philosophy honor’s thesis advisor at Harvard, who first summoned Heidegger directly from one of his films. Writing in The World Viewed on Days of Heaven, Cavell says that the imagery

Worlding the West: An Ontopology of Badlands

81

in the film “invokes a formal radiance” that strikes him as the “realization of some sentences from Heidegger’s What is Called Thinking?,” a work in which Heidegger further ruminates on the relation between beings and Being. There, Heidegger states: According to Plato, the idea constitutes the Being of a being. The first service man can render is to give thought to the being of beings, and that is first of all to pay it heed . . . the word [being] says: presence of what is present . . . A mountain that lies before us may serve as an example. We give our attention to the mountains that are there, not in respect to their geological structure or geographical location, but only in respect of their being present. What is present also has entered into what was already unconcealed: the mountain range lies in the landscape . . . The presence we have described gathers itself in the continuance which causes a mountain, a sea, a house to endure and, by that duration, to lie before us among other things that are present . . . The Greeks experience such duration as a luminous appearance in the sense of illumined, radiant self-manifestation.2 Cavell goes on to argue that Malick has “found a way to transpose such thoughts for our meditation,” by making this Heideggerian ontological thought visible on film through acknowledging that “objects participate in the photographic presence of themselves” as the fundamental essence of film’s photographic basis. Thus the cinematic image is transfigured into philosophy. Cavell further states that Malick’s films contain a “metaphysical vision of the world,” one that expresses the natural affinity between metaphysics and cinematic representations. As Mark Furstenau and Leslie MacAvoy point out in their essay “Terrence Malick’s Heideggerian Cinema: War and the Question,” Malick has created a uniquely metaphysical cinema, one which contains the possibility of not only presenting its representation, but of “drawing attention to the fact of its representing” and thus “serves as a medium for addressing the philosophical problem of presence or being.”3 The task of such a cinema, they argue, is to “address both the inherent reflexivity of the film image, as well as the potential consequences of a metaphysical thinking in which the world is understood to have been grasped through its representation.”4 Cavell believes that Days of Heaven fulfilled this task; Furstenau and MacAvoy find that The Thin Red Line also realizes it—it will be my argument in this chapter that Badlands does so as well.

82

Terrence Malick

In this chapter, I want to explore the metaphysical landscape opened in Badlands by paying particular attention to the tenuous connection between ontology and topos that Derrida, stimulated by Heidegger, named ontopology, which he defined as “an axiomatics linking indissociably the ontological value of present-being [on] to its situation, to the stable and presentable determination of a locality, the topos of territory, native soil, city, body in general.”5 I hope to show how Malick investigates the scene of human existence, what Cavell calls the “arena between earth and heaven,” within the locus of the Western landscape as an ontopological space in the film. I will also examine how he invites us to meditate upon the landscape’s significance as bound to the particular and subjective situatedness of the human being who occupies it, traverses it, or merely scans it from a solitary vista.

The World is Enough Before I actually delve into Badlands, I’d like to begin with a refresher on Heidegger’s concept of world. Heidegger opens The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics with a prolonged reflection on an enigmatic fragment by the romantic poet Novalis: “Philosophy is really a homesickness, an urge to be at home everywhere.”6 Heidegger meditates on this theme, turning philosophy into an alien demand, or rather the demand of an alien refugee to be returned to his home. Yet, a philosopher is supposed to be at home everywhere and feels this enigmatic urge to return precisely because he is not at home everywhere in the world. But what is the meaning of this enigma? Heidegger writes: To be at home everywhere—what does this mean? Not merely here or there, nor even simply in every place, in all taken together one after the other. Rather, to be at home everywhere means to be at once and all times within the whole. We name this within the whole and its character of wholeness the world. We are, to the extent that we are, . . . always waiting for something. We are always called upon by something as a whole. This “as a whole” is the world.7 The place to which our homesickness drives us is back to the world as a whole. To Heidegger, this concept of world as a whole means that human beings are restlessly driven to return to Being as a whole; our very being is this restlessness. Yet, even as we restlessly depart toward this whole, something more fundamental holds us back:

Worlding the West: An Ontopology of Badlands

83

We have somehow always already departed toward this whole, or better, we are always on the way to it . . . we are somehow simultaneously torn back to something, resting in gravity that draws us downward. We are underway to this “as a whole.” We ourselves are this underway, this transition, this “neither the one nor the other” . . . What is this oscillating to and fro between this neither/not? . . . We name it finitude.8 Heidegger muses that finitude is our fundamental way of being; it is what first situates us each as solitary individuals in the world. It is the proper task of philosophy as homesickness to meditate upon these relations between world, finitude, and individuation: This demand to be at home everywhere . . . is nothing other than a peculiar questioning about the meaning of this “as a whole” which we call world. What happens here in this questioning and searching . . . is the finitude of man. What occurs in such becoming finite is an ultimate solitariness of man, in which everyone stands for him- or herself as someone unique in the face of the world.9 Homesickness is the fundamental attunement of philosophizing and Heidegger distills this attunement further under the name of “metaphysics”: “Metaphysics is a questioning in which we inquire being as a whole, and inquire in such a way that in so doing we ourselves, the questioners, are also thereby included in the question, placed in the question.”10 This conscious pursuit of our own being—the ability to question or take a stand on our being by making it a subject for consciousness—seems to be uniquely human and, if Heidegger is right, our primordial way of comporting to the world. Metaphysics then is at the heart of our primary, preobjective perceptual experience of our surrounding environs and the objects that they contain. Each time we encounter anew an object in the world, our primary encounter dredges up with the object a whole significantly meaningful world-context in advance of our stripping down the object to its naked, abstract objectivity (which we do by assigning to it its own distinctive properties in order to isolate it from its environmental surroundings). Our natural perception and understanding of the world is therefore preontic. To use one of Heidegger’s examples, let’s consider a lectern in a classroom. As a teacher walks into the room and approaches the lectern, she first experiences the lectern ambiguously within the world as a “horizon of disclosure.”11 Though she moves toward the

84

Terrence Malick

lectern with a definite purpose in mind (to deliver a lecture), the lectern is first oriented in and orients for her the world in its entirety. She will eventually focus on the lectern as a piece of purposeful equipment, neutralizing it within the world by abstracting it from the gestalt of natural perception to locate it as a primary object situated in the surrounding environs of the classroom. Heidegger names this prejudgmental primary experience and process of distillating the environmental significance found in our initial encounter with things worlding. Worlding is a process, a verb: The world is not the mere collection of the countable or uncountable, familiar or unfamiliar things that are just there. But neither is it a merely imagined framework added by our representation to the sum of such given things. The world worlds and is more fully in being than the tangible and perceptible realm in which we believe ourselves to be at home. World is never an object that stands before us and can be seen. World is the ever-nonobjective to which we are subject as long as the paths of birth and death, blessing and curse keep us transported into being . . . By the opening up of a world, all things gain their lingering and hastening, their remoteness and nearness, their scope and limitations.12 As Dasein, we already have an implicit understanding of world; the world is “always already unveiled” with our existence. But, in our average everyday goings-about in the world we tend to encounter familiar things and man-made objects (what Heidegger calls “equipment”) of practical concern in ways in which the world as a background framework is inconspicuous (since the world itself is never an object); the world as a whole tends to withdraw behind the veil of everydayness and becomes unfamiliar, although we continue to implicitly understand that it is there as an enframing backdrop. In his introduction to The Essence of Reasons Malick himself summarized Heidegger’s thinking about world this way: Where Heidegger talks about “world,” he will often appear to be talking about a pervasive interpretation or point of view which we bring to the things of the world. This, in any case, has been the view of many commentators. But there is little sense in speaking of a “point of view” here since precisely what Heidegger wants to indicate with the concept is that none other is possible. And there is no more sense in speaking of an interpretation when, instead of an interpretation, the “world” is

Worlding the West: An Ontopology of Badlands

85

meant to be that which can keep us from seeing, or force us to see, that what we have is one.13 World, then, is not merely a collection of objects, such as lecterns and desks in a classroom. World is, to paraphrase Julian Young, Dasein’s “thrownness,” the situation into which every human being is born where a world is already made before him. Dasein is always already being in a world, yet since world is the sum and totality of our concerns and meaning, “the horizon of all our horizons,” it is camouflaged within itself: “in daily life what vanishes from our existence are the ‘simple and essential’ meanings which establish our ‘position in the midst of beings’ and give, thereby, meaning and direction to our lives.”14 One of the ways a world can be made explicit and visible again is through an encounter with a work of art. Earlier in “The Origin of a Work of Art” from the above passage Heidegger argues that a work of art can also be a worlding because it “sets up” a world for us by opening it and keeping it “abidingly in force.” For Heidegger, the way an artwork sets up a world has nothing to do with aesthetics and everything to do with metaphysics (an artwork is first and foremost a being), particularly because the “work” of an artwork is to disclose, as opposed to represent or reproduce, the truth of a particular thing and allow it to emerge into the “unconcealedness of its being.” Art is nothing less than “truth setting itself to work.” In this section of “the Origin of a Work of Art” Heidegger laboriously and rigorously works through two related metaphysical questions: (1) What is the “thingly” character of a mere thing (such as a stone)?; and (2) What is the “work” character of a work (artwork)? He is most keenly after the answer to the second. He proposes to get at the answer through the intermediate category of “equipment” since any piece of equipment is a man-made thing shaped for some useful, working purpose. The question then becomes “What is the ‘equipmentality’ of equipment?” He chooses a pair of shoes as his example of equipment. But then he does something that at first strikes the reader as odd. Rather than describing an actual pair of shoes and its various uses or explaining how a cobbler makes shoes, Heidegger instead uses an artwork to illustrate the equipmental quality of equipment. Here Heidegger gives us his famous example of a painting by Van Gogh of a pair of well-worn peasant shoes. Heidegger doesn’t see this pictorial representation as a mere image or reproduction of peasant shoes. Since Van Gogh’s painting is neither a

86

Terrence Malick

piece of equipment nor a mere thing but instead is a type of work, he views it as nothing less than a “happening of truth” in which the underlying essence, that is, the being, of the shoes can be uncovered and therefore the world of the peasant recovered with them. In his encounter with the painting, Heidegger claims to discover not only the equipmental quality of the shoes as reliable pieces of everyday equipment but also something about the work-being of the painting as a work of art, that is, the world incarnated in the work. He lets the painted pair of shoes “emerge as a thing that has been brought forth” by Van Gogh to speak of its interconnectivity to the rustic, earthy yet dignified world of the peasant woman who lives in them, replete with passages describing her slowly and heavily trudging in them through fields “swept by a raw wind,” and her “uncomplaining anxiety as to the certainty of bread” in her everyday life. This peasant’s world can only be disclosed to us in the artwork because of our own prior understanding of world in general.15 Heidegger sums up the work of this painting this way: Van Gogh’s painting is the disclosure of what the pair of equipment, the peasant shoes, is in truth . . . In the work of art the truth of an entity has set itself to work. “To set” means here: to bring to a stand. Some particular entity, a pair of peasant shoes comes in the work to stand in the light of its being . . . The nature of art would then be this: the truth of beings setting itself to work.16 Heidegger’s point in using the Van Gogh example is to show us that art can bring us “suddenly somewhere else than we usually tend to be,” namely, a world.17 An artwork belongs to world, but it also opens up and puts it on display. The role of the artwork is not to create but rather “to “make expressly visible,” to “thematize” a world which is already in existence” and which is already implicitly understood by Dasein in his everyday encounters with the entities that exist within it.18 A work of art can reopen the world by clearing a way for us beyond the work’s “thingly structure” to interrogate our implicit, veiled understanding of the world camouflaged within our everydayness to help an explicit, conscious awareness of the world as the frame and support for the very objects and entities we encounter in everyday, practical life emerge. So even though an artwork can neither create nor recreate the world, it can quite literally reset the world for us in our consciousness. In other words, an artwork can world. But a world does not set upon itself; it needs a ground upon which to stand. For this ground, Heidegger proposes the term earth. Yet, in

Worlding the West: An Ontopology of Badlands

87

Heidegger’s vocabulary this innocuous word has nothing to do with either clumps of dirt or the spinning globe circling the sun we call our terrestrial home; like world, it too is a metaphysical term. A work sets up a world only by “setting forth” the earth as the ground that juts through the world. While the essential characteristic of world as a process is openness, earth is closed and incomprehensible: The earth is the spontaneous forthcoming of that which is continually self-secluding and to that extent sheltering and concealing. World and earth are essentially different from one another but never separated . . . But the relation between world and earth does not whither away into the empty unity of opposites unconcerned with one another. The world, in resting upon the earth, strives to surmount it. As selfopening, it cannot endure anything closed. The earth, however, as sheltering and concealing, tends always to draw the world into itself and keep it there.19 Here, Heidegger gives us the example of the Greek temple. A Greek temple sitting on a rocky hill sets up a world for the ancient Greek—her culture and religion—that is still open to us to rediscover today. However, the temple is grounded on the earth, a site of the ancient Greek’s everyday, practical day-to-day life that is no longer open for us as modern people to live. When we enter the temple today, we might be able to feel the holiness of the temple as a house of worship—since it once and might still house a God—just as an ancient Greek worshipper once did. But we probably would have a hard time recreating what Eliade called the original hierophany that sanctified the ground upon which it is built in the first place. It is within this push and pull between earth as concealment and world as unconcealment that an artwork finds its unity: not an aesthetic unity, but a metaphysical one as a striving for truth as unconcealedness. But truth itself is essentially this striving between earth and world, since unconcealedness is never an existential state existing in the work but is always “happening” in the conflict between the work’s opening a world and this same world’s concealment in earth.

Worlding the Badlands In the “Age of the World Picture” Heidegger states that the essence of the modern age is the fact that the world can become picture. This doesn’t mean that we have developed a new picture of the world, but that for the

88

Terrence Malick

first time in history world can truly be grasped as a picture.20 If this is true, then there is no more emblematic world-picture making apparatus of our age than the cinema. Early in Badlands Malick paints the world picture of the entire story when Holly, in a voice-over narration flatly states: “Little did I realize that what began in the alleys and backways of this quiet town would end in the badlands of Montana.” The cinematic environment of the title congeals around the two lovers throughout the film, creating what Ben McCann calls a person-environment correlative that constantly reminds us of the mutuality between self and place.21 The badlands of North America are scattered throughout parts of Nebraska, Wyoming, Montana, South and North Dakota, and Saskatchewan. “Badlands” is the English translation of the Lakota Sioux word makhóšiča, a word used to describe an arid terrain that is tricky to traverse because of loose sand, rugged canyons, multiple toadstools, scarce water, and rapidly eroding layers of soft sediment. The Badlands National Park website describes the treacherous beauty of the South Dakota badlands this way: The bizarre landforms called badlands are, despite the uninviting name, a masterpiece of water and wind sculpture. They are near deserts of a special kind, where rain is infrequent, the bare rocks are poorly consolidated and relatively uniform in their resistance to erosion, and runoff water washes away large amounts of sediment. On average, the White River Badlands of South Dakota erode one inch per year. They are formidable redoubts of stark beauty where the delicate balance between creation and decay, that distinguishes so much geologic art, is manifested in improbable landscapes—near moonscapes—whose individual elements seem to defy gravity. Erosion is so rapid that the landforms can change perceptibly overnight as a result of a single thunderstorm.22 The utter inhospitality of such a landscape has long been inviting to outlaws and renegades seeking refuge from both justice and injustice. The badlands have rarely been a passive backdrop detached from the often violent human dramas that unfolded in its landscape.23 Butch Cassidy and the Wild Bunch blazed countless trails through the inaccessible and remote Wyoming badlands, moving through them with a familiar ease to elude and hide out from numerous posses. In 1890 a group of Lakota Sioux ghost dancers escaped to the badlands west of the Black Hills in South Dakota as a religious refuge to practice the ghost dance while the U.S. army was suppressing it on the reservations. These types of individuals

Worlding the West: An Ontopology of Badlands

89

move fluidly through the dry, crumbled, and jagged terrain of the badlands. To paraphrase Basso, not only do they occupy the landscape of the Badlands, but the landscape also occupies them.24 It’s as if the geological history of the badlands as “an old story in the arid and semi-arid regions of the West [that] always happens in rocks that are relatively nonresistant erosion and . . . always starts with a scarp” also serves as an apt description of their interaction with such a landscape.25 Kit too is depicted as one of these individuals—a scarp in Badlands arid setting—yet he seems barely interested in the picturesque open tableaus through which he and Holly travel. This is because Kit is well placed in the landscape—that is, he seems to belong to the vast geography of the badlands which serve as both the narrative space and action place of the film. Yet Malick links Kit and the landscape together to signify a particular sense of “place” or topos as opposed to reducing landscape to mere space or background scenery. Furthermore, Kit is unaffected by the landscape as he passively experiences the large geographical scales of the high plains. For example, at the point when he and Holly begin their off-road escapade across the plains, Holly narrates how Kit passively tells her to simply “enjoy the scenery” (which she does). But Kit himself becomes a precise anchoring point (but, as I shall argue later, not a ground) for us in the surrounding landscape. Topography in Badlands is important because Kit’s presence situates it for us as belonging to the world. Not necessarily the world of a casual crime spree killer (I will explore neither his psychology nor his morals here) but one that is much more familiar to us—the American West as a fugitive landscape. Malick’s landscape setting in this film is not simply the picturesque as seen through the eyes of Kit or Holly—like Van Gogh’s peasant shoes, it is a picture of a world. Kit especially stands out as a scarp in Malick’s widescreen framed landscape shots when accompanied by Holly’s voice-over narration in which she imagines Kit rapturously moving through the empty spaces of the badlands as if he were at home there. For example, in one sequence, Malick’s camera pans across the vast prairie horizon until we see Kit in full frame, silhouetted from behind, standing on the prairie at the western edge of South Dakota staring toward Montana with his rifle straddling his shoulders. Malick frames Kit in such a way that his outstretched arms are even with the horizon, as if he were hanging from its edge. Malick’s camera then lingers on Kit’s silent posture as if he were a scarecrow, an alien piece of equipment made to appear at home standing as a sentry in the solitude of the natural surroundings while disrupting

90

Terrence Malick

and frightening the natural inhabitants of the terrain. The camera then cuts to a medium shot of Kit from the front, his arms now straddling the opposite horizon. What follows next are a series of shots of a mountain in the far off distance, a pheasant, a lizard, a lightning tinged storm cloud, and a grounded hawk. The last shot in the sequence is a long shot of Kit, arms still straddling both his rifle and the horizon, as he turns in the dusk light to walk back toward Holly as her voice-over meditates upon their isolation in which she confuses their solitude for the placeless feeling of loneliness: “We lived in utter loneliness. Neither here nor there. Kit said that ‘solitude’ was a better word cause it meant more exactly what I wanted to say.” Later, Kit spins a bottle to decide in what direction to go next. When the bottle won’t spin on the hard, rocky ground, Kit exclaims, “If I’m worth a damn, I’ll pick the right direction, if not, well then I don’t care.” When he finally does choose, he decides to head in the direction of the mountains of Saskatchewan, “a magical land beyond the reach of the law.” This push and pull between fate and decision is a good example of Kit’s earth and world in strife in which “the world is the clearing of the paths that of the essential guiding directions with which all decision complies. Every decision, however, bases itself on something not mastered, something concealed, confusing.”26 Holly, on the other hand, seems to be placeless in the open landscape. She sees nature itself as charged with emotional potential. Unlike Kit, she is affected by the landscape precisely because she has a mythical and romantic view of nature as picturesque and inviting (she is, after all, only 15 years old). She imagines nature as a type of Eden, a playground where she and Kit will be the sole occupants with neither father nor mother to restrain them. For example, just after Kit shoots and kills her father, Holly tells us in her narration that “we hid out in the wilderness, down by a river in a grove of cotton woods. It being the flood season, we built our house in the trees with tamarins’ squalls and willows laid side by side to make a floor. There wasn’t a plant in the forest that didn’t come in handy.” This first refuge is not the world of the badlands, but a lush forested oasis complete with a river flowing along its borders reminiscent of the island to which Huck Finn first escaped from his father. Her Edenic description of this world, however, is undercut by the shot of a dead tree floating down the river that accompanies the voice-over. Here, Malick uses the counterpoint between sound and image to bring world and earth into strife. Later in the same scene, as Holly and Kit sit on a platform they built by lashing logs together between three trees, Holly reads a

Worlding the West: An Ontopology of Badlands

91

passage from Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon Tiki about the rhythm of the raft’s logs as the crew approach a chain of islands in the open sea. Thus, in her imagination Holly equates their own native, stationary log raft stuck on an island hidden in the earthy prairie sea with a much more exotic craft sailing through the open ocean worlds away. For Kit, this treed landscape is just another confining and concealing space—like his bedroom in town, the garbage truck and the feedlot where he worked, Holly’s house—where he is constantly under the threat of siege from any direction in the open world surrounding the hideout. He “handily” uses the forest plants to build Viet Kong styled camouflaged ambush pits and various ominous looking booby traps. He drills with a rifle and practices commando skills, knowing that sooner or later the law is coming for them. Later, as Kit fishes in the river near their tree house, we find out that their Edenic wilderness is only a few hundred meters away from a major highway. This wilderness turns out to be more like Thoreau’s Walden Pond than Huck Finn’s island. The pair is actually discovered by a pedestrian walking and smoking along the riverbank (while observing Kit comically shooting fish that he failed to catch with his homemade net). Another scene in which Kit’s world and earth are in conflict is when Kit drives out on the prairie to confront Holly’s father about his forbidding her to see him. Her father is painting a large billboard sign that doesn’t look as if it is even remotely close to a road or highway. The billboard advertises a feed store, and, painted in a primitive, folk-art style, depicts an idyllic farm complete with grazing sheep, corn planted in neat, tidy rows, chickens, a pond stocked with fish, a white picket fence surrounding a cottage, a farm couple, and an airship flying overhead. Yet, just to the left of the fish pond a painted panel has been removed and is set on the ground leaning against the billboard. The incompleteness of the painting suggests a world, perhaps even one Holly would recognize, yet the missing panel, grounded on the earth, suggests that this type of world is closed to the young lovers. The contrast here between the pastoral world of the sign and the reality of Kit and Holly’s lives in the bleak backwaters town of Fort Dupree could not be more striking. As Kit approaches and mumbles “sure looks pretty,” Malick’s camera shows us the entirety of the sign so that through the breach we see just a hint of the landscape behind it jutting into an immense, infinite blue sky punctuated by drifting white clouds. Malick complicates this double convocation of earth-world and world-earth further in the next shot where he frames Kit so that his body transects the earth of the sign and

92

Terrence Malick

the world beyond seen through the missing panel with a plumber’s line dangling in the opening over his shoulder. Here Kit’s world is momentarily plumb with his own self-image as Holly’s father mutters to him, “You somethin’,” and Kit replies with “It takes all kinds sir” then casually walks back to his car. Whereas Holly’s imaginary nature is always devoid of human contamination (outside of her and Kit), Kit’s nature is filled with human presence. In fact all of the open spaces in the film occupied by Kit are marked by the presence of man, whether it be the billboard that Holly’s father is painting, Cato’s house, a railroad track and trestle, an oil derrick, or an army base—all situated in the vast expanse of open prairie. For instance, in the scene when Kit shoots Cato, Kit is situated in a plowed field as he fires the fatal shot. Even when Kit and Holly leave the highway in fear of roadblocks and drive westward through “desert and mesa, across endless miles of open range” they use the telephone wires as path markers to the mountains of Montana. For a man on the run, Kit does little to avoid running into other people or to cover his tracks across the landscape.

Subjectile In another sense, the person-environment relationship between Kit and the natural landscape can be read through the lens of Derrida’s Heideggerian concept of the subjectile which he first uses in reference to certain drawings by Artaud. A subjectile is both a support and a surface, distinct from form and representation; it is neither a subject nor the subjective, nor is it an object; it is something between all three and can take one or the other’s place in turn. It is Kit and the landscape, both subjects of the film, stretched out between one another, between the two places of the human subject and nature: Neither object nor subject, neither screen nor projectile, the subjectile can become all that, stabilizing itself in a certain form or moving about in another . . . always oscillating between intransivity and transivity . . . in the first case, I am stretched out, lying down, in my bed, brought down, brought low, without life, I am where I have been thrown . . . thrown beneath. In the second case, I throw something, a projectile, thus stones, a firebrand, seed, or dice—or I cast a line. At the same time, and because I have thrown something, I have lifted it or founded

Worlding the West: An Ontopology of Badlands

93

it. A foundation in its turn, it can thus found, sustain a construction, serve as a support.27 As Heidegger does when explaining world, Derrida turns to the code of painting to illustrate the subjectile. But unlike Heidegger, Derrida holds the subjectile in reserve as ultimately untranslatable through illustration, even as he analyzes it in the drawings of Artaud. Given its etymology and history of usage in art, it is tempting, he argues, to equate the subjectile with porous and permeable materials such as canvas or wood commonly used as surfaces for drawing and painting. Tempting too, for our purpose, to link it to celluloid as the light absorbing material base of cinema. But the subjectile cannot be reduced to simple materiality. The subjectile is really a neologism for the place of Dasein in the world as somewhere between “the intransivity of being-thrown and the transivity of throwing.”28 Like the compact between earth and world, it names both what lies beneath the totality of things as support for human subjectivity and the topos or surface where human concerns are enacted in lived space. To put it another way, it is Dasein’s scene. In the opening scenes of Badlands, Kit is shown working on a garbage truck throwing garbage in the alleys of Holly’s small South Dakota town. He throws rocks and shoes and kicks cans and paper bags. He shoots guns and pushes cattle into pens and people into closets and root cellars. But he throws himself into his own drama the moment he tells his fellow garbage man, “I’ve thrown enough garbage today” and walks off the job to be fired. From now on he will probe the surface of the landscape on his own terms, traversing, penetrating, and perforating it with his own subjectivity. Now he will project himself from the earth, as he does when he springs from his underground hiding place in the woods to murder the posse pursuing him. Malick leaves open for question Kit’s motivations, or what truth, if any, he is probing beneath the landscape-self as subjectile. In a rare interview just after the release of the film, Malick tells Beverly Walker: “Kit doesn’t see himself as anything sad or pitiable, but as a subject of incredible interest, to himself and to future generations. Like Holly, like a child, he can only really believe in what’s going on inside him. Death, other people’s feelings, the consequences of his actions—they’re all sort of abstract for him.”29 The badlands of the title serve as an apt metaphor for this probing of self-identity. It represents the bed of the world where we dwell, the stratified but organic layers of time and space between man

94

Terrence Malick

and his environment, the supporting layers of sedimentation that open up before us as we probe our own being. As a perforating tool, the subjectile is also a trope for sewing or suturing. Malick’s landscape shots serve as image events that Christina Kennedy defines as “a series of shots that distort or enhance the rhythm of a film so that a basic rapport can be created between the spectator and filmmaker.”30 Malick uses the landscape as a subjectile to suture his audience into the narrative, stitching us into the cinematic space where the protagonist dwells to create a “person-environment interaction in the audience as well as the narrative.”31 Malick does this by discarding the idea of cinematic space as a purely illusional space. What Malick creates is an existential spatiality, or a kind of “lived space.” This lived space is of course related to our earlier discussion of worlding, but in this discussion of landscape as subjectile I want to show how Malick foregrounds space itself rather than character to suture us into Kit and Holly’s world. To do so, I will turn to the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty to explain what I mean. On the one hand, cinematic space is constructed within a three-dimensional screen bordered on all sides by a perpendicular frame, or what we can call its screen space. We sit in a darkened room with our gazes fixed to the screen. On the other hand, there is a sense in which filmic space is an illusional space. One of its spatial characteristics is that it draws our gaze through the screen, past it to what might be called the action space of the film. The action space of a film is the threedimensional space where all the narrative takes place. We may look at the screen (apperception), but we see the picture in the action space. While we are only secondarily aware of the screen (which can be a disruptive awareness when we become bored with a film), it is the action space of the film that captures our primary awareness as the “real” space of the film. It is upon this space that our vision interpolates the ordinary characteristics of real space as these are projected. Merleau-Ponty theorized that in the ordinary space of the lived world, depth reveals the familiar link between the subject and space, and movement is the variations of this setting through the thickness of temporality. Ordinary space presents itself as a continuous spatial gestalt before we are aware of any objective distances between objects and ourselves. In visual perception, every object in motion is given in a field that is the basis of movement. This field, however, is not precisely cut out from a mathematized space, but wraps itself around the object everywhere to compose a horizon of surrounding objects. This “horizon” has two

Worlding the West: An Ontopology of Badlands

95

characteristics in perception. First, though it exists as the limits of our visual field, it is not clearly separated from the nonvisual. For example, when we hear a car horn in the distance, although we cannot see the car, it is still part of our visual field. What we do not “see” is still an element of the “seen.” Conversely, the horizon consists of the unseen within the visible field: “what we see is always in certain respects not seen: there must be hidden sides of things, and things ‘behind us,’ if there is to be a ‘front’ of things and things ‘in front of’ us, in short, perception.”32 The body itself becomes another field or anchor for every object of perception. The act of seeing in normal space consists of anchoring the gaze on an object to isolate it from the field of surrounding objects, to posit it as a figure. In concentrating your eyes on the isolated object, it does not anchor itself there for you; rather, you become anchored in it. These two steps of isolation and anchorage are not two distinct processes but a continuous activity of plunging deeper into the object: “I continue inside one object the exploration which earlier hovered over them all, and in one movement I close up the landscape and open the object.”33 Our gaze pierces the inner horizon of an object so that it is seen against the horizon of surrounding objects. The horizon is what assures the significance of the object in the course of the gaze. It discloses the object of the gaze while allowing the other objects to recede to compose the horizon through which the primary object may be distinguished. This operation does not entail a discordant objective comparison of detail from the memory of a previous view, but is instead continuous and embedded in the thickness of time. In contrast to ordinary space, cinematic space is not an independent, continuous spatial gestalt. In the only passage specifically about film in the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty supports this claim: “When in a film, the camera is trained on an object and moves nearer to it to give a close-up view, we can remember that we are being shown the ashtray or the actor’s hands, we do not actually identify it. This is because the screen has no horizons.”34 Merleau-Ponty is of course talking about the action space of the film as opposed to the screen space, but this distinction is not without its ambiguities. On one hand, the cinematic object exists on the surface of the screen as a real object of perception in ordinary space with natural spatial characteristics. On the other hand, in apprehending objects as images in the action space, they cease to function in real space and dissolve into spatial discontinuities that lack the elements of ordinary space. The latter is expressed by the absence of

96

Terrence Malick

depth in the spaces of a film, while the real height and breadth felt in the perception of screen objects embodies the former. In the spatial arrangement projected into the action space of a film, the viewer sees a simultaneous presence of both objects and movement as immanent without a specific ground or field. The spatial gestalt in a film is never given in the embodied intentionality of a subject projecting himself into the world, but instead is projected for her. Since its images are projected from behind, a film can continually refer to only the screen itself, without ever really transcending the two-dimensional frame to establish inner horizons. This projection arranges objects on the screen as mutually exclusive to one another. All of a film’s spatial elements merely coexist as opposed to implying one another. It is because of this lack that it is somewhat misleading to talk about the role of “depth” in a film. Merleau-Ponty defines depth as “the dimension in which things or elements envelop each other.”35 There is no depth in cinematic representation as Merleau-Ponty defines it, but only height and breadth. None of the projected objects on the screen ever “envelop” one another in the visual process, but are instead only juxtaposed in the memory of the spectator. The spectator simply “recognizes” objects of previous shots from memory and constructs the spatial relationships by referring to his knowledge and memory of depth in the lived world. These juxtapositions are provoked by the perception of height and breadth, which are given to cinematic objects as real objects in ordinary space, and supplements the absence of depth. This indicates that cinematic space functions primarily on two temporal levels. On the one hand, it is protentional as the film’s action space reels toward the future. On the other hand, this future is always foreseen as it is projected onto the screen space; we know that it must end within the space of the screening. This protensive finality always refers us to a past, not a present. Within the present space and time of a film, the viewer must always rely on the retention of the past in order to construct figures in the absence of a field on the screen. This means that cinematic spatial perception is constructed objectively and is always secondary to temporality. For instance, when a camera shifts perspective from a stationary medium shot to close-up, it creates a pseudotranscendence in which immanent objects stand out only ostensibly from a background. The immanent object (or figure) is always given in the absence of a ground which would make this transcendence possible. The viewer, then, must continually posit himself as the only ground in relation to the entire

Worlding the West: An Ontopology of Badlands

97

screen space/action space of the film as a figure, meaning that his own body becomes a significantly expressive space. It is this interplay, and consequently the crossing-over/back-again between screen and action spaces, that constructs a pseudospatial gestalt in a film and in which space gives way to place. In his essay “A Phenomenological Aesthetic of Cinematic Worlds” Christopher S. Yates associates Malick’s cinematography with just this sort of phenomenological approach to cinematic space: Malick likewise breaks with traditional cinematography by favoring point-of-view shots over establishing shots. In most feature films, establishing shots are used to provide an objective glimpse at the scene of coming action. Malick, however, prefers to make his transitions from shot to shot by revealing the line of action as that which a given character is witnessing and is already immersed in. His intentionality, then, is to provide a subjective emphasis in his shot selection . . . the emphasis on cinematic point-of-view allows the world, in the language of phenomenology, to give itself to our consciousness. As an artist, Malick is intuitively aware that the work of his art can accomplish a convergence of viewer intentionalities concerning the truth of the world with his own. He thus prepares the way for a fusion of horizons resulting in an aesthetic experience that looks through the screen to a field of existential reflection.36 We feel this “fusion of horizons” most intently during the chase sequence in which Kit finally gives himself up to a local sheriff and his deputy. Malick cuts back and forth between cars racing across the empty landscape to Kit looking at himself in the rearview mirror. In this sequence, Malick constantly violates the 180-degree convention of continuity editing, making screen direction so inconsistent that we really have no sense of the direction in which Kit is speeding away. However, we get the sense that no matter what is in the frame—be it the two cars side by side crashing through a fence, Kit checking his hair in the mirror, or the deputy leaning out the window to fire a rifle—what Malick is showing us is Kit’s point of view leading up to his almost random decision to give himself up. This scene culminates with Kit stacking rocks into a small cairn to mark the place in the otherwise featureless landscape where he was caught, thus authorizing his own destiny by signing the terrain with its own substance.

98

Terrence Malick

Conclusion: Dwelling Heidegger emphasizes that to “dwell” as a human being means to exist in finitude, as a being-toward-death but yet at the same time to transcend our finitude through waiting for and preserving what is beyond the horizon of finitude. The concept of dwelling, the Da of Dasein, or the there of being-there, “assigns importance to the forms of consciousness with which individuals perceive and apprehend geographical space.”37 It entails being situated between earth and sky, or what Heidegger calls the fourfold.38 Malick figuratively presents this subjectile in the closing scenes of the film by taking us somewhere he has not yet shown us as an isolated space—the sky. The film closes with Kit and Holly in shackles being flown in an airplane back to civilization to face justice. They now fly over the landscape they had just in the days previous slowly traversed by car. No longer in charge of their destiny, they are instead being hurled through the sky, a place Heidegger dubs “the abode of the gods.” But Kit draws the earth and sky back together when, admiring the hat of the officer to which he is shackled, he asks him where he got it. “State” the officer utters. “Boy I’d like to buy me one of them.” The officer responds with “You’re quite an individual Kit.” As Holly looks on, Kit in deadpan retorts “You think they’ll take that in consideration?” I think it is important to notice that Kit’s last words in the film are not about shoes, but about a hat, especially one that he connects to his own authority as an individual. Early in the film Kit had been the subject of derision for the quirky boots he wears, derision that, in his own mind, confirmed his unique individuality. Now a hat, an object that sits on top of his head oriented toward the sky, especially a policeman’s, would complete his own picture of the authority of his distinctive individualism. The last shot of the film travels through a cloud-swept sky with the sun barely peeking above the clouds. Though we have not come quite full circle, we recognize an affinity between the earthly landscape where we have been the entire film and the skyscape of the closing shot; we still don’t know what direction we are headed—whether it’s east or west, whether we are traveling toward the sunrise or sunset. We are simply in the world.

Notes 1

As of this writing Malick’s oeuvre as a director consists of Lanton Mills (a short, 1969), Badlands (1973), Days of Heaven (1978), The Thin Red Line (1998), The New World (2005), and The Tree of Life (forthcoming, 2011).

Worlding the West: An Ontopology of Badlands 2

3

4 5

6

7 8 9 10

11

12

13

14 15

16 17 18 19 20

99

Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking? (New York: Harper Perennial, 1976), 235–7. Adrian Martin, “Approaching the New World,” The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America, ed. Hanna Patterson, 2nd ed. (London: Wallflower Press, 2007), 182. Ibid., 182. Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of Debt, The Work of Mourning & The New International (London: Routledge Classics, 2006), 102–3. Martin Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeil and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 5. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 8. Heidegger’s definition of metaphysics includes an implicit critique of its failure to properly investigate Being as such. Hence, his metaphysics is an attempt at overcoming traditional metaphysics. Julian Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 23. Young offers here a very succinct definition of world: “In sum, then, ‘world’ is the background, and usually unnoticed understanding which determines for the members of an historical culture what, for them, fundamentally, there is. It constitutes, as it were, the entry conditions, the ground plan, the ‘being of beings,’ which something must satisfy in order to show up as a being in the world in question.” For a definition of “horizon” let me note here one offered by Christopher S. Yates: “ ‘Horizons’ denotes, with Hans-Georg Gadamer, the specifically hermeneutical character of our experience of the world. This is opposed to a metaphysically conditioned ideal of knowledge and does not take interpretation to be a purely epistemic or noetic event. ‘Horizon’ is akin to ‘situation,’ the locus of understanding in terms of our own projects and questions.” See note 6 of “A Phenomenological Aesthetic of Cinematic Worlds,” Contemporary Aesthetics 4 (2006), www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article. php?articleID=394#FN14 Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row), 43. Martin Heidegger, The Essence of Reasons, trans. Terrence Malick (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969), xv. Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art, 32, 39, 37. In an interesting parallel, the first time we meet Kit he is on his garbage route trying to sell a pair of discarded shoes he has found for a dollar. These shoes look remarkably similar to the ones Van Gogh painted. When the man asks Kit what size they are, he responds “Your size.” Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 35. Ibid. Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art, 33. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 47. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 129–31.

100 21 22 23 24

25 26 27

28 29 30

31 32

33 34 35 36

37

38

Terrence Malick

Patterson, The Cinema of Terrence Malick, 81. www.us-parks.com/badlands-national-park/geology.htm Patterson, The Cinema of Terrence Malick, 84. Keith H. Basso, “ ‘Speaking with Names’: Language and Landscape among the Western Apache,” Cultural Anthropology 3, no. 2 (May 1988), 99–130. www.us-parks.com/badlands-national-park/geology.htm Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 53. Jacques Derrida and Paule Thévenin, The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud, trans. Mary Ann Caws (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), 77. Ibid. www.eskimo.com/~toates/malick/art6.html Christina B. Kennedy, “The Myth of Heroism: Man and Desert in Lawrence of Arabia,” Place, Power, Situation, and Spectacle, ed. Stuart C. Aitken and Leo E. Zonn (Maryland and London: Rowman and Littlefield, 1994). As cited in Ben McCann, “ ‘Enjoying the Scenery’: Landscape and the Fetishisation of Nature in Badlands and Days of Heaven” in The Cinema of Terrence Malick, 78. Ibid. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), 277. Ibid., 67. Ibid., 68. Ibid., 265. Christopher S. Yates, “A Phenomenological Aesthetic of Cinematic Worlds,” Contemporary Aesthetics 4 (2006), www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/ pages/article.php?articleID=394#FN14 Keith H. Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apaches (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), 106. Patterson, The Cinema of Terrence Malick, 185.

Chapter 6

Fields of Vision: Human Presence in the Plain Landscapes of Terrence Malick and Wright Morris Matthew Evertson

There’s a simple reason for grain elevators, as there is for everything, but the force behind the reason, the reason for the reason, is the land and the sky. There’s too much sky out here, for one thing, too much horizontal, too many lines without stops, so that the exclamation, the perpendicular, had to come. Anyone who was born and raised on the plains knows that the high false front of the Feed Store, and the white water tower, are not a question of vanity. It’s a problem of being. Wright Morris, The Home Place

Contemporary viewers of the films of Terrence Malick can easily visualize his nature trope, where close and compelling human interaction is played against a backdrop of verdant, often overwhelmingly, lush landscapes. In The Thin Red Line (1998) the characters love, fight, and die in tangles of Edenlike greenery, and in The New World (2005), the thick coastal forests await the colonizer’s axes. In this latter film especially, we open with Europeans subsumed by the canopy, desperate to carve out a pattern of settlement in a sea of untamed forest, while the natives blend in harmony with the old growth. By the end of the film, Pocahontas has been transplanted across the ocean, chasing her child through a carefully carved English garden maze. Throughout these films are images that assert man’s desire to control and contain the natural world that is crowding all around him.1 Malick began his cinematic exploration of man’s place in the universe, however, by looking not to environments with closed-in nature where

102

Terrence Malick

humans are surrounded by trees and swamps and oceans and hills, but to the featureless plains that serve as the stage for Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978). In these films Malick explores the tenuous human presence on a blank horizon: a towering home standing proud above waving wheat fields upon the Texas plain, for example, or a single oil derrick pitched against the backdrop of the Wyoming flatlands. “At the very edge of the horizon we could make out the gas fires of the refinery at Missoula, while to the south we could see the lights of Cheyenne, a city bigger and grander than I’d ever seen,” proclaims Holly Sargis (Sissy Spacek) in a voice-over late in Badlands as the killers near the Montana/ South Dakota border. Though this feat would be geographically impossible, Malick clearly wants his viewers to consider the vastness of this open landscape set in contrast to the confined, conflicted, and violent lives of its inhabitants. In exploring landscapes such as these, Malick’s early films touch upon a theme that has long been expressed in the literary tradition of the Great Plains. One thinks of the most famous writer in this genre, Willa Cather, for example, who describes a young Jim Burden encountering the prairie for the first time in her groundbreaking 1918 novel My Ántonia: There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made. [ . . . ] I had the feeling that the world was left behind, that we had got over the edge of it, and were outside man’s jurisdiction.2 In this scene the ten-year-old Jim, leaving his lush Virginia hill country behind after the deaths of his parents, feels utterly alone and exposed on the flat landscape. As if being orphaned were not enough, the plains complete his isolation. “If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter,” he continues. “Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out.” There are many similar moments throughout Cather’s work, and other writers of the plains, that offer echoes of images and sentiments captured in Malick’s first films.3 Another Nebraska writer, however, much less known than Cather, offers perhaps the most fruitful literary counterpoint to Malick. Wright Morris (1910–1998), after all, came of age in the transition from American literary realism to modernism, and he grapples with many of the same metaphysical and existential questions that Malick

Fields of Vision: Terrence Malick and Wright Morris

103

often confronts. Moreover, Morris, like Malick, explored these themes across multiple mediums; in addition to writing novels and short stories, he wrote literary and philosophical criticism, and he was a prominent photographer in his own right.4 Several of his earliest works combine in an innovative mix of images/photographs and words—and his writing, in general, places great emphasis on the themes of “looking” and, as he described it, moments that reveal the “camera eye” of narrative perspective. Moreover, Morris wrote about people and events that were contemporary with Malick’s first two films (unlike Cather, for example, whose works are set in a much earlier period of the settlement of the West). Beyond the subject matter, Morris’s technique brings to mind Malick. Sparse on dialogue, his narratives are often confounded rather than clarified when characters choose to speak. While honing in on very precise images and symbols meant to convey a larger impression of man’s place in nature, Morris tends to resist a “straight telling,” perplexing his readers in the same way viewers may at times feel during a Malick film, with scenes and images that don’t seem to fully relate to the primary plot, and endings that resist closure. Finally, like Malick, Morris enjoyed great critical success, but never earned much of an audience; critics often refer to him as one of the most underappreciated American authors in the twentieth century.5 The work that prompts the most obvious comparison with Malick is Ceremony in Lone Tree (1960), Morris’s eleventh novel, and a sequel, of sorts, to his 1956 National Book Award winning The Field of Vision. Both novels explore the influence of America’s frontier mythology as it applies to characters caught up in the consumer culture of the 1950s, and the mainstream American values and behaviors that have emerged in the postwar era. The main conflict in both novels involves the contrasting choices of the key male protagonists: Walter McKee, a successful, if conventional, Nebraska businessman with a modern split-level in the suburbs outside Lincoln, Nebraska—with a beautiful wife and family but a dull, conforming existence—and his childhood friend, Gordon Boyd, a “self-unmade man” who has failed in his various attempts as a writer and artist, but who earns grudging admiration from Boyd and others in the unconventional choices he has made in trying to break away from his small town, rural upbringing. Lone Tree serves as the destination drawing a large cast of additional characters for the ninetieth birthday of the son of the town’s founding father, and sole remaining inhabitant, Tom Scanlon. Hovering in the background of this “ceremony” is a startled nation’s reaction to one of the first mass murders in the postwar era,

104

Terrence Malick

loosely based upon eight-day killing spree across Nebraska and Wyoming by the teenage misfit Charles Starkweather in January of 1958, the same events that inspired elements of Badlands. Both the film and the novel explore the cause and effect of this eruption of violence in otherwise unremarkable young men in uneventful communities. What motivates Kit Corruthers (Martin Sheen) to kill in Badlands is never fully understood. When asked by the patrolmen who finally captures him if he “likes people,” Kit replies “they’re okay.” Perplexed, he asks “then why’d you do it?” Kit, and Malick as far as that goes, never provide a satisfactory explanation for such thoughtless violence. The young killer in Ceremony in Lone Tree, Charlie Munger, is clearly patterned on Starkweather, and articulates more clearly his frightening motivation, one that Kit likely shares. “What troubled McKee, more than the threat to his life and the murders, were the few words the boy had said. ‘I want to be somebody.’ ”6 McKee, 61 years old, captures his generation’s fear of dealing with this unpredictable youth culture. He describes a scene where a group of wild teenagers in a “souped-up Ford” had tormented him one day on the highway: “the grinning faces of those young hoodlums scared him more than he dared to admit. McKee had recognized the nameless face of evil—he recognized it, that is, as stronger than the nameless face of good.”7 The panic caused by the seemingly random and meaningless trail of violence of Charlie Munger in Ceremony at Lone Tree reflects the hysteria that erupted in Nebraska, and nationally, at the time of the Starkweather killings, and in scenes depicted in Badlands. As Holly explains in voiceover against a montage of newsreel-like images of communities readying for the killers: The whole country was out looking for us—for who knew where Kit would strike next. Sidewalks cleared out. Stores closed their doors and drew the blinds. Posses and vigilance committees were set up from Texas to South Dakota. Children rode back and forth from school under heavy guard. [ . . . ] People left their lights on when they went to sleep. This sense of fear and panic is captured throughout Ceremony in Lone Tree, foregrounded by the postwar comforts that McKee and several of his family members are hoping to protect. His wife forces him to keep all the lights on in their modern new suburban home “with the glass on three sides of it. The house was set off by itself, which was what they had

Fields of Vision: Terrence Malick and Wright Morris

105

wanted, but with the lights lit up it looked like a factory and attracted more attention than if they had been out. But you couldn’t tell that to Mrs. McKee. ‘If I’m going to be shot, I want to know who it is.’ ”8 The anxiety captured in Ceremony in Lone Tree does not just revolve around this new form of inexplicable youth violence and revolt; the novel spends a good deal of time exploring the Cold War angst of the nuclear era. Traveling north from Mexico toward Nebraska to make the birthday celebration in Lone Tree, Gordon Boyd tries to get a room in a small town near the Nevada/Utah border, only to find the hotel completely filled with spectators hoping to catch the early morning blast of an atomic bomb at the nearby test range. The owner relents and allows Gordon to stay in her son’s room, asking as he signs the register if she should mark “wake for bomb.” This phrase becomes a running joke throughout the rest of the novel, which Boyd uses to spell out the irony of the mix of security and uncertainty that marked the Eisenhower era: the specter of unpredictable mass destruction in the midst of great economic expansion and growing American might. Boyd speculates on the meaning of it all as he tries to sleep: WAKE BEFORE BOMB? How did one do it? Was it even advisable? The past, whether one liked it or not, was all that one actually possessed: the green stuff, the gilt-edged securities. The present was that moment of exchange—when all might be lost. Why risk it? [ . . . ] To wake before the bomb was to risk losing all to gain what might be so little—a brief moment in the present, that one moment later joined the past.9 This symbol of the atomic bomb representing, Gordon Boyd imagines, “the meeting point, the melting point of the past confronting the present,” touches upon similar issues of “time” and “being” that flow throughout Malick’s oeuvre, and which fuels Kit’s own desire to leave his “mark” on the world around him (as will be explored later). Moreover, while the Cold War subtext may be less visible in Badlands, one must wonder, as Morris more overtly speculates in his writing, if the background of potential mass destruction does not fuel the kind of violence that ultimately sweeps up Kit and Holly. The film alludes to these tensions, such as when Holly asserts that “it was like the Russians had invaded” as communities mobilize in fear of the young fugitives. Late in the film, when they near the Montana border, Holly proclaims “Kit was glad to leave South Dakota behind and cursed its name. He said that if the communists ever dropped the atomic bomb, he wished they’d put it right in the middle of Rapid City.”

106

Terrence Malick

Kit’s destructive impulse here might be fueled less by Cold War angst and more by small-town boredom, but such allusions remind viewers of what a tumultuous era these young outlaws confronted. Like the descriptions of many isolated, rural regions in the fiction of Wright Morris, Malick wants to present a sense of decay and lack of opportunity for young people in their home town. When Kit loses his job hauling trash and is forced to work at the local cattle feedlot, we see scenes of him squeezing cows into a chute and herding them into pens interspersed with images of a sick “downer cow” and then Kit standing upon its stiff body.10 Such imagery clearly reinforces Kit’s notion of being trapped in this dying, rural backwater; if not sifting through cluttered, materialistic existence of the town as a garbage man, he finds himself being “penned in” and domesticated as a laboring “cowboy,” quite in contrast to the Western myth upon which such “cow towns” are generally constructed. Being only 15, Holly appears similarly trapped, as reflected in the image of her huge fish in its small bowl (and later seen gasping for air as she tosses it into her back garden), but unlike Kit—no longer in school and with no family so speak of—she suffers under the thumb of the typical teen authority figures to which Kit must appear an exciting alternative.11 By this point in the film “Fort” Dupree appears less like a protective embattlement on the exposed frontier, and more as small-minded prison from which these young lovers feel compelled to escape. After Holly’s father (Warren Oates) shoots her dog as a punishment for seeing Kit and then throws the body off of a bridge into the river, (implicitly the same river that Holly and Kit have used as a staging ground for their romance, and which later will serve to forefront their idyllic escape into the wilderness), we cut to Holly peering out of a fortlike aperture in the second floor of a red-stone building with “McKenzie School of Music” across the window, looking everything like a prisoner, as her voice-over explains that her father “made me take extra music lessons every day after school. [ . . . ] He said if the piano didn’t keep me off the streets, maybe the clarinet would.” It is at this very point in the film that the flat landscape becomes a factor in revealing the “problem of being,” as Morris frames it, for Kit and Holly. We cut from Holly looking forlornly out of the music school window to an open landscape with a brilliant blue sky, trailing with fluffy, chromium-white clouds hovering over the short grasslands, abruptly broken perpendicularly by a large, colorful billboard that Holly’s father is painting. Aside from Kit’s car, and the father’s truck parked near the workspace, the landscape lacks all reference to humans or human

Fields of Vision: Terrence Malick and Wright Morris

107

activity—even the roadway that must necessitate the billboard in the first place. As Kit, eating a peach, casually approaches the father painting the sign, we get a better look at the scene promoting “Kauzer’s Feed and Grain,” filled with a fanciful, idyllic farm yard scene complete with white chickens, yellow chicks, a green background, and a pond full of colorful and happy fish (quite the opposite of the earlier images of Holly’s gasping pet). In the lower left corner of the billboard we see “Friendly” and then the blank section that Holly’s father is working on. Nothing being depicted in the sign squares with the reality of life for these young lovers in Fort Dupree, and this “false advertising” set in contrast to the wide open landscape and the high white clouds makes a profound statement about how hard it will be for the young lovers to find any acceptance in the conventional borders of what the billboard depicts; their freedom exists beyond the margins of the father’s controlled fantasy of a rural domestic space. “What you think would happen to her if she stuck around with you Kit, a guy like you?” the father asks, representing the stern voice of authority fearful of the directionless impulses of the younger “James Dean” generation. “She’d get along okay,” Kit responds, “And if she didn’t she could take off.” Unconvinced by Kit’s sense of freedom and movement, the father forbids him to see his daughter again, telling him he’s really “somethin’,” to which the departing Kit replies “Takes all kinds, sir.” This catch phrase has deeper meaning in this context than would first appear: more and more it will take “all kinds” to make up the post–World War II society, and the father’s understandable reluctance to let his young daughter hang out with this wannabe rebel will prove to be his fatal misreading of this younger generation. Meanwhile, Kit’s response represents both a challenge to accept youth culture, including rebels without much cause (“takes all kinds”) and a lingering respect for the positions in authority (“sir”), even as the older generations of this region, descendents of those who settled in these high plains, are wary of the very freedom and adventurous opportunity that brought them west in the first place. It took “all kinds” to homestead areas like South Dakota, and such endeavors themselves were predicated on the kinds of risks that Holly’s father is unwilling to allow her to be exposed to. After Kit departs the father, gesturing farewell with his back turned in another combination of both challenge and respect, we cut to a lengthy view of the colorful sign in the lower left corner of the frame and those high-minded clouds and blue sky stretched out across the vast horizon,

108

Terrence Malick

suggesting the flight about to take place. Permission having failed, Kit next encounters the father at his home and violently, if respectfully, insists. “I’ve got a gun, sir” he tells the father, and he’s taking Holly with him. When the father continues down the steps to call the authorities, Kit commands him to stop. “Suppose I shot you? How’d that be?” In a film where language is so sparse, such unique expressions stand out, just as those tall structures we see repeatedly silhouetted against the flat landscape. Kit has a tendency to say “How’d that be” in circumstances where the recipient of the question actually has little choice; it’s a system of inquiry where the answer is already foreordained. Holly’s father stubbornly refuses to imagine how it would “be” to get shot by Kit—unable to fathom a youngster actually challenging authority in such a violent way (the Starkweather killing spree is often cited as a certain loss of innocence for a nation that would never look at its disturbed youth in the same naïve way). Those who do not understand that it takes “all kinds” will likely have some trouble adapting to how it will “be” to live in the shadow of the looming counterculture. Ignoring the threats, the father soon discovers the reality of Kit’s existential question; shot twice in the chest, he crumbles to the floor with no words, just a look of astonishment on his face as he continues to stare at his young killer. This contrasts sharply with the later confrontation of another respected male authority figure, the wealthy homeowner, who—perhaps having heard the widespread news of these young killers—has less trouble imagining how it would “be” if he didn’t allow the young man to take his car. “We’re gonna take the Cadillac,” Kit informs him. “How’d that be?” “Just fine,” he says, offering no resistance to Kit, losing only his hat in the process. Because Kit speaks so infrequently, viewers are asked to pay attention to what he says. When Kit first introduces himself to Holly at the beginning of the film, he asks if she would like to go for a walk, and she naively asks “what for?” His response is “Oh—I got some stuff to say.” The question of voice, of identity, and the need to define oneself through speech and action are central in much of the fiction of Wright Morris as well (his characters’ dialogue is similarly rare and often confounding). The idea that Kit has something to say, and the citizens of Fort Dupree, such as Holly’s father, are not willing to listen, reiterates the linguistic trap that the young lovers find themselves in.12 Film scholar Adrian Danks has explored this idea in Malick’s films, especially Badlands, whose unusual tone, he argues, while “always distanced and never quite immediate” is supported, in part, by the two young lovers and their “incisive but

Fields of Vision: Terrence Malick and Wright Morris

109

impenetrable characterizations.” Kit, in particular, is driven by his need to “say something”; to stand out and make a “mark” on society: Unknown and lost in a small backwater town at the start of the film, Kit consistently attempts to record or mark their murderous adventure: on a recorded 45; on a Dictaphone; by a monument of rocks at his roadside capture; in a book belonging to Holly; in a time capsule buried roadside or floated high in to the air by a balloon; in a suicide note; by leaving his body to science; and by his unemployment registration and his criminal record.13 We could add to this collection of “markings” his suggestion that he and Holly smash their hands with a rock to commemorate their first sexual encounter by the river (instead, he picks up a small rock to mark the occasion) or by tossing his cigarette lighter and his pen and comb to the mob of authorities who surround him in the hangar after his capture. As Danks puts it, the characters in Badlands are “given no sense of distance, nor placed in a position that can possibly transcend their limited understanding of the world.” The film, he argues, is “a paean to identity, lost motivations, of what it means to be in the world and the difficulty of making a mark.” Of course, Morris’s Charlie Munger shares this same desire to “be somebody,” and make people take notice of his impact on their surroundings. If Kit first introduced himself to Holly by convincing her he had “things to say,” their final separation after his capture also pivots on speech and making a mark. Leaning on a squad car next to Holly, both in shackles, once again “captured” by the forces of authority, he says “Boy we rang the bell, didn’t we?” Marveling at the way their adventures captured such nationwide attention, he then pauses, as if recognizing the cost of their actions, and connects the two main characters who had confronted how their futures might “be” given the choices Kit gave them. “I’ll say this, though, that guy with the deaf maid, he’s just lucky he’s not dead too.” He says this in wonderment, as if it had nothing to do with his own actions. “Course, uh, too bad about your dad.” In a film where speaking and being heard are so pivotal, his final words to Holly resonate with a chill: “We’re gonna have to sit down and talk about that some time.” Holly gives no response, Kit looks off into the distance, and we cut to an image of the plane landing that is about to take them both away to face their respective punishments.

110

Terrence Malick

What might Kit want to talk to Holly about in this regard? Fate? Chance? How the father’s “being” came to expire at his hands, and not the wealthy homeowner? How would that be? Who is in control? Of course critics have long trolled this film and others for Malick’s philosophical leanings, pointing, especially, to Heidegger’s theories on “being” and “time.” Such a theoretical exploration is beyond the scope of this study—and the specific elements of Heidegger that Malick seems to employ are better left to those experts—but such analysis confirms to me that Malick’s films play with landscape as a means of exposing characters (and therefore the viewer) to moments of such ontological contemplation.14 As the epigraph at the beginning of this study suggest, Wright Morris had the same notion in mind—that the horizontal plains offer a vital space for exploring this “problem of being,” and, more simplistically (visually and symbolically), that characters will find little terrain from which to escape the elements of their own existential dread. The narrator in The Home Place (1948), Clyde Muncy—a marginally successful novelist who can no longer afford to live in New York City with his wife and two children—has returned to his boyhood home in Lone Tree, Nebraska, seeking shelter and a less frenzied environment for his family. As he tells his elderly Uncle Harry, who still lives and works on the Home Place, “There is no grass in New York, no yards, no trees, no lawn swings—and for thousands of kids not very much sky. They live in cages.”15 Despite his attempt convince himself that rural Nebraska might offer new opportunities and freedom, Clyde’s own “writer’s eye,” having been away from the plains for sometime, consistently dwells upon the bleakness of the landscape, while the “camera eye” depicts actual images of old buildings, trees, and other features of the region that Morris himself had shot; they add a haunting sense of decay and hard use on the open prairie, artifacts of the streams of people who have come to settle, then moved on. The name “Lone Tree” itself testifies to this idea of both isolation and defiance in the open landscape. Riding into town with his aged uncle, Clyde muses “there was a rolling sea of grass, and a lone tree, so the story goes, where they settled the town. They put up a few stores, facing the West and the setting sun like so many tombstones, which is quite a bit what a country store has in mind.” These “high false fronts” are like graves inscribed with “a few lines of fading inscription” that testify to their many purposes over the intervening years. Like the water tank near the railroad, or those tall elevators—or a single tree standing tall in the grass—each addresses this “problem of being,” as Clyde puts it. “Of knowing you are there. On a good day, with a slanting sun, a man can

Fields of Vision: Terrence Malick and Wright Morris

111

walk the edge of his town and see the light of the next town, ten miles away. In the sea of corn, that flash of light is like a sail. It reminds a man the place is still inhabited.”16 Holly’s envisioning the “lights of Cheyenne” in Badlands seems to cover similar territory in this regard. If Malick’s background as a philosophy major can help us to better “read” some elements of his films, Morris’s own theoretical writings may also inform his fictional treatment of these issues. Feeling that obsession with the past and a crippling devotion to nostalgia has harmed his own writing and that of other Americans, in 1958 Morris published a critical exploration of American literature, The Territory Ahead, trying to assert what contemporary writers (Hemingway, Wolfe, Fitzgerald, Faulkner) have been able to successfully glean, and what they also need to break away from, in responding to the American literary tradition (Thoreau, Whitman, Melville, Twain, and Henry James). “For more than a century the territory ahead has been the world that lies somewhere behind us, a world that has become, in the last few decades, a nostalgic myth,” he argues in the foreword.17 By the end of the book he draws the conclusion that for modern writing to truly matter, it must transcend nostalgia and find innovative ways to use the past in refiguring the present, rather than inexorably dwelling in a naïve sense of former times and former peoples. This emphasis on “time” and “being,” though not explicitly beholden to the continental philosophy that clearly influences Malick, nonetheless echoes the “Heideggerian” interests we see expressed in Badlands and Days of Heaven. “The man who lives in the present—in his own present— lives to that extent in both the past and the future,” writes Morris at the conclusion of his study. “The man who seeks to live elsewhere, both as an artist and as a man, has deceived himself. This is an old deception. It is one of the crowded provinces of art.”18 Morris explored this idea of landscape, time, and nostalgia more fully in The Field of Vision (1956), and then returned to these themes and characters four years later in Ceremony in Lone Tree. The very title of the first novel reveals its interest in how we view not only the present landscape, but our past decisions and accomplishments, selectively narrowed through our “Field of Vision.” Here Morris gathers a small cast of characters drawn together to witness a bullfight in Mexico: the comfortably consumerist, middle-class couple from Nebraska (Lois and Walter McKee), her father, Tom Scanlon, a famous founder of the tiny Nebraska backwater called “Lone Tree,” and Gordon Boyd, Walter’s childhood friend whom he has always admired, and who once vied for the affection of Lois. Walter’s obsession with Gordon (who escaped rural Nebraska,

112

Terrence Malick

but who has hardly found success or happiness in his life) is illustrated in the fact that he named his own son Gordon, and his grandson, with them at the bullfight, is also named Gordon (Jr.). As Joseph J. Wydeven puts it, this book is primarily focused on “Boyd’s struggle for the mind of young Gordon McKee, who has been captivated by Scanlon’s stories of the mythic West. Boyd, believing that the past is a trap, wants to free Gordon from the deadening effects of nostalgia and the resulting bland, middleclass life of his grandparents.”19 The parts of The Field of Vision and Ceremony in Lone Tree that relate most clearly to our study of the cinema of Malick are those scenes focused on the settlement of the West, on the establishment of communities such as Lone Tree set against the otherwise inhospitable plains, and the relationship between present inhabitants and this landscape, as well as the “territory,” as Morris would put it, both behind (in the past) and ahead (the future, if there is the promise of one). The chapters devoted to Scanlon’s perspective throughout The Field of Vision focus upon a series of harrowing, apocalyptic memories that the old man recounts of trying to guide a wagon train of settlers across a startlingly inhospitable landscape. “From the butte tops he could see almost forever, but that was all he saw. It looked just about as empty, every-where, except that to the west it looked even worse. He could see the slopes and hollows where even greasewood didn’t grow.”20 Impressionistic and cloudy through his nearly 90-year-old eyes, what we can piece together includes a series of mishaps where the settlers find themselves completely exposed in a rocky region of desert buttes with few supplies and no water, desperately baring their fingers to the bone digging in the dry earth of an arroyo—there are deaths, buzzards, and hints of cannibalism. Scanlon’s language imparts the same biblical cast we find in Days of Heaven, only in this case the landscape is demonized: “They went off toward Hell, but seeing how it looked from the bottom of the canyon, they skirted around it, since the Devil didn’t want them any more than the Lord. And the thing about Hell was that you had to go in, if what you wanted was out.”21 Somehow Scanlon made it out of “hell,” returned to Lone Tree, and never felt compelled to leave again; both books suggest that he has spent the bulk of his days contemplating the empty flatlands from the protected perspective of the Lone Tree hotel. His father, Timothy Scanlon, had helped to found Lone Tree, and established the only hotel there, a three-story structure that, like the single cottonwood that the town was named after, served as a defiant mark of upright existence against the otherwise flat landscape (and, like the tree, which had long since died,

Fields of Vision: Terrence Malick and Wright Morris

113

would remain standing long past its actual use, petrified in time, a reminder of when its interior passageways pulsed with life). Timothy Scanlon’s wife had named the town. “In her opinion, it was how it looked. A lonely tree in the midst of a lonely plain.”22 Her son, Tom Scanlon, is the last remaining resident. “His father had opened the West, his brothers had closed it, and his children had gone East.”23 Where the old man found a kind of comfort in the preserved isolation of the past on the plains, his daughter, Lois, found the isolation unbearable. In a chapter devoted to her perspective in Ceremony in Lone Tree, she confesses that as a child “she couldn’t bear to look out in any direction and see nothing but the empty plain, or after it has snowed or rained a little, the tangle of buggy tracks in the road. [ . . . ] When she read about the Pole and people locked in the ice and Commander Byrd at Little America, she knew just as well as the explorers what is was like.”24 Eventually Lois would follow those tracks out of town, moving “East,” if only to the suburbs of the state capitol in Lincoln. Her husband, Walter, suffered a similar sense of incompatibility with the flat landscape as a child. At one point in The Field of Vision, he bitterly imagines the “origin of species” needed to survive on the treeless plains, where the reality of day-today life hardly squared with the “log cabin” mythology of western settlement: “ . . . that took trees, and there were no trees on the plains. Only heroes, sheroes, villains, and lumberyards.” Instead, settlers had to import the raw materials of survival, eventually constructing “clapboard” houses “on the ground, but not in it, with an air of having been brought out on a freight car, from somewhere better, in order to prove that life could be worse.” The houses stand defiant on the plains, “the ornamental ball on the lightning rod an act of protest, a finger shaken at the way the heavens were run,” but, nonetheless, impermanent: “Temporary. A nomad’s refuge where nothing like a tent would anchor, the permanent shelter being the storm cave out in back. A hole in which to hide, like a ground hog, from the elements.”25 One did not choose to live in such places “in spite” of this exposure, McKee speculates, but “because of it,” and he could never seem to evolve the necessary defiance to try and adapt to the terrain. Later in the novel McKee recounts his experience of traveling down to the panhandle of Texas to do some work with family there. His dust bowl vision is quite in contrast to The Farmer’s Eden in Days of Heaven (the mechanized production methods outlined in the film, including the wholesale planting of entire sections for harvest, rather than letting some lay fallow, would eventually lead to the erosion problems Walter encounters in that very

114

Terrence Malick

region a decade or so later). McKee’s memories of the trip are filled with references to tall objects contesting the clouds on the empty landscape: “He’d waked up in Amarillo where the sky was supported on these giant posts. Oil derricks. Highest things he’d ever seen.”26 Or the homestead with a single house lit up against the otherwise featureless landscape, the view out of his window of endless strips of plowed fields. Echoing Holly’s sense of seeing the refinery lights in Cheyenne hundreds of miles away, Walter recalls that “on the tractor at night he could see the lights, thirty miles away, where oil had been found, and in the dawn light the rabbits, as if blinded by it, would get caught in the discs.” This last image recalls the prairie critters fleeing from the intrusive harvest equipment in Days of Heaven. Exposed on the plains, Walter finds the place disorienting. “What was wrong? Space. He had no way of measuring it.”27 He describes huge clouds of dust, drifting like smoke, which would slowly make their way north over his boyhood home in Nebraska—and eventually all the way to New York. In trying to defy nature on the plains, humans tend to defile or destroy it, Walter suggests. Then he describes taking a trip to a neighboring farm, the Gudger’s place, to help butcher a hog. “They saw the Gudger tree, sticking up like a sail, long before they got to it. The bleak gabled house, with the boarded windows, was like a caboose left somewhere on a siding, and behind this house the sky went up like a wall. The world seemed to end.”28 Recalling his role in killing the hog, McKee, all these years later, witnessing the matador’s work in the bull ring, associates such destructive violence as part of the “field of vision” he has been forced to confront across the flatlands of his youth—for him, the solution was to marry Lois, move to the suburbs and try to hide in the terrain of a conventional life. What made old man Scanlon stay in Lone Tree, then, well after the town had failed to live up to its three-story aspirations, and had been abandoned as anything more than a railroad checkpoint? As others recoil from the vulnerable isolation and exposure on the open landscape—such as Holly, late in Badlands—others thrive, such as Kit, who seems to be having more and more “fun” the further they press into the desolate landscape. Nearing his ninetieth birthday, Tom Scanlon seems quite at home isolated on the plains, preserved like a specimen in the crumbling Lone Tree Hotel, still the tallest structure in town, where he lives all alone. In the incredibly evocative opening of Ceremony in Lone Tree, Morris vividly captures a sense of one man’s “being” in the face of

Fields of Vision: Terrence Malick and Wright Morris

115

the otherwise barren landscape by describing his absence, tracing his daily life worn into the very fabric of hotel. “Come to the window,” the opening passage commands. “The one at the rear of the Lone Tree Hotel. The view is to the west. There is no obstruction but the sky. Although there is no one outside to look in, the yellow blind is drawn low at the window.” The narrator then describes a fly trapped in the blind, the way the loose pane rattles when the train passes by, and the blind sucks inward. Clearly Morris wants us to think, once again, of the “field of vision” offered to us through the narrowed perspectives of our lives: At a child’s level in the pane there is a flaw that is round, like an eye in the glass. An eye to that eye, a scud seems to blow on a sea of grass. Waves of plain seem to roll up, then break like a surf. Is it a flaw in the eye, or in the window, that transforms a dry place into a wet one? Above it towers a sky, like the sky at sea, a wind blows like the wind at sea and like the sea it has no shade: there is no place to hide.29 The narrator then describes an old horsehair sofa drawn up near the window—a worn quilt used when the couch is occupied, and an ashtray filled with cigar butts “around it, scattered like seed, are the stubs of halfburned kitchen matches.” We follow a trail of ashes down the hall. We see a coat hanging in the lobby, shoes under the stove. Everywhere are clues to the man’s presence, though “he is not there now, but the sagging springs hold his shape. He has passed his life, if can be said he has lived one, in the rooms of the Lone Tree Hotel.” At various places you will find signs of the man: his chair, or a bed, “drawn to the window facing west. There is little to see, but plenty of room to look.”30 What Scanlon views through the window is similar to what Malick presents us within his frame: an open space to contemplate our place in the universe, in the continuum of time, and in the moment of being, but confined within the edges of what we can view in that instant: In the blowouts on the rise are flint arrowheads, and pieces of farm machinery, half buried in sand, resemble nothing so much as artillery equipment, abandoned when the dust began to blow. The tidal shift of sand reveals one ruin in order to conceal another. [ . . . ] The emptiness of the plain generates illusions that require little moisture, and grow better, like tall stories, where the mind is dry. The tall corn may

116

Terrence Malick

flower or burn in the wind, but the plain is a metaphysical landscape and the bumper crop is the one Scanlon sees through the flaw in the glass.31 Such framing of the landscape occurs repeatedly in Badlands as well. When Kit and Holly are forced to flee their Edenlike refuge in the woods, they similarly find themselves exposed repeatedly to open skies and endless prairie—and their relationship soon begins to wilt unsheltered in the elements. Objects standing proud of the flat landscape will take on added significance throughout the rest of the film, such as the ramshackle house that Kit’s friend Cato lives in, completely isolated and surrounded by fields, an exposure that proves fatal to Cato. When the young couple arrives later, Kit marches them out into the broad field, then down into a storm cellar. As they descend beneath the earth, a tall, ramshackle wooden windmill crowds the corner of the frame. Kit shoots at them through the cellar door then turns to run with Holly, both figures and the windmill standing out distinct against the darkening blue sky. Kit reaches out for Holly’s hand at one point, but she does not take it.32 Headed into the badlands, Kit increasingly finds himself isolated. The final act of the film, with the authorities closing in, plays out completely across an open landscape with the big sky bearing witness, stressing repeatedly a sense of vastness to which the actions of the fugitives appear so insignificant. In a typical scene we find Kit cooking over a campfire at sunset while Holly studies a map. “That’s Montana over there.” This is followed by perhaps the most iconic image in the film, a long panning shot of the horizon (ostensibly looking toward Montana) until we come upon Kit, staring off into the sunset, his back to us, his rifle slung across his shoulders and his arms outstretched like a scarecrow (or someone being crucified), contemplating the vast expanse in front of him (not unlike Tom Scanlon’s obsession with gazing out his westward window). We cut to a close-up of his face, and then to the high clouds along the horizon, a sharp mountain in the purple distance, of animals foraging in the grass—wild turkey, a lizard, a hawk—then, appropriately enough, storm clouds. “We lived in utter loneliness. Neither here nor there,” Holly laments. “Kit said that ‘solitude’ was a better word cause it meant more exactly what I wanted to say. Whatever the expression, I told him we couldn’t go on living this way.” Days of Heaven, like Badlands and much of the writing of Morris, also places great emphasis on this notion of vulnerability, and of verticality set against the broad horizon, exposing the inhabitants in various moments

Fields of Vision: Terrence Malick and Wright Morris

117

of “being.” Upon fleeing the city, Bill (Richard Gere) and Abby (Brooke Adams) and Linda (Linda Manz) are shown hopping a freight, and then we are treated to a magnificent long shot of the steam train crossing a fragile looking trestle, the locomotive and the cars in beautiful silhouette against a high sky, seeming to escape the very top of the frame. The next shots are of the train zipping through the plains, eventually stopping at a depot in Texas with several of those tall grain elevators (in this case painted bright red) that Morris is so fond of referencing. We soon see the trio joined with dozens of other workers making their way by both truck and horse-drawn wagon toward the Farmer’s large spread. In order to mark their passage, Malick presents a breathtaking panning shot of the caravan tracking through a flat landscape with only clouds overhead and grass and wheat beneath. As they slowly approach the right edge of the frame, the camera pans with them as they cross under a tall wooden arch suspended between two upright timbers, carved at the tops like wheat stalks: this is heaven’s gate.33 The image is startlingly incongruous due to the expansive, unfenced landscape—there is really no reason for the arch, or for passing beneath it, other than its function as a marker, a claim; we are now entering the Farmer’s dominion. As if to punctuate the concept fully, the caravan continues and the shot slowly pans to reveal the Farmer’s house in the distance—a tall, castlelike structure with a long flagpole out front, and whipping flags on the turrets, and a whirling windmill to top it all off. Whether a question of “vanity” or “being,” as Morris might put it, these images compel the viewer to take notice.34 Indeed, throughout the rest of the film the drama that unfolds among the protagonists is staged in relation to varying degrees of elevation. When the Farmer (Sam Shepard), signals that it is time to begin harvest, the camera is at his feet looking up. Bill and Abby and Linda and her newfound friend spend some of their happiest hours walking through the wheat—here the camera is up above, or at shoulder height, so that the actors nearly swallowed up in the growth. Chasing a peacock one day, Abby skitters up hill toward the Farmer’s house—prominent in the upper left area of the frame. Suddenly the Farmer, who has been lying unseen in the grass, sits up. “Excuse me,” says a startled Abby. “I forgot where I was.” The Farmer entreats her, “No worry. Where you from?” Those in power stand proud of the landscape, hold the high ground, know their place and make their presence known to others—and once the scheme of wining the Farmer’s heart is underway, several shots will focus on the lighted window of his upper-floor bedroom, standing out like a beacon in the night—often with Bill looking longingly from below. Similar

118

Terrence Malick

moments occur throughout the film: the Farmer and his accountant figuring up their yield while sitting at a fancy table, couch and umbrella set in stark contrast to the surrounding plains; shots of a scarecrow standing tall on the isolated landscape, silhouetted in the sun; images of a whitecurtained gazebo residing all by itself in the middle of nowhere (decorated in the same elaborate scrollwork as the house); an image of Linda flying a kite high above the endless plains; a scene of prairie golf with a flag fluttering prominently in the foreground as the target; a time-lapse sequence of a sheaf of wheat germinating then forcing its way up through the flat soil, followed by lovely shots of rippling, ripening wheat; and a lone tree standing prominent amidst the waves of grain. The one exception to this urge to rise above the landscape comes from the perspective of the child. In a shot of Linda lying in a field, with her face to the earth, we hear her voice-over. “I’ve been thinking what to do with my future. I could be a mud doctor. Checking out the earth, underneath.” Perhaps this signals an innocent desire not to dominate the landscape, but to live, instead, in harmony within it. The Farmer’s house itself represents the most important vertical cue, however. Following a scene where Bill contemplates “accidentally” shooting the Farmer as they are out on a hunt, we cut to a scene of them plucking pheasants with the house looming tall behind them. “You seem jumpy today,” the Farmer says. Before Bill can answer, two planes from a flying circus suddenly tear through the blue sky directly over the house toward the viewer. The relationship between the inhabitants of this flat landscape and the upper reaches of their lives are ever present and integral to the drama that unfolds. Just after Abby agrees to stay on at the farm, we cut to a scene of the Farmer up on his parapet, his wind-driven dynamo whipping with frenzy behind him, as he stares down longingly at Abby crossing the farmyard to the bunkhouse. Of course, it is from this same platform that the Farmer spies Abby and Bill as they embrace each other tenderly near the end of the film, just as Bill has come to realize that she no longer loves him, and he must depart.35 The furious propeller of the dynamo accentuates the Farmer’s wrath, and the next shot is from below, looking up to the Farmer in the turret, as he stares directly at the camera in unbridled rage. Before he can act, a swarm of locusts is shown rising up in front of the house, obscuring it in the thick cloud of insects. In his final act of tragic passion, the Farmer runs upstairs to the bedroom and grabs Abby, then ties her to a pillar at the bottom of the house, signifying that her position has fallen inexorably back to earth.

Fields of Vision: Terrence Malick and Wright Morris

119

Once the Farmer decides to let the crops burn, the lush and welcoming plains that had seemed so much like heaven at the start now represent a hellish wasteland upon which the inhabitants all feel supremely exposed. Unable to start his motorcycle in an attempt to flee, Bill is easily tracked by the Farmer who comes after him with a gun. Their final struggle plays out like all of the scenes in the film, standing vulnerable above the relentless landscape. The departing shot of the farm is of Bill and Abby and Linda packing up the Farmer’s car and leaving the house, standing prominent and untouched on the blackened landscape—now just a shell, like those empty structures in Morris’s novels, leaving only remnants of the former lives, since departed. They exit through the smoldering arches—the gates of heaven have fallen and the high plains have reclaimed their territory. In an ironic reversal of Kit and Holly— who were forced out of the river and woods to their exposure and eventual capture in the badlands of Montana—Bill, Abby, and Linda flee the flatlands and attempt to escape down the river itself. In the tangled brush along the banks Bill takes his final flight into the water, unable to dodge the bullet that sends him face down into the river, a final gesture of the futility of trying to rise above the earth where, ultimately, all eventually descend. As we approach the moment of Kit and Holly’s capture in Badlands, we find a similar emphasis on this sense of exposure and isolation. Driving at night the expanse of the plains is even more pressing, as they make their way, their headlights marking just a little patch of existence in the vast darkness, heightening her sense of doom. “The dream has ended,” sings Nat King Cole on the radio as the camera slowly pulls away revealing the movements of the two lost lovers dancing in their headlights, then being swallowed up by the black prairie night, one of the most touching depictions of vulnerability in all of cinema. With the sunrise, Holly tells us that “Kit knew the end was coming.” The final shots that initiate Kit’s chase and then capture stress repeatedly this notion of his defiant “standing proud” of the flat terrain. A panning shot of the car crossing the featureless plains settles in on a tall oil derrick out in the middle of nowhere, a sure sign of modern civilization thrusting itself up from the flatlands (and tapping into the terrestrial layers of time below.) The natural landscape of short grasses, foraging animals, and tall mountains in the distance has now become the stage upon which Kit’s final act is to be written, and the imagery throughout the resultant chase reminds over and over again the intrusion of this young rebel upon a

120

Terrence Malick

revealing landscape: he swerves around cows at high speed, he twangs through barbed wire fences with a patrol car fast on his heels. Utterly exposed on the badlands, he has no way to escape, and his final shot of freedom brilliantly asserts this fact. He stops his car along the road, then stands up on the hood, marking him the tallest thing on the horizon, the fierce white clouds once again brilliantly set against the vast blue sky. Completely exposed, he fixes his hair. Puts on this hat. Checks his pulse. He gathers up some rocks to mark the spot on this otherwise featureless terrain of his capture. We wait with Kit staring down the long dirt road, the mountain way in the distance, until finally the authorities crest the hill and bear down on the fugitive, a final moment of being. At this point it is worth exploring what this specific landscape actually means in relation to the larger vision of the film itself, especially as it marks the scene of Kit’s capture. Anyone who has visited one of the many areas of the West or Midwest defined geologically as “badlands” will find little of that actual landscape in this film. Such areas generally have steep, craggy, and forbidding slopes, and rock formations that make them difficult to cross on foot, let alone in a Cadillac. The soil is often loose, dry, sandy, or slippery with scree—or it is impassibly sticky with clay or gumbo soil, sometimes with geothermic features that make the landscape bubble and ooze and stink. Such regions are inevitably arid, sparse of vegetation, and pock-marked with extensive erosion by wind and flash floods. There are formations like these in southern South Dakota (Badlands National Park) as well as in Montana (Makoshika State Park), but neither of these badlands are close to the geographical locations Holly and Kit supposedly cross. Indeed, the actual area where Starkweather was captured outside of Douglas, Wyoming, is not really a noted “badlands” region either (and he was captured on a paved highway). The chief characteristic of all these terrains—both in the film and in the real-life events upon which it was loosely based—is that of flatlands: arid short-grass prairie and plains. The reason for this discrepancy is clear. Badlands was shot primarily in Otero county in southern Colorado, nearer to New Mexico than any part of South Dakota, Wyoming or Montana, a lack of “geographic realism” that might otherwise distract viewers were it not for the fact that Malick’s “badlands” serves as primarily a metaphor rather than a mise-en-scène.36 Similarly, we must allow for a suspension of disbelief when we view Bill and Abby snuggling in a snow-dusted Texas Panhandle in the middle of harvest season (usually in June); Days of Heaven was filmed in Alberta, closer to the territory and terrain that Kit was pressing to reach in

Fields of Vision: Terrence Malick and Wright Morris

121

Badlands. Again, the actual location is not important; the landscape provides the opportunity to express the conflicts between the characters, or to heighten the sense of the relationship those characters share with their surroundings. In this sense, Malick is interested in the “badlands” as an element of human, rather than physical geography. Nature, after all, is neither good nor bad, but simply indifferent. In this case Holly and Kit’s relationship with the world around them renders their environments throughout the film as “badlands,” except for their short and idyllic time spent near the river. Actual geographic badlands would at least offer some places to hide or escape from the pursuit of others; the lands that finally expose Holly and Kit are “bad” precisely because they offer no such respite—instead, travelers across such flat landscapes will easily attract attention to their vulnerable plight, symbolic of the exposed terrains we all must cross at certain points in our lifetimes. The early films of Terrence Malick, and much of the fiction of Wright Morris, brilliantly combine this exploration of both the interior and exterior “badlands” that none, ultimately, can escape. They focus attention on that rupture of time, place, and being in which we stand exposed to the world that surrounds us. Such works compellingly capture the tension of humans—with their limited “field of vision,” framed across the vastness of their unmarked landscape—and their desire to make an impact and leave traces of their tenuous existence upon the territory they temporarily inhabit.

Notes 1

2

3

See David Sterritt, “Film, Philosophy, and Terrence Malick’s The New World,” Chronicle of Higher Education, January 6, 2006, B12–13, http://web.ebscohost. com. Sterritt offers this appraisal of Malick’s career upon the highly anticipated release of The New World: “He’s fascinated with the world of nature, and he sees the personalities and behaviors of his characters as phenomena no less ‘natural’ than the environments surrounding them. The New World affords him a perfect opportunity to examine contrasts between the notion of a timeless harmony with nature, represented by American Indian society, and the post-Enlightenment idea of taming and harnessing nature to accomplish humanly determined goals, as the English Colonists do.” Willa Cather, My Ántonia (The Willa Cather Scholarly Edition) (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 8. See Helen Thorpe, “The Man Who wasn’t There,” Texas Monthly, December 1998, http://web.ebscohost.com. Writing about the mixed and sometimes perplexed reception of Days of Heaven, Thorpe argues that “people who knew the movie history felt it was patched together, but others saw an epic told in a

122

4

5

Terrence Malick

fantastically sparse style, as if some offbeat poet had brought to life a Willa Cather novel.” Photo-texts include The Inhabitants (1946), God’s Country and My People (1968), Love Affair—A Venetian Journal (1972), and Wright Morris: Photographs and Words (1982). Photo collections include Wright Morris: Structures and Artifacts, Photographs, 1933–54 (from the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery show at the University of Nebraska, 1975), The Wright Morris Portfolio (1981), Time Pieces: The Photographs and Words of Wright Morris, March 16–May 15, 1983 (from an exhibition at The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1983). Aperture Press published Time Pieces: Photographs, Writing and Memory in 1989. Morris’s most recognized combination of photography and fiction is The Home Place (1948). The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art regularly exhibits Morris’s work, noting that he “made his mark on the fields of both writing and photography—a multimedia man avant la lettre—and left a strong imprint in the Bay Area through his teaching at San Francisco State University.” In September 2010 they held a retrospective “Where was the Home Place? Wright Morris at 100” (www.sfmoma.org/events/1712). Two of his novels won the national book award (1957 for The Field of Vision and 1981 for Plains Song), and he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in photography in 1942 and 1946, as well as several awards and fellowships with the National Endowment for the Humanities (1976) and The Arts (1986), including a Life Achievement Award. See “Wright Morris” Contemporary Authors Online, February 25, (2004), http://galenet.galegroup.com: Wright Morris was often referred to as one of America’s finest and most neglected living writers. Born near the geographical center of the nation, Morris explored and defined what it means to be American in more than forty works of fiction, photography, and criticism since 1942. Though these works received “the general indifference of the reading public,” as Jonathan Yardley noted in the Washington Post Book World, Morris garnered substantial critical acclaim and a number of coveted awards, not only for individual novels . . . but also for his life’s work.

6

7 8 9 10

Wright Morris, Ceremony in Lone Tree (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 48. Ibid., 50. Ibid., 48. Ibid., 33. See Barbara Jane Brickman, “Coming of Age in the 1970s: Revision, Fantasy, and Rage in the Teen-Girl Badlands,” Camera Obscura 22, no. 3 (2007), 25–59. Brickman offers a telling analysis of Holly’s reaction to Kit in these opening montages, as the voice-over suggests a kind of James Dean rebel, while the images themselves depict a young man trapped in the least romantic occupations imaginable, literally surrounded by garbage and then shit. Brickman shows that the images—of Kit working cows, and of Holly’s fish “gasping for life” mirror the entrapment they feel as young lovers in Fort Dupree, while also foreshadowing their future as they try to break free, only to find themselves

Fields of Vision: Terrence Malick and Wright Morris

123

pursued and unable to escape society, ending the film in chains, literal and symbolic. 11 See Ron Mottram, “All Things Shining: The Struggle for Wholeness, Redemption and Transcendence in the Films of Terrence Malick,” The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America (London: Wallflower Press, 2003), 13–23. In his retrospective essay on Malick, Mottram argues that “The real issues raised by the war were submerged by the rapid growth of a consumer economy, the American response to communism, and the alienation of young people from mainstream American values and behavior. Kit and Holly are signifiers of this alienation taken to the extreme” (23). See also Helen Thorpe “The Man Who wasn’t There,” where she reinforces this notion that Badlands is essentially viewed from the perspective of the struggling and entrapped adolescents, revealed especially in Holly’s voice-over: Narrated in a deliberately eccentric manner by Sissy Spacek . . . the movie conflates violence with sexual awakening. “I wanted to do a film on what it meant to be fourteen in the Midwest in 1958,” Malick told Women’s Wear Daily in 1974 . . . “I think there are things you’re open to as an adolescent that close up forever afterward. I wanted to show a kind of openness, a vulnerability that disappears later, when you get a little savvier.” 12

13

14

15 16 17

See Hannah Patterson, “Two Characters in Search of a Direction: Motivation and the Construction of Identity in Badlands,” The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America (London: Wallflower Press, 2003), 24–36. Patterson offers a lengthy analysis of the construction of Kit’s personality, and how what he has to “say” bears upon his relationship with Holly and her own motivations and identity. Despite his assertion that he has a lot on his mind to share with Holly, Patterson argues that there is little evidence of such communication. “It is in his attempts to speak then—his urgent need to display his words to others—that he actually reveals his faltering sense of identity” (28). Adrian Danks, “Death Comes as an End: Temporality, Domesticity, and Photography in Terrence Malick’s Badlands,” Senses of Cinema (2000), http:// archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/00/8/badlands.html See 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, no. 4 (2010), 255–66. In this recent review of the philosophical underpinnings of Malick, Rhym points to a typical exegesis that relates to this particular element of my study: “Kit’s imposition of himself on the various everyday objects around him reflects his detachment from their conventional contextualization as he attempts to recontextualize the world around him in a fashion suitable to his own mediated fantasies” (257). Rhym’s long exploration is a good review of much of the complex and extensive work that has been done on Malick in this specific area of inquiry. Wright Morris, The Home Place (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 6. Ibid., 76. Wright Morris, The Territory Ahead: Critical Interpretations in American Literature (New York: Atheneum, 1963), Foreword, n.p.

124 18 19

20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

33

Terrence Malick

Ibid., 230. Joseph J. Wydeven, “Wright Morris,” Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 206: Twentieth-Century American Western Writers, First Series, Gale Group (1999), 222–33, http://galenet.galegroup.com Wright Morris, The Field of Vision (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1974), 144. Ibid., 189. Ibid., 47. Ibid., 45. Morris, Ceremony in Lone Tree, 238. Morris, The Field of Vision, 103. Ibid., 126. Ibid., 129. Ibid., 131. Morris, Ceremony in Lone Tree, 3. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 4–5. See Hannah Patterson, “Two Characters in Search of a Direction.” Patterson explores this scene fully in her study, complete with stills to illustrate, and similarly finds the landscape a key component to the dynamic of the characters and their relationship to their surroundings. “As the two girls move away from the camera across the field, we are struck again by the relatedness of the four characters brought together amid this vast rural expanse, their diminutive statures stressed by the size of the dwarfing wind machine” (34). The religious themes that run throughout Days of Heaven, from its title to the comparisons of Bill/Abby to the biblical faux siblings of Isaac/Rebekah and or Abraham/Sarah, have received extensive treatment by film scholars. Perhaps the most recent and most thorough exploration is offered by Hubert Cohen in “The Genesis of Days of Heaven,” Cinema Journal 42, no. 4 (2003), 46–62. Even so, few critics have addressed the actual words spoken by the Russian Orthodox priest in his blessing of the crop just prior to its harvest. “For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night” (Psalms 90.4). This selection of verse suggests, once again, that Malick wants us to consider not only the impending destruction of this earthly heaven, of which Psalm 90 is chiefly concerned, but also of issues of time and temporality—touching upon the themes that this paper has explored earlier in Badlands, as well as Malick’s well-known interest in the philosophies of Heidegger. Like Morris, Malick chooses to emphasize man’s fleeting time on earth, and his subsequent attempts to register something of permanence within that narrow timeframe. The passage that the priest is about to intone, therefore, takes on some significance as the film cuts away from his liturgy to the scenes of actual harvest: “Thou carriest them away as with a flood; they are as a sleep: in the morning they are like grass which groweth up. In the morning it flourisheth, and groweth up; in the evening it is cut down, and withereth” (Psalms 90.5–6).

Fields of Vision: Terrence Malick and Wright Morris 34

125

See Ben McCann, ““Enjoying the Scenery”: Landscape and the Fetishisation of Nature in Badlands and Days of Heaven,” The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America (London: Wallflower Press, 2003), 75–85. McCann’s essay touches upon many of the issues raised in my study in regard to the human interaction with landscape in both films here under consideration: Placing the human protagonists within the widescreen frame, the subsequent dwarfing of their proportions by the natural surroundings is symbolic of their powerlessness against nature; the lack of human perspective and influence within the greater scheme of things. It also demonstrates how the scenery constantly changes for Holly and Kit during their journey, yet nature’s monumentality remains unaltered. This is best exemplified by the Farmer’s home on the prairie in Days of Heaven, which is positioned within the totality of the landscape, making explicit this isolation. Framing his landscape vistas more majestically through the use of widescreen also makes important statements about the futility of human intervention or impression upon the landscape. (79)

35

36

See Carole Zucker, “ ‘God Don’t Even Hear You,’ or Paradise Lost: Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven,” Literature/Film Quarterly 29, no. 1 (2001), 6. Zucker explores this scopophilia throughout the film, arguing that Bill and the Farmer are engaged in a power struggle of “possession” waged primarily through what they “look” at. “Bill’s first point-of-view shot contains the Farmer’s land and animals. As the narrative progresses his looks incorporate everything he covets, everything that belongs to the Farmer—his house, his possessions, and finally, his wife. The Farmer’s possession of Abby begins when he views her through his telescope.” See Chris Lukinbeal, “Cinematic Landscapes,” Journal of Cultural Geography 23, no. 1 (2005), 3–22. In this study, Lukinbeal explores film from the standpoint of a professor of geography, focusing upon issues of “place, space, spectacle and metaphor” as they are addressed in cinema. Filmmakers have to decide what kind of role they want the landscape to play in their overall vision— either as a realistic backdrop for the main action of the characters, which takes precedence (and for which you do not want the scenery to be a distraction), or for the landscape to serve a larger visual and perhaps symbolic purpose in the film’s overall presentation—to call attention to itself: Cinematic realism seeks to strengthen this disregard by ontologically bridging the divide between real and reel. As long as suspension of disbelief is maintained the viewer’s attention is on the narrative and not on the physical landscape. Suspension of disbelief is destroyed when geographic realism is not maintained. In effect, the viewer figures out the narrative is lying, that the landscape is not really the location being depicted. (17)

Chapter 7

The Belvedere and the Bunkhouse: Space and Place in Days of Heaven1 Ian Rijsdijk

Making Sense of Days of Heaven Reviews of Terrence Malick’s films are often characterized by two types of comment: first, that the films are enigmatic and ambiguously symbolic, and secondly, that they are poetic and aesthetically overwhelming. As Gilberto Perez wrote at the time of its release, Days of Heaven (1978) “drew mixed and largely uncomprehending reactions from the reviewers. Some resorted to the old rule—if you don’t know what it means, praise the photography—while others advanced glib and unwarranted interpretations.”2 Pauline Kael, for one, was as unimpressed by Days of Heaven as she had been by Badlands (1973): “The film is an empty Christmas tree,” she wrote, “you can hang all your dumb metaphors on it,”3 while David Denby even declared it “one of the most . . . senseless movies ever made.”4 Such responses troubled Martin Donougho in 1985 (when it must have seemed as if Malick was gone for good) who was moved to write: “the most puzzling thing is that there has been little attempt to understand [Days of Heaven] at all, as if there were no problem in perceiving what it means.”5 The complaints of pretension against Malick and the defense of his films point toward one area of Malick scholarship that has blossomed particularly vigorously since his “return” to filmmaking with The Thin Red Line (1998): Malick as philosopher, and the philosophical examination of those films he has directed (as writer/ director).6 Perhaps this is all Stanley Cavell’s fault. In his foreword to the enlarged edition of The World Viewed (written in 1979)—and at the moment that

The Belvedere and the Bunkhouse: Days of Heaven

127

Malick quietly disappeared from the Hollywood scene—Cavell makes this tantalizing digression into 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? 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.7 Cavell’s “fragmentary reading” is both powerful and poetic—later he describes human beings in the film “reduced in significance . . . crushed by the fact of beauty left vacant”—but also inconclusive.8 For those seeking further illumination, Malick’s legendary reticence no doubt added to the open-endedness of Cavell’s contemplation, but in hindsight (and with two further Malick films to discuss) Cavell’s reading of Days of Heaven is an early attempt by a philosopher (of the academic sort) to engage with Malick’s films. The departure point here—the leaping off, as it were—is my interest in expanding on Cavell’s brief reading of the film through more concrete analysis, to try to understand the film’s extraordinary singularity (suggested by Cavell in largely impressionistic language). Several elements of the film have aroused the interest of critics and theoreticians, but the two most frequently discussed are the cinematography and Linda’s voice-over. In this chapter, I want to examine the structuring of space in the film, particularly the way in which space is related to place (e.g., the factory and the Farmer’s house) and, in turn, to character. It is Malick’s framing and reframing—through editing and camera mobility—that destabilizes the film’s apparently serene surface of “golden hour” cinematography and poetic realism, and helps develop the drama of looking and desiring that eventually boils over into rage and murder at the film’s end. I would also like to consider the idea of place beyond the confines of aesthetics (“what a beautiful place,” usually framed as landscape in cinematography) and perspective (as in “what takes place in the narrative”), and accept a broader cultural sense of place. The Belvedere and its surrounds—so territorialized by the narrative components of dialogue, cinematography, set design, and editing—becomes a place, personalized by the increasing intimacy of the characters, their glances and gazes across

128

Terrence Malick

the porous boundary between inside and outside. When Bill enters the house while Abby and the Farmer are away on honeymoon, the tranquility of the scene seethes with anxiety and tension as Bill, stealthy as a burglar, finally crosses the threshold into the hallway and moves around inside. The fluid camera movement (loosely from Bill’s point of view) is punctuated by stiff, formal compositions (like the decanter and glasses) as our view of the space is overlayed with Bill’s perspective as Abby’s lover (and coschemer) as well as articulating the deep class division on the farm. Furthermore, the frequent cutaways to workers on the farm, Linda’s meeting with the character Ding-Dong on the train, and the fantastical intervention of the flying performers point to what anthropologist Arturo Escobar proposes is “the emplacement of all cultural practices, which stems from the fact that culture is carried into places by bodies.”9 This view of human bodies and human perceptions as “emplaced” can be usefully applied to theories of the moving image by thinking carefully about the meanings of “space” and “place” in contemporary usage. Edward Casey argues that, “once it is assumed (after Newton and Kant) that space is absolute and infinite as well as empty and a priori in status, places become the mere apportionings of space, its compartmentalizations.”10 It is this philosophical inheritance that leads to the binarism where the “universal” (space) occupies one end, and the “local” (place) holds the other. Casey writes: The idea of transformation from a “sheer physical terrain” and the making of “existential space”—which is to say, place—out of a “blank environment” entails that to begin with there is some empty and innocent spatial spread, waiting, as it were, for cultural configurations to render it placeful. But when does this “to begin with” exist? And where is it located?11 Casey’s inquiry into the subordination of place by space echoes in certain respects inquiries into the position of the subject in cinema. In some theories, and in most popular writing on cinema, the space of the image, through its visual and aural verisimilitude, is assumed to be a priori, as “being” before the viewer sees it. However, as the narrative progresses, and the characters’ relation to their world develops, the viewer develops a sense of place, of how characters relate to their environment, change the places in which they find themselves and move between places. Casey’s phenomenological thesis concludes in terms that offer an interesting approach to “understanding” and not just “perceiving” Days of

The Belvedere and the Bunkhouse: Days of Heaven

129

Heaven: “as places gather bodies in their midst in deeply encultured ways, so cultures conjoin bodies in concrete circumstances of emplacement.”12 With this in mind I want to examine a brief sequence from Days of Heaven within in the context of certain theories of narrative space in cinema, and for this I need to return (briefly) to Stanley Cavell.

(Mis)Reading the Movies Writing of his observations of the films that contributed to The World Viewed, Cavell explains: I was always aware that my descriptions of passages were liable to contain errors, of content and sequence. I have not attempted to correct such errors in this reprinting, wanting neither to disguise the liabilities of the spirit in which the work was composed nor to disguise the need for a study of what may be remembered in any art and for a study of how using an analyzing machine may modify one’s experience of a film.13 Moreover, in his preface of 1971, he notes that, “a few faulty memories will not themselves shake my conviction in what I’ve said, since I am as interested in how a memory went wrong as in why memories that are right occur when they do.”14 In examining the following brief sequence from Days of Heaven, I will invoke Cavell’s caveat before returning to the scene of the crime with a fuller view via the aid of modern viewing technology (widescreen television, DVD, and newly “restored” editions of films).15 What struck me immediately after watching the film for the first time was that it appeared to be an epic, but was not epic at all. Gone with the Wind, Ben Hur, Dr Zhivago, Giant—these were the epics of traumatic affairs set against the sweep of history that I knew. Even the gloom of Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon was (as Spartacus had been) set amidst massed ranks of extras, marching, fighting, and dying to dramatic effect, while the prolonged agony of the titular heroes was exhausting. Days of Heaven promised a Giant—dramatic landscapes, secret love, betrayal, the slow passage of time—and yet the narrative was breathless at times as scenes were trimmed bare in an almost perfunctory fulfillment of narrative continuity (consider, for example, the economy of the scenes where the Farmer proposes to Abby, followed by Bill and Abby discussing the proposal). It featured four protagonists, but very few other characters who said more than a few lines. Death was a rare occurrence, and banal when

130

Terrence Malick

it happened, and you weren’t quite sure whether you liked this character Bill enough to care about him when he died. The film’s Western visions—of wheatfields and the margins of the prairie—were a far cry from Ford’s singular re-creation of Monument Valley that supplied many of the conventional images of the Western landscape.16 What animosity should have existed between the individual hero and “the system” was constantly undermined by either the furtive, sympathetic mumblings of Linda in voice-over, or else the fact that the Farmer—even as he exploited the workers—didn’t seem like such a bad guy. As Joan McGettigan has subsequently written: “In a series of reversals, the film introduces and even elevates characteristics of the western, and then reveals them as illusions.”17 The more I thought about it, the more I felt that Malick’s filming of space was crucial to the film’s power. Watching the film a second time I noticed what I thought at the time was a very interesting cut. (See Appendix for a transcript of the scene.) I have not been fortunate enough to see Days of Heaven at the cinema, and these early viewings of the film were from a VHS copy played on a regular television in the early 1990s. In the times I viewed it subsequently I used that same VHS copy on a variety of television monitors, none of which had a widescreen or letterboxing facility. As a result, the flagpole in shot B of the transcript (Figure 1) was not visible as the edges of the frame were missing in the television format. My view of the sequence was, therefore, that (1) the

Figure 1 2007)

The Belvedere (Days of Heaven, 1978. The Criterion Collection,

The Belvedere and the Bunkhouse: Days of Heaven

131

Farmer walks out of his house toward the camera, and (2) the workers walk out of their house toward the camera (Figure 2). Therefore, because of the contiguity of the shots and, hence, the loose matches on action, one could assume that the two structures faced one another. The similar shot scale also suggested that they were relatively close to one another, and so, when the traveling shot of the trucks in shot C (Figure 3) revealed the Farmer’s house in extreme long shot, one was

Figure 2 The Bunkhouse (Days of Heaven, 1978. The Criterion Collection, 2007)

Figure 3 2007)

The Workers Arrive (Days of Heaven, 1978. The Criterion Collection,

132

Terrence Malick

suddenly aware (1) of the profound distance between the owner’s house and the workers’ bunkhouse, and (2) that the worker’s bunkhouse did not in fact face the owner’s but rather faced away, thereby masking the lives of the workers from the owner (and vice versa). Rather than facing the people who work for him, the Farmer looks out over them, surveying them from a distance as he does the fields of wheat they will harvest for him. When the foreman offers his terse response to the question, “Whose place is that?” the strict separation of labor and capital reiterates in dialogue what is simultaneously suggested through the construction of diegetic space. We might like the Farmer, but the organization of the shots tells us we should never forget his status relative to the itinerant workers he exploits in order to make him “the richest man in the panhandle.” When I got to watch a good DVD copy of the film on a television with widescreen capability, I was annoyed to see that I had been wrong: the flagpole is visible in shot B, and so there is no “trick” in the sudden appearance of that expanse of ground and the bunkhouse facing the “wrong” way. Part of my theory of the film lay in tatters, I thought. However, the more I thought about the film and rewatched it (another luxury not available to Cavell in 1971), the more I realized that my original thoughts were not wholly invalidated by the revelation of a full-screen view of the film. To begin with, other elements of the cinematic language prompted me to consider more carefully the relationship between narrative and the construction of diegetic space. In the extreme long shot (C) the Farmer is a tiny speck in the distance but his white shirt radiates brilliantly, a vivid yet distant “eye-stop” in contrast to the cluttered but drab foreground. And, in shot D, just how crunchy is that apple, given how far away he stands from the camera? It was not just the organization of diegetic space that was provocative, but shot composition and the use of sound too suggested a deployment of film language more complex than describing the simple action of workers arriving at the farm. What I thought was a trick was really a more subtle but no less manipulative use of camera mobility and the perceived spatial relations between contiguous shots. Extensive study has been devoted to the film’s sound design and voice-over by, among others, Janet Wondra and Charlotte Crofts. However, I would like to outline some of the theories that have a bearing on the understanding of spatiality in film (including the convention of shot/reverse shot editing) with the following statement by Julian

The Belvedere and the Bunkhouse: Days of Heaven

133

Hochberg (as cited by Bordwell et al. in The Classical Hollywood Cinema) in mind: “The task of the filmmaker . . . is to make the viewer pose a visual question, and then answer it for him.”18 In this sequence from Days of Heaven, one could argue that the editing gives the wrong answer to the question, or at least forces the viewer to pose the question a second time.

Suture, Cognitive Mapping, and Reframing Hollywood narrative filmmaking depends largely on creating the illusion of spatial unity and continuity of action in the diegesis through conventions such as shot/reverse shot, eyeline matches, synchronized sound, and sound fidelity; but Days of Heaven fractures these conventions in critical ways, creating apertures within the narrative that provoke the viewer not only to “fill in the spaces,” but also to question the ways in which the film structures meaning for the viewer. In film textbooks, students are usually taught the two rules of angles that govern field/reverse field setups (as opposed to shot/reverse shot as I will explain). The 180-degree rule, structured around an imaginary axis that connects two actors across which the camera may not move, produces structured diegetic space so that spectators can orientate themselves correctly in relation to the characters and the space. The 30-degree rule proposes that no shot takes place within that angle from the point of view of the previous shot, preventing “jump cuts” which would introduce a false point of view into the space.19 Two theories concerning how we are able to understand the field/reverse field in film are valuable in contextualizing this sequence from Days of Heaven: suture and cognitive mapping. In exploring these two ideas, I make no claims that a specific technique is pioneered by a filmmaker (in this case Malick) or that s/he frames a particular theory better than another filmmaker, as is often the case with film theorists and historians.20 Rather, I am interested in how these theories can help one to understand the ways in which screen space is constructed, not because one theory works better than the other, but because with both one gains a greater understanding of films for their duration (as opposed to just a scene or a shot) and film styles (as opposed to just one film or mode of film production). In this instance, an understanding of how the sequence of the workers’ arrival produces meaning allows one to follow multiple interpretive strands through the

134

Terrence Malick

films without relying on hierarchy of character and dialogue (which Malick eschews through the relative paucity of dialogue and the frequent dislocation of Linda’s voice-over from the coterminous action on-screen). Both theories seek to answer the same question, framed by Bordwell thus: “1. A character looks offscreen. 2. A second character looks offscreen in the opposite direction. From this pair of shots, the spectator typically infers that the two areas are more or less contiguous and that the characters are looking at each other. How are we to explain these inferences?”21 Suture uses Lacanian psychoanalysis to describe realization of offscreen space as absence, thereby producing a traumatic fracture between presence and absence which requires the suturing of the spectator back into the illusory unity of the image. Cognitive mapping, based in cognitive psychology, holds that, through making and testing hypotheses using patterns of knowledge, or schemata, the spectator constantly constructs and reconstructs or discard his/her perceptions of the world. In film terms, the spectator responds to contiguous images by evaluating their relation according to a variety of possible patterns and conventions: narrative context (what’s happening in the story), other filmic cues (such as sound or dialogue), or continuity of action, for example. The theory of “suture” has experienced a rather bumpy ride in film scholarship. After entering mainstream film scholarship through the essay “La Suture” by Jean-Pierre Oudart in 1969, it was seized upon by Daniel Dayan in Film Quarterly (1974), and elicited a forceful rebuttal by William Rothman in the same journal a year later. Screen then published a dossier of articles in 1977, including a translation of Oudart’s original essay, “Cinema and Suture.” From here the theory has been applied and critiqued in a variety of contexts, notably by Stephen Heath, Kaja Silverman, David Bordwell, and Edward Branigan.22 Watching the shot from Buster Keaton’s 1926 film The General that Oudart describes, one senses the delicious surprise of the Confederate troops creeping up (or is it forward?) into the bottom of the frame, and the viewer’s awareness of a second, ghostly, point of view at play.23 Oudart articulates his surprise in this oft-quoted passage: This unreal space which a moment ago was the field of [the spectator’s] jouissance has become the distance separating the camera from the protagonists who are no longer present, who no longer have the

The Belvedere and the Bunkhouse: Days of Heaven

135

innocent “being-there-ness” of a moment ago, but instead have a “being-there-for-ness.” Phrased in this way, the idea of an “innocent” space, complicated by the intrusion of another perspective so as to radically change the potentiality of the action, intersects with Casey’s outline of our conventional understanding of space and place, of the “empty and innocent spatial spread, waiting, as it were, for cultural configurations to render it placeful.” The further description of the place of the action through editing (which, admittedly, is not Oudart’s primary concern) produces the compartmentalizations of the image originally perceived, converting space into place. However, Oudart’s “reading” of the shot is not only undermined by misreading (Branigan notes that the “rise above the river” is not “hidden by the position of the camera” but is clearly visible at the bottom of the screen), but one can also frame the spectator’s jouissance in different terms.24 As someone who has watched a considerable number of combat films (and thus has patterns of knowledge regarding the genre and its conventions), I did not experience the “vertiginous delight” of “the unreal space separating the two groups,” but rather appreciated the significance of the high ground. Given that the Union Forces have been represented as the enemy for the whole film, the viewer is placed in a very specific position: as witness before the event to an ambush by the heroes of the enemy, a particular pleasure in the war film. What is more interesting in the scene from The General is the shot that follows: a row of cannons with soldiers standing by ready to fire. One assumes, owing to the structure of the previous “surprise” shot that they, too, are part of the ambush, but at no point is their proximity to the soldiers in the first shot confirmed, “through match or overlap.”25 Keaton (as the character Charlie Gray) links the spaces narratively by walking from one location to the other, but the extreme long shots are reserved for the Confederate point of view of the Union troops retreating and a shot down the river that shows both warring parties on opposite sides of the screen. This is not a pedantic critique of Oudart; what it does show is how a preexisting body of knowledge (in the form of the combat film genre, for example) and the reconstructing of the possible meaning of a shot within the context of the ensuing action can produce an equally satisfactory experience for the viewer.

136

Terrence Malick

It would be tempting to see the sequence from Days of Heaven as another neat test case for the theory of “suture” if only because it is grounded in a similar moment of surprise and partial misreading on the part of an interested spectator. But that would be a mistake. Primarily, Oudart frames his theory within the context of a single shot, even if a subsequent shot assumes the position in the reverse field: “prior to any semantic ‘exchange’ between two images . . . and within the framework of a cinematic énoncé constructed on a shot/reverse shot principle, the appearance of a lack perceived as a Some One (the Absent One) is followed by its abolition by someone (or something) placed within the same field—everything happening within the same shot or rather within the filmic space defined by the same take.”26 The slippage between “shot” and “take” is interesting, as if Oudart qualifies his expression to include the possibility of either mobile framing, or the “invasion” of the frame by offscreen space. The mobile framing of shot D in the scene from Days of Heaven is one indicator of Malick’s deliberate attempt to comment on the spatial relations in the sequence, but it comes at the end of the sequence, becoming, in effect, a reestablishing shot rather than an establishing shot. The theory of suture encourages a scrutinization of offscreen space which is crucial in understanding how narrative process works. However, beyond the bliss in the illusion of unity, disturbed by the recognition of a structured absence and the frantic suturing of this “wound” in our perception, cognitive mapping offers the spectator a model for the constant “refreshing” of narrative space as shot follows shot. Crucial to this understanding of narrative spatiality is the way in which classical narrative, as Stephen Heath notes, “determine[s] filmic procedures . . . as narrative instances (very much as ‘cues’), exhaustively, without gap or contradiction.”27 One’s understanding of the meaning of a shot is contextualized by the preceding and subsequent shots, because a movie is exactly that, a complex of shots: we don’t gather meaning or pleasure from a film by witnessing only one shot. Moreover, shot/reverse shot editing is not necessarily the dominant form of editing in a feature film, and so the information the spectator uses to anticipate and confirm the relation between shots is not just determined by the camera (screen space, offscreen space, angle and shot scale), but also by varieties of sound (dialogue, voice-over, environmental noise, nondiegetic sound) and the type of edit used. Bordwell writes: “Contrary to Oudart, the viewer checks the shot against what he or she expected to see and adjusts

The Belvedere and the Bunkhouse: Days of Heaven

137

hypotheses accordingly. By using conventional schemata to produce and test hypotheses about a string of shots, the viewer often knows each shot’s salient spatial information before it appears.”28 In addition, each new piece of information prompts the spectator to produce a new “cognitive map” of the diegetic space, and also offers a framework to test ruptures in the diegesis (like Branigan’s “impossible place,” Žižek’s “interface,” or effects such as the split screen).29 Ultimately, suture and cognitive mapping are two theories that demonstrate how we make sense of the disjointed illusion of reality of cinema: as Branigan asserts, “Every theory of framing is an attempt to describe in the broadest sense how the mind handles ‘discontinuity’—a perceived break, a difference, or caesura.”30 Branigan, in fact, offers the most useful approach to understanding the editing choices in this scene and their effect on the narrative. In his book Narrative Comprehension and Film he demonstrates that what appears to be a simple shot/reverse shot through a window in Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps is, in fact, a “false” perspective: the window bars in the first shot remain in the same relation to the frame in the second shot (thereby undermining the “new” point of view of the second shot).31 Branigan argues: The important point is that the graphics of the screen complete a pattern in parallel with the completion of a coherent pattern in the story space. In such a situation, screen space neither directly opposes nor reinforces story space, nor is it neutral; instead it complements story space. I will therefore call this an “integrated match” between the two shots. It is a moment in which our top-down processing of space—our expectation of what an invariant space in the story world should look like under a particular transformation—is smoothly integrated with our bottom-up perception of the new shapes on the screen.32 This more nuanced version of the cognitive mapping theory supports the claim that the sudden appearance of space between two places on the screen (the Belvedere and the bunkhouse) does not completely shatter the spectator’s attempt to map the space of the diegesis, but rather requires the spectator to reconcile the space that should be there with the space that is there. Malick uses a compound shot of the bunkhouse to reveal the contiguity of offscreen space while using the shift in perspective of the cut to delineate the diegetic space of the farm: its territorial boundaries are established before the girl asks her obvious question of the foreman.

138

Terrence Malick

This process of recognition and inquiry—a cognitive double take— leads the spectator to reassess the construction of space up to this point, and to anticipate further incidences of spatial mapping to come. For Branigan, “the integrated match is also a moment when . . . metaphors joining style with story become especially tempting for the spectator,” because they provide possible ways of understanding the narrative.33 Thus Days of Heaven is about much more than a love triangle on the level of melodrama, class antagonism on the level of representation, or a western on the level of iconography. The final piece of the puzzle in this scene from Days of Heaven involves reframing, here in the form of camera mobility. There are many different ways in which a director can “reframe” the action, a particular aspect of film not generally shared by theater. Editing can produce reframing in numerous ways that provide for temporal continuity and spatial relocation (a simple shot/reverse shot conversation taking place in a single time and place), temporal dislocation and spatial continuity (as in reminiscences via the use of facial morphing), or simply moving to a new part of the narrative through a simple cut (indicating a new time and space). In all cases, the narrative explains such discontinuity, rendering these gymnastic leaps through time and space sensible and “normal.” The movement of the camera also “reframes” the screen space in various ways. Though radical examples might include the almost nauseating gyroscopic camera used by Gaspar Noé in Irreversible, or Aleksandr Sokurov’s “single-shot” tour de force in Russian Ark, the very fact of the camera moving redirects the spectator’s possible view of the action. In the famous first meeting between Walter Neff and Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity, the camera “brackets” (to use Noël Carroll’s term) Phyllis as she paces back and forth while Walter delivers his sales pitch offscreen.34 We watch Phyllis think, made more apparent by the camera leaving behind the speaker who should, conventionally, occupy the screen. Tracking, panning, tilting, zooming, and racking focus all reframe with distinctly different effects; however, fundamental to all these forms of reframing is the onus placed on the spectator to reorient themselves in relation to the space and time of the narrative. This “constant renewal of perspective” as Heath describes, is not just about the technique of camera movement, but is determined by narrative logic: “the conversion of seen into scene.”35 This equates, in the context of the scene from Days of Heaven, to the conversion of space into place, from the space between

The Belvedere and the Bunkhouse: Days of Heaven

139

the Belvedere and the bunkhouse, to the place of the workers in relation to the Farmer as subjects to be gazed over, rewarded, punished, and courted.

Owning the Gaze The harmony and counterpoint of style and story is present in Days of Heaven from the moment Saint-Saëns’ parlor piece “The Aquarium” rises on the soundtrack and the montage of carefully reframed black-and-white photographs begins. Is the choice of music an ironic comment on naturalism’s scientific observation of the human condition, or (in its “classical” orientation) an explicit contrast to the folk music that will be heard later in the film, supplementing the class conflict apparent in the narrative?36 The opening shot (excluding the skillful appending of a still shot of actress Linda Manz to the title montage) suggests Charles Sheeler’s precisionist painting American Landscape (1930) with its chimney stacks, ashen sky, and solitary figure almost lost against the mountainous factory (the man may or may not be Bill, given that he’s allegedly late for work in the ensuing scene). This establishing shot, along with the shot that follows—of workers (mostly women) scavenging for scrap metal—firmly establishes place: space in relation to class and gender. Style and story are in accordance, until we enter the factory’s thundering, fiery interior and meet Bill. A handheld camera follows Bill as he repeats a weary circle of shoveling coal and tossing it into a furnace, while a foreman barks alongside, audible only intermittently. One of Bill’s coworkers (played by Malick himself) mouths, “You’re late” which is wholly inaudible: one only “learns” what the dialogue is by watching the film on DVD with subtitles. It is in the argument between Bill and the foreman that Malick makes his first significant departure from filmic convention. “Rather than privileging intelligible dialogue,” Crofts notes, “the film utilizes a sound perspective which frustrates the narrative desire of the spectator—we do not know what their argument is about or whether Bill’s blow leaves the foreman alive or dead.”37 It is an almost Godardian tactic, and one finds oneself straining to hear a word over the pounding machinery before realizing that the words do not matter—the fact of Bill’s action does. Bill is defined by action and noise: even as a sacker on the farm he is surrounded by tractors, harvesters, threshers, and furnaces.

140

Terrence Malick

If, as Heath notes, “the voice is the point of the unity [of sound an image]: at once subservient to the images and entirely dominant in the dramatic space it opens in them” then the consequence of this incident is profound.38 Without Bill’s side of the dispute, or Linda’s defense of her brother, the spectator is unsure what to think of Bill, or the clash of victimized laborer and exploitative capital that the scene suggests. Things aren’t helped by Linda either. Instead of explaining the action on-screen, or even establishing a temporal relation to the narrative, Linda’s voice, “provides a counterpoint, directing our attention subtly to the separation between knowledge and power, voice and vision, vision and knowledge.”39 As Crofts notes, Malick not only subverts the centrality of the human voice in film sound, ironically by conforming to realist expectations of sound and proximity, but also challenges the “imperative of synchronization” by which sound recreates the “real” through the wholesale reconstruction of the soundtrack.40 The two scenes of Bill in the foundry and the workers arriving at the farm play out inside the first 8 minutes and clearly foreground the complex relationship between sound and image that develops through the film. Both scenes force the spectator to reevaluate conventions of spatial representation (in terms of sound and editing) while the voice-over undermines not only the authority of the narrator (Linda ignores or does not comment on the coterminous image) but also the narrator’s place in relation to the narrative (where or when is Linda making her comments?). The result is a complicated treatment of the film’s themes: class conflict, engagement with the natural world, and the deterioration and emergence of American myths. The film’s theme of class conflict, for example, is complicated by several factors. If Bill and the Farmer are representatives of the opposition between labor and capital, then the conflict they represent is already over. Bill cannot have what the Farmer has by overwhelming him in a class war; he can only have it by substituting himself for the Farmer. In this sense, the film is closer to Richard Slotkin’s proposition that “in the West, both capitalists and workers are descendants of the conquering race who ‘explored the West and reared a golden empire.’ ”41 Slotkin cites sociologist Emma Langdon, whose 1905 investigation into the Western labor wars of the late 1890s found the laborers, “of the characteristic frontiersman type, come not so much to find work as to seek a fortune. Rough, ready, fearless, used to shifting

The Belvedere and the Bunkhouse: Days of Heaven

141

for themselves; shrewd, full of expedients; reckless, ready to cast everything on a single die.”42 Bill very much fits this description, even though he comes from an urban background. However, his violence is directed more toward figures of authority, the owners’ minions rather than the owners themselves. Days of Heaven might feint toward both naturalism and a Puritan tradition of jeremiadic pessimism, but by eschewing a sustained polemical stance on class, and by refusing to judge his characters for their moral inconsistency, the film refers to both traditions without subscribing to either one. Instead, in the character of the Farmer, Malick produces a mythical merging of late nineteenth-century Populism (emphasizing the individual owner/producer) and corporate entrepreneurship (a cash-crop producer free of the evil, monopolizing grasp of land trusts or the railroad companies). Bill, in a more deliberately political context, is a product of urban radicalism, though he is not really resentful of corporate success; rather, he is shattered by the realization that he will never make “the big score.” Like Kit in Badlands, Bill is not a class rebel who hates the rich—he likes their lifestyle too much. Janet Wondra argues that the film’s theme of class conflict is inseparable from an understanding of gender and power. Notably, it is through the exchange of gazes that the film’s class struggle is dramatized . . . the film presents the shifts in power between owner and worker as well as Bill’s desperate search for a place in which he can have a gaze of his own.43 This is precisely where the careful construction of space and the development of senses of place become most apparent. The use of shot scale, mobile framing, and editing constantly forces the spectator to interpret the proximity of characters to one another and to spaces on the screen. The conversion of space into place is fully underway in two brief scenes where Bill, Abby, and Linda’s proximity to the house is suddenly realized. In the first scene Bill (in close-up) rummages along some shelves, looking for ointment. Only when the camera follows his movement is his location revealed—inside a doctor’s wagon at the front door of the Farmer’s house. From here, he eavesdrops on the doctor giving the Farmer “maybe a year” to live (one assumes). Interestingly, the possible tension Malick might build should Bill be found hiding behind the

142

Terrence Malick

wagon is defused by a cut to the Farmer in close-up bridged by a voiceover from Linda that actually confirms the action: “He knew he was going to die.” Shortly thereafter, Abby and Linda are seen herding peacocks, and in a wide shot of Linda the camera finally rests, as it does so often in the film, on the solitary majesty of the house. The Farmer, hidden from view as he lies in the grass, rises up and greets Abby. Once again, the proximity of the house is a surprise, reminding the spectator that there is no fence around the house. The barriers of class and wealth are intangibly articulated, voiced by the foreman but without the visible referents to make his warning spatially unambiguous. Later, it is the Farmer who “invades” Abby’s space by spying on her through his telescope as she works in the fields. The viewer sees exactly what the Farmer sees by the mask over them lens mimicking the telescope’s field of vision in a gaze that is “both classed and gendered.”44 Malick’s arrangement of privileged places, and the slow erasure of the boundaries delineating those places, reaches a climax when Bill is given caretakership of the house. Like Kit in Badlands when he walks through the Rich Man’s house (another nameless member of the ruling establishment), Bill seems in awe of what he sees, curious and, at the same, reluctant to move anything or even make a noise. He seems uncertain how to behave, as if propriety has momentarily got the better of him. Significantly, Bill crosses the threshold of the Farmer’s house while Abby and the Farmer share their honeymoon: he crosses into the realm of his desires and ambition at the moment he begins to lose Abby. Notably, too, the gamboling, irrepressible Linda is nowhere to be seen. The house—based upon Edward Hopper’s painting House by the Railroad (1925)—is the film’s central site of emplacement.45 “Sublimely rootless,” in John Orr’s words, and architecturally alien, the house is also entirely American in its declaration of infinite possibility, one man’s citadel in an endless expanse of tamed land with its wilderness driven out or shot for sport.46 While a hubristic display of mastery over nature (its construction is entirely illogical in such terrain), it is also a repository of European classical learning, an oasis of advancement where Abby will attempt drawing, and Linda will briefly encounter academic education. On their first night, the Farmer asks Abby if “all this feels strange” to her, to which she mutely nods her head. Two brief static shots follow

The Belvedere and the Bunkhouse: Days of Heaven

143

before they depart on their honeymoon and the Farmer suggests that Bill move his things into the house. First there is a low-angle shot of a lit window which one assumes is the bedroom window: for the first time, we know there are inhabitants, and we can only assume that it is Bill who is looking up at that time of night. There follows a close-up of a locust on a leaf, a foreshadowing of the events to follow and a clear indication that the tragedy has more to do with the flawed marriage just consummated than nature wreaking its revenge on industrial man. In the scenes I have examined here, one can see how an awareness of the film’s style can take the spectator beyond the mere appreciation of beauty or the disapproval of abstraction. In the factory scene, sound is used to deny the spectator an opportunity to make easy assumptions of character and motivation while Linda’s voice-over dislodges the authority vested in voice-over narration and lets it roam metadiegetically, in the present, in anticipation, and in retrospect. The workers’ arrival at the farm confirms the spatial organization of the farm in terms of class to which the “integrated match” draws our attention while the subsequent scenes efficiently trespass into the space of the Belvedere, using careful reframing and narrative ellipsis. Rather than striving for a unity of sound and image, the framing and cutting produces apertures in the narrative requiring a search for meaning by the spectator rather than delivering meaning to the spectator. A series of looks develops within the diegesis based on class and gender, but also cognizant of fundamental American myths (the frontier and its disappearance) and historical conditions (Abby’s ongoing journey aboard a train full of more doomed lovers). Central to this complex of looks is the organization of space on-screen and the emergence of places in which the characters’ relations to one another and their relation to the world in which they find themselves are determined. The tragic misinterpretation of Bill’s farewell to Abby by the Farmer which ultimately results in the deaths of both men is not a bitter irony at all, but an inevitable outcome of the character’s emplacement, secured by the subtle deployment of editing and cinematography.

APPENDIX: Days of Heaven (Sequence Transcript) This scene depicts the arrival of the migrant laborers at the wheat farm. The scene starts at 6'27" and finishes at 7'29".

Shot

Visual Image

Dialogue

Sound, Music, Writing

A 00:06:27 00:06:42 00:06:56 00:07:06 dissolve

[A] Wheatfields, evening. A motley array of vehicles moves past a stationary eye-level camera. Horse-drawn carts and early trucks are piled with migrant workers. [B] The camera begins to move, tracking and following a cart in the procession [C] As the skeletal wooden entrance comes into shot, the camera cranes upward, revealing the low rolling hills of wheat and, eventually, the farm house that stands prominently in the distance.

Motors running; then the clatter of cart wheels and horses whinnying becomes more apparent. Insects and frogs are heard. At 6'52", the camera begins its upward movement and from here the sounds of the insects and frogs grow louder. By the end of the shot, the trucks and carts are almost “drowned out” by the sounds of animals.

B 00:07:06 00:07:13

Long Shot of the Farmer’s house from a slightly low angle. The car and flag to the left of the house are visible. The Farmer stands on the porch. He walks down the steps toward the camera.

C 00:07:13 00:07:19 00:07:24

[A] Long Shot of a house (the workers’ house) with geese in the foreground. Two men emerge from the house. The camera is stationary until the truck we saw briefly earlier enters the frame from the left [B] The camera tracks with the truck, revealing the Farmer’s house in the distance.

As the image of the house emerges, so the sound of the wind-generator on the roof is heard. The Farmer is heard stepping down the wooden steps. Geese heard. Motors heard before the trucks enters the frame. A child’s voice is also heard. Noise grows as more vehicles enter the frame.

D 00:07:24 00:07:29

Long Shot, again at a slightly low angle: the Farmer looks on and bites into an apple.

E 00:07:29 00:07:38

Long Shot: The camera follows a truck into the frame from the right, and then tracks Ursula as she gets down and asks the question. The Farmer’s house is visible in the distance, the laborer’s house middle-frame on the left.

The “wind-generator” is heard. A bite is taken out of an apple. Linda’s friend: So whose place Trucks and general noise of people getis that? ting down from the trucks. Foreman: The owner’s—don’t any of you go up around there either.

The Belvedere and the Bunkhouse: Days of Heaven

145

Notes 1

2

3

4 5

6

7

8 9

10

11 12 13

14 15

While the house in Days of Heaven is never named, Malick’s original script from 1976 includes the following description: “EXT. BELVEDERE. At the center of the bonanza, amid a tawny sea of grain, stands a gay Victorian house, three stories tall. Where most farm houses stand more sensibly on low ground, protected from the elements, ‘The Belvedere’ occupies the highest ridge around, commanding the view and esteem of all.” The name is loaded with meaning given its derivation: bel (Italian—beautiful) + vedere (from Latin—to see). Gilberto Perez, “Film Chronicle: Days of Heaven,” The Hudson Review 32, no. 1 (1979), 97. Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies: A Guide from A–Z (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982), 137. Vlada Petric, “Review of Days of Heaven,” Film Quarterly 32, no. 2 (1978–1979), 37. Martin Donougho, “West of Eden: Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven,” Post Script 5, no. 1 (1985), 17. The terminology of film criticism draws one into some knotty problems in theories of the moving image. For example, “filmmaking” in this context implies a modern sense of the auteur—a director whose name is used to position a film within a given market. In this context, one should not overlook Malick’s involvement in other film projects in the years between the release of Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line, as well as his role as producer in recent years (e.g., Endurance (1999, dir. Leslie Woodhead, Bud Greenspan); The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition (2000, dir. George Butler); Xingfu shiguang [Happy Times] (2000, d/ Yimou Zhang); The Beautiful Country (2004, d/ Hans Peter Moland); Undertow (2004, dir. David Gordon Green); and most recently, Amazing Grace (2006, dir. Michael Apted). Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed (enlarged edition) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), xiv–xv. Cavell admits that Malick had translated Heidegger years before (though he does not admit that he knows Malick himself). Cavell, The World Viewed, xvi. Arturo Escobar, “Culture Sits in Places: Reflections on Globalism and Subaltern Strategies of Localization,” Political Geography 20 (2001), 143. Edward S. Casey, “How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time: Phenomenological Prolegomena,” Senses of Place, ed. Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso (Sante Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1996), 14. Casey, “How to Get from Space to Place,” 14. Casey, “How to Get from Space to Place,” 46. Cavell, The World Viewed, ix. Noël Burch makes a similar admission in his book Praxis du Cinema (1969, trans. Helen R. Lane as Theory of Film Practice London: Secker & Warburg, 1973), 31 n. 1. Cavell, The World Viewed, xxiv. The Criterion Collection released a restored DVD version of Days of Heaven in 2007.

146 16

17

18

19

20

21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29

30 31

32 33

Terrence Malick

See Edward Buscombe’s deft deconstruction of an image from My Darling Clementine in which he notes the incongruity of sagura cactuses in Monument Valley (“Inventing Monument Valley: Nineteenth-Century Landscape Photography and the Western Film,” in Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video, ed. Patrice Petro [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995], 107). Joan McGettigan, “Days of Heaven and the Myth of the West,” The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America (2nd ed.), ed. Hannah Patterson (London: Wallflower Press, 2007), 52. David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960 (London: Routledge, 1985), 59. The extreme mobility of the camera, in concert with increased video-game point-of-view perspectives and the influence of performer-oriented shooting styles in music video, has made the jump cut far more common in contemporary film. See, for example, Jean-Pierre Oudart’s analysis of Bresson in “Cinema and Suture,” Screen 18, no. 4 (1977), 35–47; Noël Burch’s analysis of Renoir in “Nana, or Two Kinds of Space,” in Theory of Film Practice (17–31), or even Barry Salt’s exhaustive investigations of technique in early cinema in “The Early Development of Film Form,” Film Form 1, no. 1 (1976), 91–106, and “Statistical Style Analysis of Motion Pictures,” Film Quarterly 28, no. 1 (1974), 13–22. David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (London: Routledge, 1985), 110. Daniel Dayan, “The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema,” Film Quarterly 28, no. 1 (1974), 438–51, and William Rothman’s “Against ‘the System of Suture,’ ” 451–68, can both be found in Movies and Methods (vol. 1), edited by Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). Stephen Heath, Questions of Cinema (Bloomington: Indian University Press, 1981). Edward Branigan provides an excellent summation and exploration in Projecting a Camera: Language-Games in Film Theory (New York: Routledge, 2006), 133–45. Oudart, “Cinema and Suture,” 41. Branigan, Projecting a Camera, 291–2 n. 81. Branigan, Projecting a Camera, 294 n. 84. Oudart, “Cinema and Suture,” 37. Heath, Questions of Cinema, 43. Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, 112. Heath writes: “ ‘Impossible,’ of course, is here decided in respect of the ‘possible’ positions of the observer moving about, the disturbance involved seen as a disjunction of the unity of narration and narrated, enunciation and announced” (Questions of Cinema, 49). Slavoj Žižek, The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieślowski between Theory and Post-Theory (London: British Film Institute, 2001), 52–4. M. Night Shyamalan’s opening shot of Unbreakable is an excellent example. Branigan, Projecting a Camera, 143. Edward Branigan, Narrative Comprehension and Film (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 56–60. Branigan, Narrative Comprehension and Film, 60. Branigan, Narrative Comprehension and Film, 61.

The Belvedere and the Bunkhouse: Days of Heaven 34

35 36

37

38 39

40

41

42 43

44 45

46

147

Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Motion Pictures (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), 124–33. Overall, however, Carroll’s analysis places too little emphasis on sound for my liking. See also Malcolm Turvey’s analysis of a sequence from Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt in Doubting Vision: Film and the Revelationist Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 117–20. Heath, Questions of Cinema, 36, 37. For further examination of Malick’s use of this particular piece, see Richard Power, “Listening to the Aquarium: The Symbolic Use of Music in Days of Heaven,” 103–11, and James Wierzbicki, “Sound as Music in the Films of Terrence Malick,” 112–24, both in Patterson (ed.), The Cinema of Terrence Malick. Charlotte Crofts, “From the ‘Hegemony of the Eye’ to the ‘Hierarchy of Perception’: The reconfiguration of sound and image in Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven,” Journal of Media Practice 2, no.1 (2001), 25. It is remarkable how many critics and scholars assume that Bill kills the foreman. Heath, Questions of Cinema, 55. Janet Wondra, “A Gaze Unbecoming: Schooling the Child for Femininity in Days of Heaven,” Wide Angle 16, no. 4 (1994), 9. Crofts uses two key texts in this regard: Michel Chion’s The Voice in Cinema, edited and translated by Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); and Mary Ann Doane’s essay, “Ideology and the Practice of Sound Editing and Mixing,” Film Sound: Theory and Practice, edited by Elizabeth Weiss and John Belton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 54–62. Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Atheneum, 1992), 162. In Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation (1992), 162. Janet Wondra, “Marx in a Texas Love Triangle: ‘Marrying Up’ and the Classed Gaze in Days of Heaven,” Journal of Film and Video 57, no. 4 (2005), 3. Wondra, “Marx in a Texas Love Triangle,” 6. Hopper’s etching American Landscape (1920) is clearly an early model for House by the Railroad. In the etching the perspective emphasizes the cattle crossing the railroad track in the foreground, an unsubtle motif for the demarcation between domestic and agricultural space. While the house is still grand, it erupts into full Victorian eccentricity in the later painting, standing in solitude against a curious, murky sky. John Orr, Contemporary Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), 176.

Chapter 8

The Tragic Indiscernibility of Days of Heaven Stuart Kendall

In Cinema 2: The Time-Image, the second volume of his philosophical excavation of the history of cinema, Gilles Deleuze claims that, in post– World War II cinema, many of the dichotomies that animated, guided, and structured pre–World War II cinema dissolved into a new regime of images, characterized above all by what Deleuze, following a typology borrowed from Henry Bergson, calls the time-image. In the time-image, the distinctions between different types of images—subjective and objective, imaginary and real, physical and mental, actual and virtual—no longer function in the same way, or carry the same weight. An indiscernibility or indeterminability emerged at the core of the cinematic endeavor, where the real became a spectacle and the spectacle began to cohere into a separate reality. “The indiscernibility of the real and the imaginary, or the present and the past, of the actual and the virtual, is definitely not produced in the head or in the mind, it is in the objective characteristic of certain existing images which are by nature double.”1 The exploration and provocation of this indiscernible or indeterminable realm became the primary terrain of cinema. Thus, according to Deleuze, the image in postwar cinema is always open, always available to something other than itself, and always in oscillation with that potential meaning. Deleuze catalogs images of this type—and there are several kinds—as time-images because the temporal register of the image has overtaken its affective value, the value that had been, in his interpretation, predominant in pre–World War II cinema. The temporal nature of the image comes to the fore as the image becomes indiscernible, as it shifts between potentialities: subjective, objective, real, imaginary, actual, virtual, dream, fantasy, and so on. In a time when nothing is certain about the image, we are left with the temporality of the image, which only serves to undermine

The Tragic Indiscernibility of Days of Heaven

149

its stability even further. This is also to say that time falls into fragments as the image loses its affective meaning and its stability. Prewar cinema had been content to explore the realm of the affective register of action. Postwar cinema on the other hand opened a wide range of cinematic worlds, alluring in their ultimate indiscernibility and endless fragmentation. Deleuze links this new emphasis in cinematic practice to the post– World War II era because, as he says, “in Europe, the post-war period has greatly increased the situations which we no longer know how to react to, in spaces which we no longer know how to describe.”2 Filmmakers and film theorists, like Carl Dreyer and Antonin Artaud, had of course already begun to explore the potential of the time-image in the late 1920s and early 1930s and the style had begun to become pervasive with the work of Orson Welles and Yasujiro Ozu. But Deleuze’s historical point is still compelling. The post–World War II era brought massive changes to the organization of European cities, industries, and cultural landscapes, changes that European cinema harnessed the time-image to explore, if not necessarily reflect. But the time-image is not wholly or solely a European phenomenon nor is it a phenomenon solely linked to war ravaged urban landscapes, as Deleuze suggests. Deleuze does not mention Terrence Malick in Cinema 2: The Time-Image but Malick’s work—and Days of Heaven in particular—can easily serve as an illustration of one or several of Deleuze’s concepts. Days of Heaven consists less of a series of shots linked into a continuum determined by spatial or psychological realities (however purely filmic) as in the Hollywood style, than of a series of distinct shots gathered into a dialectical progression of contrasts. Malick rarely establishes spaces or stages conversations with standard or familiar cinematic forms. His images follow one another in unorthodox and unexpected ways. In Malick’s cinema, seemingly objective or opaque images of nature—of birds and other beasts, of flowing waters and grasses, of clouds—are often inserted into scenes and sequences, or bookend them, without apparent purpose but with a memorable and affecting allure. Enormous, washed out skies hang empty over almost barren landscapes. Fields of grain waver in the wind without conveying the joyous relief of harvest plenty. However beautiful they may be, it is a mistake to interpret Malick’s images of nature as benevolent or beneficent. His animals are often glimpsed in flight. Skittish horses haunt his scenes, often with an air of menace that deepens as the film plays on. The powerful beauty of these images in particular often overwhelms the narrative sweep of his films. At another level, his films are frequently overloaded with potentially

150

Terrence Malick

gratuitous references to historical events and philosophical, religious, and literary materials, sources and topics. These extratextual references further burden his slender narratives and scenes, leaving viewers wondering just what they should make of the film as a whole. Indiscernibility thus appears and operates in several ways across Malick’s oeuvre and Days of Heaven in particular. Indeed, Malick’s cinematic style employs a number of effects and tropes that serve to destabilize our understanding of and expectations about the diegetic action. Malick’s prominent use of voice-over is one of the most obvious of these effects. In Days of Heaven, Linda, the young girl, provides the voiceover, occasionally commenting on the action we see on-screen without necessarily explaining that action. Her comments are often at variance with our perspective on the action. A clear instance of this occurs near the beginning of the film just after Bill has injured or perhaps killed his boss at the steel mill. We see Bill, Abbey, and Linda running through the railway yards, most likely running away from the law, but Linda’s voiceover suggests that they are running off on an adventure, “searching for something,” as she says. The variance between the two perspectives might be explained by Linda’s youth (perhaps she sees things this way, or Bill explained it to her in this way), but it nevertheless puts us on our guard. We cannot quite trust her interpretation of or comments about the events presented in the film. Yet in our experience of the typical or traditional use of voice-over narration, if we cannot trust the narrator, whom can we trust? The music has a similar destabilizing effect. Malick uses the “Aquarium” section from Camille Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals (1886) early and late in Days of Heaven to convey a flowing, dreamlike effect over those portions of the film, as if we were entering and leaving a dream. The aquatic element is also visually persistent throughout the film, both in images of streams, pools, and rivers, and in flowing material forms, from the flowing liquid steel at the mill to the fluidity of the grasses, waving in the wind on the plains. The dreamlike element is also present in other visual effects. Some scenes and settings are based on familiar paintings or other visual artifacts. The film opens with a montage of photographs from the turn of the century—some very well-known photographs by Lewis Hine, H. H. Bennett, and others—and includes shots clearly modeled on iconic American paintings like Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World and Edward Hopper’s House by the Railroad, as well as images and situations reminiscent of paintings by Pieter Breughal the Elder, Gustave Courbet,

The Tragic Indiscernibility of Days of Heaven

151

and Jean-François Millet. These familiar images and tableaux linger in the mind with a greater force than less scripted images, but they linger with an air of unreality. They are so overloaded with visual impact that they border on parody or pastiche. The historical appropriateness of these images saves them from falling into parody. Their consistency saves them from pastiche. But they nevertheless serve simultaneously as both visual distractions and attractions in the film. If we merely admire the visual beauty of Malick’s images, without appreciating their references and referential depth, at least to some extent, we have surely missed half of the film. Similarly, however, if we concentrate our engagement or interpretation of the film on our reading of Malick’s visual sources we have undoubtedly misinterpreted the film, which is clearly rooted in the physical world presented in its images. The galvanizing power of the familiar images from the history of visual arts and culture lingers like a dream and too the displacement of these images, the fact that they do not quite add up to a consistent explanation or interpretation of the film—that they perhaps do not even contribute to such an interpretation—enforces the enigmatic effect of a dream. The dreamlike effect is also continued in other visual elements. In the second half of the film, roughly after the visit of the flying circus, Days of Heaven becomes more persistently a film about watching. Much of the film consists of characters watching either things or other people. Bill and the Farmer are the characters who most frequently engage in this, but it is not exclusive to them. When we first see the Farmer, he is watching the arriving workers from his house. Bill and Abbey sneak out at night to be alone, away from the Farmer’s gaze. When they return, the Farmer tells Abbey that he was looking for her. Later, most damningly, the Farmer watches Bill and Abbey from the rooftop, when they are down at the stables. But there are many other examples. Watching here is often watching from a distance and it is often accompanied by silence or at least noncommunication, either as a result of the physical distance or due to some other factor, like diegetic noise. Images and sounds thus do not quit correspond, though only in the voice-over do they appear in consistent contrast to one another. As in a dream, we can watch, or the characters can watch, but we, and they, often cannot hear what is being said. Our gazes share a motivated insistence: what do these things mean? Bill’s fight with the foreman at the beginning of the film is a good example of this. We witness the argument but we cannot hear what is said. Another, more complex example, is offered by the moment Bill

152

Terrence Malick

returns to the farm prior to his confrontation with the Farmer. As Bill approaches the house, he glimpses Abbey dancing on the back porch through a window divided into two windowpanes. We see his reflection framed in one windowpane, and we see Abbey, as he does, framed in the other. To complete the group, the Farmer sees Bill through another window at this same moment, but Bill does not see him. The image of the Farmer is not part of the image of Bill, nor is it logically contiguous with it. We simply see Bill looking through a window at Abbey then the Farmer looking through a window. None of the characters can or even could hear any of the others if anything was said, but the images define their relationships and the distances between them. It is particularly poignant to see Bill and Abbey framed separately in the two windowpanes, kept apart, knowing as we do that she is happy with the Farmer and thus emotionally separated from Bill. The pace of the narrative in Days of Heaven also has a destabilizing effect. The film seems to lope and leap along, with characters lazing one minute before bursting into action in the next. Some events—like the Farmer’s courtship of Abbey—proceed at an almost methodically regular or expected pace. Other scenes or sequences rush toward a conclusion, as in Bill’s fights with both the foreman and the Farmer, which are over almost as soon as they began. At another level, we might say that while some scenes and sequences have a clear and definite sense, even a violent dramatic effect within the narrative, as in the fight with the foreman, other images, scenes, and sequences are far more ambiguous, as in the images of the flora and fauna of the farm, the scenes of migrants at work or play, and the sequence with the flying circus. All of this in mind, we might say that Days of Heaven seems to oscillate between clarity and confusion, action and ambiguity, or dream and reality, though none of these poles should be taken as definitive for any given image or scene. The visual and aural landscapes of the film both complete and compete with one another, from within the narrative space and beyond it. And the visual effects themselves, the visual references and framing, as well as the overt beauty of some images, hardly help clarify the sense of the film; quite the opposite in fact. Everything seems intended as a device of destabilization and disarticulation, an evocation, as we have seen, of what Deleuze calls the indiscernible. Similar gestures, tropes, and effects are also present at the level of the narrative and thematic content, not only in terms of pace and internal sense, but in terms of external references and sources.

The Tragic Indiscernibility of Days of Heaven

153

In The Films of Terrence Malick, James Morrison and Thomas Schur make the paradoxical claim that “Malick’s influences are so obvious, so much on the surface, that they are ultimately difficult to credit. His films seem to subsume influences by telegraphing them.”3 Extending these claims only a little, we might say that Malick so transforms his sources that any consideration of the sources themselves will not be instructive. To a limited extent, I am prepared to agree with Morrison and Schur. Malick’s films are indeed so filled with references, small and large, obvious and obtuse, that the clear and direct influence of no single source seems to hold sway over any given film. Indeed, his films might best be viewed as palimpsests in which a number of sources have been woven seamlessly together, woven together so seamlessly in fact that many of his sources have remained relatively obscure to casual viewers and overlooked in the literature about Malick’s work. In his Guide to Kulchur, Ezra Pound claims, “the domain of culture begins when one HAS ‘forgotten-what-book.’ ”4 Malick’s films certainly speak from this kind of cultural space. But this should not be taken as justification for ignoring his sources. Indeed ignoring Malick’s sources—or treating them as if they were all functionally equivalent to one another—has the effect of decontextualizing his films. In contrast to Morrison and Schur, I would like to contend that the overdetermination of Malick’s films, the specific way that they are loaded with source materials as well as the specific ways that some of those sources have been transformed, both through modification and through simple juxtaposition with other sources, constitutes one of the core gestures of Malick’s filmic oeuvre. In short, though I agree with Morrison and Schur that Malick’s films cannot be understood through reference to any single influence or source—philosophical, literary, or visual—I believe that the specific sources of his work as well as the specific uses that he makes of those sources are key elements of his filmic endeavor. Given the range and density of Malick’s source materials as well as the distance of those sources from materials typically enjoyed by aficionados of contemporary American film, it is unsurprising that these sources should be relatively underappreciated in the scholarly literature devoted to Malick. At another level, while adaptation is a significant area of research in film studies, intertextuality of the kind that characterizes Malick’s films remains relatively understudied. Malick’s films do in fact betray an astonishing array of source materials, ranging from the histories of fine art and photography to European

154

Terrence Malick

and American film, classic and contemporary, among the visual sources, and classical and modern literary, philosophical and religious texts among the written. While many accounts of Malick’s work often situate him alongside other American filmmakers of his immediate generation—the generation that went to film school in the 1960s and began making films in the 1970s, filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, David Lynch, Brian De Palma, and others—Malick’s films arguably have far more in common with several masters of European cinema—Antonioni, Godard, Tarkovsky, for example—than with his American contemporaries.5 But Malick’s visual references extend far beyond the confines of cinema. As we have already observed, Days of Heaven opens with a montage of photographs from the turn of the century and includes shots modeled on iconic American paintings as well as images and situations reminiscent of paintings by Pieter Breughal the Elder, Courbet, and Millet. Despite this range, the literary and religious references in the film are arguably more significant. Perhaps most prominent among these are the references to biblical materials. The title of Days of Heaven, for example, derives from Deuteronomy 11.21, in which Moses gives the commandments of the Lord to the people of Israel: “so that your days and the days of your children may be multiplied in the land that the Lord swore to your ancestors to give them, as long as the days of heaven are above the earth.” This, however, hardly explains the action of the film or the relationship of the title to the work. The title is among the most enigmatic devices deployed in the film. What or when exactly are the days of heaven mentioned in the title? Are they the days that Bill repeatedly promises to Abbey once they get “fixed up”? As stand-ins for Abram and Sarai, and as Americans propelled across the plains by Manifest Destiny, Bill and Abbey are searching for their own promised land. These days of heaven might motivate the film as a whole. Even the Farmer’s actions are motivated by his search for a happiness that wealth alone cannot provide. The days of heaven may also be the days of leisure enjoyed by Abbey and Linda on the farm after Abbey marries the Farmer—days bookended by two periods of flight from the law. Linda’s voice-over makes it clear that these were days of true happiness for everyone involved. If these were the days of heaven referenced by the title, they were short lived and disrupted by economic circumstances, fate, or chance. As a story narrated by Linda, the film is also a story of her youth, which seems to have come to an end with her brother’s death. Her childhood,

The Tragic Indiscernibility of Days of Heaven

155

in other words, might correspond, however darkly or ironically, with the days of heaven. Or, more broadly again, perhaps the days of heaven refer to all of the days covered in the film—to days of both freedom and vengeance—days of life under the eyes of the Lord. If the title derives from Deuteronomy 11.21, this interpretation would seem to be correct. The days of Days of Heaven may be all of the days of the Lord’s presence, whether furious or gentle, in the life of his flock. This suggestion is powerful when applied to film that is so firmly and pointedly rooted in a specific historical moment. Were the film based on a single biblical story, as in Godard’s Hail Mary, for example, it might invite an indictment of blasphemy. Despite this wide range of potential meanings, the title does clearly indicate, or at least encourage, the necessity of a Christian or JudeoChristian interpretation of the film. It also foregrounds the other biblical themes and materials that help structure and animate the plot. Without this particular title these themes and elements might be overlooked amid the welter of other references and source materials. The final reticence of the title in relation to its object may also derive from the Judeo-Christian tradition: wherein the Lord has ceased speaking directly to his people, speaking instead through signs and symbols that must be interpreted by human beings. The question cannot finally be answered. Like many other elements of the film, the title poses more problems than it solves. The plot of the film derives in part from Genesis 12.10–20: Now there was a famine in the land. So Abram went down to Egypt to reside there as an alien, for the famine was severe in the land. When we was about to enter Egypt, he said to his wife Sarai, “I know well that you are a woman beautiful in appearance; and when the Egyptians see you, they will say, ‘This is his wife’; then they will kill me, but they will let you live. Say you are my sister, so that it may go well with me because of you, and that my life may be spared on your account.” When Abram entered Egypt the Egyptians saw that the woman was very beautiful. When the officials of Pharaoh saw her, they praised her to Pharaoh. And the woman was taken into Pharaoh’s house. And for her sake he dealt well with Abram . . . But the Lord afflicted Pharaoh and his house with great plagues because of Sarai, Abram’s wife. So Pharaoh called Abram and said, “What is this you have done to me? Why did you not tell me that she was your wife? Why did you say, ‘She is my sister,’ so that I took her for my wife? Now then, here is your wife, take her and

156

Terrence Malick

be gone.” And Pharaoh gave his men orders concerning him; and they set him out on the way, with his wife and all that he had. This passage helps to partially explain Bill’s very unmodern wish to keep the true nature of his relationship with Abbey a secret. In the film, Linda explains that “people will talk” if Bill and Abbey don’t pose as brother and sister, though obviously people do talk precisely because of this pose, leading Bill into a fight with one of the other workers in the migrant camp. In the film, it is unclear whether Bill and Abbey are married or simply lovers. In their deliberation over the Farmer’s proposal to Abbey, Bill wonders whether anyone would know the truth of the situation but them, settling on the notion that no one would. If Bill and Abbey were married, this concern would be more serious, as Abbey’s marriage to the Farmer would then be illegal. But the question is never truly clarified. Even in the scenes when we see them embrace, we never see them actually having sex, though this level of intimacy is strongly suggested if not explicitly implied. The primary point here is that the relationship between Bill and Abbey, and by extension, the plot that unfolds with the Farmer derives from a biblical source, where this plot makes sense, rather than from a modern source, wherein it arguably does or would not. The biblical book of Ruth also contains elements echoed in Days of Heaven. Ruth is the story of a destitute young woman named Ruth who is essentially saved by a rich man, named Boaz. Boaz first glimpses Ruth in his fields, after she “has been on her feet from early this morning until now, without resting even for a moment.” Boaz “said to his servant who was in charge of the reapers, ‘To whom does this young girl belong?’ ”(1.5). Boaz then asks Ruth to stay and continue working his fields. Ruth is relieved by and respectful of his willingness to help her. Later, Ruth relates the incident to her mother-in-law, Naomi, with whom she lives, and Naomi encourages her to place herself at Boaz’ feet as he sleeps on the threshing floor (3.4). Though Naomi is suggesting that Ruth seduce Boaz so as to secure his aide, the scene is not unduly manipulative and Boaz does not simply have sex with her. He takes appropriate steps to marry her in the eyes of the community. Ruth and Boaz have a son, Jesse, who takes his place in the genealogy of David, the future king of Israel. The story is thus a story of one woman and her family, but it is also part of the story of the nation of Israel. The Farmer’s sensitivity to Abbey’s destitution derives from the story of Ruth and Boaz. Days of Heaven also obviously derives in part from the parable of Cain and Abel, from Genesis 4, though the film reverses the parable in one

The Tragic Indiscernibility of Days of Heaven

157

significant way. In the parable, Abel is the “keeper of the sheep” and Cain the “tiller of the ground.” When Abel found favor with the Lord, his brother Cain became jealous. “Cain said to his brother Abel, ‘Let us go out to the field.’ And when they were in the field. Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and killed him” (4.8–9). In the film, the Farmer, rather than the herder, is the victim, slaughtered amidst his ruined harvest. At the time of the murder, the Farmer is not Bill’s brother; he is his brotherin-law. Bill, as Cain, does become a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth, though he may already have brought this curse upon himself through his potentially fatal fight with the foreman in the Chicago factory. We will return to this topic below. The parable of Cain and Abel nevertheless remains a powerful reference in the film, particularly as a meditation on guilt and innocence, murder and sacrifice. The apocalyptic imagery of the film—first present in the fires of the forge and the rivers of flowing steel, then in Linda’s account of her friend Ding Dong’s prophecies, and later in the locusts and the fire that consumes the harvest—also obviously derives from biblical sources. The locusts echo the eighth plague that the Lord visited upon Egypt in Exodus 10. The Lord brought an east wind upon the land all that day and all the night. When morning came, the east wind had brought the locusts. The locusts came upon all the land of Egypt and settled on the whole country of Egypt such a dense swarm of locusts has had never been before, nor ever shall be again. They covered the surface of the whole land, so that the land was black; and they are all the plants in the land and all the fruit of the trees that the hail had left; nothing green was left, no tree, no plant in the field, in all the land of Egypt. (10.13–15) As significant as these Judeo-Christian religious references are to the content and orientation of Days of Heaven, they are not the only sources for the film, not by any means. As Lloyd Michaels demonstrates rather conclusively in his Terrence Malick, portions of Linda’s voice-over monologue and portions of the main theme and handling of Days of Heaven derive from Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885).6 Huck and Jim light out for the territories on the river that runs down the center of American life in much the same way that the central characters in Days of Heaven set off on their own series of adventures. It is in fact difficult to overemphasize the importance of water in Malick’s oeuvre and of the river in Days of Heaven. One of the first images in the film is an image

158

Terrence Malick

of women combing through trash on the banks of a trickling stream running through the industrial wastes of Chicago. Later the migrants bathe in ponds and in the river that runs through or near the farm and Bill and Abbey in particular return to that river repeatedly, at each significant turn in their life at the farm. They discuss the Farmer’s feelings for Abbey when walking through the river—the handheld camera flowing around them as they walk—and they return there in the middle of the night after Abbey’s marriage. At the end of the film, after the Farmer’s death, the river is their initial means of escape from the farm, though, at the very end, it is the scene of Bill’s death. This river is Huck’s river but it also recalls Heraclitus, for whom the river offered an example of relentless change: a river of time and transformation. “The river where you set your foot just now is gone—those waters giving way to this, now this.”7 Another reference for the plot of Days of Heaven from classic American literature is Henry James’ novel The Wings of the Dove (1902). In James’ novel, Kate Croy and Merton Densher are lovers who conspire to acquire the money for their own marriage from a dying heiress, Milly Theale, who has fallen in love with Merton. As in Days of Heaven, the context created by the innocence and generosity of the dying figure challenges and ultimately undermines the relationship between the conspirators. Reaching a little further afield we should remember that Jean-Luc Godard explored this theme in a different but closely related way in his film Contempt (1963). In Godard’s film, Michel Piccoli plays a screenwriter hired by a pompous American producer, played by Jack Palance, to write an adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey for Fritz Lang, who plays himself, to film. Brigitte Bardot plays the screenwriter’s wife. When the producer shows interest in Bardot’s character, the screenwriter is forced to choose between being protective (or possessive) of her, and potentially lose his job, or letting, perhaps even encouraging, her to have a relationship with the producer. The scene in which Piccoli and Bardot discuss the situation is fraught with subtext, understatement, and ultimately, it seems, misunderstanding. The scenes in which Bill and Abbey discuss her evolving relationship with the Farmer bear echoes of Godard’s style in general and of these scenes from Contempt in particular. The reference to Homer’s Odyssey in Contempt is of course a loaded one. Homer’s Odyssey is a classical tale of faithfulness and understanding, while Contempt is a modern study in faithlessness and misunderstanding. In Days of Heaven, Malick exchanges Godard’s Homeric references for Hebrew ones, as we have seen, but the core problem remains the same. Godard’s film is explicitly coded as a modern European film—about the modern

The Tragic Indiscernibility of Days of Heaven

159

European film industry—and Malick’s Day’s of Heaven is just as explicitly coded as a modern American film, a film concerned with the industrial era in the United States. This kind of re- or decontextualization is operative with regard to almost all of the sources discussed above. Indeed, while Days of Heaven may reference biblical stories and themes, among other stories, it is clearly and pointedly set in the industrial Midwest and the agrarian Texas panhandle in 1916. The historical setting of Days of Heaven is itself significant, not only as a mark of distance from our own times, but also as a moment marked by internal division within American history. We see Bill working both in a steel mill and on a farm. The farm uses industrial technologies like tractors and harvesters, but it also employs an army of migrant workers, and neither the industrial technologies nor the farm hands seem out of place. The film merely presents technology on the farm, it doesn’t condemn that technology, nor does it condemn the life lived by the workers. On the contrary, in many ways Days of Heaven seems to eulogize that moment in American history and the way of life pursued by those workers. This is most clear in Linda’s voice-over comments about Bill during the harvest festival. While all of the other workers are preparing a feast, laughing, dancing, and rough-housing in a good-natured way, Linda says that Bill doesn’t fit in, that he has gotten tired of living like that. The comments clash with the joyousness of the workers on-screen, suggesting that we might be meant to condemn Bill’s dissatisfaction, his ultimately fatal ambition for a better life, even though that ambition is the essence of the American dream. While we might first be tempted to interpret the film as a naturalistic tract on the evils of industry or capitalism, or both, we cannot settle on this interpretation without distorting the overall balance of elements in the film, without in other words, overemphasizing this theme in the film at the expense of other thematic elements. Bill clashes with the foreman in the steel mill and with the Farmer. But both of these clashes are personal, rather than political or economic in motivation, though, in another sense, we might say that Bill’s clash with the Farmer was ultimately created by the economic disparity between them rather than by true personal animosity. More significantly though, and as I have already suggested, Malick’s treatment of the migrant workers is almost loving: it is certainly appreciative in its level of carefully observed detail. The migrants work hard but they are not miserable. They are treated harshly—as when Bill and Abbey

160

Terrence Malick

are docked by the farm foreman for wasting bushels of wheat—but they are not slaves and this theme does not reappear in relation to other characters. Malick’s portrait of the migrants recalls John Steinbeck’s use of similar settings in his dust bowl writings but Steinbeck is much more interested in observing the injustice of the social and political systems that surround his characters than Malick seems to be. Malick shows us his characters at work and rest, at play and in religious service, as in the blessing of the wheat. This is a comprehensive and affectionate portrait of a people and a place and time rather than a stock treatment of social or economic injustice. Malick’s use of medium and long shots in depicting the migrants, rather than close-ups, helps to both maintain the anonymity of the individuals and strengthen our sense of the commonality of experience or communal cohesiveness of the group. Days of Heaven, in other words, will disappoint viewers looking for a tale of social or economic oppression or nascent class-consciousness. The main characters also play both with and against their types. As the Farmer, Sam Shepard is appropriately aloof and apparently emotionally naïve as the rich farmer. He is aloof from his workers but also curious about them. We first see him from a distance but he is soon seen among the workers and he is interested enough in them and open enough to them to fall in love with one of them, Abbey. He tells her that he thought a man “just had to get used to being alone,” but this is an unexpected perspective from a wealthy and successful man, and hardly in keeping with a portrait of a harsh or aristocratic boss. The Farmer is portrayed as an innocent, caught in a situation that he does not deserve. Richard Gere’s Bill too is unexpected. He is a hot-headed schemer, a man of resource and violence, but he is also a dedicated lover and brother. He leaves the farm after it becomes clear that Abbey has feelings for the Farmer, but he returns the following season riding a fancy motorcycle obviously hoping for some kind of reconciliation. Even though he kills several men in the course of the film (including his final shoot-out with the police), we don’t leave the film with the sense that Bill is a bad guy. Looking at these two characters we might simply say that they are fully fleshed, realistically depicted human beings, rather than the kind of stock types that one encounters in more conventional films. But I don’t think this is quite true. It seems more accurate to suggest that they simply play both with and against their types, that they are, in other words, characters built out of internal and external contradictions. Internal contradictions include, for example, the fact that Bill is at once thoughtful and

The Tragic Indiscernibility of Days of Heaven

161

rash, always looking out for Linda and Abbey even as he rushes from one dream to the next. External contradictions develop as the characters respond to situations and interact. Malick uses strategies of doubling and repetition as means of comparison through contrast but also as means of creating ambiguity and, in Deleuze’s term, indiscernibility. Characters and even gestures double one another within films and across Malick’s oeuvre. Situations are repeated to reinforce one another and build signs from film to film but also, perhaps just as often, to drain them of any certain meaning. Malick’s young female characters all do cart wheels, for example, as a clear sign of joyous physical freedom. Rivers, oceans, and streams recur as enigmatic scenes and signs of change. But other instances of repetition and doubling have a more enigmatic effect. In Days of Heaven, Bill and the Farmer are doubles, compared both implicitly and explicitly, and Bill in particular repeatedly faces similar situations. Bill tells Abbey about the first time he saw her and both Linda and the Farmer reflect on the Farmer’s first impressions of Abbey. Bill and the Farmer also both juggle as a way to amuse and impress the girls. But these points of comparison seem trite if we attempt to grant them any weight. Surely every man has recounted his first sight of his beloved to her and every woman listened to similar reflections on her meaning in different men’s lives. Bill and the Farmer are of course also presented in stark contrast to one another. Bill has no money at all, big dreams but no prospects. The Farmer is the richest man in the panhandle, according to his accountant. Bill is as quick to see an angle or argue a point, as the Farmer is generous with his wealth. In the end, they share our common fate. Bill’s repeated acts of homicide offer another surprising example of ambiguous repetition. Assuming Bill killed the foreman at the steel mill at the beginning of the film, he kills both of his bosses, but this surface similarity belies vast differences in circumstance. Bill’s fight with the foreman seemed utterly spontaneous. We don’t know if he had been on the job for a day or a month before the conflict broke out, but it was decided in an instant. Bill’s conflict with the Farmer, on the other hand, was obviously overdetermined. In search of its roots we might recall the moment in the field when the farm foreman docked Bill and Abbey pay for wasting wheat. Even at that moment the foreman treated Bill and Abbey with hostile suspicion. The murder of the Farmer might have been motivated by this lasting conflict, or by more recent and serious developments, by either jealousy or greed, but the murder itself may also

162

Terrence Malick

have been an accident or an act of self-defense. The Farmer came looking for Bill, after all, with a gun. Bill wasn’t looking for the Farmer. But why didn’t the Farmer shoot? Did he lose his nerve? Was he simply too innocent and kind to kill a man? Bill kills two men, each in a similarly spontaneous way, each in at least partial or potential self-defense, but, in the case of the Farmer, the act is absolutely overdetermined. Perhaps the most ironic turn, for Bill, comes as he encourages Abbey to “see what happens” with the Farmer. This situation is subtle and complex and the film is intensely reticent at key moments as the theme develops. When Abbey and Bill are discussing the Farmer’s declaration of his love, Bill tells Abbey that he is tired of seeing other men look at her, bent over, working in the field, as if she were a “whore.” Yet at that very moment Bill is himself encouraging her to marry the Farmer purely for financial gain. In order to avoid having men look at her as if she was a whore, he would have her essentially become one. This is the point of reversal where Bill’s concern for Abbey pushes Abbey beyond his reach and Abbey’s love for Bill begins to drive her away from him. Brooke Adams’ performance as Abbey is perfectly opaque at this point, as it is when the Farmer declares his love. I don’t believe we ultimately have enough information to determine whether or not Abbey married the Farmer for herself, for Bill, or for the Farmer. But here again the indeterminability derives not from a total lack of information, from the film saying too little, but rather from the opposite, from the film saying too much. The reticence of the film is paradoxical. Without offering enough information to ground a clear and distinct interpretation of the film as a whole, Malick and his characters provide enough information for us to reach several possible interpretations. Malick’s cinema is similar to Greek tragedy in this way.8 In tragic theater, as in Malick, actions are at once overdetermined and ambiguous. Character, for the Greeks, is fate, but it is also ambiguous and caught in tension between the competing forces of reason and religion and duties to city and family. Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides culled their characters from the Homer’s heroic poems, the national narratives of their tribe, just as Malick derives his characters, plots, and images from American history, literature, and experience. The Greeks situated their reenactments of myth on the edge of the city, in the borderland between country and city, nature and culture, the organic and, for Malick, the industrial, where binary oppositions like these were at once most clear and most unstable. Such places mark the limits and tests for civilization and this is Malick’s territory.

The Tragic Indiscernibility of Days of Heaven

163

As with the Greeks, Malick stands at a distance from his materials, a distance that denies us conclusive insight into the characters or actions of the film but that also opens the space in which our own judgment can become active. For the Greeks, this distance was the distance of disenchantment, the distance of an uncomfortable community of secular citizens examining figures from its religious history: spectators at a religious theater who had almost, but not quite, lost their faith. Significantly, Greek tragedies do not simply combine religious and philosophical motifs: they are works of religious theater, dependent upon the faith of their audience, as well as being nascent philosophical dialogues, studies in argumentation and persuasion, discourses on and illustrations of philosophical problems. This is an important point that we often overlook in our haste to understand these works on the basis of our own secular theater. Something similar occurs in our approach to the films of Terrence Malick, whose works are philosophical examinations of elements of our own national gospels, though they are never simply philosophical tracts. As Malick’s films demonstrate, America is a secular nation that nevertheless has its sacred cows—national notions, narratives, and nostalgia, which Malick offers up for examination and, ultimately I think, sacrifice. We can, I think, conclude by observing that Days of Heaven is clearly, and profoundly, more than the sum of its sources, only some of which have been sketched here, and that Malick doesn’t simply transform his source materials: he tears them to shreds. He puts them into impossible combinations, combinations that should more rightly be understood as confrontations, confrontations that empty his sources of clear and distinct identity. Christian themes and characters conflict within classical structures in contemporary, or roughly contemporary, settings. The images are at once highly scripted in terms of overt reference to a rich array of visual culture—paintings, photographs, and films—and poignantly, often sublimely, beautiful in a purely indexical sense. Images of animals and landscapes seem simultaneously empty and full of meaning, valuable as pure presence and haunted by powerful symbolic forces. Voices and music echo and undermine the images in turn, redirecting our understanding of the action or recasting it entirely. Malick’s cinema is a cinema of discontinuities, designed with a distinct purpose. Comparison with Godard is again instructive. In his early films in particular, Godard developed strategies, derived from Brecht, of disrupting the continuity of his films in an effort to create critical consciousness in his viewer. For Godard, these strategies included a number of

164

Terrence Malick

visual elements, like absurdly long dolly and pan shots in Week-end, and sound elements, like discontinuous voice-over or sound. Godard’s films occasionally have an intentionally flat, pop art quality that provides evidence that he is at once not going to fool the audience and fooling his audience. In Malick, this flatness is reinvented as distance on the classical model, and the techniques and strategies of disruption are reinvented based on the needs of Malick’s plots and purposes. In a far more aggressive and holistic way than Godard, but in a manner consistent with the Greeks, Malick opens a tragic dimension in his films by stuffing them with information, with discourse, with all the languages that attempt to define his times. His films are thus open to myriad interpretations—Marxist, psychoanalytic, literary, cinematic (history of cinema), environmental, religious—they activate all of these discourses or registers of information, not in an attempt to exhaust them, but in an effort to split them apart, to fracture them through a nonbinding montage. The disruption of cinematic continuity, the evocation of the indiscernible, is the provocation of a tragic vision, in the Greek sense of tragedy. This is the source of the power of Malick’s cinema.

Notes 1

2 3

4 5

6

7 8

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 69. Ibid., xi. James Morrison and Thomas Schur, The Films of Terrence Malick (Westport: Praeger, 2003), 29. Erza Pound, Guide to Kulchur (New York: New Directions, 1970), 134. For a typical treatment of Malick’s work within American cinema see Ryan Gilbey, It Don’t Worry Me: The Revolutionary American Films of the Seventies (New York: Faber and Faber, 2003). Lloyd Michaels, Terrence Malick (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 43. Heraclitus, Fragments, trans. Brooks Haxton (New York: Penguin, 2001), § 41. My understanding of Greek tragedy owes a great deal to the writings of Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet. See in particular their book Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone Books, 1988).

Chapter 9

Darkness from Light: Dialectics and The Thin Red Line Russell Manning

One of the important things about watching good films is their ability to provoke questions beyond their surface plot. Good films, as with good Art raise questions and seem to reveal an extra layer upon examination. It is what separates a good director from an ordinary one. Admittedly no director can save an abysmal script but often a director, working with their own script can do more than entertain their audience. They can reveal something to the viewer that changes the way the viewer sees. This then becomes film as philosophy because the film has made the world more interesting and perhaps even more complex. Terence Malick, in his films to date, does this effortlessly. This extra layer also can therefore allow us to make more subtle and refined judgments about everyday life, something we may miss if we are not “tuned in” to what the film is revealing. The interaction with these good films, similar to reading a provocative poem may entice us to make connections between diverse subjects of discussion. These are, at first glance unusual, but after some careful thinking can be strongly and apparently associated. For example, when we watch the Superhero we can be drawn through the action on the screen to ask questions about what constitutes heroism, justice or questions about the nature of evil. Good films do this seamlessly. It is as if there are ideas on the screen waiting to emerge; ideas that give the film this extra layer, a dimension emerges so we may talk about them long after leaving the cinema. Teasing these ideas out in this way is to think dialectically. Thinking is not a unified, one way activity. Conclusions are never fresh, immediate thoughts in our head. They are a clash of intelligent, articulate but often opposing or conflicting ideas that we bring together to reach a different (some might even say higher) state of mind. These good films set up

166

Terrence Malick

discussion that moves away from simple analysis of the plot and characters or explosions, car chases, and sex scenes. To return to our Superhero example. We may ask if their actions are just when they beat information out of a suspect or summarily kill an enemy before they have a chance to defend themselves. These are never simple conclusions even though an indiscriminate audience may cheer at their actions. We will approach Terence Malick by paying attention to some very simple points. When we carefully investigate his elegiac war film a Thin Red Line, what emerges, I will argue, may draw our attention to three things. First, the film invites us to rethink the war genre film as it has been asserted over time. We do this by trying to draw interpretation and inconsistencies out from beneath the surface of the film, to make films reveal what (feels like) they have been concealing from us. For example, the iconic image of the heroic soldier slaying the evil enemy for the greater good is not a fair, accurate or any way total account of what war or war films might actually be saying to us. In Malick’s war film the majority of characters suffer from anxiety and insecurity brought on by their involvement in the war. The war “at the heart of nature” is measured as anxiety and security, which constantly plays out on the screen through Malick’s camera. It is as if as the film unfolds it comes with its own in disguised contradictions, in which the subject on-screen has a fatal flaw, that through closer examination we may be able to discover. Malick’s camera and poetic voice-over in this sense teases out a dialectical struggle the soldier is having as he fights. There is a tension between what they are doing and what they are thinking. They act so brutally and so instinctively for self-preservation and victory. But inside they are pondering much deeper and darker questions. They see an evil residing in their quest and hence darkness in light. Secondly, if we carefully think through some key scenes in the film we can see that we can use this rethinking of the war-film genre to preserve something positive that lies at the heart of the war film. What I mean here is we can grasp something in the war film that teaches us more about human behavior than a traditional war film. When we bring these contradictions forward we learn more than just about the film; we learn interesting and useful things about the world around us. When the hill is taken in the film we cannot honestly sit back and say we showed the enemy a lesson because the enemy becomes distinctly human, we see the pain of their lost youth and the trauma of what they have been asked to do. We confront the war at the heart of nature first hand.

Darkness from Light: Dialectics and The Thin Red Line

167

Finally we can take what we have learnt by thinking about the contradictions in the war film and apply it to the general world. This is the philosophical beauty of Malick’s work. It reveals contradictions about the world around us. It is as if we enter into a conversation or a dialogue with the film that challenges us to think about a catalogue of issues that are bigger than the film itself. We talk about the philosophy of the film. The camera and the voice-over become instructional as well as entertaining. We may even derive some working knowledge and application about philosophical concepts such as Truth or Justice as a result of entering into an exchange with Malick’s important film. Dialectics is a method of argument whereby two contrary positions are brought together in contest with the aim of developing a more truthful—or at least—more usable ideas. To return to the idea of the typical war hero we can grasp dialectical thinking in action. Take, for example, the iconic war-film hero: John Wayne’s Col. Mike Kirby in Ray Kellogg’s 1968 The Green Beret’s. Even though Wayne has all the features of the traditional action hero (strong, tough, single-minded) we see that he can never be wholly admired because the viewer cannot ignore the obvious political arguments that were being waged at the time. America’s war in Vietnam complicates our ability to make a singular assessment of character and his motivation in this film. Was he a war hero or a warmonger? He was both because parts of his character are worthy and virtuous while other parts of his character are not. There clearly is a tension in the character that we can see dialectically. In philosophical terms there are two schools of thought. One suggests that we can find fixed, immutable, and universal truths. The second thinks that truths are not the really important factor at play, but the usability or practicality of ideas maybe. What I will claim here is that film is an excellent tool for fostering discussions about the changing and unchanging as we have seen with the John Wayne character. When we look at some of the key scenes of A Thin Red Line we find the traditional war genre film “moving” ideas from a hidden or concealed position to one of a higher form testimony that this type of thinking challenges and enlightens at the same time. This does not happen in the hands of a more direct or traditional film director and this is why I am claiming that Malick brings ideas alive by giving us an opportunity to think dialectically.

“What is the war at the heart of Nature”—Witt I am going to argue Malick is a dialectical film maker par excellence and The Thin Red Line is so much more than a film explored solely in the war

168

Terrence Malick

genre. The main aim of the essay is philosophical in nature. What is the strength of Malick’s The Thin Red Line to inform us about dialectic itself? It is both a way of thinking about film and thus a way of thinking about the real world. As you will notice I have divided this opening section into three sections because I want to mirror the “movement” of the dialectical process. The original thought confronted by another idea that fights to form the new idea, which hopefully is stronger and more rigorous. Dialectic, in philosophy is as old as the ancient Greeks and that is where we begin. The war at the heart of nature are the questioning lines which open the film, but these words could also begin to explain the first uses of the dialectical method. Dialectic begins as a battle between ideas to attain the truth. Let us thus begin with Plato (427–347 BCE). Plato thought that the essential knowledge of the world was located as an “eternal form” or perfect idea and could be accessed through human cognition or thinking. Hence when we think of a chair we are not just thinking about that chair but chairs in general. For Plato the idea was drawn from the world of the forms where an ideal or perfect chair was located. For Plato there are fixed ideas about the world which we can access through clear and rational thinking. We can thus provide an order to the world; know the world’s form by seeing the true meanings of common words and ideas. Dialectic then is simply closely examining a person’s ideas or words to bring out the contradictions in them; the unclear forms that they are often expressed in. By rigorous testing and examination through trial by our intellectual faculties we can begin to see the necessary conditions of the idea, what makes it true. Once we have gone through this process we are left with a new idea, a more refined perhaps stronger idea closer to the “truth” in its ultimate or final form . In Plato’s dialogues he is—through his interlocutor Socrates—exposing the weakness in an argument by such a process. We have to be open to the film asking us questions, presenting us with evidence and information from which to absorb. This is why films such as A Thin Red Line are so engaging, because they do not lecture us about the content of the film nor the form of its presentation like so many war films which we see attempt to do. Briefly consider, as mentioned above, a “typical war film” with its clearly defined notions of the good guys and the bad guys. The film is presented as factual and persuasive. We are not allowed to challenge or argue with many of its conclusions. What we are faced here is what Socrates spent his life challenging. He always challenged what people thought were clear truths about human behavior

Darkness from Light: Dialectics and The Thin Red Line

169

about important topics such as justice, or goodness, or proper behavior. War films often paint the world as black and white, good and evil as if the minds of the viewers are already made up. However this “us and them” dichotomy can be countered through a careful consideration of what it might be like to hold a contrary view or a different position, which is to think dialectically. Malick affords this type of Socratic thinking. Thus at the opening of the film when Witt (James Caviezel) is living with the Solomon Islanders in their paradise we are immediately challenged to ask ourselves some very philosophical questions. We do not ask when is the war going to start, but why are these innocent people so happy? The war becomes an intrusion, announced by the arrival of the ship into the frame of the film and the defeated look on Witt’s face. So what is the war at the heart of nature? All Malick’s films are punctuated by shots of natural surroundings.1 The Thin Red Line opens with a shot of a crocodile, one of natures great “products.” Let us think this through dialectically. An animal that has survived for over 200 million years begins a film about a species that has tried to kill each other for a couple of hundred thousand years, yet we think of ourselves as the superior species. Malick might be offering us here a comment on the fragility and precarious nature of human existence when compared to the more “eternal” and successful crocodile. The war at the heart of nature is the war for survival at the hands of whatever forces we subject ourselves to. It is, seen this way, a dialectical struggle as the environment issues its challenges. Man, in this light is cast as a player in a drama much bigger than we can imagine. We are, through Malick’s eye, asked to turn our attention to this challenge. We can never win this war against nature. However, we can look at the crocodile and imagine and argue and hypothesize thoughts that perhaps were hidden behind the way we usually think. Many people sitting in the cinema will be responding to the crocodile with thoughts like “dangerous” or “primitive.” But remember this is a war film and as such the crocodile could also reveal a statement implied by Malick that after the war moved on and many were killed, turned insane or irreparably wounded. Yet the crocodile slipped into the water and swam away unconcerned and untouched. When we think about the film in this way we can bring these more challenging conclusions about the war-film genre to the surface. This form of synthesis allows us to shed more light on what the film means or reveals or instructs. Socrates would have wondered how just the war was. Now as previously stated the war-film genre seems to often lead us to not conclude this. We may even be impatient to get the crocodile off the

170

Terrence Malick

screen and cut to the soldiers, to get the real film started. But Malick wants to take his time, or more importantly to show how time is always on the side of nature, its slow glacial impervious account, that man so rudely attempts to control.2 The war at the heart of nature is always lost to time as we can never capture time except for fleeting moments of reflection and memory. The problem is that we think we do, we have control and we have fixed knowledge of things, but as we will see below control and knowledge are always open to challenge. And there is no better way to see knowledge and control explored than by looking at how commanding soldiers think and act.

Show Me How to See the Things the Way You Do: The Sophistry of Command In The Thin Red Line the notion of the nature and meaning of command becomes very central. Each relationship between the soldiers suggests that the commanding officer is to be critically reflected upon. Here dialectical argument is beautifully exposed by Malick as the camera juxtaposes the conflicting points of view of the commander and the commanded. The film raises the question about legitimacy and authority of those in command as Plato did in many of his dialogues. Plato loathed sophistry which he saw as a deceptive form of argument. Plato was especially suspicious of argumentative bullies who won arguments by bluster. We will look at one critical encounter between Captain Staros (Elias Kotas) and Lieutenant Col. Tall (Nick Nolte). As the dialectical viewer “works” through these scenes we see opposed points of view but through our privileged position as observers of their confrontation we can conclude that they are both talking about different versions of the same topic; loyalty. Staros’ humanistic attitude toward his men is that of the part and Tall’s holistic attitude to victory is one of the whole. Saros wants to preserve the life of his men, Tall wants victory at any cost. Saros is calm and refined, Tall is apoplectic and agitated. The dialectical argument about who we should be primarily loyal to unfolds as the battle relentlessly claims lives on both sides. The argument draws out the equal portions of strength: loyalty to the individual or to the state; a classic philosophical argument. The powerful effect of Malick’s camera is that it brings out the tension between both sides and opens a space in the film for this to be played out. The astute viewer takes in both sides at once, letting the idea strengthen and gain traction until we see that the war film here is peripheral to a much larger and more primal battle.

Darkness from Light: Dialectics and The Thin Red Line

171

Tall’s attitude through the taking of the bunker represents the attitude of a nationalistic militarism where death in battle is conceived as a historical necessity for the nation and victory. He makes his point forcefully and powerfully, but we know, because of the voice-over, that he is wracked by personal bitterness over his nonpromotion that was given earlier in the film. Staros sees the waste of each individual as a personal affront to his connection with the men he has worked and fought with for two and a half years. Here we have a dialectical exchange where the viewer is privileged to a trade between one character arguing holistically and the other responding from an individual standpoint. The construction of the scene will finally preference Saros, as Malick’s camera cuts between the inept attempt to take the bunker and the insanity this action is producing as well as the lives it is claiming, the minds it is frying. Here command comes under question because there seems to be limited justice in the way Tall has gone about victory. It is sophistry in command that moves us further away rather than closer to some truth about the battle. The viewer is asked to work through this argument, taking both points of view. If we are attuned to a philosophical way of thinking here we can make conclusions about this scene in a more informed frame of mind. Malick’s sentiment is clearly with Staros as he privileges Staros with the movement of the camera, the reversion to slow motion, the evocative soundtrack, and the juxtaposition with the shots of nature. We can empathize with Tall’s predicament and that he has issues of his own, but because we also have access to Staros’ view as well we do our own dialectical analysis. And now the idea emerges that this battle to take the bunker is not going to immediately bring forth a hero and all will be well. But Malick slowly presents a dialectical analysis with his camera. In the early stages of the interchange Malick gives us a view from behind the Japanese machine gun nest that shows the suicidal nature of Tall’s orders. After Tall decides to assess the situation for himself a young soldier dies in Staros’ arms. As the boy dies we see the sun poke through the trees juxtaposed with a soldier holding his ears and screaming. As he dies the camera slows down, the camera lingers on some dead leaves on a tree. At his moment of death the dissolve of his dying face is replaced by Tall walking into the battle. Here we could say Malick is accusing Tall of culpability, that the fragility of life and the taking away of young life is not just the necessary causality of war but the refusal to see the war from nay other, grander perspective. As Tall imposes himself on this scene we are privileged to his voice-over that reveals he is also dying inside. He says “Shut up in a tomb, cant lift

172

Terrence Malick

the lid.” This access to Tall’s necrophobic thought leads really to the view that this is no simple documentation of World War II battle, but the confused and complex attempt by men trying to understanding at a much higher level the place that they are in, its immense fragility, and the love and stress that emerges in times of inconceivable stress. Tall is on the surface one hundred percent soldier, but on the inside he is a man torn apart. As Staros talks about the net way to process in the taking of the ridge, Malick allows us back into the insane world of Sergeant McCron (John Savage) as he plays in the dirt. McCron has crossed the Thin Red Line into madness, but his descent is a result of Tall’s insistence of their involvement in the futility of capturing the bunker by regular military tactics. As this scene ends we are in the advantaged position of being able to critique both Staros’ and Tall’s dilemma simultaneously. The result is we know more about the sophistry of command and how it often leads us to valor or madness. 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. We can begin to understand how thinking itself is not a binary process of right/wrong or good/bad. The subtleties and nuances of these scenes display the fundamental problem with thinking itself. Conclusions are difficult to universalize. Truth is slippery. It has to be worked at. Malick brings these concerns onto the screen as revelation. We can now see that the application of a dialectical methodology takes us to a different place for our thinking. To extend and build upon this we will now turn to a different form of dialectical thinking that invites us to see how A Thin Red Line might teach us something about one of the greatest dialecticians in philosophical history.

Hegelian Dialectics and the Unhappy Souls G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) was a notoriously difficult philosopher to read but an acute diagnostician on human consciousness and knowledge. We will simplify and demonstrate Hegel’s thinking here through two accounts of Malick’s film. First, we will look at how Hegel conceives consciousness and thinking itself as, in Hegelian terms the mind moves toward freedom or harmony. To appreciate these ideas we will work through Malick’s screen where what we see is not necessarily what we get.

Darkness from Light: Dialectics and The Thin Red Line

173

Then through another look at Private Witt we will turn to Hegel’s famous Master Slave dialectic to demonstrate once again how Malick’s film keeps revealing new ways of thinking about the world. Hegel sees the thinker in a determined bid to know the whole or final truth of the world but the only way to proceed is to consider two opposing thoughts together at the same time. For example, to have an idea what black is we have to understand that it is also not white. The same could be said for good and evil or up and down. While it is not as simple as just opposites it does give us a place to start. We need not get into the complicated argument about Hegel’s ideas but start at the notion that for Hegel thinking is an exercise designed to pursue freedom through self-consciousness being aware of itself as self-consciousness. When we think, we engage in a simple dialectic, as thoughts have a tendency to challenge or as Hegel would say negate themselves. What he means can be simply displayed if we think about the weather. We look at the sky and see it is sunny. But we may also scan the horizon searching for the good weather’s opposite such as storm clouds. We are here almost contradicting ourselves. In short we are thinking about the freedoms of our own thinking. The more effectively we can do this, the more we will be able to navigate and negotiate the world. Hegel invites us to think with “negation,” that is to tune into the background of thought where incoherence or contradiction lurk. When thoughts attempt to become whole these oppositions act as wider and stronger reflections. We can also make stronger judgment about the world because we are operating at a higher level of thinking than mere one-dimensional reflection. Consider the example of driving a car in treacherous conditions. We are aware of the processes we go through to drive the car but at the same time we are aware of the slippery road, the unpredictable nature of the other cars around us, the poor visibility we encounter, and so on. We are driving the car but at a much higher awareness than typical because of the dialectical interplay of the competing thoughts swirling through our head. Hegel suggests thinking moves in this way, trying to grasp the whole universal thought by reflecting and engaging with the particular and fragmented components of it. The end game of Hegel’s systematic thinking was an “absolute” mind, a totality of knowing the end of a dialectical process would bring us to perfect knowledge. Of course an arrival at absolute knowledge seems philosophically and empirically far fetched or strongly religious, even new age. But if we stop for a minute to consider the Hegelian dialectical model of thinking, how

174

Terrence Malick

it “holds together” thinking then we can appreciate how this type of thinking can be used to raise critical thinking to a higher level. By engaging in a “thinking move” from simultaneously holding together in our minds two opposing thoughts and letting them battle it out for a higher unity of thought we may find a practical thinking tool not just for philosophy but for everyday life. Here we can use Malick to draw this assertion out. Once again consider the arrival of Tall’s battalion at the top of the hill. The American troops have a major military victory, but Malick does not focus on the congratulatory images of self-consoling triumphant soldiers but instead lingers on a seriously disturbed and naked captured soldier and a barely recognizable Japanese face almost totally buried in the dirt. There can be no victory without the degradation of the enemy. But the enemy is both human and thinking and feeling creatures as well. When we hold both of these thoughts together, victory and loss, friend and enemy we see what humanity may be actually reduced to. Its animal status is revealed here not in glory, but in a dialectical warning. Victory is never a simple conquest of the enemy, but often a humiliation of all involved. The death and destruction that ensues with the overrunning of the Japanese position has a distinctly universal application to it. From sporting conquests to the business world we often do violence on the opposition reducing their humanity to something other than that. In order to pump up our own self-importance we have to act ungraciously or even immorally. Witt, at this stage asks, “Where does the evil come from?” One answer to this question is that this war at the heart of nature is what we see when we expose the humans to the most extreme and arduous tests of morality. Nobody is totally noble or evil, but the warring dialectical struggle at the heart of nature itself. Malick’s camera allows the viewer into this struggle as we experience the dehumanization of the captured Japanese soldiers, their love for each other juxtaposed against the wicked retributions inflicted by their captors. We are now strongly contradicted when we watch this series of scenes. We know that the Japanese soldiers have been killing the Americans with ruthless efficiency and yet they are, by the end of their harrowing capture reduced to mournful “things” removed from the veneer of humanity they had clung on to as soldiers. Malick’s fluid movement of the camera through their stronghold as it is captured and his elegiac music laments the inability to see war as solely heroic but always implicitly melancholic and tragic. We even lose when we win. This contradiction seems to be that reality is never “equal to itself” but always embedded with contradictions and negations. At its

Darkness from Light: Dialectics and The Thin Red Line

175

most powerful moments we recognize that the Japanese soldiers, young traumatized men are merely and essentially that, men. Their appeal to be recognized by us sear their images into the frame as they are overrun, murdered, tortured, and treated as subhuman. The film makes it very difficult for us to see victory as absolute or final. We are never fully victorious. Hegel’s dialectical analysis sees us move toward a higher understanding, our ideas are sharpened and enhanced. Malick’s camera does exactly the same thing. To further this thought we will now turn to Hegel’s celebrated Master/Slave dialectic.

Each Standing in Each Other’s Light: Masters and Slaves and the Hegelian Dialectic Hegel’s most famous piece of dialectical analysis tells the story of an alienated and fragmented subject struggling for recognition in the world. His basic idea was that for each individual their consciousness was struggling in its social context to establish itself. This complex idea is easy to grasp by imagining yourself at a party walking into a room full of strangers. You have to establish yourself first and foremost to satisfy and quell your own feelings of rising anxiety. This struggle was always a dialectical one as we encounter others who are in exactly the same predicament. Everyone else at the party is doing the same thing, some better than others. We can read recognition in two ways. First, it is on a subjective sense as the person yearns to be acknowledged as a fully accepted person. (We all seek this verification of self.) At the party we feel comfortable if dressed right or able to hold an acceptable conversation. Secondly, recognition is also a state of consciousness where our self-awareness seeks to know itself, establish a place for itself in the world. Hegel’s metaphor of the Master/Slave dialectic (he called it Lord and Bondsman) can be read both ways. First, it accounts for how subjectivity is established and, secondly, it accounts of the establishment of a higher form of selfconsciousness. If we pause here to consider the typical war film we may see why this account becomes so important for a more fully robust account of what it is to be human. As stated above a traditional war film often treats the hero as a more fully developed and rounded totality than we may give them credit for. Not only that the mission he is charged with is difficult to achieve but simple to define. He has to rescue the captured prisoners (as with Rambo or The Dirty Dozen). He may have to knock out an enemy

176

Terrence Malick

installation or assassinate an enemy. The solution is complex (as in Where Eagles Dare) and requires bravado and ingenuity (The Dam Busters). He needs resilience, but the goal is always achieved in all its celebrated glory. The recognition often comes at a cost (death, injury) but those involved seem to achieve victory despite the insurmountable odds and the film usually finishes with the audience recognizing the hero established as the master of his environment. Now we turn to Malick to see that this is not as simple as we conceive it. Witt’s death demonstrates that at times the soldier’s quest is far more complex and baffling and that the common soldier is an integral part of the “idea” of the battle. In A Thin Red Line the viewer is privileged to see an example of Hegel’s Master/Slave dialectic in action. When we look at the relationship between Witt and Sergeant Welsh (Sean Penn) we see how interdependent the strong authoritarian relationship of Welsh is on the more anarchic and “natural” Witt. Hegel suggested in his mythological encounter between the master and the slave that while the relationship is first established as a dichotomy of leader and follower or stronger and weaker it quickly becomes apparent that this relationship is two way. The Master has to be Master over something. He becomes dependent on the slave to remain Master. There are three main encounters between Witt and Sergeant Welsh (Sean Penn). In the first encounter in the ship’s brig, authority is already established and Welsh tries to assert a traditional relationship between himself and his subordinate. As the film unfolds we learn that Welsh is suffering from reservations about the war, and his personal place in it. The second encounter between the two after the hill has been taken sees Welsh unsatisfied with the control he has over Witt. In fact Welsh admits his jealousy for Witt’s state of being. We can see here that Witt has become the “Master of the Master” and that Welsh’s brooding dissatisfaction with his sense of self and his desire to be at some form of personal peace is intricately bound up with Witt. Witt says to him “I still see a spark in you” and we can see that he has the upper hand in the relationship, because he is in control of his place in the world where Welsh is a man out of place, who only feels “alone around people.” What we learn here is that the dialectical struggle is always that. It is a competition that is forever at tension. Human beings can never settle, or be totally satisfied. For whatever biological or anthropological reason we struggle for control over the world and more importantly over our own consciousness. Both Witt and Welsh, because they are typically human, struggle and Malick’s camera allows us to see, hear and feel this struggle.

Darkness from Light: Dialectics and The Thin Red Line

177

Let Me Feel the Lack Marx’s Dialectical Materialism Finally let us turn our attention to the notion of dialectical materialism. Karl Marx said in the nineteenth century that all struggles are class struggles and we can see that Malick makes certain we see the working class soldiers of the United States in their rawness and innocence. Their naivety resonates within Malick’s voice-overs or in their simple dialogues with each other. Recall the moment before the landing on the beach when a scared and innocent Edward B. Train (John Dee Smith), too young to die and scared witless of it says “I wanna own an automobile when I get out.” These words haunt us because the startled looks of his fellow soldiers could be read as the knowing of their exploitation, their impending death for a cause that they are not quite settled with. While the imminent battle could be filled with heroic anticipation and statements of how fearless and patriotic these soldiers could be Malick chooses to film this with uncertainty and foreboding as the camera moves through the ship catching conversations of the ignorance and unsettled nature that these soldiers are in. What is this battle taking place for? The battle for Guadalcanal was a battle for “dirt” because it was seen as a vital piece of land in the transport route between Japan and the Australia/Pacific. In the central part of the film we witness the prize of the U.S. soldiers realized as they storm the hill being resisted by a bunch of young and very frightened Japanese soldiers. Malick’s camera here lingers on the insanity and traumas of the battle as the Japanese solders capitulate. We see the Japanese’s as vanquished, but more so as alienated from their humanity, reduced to total victims of the their countries imperialism, but at the same time ridiculed and shamed, tortured and humiliated by the American version of Imperialism. Here Malick makes negative light of the victory. His camera shows us the depressing result of what this battle for a small strip of land in the Pacific really was. The result is the tortured, psychotic, fractured effect on real human lives. While the generals talk of victory and the politicians talk of glory, Malick’s camera talks of human suffering. The Marxists notion of the “negation of the negation” is here. We feel elated at the negation of the Japanese but our elation is quickly tempered by the negative aspects of our victory and the realization of its broader consequences. This is the dialectic in action. Malick’s camera affords us a personal account of how this victory is always some form of defeat. There is an inherent contradiction in what

178

Terrence Malick

we see here and what we are supposed to feel. There is no glory here, but we are left with a sour taste in our mouth that these young men on both sides have been reduced to this. This form of the dialectic is how Marxists saw the history of the world always spiraling forwards. At the bottom of the political chain working class, poor men were enlisted to fight for causes that their so-called superiors had encouraged them to do. Marxian dialectics encouraged us to take a political stance in the historical struggle and in a way Malick’s camera does that. Nobody is innocent. There are no real simple answers to be had here. The world is a contradiction and a struggle. Philosophy attempts to untangle it but sometimes finds itself becoming even more entangled through its exploration. The Thin Red Line helps make that tangle even more sumptuous and enticing to think about. It shows us that in the moment of light, darkness is waiting to be revealed. Thinking about the film takes us to another level of thinking itself. This is the dialectic in action. It is worth repeated viewings.

Notes 1

2

Consider the caged chicken in Badlands, the shots of the fields in Days of Heaven, or the natural habitats in The New World. For an excellent discussion of this idea in Malick’s work see www.filmphilosophy.com/vol6–2002/n48critchley (accessed on February 2010).

Chapter 10

Song of the Earth: Cinematic Romanticism in Malick’s The New World Robert Sinnerbrink

Terrence Malick is a filmmaker who takes time: time to make films, time for us to become immersed in his unique cinematic worlds, time for us to appreciate the critical and aesthetic achievement of his work thus far.1 Not every filmgoer or critic, however, takes this time over or with Malick’s work. Despite widespread praise for his cinematic achievements, his reputation as an elusive, maverick genius working at the margins of Hollywood, the critical response to his fourth film, The New World (USA 2005), has been, as Lloyd Michaels notes, “generally disheartening”: “More discouraging than the predictable complaints about slow pace, pretentious imagery, incoherent voiceovers, empty dialogue, and wooden performances was the mocking tone that informed several reviews” (Michaels 2009, 84).2 Mocking ridicule replaces critical reflection, as though the difficulty of a film, its resistance to superficial appropriation, or instantaneous intelligibility, were marks of its artistic or intellectual failure. As Adrian Martin observes, however, we should remember that all of Malick’s films had mixed reviews when first released, even those now regarded as classics. Moreover, that this tells us something important about practices of film reviewing and film criticism that refuse to take the time required (“more than ever, in the Internet age”) to digest Malick’s films, and hence fail, in their haste to pass judgment and in their refusal of aesthetic reflection, “to take the measure of Malick’s achievement.”3 Indeed, as Martin observes, The New World “still feels like a new film, a young film,” one that we can respond to as yet only in a fragmentary and preparatory way. Perhaps this quality of remaining “forever young” is fitting for a film that takes the uncanny encounter between Old and New Worlds as its subject, and which strives to make us to experience the world—not only cinematic worlds, but a sense of world renewed—in a

180

Terrence Malick

different way, as naïve, in the original sense of natural or innocent (the “innocence of becoming,” as Nietzsche once said). How, then, to approach this enigmatic and untimely work? Celebrated and criticized at once as Hollywood’s most elusive auteur, Malick’s work has always attracted an ambivalent mixture of critical admiration and mixed box-office success.4 The New World is no exception, presenting a strikingly poetic evocation of one of America’s founding myths, the story of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith. Following nineteenth-century tradition, Malick renders the latter as a romantic tale of thwarted love, misguided ambition, and spiritual reconciliation; but unlike tradition, he lingers on the ambiguous dimensions of intercultural conflict, explores diverging attitudes toward nature between Old and New Worlds, and shifts the narrative focus toward the usually neglected marriage between Pocahontas/Rebecca and tobacco grower John Rolfe. Despite its apparent shift into the genre of historical epic, it resonates deeply with his other, generically idiosyncratic works—Badlands (USA 1973), Days of Heaven (USA 1978), and The Thin Red Line (USA 1998)—by presenting a mesmerizing philosophical meditation on our relationship with nature, our experience of mortality, and the nature of love. Indeed, if The New World can be understood as historical, spanning the founding of Jamestown in Virginia in 1607 to Pocahontas’s death at Gravesend, England, in 1617, it is history in the form of mythic poetry (akin to how The Thin Red Line presents the historical Battle of Guadalcanal in a manner evoking Homer’s Iliad).5 With this emphasis on myth in mind, I shall approach The New World as a work of cinematic romanticism that attempts to transform the familiar Pocahontas legend by presenting the historical encounter between Old and New Worlds in the register of poetic myth rather than historical fact. In the words of Pocahontas/Rebecca, The New World seeks to “sing the story of our land”; it is a “song of the earth” in a romantic key, evoking not only Heidegger and Nietzsche but Emerson and Cavell. The film’s central romantic narrative—the love triangle between Pocahontas/ Rebecca, John Smith, and John Rolfe—has an important allegorical meaning in at least two registers: the possibility of a successful marriage or cultural exchange between Old and New Worlds, and the possibility of achieving a kind of reconciliation with nature—our own mortal nature as well as the nature upon which we depend—that would sustain any such intercultural reconciliation. At the same time, the film attempts to present an “impossible” experience fusing mythic history, intensively subjective reflection, and a

Song of the Earth: The New World

181

metaphysical perspective in which nature itself speaks. This audacious undertaking has prompted a certain anxiety on the part of the film’s more philosophical critics to disavow The New World’s romantic “naivety”; a naivety, or openness to the new, expressing the film’s most fundamental mood. To elaborate this claim, I shall explore The New World from a philosophical-critical perspective, suggesting that it strives to perform a cinematic version of the kind of “aesthetic mythology” called for by the early German romantics in response to the crisis of reason and meaning afflicting the modern world.6 In this sense, The New World explores the potential for cinema to enact alternative forms of world-disclosure, aesthetically revealing, through cinematic art, new ways of being, of dwelling, within a world-context and relationship with nature that is more than ever under pressure from a destructive rationalism, reductive instrumentalism, and imperialist violence. Malick nonetheless approaches this aesthetic mythology with romantic naivety: the innocence of mythic history for which the burdens of the past, and of the present, are magically transfigured, not least through the shadowy ways in which characters are cinematically drawn in the film. Indeed, as Adrian Martin notes, the film presents as though they were not yet fully formed, depicting them “in the uncertain, twilight, becoming state before such a congealing of identity.”7 This hovering of identity, prior to its congealing into a fixed state (historical, personal, or narrative), is central to the aesthetic mythology of The New World; a mythology that performs its aesthetic disclosure of worlds in cinematic and poetic rather than narrative or historical terms. Malick’s “Song of the Earth” captures the threshold or origin of an historical myth—the myth of America—one that resonates and needs retrieving precisely because of the historical disasters of colonialism, the exploitation, historical conflict, and destruction of nature and culture that we have witnessed in its wake. Nonetheless, for many critics there is something troubling about The New World, whether understood as history, myth, or poetry. A number of recent critical discussions of the film articulate a critical ambivalence concerning the film’s romantic “naivety”: its evocation of an ideologically tainted myth (celebrating the colonial “encounter” between Old and New Worlds), and its deployment of apparently anachronistic cultural and aesthetic tropes (of nature, love, and mortality).8 Indeed, it is precisely this romanticism—or rather Malick’s romantic naivety, the film’s “naïve” celebration of nature and risky historical handling of Colonial contact—that troubles critics and scholars alike. James Morrison, for

182

Terrence Malick

example, dismisses this “naïve romanticist” approach to film, arguing that if Malick “were indeed rehearsing North America’s myths of origin merely as occasions of neo-Romantic exercises in transcendentalism, or sporadic bouts of an accustomed lyricism, complete with Edenic pastorals and noble savages,” then the film would surely deserve to be dismissed for its “terminal naivety.”9 The issue here with romantic naivety can be put in the form of a paradox. On the one hand, The New World confronts us, in strikingly realistic fashion, with the dramatic cultural and historical conflict between Old and New Worlds; on the other, it immerses us aesthetically in the “timeless” space of historical myth—opening up a space (and time) of awe and wonder, via the transfiguring power of cinematic poetry, in which nature itself is allowed to speak. In other words, it is not so much The New World’s romanticism as its naivety that critics find troubling: its seemingly unwitting evocation of ideologically suspect myths or historically anachronistic tropes. Two questions present themselves at this point. Is the film unwittingly naïve or knowingly so? And why is the film’s alleged “romantic naivety” so problematic? To address these questions, I shall explore the following thesis. The critical ambivalence toward the film that I have mentioned is prompted by what critics perceive as an uncomfortable dilemma: either The New World is a lyrical, poetic work that lapses into unknowing naivety, celebrating what was in fact a tragic historical contact between Colonists and natives; or else it is a sophisticated apologia for Colonialism, one that knowingly elaborates an aesthetically rich but ideologically dubious version of this troubled history. Given these alternatives, it is not surprising that many critics opt for the first alternative—The New World is compromised by its unknowing romantic naivety—without clarifying, however, why this should be resisted. This critical ambivalence, moreover, points to a genuine difficulty: the film’s simultaneous screening of an historical event and an experience of myth, a poetic presentation of subjective experience and a metaphysical attempt to give voice to nature itself. In what follows I present an alternative response to the concern that the film remains unwittingly tainted by ideology or vitiated by outmoded tropes. Far from being “naive,” The New World is a knowing kind of romanticism: a concerted attempt to immerse us in the imagined experience of this mythic moment of contact between Old and New Worlds, and to transfigure this tainted myth of intercultural encounter through the aesthetic power of cinematic poetry. The film generates an immersive experience of “The New World”—openness to “the New” as such—that would

Song of the Earth: The New World

183

transfigure our perception of its history and open up the possibility of renewing its original promise. In short, I want to suggest that the audacity—but also questionability—of Malick’s romanticism is to rejuvenate the Pocahontas myth not only to retrieve the possibility of reconciliation between cultures, but to suggest the possibility of a “New World” in which human dependence upon nature is acknowledged as the basis for any enduring intercultural or historical reconciliation.

The Pocahontas Legend The difficulties involved in writing about Malick’s idiosyncratic films are well known. Hwanhee Lee remarks, for instance, that the lack of critical work on his films “is partly due to the fact that (besides the lack of outputs) it is hard to articulate the motivations or concerns behind them.”10 In the case of The New World, however, things are perhaps a little less mysterious. We know that Malick had entertained for some time the idea of filming the Pocahontas story, having written the script back in the 1970s.11 He returned to the idea for the film only after abandoning a project on the life of Che Guevera.12 It is also clear that The New World repeats and develops themes and sequences that can be found in The Thin Red Line (the sometimes traumatic encounter between two worlds; our relationship with nature; the philosophy of love), as well as in Days of Heaven (contrasting ways of cultivating and inhabiting the land; the love triangle between Bill, Abby, and the Farmer). The tale itself is one of the favorite myths of the founding of America, having been the subject of numerous novels, plays, and a number of previous film versions.13 Since 1994 there have been three animated versions, including two Disney animations that emphasized the romantic relationship between Pocahontas and John Smith, introducing a rather cloying strain of New-Age spiritualism and sentimental multiculturalism.14 As many commentators have noted, the romantic version of the legend, emphasizing the historically dubious possibility of a romantic involvement between Pocahontas and John Smith, is an invention of the nineteenth century. Why does Malick give it such prominence in his decidedly romantic rendering of the tale? To begin composing an answer to this question we should first consider what we might call the John Smith version of the Pocahontas story, which has become a mainstay of American cultural mythology. As Edward Buscombe notes, through innumerable retellings, Smith’s notoriously unreliable version of the story “has acquired mythological elements

184

Terrence Malick

shared with other stories of encounters between Europeans and Indians, to such an extent that the original ‘facts’ (if they are certain enough to be worthy of the name) have been distorted and obscured.”15 The basic historical elements of the tale are as follows.16 In 1616, explorer and adventurer Captain John Smith, one of the early colonists in Jamestown, Virginia, recounted in a letter how some ten years previously a young teenage girl called Pocahontas, daughter of Powhaten, chief of the Algonquian Indians, intervened to save his life after he was captured and taken to Powhaten’s residence at Werowocomoco, 12 miles from Jamestown.17 Smith describes how after a feast with the chief, he was forced to lie down across two large stones, with natives poised above him ready to beat him to death with clubs, until Pocahontas intervened and his life was spared. In all probability, Smith was subjected to a traditional ritual involving a symbolic death and rebirth that would initiate him into the community; and Pocahontas was most likely performing her prescribed role in intervening and sparing his life (the stylized presentation of this legendary event in Malick’s film suggests precisely this kind of “symbolic” death and rebirth ritual).18 Over the following year, the lively Pocahontas (a nickname in Algonquin meaning “wanton one” or “playful one”) develops friendly relations with the colonists, reportedly visiting the colony to trade food and furs or to play games with the local boys (her cartwheels are mentioned); though she greatly admires Captain Smith and frequently talks with him, there is no suggestion of any romantic relationship between them. In 1609 Smith is forced to return to England (due to serious injuries sustained from a gunpowder explosion), where he remains for the rest of his life. Upon her next visit to Jamestown Pocahontas is told that Smith has been killed. In 1613 Pocahontas is kidnapped and held for ransom by an enterprising Jamestown resident, Captain Samuel Argall. She returns to Powhaten in 1613 in exchange for part of the ransom and some English prisoners and arms in his possession. She moves to another settlement, Henrico, where she begins her education in the Christian faith, then meets and starts a relationship with tobacco planter John Rolfe. After a raid on Powhaten’s territory by Sir Thomas Dale (leader of Henrico) and his men, bent on extracting the remaining ransom from Powhaten, the Algonquians attack and the Englishmen respond by burning houses, burning villages, and killing a number of natives. Pocahontas is eventually released, explains that she has been treated well while in captivity, and that she wants to marry John Rolfe. Powhaten consents and the Englishmen withdraw, the marriage between Pocahontas, now baptized

Song of the Earth: The New World

185

as Rebecca, and Rolfe (in July, 1614) signaling a welcome end to hostilities between the colonists and the natives. Smith, a deeply religious man, explains his reasons for marrying a “heathen” as being for the good of the plantation, the good of the colony, and for the greater Glory of God (a line quoted directly during an important scene in the film). Sir Thomas Dale leads an important expedition back to England in 1616 to secure financial support for the Virginia Company and brings along a dozen Algonquian Indians, including Pocahontas/Rebecca, to ensure maximum publicity for the cause. Accompanied by husband and child, Pocahontas’s arrival in England, as the “Indian Princess,” is the subject of great interest (one of the few contemporary portraits of Pocahontas shows her in Tudor dress). She is received at court of King James I, introduced to the Royal Family and to the best of London society. While in London, she learns that Captain Smith is in fact alive and has a meeting with him. At first too emotional to speak, Pocahontas/ Rebecca later addresses him as “father,” a term to which Smith objects but upon which she insists. In March 1617, Rolfe and his wife planned to return to Virginia, but Pocahontas/Rebecca fell gravely ill at the commencement of their return journey. She reminds Rolfe, distraught at the prospect of her impending death, that “all things must die,” and that “it was enough that their child should live.” She succumbed to her illness and was buried in a churchyard at Gravesend, England. She was 22 years old.

From Mythic History to Cinematic Poetry How to retell this romantic tale of the encounter between worlds, of the possibility of experiencing a new worlds or one’s own world anew, in a skeptical and spiritless age? Critics have generally tried to resist The New World’s romantic naivety (through irony or skepticism) or restricted it to autobiography.19 Here I would like to propose an alternative interpretation of this naivety, and a response to the critical ambivalence it provokes. First we should reflect on what it means to describe the film as “naïve,” which in everyday speech refers to someone who lacks worldly experience, who is ignorant of the way of the world, or perhaps “otherworldly” in his or her vision of things. In an aesthetic context, however, we can speak of a naive style, which refers to a conscious attempt to produce this kind of untutored, spontaneous, childlike, or “primitive” vision of the

186

Terrence Malick

world or treatment of subject matter. Critics of The New World, however, are clearly not intending the term in this sense, despite there being good grounds to describe at some aspects of Malick’s cinematic aesthetic, with its poetic voice-overs, sensuous treatment of nature, and evocation of silent cinema, in precisely this manner—a naive style in film. At any rate, the criticism of naivety, understood less as a style than as a way of treating the film’s subject matter, is a charge leveled from the perspective of superior knowledge or judgment tempered by historical experience. It faults the film for wittingly deploying dubious tropes or reproducing questionable points of view. To (implicitly) criticize The New World for romantic naivety is to suggest that it is ignorant of, or remains ideologically captured by, a history that it is unable to comprehend or adequately portray. Or it is to suggest that the film reverts to tropes— concerning nature, love, and mortality—that have become historically enervated or culturally obsolete. At the same time, the implication is that the film unwittingly suffers these historical, moral, or aesthetic lapses. Otherwise one would have to propose that Malick’s film knowingly attempts to aesthetically justify one of the more ideologically “tainted” myths supporting the Colonialist project and its destructive impact upon native peoples. Since this alternative would compromise the aesthetic and moral worth of the film, the former alternative provides a means of rationalizing or domesticating The New World’s unabashedly romanticist gestures. How does Malick’s romantic naivety work in the film? Let us consider the film’s remarkable opening sequence: an image of quiet movement across the surface of water, as though we were in a boat or canoe, with a voice-over (who will turn out to be Pocahontas) reciting lines from a poem or proem: “Come, Spirit. Help us sing the story of our land. You are our mother, we your field of corn. We rise from out of the soul of you.”20 Her voice recites this verse against the prominent background sounds of birdsong, crickets, and water. We then cut to image of what will prove to be Pocahontas, shot from below, arms raised heavenward, giving thanks to the sky. This sequence is followed by the credits proper set against a background of animated maps of the Virginia region festooned with animals, birds, and waterways, but also marked by ships, dwellings, and battles. Compare this with the opening sequence of The Thin Red Line, which begins with images of a crocodile sliding under the water, vast jungle trees and treetops illuminated by sunlight, and a Southern male voiceover (Witt?) asking “What is this war in the heart of nature?” The Thin Red

Song of the Earth: The New World

187

Line similarly includes images of children swimming underwater illuminated against the water’s surface reflecting the sky, followed by an image of Private Witt serenely paddling his canoe on the water’s surface, greeting the local fishermen, a beautiful new world that serves as idyllic backdrop for the violent encounter between worlds that is soon to follow. These subaquatic images have featured regularly in Malick’s films, for example, Bill’s extraordinary death scene in Days from Heaven (1978), which shows, again from below the water’s surface, as it were the reverse sequence, from life to death: Richard Gere’s face crashing into the water after having been fatally shot in the back.21 Crucial scenes from The New World will also feature water or a return to water, Pocahontas/Rebecca praying to her Mother/Spirit, or at the end of the film, standing, fully clothed, joyously smiling having been immersed in water at the moment her spirit is released in death, or the concluding images of water running over rocks before the final sublime shot of treetops swaying in the wind. The opening image of The New World, accompanied by gradually swelling horns announcing Wagner’s famous “Rheingold” prelude, features naked figures swimming amidst fish and against the sunlit surface of the water.22 Momentarily we glimpse a beautiful young woman, her face seen from an underwater perspective, her hand gently touching the water’s surface. The extended cut of the film dwells on the figure of young girls, one in particular, swimming gracefully beneath the surface, with a voiceover, possibly hers, that continues: “Dear Mother, you fill the land with your beauty. You reach to the end of the world. How shall I seek you? You, the great river that never runs dry.” We cut to an image of strong, young men, seen again from beneath the water’s surface, pointing intently off into the distance. The next shot reveals three ships, imposing and grand, entering the harbor and announcing the central contrast of the film: between the New World, that is also a mythic world immersed in nature, and the Old World, that is an historical world of the colonial settlers who have come to establish the first permanent colony on these shores (an intertitle announces that we are about to enter (Western) history: Virginia, 1607). The images of the ships’ occupants, commanders, sailors, and the like, show a mixture of responses, from wariness, and caution to amazement and wonder. A porthole image—a frame within the film frame—shows the ships sailing into harbor from yet another perspective beneath the surface of things. From a darkened background we see a handsome face emerge, a prisoner in chains peering out toward the world, then gazing skyward, hands outstretched, echoing the image of Pocahontas worshipping in

188

Terrence Malick

the prologue; his purpose here, however, is not to worship but rather to catch the water dripping down on his face from the grill up on deck. The images of Pocahontas and Smith, however, are already linked and twinned; the contrasts between freedom and constraint, community and exile, new and old worlds, already deftly set into motion. The film cuts back to the excited figures on shore, running from their village to a higher vantage point from which they can see the strange apparition. Our attention is drawn to one character in particular, Pocahontas, whose perspective and response frames that of her people and of the film itself, gazing in amazement as the ships sail closer to shore. The film cuts back to the handsome prisoner on the ship, peering again through a porthole, an image that neatly frames another of longboats heading toward the shore, as he smiles in joyful anticipation. These two are destined to meet, their worlds to collide, their fates to entwine; yet this is an encounter whose outcome cannot, as yet, be anticipated, nor one in which our background knowledge of the legend or subsequent history of Pocahontas and John Smith is supposed to figure in our response. It is a moment preparing for an encounter between worlds, between myth and history, an encounter that the film signals shall be presented in a manner that is naive, mythic, and poetic rather than documentary, historical, or political. Let us add an encounter between worlds that raises the question of marriage, a question presented in a romantic key, as the Wagnerian prelude, the first of three appearances of this same prelude in the film, vividly attests. The second time the Wagner prelude appears is to signal the blossoming of love between Pocahontas and John Smith, a nuptials already hinted or prefigured in the opening sequence of the film.23 Another voice-over by Pocahontas begins, again evoking or questioning her Mother/spirit: “Mother, where do you live? In the sky? The clouds? The sea?” We see images of the interior of a hut, filled with smoke and statues (one of the many varieties of interior dwellings to be found in The New World, as well as in The Thin Red Line), and of Pocahontas worshipping the sky. An image of the roof of the hut, open to the sky but framed by a small windowlike opening, releasing smoke, rhymes with but also inverts the earlier image of Smith’s vision of the windowlike opening above the hold of the ship, a grilled prison cell opening into which water would drip down to his face. “Give me a sign,” says Pocahontas, “We rise. We rise.” Like smoke from a fire or clouds from the sea, the spirit rises into the firmament; love takes flight, spanning immeasurable distances. In

Song of the Earth: The New World

189

the extended version of the film, we see an image of Pocahontas’s actual mother (played by Irene Bedard), face painted white and reciting a ritual incantation, followed by lyrical and poignant images of Pocahontas and John Smith, their wordless, expressive love beginning to flower, with all the exhilaration, joy, and fear that involves: “Afraid of myself. A god he seems to me.” Her growing self-understanding is figured in a moving vignette showing Pocahontas regarding her image in a broken shard of mirror, laughing delightedly at her image. “What else is life but being near you,” the voice asks, as they regard a book together, Smith showing her pictures of that wonder of the Old World, the city of London. Pocahontas’s growing recognition of her love for Smith, and for the potential transgression this might entail, is signaled in her reflections on how they appear to others in her community, and the knowledge that this blossoming love is nonetheless fated not to last: “Do they suspect? Oh, to be given to you. You to me.” The voice-over here and throughout this sequence is punctuated by images of trees, water, birds soaring; a rapturous fusion of nature, spirit, and becoming: “Two no more. One. One, I am. I am,” as images of water appear once again along with treetops reaching for the sky, images of Pocahontas and Smith together. The E flat major “drone” of the Wagner prelude has swelled to its fullest intensity by this point, as we cut to an image of a Powhaten native calling to one of the pair, at which point Smith now begins to speak, narrating how he was suddenly freed by the King, and told he would be sent back to his own people, in order to tell them that they could stay until the spring, after which “they were to go back from where they came.” Against images of Pocahontas taking pleasure in the scent of drying tobacco leaves and giving thanks to the sky, Smith is returned to fortresslike Jamestown, bearing food and gifts for the coming winter. The music fades and finally stops as he is lead into the gray, muddy, and depressing fort, the Wagnerian prelude replaced by the sound of barking dogs and a desolate whistling wind. The Wagnerian prelude has shifted here from an anthem announcing the theme of encounter between old and new worlds, and the linked fates of Pocahontas and Smith, to the accompaniment and expression of their burgeoning love, their realization of the limits and impossibility of this love. It communicates Smith’s return from the other world, his idyllic sojourn with Pocahontas and life within the Powhaten community— “there’s only this, nothing else is real”—to the stark reality of his other life as soon-to-be commander of a derelict and dying colony. Wagner’s

190

Terrence Malick

romantic theme, which first announced the encounter between Old and New Worlds, has shifted into an anthem for a vibrant but impossible love; the irreconcilable clash between worlds that demands that both Smith and Pocahontas sacrifice their love for the sake of community and tradition, conquest and colonization. Indeed, it is precisely this theme of marriage as expressing the possibility of a reconciliation between Old and New Worlds, but also of the discovery—or recollection—of another way of inhabiting the earth, that holds various parts or elements of The New World together. Marriage—or better, remarriage, as is the case with Pocahontas/Rebecca—unites aesthetically the allegorical dimensions of the Pocahontas myth. The “natural” marriage between Pocahontas and Smith is superseded by the “cultural” marriage between Rebecca and Rolfe. Indeed, it is only with Rolfe (farmer and cultivator), rather than Smith (leader and adventurer), that the nuptials between naturalized culture and cultivated nature can be fleetingly realized. This romantic myth of “impossible” marriage is what enables Malick to hold open, in a space of poetic wonder, the possibility of a world other than either the Old or the New. This would be a genuinely “New World”— experienced through Malick’s immersive cinema—grounded upon a renewed relationship with the earth, without which the possibility of mutual recognition between worlds degenerates into conflict and domination. This knowingly romanticist gesture—proposing an aesthetic mythology in order to heal the breach of reason and feeling, nature and culture—captures the heart of Malick’s supposed “naivety.” The New World is a knowingly mythic recasting of the Pocahontas/Rebecca story as a poetic meditation on what marriage between cultures, but also between human culture and nature, might mean.

In Praise of Cinematic Romanticism Let us consider the extraordinary concluding sequence of the film, following Rebecca’s poignant parting from Smith in the English gardens and her emotional reconciliation with Rolfe (“my husband,” she whispers). With the film’s third recitation of the Rheingold prelude, its original mythical meaning in Wagner’s opera has now been effectively reversed.24 As we have seen, we hear it the first time at the beginning of the film, accompanied by underwater images of fish and native figures swimming, followed by images of the arrival of the Colonists’ ships, much

Song of the Earth: The New World

191

to the amazement of the “naturals” watching from shore. The second time the prelude plays is during Smith’s idyllic sojourn with the Powhaten, depicting the flowering of love between Pocahontas and Smith, and Smith’s profound transformation during his sojourn with her people. When we hear the Rheingold prelude a third time, however, its significance has been subtly transfigured: it is no longer an anthem to wonder and possibility opened up by the nascent encounter between Worlds; it is also broadened beyond the lyrical expression of love and utopian community that Smith experiences with Pocahontas and the Powhaten. These two rather polarized renditions of Wagner’s piece are transfigured in this third rendering, which gives sublime musical expression to Pocahontas/Rebecca’s acceptance of death, affirmation of life, and reconciling of Old and New Worlds in another, no-longer-human world. This swelling, intensifying musical crescendo suggests nothing less than the self-expression of nature that is here momentarily allowed to “sing,” to bear witness to Pocahontas/Rebecca’s spiritual reconciliation and her return to (mother) earth. Wagner’s prelude is transfigured through aesthetic repetition in a manner that mirrors Pocahontas/Rebecca’s own experience of transformation, which is presented, finally, as of a piece with the becoming of nature itself. In this final sequence, the music signals a process of reconciliation, of homecoming, Pocahontas/Rebecca’s discovery of who she is, and her reconciliation with life and death (“Mother, now I know where you live,” she says, answering the question she first posed at the beginning of the film). The sequence is shown first from the perspective of her child, playing hide-and-seek with his mother in the English gardens, and then looking for her once she disappears (after her moment of recognition, her answering of the question that has guided her throughout). We then cut to Pocahontas/Rebecca’s unexpected death at Gravesend, just as she and her family were to return home to Virginia. The moving images of her deathbed parting from Rolfe (“All must die,” she says, “yet ‘tis enough that our child should live”) are narrated from a letter Rolfe has written to his son that is to be read by him in the future. Images of death, recognizable from other Malick films, punctuate the scene: windows, crisscrossed with grills, opening toward the sky; an empty bed; a powerful, noble spirit departing the room in a bounding rush (one of the most sublime images of death in recent cinema). We see a montage of images of Pocahontas/Rebecca’s departure from this life, her joyous worship of earth, sky, and water, her cartwheels, her sublime celebration of, and return to, the creaturely life of nature. After its final crescendo,

192

Terrence Malick

accompanied by images of ships departing from the shore, of Rebecca’s cruciform gravestone rhyming with that of the ship’s masts, seen from below, silhouetted against the evening sky, the music finally ceases— beyond death—with the film’s final images of rushing water and towering treetops swaying in the wind. With the music giving way to birdsong, rushing water, and forest sounds, the film is fleetingly transformed into a sublime song of the earth, one in which nature itself “poetises” in a breathtaking moment of mythic possibility. The three renderings of Wagner’s Rheingold prelude mark a profound transformation between the early, middle, and concluding parts of the film. These musically and visually rapturous sequences announce the encounter between worlds, celebrating the couple whose idyllic love and shared destinies mark both the utopian possibility and historical tragedy of this encounter, of this marriage. Malick’s visual symphony combined with Wagner’s overture reveals the transformation of the (Western) desire for conquest and domination, transfigured through love, the overcoming of opposition, and the need to acknowledge a deeper (spiritual) unity with nature. It aesthetically discloses the sublimity of nature understood as elemental earth, that which underlies and supports any form of historical human community. Acknowledging this unity with nature is what makes possible—were one inclined to put it in the form of a thesis—the kind of plural coexistence or marriage between worlds, that The New World evokes through mythic history and cinematic poetry. Yet there is still something unsettling about The New World’s aesthetic mythologizing. In his remarkable fusion of mythic history, subjective reflection, and the self-expression of nature, Malick attempts no less than presenting the experience of an “impossible” point of view. On the one hand, the film immerses us, with careful verisimilitude, in the imagined experience of the historical encounter between colonists and natives. On the other, it immerses us within a mythic rendering of this event, within the ahistorical space of myth. Both perspectives are then contrasted or even integrated with the sublime presence of nature in all its elemental splendor. The New World thus exemplifies what Stanley Cavell describes as the defining myth of film: “that nature survives our treatment of it and its loss of enchantment for us, and that community remains possible even when the authority of society is denied us.”25 Nature is both the deeper ground of cultural reconciliation, and the hidden source of a utopian community that could found a new world; but this experience of nature remains a poetic evocation, a moment of aesthetic sublimity fleetingly celebrated on film. Malick’s inherently

Song of the Earth: The New World

193

unstable “song of the earth” is thus an enthralling combination of historical detail and aesthetic mythology, intimate subjectivity and “inhuman” nature. The audacity of The New World’s romanticism is to allow, through cinematic poetry, nature to reveal or disclose itself as a “subject,” as a participant in this mythic history. This is a perspective that requires all of Malick’s cinematic art to make meaningful, something we might affectively experience, or that might even provoke us to thought—if only we are open to this possibility. Viewed from our historical perspective, this romanticism is knowingly untimely, in Nietzsche’s sense: acting against the prejudices of the age in favor of a time to come. Malick’s romantic naivety is a refusal of the “worldliness” that would presume to know the meaning of the historical and cultural conflict between worlds, or indeed between human worlds and the earth upon which they depend. This is signaled explicitly in the extended “director’s cut” of The New World, which is prefaced by a quotation from Captain John Smith warning that those who think they have experienced Virginia “do not understand or know what Virginia is.” Malick’s romantic naivety remains true to Smith’s warning against the arrogance of historical worldliness—and Smith should know, having renounced nature and love in favor of history and conquest, but in the process having “sailed past” his true Indies, as Pocahontas/Rebecca remarks. Indeed, we still do not know, as Heidegger once observed, what worlds are; let alone how to understand the birth of worlds, or how to foster their flourishing in a manner consonant with the acknowledgment of human plurality and finitude. That this is a risky aesthetic undertaking is undeniable, for it conflicts with our shared skepticism toward “the New”: a skepticism characteristic of our sense of historical disappointment following the collapse of Enlightenment hopes—or what Nietzsche famously called “European nihilism.” Malick rejuvenates this possibility of experiencing the New— an American sublimity, we might say—through the poetic power of myth. We can experience this mythic history, however, only aesthetically, through cinematic poetry, and then only fleetingly. In the film’s final rhapsodic sequence, the fusion of musical and visual sublimity give way to the sound of water running over rocks, of insects and bird song, and of wind whistling through the treetops. Malick’s “song of the earth” is thus an aesthetic challenge to our historical skepticism, which always treats romantic naivety—our openness to the experience of new worlds—as untenable and unworldly.

194

Terrence Malick

Notes 1 2

3

4

5

6

7 8

9

10

11 12

13

Malick’s fifth film, Tree of Life, is due for release in late 2011. Lloyd Michaels, Terrence Malick (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 84. Simon Critchley, for example, remarks of The New World: “Very sadly, I have come to the view that the less said about the latter the better.” Critchley does not reveal the basis for his dismissal of the film (27). Adrian Martin, “Approaching the New World,” The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America, ed. Hanna Patterson, 2nd ed. (London: Wallflower Press, 2007), 218. Martin Flanagan, “ ‘Everything a Lie’: The Critical and Commercial Reception of Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line,” The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America, ed. Hanna Patterson, 138–9. A point well made by Simon Critchley: “If we cast the Japanese in the role of the Trojans, and Guadalcanal in the place of Troy, then The Thin Red Line might be said to recount the prehistory of American empire in the same way as Homer recites the prehistory of Hellenic supremacy” (12). Simon Critchley, Very Little . . . Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature, revised edition (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 99–114. Critchley offers a different account of romantic naivety than that which I discuss here with reference to The New World. For Critchley, the “naïveté of romanticism is the conviction that the crisis of the modern world can best be addressed by art,” in particular through poetry, or the marriage of philosophy and literature in the novel as the ideal romantic poetic form (1997, 99). Malick shares this romantic naivety concerning the power of art but transposes it to film as the ideal romantic poetic form. Martin, “Approaching the New World,” 213. For a critical analysis of these ambivalent responses to The New World see Robert Sinnerbrink, “From Mythic History to Cinematic Poetry: Terrence Malick’s The New World Viewed.” Screening the Past, Issue 26: Early Europe (December 2009), www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/26/early-europe/ the-new-world.html James Morrison and Thomas Shur, The Films of Terrence Malick (Westport: Praeger, 2003), 199. Lee Hwanhee, “Terrence Malick,” Senses of Cinema, 2002, http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/02/malick.html Michaels, Terrence Malick, 78. Lloyd Michaels notes that “Malick had been working with Benicio del Toro for some time on a biopic about Che Guevera when the project foundered for lack of financing” (81). He is currently completing a film titled The Tree of Life with Sean Penn and Brad Pitt (replacing Heath Ledger). Due for release at the end of 2011, The Tree of Life is a tale of innocence and experience set in the 1950s Midwest; it is simply described as “a cosmic epic, a hymn to life.” Pocahontas and John Smith (1924, Bryan Foy), Captain John Smith and Pocahontas (1953, Lew Landers), Pocahontas (1994 animated film, Toshiyuki Hiruma Takashi), Disney’s Pocahontas (animation film, 1995), and the Disney sequel, Pocahontas II: Journey to a New World (1998).

Song of the Earth: The New World 14

15

16

17

18

19 20

21

22

195

Pocahontas (USA 1995). At least one commentator has claimed that the Disney version is a primary reference for Malick’s The New World, a claim based largely upon the emphasis on the romantic involvement between Pocahontas and Smith and the appearance of actors (Irene Bedard and Christian Bale) from the Disney version in Malick’s film (in which Bedard plays Pocahontas’s mother and Bale her husband John Rolfe) (see Macdonald 2009, 100–1). It seems far more likely that the romantic story between Pocahontas and Smith is taken up because it serves Malick’s artistic purposes: first, because it allows Malick to explore the theme of love in more depth than in his previous films (the love triangle between Pocahontas, Smith, and Rolfe recalling, but also differing from, that between Abby, Bill, and the Farmer in Days of Heaven); and secondly, because it also provides the opportunity to develop the allegorical significance of the theme of marriage and the possibility of reconciliation between cultures, or more deeply, between human culture and nature. Edward Buscombe, “What New in The New World?” Film Quarterly 62, no. 3 (Spring 2009), 35. I draw here on the accounts of Buscombe (2009), D’Entremont (2007). See also Woodward (1969). Popular usage substitutes the Algonquin term for “chief” (Powhaten) with the name of Pocahontas’s father (Wahnunsunackock). Pocahontas’s actual name was Matoaka. As noted by Michaels (2009) and Martin (2007). For a historian’s critique of the historical distortions in Malick’s romantic rendering of the tale see D’Entremont (2007). See Sinnerbrink, “From Mythic History to Cinematic Poetry.” As Adrian Martin notes, this verse is an example of Malick’s remarkable use of preexisting versions of the Pocahontas tale, in this case echoing and reworking “a poem by that great on-the-spot theorist of silent film, Vachel Lindsay (1917),” titled, “Our Mother/Pocahontas” (2007, 215). Lines from Lindsay’s poem—“We rise from out of the soul of her” and “Because we are her fields of corn—are directly referenced in the voice-over to Malick’s film. The New World also resonates with the kind of imagery, sympathy for Pocahontas, and renunciation of English/American and Western European ancestry to be found in the Lindsay poem (2007, 215). Malick, however, submits it to a subtle rewriting: Lindsay takes Pocahontas to be the “sacred mother” figure, whereas in The New World Pocahontas is a seeker searching for her Mother, “the ‘spirit’ whom she invokes in order to sing the story of our land’ ” (2007, 215). The film also features a suitably romantic-aquatic signature piece, “Aquarium,” from Saint-Saëns’ Le Carnaval des Animaux. The prelude to Das Rheingold begins with the three Rhine maidens swimming beneath the surface of the water. They mock the ugly Alberich, a Nibelung dwarf, who steals the famous Rhine gold they were supposed to guard. In stealing the Rhein gold, which can only be acquired abandoning love in favor of wealth and power, he fashions a magic ring that gives its bearer the power to rule the world. It is not difficult to discern the parallels in Malick’s recasting of this mythic scene to the Virginian tidewater region, which commences with native American water maidens and the arriving colonists (including,

196

23

24

25

Terrence Malick

ironically, John Smith) embodying Alberich’s rejection of nature and love in favor of power and wealth. It is also used, to quite different effect, in Werner Herzog’s marvelous Nosferatu (1979). The other piece of music used to articulate the relationship between Pocahontas/Rebecca and Smith is from Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23. As mentioned above, this prelude evokes the moment in Das Rheingold “when the mythical character Alberich, a Nibelung dwarf, steals the river Rhine’s golden treasure, renouncing love in favor of wealth and power” (d’Entremont 1024). Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed, enlarged edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 214.

Chapter 11

Whereof One Cannot Speak: Terrence Malick’s The New World Elizabeth Walden

Invocation Terence Malick’s film The New World (2005) opens with an inverted image of trees and sky, a reflection in water, which foreshadows, perhaps, the upending of our expectations of the world we will encounter in the film. Soon thereafter we hear the voice we will come to recognize as that of Matoaka, the daughter of the Powhaten chief popularly known as Pocahontas.1 The voice says “come spirit, help us sing this story of our land. You are our mother. We need this field of corn. We rise from out of the soul of you.” Then we see Pocahontas shot from a low angle as she gestures overhead to the sky. Malick’s narrators are never obviously authorial and often evince views shaped by limited or transient perspectives. The separation of the voiceover from the image of the Pocahontas creates ambiguity as well because it severs voice and speaker, language from image, a move which has become the hallmark of Malick’s mature style. Nevertheless, I want to address this invocation as offered in good faith. The film, I propose, does indeed seek to “sing the story of our land.” I recognize that this may seem an unlikely claim for a contribution to a volume on Malick and philosophy. An invocation evokes a connection to an oral tradition of myths and stories more than philosophy.2 But, this film, I suggest, makes a philosophical intervention through that gesture and encourages us to think philosophically about myths and stories in relation to a modern approach ostensibly distinct from such. Malick sides with myth, I argue, not against a modern view of the world, but after having undermined the self-assurance of the modern exception, the idea that the modern point of view bears a relationship to the world essentially distinct from that of myth. In the end, I think that Malick attempts to show us something in

198

Terrence Malick

his film whereof one cannot easily speak: though our ways of knowing the world are material forces within it, the world is nevertheless irreducible to their terms and, importantly, this ought to be a cause of wonder, even humility, before it.

Myth and History The New World seems to address its subject matter from two seemingly incompatible approaches: myth and history. And it approaches both, not casually, but with great intention, suggesting a unified, if not initially clear purpose. If we take the invocation in good faith—if the film seeks to “sing the story of our land,” we enter into the realm of myth or legend. But how are we to regard such? How do we know if it has hit its mark? We moderns regard myths as inaccurate or mystified accounts of the facts of the matter, a fanciful mistelling of history or natural science. Of course, we are accustomed to fiction and yet fiction and myth are not the same thing. Fiction makes no claim to truth, while myths are often meant to be explanatory. If the film itself indicates a relation to myth by opening with an invocation, this relation is redoubled by the fact that the central narrative of The New World is also mythic. The film presents the familiar legend of Pocahontas and John Smith as lovers. Pocahontas, according to the legend, saved her beloved’s life, throwing herself upon him, when her people sought to kill him. But historical consensus is that Pocahontas and John Smith were never lovers, despite what Smith claimed some 17 years after the fact, and that Smith misinterpreted what happened to him: what he took for a near death experience was probably part of a ritual accepting him into the tribal community.3 Malick depicts the frightening confusion during Smith’s capture and acceptance into the tribe, and so gives a sympathetic, but historically plausible, representation of Smith’s experience. But the film clearly suggests that there was a great love between Pocahontas and John Smith. And the story of that love is at the center of the film, even after Smith has set out for parts unknown. In an interview on National Public Radio, The New World’s producer, Sarah Green, said, “if the legend hadn’t lasted as powerfully as it has, I don’t think we’d have gone there. But that legend has lasted, and it’s very resonant, and like the great legendary affairs, it has a power of its own.”4 I think that the “resonance” that Green mentions, the “power” of

Whereof One Cannot Speak: The New World

199

the legend, contributes something an attempt to set the record straight regarding the relationship would not be able to capture. But recall that the story the invocation addresses is “the story of our land,” not of individuals. The film is called The New World, not Pocahontas and John Smith. So we may surmise the historical inaccuracy, the legend of Pocahontas and John Smith, is present in the service of telling “the story of our land,” the new world the film explores. The film does not simply present us with myth, however; it purports to treat historical figures and events: Pocahontas, John Smith, John Rolfe, and the founding of Jamestown. And except for the legend of the love between Pocahontas and John Smith, the film is deeply dependent upon the historical record.5 The film shows familiarity with the literature of its subject, both the history and the first-hand accounts of colonists; we know Malick sought advice from a range of expert sources. The costumes and artifacts were made out of period appropriate materials, often with period tools. He researched flora and fauna, planting a strain of heritage corn for the film, rather than using more common engineered varieties. Malick hired linguist Blair Rudes, an expert in language revitalization, the reconstruction of lost languages, to recreate the Algonquian language of the historical Powhaten peoples, which was lost as the Powhatens were decimated and driven from the land. Malick is committed, as well, to capturing material reality in rich and natural detail in his films. To this end he avoids artificial lighting and effects. He prefers the use of handheld cameras. The only digital effect in the film was an animated insert of a Carolina Parakeet that is extinct, but would have been seen at the time the story was to have taken place. Malick’s foregrounding of myth in the film’s invocation suggests sympathy with the world of myth, but how this is so and how the film “sings the story of our land” requires that we move in two different directions: first, in the next section, we dig deeper into the specific world of the film. And then, in the section that follows, we will consider Malick’s mythic relationship with philosophy and the concept of world he encountered there.

Two Worlds Malick’s use of both myth and history create a film world which engages at the level of representation a distinction that is recapitulated thematically in the film itself in the meeting of the Powhaten and the Jamestown colonists and the two cultures they represent.

200

Terrence Malick

After the invocation that begins the film, the titles are shown. If Pocahontas has already invoked the world of the Native Americans, we next confront the radically different world of the Europeans. We see maps in the style of the period showing the Atlantic and the American coast, we see unknown areas fill in as the corollary, we presume, of exploration, we see botanical drawings and drawings of wildlife and engravings of natives in pitched battle with colonists. In the difference between the world of the invocation and the titles, Malick contrasts the oral culture of ritual and gesture, the human stretched out between earth and sky and the culture of the book, the map, the engraving, with the human directing its representations as if from the outside. The “story of our land” concerns these seemingly incommensurable worlds in contact. Malick makes the difference between these worlds palpable. Except for the enchanting “Indian princess,” Pocahontas, the members of the Powhaten tribe are represented as almost shockingly “other.” Native American critic Leo Killsback connects these depictions to a lineage of racist cinematic imagery: The European arrival to The New World is much like the astronauts’ arrival on The Planet of the Apes. There seems to be no sign of intelligence. Although there are beings that do possess both human and animal characteristics, for the most part they are as wild as the deer and as pitiful as toddler children in need of guardians . . . The random movements of the Powhatan people were akin to those of monkeys, or like the indigenous people depicted in the latest King Kong. They lacked any sophistication or anything human.6 As Killsback indicates the physical comportment of the Native Americans is especially striking. At the first meeting between the Native Americans and the colonists, the former appear distinctly animalistic.7 They make animalistic hoots, their first inclination is to smell the colonists, their highly decorated appearance is deeply strange. They are high-strung and jumpy: the voice-over confirms that they seem “timid—like a herd of curious deer.” Yet, despite the shock that the images produce, I do not think that Malick’s imagery is racist, nor do I think that he implies any hierarchy between these cultures—indeed, just the opposite. I think that he is trying to respect both the radical difference between these cultures and the

Whereof One Cannot Speak: The New World

201

nature of the difference. Malick represents two different people with distinct histories and relationships to nature and to the world. Such makes for significant and deep differences in appearance. But neither is shown to be intrinsically morally or culturally superior. The Native Americans are shown with an animal attunement to their surroundings as befits their relationship to the land as hunters and seasonal farmers. But the animality of the Native Americans is contrasted with the brutishness of the colonists and the latter come out looking much more savage. This is especially evident when John Smith returns to the fort after his long stay at the stately, productive, Powhaten village only to face the barbarity, laziness, and filth of the colonists stressed by their inability to survive in the natural environment, despite its bounty of plants and animals. But lest we lose ourselves in a fantasy about the noble savage, we are made aware of Native brutality as well, when we see a severed head mounted along the river, perhaps as a warning to the invaders. Indeed I think that Malick is at pains to show that these two cultures are precisely anthropologically symmetrical, that the meeting between them is a meeting of equals.8 And this does not mean that they are measured by the same standard, but that there is no single cultural standard with which to judge their cultures. It is to this end that I think that the legend of Pocahontas and John Smith is especially effective for Malick. The legend of Pocahontas and John Smith serves as a myth of origin for the world of anthropological symmetry. They are allegories of their cultures and their love is an ideal of contact across such vast differences. Love is the meeting of equals and requires an openness and curiosity that expands the boundaries of one’s world in an attempt to comprehend the other. Pocahontas and John Smith belie their differences and show that love makes its own world. Malick is no romantic, however. The love between Pocahontas and John Smith effervesces and leaves something else in its wake. The rest of the story follows Pocahontas as she struggles with the implications of that love and the new world of which she has become a part. The colonists come from a land of a vastly different scale and structure than the tribal world of the Powhaten, but it is not depicted here as different in kind. Both cultures make myths. The myth of modern exception, according to which the modern view of the world is essentially different from that of nonmodern peoples, is, on this view, just cultural chauvinism. That Malick rejects such is evident in the way the film positions itself as on the side of myth and the way that it insists on our own

202

Terrence Malick

myth—that of Pocahontas and John Smith—as a significant element of the story of our land, not to be relegated to Disney and its youthful audience.

Showing the World: A Myth about Terrence Malick, Philosophy, and Filmmaking A set of biographical facts about Terrence Malick and his relationship to philosophy are part of his legend as a filmmaker.9 Malick studied philosophy at Harvard in the early 1960s with Stanley Cavell, who supervised his honors thesis. He was interested in the relation between continental thought, especially that of Heidegger, and Anglophone philosophy. After Harvard, Malick went to Magdalen College, Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, but he eventually “left Oxford because he wanted to write a D. Phil thesis on the concept of world in Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein, and was told by Gilbert Ryle that he should try and write on something more ‘philosophical.’ ”10 After leaving Oxford he taught philosophy in the United States and worked as a journalist. In 1969 he published a translation of Heidegger’s The Essence of Reason, and the same year he began to study film at the American Film Institute. Since becoming a filmmaker, Malick has been notoriously reluctant to give interviews or to comment on his films. It is widely agreed that Malick is in some sense a philosophical filmmaker. He seems more interested in “ideas” than in narrative or character. There are many wonderful essays that draw upon the cited biographical facts to draw connections from particular philosophical positions to particular elements of Malick’s film exposition. I am doing no different here. But I want to make a stronger claim as well, one that is less respectful of disciplinary boundaries. For I think that Malick’s philosophical interest in a concept of world may explain his transition from philosophy to film and may also help us to understand what it means for The New World to “sing a story of our land.” Malick’s legend has him turning to film after leaving Oxford without the terminal degree that would have secured him a career in philosophy. Perhaps, on one telling, he discovered that his interests were indeed insufficiently “philosophical,” as his advisor Gilbert Ryle told him, and that he would like to try something significantly different. But I’d like to tell the story another way. Stanley Cavell, Malick’s honor’s thesis advisor from Harvard is one of the great American interpreters

Whereof One Cannot Speak: The New World

203

of Ludwig Wittgenstein. In his best work he takes from Wittgenstein an understanding of the tradition of skepticism and a concept of the ordinary that leads to a complex engagement with the Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, literature, film and daily life. Malick undoubtedly got from Cavell a rich sense of what the analytic tradition in philosophy could do, which included an open and productive engagement between analytic and continental philosophy. One can imagine the excitement, when Malick, upon winning the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship, followed his interests to Britain, the spiritual home of Analytic Philosophy, where Wittgenstein developed his best work. The opportunity to work with Gilbert Ryle, a leading Ordinary Language Philosopher, heavily influenced by Wittgenstein, must have felt like drawing nearer to the source. It is said that Wittgenstein’s physical mannerisms lived on in even the fourth generation of his acolytes.11 And one can imagine the crushing disappointment of having his project idea, so clearly inspired to a great degree by Wittgenstein, belittled by Ryle as insufficiently philosophical. Malick’s project on the concept of world in Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Wittgenstein, is the sort of project that he could have worked on with Cavell, with this latter’s generous understanding of the implications of Wittgenstein’s work. Ironically, it seems the closer Malick drew to the world that nurtured Wittgenstein’s thought, the further he was from the rich ferment of the ideas that fueled his interests. Wittgenstein’s work has the strange distinction of inspiring schools of thought that drew wildly disparate implications from his work. Ryle’s masterwork, The Concept of Mind, for example, seeks to explode a myth he famously refers to as “the dogma of the Ghost in the machine.”12 According to such, we have both bodies and minds: there is some sort of mental substance that exists separately but analogously to body. Now mind/body dualism has been attacked from many quarters that need not be rehearsed here, but Ryle’s particular response is of interest for understanding his version of the legacy of Wittgenstein. The problem with the concept of mind, according to Ryle, is not that it is part of an incorrect theory, or that it perpetuates an ideology, but that it involves a “category mistake.” The concept of mind is a “dogma” that “represents the facts of mental life as if they belonged to one logical type or category . . . , when they actually belong to another.”13 Ryle clarifies that “a myth is, of course, not a fairy story. It is the presentation of facts belonging to one category in the idioms appropriate to another. To explode a myth is accordingly not to deny the facts but to

204

Terrence Malick

re-allocate them.”14 So a myth is an attempt to represent the truth, but one which founders on confusion about the sort of thing that one is talking about and the rules that apply to such talking. In the case of the concept of mind: “certain sorts of operations with the concepts of mental powers and processes are breaches of logical rules.”15 We can imagine then that the concept of world may seem to Ryle to be something akin to mind, a concept which seems deeply significant only as a result of a category mistake. We can imagine an analogy based on Ryle’s famous example of someone misunderstanding the logic of the concept of “university”: A foreigner visiting Oxford or Cambridge for the first time is shown a number of colleges, libraries, playing fields, museums, scientific departments and administrative offices. He then asks “But where is the University? I have seen where the members of the Colleges live, where the Registrar works, where the scientists experiment and the rest. But I have not yet seen the University in which reside and work the members of your University.” It has then to be explained to him that the University is not another collateral institution, some ulterior counterpart to the colleges, laboratories and offices he has seen. The University is just the way in which all that he has already seen is organized. When they are seen and when their coordination is understood, the University has been seen . . . . He was mistakenly allocating the University to the same category as that to which the other institutions belong.16 So perhaps the concept of “world” is like “University” in Ryle’s view: to the degree that it appears to refer to something distinct from the many things “in” the world it is nothing but a detour to myth and “windy mysticism.”17 Ryle’s notion of philosophy does not seek to produce rich explanations of complex human concerns, but, rather, “is the replacement of category habits by category-disciplines,” that is, an unmooring of bad intellectual habits that lead one astray from the appropriate logic of a concept.18 He admits that he himself is guilty of such bad habits and his work is a form of self-therapy: “Primarily I am trying to get some disorders out of my own system. Only secondarily do I hope to help other theorists to recognize our malady and to benefit from my medicine.”19 The idea of philosophy as a sort of therapy comes directly from Wittgenstein, who talked of philosophy as waging “a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”20 Ryle is

Whereof One Cannot Speak: The New World

205

clearly influenced by the dramatic admonishment to philosophy that Wittgenstein gives at the end of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The right method of philosophy would be this. To say nothing except what can be said, i.e. the propositions of natural science, i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy; and then always, when someone else wished to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had given no meaning to certain signs in his propositions. This method would be unsatisfying to the other—he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy—but it would be the only strictly correct method. My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must, so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.21 This would seem to be the final word on the matter. World as apart from specific things in the world is, in Wittgenstein’s terms, nonsense and ought then to be passed over in silence. This cannot be the end of the matter, however. For it is difficult not to read the end of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as ironic. It seems precisely philosophy’s business to talk about that “whereof one cannot speak.” Certainly, Ryle’s The Concept of Mind is such a venture in talking at great length about that “whereof one cannot speak.” But leaving that aside, something else of interest appears in Wittgenstein’s struggle with the limits of sense: a fascinating gap opens between showing and saying, between language and apprehension. “What can be shown cannot be said,” Wittgenstein says.22 Language directs us, in this formulation, beyond language. Unlike many of his followers, Wittgenstein does not restrain himself from nonsense. For he recognizes that everything of value lies beyond the limit he has drawn in language: “The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value—and if there were, it would be of no value.”23 So, we can talk sensibly neither of ethics nor of God.24 And for the Logical Positivists and Ordinary Language Philosophers of Ryle’s stripe this made perfect sense—we should cleanse the language of metaphysical notions and explode philosophical myths. But this is not where Wittgenstein stands. He concludes, rather: “there is indeed the

206

Terrence Malick

inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical.”25 And, “Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is.”26 Both Ryle and Wittgenstein agree that philosophy must draw limits to sense. The difference between them is that Ryle seems more contented with such limits, more able to accept the therapy that philosophy provides than Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein seems endlessly ambivalent about such. (He, like Malick, left Britain without his degree.) His work is always straining at the limits of sense, even to the degree that he writes aphoristically, refusing the appearance of completion. Malick, on the other hand, on this telling, makes the choice to bypass such limits altogether. By turning to filmmaking, he is able to explore the world as something that shows itself, as something of value that cannot be reduced to what can sensibly be said about it.

Conjuring the World Malick’s transition from philosophy to filmmaking, an attempt to “show what cannot be said” is a significant intervention within the philosophical discourse that seeks to draw a limit to sense. The world that Malick shows us is not nonsense; it shines through Malick’s rich cinematic engagement with the natural world, returning Wittgenstein’s sense of the mystical to the world in its material specificity. The distinction he shows us is not between sense, the propositions of natural science, and nonsense and the mystical, but between the world as it figures into various human machinations and the world which exceeds such. The two worlds, the worlds of myth and history, the worlds of Powhaten and English, are not significantly different on this view; they are alike in their partiality. The world Malick shows in The New World is not reducible to either one; it is specific and material. Malick does not want us to become simple relativists, however. He is not staking out a position of intellectual neutrality. The world he shows us is a world that is specific and material and glorious and natural: it evokes wonder and a sense of humility. His cinematography “sings” the land for us, insisting that we recognize that we exist within its majesty; it is not simply an abstraction of our philosophy. In essence what Malick does with film is to break down the boundary, so tenuous in Wittgenstein, between philosophy and myth. And specifically, in The New World, this means, as well, that he breaks down the myth of the modern exception. The extreme limits on what can be said sensibly in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, is a reductio ad absurdum of modern exceptionalism. All that can be

Whereof One Cannot Speak: The New World

207

said, according to Wittgenstein, is the propositions of the natural sciences. All other propositions, including this one, are nonsense. It is the propositions of natural science that manifest the specialness of the modern relationship to the world on the model of modern exceptionalism. And yet in order to secure philosophically their distinctiveness from all other ways of engaging the world, everything else must be seen as nonsense, that is everything of value, including value itself. In order to prove itself, modern exceptionalism sacrifices everything, even the world, even the human. If Wittgenstein was restrained at the end of the Tractatus about the true status of philosophy, he is less so in a note left out of the typed manuscript of his Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough. Philosophy is unavoidably involved in magic. Rush Rhees, his editor, notes that Wittgenstein himself was unhappy with these remarks and wanted them stricken. Rhees says, “I think we can see why”: I think now that the right thing would be to begin my book with remarks about metaphysics as a kind of magic. But in doing this I must neither speak in defense of magic nor ridicule it. What it is that is deep about magic would be kept.—In this context, in fact, keeping magic out has itself the character of magic. For when I began in my earlier book to talk about the “world” (and not about this tree or table). Was I trying to do anything except conjure up something of a higher order by my words?27 Wittgenstein recognizes that his own use of the term world, to conjure up something is akin to magic. The Tractatus, the very book that launched so many projects to cleanse philosophy of metaphysical thinking, is a book of magic, beginning with its own invocation of the world (which, he says, “is everything that is the case.”28 Its attempt to keep magic and myth from our language is a magic spell. Modern culture differs from other cultures only in disavowing its magic and in believing that nature is reducible to what it makes of it. The world that Malick conjures for us is a natural world. It exceeds human interest, it escapes our narratives and our forms of knowledge. But we are within it, not outside of it. All attempts to characterize the world are forms of myth, provisional, incomplete. This is not a way of belittling them however, for Malick. Nor is it a naïve call to return to some premodern era, with its “inseparability of natures and societies.”29 It is a call to a world that can be acknowledged as having intrinsic value—a world that can indeed be shown and shown as wondrous.

208

Terrence Malick

The New World We all know what happens after the period that the film depicts, the period of the early settlement of the Americas. In the near term, the Powhaten and other coastal tribes are decimated through war and disease and driven from their land; in the longer term the indigenous people of the continent are subject to genocidal destruction and followed by injustice. Knowledge of this history haunts the film for the viewer, but Malick directs our attention elsewhere. Killsback’s evident disgust with The New World raises a legitimate question: is it possible to treat any part of this history without acknowledging the subsequent history of genocide and injustice? My inclination is to say, No! To ignore what is set in motion during this era is to perpetuate its misdeeds. But my appreciation of Malick’s film is such that I think, in this case, the answer is, yes. And I say this primarily because I think that the reflex of shame concerning the subsequent history often perpetuates the cultural chauvinism of the modern exception. It typically seems a foregone conclusion that the culture of advanced technology and modern science would be victorious over other cultures it encounters; the regret is over the violence and destruction and the loss of difference. But rarely does an honest reconsideration of modernity take place. Malick’s focus on the moment of early contact, however, encourages us to reconsider the anthropological symmetry between the two cultures. It undermines our naïve belief in the modern exception and asks us to go beyond shame to rethink our understanding of culture itself and its relation to nature. This is of special significance at a time in history when we see the results—global warming, species destruction, resource wars—of the relation to the world upon which the modern exception depends: a view of the human subject as outside of nature, a view of nature as that which corresponds to the propositions of the natural sciences, a nature whose meaning is exhausted by our knowledge of it and which exists, hence, merely as a resource for our use. At the end of the film, Pocahontas meets with John Smith again in England, having learned that he is still alive. Pocahontas had been trapped by her exclusive love of Smith, which cut her off from her people, from her land and from her spirituality, even from her identity. Meeting with Smith releases her. She listens to him and watches him. He is nothing special. If at one time he “appeared as a god to her,” now he is just a man, and a rather sad man at that. “Did you find your Indies, John?” Pocahontas asks. “I may have sailed past them,” he responds in a rare

Whereof One Cannot Speak: The New World

209

moment of personal insight. She ends up walking away. She is released from her entrancement with Smith and the world itself seems changed. She embraces John Rolfe as her husband, Rolfe who is shown waiting and watching and learning from her. “There is that in her I shall not ever know,” he admits. And at the same time there in her corset, in the manicured formal garden in England, we hear her voice say, “Mother, now I know where you live.” As she gets over the fantasy of Smith’s exceptionalism, she is returned to the relationship with the world with which the film began. There are many “new worlds” that the film presents. There is the new world of the Americas for the settlers and the new world that the Native Americans must encounter first as a new element in their landscape, and then as the new conditions of their survival. For Smith and Pocahontas there is the new world that they represent to each other as lovers. For Pocahontas there is the new world that she embodies as she changes from Motoaka into Rebecca and travels from village, to fort, to her presentation to the Queen. But I think that the New World that Malick wants to show us is the one that Pocahontas evokes at the beginning and the end of the film. The world that is new each time we lift ourselves from our human concerns to regard it with appropriate wonder and humility, the world which is there around us in its material specificity all the time, the world that cannot be properly known, but must be shown . . . or sung.

Notes 1

2 3

4

5

6

7

8

Neither name is used in the film. Knowledge of her identity seems presumed. She is christened Rebecca, while living with the colonists. The epic poem The Odyssey begins “Sing to me of the man, Muse.” Roy Crazy Horse, “The Pocahontas Myth,” http://powhatan.org/pocc.html (accessed July 27, 2010). Kim Masters, “ ‘New World’ Offers New Take on Pocahontas,” National Public Radio, December 21, 2005. Jamestown1607, Org. www.jamestown1607.org/newworldfilming.asp (accessed July 27, 2010). Leo Killsback, “The New World Review,” Wicazo Sa Review 21, no. 2 (Fall 2006), 197–201. The Powhaten already had some limited contact with Europeans; the film represents the first contact with the Jamestown settlers. I take the idea of anthropological symmetry from Bruno Latour, who argues that we need a truly symmetrical anthropology that would allow us to move

210

9

10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29

Terrence Malick

back and forth between modern and nonmodern cultures, as I believe Malick encourages us to do, 91–2. Simon Critchley, “Calm—On Terrence Malick’s ‘The Thin Red Line’,” FilmPhilosophy 6, no. 38 (December 2002), www.film-philosophy.com/vol6–2002/ n48critchley Ibid. Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), vii. Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1949), 15–16. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 16. Martin Heidegger, of course, distinguishes between beings and Being in just this way. I am not addressing the role of Heidegger in Malick’s work because it is beyond the scope of this paper and because it has been treated well in so many other essays on Malick. Ryle has a complex relationship to Heidegger, which is fascinating in its own right. In his review of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, Ryle recognizes the significance of Heidegger’s work but ended saying that in Heidegger’s hands phenomenology was “heading for bankruptcy and disaster or will end in self-ruinous Subjectivism or in windy mysticism.” Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 9. Ibid., 9. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (New York: Macmillan, 1953), 109. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 6.53–7. Ibid., 4.1212. Ibid., 6.41. Ibid., 6.42 and 6.432. Ibid., 6.522. Ibid., 6.44. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough (Cottage Denton near Harleston Norfolk: Brynmill Press, 1979), v–vi. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 1. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 91–2.

Bibliography

Aitken, Stuart C. and Leo E. Zonn, eds. Place, Power, Situation, and Spectacle. Maryland and London: Rowman and Littlefield, 1994. Alemendros, Nestor. Man with a Camera. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1984. Aristotle. Physics. R. P. Hardie and R. K. Gaye, trans. The Complete Works of Aristotle, Volume One, Bollingen Series LXXI—2. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. Basso, Keith H. “ ‘Speaking with Names’: Language and Landscape among the Western Apache.” Cultural Anthropology 3, no. 2 (May 1988): 99–130. —. Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apaches. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996. Bersani, Leo and Ulysse Dutoit. Forms of Being. London: BFI Publishing, 2004. Biskind, Peter. “The Runaway Genius.” Vanity Fair 460 (December 1998): 116–25. Blackmore, Susan. The Meme Machine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Blanchot, Maurice. The Work of Fire. Charlotte Mandell, trans. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960. London: Routledge, 1985. —. Narration in the Fiction Film. London: Routledge, 1985. Boyle, Alan. “How a Linguist Revived ‘New World’ Language.” January 21, 2006. www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10950199 (accessed July 2009). Branigan, Edward. Narrative Comprehension and Film. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. —. Projecting a Camera: Language-Games in Film Theory. New York: Routledge, 2006. Brickman, Barbara. “Coming of Age in the 1970s: Revision, Fantasy, and Rage in the Teen-Girl Badlands.” Camera Obscura 22, no. 3 (2007): 25–59. Burch, Noël. Theory of Film Practice. Helen R. Lane, trans. London: Secker & Warburg, 1973. Buscombe, Edward. “What New in The New World?” Film Quarterly 62, no. 3 (Spring 2009): 35–40. Carroll, Noël. The Philosophy of Motion Pictures. London: Blackwell Publishing, 2008. Cather, Willa. My Ántonia. (The Willa Cather Scholarly Edition). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. Cavell, Stanley. The World Viewed (enlarged edition). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979. Chion, Michel. The Thin Red Line. London: BFI Publishing, 2004.

212

Bibliography

—. The Voice in Cinema. Claudia Gorbman, ed. and trans. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Ciment, Michael. “Interview with Terrence Malick.” Positif 170 (June 1975): 30–4. Cohen, Hubert. “The Genesis of Day’s of Heaven.” Cinema Journal 42, no. 4 (2003): 46–62. Crazy Horse, Roy. “The Pocahontas Myth.” http://powhatan.org/pocc.html (accessed July 27, 2010). Critchley, Simon. “Calm—On Terrence Malick’s ‘The Thin Red Line’.” Film-Philosophy 6, no. 38 (December 2002). www.film-philosophy.com/vol6– 2002/n48critchley (accessed June 2010). —. Very Little . . . Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature, revised edition. London and New York: Routledge, 1997. Crofts, Charlotte. “From the ‘Hegemony of the Eye’ to the ‘Hierarchy of Perception’: The Reconfiguration of Sound and Image in Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven.” Journal of Media Practice 2, no.1 (2001): 19–29. Danks, Adrian. “Death Comes as an End: Temporality, Domesticity, and Photography in Terrence Malick’s Badlands.” Senses of Cinema (online). Senses of Cinema (2000). http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/00/8/badlands.html Davies, David, ed. The Thin Red Line. London: Routledge, 2009. Deleuze, Gille. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, trans. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. —. Kant’s Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, trans. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. d’Entremont, John. “The New World (movie review).” The Journal of American History 94, no. 3 (December 2007): 1023–6. Derrida, Jacques. The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud. Mary Ann Caws, trans. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998. —. Spectres of Marx: The State of Debt, The Work of Mourning & The New International. London: Routledge Classics, 2006. Donougho, Martin. “West of Eden: Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven.” Post Script 5, no.1 (1985): 17–30. Escobar, Arturo. “Culture Sits in Places: Reflections on Globalism and Subaltern Strategies of Localization.” Political Geography 20 (2001): 139–74. Feld, Steven and Keith H. Basso, eds. Senses of Place. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1996. Gilby, Ryan. It Don’t Worry Me: The Revolutionary American Films of the Seventies. New York: Faber and Faber, 2003. Heath, Stephen. Questions of Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981. Heidegger, Martin. Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry. Keith Hoeller, trans. Amherst: Humanity Books (an imprint of Prometheus Books), 2000. —. The Essence of Reasons. Terrence Malick, trans. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969. —. Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World Finitude, Solitude. William McNeil and Nicholas Walker, trans. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.

Bibliography

213

—. Poetry, Language, Thought. Albert Hofstadter, trans. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. —. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. —. What is Called Thinking? New York: Harper Perennial, 1976. Held, Klaus. “Phenomenology of ‘Authentic Time’ in Husserl and Heidegger.” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 15, no. 3 (September 2007): 327–47. Heraclitus. Fragments. Brooks Haxton, trans. New York: Penguin, 2001. Hölderlin, Friedrich. Werke in einem Band. München Wien: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1990. Jamestown1607. org. www.jamestown1607.org/newworldfilming.asp. (accessed July 27, 2010). Kael, Pauline. 5001 Nights at the Movies: A Guide from A–Z. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982. Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgement. James Creed Meredith, trans. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953. Killsback, Leo. “The New World Review.” Wicazo Sa Review 21, no. 2 (Fall 2006): 197–201. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993. Lee, Hwanhee. “Terrence Malick.” Senses of Cinema, 2002. http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/02/malick.html Luhmann, Niklas. Art as a Social System. Eva M. Knodt, trans. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Lukinbeal, Chris. “Cinematic Landscapes.” Journal of Cultural Geography 23, no. 1 (2005): 3–22. Malick, Terrence, director. Badlands. Warner Brothers Pictures, 1973. —. Days of Heaven. Paramount Pictures, 1978. —. The New World. New Line Cinema, 2005. —. The Thin Red Line. Fox 2000 Pictures, 1998. —. The Tree of Life. Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2011. Martin, Adrian. “Things to Look Into: The Cinema of Terrence Malick,” accessed at Rouge Press. www.rouge.com.au/10/malick.html (accessed August 2010). Masters, Kim. “New World Offers New Take on Pocahontas.” National Public Radio. December 21, 2005. www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5064030 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. C. Smith, trans. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962. Michaels, Lloyd. The Phantom of the Cinema: Character in Modern Film. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. —. Terrence Malick. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009. Morris, Wright. Ceremony in Lone Tree. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001. —. The Field of Vision. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1974. —. The Home Place. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. —. The Territory Ahead: Critical Interpretations in American Literature. New York: Atheneum, 1963.

214

Bibliography

Morrison, James and Thomas Shur. The Films of Terrence Malick. Westport: Praeger, 2003. Nichols, Bill, ed. Movies and Methods (v. 1). Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. Nisbet, H. B., ed. German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: Winkelmann, Lessing, Hamann, Herder, Schiller, and Goethe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Orr, John. Contemporary Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998. Oudart, Jean-Pierre. “Cinema and Suture.” Screen 18, no. 4 (1977): 35–47. Patterson, Hanna, ed. The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America (2nd ed.). London: Wallflower Press, 2007. Perez, Gilberto. “Film Chronicle: Days of Heaven.” The Hudson Review 32, no. 1 (1979): 97–104. Petric, Vlada. “Review of Days of Heaven.” Film Quarterly 32, no. 2 (1978–1979): 37–45. Petro, Patrice, ed. Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Pound, Ezra. Guide to Kulchur. New York: New Directions, 1970. Price, David A. Love and Death in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas and the Heart of a New Nation. New York: Knopf, 2003. 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, no. 4 (2010): 255–66. Ryle, Gilbert. The Concept of Mind. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1949. —. “Review of Sein und Zeit.” Mind 38 (1929): 355–70. Salt, Barry. “The Early Development of Film Form.” Film Form 1, no. 1 (1976): 97–8. —. “Statistical Style Analysis of Motion Pictures.” Film Quarterly 28, no. 1 (1974): 13–22. Sargeant, Jack. Born Bad: The Story of Charlie Starkweather and Caril Anne Fugate. New York: Creation Books, 1996. Schiller, Friedrich. Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen, accessed at Project Gutenberg (Germany). www.gutenberg.org.de —. Über naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2002. Silverman, Kaja. The Subject of Semiotics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. Singh, R. Raj. “Heidegger and the World in an Artwork.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48, no. 3 (Summer 1990): 215–22. Sinnerbrink, Robert. “A Heideggerian Cinema?: On Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line.” Film-Philosophy 10, no. 3 (2006). www.film-philosophy.com/index. php/f-p/issue/view/20/showToc (accessed May 2010). —. “From Mythic History to Cinematic Poetry: Terrence Malick’s The New World Viewed.” Screening the Past, Issue 26: Early Europe (December 2009). www. latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/26/early-europe/the-new-world.html Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Atheneum, 1992.

Bibliography

215

Smith, Murray. Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Sobchack, Vivian. The Address of the Eye. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991. Sterritt, David. “Film, Philosophy, and Terrence Malick’s ‘The New World.’ ” Chronicle of Higher Education, January 6, 2006, B12–13. http://web.ebscohost.com Thompson, Kristin. Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film Analysis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988. Thorpe, Helen. “The Man Who wasn’t There.” Texas Monthly, December 1998. http://web.ebscohost.com Turvey, Malcolm. Doubting Vision: Film and the Revelationist Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Vernant, Pierre and Pierre Vidal-Naquet. Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece. Janet Lloyd, trans. New York: Zone Books, 1988. Weiss, Elizabeth and John Belton, eds. Film Sound: Theory and Practice. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. New York: Macmillan, 1953. —. Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough. Cottage Denton near Harleston Norfolk: Brynmill Press, 1979. —. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981. Wondra, Janet. “A Gaze Unbecoming: Schooling the Child for Femininity in Days of Heaven.” Wide Angle 16, no. 4 (1994): 5–22. —. “Marx in a Texas Love Triangle: ‘Marrying Up’ and the Classed Gaze in Days of Heaven.” Journal of Film and Video 57, no. 4 (2005): 3–13. Woodward, Grace Steele. Pocahontas. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1969. “Wright Morris” Contemporary Authors Online, February 25 (2004). http://galenet. galegroup.com Wydeven, Joseph J. “Wright Morris.” Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 206: Twentieth-Century American Western Writers, First Series. Gale Group (1999): 222–33. http://galenet.galegroup.com Yates, Christopher S. “A Phenomenological Aesthetic of Cinematic Worlds.” Contemporary Aesthetics 4 (2006). www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/ article.php?articleID=394#FN14 Young, Julian. Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Žižek, Slavoj. The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieślowski between Theory and PostTheory. London: BFI Publishing, 2001. Zucker, Carole. “ ‘God Don’t Even Hear You,’ or Paradise Lost: Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven.” Literature/Film Quarterly 29, no. 1 (2001): 2–9.

Index

acousmêtre (not-yet-seen-voice) 26–7 action space 94, 95, 96 Adams, Brooke 7, 23, 65, 66, 79n28, 117, 162 aesthetic mythology 181, 192–3 aesthetics, motif of 2, 20, 26, 54, 62, 64, 65, 97, 126, 127, 179, 181, 182, 185–6, 190–3 Affleck, Ben 10 Almendros, Nestor 7, 8, 12n12 Altman, Robert 4 American Film Institute, Los Angeles 1 Center for Advanced Film Studies (now the AFI Conservatory) 5, 6, 80 Antonioni Michelangelo 154 Apted, Michael 10 Ariosto, Ariosto 61 Arkin, Alan 6 Artaud, Antonin 149 artwork and world, relationship between 20–2, 25, 85–6 Badlands dwelling and 98 Malick, Terrence 3, 6–7, 8, 11n3, 13, 18, 22, 24, 25, 27, 32, 33, 35, 38, 40, 41, 42, 43–4, 45, 50, 51–3, 54, 55nn5–6, 59, 63–5, 102, 104, 105–10, 111, 114, 116, 119–21, 122–3n10, 123n11, 180 subjectile and 92–7 worlding of 87–92, 178n1 Bale, Christian 10, 73, 195n14 Barber, Samuel Adagio for Strings 45

Bardot, Brigitte 158 Barry Lyndon Kubrick, Stanley 129 Basso, Keith H. 100n24, 100n37 Bear’s Kiss Bodrov, Sergey 10 Bedard, Irene 189, 195n14 being Being and 81 camera and 17 and transcendence 34 Ben Hur Wyler, William 129 Bennett, H. H. 150 Bergson, Henry 148 Bersani, Leo 30, 39n23 Forms of Being 77n3 biographical itineraries 4–11 Biskind, Robert 8, 9, 12nn5, 13–15 Blanchot, Maurice 77n7 Bleasdale, John 40 Bonnie and Clyde Penn, Arthur 56n19, 66 Bordwell, David 14, 39nn3, 11, 134, 136, 146nn18, 21, 28 Branigan, Edward 134, 135, 138, 146nn22, 24–5, 30–3 Narrative Comprehension and Film 137 Brecht, Bertolt 62, 163 Breughal, Pieter 150, 154 Brickman, Barbara Jane 23, 39n16, 122n10 Brooklyn Academy of Music 9 Bujold, Genevieve 7 Burch, Noël 146n20

218

Index

Buscombe, Edward 146n16, 183, 195nn15–16 calm, motif of 36–7, 61, 63, 73, 78n11, 170 camera 37, 89–90, 117, 171 autonomy of 17–18 as being and becoming 17 gaze of 29 mobility 138, 146n19, 174 revelation of space by 32 in sensuous relationship to landscapes 17–18 Cannes film festival 8 Carroll, Noël 138, 147n34 Casey, Edward 128, 135, 145nn10–12 Cather, Willa 121n2 My Ántonia 102 Cavell, Stanley 2, 11n1, 19, 80, 81, 126–7, 129, 145nn7–8, 13–14, 192 The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film 1, 126, 129, 196n25 Caviezel, James 50, 169 Caviezel, Jim 9 Caviezel, John 66, 71 Chaplin, Charlie 23, 25 Che Soderbergh, Steven 10 Chion, Michael 15, 26, 39nn18–20, 45, 56nn11, 13, 16–17, 77nn3, 5, 79n28, 147n40 Ciment, Michel 6, 12nn6, 10, 45, 55n7, 78n23 cinematic realism 125n36 cinematic romanticism, in The New World 179, 190–3 mythic history and cinematic poetry and 185–90 Pocahontas legend and 183–5 cinematic space 18, 94, 95, 96 phenomenological approach to 97 cinematography see camera class conflict, motif of 140–1 classical cinema 14, 23 cognitive mapping 133–8

Cohen, Hubert 124n33 conflict, motif of 29, 61–2, 64, 66–7, 69, 71–5, 121, 140–1, 161, 180, 182, 190, 193 Contempt Godard, Jean-Luc 158 Coppola, Francis Ford 154 Courbet, Gustave 150, 154 Cousins, Mark 79nn33, 38 Critchley, Simon 36, 39n27, 62, 78nn11, 15, 194nn2, 5, 6 Crofts, Charlotte 132, 139, 140, 147nn37, 40 Dances with Wolves Costner, Kevin 66 Danks, Adrian 108, 109, 123n13 Dante 61 Dasein 34, 84, 85, 86, 93, 98 Davies, David 4, 77n3 Dayan, Daniel 134, 146n22 Days of Heaven criticism of 129–33 gaze in 139–43 making sense of 126–9 Malick, Terrence 1, 4, 7–8, 13, 17, 18, 23–4, 32, 38, 40, 41, 45, 49, 50, 53, 54, 55n6, 59, 65–8, 79n28, 80, 81, 98n1, 102, 111, 112, 114, 116–19, 121n3, 124n33, 125nn34–35, 149, 178n1, 180, 183, 187 reframing in 138 suture and cognitive mapping in 133–8 tragic indiscernibility of 148–64 De Palma, Brian 6, 154 Deadhead Miles Zimmerman, Vernon 6 Debray, Régis 5, 10 Defoe, Willem 45 Deleuze, Gilles 3, 11n2, 152, 161, 164nn1–2 Cinema 2: The Time-Image 148, 149 Denby, David 126 D’Entremont, John 195nn16, 18 Derrida, Jacques 3, 82, 92, 93, 99n5, 100nn27–8

Index Deuteronomy 154, 155 dialectics 167–72 Hegelian, and master and slave 175–6 Hegelian, and unhappy souls 172–5 Marxian 177–8 Die Horen 58 Dillon, Robert 9 Dirty Harry Siegel, Don 6 Dixon, Franklin W. Hardy Boys, The 64 Doane, Mary Ann 147n40 Donougho, Martin 126, 145n5 Double Indemnity Wilder, Billy 66, 138 Dr Zhivago Lean, David 129 Dreyer, Carl 149 Drive, He Said Nicholson, Jack 6 Dutoit, Ulysse 30 Forms of Being 77n3 dwelling, motif of 98 earth 29 of cinema 21–2 and world 21–5, 30, 86–7, 91–2 Eisenstein, Sergei 2 elegy, motif of 62, 66–7, 78n12 Elias, Julius A. 59 English-Speaker, The (forthcoming) Malick, Terrence 9 equipment, equipmental quality of 85–6 Escobar, Arturo 128, 145n9 Evertson, Matthew 101 existential space 94, 128 Exodus 157 Farrell, Colin 10, 15, 50, 72 Faulkner, William 62, 111 field/reverse field 133–9 Fielding, Henry 61 film phenomenology 14–18 Film Quarterly 134

219

finitude 83, 98, 193 fire, as motif 40–5 first-person voice-over 15, 24, 26, 31 see also voice-over Fisk, Jack 6, 11 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 111 Flanagan, Martin 194n4 Fog, The Carpenter, John 27 Ford, John 59 Fugate, Caril Anne 6, 53 Furstenau, Mark “Terrence Malick’s Heideggerian Cinema” 81 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 99n11 Geisler, Bobby 8, 9 General, The Keaton, Buster 134, 135 Genesis 155, 156–7 Gere, Richard 7, 23, 49, 50, 65, 66, 79n28, 117, 160, 187 Giant Stevens, George 129 Gilbey, Ryan 164n5 Glass, Robert W. Jr. 8 Gleason, Michie 8 Godard, Jean-Luc 154, 158, 163–4 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 60, 61 Gold Rush, The Chaplin, Charlie 25 Gone with the Wind Fleming, Victor 129 Gravy Train, The Sharrett, Jack 6 Great Balls of Fire! McBride, Jim 9 Green Beret’s, The Kellogg, Ray 167 Green, David Gordon 10 Green, Sarah 198 Guevara, Che 10 Hail Mary Godard, Jean-Luc 155 Hanks, Tom 56n14

220 harmony 61, 62, 67, 72, 76, 78n12, 79n39, 101, 118, 139, 172 Heath, Stephen 134, 136, 138, 140, 146nn22, 27, 29, 147nn35, 38 Hegel, G. W. F. 60, 172 Heidegger, Martin 3, 14, 19–21, 25, 26, 28, 29, 39nn9, 12–14, 17, 21, 25, 77n7, 80, 82–7, 93, 98, 99nn2, 6–10, 12–13, 16–17, 19–20, 100n26, 110, 124n33 “Age of the World Picture” 87 The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics 82 “On the Origin of the Work of Art” 19, 85 Vom Wesen des Grundes (The Essence of Reasons) 5, 19, 33, 34 What is Called Thinking? 1, 81 Held, Klaus 34, 39n26 Hemingway, Ernest 111 Heraclitus 3, 164n57 Heyerdahl, Thor Kon Tiki 91 Hine, Lewis 150 Hitchcock, Alfred The 39 Steps 137 Hochberg, Julian 133 Hölderlin, Friedrich 60, 61, 65, 70, 72, 77n7, 79n31 Homer 61 Odyssey 44, 158 homesickness, motif of 82–3 Hopper, Edward American Landscape 147n45 House by the Railroad 142, 147n45, 150 horizon 94–5, 99n11, 116 fusion of 97 Husserl, Edmund 17 Huston, John 59 idyll, motif of 50, 51, 59, 62, 70, 72, 78n12, 91, 106, 107, 121, 187, 189, 191, 192 illusional space 94 image 31, 36, 151, 152 construction 15, 17

Index moving 23 of nature 28–9 porthole 187, 188 still 17, 22 time- 148–9 Imitation of Life Sirk, Douglas 72 indeterminability 19, 20, 22, 33, 148, 162 indiscernibility 148–64 innocence, as motif 49–55 innocent space 135 Irreversible Noé, Gaspar 138 Jakes, Jill 6, 7 James, Henry 111 The Wings of the Dove 158 Jones, James The Thin Red Line 9, 53 jouissance, of spectator 134–5 Kael, Pauline 145n3 Kant, Immanuel 3, 60, 71, 79nn32, 39 Kazan, Elia 66 Keaton, Buster 134, 135 Kendall, Stuart 1, 148 Kenji, Mizoguchi 9 Kennedy, Christina B. 94, 100nn30–1 Kennedy, Robert 5 Kilcher, Q’orianka 10, 15, 59, 72 Killsback, Leo 200 King Kong Jackson, Peter 200 King, Martin Luther 5 Kotas, Elias 168 landscape 35, 42, 47–8, 98, 125nn34, 36 and character 30 cinematic 18 human presence in plain 101–21 presentation of 16 relationship with camera 17–18 subjectile and 93

Index world and 88–92 Lang, Fritz 27, 158 Langdon, Emma 140 Lanton Mills Malick, Terrence 6, 98n1 Lawrence of Arabia Lean, David 55n1 Lee, Hwanhee 183, 194n10 Lee, Sheryl 75 Lewis, Jerry Lee 9 Life 5 Lindsay, Vachel “Our Mother/Pocahontas” 195n20 Lubezki, Emmanuel 10 Lucas, George 154 Luhmann, Niklas 77 Lukinbeal, Chris 125n36 Lynch, David 5, 6, 8, 75, 154 MacAvoy, Leslie “Terrence Malick’s Heideggerian Cinema” 81 Malick, Terrence 145n6 The Essence of Reasons 5, 14, 19, 80, 84 see also under individual films Malle, Louis 9 Manning, Russell 165 Manz, Linda 59, 65, 66, 79n28, 117, 139 Martin, Adrian 33, 39nn15, 24, 57n25, 79n28, 99nn3–4, 179, 181, 194nn3, 7, 195nn18, 20 Marvin, Lee 6 Marx, Karl 177 master and slave and Hegelian dialectics 175–6 McAdams, Rachel 10 McCann, Ben 88 “Enjoying the Scenery” 125n34 McGettigan, Joan 130, 146n17 McMurtry, Larry The Desert Rose 9 Medavoy, Michael 6, 9 melodrama 72, 138 Melville, Herman 61, 111 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 3, 94, 95, 96, 100nn32–5

221

Merrick, John 8 metaphysics 80–3, 85, 87, 99nn10–11, 102, 116, 127, 181, 182, 205, 207 Michaels, Lloyd 31, 38n2, 56n9, 57n24, 63, 65, 78nn16, 21, 26, 164n6, 194nn11–12, 195n18 Terrence Malick 4, 12n5, 77n3, 157, 179, 194n2 Millet, Jean-François 151, 154 Milton, John 61 Moland, Hans Petter 10 Molière, Jean Baptiste Poquelin 61 Tartuffe 9 Moore, Juanita 72 moral authority 47 moral feeling 63 Morette, Michèle 8, 9 Morricone, Ennio 8, 41 Morris, Wright 3, 101, 102–3, 106, 108, 110, 117, 121, 122nn4, 6–9, 123nn15–17, 124nn18, 20–31 Ceremony in Lone Tree 103–5, 111–13, 115–16 The Field of Vision 103, 111, 112, 113–14, 122n4 The Home Place 101, 110–11 Plains Song 122n5 The Territory Ahead 111 Morrison, James 12nn7, 9, 10 62, 78n14, 164n3, 181 The Films of Terrence Malick 77n3, 153, 194n9 Mottram, Ron 123n11 naïve poetry and sentimental, difference between 61 narrative cinema 16, 23, 26 National Public Radio 198 Natural Born Killers Stone, Oliver 55n5 natural trope 101 naturalness, motif of 7, 10, 14, 15, 24, 36, 48, 50, 54, 61, 63, 64, 68–70, 72–5, 83–4, 89–90, 95, 101, 119, 121n1, 125n34, 139–41, 159, 169, 176, 180, 190–1, 199, 205–8 see also landscape

222

Index

Oates, Warren 6, 51, 56n20, 106 offscreen space 136 180-degree rule 133 ontopology, of The Badlands dwelling and 98 subjectile and 92–7 worlding and 87–92 opportunity, sense of 32–8 ordinary space 94–5 Orff, Carl 41 Orr, John 142, 147n46 Oswald, Lee Harvey 45 Oudart, Jean-Pierre 135, 136, 146nn20, 23, 26 “La Suture” 134

see also landscape Peterson, Hannah 100nn21, 23, 38, 123n12, 124n32 The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America 4, 11n4, 77n3 Petric, Vlada 145n4 Phoenix Pictures 9 Piccoli, Michel 158 Pitt, Brad 10, 194n12 place 127 subordination, by space 128 see also landscape Planet of the Apes, The Burton, Tim (2001 version) 200 Shaffner, Franklin J. (1968 version) 200 Plato 81, 168, 170 Platoon Stone, Oliver 45 Plummer, Christopher 10, 43 Pocahontas Disney 16 Pocket Money Rosenberg, Stuart 6 poetic cinema 22, 37 porthole image 187, 188 Pound, Ezra 164n4 Guide to Kulchur 153 Power, Richard 147n36 Pressman, Edward 6, 10 Price, David A. 57n22 protagonist 16, 94, 117, 125n34, 134 in classical cinema 14–15 search of 29 Psalms 124n33

Palance, Jack 158 Paramount Pictures 7, 8 parataxis 15 Penn, Arthur 4, 66 Penn, Sean 9, 10, 71, 176, 194n12 Percy, Walker The Moviegoer 9 Perez, Gilberto 126, 145n2 person-environment relationship 88, 92, 94

Rafelson, Bob 4 real space 94, 95 Redford, Robert 10 reflective and naïve, difference between 61 reframing, motif of 138, 143 Reitz, John T. 8 Rhym, John 123n14 Rijsdijk, Ian 126 Roberdeau, John 9

neo-modernity, cinematic 58–63 Badlands and 63–5 Days of Heaven 65–8 The New World 72–6 The Thin Red Line 68–72 New Line Cinema 10 New York Film Critics Circle 8 New York Film Festival 7 New Yorker 5 Newman, Paul 6 Newsweek 5 Nicholson, Jack 6 Nietzsche, Friedrich 193 Nisbet, H. B. 78n8 Noé, Gaspar 138 Nolte, Nick 9, 170 Norris, Patricia 8 Nosferatu Herzog, Werner 196n22 nostalgia 53, 111, 112

Index romantic naivety 181–2, 185–6, 193, 194n6 Rome Film Festival 3, 11n3 Rosenberg, Stuart 6 Rothman, William 134, 146n22 Rudes, Blair 199 Russian Ark Sokurov, Aleksandr 138 Ruth, biblical book of 156 Rybin, Steven 13 Ryle, Gilbert 3, 5, 80 Saga of Anatahan, The Sternberg, Josef von 27 Saint-Saëns, Camille 139 Carnival of the Animals 150, 195n21 Salt, Barry 146n20 Sansho the Bailiff 9 Kenji, Mizoguchi 9 Sargeant, Jack Born Bad: The Story of Charlie Starkweather and Caril Anne Fugate 57n21 satire, motif of 62, 64, 73, 78n12 Savage, John 172 Saving Private Ryan Spielberg, Steven 9, 46, 47, 56n12, 57n26 Schiller, Friedrich 3, 59–62, 64, 66, 70, 77nn1–2, 6–7, 78nn9–10, 13, 17, 20, 27, 79nn29–30, 34, 39 “Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen” (Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man) 58, 67 “Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung” (“On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry”) 58 Schneider, Bert 7 Schneider, Harold 7 Schrader, Paul 5 Schur, Thomas 12nn7, 9, 10, 62, 78n14, 164n3 The Films of Terrence Malick 77n3, 153, 194n9 Scorsese, Martin 154 Screen 134 screen space 137, 138, 143

223

Segovia, Andrés 4 self and artwork 21 self-consciousness 23, 173, 175 semi-acousmêtres 26, 27 sensuousness, motif of 15–17, 21–5, 30, 186 sentimental (sentimentalische) 61 genres of 61–2 Shakespeare, William 61 Sharrett, Jack 6 Sheeler, Charles American Landscape 139 Sheen, Martin 7, 22, 43, 50, 63, 66, 104 Shepard, Sam 7, 23, 49, 65, 117, 160 Siegel, Don 6 Sight and Sound 5, 53, 78n18 Silverman, Kaja 134, 146n22 Singh, R. Raj 20, 39n10 Sinnerbrink, Robert 19, 39n8, 179, 194n8, 195n19 Slotkin, Richard 140, 147nn41–2 Smith, John Dee 29, 177 Smith, Murray 38nn1–2 Sobchack, Vivian 16–17, 19, 21, 39n5–7 Socrates 168 Soderbergh, Steven 10 Sokurov, Aleksandr 138 space 128, 130 conversion into place 138, 141 diegetic 132, 133, 137 innocent 135 offscreen 136 representation of 32, 54 screen 137, 138, 143 unreal 134, 135 Spacek, Sissy 6, 7, 18, 43, 56n19, 59, 63, 66, 102, 123n11 spectatorship 23, 96, 134–6, 138, 139, 140, 143 Spielberg, Steven 9, 46, 47, 154 Staiger, Janet 39n3, 146n18 Stanton, Harry Dean 6 Starkweather, Charles 6, 53, 104 Steinbeck, John 160 Sterritt, David 121n1

224

Index

Stevens, George 66 Stevens, George, Jr. 9 still photograph, significance of 17 Stone, Oliver 42, 55n5 strife, voicing 26–32 Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy series 5 subjectile, motif of 92–7 subjectivity 16, 26, 27, 30, 31, 35, 82, 93, 97, 175, 182, 193 Sunflower Productions 10 suture, theory of 133–8 Swift, Jonathan 61 Tarantino, Quentin 42, 55n5 Tarkovsky, Andrei 154 Tasso, Torquato 61 tenderness, motif of 60, 64, 66–9, 73, 74, 118 Testament of Dr. Mabuse, The Lang, Fritz 27 The Immigrant Chaplin, Charlie 23, 24 The Longest Day Annakin 66 Marton, Andrew 66 Wicki, Bernhard 66 Zanuck, Darryl F. 66 The Man Who Loved Women Truffaut, François 7 The New World cinematic romanticism and 190–3 Malick, Terrence 10, 11n3, 13, 14–16, 18, 22, 26, 30–2, 33, 38, 40, 42, 43, 45, 48, 49, 54, 55n3, 59, 62, 69, 72–6, 78nn22, 28, 101, 121n1, 178n1, 179–82 myth and history and 198–9 from mythic history to cinematic poetry 185–90 Pocahontas legend in 183–5 Thévenin, Paule 100nn27–8 Thin Red Line, The Hegelian dialectics and 172–6 Malick, Terrence 4, 9–10, 13, 18, 28–30, 32–3, 35–8, 40, 41, 43, 44, 45–8, 49, 50, 53, 54–5,

56nn11–13, 18, 59, 62, 66, 68–72, 75, 77n3, 78n11, 81, 98n1, 101, 126, 166–7, 180, 183, 186–7, 194n5 Marx’s dialectical materialism and 177–8 sophistry of command in 170–2 war nature in 167–70 30-degree rule 133 Thomas, Barry 8 Thomas, D. M. The White Hotel 9 Thompson, Kristin 39nn3, 11, 146n18 Thoreau, Henry David 111 Thorpe, Helen 121n3, 123n11 time-image 148–9 time-lapse photography 17 Toro, Benicio del 10 transcendental consciousness 17 transformation, motif of 35, 128, 137, 153, 158, 163, 180, 191–2 Travolta, John 7 Treasure Island Fleming, Victor (1934 version) 53 Haskin, Byron (1950 version) 53 Tree of Life Malick, Terrence 10, 55n3, 98n1, 194nn1, 12 True Romance Scott,Tony 55n5 Truffaut, François 7 truth, Heidegger on 20 Tucker, Thomas Deane 1, 80 Turner, Lana 72 Turvey, Malcolm 147n34 Twain, Mark 111 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The 64, 157 Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The 64 Twin Peaks Lynch, David 75 Vernant, Jean-Pierre 164n8 Vidal-Naquet, Pierre 164n8 violence, histories of fire as motif and 40–5 innocence and 49–55

Index war and nature and 45–8 voice-over 7–8, 13, 15, 24–31, 37, 40, 42, 65, 72, 88–90, 106, 118, 122n10, 123n11, 127, 130, 132, 134, 140, 143, 150, 151, 154, 157, 159, 164, 166, 167, 171, 177, 186, 188, 189, 195n20, 200 voicing, of meaning 13–14 film phenomenology and 14–18 opportunity and 32–8 strife and 26–32 world and worlding and 19–25 Von Kleist, Heinrich 61 vulnerability, motif of 50, 76, 114, 116, 119, 121, 123n11 Wajda, Andrzej 9 Walden, Elizabeth 197 Walker, Barbara 5, 78n18 Wall, Thomas 58 Wallace, Alexandra “Ecky” 9 Warterberg, Thomas E. 38n1 Washington Post Book World 122n5 Weisz, Rachel 10 Welles, Orson 149 Wexler, Haskell 7 Whitman, Walt 111 Whitney, David see Malick, Terrence Wierzbicki, James 55n2, 147n36

225

Wild Bunch, The Peckinpah, Sam 52, 56n20 Wilkinson, John K. 8 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 3 Wolfe, Thomas 111 Wondra, Janet 132, 141, 147nn39, 43–4 Woodward, Grace Steele 195n16 world 99n11 as whole 82–3 and worlding 19–25, 84–5, 87–92 Wydeven, Joseph J. 112, 124n19 Wyeth, Andrew Christina’s World 150 Wyss, Johann David Swiss Family Robinson 64 Yardley, Jonathan 122n5 Yasujiro, Ozu 149 Yates, Christopher S. 99n11, 100n36 “A Phenomenological Aesthetic of Cinematic Worlds” 97 Yimou, Zhang 10 Young, Julian 85, 99n14, 18 Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art 99n11 Zimmer, Hans 41 Zimmerman, Vernon 6 Zucker, Carole 125n35