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I thought it was a dream...
what we knew in the forest.
It is the only truth.
There are only a few directors who have truly developed their own cinematic language like Terrence Malick has.
While we can break this down as a combination of techniques like his frequent use of Steadicam,
wide-angle lenses, or his use of poetic voice-overs,
What's this war in the heart of nature?
I am more interested in the immediate experience of his work,
which to me feels like a view of the world that is always wandering,
that always seems to be in search of something that lies just beyond the story we are witnessing.
Actor John C. Reilly once told a story about how he was working on this big scene in The Thin Red Line.
He and some of his fellow actors were in this big truck that was set to drive into camp;
a huge set on which the crew had to coordinate not only the vehicles,
but also the dozens of extras and planes flying overhead.
But all of a sudden, Malick spotted a bird and the entire scene was put on hold to film this one creature.
It seems to be a frequent occurrence as all of Malick’s films contain these spontaneous moments
that capture something that clearly wasn’t staged,
be it crickets in the wheat fields in Days of Heaven, or a butterfly in the street in The Tree of Life.
At first glance, it might feel like the point of view of someone who is easily distracted, confused even.
This became even more pronounced in his later work,
a series of films that were essentially shot without a script,
and diverged so much from any kind of pre-conceived structure that even his long-time admirers
began to wonder what Malick was trying to achieve.
What was he searching for?
I thought that we could build our nest high up.
With this year’s release of A Hidden Life,
the true story of an Austrian farmer who was prosecuted for refusing to fight for the Nazis,
critics have hailed Malick’s return to form.
And although the film is indeed more conventionally structured,
it still contains many of the same elements.
Above all, the main question still remains: what is he trying to achieve?
What is he searching for?
The Cinema of Terrence Malick
Why is there something rather than nothing?
Long before his first feature film, Malick was actually on his way of becoming a philosopher.
As a university student,
he was particularly drawn to the work of one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century:
Martin Heidegger.
Heidegger argued that philosophy, since the Ancient Greeks,
had avoided what he sees as the most fundamental question,
that of the meaning of being.
A question that was often dismissed for being either too obvious or too indefinable for meaningful engagement.
But for Heidegger, this was the result of a wrong perspective on the concept of being,
one that is too concerned with consciousness,
with traits of being, and not the meaning of being.
He was particularly critical of Descartes, whose separation of body and soul,
of the world and the mind,
created what for Heidegger was a needless abstraction of the way we relate ourselves to existence.
In his magnus opus Being and Time,
Heidegger carries out his fundamental ontology by introducing the notion of ‘Dasein’, or ‘being-there’;
the distinctive mode of Being particular to humans, the beings for whom being matters.
Actually, let’s not forget:
Terrence Malick did not become a philosopher,
he became a filmmaker.
And this shift from philosophy to cinema, I think, should be taken into account,
lest we make a mere overview of Heidegger’s ideas as they are represented in Malick’s films.
Heidegger’s ambition was to move away from philosophy
as an overly anemic and intellectual endeavor.
To him, the discussion of metaphysics was limited by technical philosophical language,
one that, as he later admitted, he was not able to transcend in Being and Time
despite his already highly poetic style of writing.
And I can imagine Malick realized this as well,
and therefore set out to explore a different kind of language.
So instead of trying to fit cinema into philosophy, let’s try it the other way around.
Let’s see how the work of Terrence Malick not only captures,
but also clarifies and contributes to Heidegger’s ideas.
One of the most recurring elements in Malick’s work is his clear distinction between the world of nature,
and the world of man, or more specifically; the world of technology.
Malick’s characters are almost always introduced as practical beings in a practical world;
a garbage collector, a factory worker, a soldier, architect, screenwriter, farmer.
They capture the fundamental break that Heidegger made with Descartes,
and to a lesser extent, his own teacher Edmund Husserl.
For Heidegger argued that our default experience of the world is not based on knowledge or reason,
but on a pre-existing sense of practicality.
Before we question what is, as previous philosophers proposed,
we first instinctively see how to use.
Heidegger uses the example of a hammer
to point out that before we’ve intellectually questioned the attributes of such an object,
let alone pondered the meaning of its existence,
we already have an engrained idea of how to use it.
It is only when using the hammer fails or surprises us in some way,
that we begin to think about its being.
And the same goes for our lives in general.
In Malick’s first film, Badlands, the story is deliberately guided by a rather naïve narrator;
by a sheltered teenage girl named Holly.
Little did I realise that what began in the alleys and back ways of this quiet town
would end in the Badlands of Montana.
The story begins with her falling in love with Kit,
a James Dean wannabee who takes her on an adventure that eventually becomes a killing spree
and ends with both of them arrested.
Through her eyes however, the crimes are presented with a rather careless lightheartedness,
with a level of mindfulness that does not seem to consider the meaning of what is happening.
It exemplifies what Heidegger meant when he said that our default state
is not one that questions the meaning of being, and portrays what its consequences are.
For a disposition that does not engage with the meaning of being,
that does not relate itself to our mortality, to our ‘thrownness’ as Heidegger called it,
has no real connection to life and death, and renders both insignificant.
I want you to attack! I want you to attack right now with every man at your disposal!
It dulls us into a kind of unconsciousness,
and for Heidegger as well as for Malick, this seems to be the great illness of who we are.
We see this in the absurdity of war in The Thin Red Line,
but we also see it in his later films.
In Knight of Cups, the story of a Hollywood screenwriter is paralleled with a fable of a knight
who travels west in search for a pearl,
but then drinks from a cup that lulls him into a deep sleep,
completely forgetting who he is, completely forgetting about the pearl.
In Song to Song, the characters deliberately live their lives moment by moment.
I thought we could just roll and tumble, live from song to song, kiss to kiss.
A careless existence that does not worry about the grander questions.
To symbolize the insidiousness of this kind of unconsciousness,
Malick also employs the motif of snakes
which, from a biblical perspective, represent the seduction into sin and evil.
Sometimes this takes the form of literal snakes,
other times they are human characters tempting others with snake-like behavior,
The world wants to be deceived.
which actor Michael Fassbender emphasizes here through his crawling, aggressive movement.
Another motif is our technological progress,
and the modernity representing our practical disposition that, in its advancement,
removes us ever further from the question of the meaning of being.
In The Tree of Life and Malick’s later films,
the main characters find themselves in completely artificial worlds
populated with beings that relish in the excesses of modern life.
This, however, is not to make a simple statement about how technology and progress is bad.
In Days of Heaven, the characters try to exchange their industrial world for a more natural one.
But even here, we see how technology has taken root in what was once the domain of nature.
This becomes especially evident in The New World,
in which colonists arrive in what to them was a place largely untouched by mankind,
a place that is soon transformed by their presence.
What The New World shows, perhaps more than anything on this subject,
is that a practical approach towards the natural world is not just an illness of modernity,
but is engrained in our very being.
It just revealed itself more clearly over time.
You thought we had forever.
That time didn't exist.
The real problem with engaging the world based on mere utility
is that not only we tend to view its resources as endless,
we also see ourselves as practically immortal.
Again, a disposition that does not consciously consider the meaning of being
has no immediate connection to life,
and more importantly,
it does not truly concern itself with death,
besides acknowledging it as a vague theoretical concept.
Of course, sooner or later, despite our best effort to avoid it,
the limits of existence will impose themselves on us nonetheless.
In Badlands, Holly at one point finds herself out in the wilderness
where she is looking at some old images when suddenly her own mortality,
and the transience of all things, dawns on her.
She wonders what would have happened if she and Kit had never met, or if he had never killed anybody.
She wonders what would have happened if her father and mother had never met.
In short; she begins to question her world.
For days afterwards, she narrates, I lived in dread.
I suppose that's what damnation is,
the pieces of your life, never to come together.
This is where we can re-introduce Heidegger’s conceptualization of human existence,
which he referred to as our Dasein, our Being-there.
According to professor John Haugeland, Dasein should not be understood as ‘biological human’,
nor as ‘the person’,
but as “a way of life shared by the members of some community.”
When it comes to what could be seen as our community of human beings;
our way of life, our Dasein, is one that can reflect on what it means to be.
However, because this is not our default state,
and because we are so easily dulled into mere practicality,
this only shines through occasionally.
But when it does, it can upset our entire world.
It can make us question every aspect of our being.
You let a boy die.
Never had it struck me so forcefully before that I had the power to grant life and health to others.
As Holly expressed earlier, this feeling is defined by a particular type of dread or anxiety,
one that all of Malick’s characters experience at one point.
You have to struggle with yourself.
Afraid of myself.
How'd we lose the good that was given us?
Let it slip away?
As Heidegger explained; anxiety is the only human emotion that is unbound from our world.
Although it can be triggered by external events that awaken us from practically into awareness
and contemplation, by the failing or surprising hammer, so to speak,
the feeling itself is not related to anything concrete,
rather it is defined by an absence, it relates to the nothing, to the void.
It is not unsurprising then that Malick’s characters are overcome with this anxiety
precisely when everything falls silent,
when their world suddenly feels distant,
and its noise no longer drowns out the quiet voice coming from within,
thereby creating space for the dialogues with our own mortality,
and with the knowledge that everything that is will one day be gone.
Guide us.
To the end of time.
And this, I think, is what Malick really underlines in his work.
To return once more to the places in Malick’s worlds,
be it the wheat fields of Texas, the Malaysian village in the South Pacific,
or even the prehistoric realm of the dinosaurs as seen in the Tree of Life and the documentary Voyage of Time,
all of these are temporary.
It was inevitable that our native roots wouldn’t last,
just as our agricultural settlements would be swallowed up by industry,
by a new world that would change and transform,
and will do so until our entire existence will be washed away.
“For Malick,” as Martin Woessner wrote in his journal article,
“all places are temporal.
They are governed not only by the changes of nature but also by our ever-changing engagement with them.
They are worlds of meaning that might be held open for a time,
but they can and certainly will fall away eventually.”
Time...
goes back to her source.
The point of this focus on temporality, however,
is not just to invoke grief over the loss of particular worlds through war, greed or excessive hedonism,
but it also serves, as Stanley Cavell wrote in his book The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film,
to “[press] questions we ought to have made ourselves answer.”
Because by operating according to our default state,
by going through life without really engaging with the question of the meaning of being,
we do not just avoid our own mortality,
we also separate ourselves from life itself,
we blind ourselves from the beauty,
from experiencing things as they are.
And this is the tragedy; to one day realize that we have been asleep,
that we have not seen what was always right in front of us.
I lived in shame.
I dishonored it all and didn't notice the glory.
As such, the true destructive force is not death, or temporality,
it is regret.
Things turned out a little different than we thought they would, didn't they?
Did you find your Indies John?
I may have sailed past them.
Again, we are back at Heidegger’s most important and often neglected question on the meaning of being,
and his notion of Dasein.
For the ‘Da’ in Dasein has also been translated not as ‘there’ but as ‘open’,
meaning that we as humans possess a natural openness
to encounter and experience other beings in particular ways,
not just practically but also theoretically or aesthetically.
To put it simply, it opens the discussion on human freedom.
And this is another thing that Malick really puts to the foreground in his work,
that being, our own role in the construction of meaning.
Both in the context of the natural world,
and in the finding of purpose in a temporal universe that ultimately overpowers human agency.
As well as in the context of the human world,
and the manifesting of meaning within a community that has no place for it,
that operates as a mindless machine.
A machine that, even if one would want to, cannot seem to be escaped.
They want you dead, or in their lie.
We see this with so many of Malick’s characters,
whether they are trying to find peace amidst war and destruction,
or compassion in a world where every man fends for himself,
they always seems to find themselves on the losing side.
What difference you think you can make, one single man in all this madness?
A small spark of light in an overwhelming darkness.
This conflict is perhaps most explicit in A Hidden Life,
where one farmer tries to resist the war machine of the Nazis,
We have to stand up to evil.
only to find himself and his family ostracized by his community.
It’s a rebellion that eventually seems to lead only to his own demise.
And yet, despite the seemingly impossible odds,
Malick draws attention to this freedom not just as a choice that lies within our agency,
but also as a responsibility.
We wish to live inside the safety of the laws. We fear to choose.
Jesus insists on choice. The one thing he condemns utterly is avoiding the choice.
If God gives us free will, we are responsible for what we do, what we fail to do.
To choose is to commit yourself.
And to commit yourself is to run the risk of failure, the risk of sin, the risk of betrayal.
When you give up the idea of surviving at any price, a new light floods in.
You say, Christ said this, Christ said that, What do you say?
In his book ‘A Cinema of Loneliness’,
Robert Kolker describes the post-Classical era of American filmmaking in the sixties,
an era defined by films like Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider and Taxi Driver,
all stories that feature lost souls and isolated individuals
in search for meaning and purpose in a world that has no place for them.
It’s the era in which Malick also emerged with his first two films,
and yet, despite dealing with the same themes, he is not mentioned in Kolker’s book.
As Martin Woessner argues in another article, the reason for this might be that for Malick,
this kind of existential anxiety is not a sorrowful fate in an indifferent, nihilistic world,
it is quite the opposite;
it is the pathway to meaning.
To suffer binds you to something higher than yourself, higher than your own will.
Takes you from the world, to find what lies beyond it.
The anxiety of Malick’s characters is directed outwards, not inwards,
“towards recognizing, if not achieving,” - As Woessner put it –
“an authentic, cosmic connection.
With others, with animals, with the natural world, perhaps even with God.”
This was Heidegger’s ontology, in which anxiety is not a token of our solitude,
but instead signifies our pre-existing, internal connection to the nothing;
a sort of umbilical cord tied directly to the source of all creation.
Mother.
I take your hand.
And this is exactly what Malick seeks to communicate through cinema.
This is what his cinematic language is always in service of:
he is deliberately unraveling the notion of a self that is distinct from the external world.
Two no more.
One.
Love binds us together.
I forget what I am, whose I am.
It is why his characters often lack characterization, not because they are passive or empty,
but because we are meant to view them as one with the world around them.
Their struggles are the struggles of the world.
Their loss of meaning is the world’s desert.
Their redemption is the world’s purifying water.
It is why he sometimes shoots the same scene on multiple locations and then intercuts between them,
it is not to confuse the audience,
but to urge us to look beyond the particularities of time and location.
To reveal the eternal within the temporary.
And indeed, it is why he chases birds and butterflies,
why he seek out those spontaneous moments that remind us of what is at stake,
of what this is all about.
“All this “naturalness” – Woesnner wrote –
“suggests that the world around us is still in fact the world of unfolding creation
– and furthermore, that we are empathically part of that creation."
"It is a cosmic perspective that renders human existence not only bearable, but also profoundly meaningful:
“the universe is you,” they seem to say,
“just as you, yourself, are the universe.”
'Cause that's where it's hidden, the immortality I hadn't seen.
Now we can also imagine why Malick chose the language of cinema instead of philosophy.
As Stanley Cavell argued;
film can perceive the world for us without our meddling selves getting in the way,
it can train us to pay attention to it in all its sensory details;
its sounds, its textures.
Whereas a written account can only describe, film can reproduce.
Film theorist Siegfried Kracauer adds that in response to the growing abstraction of the modern world,
we have developed an urge for connection,
an urge “to touch reality not only with our fingertips, but to seize it and shake hands with it.”
And this is what film does, it reacquaints us with the world we live in.
As Woessner concludes: “we watch films in the dark and quiet solitude of the theater,
but we emerge, blinking in the sunlight of the day,
reconnected to the world in which we hope to dwell.”
What is this love that loves us?
Maybe all men got one big soul.
That comes from nowhere.
One big self.
You fear your love has died?
It perhaps is waiting to be transformed into something higher.
And so, when it comes to existential anxiety, and the question of the meaning of being,
Malick uses cinema not only as a platform for philosophical discussion,
but also as a vehicle to invoke it.
to make us notice.
To make us recognize and consciously experience the gift that we’re given.
To help us find our place in the cosmos.
To find connection.
He shows us that love is real and attainable,
that it was there in dreams in the forest,
in hidden lives,
in the fleeting moments that so easily pass us by.
And invites us to see it too.
A time will come when we will know what all this is for.
And there will be no mysteries, we will know...
I am,
why...
I shall be,
we live.
yours.
If I never meet you in this life,
let me feel the lack.
A glance from you eyes,
and my life will be yours.
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