Echoes of What We Have Lost: The Cinema of Terrence Malick
by Thomas Brandon

 

            The world does not need words.  It articulates itself

            in sunlight, leaves, and shadows.  The stones on the path

            are no less real for lying uncatalogued and uncounted.

            The fluent leaves speak only the dialect of pure being.

            The kiss is still fully itself though no words were spoken.

 

--- from “Words” by Dana Gioia

 

           

If the New Hollywood was a “Wave”, Terrence Malick was the undertow.  Among the influential directors of the sixties and seventies, he stands as a curiosity, an anomaly that somehow ranks among the best of the era while remaining distinct from the mainstream revolution.  During that period, Malick made only two films and has since made only two more.  Taken together, these films reveal an artist unbounded by a specific cultural movement or zeitgeist.  Naturally, no work of art can be completely divorced from its contextual origins, and Malick’s films do reflect, in part, the cultural current of their time.  On the whole, however, his aesthetic and thematic concerns ultimately diverge from those of most of his peers.  The director’s work is rooted not so much in the spirit of the times, but in the spiritual nature of reality.  Little wonder that he began his career as an independent and remained an outsider – in a time that emphasized “movements” and “community”, he was, and remains, sui generis.           

 

It should be noted that implicit in this paper is the notion of a director as one of the primary voices in the creation of the filmic art.  While this cannot be said of all films, it certainly can be said of the distinctive work of Terrence Malick, who acts as writer, director, and sometimes producer.  Each one of his movies shares remarkable similarities with the next, so much so that one may examine his work as an unbroken evolution into a style and theme that continues to set him apart even after the dissolution of the New Hollywood of the sixties and seventies.          

 

History

Having made only four films in a career that spans thirty-three years, Malick “has managed, in spite of the paucity of his output, to maintain his stature as a brilliant, if difficult and perfectionistic, genius” (Zucker 2).  The fact that he is often considered “the film poet of his generation” is a testament to the power of those few films (Mast and Kawin 450).  Malick was raised in Texas.  Harvard educated, he was a Rhodes scholar who alternated between journalism and teaching philosophy at MIT before enrolling in the AFI academy in California (Thomson 552).  He received his first screenwriting credit in 1969 for the film Lanton Mills.  Soon after, he convinced Ed Pressman, the independent producer of DePalma’s Sisters, to finance a script Malick had written entitled “Badlands” (Biskind 249).  The initial budget was $450,000, although the costs kept rising as the film wore on.  They sold the completed film to Warner Brothers for $1.1 million, and it was released in 1973 to great critical acclaim, but poor box office (Cook 131).  Badlands cemented his reputation as a cinematic artist, and may well be “one of the most moving and intelligent works of film in the early seventies” (Whalen 162).  David Thomson even went so far as to suggest that Badlands might be “the most assured first film by an American since Citizen Kane” (552).     

 

His second film, Days of Heaven, was produced by Bert Schneider, who set the project up at Paramount.  Even though he was technically making a studio film, Malick did so with little interference; his film was “an anomaly” at the studio (Biskind 299).   Released in 1978, the film garnered four Academy Award nominations (one win for cinematography), as well as the Best Director prize at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival.  To this day, it stands “among the most sustained works of poetic virtuosity in the American cinema” (Morrison and Schur 33). 

 

Malick followed this critical triumph with twenty years of silence.  He moved to Paris, seldom, if ever, granting interviews to curious journalists.  By all accounts a very private, reserved man, he left Hollywood and the film business apparently for good.  In 1998, however, he returned to the screen with The Thin Red Line, a surreal WWII drama that amassed a wealth of accolades, awards, and fierce detractors.  By this point, the Malick legend had grown to the extent that he had the luxury to make an extremely atypical war film on the Fox studio dime.  Eight years later, he released The New World, an epic set during the colonization of Virginia which was financed by New Line Cinema.  None of these films turned a profit in their theatrical runs, with the exception of Badlands.

 

His films trace an author enraptured by images, and as interested in nature as in humanity.  In the face of a general shift in Hollywood towards realistic and gritty pictures during the seventies, he was making films of serene beauty and expressionistic worlds.  His two subsequent films continue that development.  Talent, it has been remarked, comes in waves.  As a group of outsiders and rebels were settling in to remake Hollywood in their image, Malick was a lyrical counterpoint.  Certainly, he owes much of his freedom to the culture of the New Hollywood, but what he does not owe to them is his aesthetic or thematic concerns.  His rise to prominence may have come about because of the new-found creative liberties of the seventies, but his artistic connection to his peers was tangential at best.              

 

The Themes that Inspire the Images

Unlike many filmmakers in Hollywood during the sixties and seventies, Malick came from an upper class and heavily academic background.  The philosophical complexity of his films is doubtless due, in large part, to this exposure to the contemplative life.  Several adjectives could be suggested to describe the films of the New Hollywood: none of them are “contemplative.”  The filmmakers of that time set about to inject movies with a sense of life and possibility.  Inspired by the vivacious French New Wave, these young filmmakers took their cameras outside and went searching for truth (Cook 71).  Malick’s intentions mirror this trend of exploration, his rural upbringing informing his agrarian sensibility.  Where the director diverges from the trends, however, is in the themes of his work.    

 

At first glance, Badlands might seem to fit nicely into the growing “youth cult” market of the time, as the film depicts a couple of Bonnie and Clyde wannabes on a killing spree.  Instead of the moral ambiguity of Arthur Penn’s film, however, Malick makes sure to establish his teens as heavily influenced by the pop culture of their day.  Sissy Spacek’s Holly Sargis describes Martin Sheen’s Kit Carson as looking “just like James Dean.” At one point, Kit introduces himself in a self-aggrandizing style reminiscent of Bonnie’s direct “We rob banks.”  At the end of the film, Kit is standing in hand-cuffs, giving away his possessions to awe-struck deputies.  Fulfilling the image becomes their goal.   Malick’s film also toys with the popular trend of unsympathetic authority figures, such as the father who shoots Holly’s dog as a punishment.  On the other hand, the authorities are not portrayed as incompetent – the policemen are surprisingly capable and sympathetic characters.  Instead of glorifying the outlaws and demonizing the establishment, Malick uses ironic edits and voiceover to expose the emptiness of his characters as they pursue a clichéd legend.  Unlike those around him, Malick devoted himself to making films that were apolitical and philosophical rather than ideological.  

 

A thematic concern that did Malick share with his peers of the “cultural revolution” was the emphasis placed on individuality.  Filmmakers like Paul Mazursky and Hal Ashby made movies that privileged character over plot.  Films like Five Easy Pieces (1970) focused relentlessly on the nature and freedom of the individual.  Similarly, Malick makes films about solitary people, and even when the characters are together, they never seem to connect to each other in the way that each character connects with the audience.  Badlands follows the exploits of two young runaways exslusively.  Malick frames them against the plains of the Mid-West as a means of isolating them, making them known as people in of themselves.  We, as an audience, never get inside the mind of any other characters.  Through voiceover (which will be touched upon later) and myriad close-ups of their faces, Malick explores his characters separately, keeping a sense of distance between them.  This follows for Days of Heaven, as well.  The other characters beside the main four serve much the same function that the house on the plains does: they form the world.   The entire story can be whittled down (and indeed it is for a little while) to Billy, his wife Abby, his sister Linda, and the Farmer.  The essence is the conflict amongst “rugged individuals” (Zucker 6). 

 

It should be noted that while an appearance of individuality marked the films of the period, it seems a large part of the movement was an interest in individuals in a social and communal context.  Even calling it a “cultural revolution” implies a united community.  Filmmakers like Coppola and Altman made films of intense personal expression, yes; but these films were about societal structures, such as family in The Godfather (1972) or the army in M*A*S*H (1970).   As the decade wore on, the vast majority of Hollywood films dealt with groups and organizations over people.  Individuals were explored in relation to their roles.  Malick never succumbed to this trend.  Both of his later films continue to emphasize the individual over the group.  In The Thin Red Line, Malick utilizes a cast that numbers in the forties, and yet, the characters only connect with us, the audience.  Through their private voiceovers, we are invited into their heads in a way that no other character is.  Even in a film that deals with a company of men fighting together, Malick allows only one strong connection, the friendship between Walsh (Sean Penn) and Whitt (Jim Caviezel).  The New World affords Malick the greatest opportunity to explore humans in a social environment.  He focuses, instead, on individuals cut off from their societies.  Key moments in the lives of the settlement and the native tribe are skipped over in order to retreat into the solitude of Pocahontas’ (Q'Orianka Kilcher) or John Smith’s (Colin Farrell) thoughts.  True enough, the two characters share a brief love, but the majority of the film, the viewer sees them alone or cut off from those around them.   

 

The most remarkable thing, however, is that these individuals are not portrayed without respect to their societal contexts.  In fact, Malick takes great care to note the lack of connection.  His characters are known as individuals, and one cannot help but sense the tragedy of it.  This leads to what must be considered the hallmark of Malick’s themes: the presence of evil, of pain, and of tragedy in the world.  There is something we as humans are missing, and Malick’s characters are doomed to feel the lack without finding the fulfillment.  Here is where the director veers gloriously off course from the track of the New Hollywood.  Terrence Malick is, for all intensive purposes, a religious filmmaker.  By using the term “religious”, I mean not that Malick is making films of theological accuracy (indeed, his vision of God is noticeably incomplete), but that his thematic concerns are anchored by the questions that form the very basis of spiritual exploration.  His films, likewise, “intimate that a transcendent power operates in the material world” (Cohen 46).  Unlike his contemporaries, who treated religion as another institution against which to rebel, Malick uses his films to attempt to communicate, however briefly, an image of the transcendent made immanent.

      

Badlands is Malick’s most conventional film, and the one whose themes are most covered over by the prevailing ironic attitude of the day.  The famous moral ambiguity of the film says not so much about Malick, as it does about the nature of the world in Malick’s view.  Life is a tragic place where kids can do evil things and never quite understand the evil that they are doing.  The overall sensation is one of wonder at how far these characters drift from “normal” behavior.

 

Whereas Badlands was masked in irony, Days of Heaven is almost allegorical in its simplicity.  The story is a fusion of several Old Testament stories.  Like Moses, Billy is on the run after striking an authority in anger and possibly killing him.  Like Sarah and Abraham, Billy convinces Abby to pose as his sister instead of his lover when they arrive in Texas.  And, like Adam and Eve, the two lovers are eventually turned away from their paradise.  Here, Malick’s concern with the world as a paradise lost begins to come to the foreground.  There are two aspects to this idea which are difficult to discuss without referencing the other; in fact, it may be impossible to separate them.  The first aspect is the glory of “creation”; the second is the “fallenness” of that world.  It should be noted that these terms come from a specifically Christian worldview, and it is not clear from his work how comfortable Malick would be with such designations.  Nevertheless, the representation of the physical world as a corrupted, Edenic paradise is given such weight in these four films, that I feel confident applying these labels for our purposes.      

 

Days of Heaven is a film which “chooses to dwell on the ‘thingness’ of the world” (Zucker 3).  The waves of grain, the Victorian house, the migrant worker in the field at sundown – these are all given the same ontological priority, part of a “vast tapestry in which man and nature are interwoven, neither one more important that the other” (Cohen 51).  In contrast to the grimy, noisy city, the panhandle of Texas is idyllic, a land of soul-stopping beauty where the sunlight retains a golden, afternoon hue.  Here, Billy and Abby and Linda seem to find a promised land, but the appearance is short-lived.  The harvesting work is hard, the deception is revealed, and the end is expulsion from the farm and the natural world.  Like Kit and Holly’s forest hideaway, the peace is fleeting.  Forces are already in motion, both within and without the characters, to tear the paradise apart.  The harmony between Private Whitt and the native peoples in The Thin Red Line is as doomed as the truce between the natives and the settlers in The New World.  Malick’s characters each believe at some point that they “are living in an earthly paradise, a place they eventually have to leave because of original sin and death” (Cohen 47).  This conflict between creation and fall is central to Malick’s work.        

 

Part of the blame for this corruption of the world is laid at the feet of humankind, the initiators of the Fall.  The natural world is consistently being damaged by “civilization” in these films.  It is striking how many animals are injured and/or killed in Badlands.  Holly’s dog, several cows, a fish, and a chicken are all seen as the victims of violence.  In Days of Heaven, “ground level close-ups force us to share the panic felt by the land’s other inhabitants: the rabbits, skunks, and pheasants that may be killed by the advancing blades” of the harvesting machines (50).  The first shot of The Thin Red Line is of an alligator slowly entering swampy waters.  A similar alligator is later captured by the troops towards the end of the film.  They have tied it down and are poking it to see if they get a response.  At another point, we see a young bird, obviously wounded, struggling to get upright, bright blue feathers against the charred black ground of combat.  Significant emphasis is also placed in The New World on how the settlement of Jamestown affects the animals and plants of that vicinity.         

 

For all the human darkness, however, Malick seems to find something in nature itself that displays imperfection and loss.  What is it, asks a soldier in The Thin Red Line, that makes nature war with itself?  This certainly seems to illustrate the Christian concept of the fallenness of the entire world: “no created thing is in principle untouched by the corrosive effects of the fall” (Wolters 44).  The same nature that evokes such serenity in Days of Heaven also ushers in a plague of locust that devours the wheat crop and accelerates the violence between Billy and the Farmer.  Malick constructs beautiful worlds, but they are worlds that are inherently painful and corrupted.  No film illustrates this more so than The Thin Red Line, which “explicitly presents itself as a reflection of the presence of evil in the world” (Bersoni and Dutoit 128).  The lyric serenity of Guadacanal island is contrasted forcefully with the bloody violence of the WWII battles, “showing you what is slipping inexorably away as you gaze” (Morrison 37).  How can such a beautiful world contain such ugliness? 

 

Were Malick to stop at this apparent contradiction, his films need not be considered as dealing with religious ideas.  Even atheists can suggest that the world is an alternately cruel and beautiful place.  What motivates such a claim is the essence of Malick’s work: the ache for what we have lost.  The main theme of Days of Heaven is an ache that could be identified as “restlessness” (Morrison and Schur 33).  The migrant workers are looking for a peace and a stability that the city cannot afford them.  For awhile, it appears the farm will be their rest, their biblical “days of heaven.”  As noted above, however, the paper paradise does not last.

 

Another way to glimpse this longing is through the voiceovers of the soldiers in The Thin Red Line.  At one point, we hear Sgt. Bell’s (Ben Chaplan) voice, presumably from a letter he has written to his wife (Miranda Otto).  He starts by noting how much the violence and war has twisted him and changed him.  “War does not ennoble men . . . [it] makes men into dogs,” he observes.  He expresses a desire not only to be with his wife, but to be with her the way they used to be, before the war.  “How do we get to those blue shores?” he asks.  Private Whitt asks towards the end of the film, “What was it that we lost?”  He, especially, tries to reconcile in his mind the disconnection between man and nature.  Much of the ache for the natural world “comes from the sense that the beauty it displays is, in fact, not apprehensible by the modern subjects who dwell within it” (51).  The feeling one gets from a Malick film is not merely that the world is a painful and beautiful place, but that there is a beauty that has been lost that is longed for anyway.  Whether it is the cruelly ironic Fate of Badlands, the judgmental God of Days of Heaven, the Spirit of The Thin Red Line, or the sense of Destiny that slowly creeps through The New World, Malick takes the time in his films to “remind us of the presence and materiality of the invisible” (Cohen 59).  There is something in these films that transcends the colors and lines of the images.  There is a sense of the ineffable about these movies, and that sense is created thanks to Malick’s poetic style. 

 

 

 

 

The Artistry that Communicates the Themes

 

The New Hollywood eschewed technical virtuosity for verisimilitude.  Malick’s films are quite the opposite.  Technically impeccable, they are not about “recreating” life, but about finding ways of expressing what is going on beneath the surface of existence.  He achieves this through narratives which are structured poetically, as opposed to causally.  In fact, one of the films’ “main structural strategies [is] to dislocate cause from effect in its narrative composition” (Morrison and Schur 41).  While Badlands is Malick’s most linear film, it still evokes a sense of disjointedness and free association.  Malick often cuts away from a scene to a shot of nature or some image only tangentially related to the plot.  In this way, he is able to emphasize the totality of a “world.”  Even in the sound mix of his films, “dialogue seldom enjoys a hierarchy over other elements” (Crofts 25).  In the midst of this narrative chaos, an unusual miracle occurs, the seemingly disconnected pieces of the film form an even greater connection as “the film’s style conveys thoughts and feelings inarticulable in the logic of narrative” (Morrison 36).  The effect is images which are not necessarily consciously connected, but “a set of given patterns self-consciously recombined, arranged with the impartial sophistication of a chronicler attuned to the gridwork of collective unconsciousness” (37).  The editing and images of the films “accentuate a multiplicity of perspectives rather than a unified gaze” or approach (Vivian 258).  A stunning example of this would be the director’s tendency to jump across time in editing (from morning to sunset) or to jump across space (from fighting the war to holding his wife).  Malick uses these kind of structural ellipsis so freely, it seems, because what he is concerned with is not the particulars, but the ways in which the particulars can illuminate the universals. 

 

The films are held together by voiceovers which sometimes correspond to the image onscreen, but most often correspond only to the characters’ state of mind.  Often, narration is a means by which the author of a film speaks to the audience.  Malick, however, keeps the narration in the characters’ literal and figurative voice.  They tell us not so much what is going on in the story, but what is going on beneath the surface.  The ironic humor of Badlands is built through Holly’s understated and apathetic narration, which is in stark contrast to the violent images and “prevents us from sympathizing with her and Kit” (Dick 48).  Days of Heaven is narrated from Linda’s perspective, and so the conclusions drawn in the voiceover are not the films’, necessarily, but those of a young girl looking for a home.  With The Thin Red Line, Malick started using multiple voiceovers, allowing us into the perspective of many characters.  The audience even hears the voice of a dead Japanese soldier.  The New World continued this multiplicity and is perhaps the most narration-heavy of his films, as well as being the most non-linear.  It bears pointing out that none of the voiceovers contain the “meaning” of the film – they are all taken seriously, but not given any philosophical weight (Bersani and Dutoit 132).  The questions about the relationship between man and nature posed in The Thin Red Line are phrased as an uneducated, southern soldier might ask them.  The mysteries of God are whittled down in Days of Heaven to what a young city girl has heard said.  In this way, while the voiceovers connect the images, they do not define them.  The narration is one more element, one more perspective, one more part of the world.

 

The camera work in his films gives the essential perspective to the questions being asked.  Rarely using shots from the characters’ point of view, Malick places his camera to give the sense of a divine perspective, which sees everything from the look on someone’s face to the arc of the pheasant flying in the afternoon sun.  In The Thin Red Line, crane shots are used to sweep through the tall grass, just above the soldiers.  We, the viewer are not down on the ground with them, but slightly above, moving freely from soldier to soldier.  The movement is fluid and ethereal.  In The New World, Malick keeps the camera on the actor’s level, but uses steadicam shots almost exclusively.  The result is a hypnotic sense of floating through the film.  These stylistic devices are easy to define, but hard to communicate.  Like poetry, Malick has made something which does not translate well outside of its own terms.  The images speak volumes about the glory of creation and the weight of the fall. 

 

While Malick does share similarities with the generation of filmmakers that rose to prominence in the seventies, he remains an independent thinker and a Hollywood outsider.  His films, though few in number, continue to show a development and growth in the visual poetics of film as a means of expressing the deepest issues of life.  More so than any other American director of his time, Malick was and is concerned with the relationship of man to nature.  His aim is to “to have us experience not only the pain but the wonder and glory of what he believes is God’s world” (Cohen 60).  His characters navigate a fallen world in search of something that was lost, a connection to nature and, possibly, to heaven.  But he is not a filmmaker without hope.  In all of his films, there are brief flashes of connecting to what was lost.  The echo of that for which they seek can still break through, leaving the characters with the “possibility of another world, another reality” (Vivian 255).  The moments are fleeting, but the hope is there, nonetheless.  Maybe what was lost can be regained, for “in the pain of human suffering lies the possibility of purification – and maybe even redemption” (Zucker 9). 

 

In no sense should this interpretation of Malick’s films be considered final or complete.  Like poetry, these movies are bigger than what can be put into words, and Malick’s “aesthetic precludes traditional closure” (Cohen 58).  There are some things for which words will never do.  Malick, more than most, knows this.

 

Works Cited

Bersani, Leo and Ulysse Dutoit.  Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity. London: BFI, 2004. 

Biskind, Peter.  Easy Riders, Raging Bulls.  New York: Touchstone, 1998.

Cofts, 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.  2.1 (2001): 19-26

Cohen, Hubert.  “The Genesis of Days of Heaven.”  Cinema Journal.  42.4 (Summer 2003): 46 – 61

Cook, David.  Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam.  Berkeley: U of C Press, 2000.

Dick, Bernard F.  Anatomy of Film.  Boston: Bedford, 2002.

Mast, Gerald and Bruce Kawin.  A Short History of the Movies.  Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2000.

Morrison, James.  “The Thin Red Line.”  Film Quarterly.  53.1 (1999): 35-38 

Morrison, James and Thomas Schur.  The Films of Terrence Malick.  Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003.  

Thomson, David.  “Terrence Malick.”  The New Biographical Dictionary of Film.  New York: Knopf, 2002.

Vivian, Bradford.  “The Question of the Cinema.”  Journal of Speculative Philosophy. 19.3 (2005): 250-265 

Whalen, Tom.  “‘Maybe All Men Got One Big Soul’: The Hoax Within the Metaphysics of Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line.” Literature-Film Quarterly.  27.3 (1999): 162-167

Wolters, Albert M.  Creation Regained.  Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1985.

Zucker, Carole.  “‘God Don’t Even Hear You,’ or Paradise Lost: Terrence Malick’s Days  of Heaven.”  Literature-Film Quarterly.  29.1 (2001): 1-9