Films of Terrence Malick

The Films of Terrence Malick
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The Films of Terrence Malick
JAMES MORRISON
AND
THOMAS SCHUR
PAREGERC£) Westport, Connecticut

London
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Morrison, James.
The films of Terrence Malick / James Morrison and Thomas Schur.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-275-97247-X (alk. paper)
1. Malick, Terrence, 1943 Criticism and interpretation. I. Schur, Thomas. II. Tide.
PN1998.3.M3388M67 2003
791.43'0233'092—dc21 2003045597
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.
Copyright © 2003 by James Morrison and Thomas Schur
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be
reproduced, by any process or technique, without the
express written consent of the publisher.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2003045597
ISBN:" 0-275-97247-X
First published in 2003
Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881
An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.
www. praeger. com
Printed in the United States of America
The paper used in this book complies with the

Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National
Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Copyright Acknowledgment
The authors and publisher gratefully acknowledge permission to reprint the following:
"Review of The Thin Red Line;" Film Quarterly 53, no. 1 (Fall 1999). Copyright © 1999 by
the Regents of the University of California. Reprinted from Film Quarterly by permission of
the University of California Press.
The authors thank Claremont McKcnna College for financial support in the completion of
this project.
You hope that the picture will give the person looking at it a sense
of things.
—Terrence Malick
Contents
Illustrations ix
Preface xi
CHAPTER 1 1
Things Make Themselves Known:
An Overview of Malick's Work
CHAPTER 2 33
Streams of Consciousness, Spools of History:
Days of Heaven
CHAPTER 3 59
A Sense of Things: Reflections on Malick's Films
CHAPTER 4 115
In Production: On the Work of Style
Filmojjmphy 135
Bibliography 151
Index 157
Illustrations
Fig. 1. Ignoble savages: Kit and Holly in the woods. Badlands. 16

Fig. 2. James Dean as psychopath: Martin Sheen as Kit 16
in Badlands.
Figs. 3-4. We begin to lose sight of Kit and Holly: 22
The ending of Badlands.
Fig. 5. In battle: The Thin Red Line. 26
Fig. 6. Solitude: Days of Heaven. 42
Fig. 7. Among others: Community in Days of Heaven. 55
Fig. 8. Kit with Holly's father against a pop-art background. 63
Fig. 9. The house in Days of Heaven owes as much to 71
Hopper and Wyeth as to George Stevens's Giant (1956).
Fig. 10. A star's a star for all that: George Clooney in 85
The Thin Red Line.
Fig. 11. Versions of male beauty: Martin Sheen in Badlands. 107
Fig. 12. Versions of male beauty: Jim Caviezel in The Thin 109
Red Line.
Fig. 13. Earth, air, water—fire: The plague of locusts in 112
Days of Heaven.
Preface
Trying to assess the achievement of Terrence Malick in the wake of

his third film, amid a career of some thirty years' duration, presents a
number of challenges from the start. The sheer number, for instance,
does not signify great quantity, and though these three films—Bad-
lands (1974), Days of Heaven (1978), and The Thin Red Line (1998)—
stand among the most revered and influential of this definitive period,
they are not the first movies to come to mind as one tries to parse
the tenor of that time, or to define a particular Zeitgeist of the era.
More noteworthy in that respect might be the anarchic, derelict melo-
dramatics of Martin Scorsese {Mean Streets, Taxi Driver), the make-
shift psychedelic angst of Francis Ford Coppola (The Conversation,
Apocalypse Now), the feverish pop-cult energy of Brian De Palma (Sis-
ters, Carrie, The Fury), the social consciousness mitigated by the som-
ber satirical temper of Paul Schrader (Blue Collar, Hardcore), the
free-wheeling fancies of Steven Spielberg (Jaws, Close Encounters of the
Third Kind), even the hothouse surrealism of David Lynch
(Eraserhead).
In relation to their precedents in the Hollywood cinema, and by
comparison to their contemporaries, Malick's films seem quite self-
effacing, in their way, and far less inclined toward a self-defined nov-
elty. They give the sense of a steady hand at work, of unstinting
qualities of gravity and seriousness, of a thoughtful gaze that remains
clear-eyed, even at its most daunted. In fact, like many of the world's
great filmmakers—the case of Orson Welles springs to mind at
once—Malick has come to be defined in his reputation against en-
Xll Preface
crustations of legend that have gathered around his name, fraught

with implications of wastefulness, fickleness, contempt for the bot-
tom line, disaffection, and disillusionment. The genesis of these leg-
ends is difficult to trace but easy enough to account for, since the
relative self-effacement of Malick's work finds a certain correspon-
dence in his life, in his flight from the routine publicities of the film
world—his refusal to give interviews, for instance, to "sell" his mov-
ies in any direct way, or even to allow photographs of himself to be
disseminated. The two decades of silence that intervene between his
second and third films have obvious ramifications in this regard.
Products of a community inclined to view impulses to privacy as
streaks of perversity, those legends remain of interest insofar as the
fables of Malick's personage carry with them basic assumptions about
symbolic capital and cultural value that determined the atmospheres
in which his work was produced.
There is little in the work itself, not even in its paucity relative to
the output of other American filmmakers of this generation, to bear
out the imputations. If competence alone were the only gauge of fit-
ness in the Hollywood system—and not even capability, it sometimes
seems, is operable very often in that context—Malick's work would
more than meet it. What is most striking about his first two films,
especially in retrospect, is the correlation of their innovations and even
their eccentricities with time-honored aesthetic values of economy,
proportion, surety, balance, even a kind of modesty. The same can-
not be said, by any means, of the work of most of Malick's contem-
poraries. Those values are, it is clear in the long run, exactly the ones
that this era in moviemaking, and the films named above perhaps most
diligently, rendered all but obsolete, and replaced with extravagance,
scale, an extreme emphasis on certain forms of originality or virtuos-
ity manifested as strong assertions of individualism—as powerful
signifiers of the new auteurism.
By the time of The Thin Red Line, the old values were somewhat
less evident even in Malick's own work, reflecting changes in the in-
dustry over the twenty years of his absence from it, and his current
standing as a figure of unquestioned genius probably owes as much
to the new rules as to the lingering glamour of a past order that Malick
had, by this time, come to represent. Yet his work remains as rever-
sionary as it is progressive, as much aligned with passing traditions as
with rising currents, and that quality of impersonality that runs
through his work seems directly related to the symbiosis of detach-
Preface xm
ment and engagement, aesthetic distance and emotional power, that

is perhaps the most characteristic feature of his films.
Despite the anomalies of his profile, it is possible to place Malick
squarely among the more typical figures of his generation. O n the one
hand, as a "maverick" director in the 1970s working within traditional
genres of American cinema, in an increasingly high-concept mode of
production, Malick can readily be seen as one of the new "film gen-
eration" auteurs. Badlands is as evocative of the "indie" model of film-
making on the rise in the 1970s as Days of Heaven is representative,
in its way, of the "blockbuster" mode emerging at the end of the same
decade. Badlands was bankrolled outside the studio system and gained
a reputation on the film festival circuit, screening at the New York Film
Festival in September 1 9 7 3 , before its national release in the spring
of 1974. Days of Heaven was a veritable "road show" attraction, blown
up to 70 m m , specially screened with the most cutting-edge stereo
systems in key venues, and all b u t interchangeable in the popular
imagination (when it registered there at all) with that quintessential
big-budget flop of the same time and a similar title, Michael Cimino's
Heaven's Gate (1981).
O n the other hand, with Malick's philosophical bent, his affinity
for silent cinema, often esoteric working methods, concerted with-
drawal from public life, and penchant for viewing archetypal or mythic
material through the lens of fractured modernist narratives and tech-
niques, his work can be allied with that of Hollywood outsiders from
John Cassavetes to David Lynch. In bridging a range of positions that
are very much definitive of " N e w Hollywood" filmmaking, Malick
emerges as one of the most representative and influential filmmakers
of his time, despite the specialized beauty and distinct idiosyncrasy of
his work. Yet, in critical studies of the periods in which he has worked,
Malick's films are either completely ignored or treated with respect-
ful lip service. 1
Badlands was released at a time when a series of American films had
rendered the outlaw-lovers-on-the-run pop melodrama nearly identi-
cal, as a genre, with the forces of the "new" in the New Hollywood.
In that atmosphere, it is surprising that Malick's relatively modest,
quietly sardonic film was not treated as just another entry in the field.
O n the contrary, it was often discussed quite apart from this conven-
tional template, perhaps because its adaptation of techniques from
European art cinemas was less baroque than, for example, those of
Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967), its revisionist treatment of genre less
XIV Preface
pronounced than Altman's Thieves Like Us (1973), and its melodrama

less emotionally charged than Spielberg's The Sugarland Express
(1974). Indeed, critics registered the complex distancing effects of
Malick's film when they spoke of an essential "coldness" in the treat-
ment of the material.2 Still, the outlines of an archetypal American
movie with clear contemporary reference points were easily discern-
ible, even if Malick's film seemed also to look back to the distilled
romantic irony of an earlier example of the genre, Nicholas Ray's They
Live by Night (1948).
Ramifications of genre and theme may have placed Malick in the
company of the other new young auteurs, but the complexity of his
vision often troubled the connection. By the time of his next feature,
Days of Heaven, the links between the textures and styles of Malick's
work and those of his contemporaries were harder to see. With its
exacting combination of austerity and excess, its play of minute ob-
servation against epic plot or landscape, and its considerable scale of
visual conception, Days of Heaven was greeted with a certain respect-
ful indifference: Despite its surface pictorial beauty, critics found it
lacking in dramatic interest, audiences had little to say on the matter,
and other directors, occupied in chronicling yet again (albeit with the
necessary contemporary twists) the exploits of down-on-their-luck
boxers, beautiful losers, or starry-eyed visionaries, were too busy to
comment.
The enthusiasm that greeted Malick's most recent project as of this
writing, some twenty years after Days of Heaven, is therefore all the
more surprising. By the time of The Thin Red Line, Malick had clearly
undergone a mysterious transformation, in his reputation, from an
inveterate member of the Hollywood out-group or an intemperate
maverick to an Old Master, and stars lined up by the dozens to ap-
pear in this latest project. The twenty-year hiatus between films marks
Malick's career as entirely anomalous in the history of American cin-
ema, and it is especially singular in contemporary Hollywood, where
the need to produce a "hot" new project every year has long dictated
the commodity forms of movies and quickly drained the talents of
more than one contemporary auteur. That Malick resists the impera-
tives of Hollywood's commodity culture has always been clear from
his work, which has taken the oppression of commodity culture as one
of its subjects; the way that his reputation has evolved surely demon-
strates something of the force of his influence on the larger culture
of Hollywood filmmaking.
Preface xv
The lack of a single volume on the work of Terrence Malick is par-

ticularly striking when one reflects on the number of books to treat
the work of nearly every one of his contemporaries, including many
far less important than he. Perhaps this lack itself reflects an assump-
tion of commodity culture, that significance can be measured chiefly
by abundance. Malick's three films to date, slim an output as they may
seem to constitute at first glance, have done much to keep alive the
possibilities for serious art in American movies, so it is not surprising
that the relative dearth of critical work on Malick's films has been re-
marked by a variety of critics. Especially in the wake of The Thin Red
Line, a film that has reawakened interest in Malick and introduced
many younger moviegoers to his films for the first time, a book on
his work is overdue.
In outline, this monograph treats Malick's films, career, reputation,
and working methods in four sections. By way of introduction, in
chapter 1 we establish and amplify the critical issues outlined above,
and provide an analytical overview of Malick's career. In chapter 2,
we present a detailed close analysis of Days of Heaven, as perhaps
Malick's most representative work to date. Chapter 3 studies a range
of issues raised generally throughout Malick's work, from such large
matters as his attitudes toward nature, his uses of literary sources or
allusions, his debts to silent cinema, his relation to larger currents of
contemporary cinema, or his representations of cultural iconography,
to more local matters, such as his uses of sound. In chapter 4 , we
explore Malick's working methods in production in an effort to de-
fine his style more clearly. Our hope is that the relative diffuseness of
the book's third chapter will be counterbalanced, if such equipoise is
needed, by the more traditionally grounded approaches of the other
sections. We have been motivated by the conviction that a more ex-
ploratory approach, of the type illustrated by the critical vignettes or
riffs of chapter 3, would ultimately be more responsive to the particular
styles, textures, and moods of Malick's films.
NOTES
1. In David Cook's Lost Illusions, Malick is discussed briefly in a section

on maverick outsiders of the New Hollywood. In Peter Lev's American Pilms
of the '70s, Malick is not mentioned at all, nor is his work referred to in Robin
Wood's Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan, though Wood devotes an en-
tire chapter to the rehabilitation of Cimino's Heaven's Gate. More recently,
XVI Preface
Yvonne Tasker's Fifty Contemporary Filmmakers, despite its evident range,

makes no reference to Terrence Malick.
2. The best example is Pauline Kael's review of the film. Like many of the
film's reviews, this one pairs Badlands with another outlaw-lovers-on-the-
run movie, Spielberg's Sngarland Express. Unlike most, Kael prefers The
Sugarland Express to Badlands, dubbing Spielberg's movie an exhilarating
piece of work and Malick's a cold, fussy curiosity (Kael 1976, 300-306).
CHAPTER 1
Things Make Themselves Known:
An Overview of Malick's Work
EARLY WORK
Malick's first major work to enter public view was a translation of Mar-
tin Heidegger's The Essence of Reasons, published in 1969. Complete
with a beautifully wrought preface and an abundance of insightful criti-
cal notes by the translator, the book presents nothing to suggest that
it is in any sense a false start. As far as we are aware, it remains the
definitive English translation of this key work. It gives every indica-
tion of initiating the career of a philosopher, and a distinguished one
at that (indeed, Malick taught philosophy at the Massachusetts Insti-
tute of Technology for one year in 1968). An unreconstructed
auteurist would probably rush to the conclusion that it did in fact
initiate just that, and that Malick is nothing less, or more, than a phi-
losopher with a camera. There are some grounds for this conclusion
(Malick, by the way, was taken to task by some reviewers for translat-
ing "grundes" as "reasons" in his edition, instead of as "grounds"),
but there are also some reasons to resist it. For now—we will return
to this translation for further discussion later—it is sufficient to note
that this evidence suggests Malick was not to the camera born, that
he could well have pursued other avenues, that he came to film
through the mediation of other interests, and that his responsiveness
to cinema as a medium, and his achievements within it, remain in-
flected by a range of concerns and dispositions—aesthetic, intellectual,
and philosophical. He does not, this is to say, boast the single-
mindedness of so much of the "film generation."
2 The Films of Terrence Malick
For a time, Malick did in fact pursue other avenues. During this
same period, reportedly, he wrote journalism for Life, Newsweek, and
The New Yorker, though none is credited to him in those magazines.
By one account, he was assigned a piece on Regis Debray (Handelman
1985, 106); another source says it was Che Guevara (Gillis 1995, 64),
a project which he worked on but never finished. These accounts, for
whatever reason, appear to have a polemical intent, to lay groundwork
for a finding of sloth, or for the charge of Malick's being a chronic
nonfinisher. From an examination of primary sources, however, all that
is apparent is that the almost classical proportion of Malick's career
to date—three films, a veritable trilogy, pursuing clearly defined the-
matic trajectories, stylistic experiments, and tonal registers, from irony
to romantic irony to full-fledged if tragic lyricism, as if working
through a conscious design well known in advance—is visible only by
hindsight, though perhaps still the product of a deliberate hand.
At the American Film Institute, where Malick enrolled as a mem-
ber of the first class in 1969, he made at least one film that remains
on record, an eighteen-minute short called Lanton Mills. This film was
screened in New York in 1974, after the premiere of Badlands but
before that film's national release (Haskell 1974, 83). Sometime there-
after, however, the institute filed a stipulation that Lanton Mills was
not to be screened. In 1972, a script by Malick was made into a film
called Deadhead Miles. Whether or not it was ever released through
any ordinary channels remains unclear. One Internet source says it was
released in 1982, but no substantiating record of this has been found
elsewhere. In 1985, Deadhead Miles was shown at "Filmex" (the Los
Angeles Film Exposition),1 and a print of it was available in the archive
of the University of California at Los Angeles until 1994, when it was
withdrawn. The film's director, Vernon Zimmerman, says that it is
unavailable in any format, as far as he is aware, and simply cannot be
seen. (Asked to comment on the film itself for this project,
Zimmerman replied with Malick-like laconicism: "No.")
A first draft of the script, however, is available in the Margaret
Herrick Library of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences
in Los Angeles. From a reading of the script and knowledge of the
cast, Deadhead Miles is difficult to imagine, and those associated with
it appear to have little interest in recalling it. Alan Arkin played the
main role, according to an extant cast list. This character is emphati-
cally described as a backwoods type with a bayou drawl, so it is diffi-
cult to imagine the very urban-seeming Arkin in the part, especially
Things Make Themselves Known 3
before the precedent of his absurdist turn in Nichols's Catch-22

(1971), for which this role could have served as a dry run. As a script,
in any case, Deadhead Miles holds out exhilarating promise. With an
ambling road-movie structure and a dizzying, intoxicating sense of
language, it plays in the mind as a vital compendium of energies—Easy
Rider meets M*A*S*H. The script tells the story of Cooper, a ren-
egade trucker who ambushes a hijacked thirty-two wheeler, filled with
old carburetors, from a gang of thugs he has been involved with, and
drives it across the United States from New England to the West
Coast. Along the way, he finds solace with an inflatable woman and
meets up with a group of hitchhikers, a retarded girl who is kept on
a leash in a shack, a gang of drag racers, and sundry other weird types
of American pop culture. The principles of plot development are based
largely in randomness and dreamlike caprice. The invention rarely flags,
but neither does it really build. An ending in which Cooper finds him-
self suddenly stranded in a depopulated suburb veers away from the
rural Gothic black comedy that predominates. Consistent with the di-
gressive temper of the whole script, this wild shift—as if we'd been
vaulted from Flannery O'Connor country into John Cheever terri-
tory—shows once and for all Malick's restless, riotous drive to find a
structure malleable enough to let him throw in everything he dreams
up.
The script's values are highly literary, with descriptions of charac-
ter and action often novelistic in their phrasings. Each character is
depicted with a chiseled, epigrammatic tag line, and though the script
does not equal the literary texture of some of James Agee's screen-
plays, Malick often comments on action in ways that far exceed re-
quirements or conventions of the form. He writes in the manner of
an intrusive omniscient narrator in a work of fiction. The technique
is often daringly impressionistic, even down to commentary on inner
action with no clear visual correlate that would be impossible to show.
In the midst of a long, comic dialogue at cross-purposes, Malick plants
a sly witticism describing the benightedness of the speakers, and after
a particularly resonant episode, Malick ends the scene with a digres-
sion in the directions, a direct authorial intrusion, that has a lyric ex-
istential thrust. In its quirks of phrase and its novelistic turns, the
Deadhead Miles script is the work of a gifted young writer full of ideas,
but it also has dimensions that make it seem quite private, even her-
metic. It shows indifference to traditional verisimilitude or causality,
renders character psychology quite abstractly, and even invents words
from time to time in a spirit of Joycean exuberance. Much about the

script suggests that its author never thought it might actually be
filmed.
This is not to say that the Deadhead Miles script is lacking in visual
imagination. Without matching the intricate detail of some of Agee's
scripts, Malick's screenplay contains a number of key set pieces that
imply a full-scale conception of visual style in a hallucinatory mode.
The opening credits, for instance, are described as a montage that
combines fluttering images of highway lines and emblems of truck-
ing trademarks. Reading this description, one imagines a cross between
the brand-names country-music opening of Altman's Nashville and the
surreal, moonstruck roadway tracking shot at the start of David
Lynch's Lost Highway. Later, a montage of road signs suggests both
the progress of the journey and the shifting visual textures of the places
the truckers travel through. In the Deadhead Miles script, Malick com-
ments very directly on a mythical dimension he imagines in these land-
scapes. An interlude by moonlight involving the burial of a deceased
trucker is described in a manner that prefigures the lyric ironies of
Badlands or Days of Heaven—or the funeral of Witt in The Thin Red
Line, which looks back to this scene in its tone of mournful hero
worship, though without the absurdism. The final set piece in subur-
bia is described as having an apocalyptic tenor that seems distinctly
Cheeveresque.
Indeed, the script's discursive format is largely the product of its
effort to incorporate a compendium of references and offhand hom-
ages to a wide variety of cultural texts, styles, movements, or manners.
O'Connor's Gothic picaresque novel Wise Blood (1953), in its pen-
chant for grotesquerie and its interest in deformity, is felt distinctly
as a key influence behind Deadhead Miles. Cooper's effort to verify
Christ's credentials at one point of the script suggests the Dostoevskian
spiritual travails of that novel, as well as conjuring up another
O'Connor story, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," where the charac-
ter of the Misfit seeks similar verification. That story is cited directly
when Cooper's boss, in tribute to his guile, speaks a line that echoes
the Misfit's phrase in acceptance of his own imprisonment: "I know
I done it because they got the papers on me." The dialogue in gen-
eral, in the Deadhead Miles script, gives the appearance of being a vig-
orous patchwork of recalled phrases from literature and popular
culture. The wayward cultural references—to movies like They Drive
by Night or The Land of the Pharaohs, songs by Dave Dudley or Red
Simpson, a character dressed as a corn dog, or a billboard featuring

Cleopatra wearing wreaths of peas as pasties—stitch together a sensi-
bility that both mocks and delights in the spectacle of American weird-
ness. In a throwaway scene in a gas station, George Raft and Ida
Lupino (paired also in the cast of They Drive by Night) play themselves,
an in-joke that prefigures the comic self-reflexivity of indie cinema of
the '90s. As outlined in the script, the movie Malick wrote is less a
road trip than a hectic catalogue of wryly observed oddities, and in
this penchant for pastiche it rides a first wave in the postmodern cur-
rent that would buoy American movies for the next thirty years.
Around the same time, Malick wrote another script under the
pseudonym "David Whitney," for Jack Sharrett's crime caper called
The Gravy Train (1974). The film received some limited release, it
seems, but not a single traceable review in any national publication
in America. Like Deadhead Miles, it fell from sight, and is now un-
available. Uncredited work on other scripts—including Don Siegel's
Dirty Harry (1971) and Jack Nicholson's Drive, He Said (1971)—
has been documented, but little in those scripts forecasts anything of
merit in the work to come, and these reports, even as verified, still
hardly reveal the figure in the carpet. Some have speculated that the
frustrating experiences of these early failed efforts led Malick's resolve
to direct his own scripts.
The appetite of oblivion appears to be far keener than usual when
it comes to the apprenticeship of Terrence Malick, so much so that
his first significant work in cinema, for all intents, is the script for Pocket
Money, a film that seems designed to follow up one of the most popular
movies of the New Hollywood, Stuart Rosenberg's Cool Hand Luke
(1967)—with which it shares a director and star—and to blend it with
the rowdy comedy of Elliott Silverstein's Cat Ballou (1965).
Rosenberg's Pocket Money (1972) is an affable picaresque tale about
a cattle drive from Mexico to Southern California. Jim (played by Paul
Newman) is a down-on-his-luck cowboy enlisted by a shady but ami-
able businessman (played by Strother Martin) to deliver a herd for the
rodeo market. In Mexico, Jim looks up his old friend, Leonard (played
by Lee Marvin), and the two join up to face a series of setbacks as
they drive the steer across a blighted range, a hard stretch of desert
land stuck between rising modernity and the Old West. Released in
1972, the film appeared at the height of the last great wave of West-
erns in American film, a cycle so checkered, double-dealing, and ram-
bunctious, it all but killed off the genre. The wave was really, as usual,
a series of counter-undulations, divided principally between those films

that made it their business to deconstruct the conventions of the
Western and those bent on sustaining or reviving them.
Both camps acknowledged threats to the movie Western in the
shape of a belated recognition of modernity, threats that had loomed
at least since 1954, when Robert Warshow, in his classic essay on
"The Westerner," spoke of an "anti-Western" attitude on the rise
within the genre (Warshow 1962, 135-54). In a similar spirit, films
like Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969) or Pat Garrett and Billy
the Kid (1975), Martin Ritt's Hombre (1968), or Don Siegel's The
Beguiled (1971), exposing the heady nihilism underlying the
Western's traditional mythologies, implied the triumph of modernity
over the legends of the Old West. By contrast, movies like George
Roy Hill's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), Howard
Hawks's Rio Lobo (1970), Henry Hathaway's True Grit (1970), or
films by Peckinpah in a slightly more jovial mood, like The Ballad
of Cable Hogue (1970) or Junior Bonner (1972), granted the possi-
bility of the Western's continued vitality, showing the persistence of
the genre's tradition, wisdom, and lore in the face of modernity's
assaults. An elegiac tone unites the two strains—the aging cowpokes,
melancholy sunsets, railway-blasted landscapes, and ramshackle ghost
towns—and some films, like Arthur Penn's Little Big Man (1970),
move between them, but most choose sides, with either the bleak,
gritty cynicism of the first—and probably dominant—strain, or the
spry folk comedy of the second.
Pocket Money places itself pretty squarely in the second camp while
foreshadowing the complex position between genre revisionism and
genre reconstructionism of Malick's films as director. Following upon
the experiments of the Deadhead Miles script, the film's quirky dia-
logue blends a borrowed argot of the Old West with some contem-
porary slang and terse, idiosyncratic turns of phrase to forge a
distinctive, impacted, self-conscious patois somewhere between Zane
Grey and Harold Pinter. The comedy derives largely from affection-
ate jokes on traditional generic values of the Western and localized
verbal misunderstandings that make slipknots of language a primary
subject of the film. The businessman's sidekick, meaning to ingrati-
ate himself to Jim, says he will pay him tribute by calling him "Chee-
wa-wa," after the Mexican town. Looking troubled, Jim answers,
"Folks might think you mean one of them little dogs"—awkwardly
measuring smallness of scale with his fidgety hands. Then the busi-
nessman chimes in irritably, in his high-pitched drawl: "Oh—let's just

drop the subjeck!" In its wayward, skittish whimsy, the exchange char-
acterizes the sly linguistic absurdism of the whole film, constantly
drawing playful attention to the trips, muffs, and vagaries of a highly
conventional yet colorfully inflected vernacular.
This lcind of talk at cross-purposes has been said to typify a whole
cycle of New Hollywood filmmaking (Ray 1985, 277), but it is use-
ful to distinguish Malick's practice of it from either the naturalistic or
the existentialist versions current at the time. Under the sway of
method acting or the influence of art-film tactics, Hollywood dialogue
of the '50s, '60s, and '70s underwent widespread changes in a bid for
greater realism, incorporating a new set of stammers, stutters, and false
starts, tics of verbal imperfection meant to simulate the interruptions,
falterings, and hems and haws of "real" speech more aptly than the
smooth, faultlessly delivered dialogue of the Golden Age. In movies
like Bonnie and Clyde or Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1975), these novel
turns of dialogue underline themes of alienation, despondency, and
miscommunication, expressing a new, self-conscious pessimism that is
itself displayed as a gauge of greater realism. A more particularized
manifestation of the same trend appears in the work of Rudy Wurlitzer,
who wrote scripts for such neo-Westerns as Monte Hellman's Two
Lane Blacktop (1971) 2 and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, rife with a
sense of existentialist anomie evident in oblique dialogue and opaque
plot dynamics.
The sense of language that emerges in Pocket Money diverges from
either of these options—though it is closer to Wurlitzer, without quite
the same angst—and prefigures main currents that define the rest of
Malick's work to date. Hardly an exercise in realism, Malick's dialogue
for Pocket Money emphasizes the conventionalism and artifice of the
characters' colloquies. On the brink of parody, the discourse delights
in reproducing the jive and cant of an imagined time and place, spin-
ning it out to the boundaries of credulity and framing it in a nexus of
misprision, the satirical point of which is that people who think they
share a language use it in ways so personal, they can't communicate.
For Malick, language is by definition an artificial medium, fraught with
private motives and liable to petty deceptions. The film's theme of
duplicity finds its correlate in the absurdist or mock-heroic dialogue,
which carries both the characters' speech and, without any overt com-
mentary, the author's take on it. Considering this double-sided treat-
ment of dialogue, it is not surprising that Malick turns to voice-over
as a key technique, establishing dual tracks of characters' speech, in

his films as director.
It may be in the treatment of plot that the script forecasts most fully
some important tendencies of Malick's subsequent work. The cattle-
drive plot lends itself to the kind of classical construction it received
in what might have seemed to be Hollywood's last word on the sub-
ject, Howard Hawks's Red River (1949). In that film, the cattle drive
itself establishes and stokes the momentum of the plot, serving as the
primary goal around which the events of the story are organized. In-
sistently displacing the classical rule of ends, Malick concentrates al-
most entirely on means. The cattle drive is downplayed almost
comically, occupying a few perfunctory scenes midway through the
film, and the digressive, episodic plot releases cause from effect as if
the relation between them were as arbitrary as the crafty languages
the characters count on to ratify it. When we learn, in the end, that
the rodeo business is shutting down and the cattle drive has been for
naught, the outcome seems less to finish off the Old West than to
disclose the perennial truths of whimsical fate.
ADRIFT IN A WORLD OF OBJECTS: BADLANDS
Looking forward from Pocket Money, as some reviews indicate, the

absurdist comedy of Badlands might have seemed like its most promi-
nent quality.3 Looking back, and considering the context in which it
appeared, the most striking feature of the film is its originality. Based
on a simple summary, especially against the background of its time,
originality might be the last quality one would ascribe to it. A tale of
renegade lovers on the run from the law, shot through with imperti-
nent irony, inflected with shifting and often unreadable tones, and
showcasing straightforward, relatively realistic depictions of violence:
the description fits any number of movies of the period—from Bonnie
and Clyde to Noel Black's Pretty Poison (1968) to Spielberg's The
Sugarland Express (1974) or John Hough's Dirty Larry and Crazy
Mary (1973) to Altman's Thieves Like Us (1973) or even, stretching
it a little, George Roy Hill's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
(1969) or Hal Ashby's The Last Detail (1974). Suggesting the range
and persistence of this pattern, these films also demonstrate that this
plot, with just this sort of treatment, could easily be seen as the de-
fining template of the time.
Released in spring 1974, Badlands comes late in the sequence, so

it is not surprising that most of the reviews noted its broad relation
to those earlier films, but the most acute, cogent, or prescient of the
reviews, in one way or another, also noted its distance from them (see
especially Kinder 1974, 2). If we take Bonnie and Clyde as the touch-
stone—and it is worth noting that Arthur Penn, the director of Bonnie
and Clyde, is acknowledged in the credits of Badlands—the affinities
are clear but decidedly misleading. In place of lively Americana, Bad-
lands offers a dour anatomy of cultural styles. Instead of infectious,
spirited comedy, Badlands traffics in a kind of astringent wit, ironic
without seeming derisive, bitter, or arch. In place of visceral pathos,
Badlands exhibits somber, clear-eyed sympathy, detached without
seeming entirely remote, critical without seeming entirely reproach-
ful. T h e other films of this cycle diagnose the pathologies of their
characters either superficially—it's the repressive law that made them
criminals—or, as a dimension of their bids for hipness, n o t at all.
Badlands is incomparably more attuned to the philosophical contexts
from which such plots arise, or the fund of ideas they draw from, and
its mix of existential angst and counterculture verve has an analytical
intensity that sets it apart from any other such film of its time.
It would be a mistake, nonetheless, to think of the film as some kind
of formalist exercise. Its formal texture counterposes great delibera-
tion against odd bursts of spontaneity—most of which are threaten-
ing rather than liberating—and the overall effect is of an audaciously
wide variety of materials brought under the sway of a quietly persua-
sive, even somewhat reticent, viewpoint. The uses of music, for in-
stance, demonstrate this point in a way that is especially pertinent since
they establish methods Malick continues to employ in subsequent
films. Four rather different strains of music are woven through the
film—prefiguring the combination of Ennio Morricone's orchestral
music with Leo Kottke's folk guitar in Days of Heaven, or the mix-
ture of Hans Zimmer's score with adaptations of American hymns and
Eastern chants in The Thin Red Line. The dominant strain weaves two
pieces of classical music in the modernist tradition—Carl Orff's
"Musica Poetica" (written with Gunild Keetman) and Erik Satie's
"Trois Morceaux en Forme de Poire." Redolent of a kind of minimalist
retrenchment, this music imparts a quality of bumptious severity—
especially in a scene where choric chants accompany bold, piquant
images of a burning house that the main character has set aflame. Both
Satie and Orff, in different ways, aspired to synthesize popular and
classical forms in music, but though Malick clearly shares such aspi-
rations, that does not prevent these selections from clashing with the
other pieces of music found in the film—Mickey and Sylvia's "Love
Is Strange" and Nat "King" Cole's "A Blossom Fell." Snatches of the
"Migration" theme, apparently composed for the film by James Tay-
lor, and brief glints of the original music by George Tipton, r o u n d
out what by rights should appear to be a fragmentary, diffuse score.
In practice, however, this variegated composite seems to be very
much of a piece, expressing the shifting moods of the film while cre-
ating, in the consistency of its deployment, a unified effect. Where the
music functions as something more than conventional punctuation it
tends to serve both as ironic commentary and intransitive interjection,
both mute and breathless. Badlands takes its place among the more
influential films of its day—notably the otherwise quite different Taxi
Driver—dealing in forms of irony that seem unloosed from subject
or object, causeless or short-circuited. The use of Orff's music over
shots of a burning house sets up a kind of emotional disconnect, even
if the commentary of the music on the images is, if anything, all too
clear. Both music and image express, here, an awesome, horrific gran-
deur, a kind of terrible beauty, given its due as one of the rhetorical
high points of the film. The sequence, unresolved formally at least to
the extent that the musical piece remains unfinished, gives way with
emphatic fluidity to a m o m e n t of deliberate bathos: a shot of a locker
in a high school hallway, as Holly (Sissy Spacek), who is running away
with Kit (Martin Sheen), the boy who has killed her father and burnt
down the house, narrates a voice-over in her affectless Texas drawl:
"Kit made me get my books from school so I wouldn't fall behind."
Clearly, this is no ordinary irony—or at least, it's not the kind of
irony to be found even in progressive American movies of the '60s,
like John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate (1961), Stanley
Kubrick's Lolita (1962), Tony Richardson's The Loved One (1965),
or Bonnie and Clyde. For one thing, it distances itself from overt
parody or satire, and its wry, laconic detachment is not incompatible
with ineffable notes oflyric passion (though this could perhaps be said
of Lolita, too)—as if to recognize a vitiating continuity among the
beautiful, the ugly, the sublime, and the ridiculous.
What marks Badlands as so decisive a break from the movies that
came before it is precisely the quality of its detachment. The line of
films it culminates deals to varying degrees in irony, satire, or parody,
but Badlands is just about alone a m o n g them in articulating some
sense of the link between the characters' alienation and its own atti-
tudes of ironic detachment. A fictionalized reconstruction of the ac-
tual 1950s m u r d e r spree of Charles Starkweather and Caril-Ann
Fugate, the film's treatment of these true-crime materials is note-
worthy chiefly for what it refuses to do with them—and the feeling
of the whole film, in a way, is determined by a refined, strangulated
aloofness. It refuses, for instance, to solicit any special sympathy for
the murder victims (perhaps assuming, unlike other films in this group,
that we will already feel such sympathy). By contrast to the stylized,
balletic, protracted, and overblown portrayals of violence that were
current at the time (in films like Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild
Bunch), renderings of violence in Badlands are quick, blunt, unpre-
dictable, and truncated, with an unusual emphasis on the still, terrible
aftermath. Withdrawing from the more sensational aspects of the real-
life crimes, Badlands places them on mordant view as if they were to
be understood as in some way generally representative, or as if some-
thing remotely comic were discernible about them.
What's meant to be funny, it seems, is the very extremity of the char-
acters' estrangement from their own actions, and at first glance, with
the conflict between the inflammatory content and the steely, placid,
insulating tone, the film confronts us with a highly cosmopolitan view
of provincial, backwoodsy abjection. The uses of Orff and Satie, cer-
tainly, among other formal elements, bespeak a high-art milieu much
removed from the atmosphere of the film's settings. At a key turning
point, Kit and Holly arrive at the home of a rich man, w h o m they
briefly take hostage, and t h o u g h the form and content of the film
remain as divided from each other as adjacent echo chambers, the
scene opens up a meaningful channel between them that alters the
tenor of the film as a whole.
"We needed supplies so we stopped at a rich man's house," says
Holly in her slightly breathy, matter-of-fact monotone. "Kit said it'd
be better than going into the downtown." T h o u g h the scene marks
a crucial turn in the film, the voice-over that introduces it is charac-
teristic in its homespun chatter and fussy logic. The house is occu-
pied only by the rich man and his deaf maid, who react to Kit and
Holly's intrusion with a careful, solemn, fearful deference that sug-
gests the fugitives' reputation has preceded them. Part of what gives
the scene a special status in the film is that, nearly two-thirds of the
way through the movie, it provides the first opportunity for a reality
check. It is just about the only time we hear Holly speak to anyone
but Kit, apart from the voice-overs themselves and a brief scene with
her father early in the film. "They say I got him wrapped around my
finger," she unexpectedly tells the rich man, "but I never told him to
shoot anybody." The scene before this one has shown a series of styl-
ized, sepia-tinged images of lawmen in pursuit of the fugitives, but
this comment is the only glimpse we get into Holly's outlook on their
public notoriety. By contrast to a film like Bonnie and Clyde, in which
the gang's manipulation of their own public image is a central theme,
Badlands treats the theme only obliquely and elliptically. It is more
interested in the outlaws' sense of themselves as passive victims than
in their role as active agents.
The real significance of the scene is to show Holly and Kit in an
alien cultural environment. The house is a space of entombed seclu-
sion—somewhat akin to the Bates house in Hitchcock's Psycho
(1960)—filled with Victorian paintings, busts and sculptures, stately
mantels and clocks, well-kept artifacts signifying richness of every
stripe. In a way, oddly dreamlike as the scene is, the house figures as
an oneiric amplification of Holly's lost home: The shot that introduces
it is of a cupola, parallel to an earlier shot of Holly gazing from an
upper window in a cupola of her own house, and Kit's manner with
the rich man reverts to the belligerent respect he showed Holly's fa-
ther just before shooting him, down to repeating the same passive-
aggressive phrase: "How'd that be?" In another sense, the house is a
conceptual extension and practical opposite of the hovel presided over
in an earlier episode by Kit's friend, Cato, an enclave also distinguished
chiefly by the quality of the objects it contains. As Cato, shot by Kit,
bleeds to death in a corner, Kit remarks contemptuously of the tools,
wheels, old radios, and gimcrack mechanical devices that clutter the
room, "Look at all this junk." In the rich man's house he is less di-
rect in his estimation but wanders through the space gazing at ob-
jects, even touching or poking them, with much the same dazed, irate
manner.
The stifled comedy of the scene comes from its atmosphere of ar-
bitrary waiting and from dry observation of Kit and Holly's wan ef-
forts to make use of the objects in the rich man's house. The camera
pans across a pre-Raphaelite canvas as we hear an eerie keening
sound, the source of which is identified as we cut to a shot of Holly
running her finger around the rim of a fine crystal glass. Kit rings a
bell and then, gazing blankly into the camera, announces, "Next time
I ring this bell means it's time to leave." Another shot shows Holly
"awkwardly moving a bust from a piano to a stand, or trying out a

high-backed chair with a look of discomfort, then shifting to another
chair; or Kit fingering an ornately framed portrait on a mantel. Each
of these shots is inflected with a composed interest, but this last one
has special weight because it parallels a gesture in the scene at Cato's
cabin. There, as Cato dies, Kit picks up a framed photo from a side
table and affably quips, "You never tol' me about her!" Cato, dy-
ing, makes no reply, but Kit's assumption that the photo signifies a
romantic interest is grotesque, not just because of how inappropri-
ate his chumminess is under the circumstances, but because there is
nothing to bear it out. There is no way of knowing Kit's reaction
to the photo in the rich man's house, or what he thinks it means,
but the parallel scenes establish a relation between differing orders
of objects—implements and artifacts, objects meant for use that be-
come "junk" when they fall into disrepair, and objects meant for
contemplation that take on a greater aura the further removed they
are from the merely instrumental.
Especially in light of its neo-Victorian atmosphere, the scene is a
reminder of the forms and even something of the histories of detach-
ment as a modern attitude. Recent studies have argued for an under-
standing of detachment as a definitive "stance" of modern sensibility,
given particular stress, according to one scholar, in the Victorian age,
when impartiality and objectivity came to be valued as palliative re-
sponses to the ills of modernity, in the work of John Stuart Mill,
Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, or Oscar Wilde, among others. 4 The
concept was much debated in light of its coextensiveness with presum-
ably undesirable effects like disengagement, indifference, or social
quietism, but it was frequently defended as the last stand of critical
self-reflection in a time of new velocity in social technologies, or bur-
geoning vulgarity and growing impulsiveness in cultural programs. The
ideal of objective contemplation, especially in the name of universal
understanding, reveals detachment as, essentially, reaction formation,
and the obvious question when considering the cultivation of distance
as a philosophical, intellectual, or aesthetic position is, Distance from
what? Critics of cultivated detachment argue that it disdains the in-
evitable struggles of lived experience, or parallels the modern alien-
ation it arises against, and it is, finally, hard to conceive detachment
apart from mechanisms of self-protection, even when its pledged goal
is self-reflection—which may be, after all, only another form of self-
protection.
By the time existentialism installed a version of detachment as a

cornerstone of being, it had incorporated its positive and negative
possibilities into a crucible of exigencies. For Heidegger, in Being
and Time, alienation and a t t u n e m e n t were two sides of the same
coin, implying that detachment was n o t a position to cultivate b u t
a fact of subjectivity—at least to the extent that, in material space
and time, we are distant from many more things than we are ever
close t o , may never really be close to anything, and can experience
even ourselves as other, our own bodies as distant. "That about which
one has Angst is being in the world as such," Heidegger declares, but
Angst, a species of alienation, is "a fundamental form of a t t u n e m e n t "
that takes its point of departure from "the p h e n o m e n o n of entangle-
m e n t " (Heidegger 1996, 1 7 1 , italics in original). Heidegger's stub-
born refusal to credit inner experience as salvation or even relief from
a hostile world derives from his rejection of the subject-object di-
chotomy as an illogical opposition based on false priorities. H o w can
we conceive of ourselves as subjects if we can never imagine ourselves
apart from the world of objects, coming before it or taking prece-
dence over it? The defining paradox of Heidegger's t h o u g h t is that
we are detached or alienated because we are so unavoidably entangled
in the "world" (a word Heidegger himself rarely used without quo-
tation marks). The same lesson infuses the epiphany at the climax
of Camus's The Stranger ( 1 9 4 2 ) , the quintessential existentialist fic-
tion and an obvious reference point for Badlands. In that novel,
Meursault goes to his death calmly after having finally learned to
accept his position as an object in the world, with no special status
as subject. Camus's point seems to be that if only he had come to
this realization sooner, he might have achieved some authentic sub-
jectivity in his life.
T h e existentialists pondered differences, or at least relations, be-
tween authentic and inauthentic being, but by the time their ideas
trickle down into movies, it is not at all clear that such differences
or relations any longer pertain. Pop existentialism especially infuses
films of the New Hollywood, which tend to present alienation n o t
as some dread aberration but as an everyday n o r m , and to treat the
t h e m e with a cool, nonjudgmental objectivity, or at least what is
routinely put forward as such. Those who argue that this period (and
the one leading up to it in Europe) finally realized nascent potenti-
alities of film, in accord with the " m o d e r n , " advert to the insistent
objectivity of cinema as a medium. Stanley Cavell does so, with spe-
cific reference to Malick and Heidegger. According to Cavell—an-

swering to the insights of Heidegger's What Is Called Thinking?—
Malick has
discovered, or discovered how to acknowledge, a fundamental fact of

film's photographic basis: that objects participate in the photographic
presence of themselves; they participate in the re-creation of themselves
on film; they are essential in the making of their appearances. Objects
projected on a screen are inherently reflexive, they occur as self-refer-
ential, reflecting upon their physical origins. . . . Then if in relation to
objects capable of such self-manifestation human beings are reduced in
significance, or crushed by the fact of beauty left vacant, perhaps this is
because in trying to take dominion over the world, or in aestheticizing
it (temptations inherent in the making of a film, or of any art), they are
refusing their participation with it. (Cavell 1979, xvi)
Cavell is speaking here of Days of Heaven, trying to account for the

effects of its beauty and his sense of this beauty as " r e d u c i n g ] to in-
significance" (xiv) the thoughts and actions of human beings against
the "casual r o u n d s " of nature. The observation extends to Badlands,
but must be qualified in light of the lesser concern in the earlier film
with nature as a preserve of objectivity. In flight, Kit and Holly build
a primordial home in the wilderness, and though the film draws pass-
ing attention to natural beauty in this sequence—in a lcind of dry run
for the descriptive passages of Days of Heaven—it emphasizes the
cliched, ludicrous quality of their efforts to build a native domicile as
if out of random recollections of the Swiss Family Robinson or Kon-
Tiki, a book they actually read for inspiration (fig. 1). From the start
we are encouraged to note the blandness or inadequacy of their re-
sponses to nature: "What a nice place." "The tree makes it nice." O n
the run again, they flee through open, empty, obdurate landscapes that
seem to mock dreams of freedom, and at every turn they seize on
ready-made bromides to account for their situation. "They'll probably
pin that on me t o o , " carps Kit as they drive past an abandoned car.
Kit thrives on his perceived resemblance to James Dean and even
imitates the Dean iconography, as when he braces a rifle across his
shoulders in the manner of Dean in Stevens's Giant (1956) (fig. 2).
In the woods, he shrugs off this image and adopts instead a ldnd of
prefabricated noble savage posture. The point, clearly, is not that the
flight into the woods brings him into closer contact with nature and
the realm of the a u t h e n t i c — t h o u g h that is h o w he and Holly
Fig. 1. Ignoble savages: Kit and Holly in the Woods. Badlands. Courtesy
of Photofest.
Fig. 2. James Dean as psychopath: Martin Sheen as Kit in Badlands. Cour-

tesy of Photofest.
understand it—but only that he has traded in one set of cliches for
another.
Earlier versions of this plot, even when they present their outlaws
as helpless victims of a system (as in Lang's Tou Only Live Once [1937]
or They Live by Night), treat the plot itself, typically, as a cautionary
tale, and what distinguishes the N e w Hollywood cycle from earlier
manifestations is its palpable mistrust of social critique, a skepticism
that both enables and prods the ironic postures the films variously take
up. Bonnie and Clyde, for instance, retains some of the victims-of-a-
system pathos, but conceives society as an aggregate of lies, hypocri-
sies, cliches, and shams perpetrated by vulgar functionaries or
grotesque hucksters—and a few J o h n Ford " c o m m o n folk" types
thrown in with a marked lack of conviction. By no means are the crimi-
nals seen as odious threats to decent society, and though Badlands has
no interest in converting its main characters into folk heroes, its feel-
ing of detachment hinges in part on a distinct indifference to the so-
cial-problem dimensions of the material. Kit and Holly are seen as
significant neither as menaces to social welfare nor as representatives
of social pathology. Their pertinence seems more directly existential-
ist; what they manifest is, to paraphrase Cavell, a reduction in signifi-
cance itself.
The problem is not that Kit and Holly are estranged from their own
subjectivities. Despite their affectlessness and even their relative pas-
sivity, their senses of themselves as subjects are all too apparent. Nearly
every word they utter is the expression of an opinion, a reflection, a
memory, a chimera, a hope, a grudge, an idea, an expectation, a wish,
or some other effect of inner experience. The whole point of Holly's
voice-over narration—that odd amalgam of romantic cliches, dime-
novel pieties, fervent convictions, and spacey reasonings—is to sug-
gest a constant u n d e r c u r r e n t of t h o u g h t and feeling that never
manages to intervene in, and certainly does nothing to halt, the re-
morseless progression of the action. The uncanniest moments of the
voice-over occur when Holly blithely reveals information that alters
our senses of her own relation to the action—as in the strangely poi-
gnant scene where she gazes through her father's stereopticon and,
over hauntingly random images of a fanciful past, speculates about the
man she will marry, showing that she does not expect it to be Kit; or
when she reveals, near the end of the film, that she has married the
son of her lawyer after her trial. The only moment when this ribbon
of words makes real contact with the Mobius strip of the action is when
Holly says in the voice-over that she is going to leave Kit, and we then
see his response on screen—and this is also, significantly, the only time
Kit expresses real rage in the film. For his part, Kit commits two mono-
logues to record in the course of the film—both of which manage to
be at once florid and taciturn—and they reveal a mix of psychotic self-
importance, aggrandizing modesty, and cracker-barrel philosophizing.
Yet neither are Holly and Kit akin to the lineage of film characters
of the time who are so alienated they just want to feel something, even
if it's something terrible—such as George C. Scott in Richard Lester's
Petulia (1968), Faye Dunaway in Jerry Schatzberg's Puzzle of a Down-
fall Child (1968), Jack Nicholson in Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces
(1970), Tuesday Weld in Frank Perry's Play It As It Lays (1972), Weld
and Anthony Perkins in Pretty Poison, or Jack L e m m o n in John G.
Avildsen's Save the Tiger (1973). Nor does the authenticity of this feel-
ing appear to be what is at stake, since its inauthenticity is made so
clear from the start, so much a part of the film's mordantly comic
ambience. If Kit and Holly are not narcissists in any salient or clinical
sense—and the film is about as interested in traditional psychological
explanations as Heidegger was—they might as well be, for it is the
outer world of objects, more than the domain of subjects, that is out
of joint in Badlands. Kit and Holly are adrift in a world of objects,
and from the beginning, the film asks us to pay close attention to how
the relations among the characters are mediated by their own relation
to objects, 5 which is, from the start, defined in terms of aggression.
In the first scene, impulsively quitting work early on his job as a gar-
bage collector, Kit throws a piece of rubble back at his coworker, Cato,
who has thrown it at him. Fired from his job, Kit is pelted by the fore-
man as he walks off. When Kit and Holly play in a field adjacent to
Cato's hutch, their game entails throwing scraps of detritus at each
other.
The superficially playful overtones of some of these interactions dis-
sipate as one considers them in sequence, and in relation to the blunt,
inexpressive language that connects subject to object, concept to per-
cept. "I found a toaster," says Kit, returning from the cellar where he
has stowed the body of Holly's father. "I got my d o g , " the foreman
yelps after his incitement of pelting Kit, when Kit briefly turns back
to him. "I almost stepped on the chicken," says Holly soon after the
two have taken refuge in their native outpost. "We d o n ' t need this,"
remarks Kit, tossing aside a rusty birdcage as they are leaving the out-
post. "[Kit] shot a football," Holly narrates in voice-over, as we watch
the action described, "that he considered excess baggage." "I found
a lid," Holly announces in the field next to Cato's house—in a va-

grant moment, the whole point of which seems to be to effect a theo-
retical echo of Kit's finding of the toaster. Each of these declarations
is, in its way, self-contained, parenthetical, and disconnected—though
such terse, paratactic utterances make up the bulk of the film's dia-
logue. Comically irrelevant non sequiturs, they suggest the proposi-
tional games of a philosopher of language—a disciple of Wittgenstein,
or a speech-act theorist. Stripping language of adornment and strand-
ing it below the threshold of meaning, they participate—taken as a
series of speech patterns—in a recurrent grammatical structure (sub-
ject, transitive verb, object) that becomes oppressive in its repetitions
in the film, and suggests an understanding of objects as having mean-
ing chiefly in relation to the subjects that get, step on, need, d o n ' t
need, shoot, or find them. Despite their simply declarative form, many
of these statements are violent on the face of it, as most obviously in
the shooting of the football. The violence of the foreman's "I got my
d o g " is veiled, but t h o u g h the dog itself seems lazily indifferent to
the threat, the assertion means that the dog will attack if Kit retali-
ates. The violence of Holly's "I almost stepped on the chicken" is
accidental—as Kit seems to think his murders are—and mitigated by
the fact that the chicken is already dead, but all she can do is report
it, and in the very next scene, arriving at Cato's, Kit cruelly holds a
chicken up by the legs as he presents it to Cato as an offering.
A third order of objects is defined in the film apart from those of
artifact and implement, though by no means distinct from them. It is
the symbolic order, and part of the point here is that objects can shift
status at a glance, depending on how they are seen or appropriated—
and that, moreover, these ways of seeing or appropriations contain,
structurally, a potential violence. To that extent, the junk that clut-
ters Cato's hovel is little different from the classy relics tastefully ar-
rayed in the rich m a n ' s house. T h e former are made for use b u t
deemed "junk" by Kit; the latter are meant for contemplation but put
to use by Kit and Holly. Neither of these orders fends off Kit's ag-
gression, for which they serve as vehicles, t h o u g h the scene in the
millionaire's house signifies, among other things, the failure of the very
safety that such objects are meant to create and certify. Symbolically,
the rich man's house seems like the haven of the film's own senses of
detachment—an embodiment of it, in its hushed, tensed atmosphere,
with the sense that something awful could happen any minute. 6 Kit's
predictably courteous yet menacing violation of that haven seems to
acknowledge that such detachment, even when based in the refuges

of class, really protects one from nothing, and Kit himself later notes
that pure chance kept him from killing the man or the maid.
"The surrounding world makes itself known," declares Heidegger
(1996, 70)—or, at least, it might, if we were not trapped in the deci-
mating logic of subject and object, falling prey to a world in which
people are always acting on things, even when the things are other
people. In Badlands, Kit is n o t alone in c o m m i t t i n g the cardinal
H e i d e g g e r e a n s i n — " p r e t e n d i n g to be two when he is really only
one" 7 —and in this film's vision, the origin of violence, if a force so
pervasive can be said to have an origin, comes not when people lose
sight of their own subjectivity, but when they lose sight of the world's
looming objectivity, as a sphere where human action need n o t be
t h o u g h t a defining circumstance, and is not always called for. Espe-
cially by contrast to the highly wrought landscapes of Days of Heaven,
the visual style of Badlands is quite circumspect. Objects are glimpsed,
rather than scrutinized, their presences rarely emphasized visually, and
the film is notably free of close-ups, shot/reverse-shot sequences,
point-of-view shots (apart from a few that are carefully placed from
Holly's perspective), or other such techniques of subjective punctua-
tion. (The prc-Days of Heaven nature footage of the forest scene is
the crucial and suggestive exception.)
N o r is this treatment proposed as an alternative to the violent ob-
ject-relations enacted in the film, for the film itself does not deny the
inevitable subjection of objects to human categories—artifact, imple-
ment, symbol. Kit, who wants to turn himself into a symbol, even as
he is too invested in subjectivity to understand himself as an object
in the world, does what there is to be done to such objects—using
them, classifying them, and investing them with meanings of his own.
In turning the camera on them, Malick seems to want every object
to pivot among the available categories, without settling into any one
of them. That indeterminacy, it seems, might save them. The toaster,
the cage, the football, the lid, a walking stick Holly swipes from the
rich man's house—these things are unusually present (though not nec-
essarily t h r o u g h direct visual imprint, as they repeatedly register as
peripheral matter), bluntly corporeal, receptive of the runoff of emo-
tional sediment that finds no ground in the human dimensions of the
film, yet seen fleetingly, as incommunicative in their way as the people
who manipulate them.
The use of animals as a motif t h r o u g h o u t the film illustrates this
point best—the cattle Kit gets a job branding, the foreman's dog or
the dog Holly's father shoots and dumps in the lake, the dead chicken
and the chicken Kit and Holly bring to C a t o , another d o g Holly
glimpses from afar as she wanders outside the millionaire's house.
Because these creatures are actually sensate, by contrast to the inert
yet mysteriously responsive objects of which they are living analogues,
they hover between the subjective and objective worlds, viewed dis-
tantly—except for a sudden close-up of the dog as it is shot, the one
m o m e n t when the film confronts violence head-on—with a cumula-
tive, unspoken sense of sorrowing, swelling up from some undisclos-
able place, for the cruelties these obtuse and pliant beings must endure,
or to which they must submit.
A curious slackening occurs at the end of Badlands, perhaps deriv-
ing in part from the fact that Holly's voice-over becomes less frequent
in the final scenes, but conveying, in any case, an odd land of reces-
sional effect. It is as if we are moving ever further away from these
people at w h o m we have gazed so intensely for so long, and at the
same time seeing things about them we hadn't divined before. Holly's
affectlessness turns into sadness, and we suddenly find ourselves see-
ing from her point of view; the last shot, through the windows of a
plane, into the folds of ineffable clouds, is from her perspective. Kit's
narcissism becomes a form of charisma, and although we are not en-
couraged to be charmed by him, the officers who have arrested him
genuinely seem to be. At the same time, the strict, precisionist focus
of the film loosens; we see fleeting details, unrelated to Kit's arrest or
Holly's fate, of the military base to which the two have been conveyed.
Apprehended, Holly and Kit are suddenly glimpsed in a definable
context, while before they had been fully visible only apart from one,
where they had hoped to subsist (figs. 3-4). In these final scenes, it
seems almost as if the film has lost interest in them, or wants us to
know they have lost their hold on us; certainly, it intends to give us
no further access to them. Instead, there is a sense of release, expressed
with such casual attentions that we may wonder how they ever gained
their hold on us to begin with. The feeling of sadness is palpable, de-
spite the comic turns of Kit's performance for those who have cap-
tured him.
The quality of the film's ironies is closer in sensibility to that of other
films of the time in this concluding segment than it is earlier in the
film. The ending of Taxi Driver, for instance, suggests comparisons.
After an explosion of violence at the end of that film, too terrible to
be cathartic, Travis Bickle becomes a hero, celebrated in the media
and recognized with respect by a woman who had previously spurned
Figs. 3-4. We begin to lose sight of Kit and Holly: The ending of Badlands.
Courtesy of Photofest.
him. Scorsese hedges bets by leaving open the possibility that this coda
is somebody's nightmare, but the satirical tenor is unmistakable. In
both cases, the theme of celebrity is introduced as if it had been the
crucial element all along, and the turn in the films' structures opens
them up, frees them from the accusation of didacticism by opposing
competing tones, and makes it hard to see what stance either film, in
the end, is taking. Only the visceral emotional and physical violence
of Taxi Driver keeps it, too, in its sly ironies, from seeming "cold,"
and the bleak moralism of the film's outlook manages to encompass
allegory, irony, and shock value. The turn at the end of Badlands is
ironic structurally, but less so tonally; it pursues the possibility that
any attitude adopted by the film is really just another stance, provi-
sional or rhetorical, one that could change in the next minute, accord-
ing to circumstance.
In a similar sense, the scene at the rich man's house, tonally reve-
latory as it is, is structurally also a bit digressive. It flirts with the di-
gressiveness that becomes central to the storytelling of Days of Heaven,
which features an insistent scene (Bill wandering alone through the
farmer's house) that echoes it quite directly, and another (the appear-
ance of the flying circus) that opens a similarly self-reflexive lens upon
that later film, with its themes of work, play, class, and migration. The
desolation of the ending of Badlands suggests that the irony that has
guided so much of the film's sensibility has been deemed something
of a dead end, and Days of Heaven reverts to a kind of romantic irony,
as if to escape the bind. Whether or not it managed to do so for its
maker may be inferred, perhaps, from the twenty years of silence that
followed.
WAR IN NATURE: THE THIN RED LINE
Whatever the relation of Malick's most recent film to his first two,
a basic tension between irony and ardency informs Badlands and Days
of Heaven. The outlaw-lovers-on-the-run template of Badlands splits
the difference between the socially conscious romanticism of They Live
by Night and the counterculture mythmaking of Bonnie and Clyde,
while Days of Heaven weds Whitman's poetic ideal of the democratic
vista to the interior landscapes of Henry James, with a plot that evokes
The Wings of the Dove and ends with a quasi-biblical plague of locusts.
Days of Heaven's sources may principally be classically literary, includ-
ing Mark Twain and Willa Cather, but the film shares some of the
aestheticist detachment of Badlands, a cool distanciation that inheres
in the formalist rigor of its imagery and the inexorable languor of its
violence. In Days of Heaven, aesthetic distance resides in a complex
system of modernist narrative ellipses, but collides with an aesthete's
passionate lyricism, much as in Badlands the continuing hope of in-
nocence, still visible in quicksilver nature, meets the seeming inevita-
bility of corruption.
In Malick's most recent film, this tension is all but gone. The Thin
Red Line, based on James Jones's 1962 novel, pursues the strains of
ardent feeling of the director's earlier work but, without seeming to
renounce it, forsakes the irony. The core of the film follows an Ameri-
can battalion's fight against the Japanese for a hill at Guadalcanal, and
although this core provides dramatic grounding for the movie, it is
flanked at both ends, beginning and end, by stretches of storytelling
so fragmentary, so mercurial, they're nearly abstract. If in Badlands
Malick sought the stringency of a tone poem, and in Days of Heaven
the breadth of a ballad, in The Thin Red Line, the director aspires to
the impersonal grandeur of the epic. In each set of narrative possibili-
ties, Malick finds the same association between pain and ecstasy, but
in the earlier films the dialectic bred a certain agitation, while in The
Thin Red Line, it has resolved into a strange tranquility. Narrative here
remains tied to archetype, a set of given patterns self-consciously re-
combined, arranged with the impartial sophistication of a chronicler
attuned to the grid work of collective unconsciousness, but the fer-
vently self-reflexive turns of the story, as complex as ever, are no longer
fully in the service of an ironic skepticism. The Thin Red Line is an
antiwar movie, but unlike other antiwar movies it superficially re-
sembles, from the hallucinatory inferno of Apocalypse Now (1979) to
the gung-ho kitsch of Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan (1998), it is
almost entirely free of anger or bitterness. Its battle scenes are poeti-
cally matter-of-fact, among the most powerful ever filmed, but its cri-
tique of the ethos of war appears to derive from a vantage point of
ultimate quiescence, and in that regard, The Thin Red Line is unique
among American war films.
In its picture of combat, The Thinh Red Line falls somewhere be-
tween Renoir's Grand Illusion (1937) with battle scenes put in, and
Jancso's The Red and the White (1968) or Saving Private Ryan with
the savagery distilled. The representations of battle in The Thin Red
Line do not shirk the need to confront ferment or unspeakable besti-
ality. They expose with the single-mindedness of sober, unyielding

conviction the fundamental outcome of war, the deaths of boys. With
the dulcified logic of an elegy, grievously resigned to past losses but
steadfastly borne up against future ones—like the poems of Wilfred
Owen—the battle scenes unflinchingly portray relentless casualty, but
they do so in a mode of inconsolable lyricism: sudden cuts to the
unbearable beauty of a breathtaking, twilit sky that heralds only doom,
or protean inserts of a fissured leaf with blinding light streaming
through the holes. Even if, Whitmanesque, they romanticize fated
male youth, these lyric interludes do not poeticize the soldiers'
deaths—the violence is too immediate—but forthrightly show what
it is that these deaths violate. As Renoir does in Grand Illusion, Malick
refuses the salve of villainy. Even the driven commander Tall (played
by Nick Nolte), who pushes men to their deaths, is himself revealed
as vulnerable in pensive voice-overs, and although in the clearest gauge
of the film's post-Vietnam dispositions, we are confronted with the
grisly spectacle of Americans gratuitously torturing entrapped Asians,
these scenes appear to propose reversion to barbarity as a refutation
of the pseudorationality of military science.
The narrative structure of the film divests the battle scenes of the
excitement or grandeur typical of the genre. For one thing, the big
battle scene is displaced from a climactic position in the story, and after
it is over, the film goes on for nearly an hour without heeding any
narrative compulsions to build further. Malick risks such anticlimax
to strip the battle scenes of their trivializing generic functions—to pay
off a plot's setups or to generate frivolous suspense. These scenes ab-
sorb the heightened energies of elevated rhetoric, to be sure, and they
have a hushed, breathtaking sweep, but it is characterized by a dif-
fused sensibility. The primary formal maneuver of these scenes is a sinu-
ous, decentered tracking shot that glides over multiple planes of action,
following one character and then shifting to others with just the small-
est turns of its roving but precisely defined perspective. In these shots,
the camera's gaze seems to be at once restive, unflinching, and ten-
der, and even as it shows how each of the men is alone in his fear, it
constantly reveals unexpected connections between them in space (fig.
5). In such shots, Malick has solved the problem of how to represent
battle as collective strife, against demands of individualist narrative
points of view. In battle, the men are deindividuated and sympatheti-
cally particularized in the same moment. The fracturing of the narra-
tive line also works to refuse the standard emotional parabola of the
Fig. 5. In battle: The Thin Red Line. Courtesy of Photofest.
war film. Frequently we are shown effects before causes, badly wounded
men, for instance, before the fighting itself.
The uses of voice-over in the film similarly contribute to the con-
struction of character, synthesizing impersonal chronicle with stream -
of-consciousness poetics. In Malick's previous films, the voice-over was
perhaps the clearest gauge of irony, revealing the distance between the
limited perspectives of the characters and the mordant self-reflexivity
of the narration. In Badlands, Holly's patter of dime-novel cliches trips
over a steely procession of tersely contrapuntal images, while in Days
of Heaven the little sister, Linda, spoke artlessly meditative monologues
that surprise in their patchwork assembly as surely in what they show
she does not know as in what they show she does. These voice-overs
ask to be seen, in part, as pastiches—of a penny-dreadful false con-
sciousness or of a kid's tough, slangy talk—yet despite the irony of
their deployment, they also comment on the poignancy of mis-
recognition and the vulnerability of the ignorant, the innocent, or the
impressionable. The sentiments that characters utter in voice-over in
The Thin Red Line could also easily be heard as cliches. "What is this
war in the heart of nature?" is the first sentence we hear, murmured
earnestly by the AWOL soldier, Witt (played by Jim Caviezel), at the
start of the film. "I was a prisoner, you set me free . . . I drink you
like water," says the private, Bell (played by Ben Chaplin), in an inte-
rior monologue addressed to his wife. "You are my sons," thinks the
officer, Staros (played by Elias Koteas), leaving his battalion, "my dear
sons. I carry you inside m e . "
These musings are delivered with real, direct conviction, and they
are not counterpointed by action or images, as the voice-overs in Days
of Heaven or Badlands often are. They are elliptical, however, fleet-
ing and fragmentary, and they no more function to convey standard
exposition than the voice-overs of Malick's previous films do. Indeed,
so dispersed are they across the film's many characters—at one point,
as we're looking at the lifeless face of a half-buried Japanese soldier,
we hear a rumination in what we can only assume to be the dead man's
voice—and so ephemeral are they, so moody and mercurial, they serve
something like the opposite function of a traditional voice-over. Far
from seeming to grant any privileged access to the interior lives of the
characters, these voice-overs make those interior lives seem more
mysterious than they would otherwise. They are the fragments of
thoughts, prayers, letters h o m e , yet as these forms bleed into each
other, and as the voice-overs blur the boundaries of inner and outer—
at times, what begins as a line of spoken dialogue ends as a voice-
over—their address seems finally constant. All the men, together or
alone, even at the height of battle, and even if they think they are
addressing God or one another or absent lovers, are really talking only
to themselves. Their musings would have to be rejected as cliche only
if we, as listeners, insisted upon reverting them to a public form, and
they claim a measure of their pathos from their forthright platitude,
showing a hopeful perseverance of the private, even in the grip of the
ultimate, when selves are lost. They are the shards of lost, fleeing voices
that, even if we are somehow privy to them, cannot be heard in the
real world.
A m o n g other things, The Thin Red Line is a mosaic of faces, and
the use of actors is determined by the narrative impulse to collectiv-
ism—though the jarring appearance of "stars" sometimes undermines
this impulse. The dominant scales of the film's perspectives are long
shots and close-ups, and by combining these extremes, Malick syn-
thesizes the epic and the intimate. The close-ups work by principles
of Eisensteinian typage, shots sometimes gone too quickly to afford
recognition of the actor's face, and sometimes lingering, held to sug-
gest an oblique, obtuse meaning beyond the visible. Because the nar-
rative follows no single character as its focus, the viewer is repeatedly
surprised by the reappearance of characters in unexpected contexts,
and because exposition is presented so elusively, the faces take on

meanings they might otherwise not have assumed. As Witt, Jim
Caviezel brings an expressive tranquility to the film, and it is right there
in his open, angular face, at once beatific and amused, generous and
skeptical. In Jones's novel, Witt is kin to the character of Prewitt from
the author's previous book From Here to Eternity, famously filmed by
Fred Zinnemann in 1953, and Caviezel's facial resemblance to Mont-
gomery Clift, who played Prewitt in Zinnemann's movie, marks the
film's allusive distance from more typical war movies. Caviezel also
resembles Ben Chaplin, who plays Bell, and the movie exploits the
resemblance by courting confusion between the characters, as if to
connote visually the final meditation we hear spoken in the film:
"Darkness and light, strife and love—are they the workings of one
mind, the features of the same face?"
The movie follows the plot of Jones's novel fairly closely, with cru-
cial exceptions, but its final effects are closer to those of another
Jones—David—and another James—Joyce. In its mixture of discur-
sive forms, its atomization of character, and its plaintive contempla-
tion of the philosophy of war, it bears direct affinities to David Jones's
great novel/poem/palimpsest In Parenthesis (1937), while in its mar-
shaling of streams of consciousness, it suggests Ulysses (the first
memory in the film appears to evoke directly the death of Stephen's
mother in that novel). The film is delicately allusive—the lyricism of
the opening suggests Flaherty and Murnau's Tabu (1929), while the
battle scenes cite other famous cinematic battles from Eisenstein's
Alexander Nevsky (1938) to Welles's Chimes at Midnight (1967)—but
the references do not conjure a postmodern citationality. Rather, they
function almost subliminally (like allusion in Ulysses), introducing a
framework of self-consciousness against which to apprehend the story's
emotional content. Malick may be adapting a straightforward war
story, but he returns to a distinctively modernist heritage to negoti-
ate the relation between aesthetic distance and emotional engagement.
Malick taught philosophy before he turned to filmmaking, and this
meditation on the nature of war, or the war in nature, echoes philo-
sophical treatises on the subject from Heraclitus's fragments to Kant's
Perpetual Peace. By granting such insights to unschooled characters,
Malick keeps them from grandiosity and suggests a dialogic,
uncontentious interplay of ideas. On the one hand, the film seems to
adopt a Kantian idea of war as the instrument of nature toward the
purpose of unifying through differentiation and ordering through the
establishment of covenant, accord, or law. On the other hand, the film

expresses abhorrence of war to a degree that is astonishing consider-
ing its refusal to stir emotional allegiances or proprietary affiliation—
as if to express simple rage, or outrage, at the ravages of war would
merely reenact the same impulses that brought them about. There is
probably no other film that so compellingly represents the horror of
war, yet so thoroughly resists the dialectics of conflict. Its tone is
mournful, not angry. Watching it, you may feel it is showing you what
is slipping inexorably away as you gaze. "Look," the film seems to say
in shot after shot, "look: here is what will be lost."
INFLUENCES AND INFLUENCE
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. Could such a range of influences—from
Flannery O'Connor, Stephen Crane, Willa Cather, Norman Mailer,
or Erich Maria Remarque in literature, to Sjostrom or Murnau,
Aleksandr Dovzhenko or Arthur Penn in film—evident as they are in
the films, really cohere into the unified style on view in Malick's work?
The instance of Henry James is instructive. Most readers will acknowl-
edge that the plot of Days ofHeaven is clearly indebted to that of James's
late novel The Wings of the Dove (1902). What's more, in its intricate
and elliptical structure, it draws from the fund of modernist technique
that James was striving toward. Yet the feeling of the film is so differ-
ent from that of the novel, it is as if a Jamesian milieu had been so thor-
oughly transposed that it makes little sense to speak of it as an influence
at all. In fact, when one reviewer of the film mentioned a Jamesian in-
fluence (without mentioning The Wings of the Dove, the reference that
might have clinched the case), another reviewer for the same publica-
tion, in a sour exchange of letters to the editor, sniped at him about
the comparison. The first reviewer had said that Malick's film reminded
him of "a James who refuses to analyze his characters," and the sec-
ond, trying to discredit the parallel, barked back, "If Henry James had
ever refused to analyze his characters, he would not have been Henry
James as we know him!"8 The point is that both, somehow, were right.
Malick wears his influences so much on his sleeve that they become
something like floating signifiers, bringing meanings of their own that
buttress the work's imposing originality.
The example of Fred Zinnemann, an influence as convincing as any,

reinforces this point. Both Malick and Zinnemann have worked with
an extraordinary range of materials, both evince a certain interest in
spiritual style, and both directors have treated similar themes. Like
Malick's, Zinnemann's films return to tragic/lyric images of childhood
(especially in The Search [ 1 9 4 8 ] or The Member of the Wedding
[1952]), to concerns with nature, especially as manifest in the fate of
animals (particularly in The Sundowners [ I 9 6 0 ] ) , and to the theme of
violence and warfare—indeed, both have directed a film adapted from
the same author, James Jones {From Here to Eternity and The Thin Red
Line). Like Malick, Z i n n e m a n n worked with "sonically i n t i m a t e "
voice-over narration, according to Walter Murch (Ondaatje 2 0 0 2 ,
63)—in Zinnemann's case in Member of the Wedding or Julia (1978).
Moreover, as Murch's testimony about working with Zinnemann on
his late film Julia shows, Zinnemann was drawn to improvisation and
experimentation of many kinds in production, as has Malick (see chap-
ter 4). Zinnemann, according to Murch, had "an interesting approach
to directing—a unique combination of the previsualized and the im-
provisatory" (Ondaatje 2 0 0 2 , 223). As we will see, something of the
kind could be said of Malick, but the fact that these parallels are per-
haps as persuasive as any we could draw—and that they are, /w paral-
lels, severely limited—may only go to show how fruitless is the search
for influences on Malick's work to an understanding of his films. (The
work of another Hollywood stalwart, George Stevens, also suggests
interesting comparisons to much the same ends, though it is worth
noting that Stevens's son, George Stevens, Jr., has had a hand in the
development of Malick's career.)
The same could be said for Malick's own influence on American
filmmaking of the last thirty years, an influence that is probably un-
deniable, but certainly hard to trace. O n e avowed disciple, H a r m o n y
Korine (who speaks of his reverence for Malick's work in interviews),
makes films that are nothing like Malick's. Two directors whose work
bears apparently elective affinities to Malick's are Christopher M u n c h
and David G o r d o n Green. M u n c h ' s 1996 film The Color of a Brisk
and Leaping Day tells of a boy's fascination with trains and his ulti-
mate aspiration to operate a railroad in early twentieth-century south-
ern California. It contains lyric interludes of landscape that detach
themselves from the narrative's m o m e n t u m , much in the manner of
Malick's work on Days of Heaven. Green's 1998 film George Wash-
ington plays something like a pastiche of Malick's techniques, to an
extent that virtually n o critic reviewing the film failed to mention

the parallels. Its tale of aimless juveniles in a small town is narrated
by a boy whose voice-over is as stilted and insinuating as Linda's in
Days of Heaven (without perhaps equaling the underlying poetry).
But the reason such examples are so noticeable is precisely that they
are so anomalous. In the context of American cinema at the start of
the twenty-first century, Malick's work remains very much in a place
of its own.
NOTES
1. It was screened twice on March 22, 1985, with respectable turnouts,

reportedly, at both screenings. A note in the program by Ron Holloway read,
"When someone in the Paramount publicity department asked [Vernon]
Zimmerman [the director] what Deadhead Mileswas supposed to mean, he
answered that its roots are to be found in German Expressionism." Thanks
for this material to Peter Reiher, who was present at one of the screenings,
and who comments that these expressionist roots were not evident to him.
About the film itself, Reiher remarks: "The major assets are Arkin [the lead
actor] and Malick's script. Arkin has never been better . . . There is no di-
rection in the script. On the other hand, there are many excellent lines and
hilarious bits."
2. Interestingly, Malick wrote a treatment for Two Lane Blacktop that
ended up not being used. However, Mike Medavoy reports that he saw the
treatment on Monte Hellman's desk and took Malick on as a client on the
strength of this work. This was clearly the major turning point in Malick's
early career (see Medavoy 2002, 5-6).
3. See Kauffmann 1975, 271-73. A fan of Pocket Money, Kauffmann seems
a little disappointed in Badlands because it is not as funny, and because of
its "cool" distance and "sophomoric" underpinnings.
4. See Anderson 2001, especially 3-33. On detachment as a "stance," see
Taylor 1989, 514. The implication of thinking about it in these terms, for
Taylor, is that it need not then be considered as an ultimate stance, nor as
the only available position—one can be detached about some things, and not
about others, and one can even change positions over time. This point seems
especially germane to the shifting subjects and tones of Badlands At the end.
5. For a treatment of the role of object relations in culture and criticism,
especially with reference to grandiose personalities, see Sussman 1993, es-
pecially 45-91.
6. The distinction of this scene, and something of its didactic function,
is further marked by the appearance of Malick himself, as an actor, who ap-
pears at the front door of the rich man's house, inquires after him with pas-
sive, zonked-out concern, and then, put off by Kit, leaves. It is an uncanny
moment.
7. This concise formulation of the Heideggerean dilemma is courtesy of
Irving Massey; for Heidegger, according to Massey, perception of difference
precedes perception of identities as an article of bad faith. Massey himself
argues against the Heideggerean position: "Things exist individually . . . but
we force a relation on them" (see Massey 1976, 145, and for the quote, 102).
8. The correspondents are Vernon Young and Gilberto Perez. Young, who
had liked Badlands, loathed Days of Heaven, referring to it as "overblown"
and "mendacious." See Hudson Review 32.3 (fall 1979): 326-31.
CHAPTER 2
Streams of Consciousness,
Spools of History: Days of Heaven
The opening sequence of Days of Heaven, in quick strokes that seem

broad and precise, tentative and assured, establishes the distinctive
moods and key themes of this film, among the most sustained works
of poetic virtuosity in the American cinema. The dominant mood of
the piece is a feeling of restlessness, and the central theme of root-
lessness—familiar in "classic" American literature—is treated here with
a self-conscious, almost academic awareness of its archetypal allure and
an immediate alertness to its primal pull. This layering of aesthetic
distance and emotional directness is perhaps what enables one of the
most mysterious effects of this sequence, and of the film as a whole:
Though much concerned with the construction of social space—with
crowds in their messy, fugitive commerce, convivial or hostile—the
most powerful feeling the sequence conveys is that of an ineluctable
solitude.
The narrative content of the film encompasses a virtual catalogue
of classic American literature, from Rebecca Harding Davis to Twain
or Whitman, Willa Cather, Stephen Crane, or Henry James—as if the
film's maker were flipping erratically through a thick anthology, yet
somehow concentrating intensely on each page. The compendious
treatment of plot and general iconography is not without its quality
of pastiche, its highbrow reader's-digest aura, but it gains emotional
authority by extrapolating from its precursors ideas and images that
are general to the culture and then—like the greatest of these precur-
sors—discovering a core in them that is resolutely individual, origi-
nal, and richly idiosyncratic. In the great tradition of classic American
literature, Days of Heaven evokes a sense of place at once mythic and

diurnally specific. By virtue of its intricately intertextual relationship
to tradition, the film presents its recurrent themes as definitively
"American," yet it follows tradition, as well, in coming down finally
on the side of the individual. It is this dissonance that gives weight
to the film's discursive contemplations of the individual and the col-
lective, of fellowship and solitude.
T H E A C K N O W L E D G M E N T OF SILENCE
The first sequence of the film follows a season of labor in a wheat

field of the Texas panhandle. The laborers are displaced persons, no-
mads, immigrants, and fugitives, viewed in fleeting, elliptical images,
and the tone is poised between lyric idyll and critical reckoning. Al-
most imperceptibly, a complex narrative line begins to establish itself:
The owner of the farm, smitten with one of the female workers, bids
her to stay on past the season's close; her lover, on the run from the
law, encourages her to accept the offer because he learns the owner
is soon to die, and covets an inheritance from the wealthy man. Pos-
ing as brother and sister, the two stay on, together with the man's real
sister, a street-tough but warmhearted girl. The three of them begin
to insinuate themselves into the farmer's household as, in the order
of things, the other workers leave and the season ends.
From this summary, one might conclude that the film's first se-
quence is plot-heavy, and in a way it is, but the handling of narrative
elements is, from the start, eccentric, circuitous, casually digressive.
In the vigorous bustle of the action—fitful rounds of stray h u m a n
intercourse—it is as if plot had been displaced to the margins, where
it vegetates lushly. The first few shots of the film set up the plot with
brisk, fragmentary economy. In a flare of temper, a steel mill worker,
Bill (played by Richard Gere), confronts and accidentally wounds a
hostile foreman, perhaps killing him. After an establishing shot out-
side the mill, and a subsequent scene of a woman working in an adja-
cent stream, the shots inside the mill are halting, disjunctive, elliptical.
A hand-held camera tracks in vertiginous circles to follow Bill as he
shovels coal into a blazing furnace, and a sudden cutaway shot shows
a tight, aggressive close-up of the foreman's menacing face. The fore-
man confronts Bill, mouthing words drowned out by the din of the
mill, and Bill turns contemptuously away from him. When the fore-
Streams of Consciousness, Spools of History 35
man pursues Bill, unrelenting, Bill sideswipes his head with a tool and
falls on him, then, realizing the extent of his injury, pulls away. The
hand-held camera dizzily circles the foreman's contorted face; a cut-
away shot shows a fire-red ingot crashing slowly to the ground; and
a final shot, symmetrically framed, glowing with molded shafts of light,
shows Bill running off into the distance. On this image we fade, slowly,
to a still, tranquil shot of Bill's little sister, Linda (played by Linda
Manz), in a bower of daisies, a field both shadowy and drenched in
sun. Her voice over the images links the two shots: "Me and my
brother—it used to be just me and my brother . . . He used to amuse
us, he used to entertain us."
The girl's voice is brisk, knowing, matter-of-fact; if it registers at
all the impact of the extraordinary event we have just witnessed, it does
so only obliquely, subtly—in the initial stammer, say, in the delivery
of the lines. Throughout, the seeming directness and spontaneity of
Linda's sporadic monologue clashes with the circuitous logic of the
action, which it does little to explain. The viewer can resort to specu-
lation in order to substantiate motive—understanding the accident,
for instance, as a haphazard consequence of one man's hostility and
another's temper. But the withholding of background circumstance
lends the event something of the indefinite gravity of archetype—as
if it were to be accepted only as a given fact, in need of no elabora-
tion, a simple inevitability, if not a narrative convenience.
The following shots continue to establish an erratic, mercurial
rhythm. Abby (played by Brooke Adams), whom we recognize from
the scene of the women working in the stream, reclines uneasily in a
bed in a dark, dusky chamber, her brow caressed by Bill. The shot is
brief, still, and the two mumble in low voices. "Things aren't always
going to be this way," says Bill. A sudden cut to a low, exterior angle
shows Bill, Abby, and Linda running heedlessly into the depth of the
frame. Again we hear Linda's voice-over, now tinged with a rumina-
tive chattiness, oracular but childlike: "For a long time all three of us
been goin' places . . . lookin' for things, searchin' for things." A gui-
tar riff of folk music commences casually, at odds with the grandilo-
quence of the main score, while a breathtaking shot of a distant train
streaming over a suspension bridge under a wide, bright sky initiates
a transition from the city to the country, where the three have fled to
seek refuge.
Only a few minutes into the film, an intricate series of symphonic
drifts, counterpointed effects, have been laid out—directness against
indirection, stillness against motion, nonchalance against weightedness.

The sequence appears to deny emphasis on psychological causality to
achieve its seemingly slapdash m o m e n t u m , but gradually, as we piece
together this story that proceeds by apparently random accumulation,
we begin to see that the film's style conveys thoughts and feelings
inarticulable in the logic of narrative. Once one realizes, for instance,
that Linda's voice-over registers fear and insecurity, its poignancy
grows in direct proportion to the manner in which it fails, or refuses,
to acknowledge such feelings. Like all of Malick's films, Days of Heaven
explores an unusual relationship between style and narrative; the film's
meanings derive from the supple, mutable dialogue between these
textual levels.
The first striking disjunction of the sequence occurs with Linda's
initial voice-over. Having just witnessed the violent confrontation
between Bill and the foreman, the viewer might expect the voice-over
to address this event in some way; instead, it introduces new plot in-
formation with two clipped sentences that define an oblique relation
to one another. In the first sentence, Linda refers to a previous time
when "it used to be just me and my brother." But the second—"he
used to amuse us"—alludes to an undefined " u s " that seems to con-
tradict the assertion of the first sentence. In its matter-of-fact way, the
voice-over refers to a happier time now apparently lost; if the tone is
not exactly Proustian, the tense is: "For a long time I used to go to
bed early," reads the famous first sentence (in the standard English
translation) of In Search of Lost Time. Linda's next line is, "For a long
time all three of us been goin' places." The shift from the past to the
present tense coordinates the movement from a time when "it used
to be just me and my brother" to a time when there were "three of
us," without ever remarking that movement directly. The effect is to
establish, at once, a subtle pattern of avoidance in the voice-over. Es-
pecially in concert with the visual text, which repeatedly shows Bill
and Abby together and Linda apart, it becomes clear that the real
emotional undercurrent of Linda's monologue concerns her feeling
of increasing isolation, her growing separation from her brother.
Whether or not Linda knows what happened is never made clear;
she romanticizes their flight from Chicago as a kind of mythic quest—
"lookin' for things, searchin' for things"—though the viewer is more
likely to see it as a desperate escape from the consequences of Bill's
fight with the foreman. In any event, the question of Linda's knowl-
edge of narrative events remains important, since her access to narra-
tive information at other points in the film is inexplicably full. Over
the shots that show the farmer (played by Sam Shepard) gazing long-
ingly at Abby (played by Brooke Adams), Linda's voice-over resumes:
"This farmer, he didn't know when he first saw her, or what it was
about her . . . Maybe it was the way the wind blew through her hair."
Later, after Bill has overheard a doctor telling the farmer that he has
only a year to live, a quick close-up of the farmer lying alone in his
bed is accompanied by another of Linda's voice-overs: "He knew he
was going to die . . . You're only on this earth once, to my opinion
you ought to have it nice." Whether stiltedly poetic or childishly philo-
sophical, these voice-overs give us little grounding in the plot. In each
case, the question of how Linda has come by the information she so
blithely imparts is left unanswered.
Two main conventions of cinematic voice-over are defined by the
positioning of the narrator.1 In some cases, a dramatic situation mo-
tivates a narrator to tell the story the voice-over recounts, as in Billy
Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944), the prologue to Donen's Singin'
in the Rain (1951), or Bunuel's That Obscure Object of Desire (1977).
In such instances, the narrative is typically rendered as flashback, with
the voice-over explaining the story's events in the past tense from a
clearly defined present tense, as we see the events unfold, and the
voice-over is often addressed to other characters in the film. In other
cases, perhaps more conventionally, the voice-over issues from a con-
ceptually oriented, nonliteral space, without clear reference to a dra-
matic situation or a definable tense, as in Wilder's The Apartment
(1960), Chris Marker's La Jetee (1962), or Stanley Kubrick's Barry
Lyndon (1975). In these instances, the voice-over serves a more strictly
narrative function. The speaker is, in a much more direct way, func-
tioning as a narrator, and even when the voice is that of a character
in the film, as in The Apartment, the question of when or from where
the voice is speaking is not addressed in the discourse of the narra-
tive. The use of the past tense implies that the voice-over's relation
to the story's events is retrospective, but a high degree of convention-
alism typically renders the device of the voice-over as relatively trans-
parent—except in famous, anomalous examples of films that exploit
the conceptual character of the device in order to "lay it bare," as it
were—such as Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950) or Sam Mendes's
American Beauty (1999), where the voice-over, in both cases, turns
out to be that of a character who is murdered in the plot.
What Malick does with Linda's voice-over in Days of Heaven is to
employ, on the whole, the second of these conventions, but to ren-
der it in a way that implicates the first. If Malick's achievement in so
much of his work is to synthesize forms of modernist distanciation with

an intensity of emotional engagement, the voice-over in Days of
Heaven is a fine gauge of this achievement. Its elliptical, enigmatic
construction undermines the conventional transparency of the voice-
over technique while playing on the more literal, circumstantial bases
of the device. By the end of the film, Linda's fate is very much at is-
sue; the fact that we have been made to consider when or from where
she speaks, as both a formal question and a narrative concern, together
with the fact that we do not ever really know, gives the voice-over
much of its piercing emotional effect.
Michel Chion argues that disembodied voices in film have power
over the images upon which their speech is imposed, but distinguishes
between the conventional voice-over and a type of "acousmatic char-
acter whose relationship to the screen involves a specific kind of am-
biguity and oscillation . . . whose wholly specific presence is based on
their characters' very absence from the core of the image" (Chion
1994, 129). These "acousmetres" (Chion's coinage) include the Wiz-
ard of Oz, Norman's mother in Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), and HAL
the computer in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)—figures
whose authority derives from a noncoincidence of voice and body that
implies a supernal state of being. The "acousmetre," Chion goes on,
"can be instantly dispossessed of its mysterious powers . . . when the
film reveals the face that is the source of the voice" (Chion 1994, 131).
That is the moment of the characters' "descent into a human, ordi-
nary and vulnerable fate" (131).
Malick's voice-over narrators, whom Chion partially exempts from
his theory, overturn basic assumptions of this model in ways worth
considering. Like many important theories of sound, Chion's makes
the distinction between on-screen and offscreen space primary, asso-
ciating on-screen space with the apparent, known, substantial, fixed,
demonstrable, verified; and offscreen space with absence, secrecy,
omission, lack, indeterminacy. Since sound can signify presences
offscreen and substantiate presences on-screen, it is seen as the mys-
terious bridge between these conditions, itself lodged between mate-
riality and immateriality, between the sensory and the invisible.
Obviously, in nearly every film, on-screen and offscreen space oscil-
late constantly in relation to one another, as Chion acknowledges, and
consequently things on-screen may be mutable, inscrutable, or com-
monplace, things offscreen ordinary, obscure, equivocal, or irrelevant,
depending on context and treatment. Equally obviously, technical
advances of the last thirty years—multichanneled sound, stereophonic

acoustics—have complicated the simple dichotomy of on-screen and
offscreen space, especially where sound is concerned, and indeed
Chion numbers Malick, with David Lynch, Francis Coppola, and Wil-
liam Friedkin, among the pioneers of these developments (Chion
1994, 153).
It is clear that Malick, for all his apparent interest in specialized or
advanced technologies, never uses them to the ends of simple aesthetic
transparency. As a feature of a complex and densely layered soundtrack,
Linda's voice-over is most striking in the ways it is continuous with
other elements, not divergent from them. Linda addresses us directly,
but her discourse is oblique, however she intends it, and her scratchy
drawl, lapsing into unintelligibility from time to time, has been pro-
nounced flatly incomprehensible by some viewers. Though she speaks
from a loftier rhetoric in the voice-over than in the diegesis (the world
created by the film's narrative), we are made aware of the contigui-
ties of her voice across these different registers. For instance, the first
line she speaks in the film, apart from the voice-over, is a raspy, lazy
mutter to herself: "What else do I gotta do today?" Similarly, the in-
flections of the other characters' speech range across whispers, mur-
murs, fragmentary slurs, muted asides, and distant cries. Fleeting and
transient, the voices are present to us, not so much as if they have been
already fully heard, but as if they had been overheard in passing, and
they demand kinds of attention we give to sound that hovers or hums
just out of earshot.
The voice-over bears affinities with the musical score that are also
suggestive. In its orchestral grandeur, Ennio Morricone's score exhibits
a quality of impassivity, and in its relative lack of formal variation—it
has only three strains, really, each of only a few bars repeated at length
and slightly varied—it conveys a stoicism that bespeaks a kind of sor-
rowing resignation. Its uses in the film emphasize these aspects. Af-
ter dramatic turns in the plot—Bill's death, say—where we might
expect the music to register a shift of emotional tenor, it goes on just
as before, a recurrence, or a perennial recapitulation, an echo of it-
self, oddly implacable. In much the same way, Linda's voice-over—
coming from a sphere elsewhere congruent, we may imagine, with that
from which the score issues—omits reference to crucial events of the
story, falls silent for long stretches, then recommences with a kind of
plucky, obstinate perseverance. Both the voice-over and the score,
mutely repetitive and unswerving, seem always to be resuming, as if
despite appearances nothing had ever really changed, and both fulfill
and acknowledge the silences from which they derive, and on which
they c o m m e n t . In that sense, they are true to the spirit of Stanley
Cavell's remarks on "the acknowledgement of silence" as an effect of
film sound:
I have in mind not the various ways dialogue can stand at an angle to
the life that produces it; nor the times in which the occasion is past when
you can say what you did not think to say; nor the times when the
occasions for speech is blocked by inappropriateness or fear, or the
vessels of speech are pitched by grief or joy. I have rather in mind the
pulsing air of incommunicability which may nudge the edge of any ex-
perience and placement . . . spools of history that have unwound only
to me now, occasions which will not reach words for me now, and if
not now, never . . . This reality of the unsayable is what I see in film's
new release from the synchronization of speech with speaker, or rather
in its presenting of the speaker in forms in which there can be no speech.
(Cavell 1979, 148)
Cavell wants to understand speech as an element of sound, sound as

an element of vision, and vision as an image of being. "A silent movie
has never been made," he says (149), because the images of cinema
entail an inner speech and an outer silence, the potentialities of lan-
guage that stream beneath every image, and the irreducible silence of
the world those images imitate in their piecemeal, shadowy reflections.
"For the world is silent to us," Cavell continues, "the silence is merely
always broken" ( 1 5 0 - 5 1 ) . In Cavell's work, the synaesthesia of the
cinema is given primary importance as something like its essence, and
Malick's film extends Cavell's comments in a highly suggestive way.
The fact that sound is audible, the film reminds us, does not mean
we will hear it, any more than the fact that a thing is made visible will
always or only rob it of its mystery.
In part because of the voice-over, Linda is the character a b o u t
w h o m we know the most, even if we cannot always determine exactly
what we know. The farmer is the one we know7 the least. The two
characters are linked, in their loneliness, by a pattern of shots that show
them either decisively alone or appearing uncomfortable and out of
place among crowds of other people. Our first glimpse of the farmer
occurs in a long shot of his house, a shot that recurs as a visual cen-
terpiece t h r o u g h o u t the sequence. O n e of the workers asks whose
place it is, and the supervisor, the farmer's right-hand man, snarls, "It's
the owner's—and d o n ' t any of you go up around there either!" This

prohibition is mildly tempered by a closer shot of the farmer, biting
into an apple as he gazes over the fields from the porch. In keeping
with the film's style as a whole, the shot seems b o t h fleeting and
charged; the gesture it shows could be construed as casual, throwaway,
or as archly symbolic—a quicksilver apogee of the Fall of Man.
A shot of Linda, apart from the others, plucking a chicken with dis-
tracted, impatient doggedness, is less weighted with inherent gravity.
This comes after a scene in which one of the workers mutters an im-
pertinence to Bill regarding Abby; a fight ensues, and after it is bro-
ken up, we see Bill and Abby resting in a makeshift alcove under a
wagon, in an attitude of careless intimacy. The whole sequence articu-
lates the principles of subtle parallelism around which the plot is built.
The fight in the field harks back to the first scene in the steel mill,
down to the repeated use of hand-held camera, and the shot of Bill
and Abby echoes the first shot of them together following that ear-
lier scene. An edgy, heightened rhythm of sudden strife followed by
brief interludes of lambent peace is thus sketched as a pattern that
recurs throughout the film. The cutaway shot of Linda plucking the
chicken disrupts it—if a rhythm so delicately shifting can be dis-
rupted—not just metrically, with its shift in editing rhythms, but the-
matically. Aside from a scene of Bill wandering alone in the fields early
in the first sequence, Linda and the farmer are the only characters we
ever see palpably alone, where their solitude itself is what the images
seem most to communicate; and while the shots of Bill are given a
t o n e of tranquil reverie, those of the farmer and Linda are shot
through with feelings of vulnerability or unarticulated longing (fig.
6). Considering this pattern, it would not be too far from the mark
to interpret Linda's knowledge of the farmer's inner states, as expressed
in the voice-overs, as a sign of a kind of supernal affinity that the film
proposes between these characters.
Such literal effects of abstracted causes are not at all unusual in the
film as a whole. Indeed, it is one of the film's main structural strate-
gies to dislocate cause from effect in its narrative composition. The
handling of the fight with the foreman and its aftermath is one ex-
ample; another, more localized but equally representative, occurs later
in this sequence. In a low-angled close-up of the farmer, we hear him
tentatively asking someone offscreen, out of view, about Abby: " D o
you know anything about her?" The foreman's voice replies, mutter-
ing, "I can find out." In the next scene, as Bill and Abby are working
Fig. 6. Solitude: Days of Heaven. Courtesy of Photofest.
in the field, the foreman strides up to her and docks her pay for some
minor infraction. When Bill objects on her behalf, the foreman qui-
ets the objection by threatening to fire them both.
Most obviously, the scene registers the injustice of the workers' sub-
ordination—"They didn't need you," Linda comments dourly in one
of the voice-overs, "they'd ship you right out of there and get some-
body else"—but its less obvious point is more narratively implicated.
Malick introduces a key motif of the plot in this strange mix of di-
rectness and obliquity. The foreman's paternal, protective relation to
the farmer translates into his hostile suspicion of Bill and Abby. In its
way, the point is indeed quite direct: Because of the farmer's offhand
inquiry about Abby, the foreman targets her in the next scene for
punishment. Yet it is rendered, here, in an emphatically sideward
manner. In the close-up shot of the farmer's query, the foreman's
presence is signified only by his stoic mumble offscreen, diminishing
the literal connection between this moment and its consequence.
One outcome of such dislocation of cause from effect is to require
the viewer to complete the connections between the terms. Another
such outcome, more important in the film as a whole, is to deny uni-
lateral or unilinear connections among causes and effects. In the ex-
ample in question, for instance, the confrontation among the foreman,

Bill, and Abby is certainly brought about by personal motivations, but
it is also determined by larger edicts of class or labor. It is precisely
Malick's aspiration to explore the interrelation of local, personal, pri-
mal currents with social, historical forces that accounts for the distinc-
tiveness of the film's construction: at once impacted and tightly
condensed with narrative economy, like a fable, and digressive and
broadly sketched, like a ballad. Both a miniaturist and a cosmologist,
Malick achieves a synthesis of these extremes in the visual poetry and
thematic complexity of Days of Heaven.
CLASSIC VS. M O D E R N
D. H . Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) de-

finitively anatomizes that eponymous tradition, and Malick's film takes
up, one by one, nearly all the important themes Lawrence sounds.
Bringing together the democratic scope of Whitman, the rarefied self-
consciousness of James, the slangy argot of Twain—all shot through
with a sense of landscape out of Winslow H o m e r by way of Whitman
or Cather—Days of Heaven characterizes itself squarely in relation to
its "classic" antecedents. As in many of the most important Ameri-
can films of the time, this relation is one of nostalgia and revision, yet
the film brings a decisively modernist sensibility to this morphology
of its "classic" materials. Roughly contemporary in its setting with the
publication date of Lawrence's monograph, it is pervaded by a sensi-
bility akin to that of Lawrence's study—critical yet impassioned, de-
tached and engaged at once—which is surely a m o n g the most
long-standing, influential documents on concepts of the classic and
the modern, and how they are related, in the study of American cul-
ture.
At the outset of his study, Lawrence himself asserts a sharp distinc-
tion between the classic and the modern: "There is a new feeling in
the old American books, far more than there is in the modern Ameri-
can books, which are pretty empty of feeling, and proud of it. . . . It
is the shifting over from the old psyche to something new, a displace-
ment. And displacement hurts" (Lawrence 1923, 1-2). The passage
expresses Lawrence's well-known contempt for the deracinated spirit
he saw as characteristic of the modern sensibility. Yet a paradox lurks
under Lawrence's arch declarations: the "old" books give up a "new"
feeling, which registers a shift from the "old psyche" to "something
new." What is this feeling, what is new about it, and how is it that
the "modern American books"—which should by rights define it—
instead no longer participate in it? The crabby ellipses of Lawrence's
style, enabling at once authority and diffidence, do not allow for easy
answers. It seems clear, however, that he wants to mark out as "clas-
sic" the period in American literature from the end of the revolution
to the time of the Civil War. According to Lawrence, in fact, there is
a distinction between the "Pilgrim Fathers," who thought they were
escaping into freedom, and the "modern Americans tortured by
thought," who believe they have discovered a homeland, yet whom
the genuine freedom of "wholeness" still eludes.
"Classic" American literature, then, according to Lawrence, lies be-
tween the innocent idealism of the colonies and the jaded integrity
of the states. The latter apotheosis, for Lawrence, is no less idealist
than its heritage, but the period between that propitious origin and
its ultimate fulfillment is given a special status in Lawrence's
macrohistory of America's cultural evolution. It comes after the shack-
les of Europe have been thrown off, and before those of "America"
as such, as a fully defined national identity or cultural ideal, have been
secured, and so it shows exactly what Lawrence wants America to il-
lustrate: a concept of freedom as endless quest, unfettered by ideol-
ogy, and pursued in a spirit of naivete without sentiment, a mood of
extremity without self-consciousness, with an awareness that the goal
is delusion.
"Displacement hurts"—but it is also, evidently, the raw material of
"wholeness." Or, at any rate, it can be the bane of the "conscious self
that will let the "deepest self emerge, to realize that "IT"—the
"whole American self—arises in the recognition that displacement is
an essential condition of being. Neither the soul in flight nor in re-
pose can perceive this, Lawrence suggests, only the soul poised be-
tween flight and rest. He uses the word "classic" to mean not just old
and venerated, but harmonious and balanced, even if what draws him
so powerfully to these "old" American books is how they display the
balance of crisis acknowledged, not avoided, and the sloppy harmony
of the urge to embrace the negative en route to some final affirma-
tion—to cry "No!" in Thunder (to paraphrase Melville on
Hawthorne), even if all the world would have you say "Yes."
It is disconcerting to hear Lawrence speak of the "negative ideal
of democracy," and then go on to revel in this visionary fantasia of
"deepest" selves and "whole" American souls. One finds little of this
kind of energetic cosmology in Days of Heaven, and the film's way-

ward strain of social consciousness—"America Was Promises," as one
neo-Lawrentian critic quipped, after MacLeish—would hardly have
been to Lawrence's taste. After the first scene in the mill, it seems the
film could go either way: following the route of U p t o n Sinclair, or
pursuing that of Whitman, Twain, and the classics. T h o u g h Days of
Heaven never relinquishes a certain earnestness of social commitment,
it proceeds to filter its decidedly classic materials through the lens of
the modern.
From the title of Malick's film, one might be led to expect a hymn
t o the agrarian past, the preindustrial paradise of American lore.
Malick's point is n o t exactly that such versions of the past are pure
myth; indeed, it is instructive to compare his work with the more bitter
ruminations on the American past of, say, Robert Altman's films of
the 1970s—McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), Thieves Like Us (1973),
Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1975), or even, in its odd way, Popeye
(1981). Like Days of Heaven, each of these films brings a contempo-
rary sensibility to bear on its evocation of the past. By contrast to more
traditional Hollywood historical epics of the time—for example, Hal
Ashby's Bound for Glory (197'5) or George Roy Hill's The Great Waldo
Pepper (1975)—these films do not attempt to create a simply nostal-
gic and transparent reconstruction of bygone eras. Rather, they present
stylized images of the past, where the process of historical reconstruc-
tion becomes a key part of the films' self-conscious design, often
employing deliberate anachronism or disruptive juxtapositions of seem-
ingly incompatible techniques or effects. In this way, they measure a
mythic past against the cultural dispositions or assumptions of their
own present.
T h o u g h Altman's movies are comparable to Malick's film in this
regard, they differ in the level of their commitments to a land of ideo-
logical revisionism. Each of Altman's films takes up a particular aspect
of the mythology of the American past: the frontier ideal in McCabe
and Mrs. Miller, the archetypal figure of the outlaw-hero in Thieves
Like Us, or of the Native American in Buffalo Bill, the pop-culture
antiheroism of Popeye. In each case, Altman counters a mythic affir-
mation with a negative antithesis: "Manifest Destiny" was n o more
than a rationalization of violence, his films variously suggest, and those
we had taken for heroes were really outlaws, or vice versa. Thus, the
allegedly unifying principles of popular culture's mythologies were
exposed as tools of ideological conformity and social complacency.
(From this perspective, Popeye is best read as an effort to defamiliarize

the comic-book world of the title character—to reassert elements of
strangeness and idiosyncrasy in reimagining this world, in order to
counter the tendency to convert potentially disturbing pop-culture
images into cozily commodified, ready-made icons.) T h o u g h Altman's
films are hardly free of their own lyric impulses, the tone is typically
sardonic, even a little hectoring—Altman's worst films feel like screeds,
when the satire goes sour—and the lyricism is usually crusty, dark,
ironic.
The title of Malick's Days of Heaven certainly lends itself to an ironic
reading, but that sense is not always fully borne out in the film itself.
Rather, the film aspires to a fusion of romantic and ironic modes.
Among the revisionist Hollywood genre films of the late '60s and '70s,
Altman's may be the most extreme; taken as a sequence, they consti-
tute headlong and systematic assaults on traditional American my-
thologies. Like Badlands, Days of Heaven can be seen as part of the
revisionist impulse of the time, but together with the impulse to ex-
pose the old myths as false, the film expresses responsive attitudes
toward what gave those myths their meanings and their power in the
first place. For Altman, American mythologies are composites of op-
timistic idealism, to be subverted by the assertion of their negative
counterparts. Malick's film shows that these mythologies embrace, at
once, affirmative visions of American identity and darker undercurrents
of American experience. They can encompass both positive and nega-
tive, the film suggests, and that is why they are not so readily dis-
mantled.
The film's opening credits, for instance, proceed like an anthology
of styles in the history of American photography, from the nature stud-
ies of Ansel Adams to the quasi-modernist folk-iconography of Anne
Brigman or Edward S. Curtis, to the quintessential images of urban
poverty of Lewis Hine or Jacob Riis, to those of rural poverty, as in
Walker Evans's photographs for his collaboration with James Agee in
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. (In fact, the opening mixes found
photographs, including the work of Hine, with photos made especially
for the sequence [see filmography for list of photographers].) Each
image evokes a mood, a style, a period, with pictures of children at
play mixed with images of desolation or blight. Accompanying these
images, Morricone's score, alternating lush crescendos with trilling
falls, creates a feeling of melancholy grandeur. Although the score is
n o t as directly allusive as the photographs, it reverberates between
folksy classicism and classy kitsch (and the numerous contexts into
which it has been appropriated since the film's release, from previews
for other films to television commercials, attests to its quality of adapt-
able mimicry), as if it were simulating an archetype so pervasive in the
collective imagination that it could not be traced back to its origin.
In its dreamy solemnity, the score achieves the effect of having been
heard before—even if one is hearing it for the first time; likewise, the
photographs seem meant to appear as if already seen, even if one is
unaware of their referents. They inhabit the sphere of the "mythic,"
insofar as they seem to exist outside time, out of place, yet to evoke
relatively local moods, styles, periods.
Nor does Malick oppose the images of arcadian pastoral to those
of wretchedness and despair. Rather, he casts them both in the same
mythically sepia glow, as part of the same construct, to show an
America that has forged itself from myths of celebration as well as
myths of penitence—days of heaven and days of hell.
Malick's film is structured around polarities that shape the tradi-
tional frontier mythology so widely resonant in American culture: city
and country, civilization and wilderness. The film starts in the hellish
city and moves to the paradisiacal country—the journey made pos-
sible by the quintessential machine-in-the-garden, the railroad train.
But the escape, the film reminds us, is an element of the myth, not a
departure from it, and the machine extends its reach into every ves-
tige of the idyll. The cycle of the harvest is shown in all its elemental
glory, but into the midst of it, bluntly and with forthright didacticism,
Malick cuts a shot of a blazing furnace, the emblem of what the char-
acters think they have left behind. Thematically transparent, but for-
mally enigmatic, this intrusive shot announces the juxtaposition of a
highly modern sensibility upon the materials, and although this sen-
sibility is pervasive, its intent seems to be to amplify the classic mate-
rials it shapes, not to counter them. Such formal correlatives of this
sensibility are relatively rare in the film—certainly by comparison to a
film like McCabe and Mrs. Miller.
Though these fleeting moments in Days of Heaven are striking, it
is primarily an elusive yet pervasive quality of tone that gives them their
weight. To call this tone romantic irony conveys both its synthetic
quality and its atavistic tendencies. Malick may not be inclined to
counter, in any direct or simple way, romantic myths of the land with
ironic assertions of self-consciousness; still, the point of that editorial
insert, the intercut shot of the furnace, is clearly to assert continuities
of labor, from country to city. As a whole, the film demythologizes

the American frontier, showing its limits and constraints, yet its evo-
cations of landscape are infused with a rare lyricism; they occupy a
descriptive space that stalls the narrative—that's part of their beauty—
and exist as interludes, or intervals, between relatively dissociated
patches of story.
It is worth pausing here to ask whether, properly speaking, film can
be said to have a descriptive style at all. Is to show a thing to describe
it? The issue seems to revolve around differences between words and
images, differences that determine, of course, our sense of the rela-
tion of literature and film. If we assume that these media are symbi-
otically connected, as many do, we will likely conclude that words are
always reaching out toward images, images forever striving to be put
into words. Following this logic, to show something presumably means
that there is no need to describe it, and conversely, writers would not
need to describe, if only they could show. In prose, description is a
sequential, temporal procedure integral to narrative, if apart from it,
and a differing order of time, to the extent that it details the phenom-
enal surround or the perceptual field, rather than the events, of a story.
The boundary between broad surround and concrete event seems far
more permeable in narrative prose than in narrative film, where back-
ground and action are so integrally related that often no formal ges-
tures of description are visible, or necessary. O n e c o m m e n t a t o r ,
indeed, states the situation bluntly: "It is my impression that descrip-
tion per se is generally impossible in narrative films" (Chatman 1978,
74).
In fact, since few would deny the descriptive function of photog-
raphy, such debates in cinema seem predicated not on the p h o t o -
graphic bases of film, but on its temporal, narrative, or theatrical
dimensions. It could be said that that is just what a photograph is—a
description of its subject, made palpable in the volition of seizing the
object in time and displaying it in space. Early in the development of
film theory, the photographic heritage of movies was very much to
the point in Bela Balasz's discussion of cinema as a perceptual appa-
ratus:
Every picture shows us not only a piece of reality, but a point of view
as well . . . The physiognomy of every object in a film picture is a com-
posite of two physiognomies—one is that of the object, its very own,
which is quite independent of the spectator—and another physiognomy,
determined by the viewpoint of the spectator and the perspective of the
picture. In the shot the two merge into so close a unity that only a very
practiced eye is capable of distinguishing these two components in the
picture itself (Balasz 1970, 89-91)
It is just this "unity" that leads some theorists to deny the descriptive
valence of cinematic images. Description, in film, would apparently
require some interval between self-evident object and self-effacing
viewpoint, even if every but the most naive viewer knows that the phe-
nomena making up the perceptual field, at least in a fiction film, are
always determined by a process of conception, selection, and arrange-
ment. Because photographs do not usually tell a story over time, the
unity of "reality" and "point of view," object and subject, inheres to
make the p h o t o g r a p h available as representation. T h e very acts of
conceiving, capturing, displaying, and exhibiting the photograph all
participate in that "unity," and in photography, we could say, to show
is to describe. In film, subject and object, perspective and reality, are
in constant flux, both caught in a temporal process that supplants the
unity between them. To put it another way: A film need not pause
for description, but a photograph wsuch a pause.
Clearly, of course, many films do pause for description—think of
ethnographic or scenographic films, many documentaries, or the work
of the great nature poets of the cinema, from Sjostrom to Murnau,
Dovzhenko, Renoir (in A Day in the Country [1936] or The River
[ 1 9 5 1 ] ) , Drever (in the exteriors of Vampyr [ 1 9 3 1 ] , Day of Wrath
[ 1 9 4 3 ] , and Ordet [1955]), or Michael Powell (sporadically from The
Edge of the World [1937] to Age of Consent [1968]), to John Ford,
Souleymene Cisse, or Aleksandr Sokurov, and including Malick. What
Malick does in Days of Heaven is to conjure exactly the kind of inter-
val between the one who sees and what is seen that theorists have tra-
ditionally found lacking, and to do so at both formal and narrative
levels. Formally, Malick makes us constantly aware of perspective, by
intercutting images of landscape with characters who appear to be
looking at something. Yet our awareness remains arrested at a formal
level, since the literal anchorage of perspective is frequently snatched
away, when it turns out that what we are seeing is not, after all, from
the point of view of the character we thought it was. We are constantly
made aware of people gazing, but can never really be sure what they
see, or if we are seeing what they see. How, after all, could we possi-
bly know? Among its many illusions, the cinema makes available the
impression of shared vision, and part of the grandeur of Malick's land-
scapes comes from his use of that capacity—in our sense of the film's
representations of nature as luminous, awe-stricken, and awe-inspir-

ing, returning us to a classical conception of nature as wholeness.
But cinema has also been called the medium that realized the pos-
sibilities of modernism in technology, in that its views can really only
ever be partial (see Cavell 1979, 118), and Malick's uses of montage
make us repeatedly aware of that principle as well, not just in the con-
stantly shifting and unstable perspectives, but in the highly deliberate
distribution of the film's materials into narrative and descriptive seg-
ments that interact enigmatically yet lucidly. In Days of Heaven, the
impulse toward narrative—to order, to impose pattern, to control
time—is fraught with anxiety, and speeds the characters toward what
seems in the end like fated destinies; the impulse toward description
includes pensive contemplation, reverie, and stillness.
For the characters, these extremes remain opposed. They see the
beauty of the land, and at times we share their vantage point as they
gaze on it. More often, though, the landscape is seen from a detached
or dislocated viewpoint, suggesting a lack of integration between the
characters' perception and the blunt, capacious objectivity of the natu-
ral world surrounding them. 2 The intense emotionality of the film
hovers between these fields, and between a classical conception of
nature as a harbinger of wholeness and a modernist conception of
subjectivity as discrete, discontinuous, cut off from the primordial,
romanticist unity of humanity and nature. In the landscape sequences,
that quality of restlessness is marked by the constantly shifting rhythms:
a shot of Bill wandering lonely as a cloud in the great fields, and
countershots of a stolid herd of buffalo, or a flock of birds in flight,
will be followed suddenly by a scene in a field (between Linda and a
woman she has met by chance) with a handheld camera that eschews
the classical pictorialism of the sequence of which it seems to be part.
Nature is whole in itself—or was, the film seems to say—but can be
captured only serially, without trying to pin it down, with fresh im-
pressions of it apprehensible only fleetingly, if at all. Part of the film's
audacity, especially in its landscape depictions, is its unapologetic re-
version to film's photographic heritage, which others might have
t h o u g h t had long since been subsumed or relinquished. The most
breathtaking shots of nature in the film are as overtly descriptive as
photographs, presented with an evanescent forthrightness, without
recompense for their trafficking in the tritest conventions of photo-
realism.
Pace Cavell, this sense of conviction in the film may be Malick's way
of letting objects speak for themselves—of showing them as they have
been glimpsed, without worrying about making them look particu-
larly new or strildngly distinctive; on the contrary, it seems clear they
are usually meant to function as visual echoes. When Cavell speaks of
how Malick's art reveals the participation of objects in their own pho-
tographic representation, he may get at crucial features of this art—
the clarity and precision of Malick's descriptive scenography, the
tendency to combine a neo-Romantic identification of self and nature
with elements of a postmodern objectivism (a la Robbe-Grillet, if he'd
ever had a Chateaubriand phase). But it remains unclear, in this con-
text, what Cavell thinks Malick has done that is different from what
any other filmmaker might do: D o objects, as Cavell suggests, always
participate in their own representation? If so, then in what sense is
Malick's treatment special? What Cavell misses is the thematic dimen-
sion of Malick's landscape description. The ache of this film (and of
The Thin Red Line) comes from its sense that the beauty it displays
is, in fact, not apprehensible by the modern subjects who dwell within
it, if it ever was. Late in the film, Bill and Abby sneak out for a tryst
and wade through a river, drinking champagne. When Bill drops his
glass in the water, it is noted only in passing. Later, however (in a shot
akin to the insert of the furnace), Malick emphatically cuts back to it:
that abandoned glass, resting at the bottom of the river, in a spectral
glow of moonlight. People may leave their traces on the land, the shot
seems to say—and the film as a whole shows us the devastation of such
traces—but they can never truly join with it.
The descriptive passages of the film remain apart from those more
strictly narrative to a degree nearly unheard of since the days of silent
cinema. Malick depends on this separateness for the film's distinctive
rhythms much as he relies on their reversionary character to synthe-
size them into an organic whole. A romance of the land can merge
with a modernist ballad of disillusionment if it harks back to the clas-
sic era of the movies, the film shows us, and to that end, Malick oc-
casionally risks cliche in the lyricism of his landscapes—as, for instance,
in one of the nature montages that appears in the film, in a time-lapsed
image of a flowering plant. The romantic irony of Malick's vision in
this film stands in contrast to the shallow skepticism of the " m o d e r n "
film of the 1970s Hollywood renaissance. In Days of Heaven, Malick
attempts w4iat Lawrence counseled: to find the "new feelings" in the
"old" models, and to make that displacement unite.
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE THEME

OF INNOCENCE
One of the key critical problems of Days of Heaven emerges most

clearly in its tendency toward folk pastiche. Amid the movie's diffuse
allusions to classic American literature appear many fleeting evocations
of American folk culture. The opening montage of photographs and
Morricone's score is an important example, as are, among others, the
riffs of Leo Kottke's banjo on the soundtrack, the snatches of folk tales
Linda recites in the voice-overs, and the performances of soft-shoe or
fiddle in the many scenes of communal celebration. It is their quality
of pastiche that complicates the presentation of these materials, espe-
cially if we accept the widespread current understanding of pastiche
as a self-conscious technique of modernist or postmodern art. Pastiche
is typically considered as a radical deframing of the materials it as-
sembles, casting them in a newly critical light, displacing them into a
context that alters their meanings, or testifying to the exhaustion of
forms. Especially if the elements of folk culture are understood to gain
aesthetic significance from their putative originality or authenticity, it
is worth asking what happens to such values when those elements have
been displaced through the techniques of pastiche. Are we really meant
to admire the guileless energy of the soft-shoe for its own sake, or the
frank, plain, simple art of the fiddler? Or is Malick joining the league
of modernist bricoleurs?3—that tradition from Pound to Joyce to Eliot
and beyond, whose highly sophisticated reactions to the folk-culture
materials they appropriated typically expressed either lofty condescen-
sion or idealist pathos, seeing these materials as either touchingly naive
or as vestiges of a pre-lapsarian condition that wâs tragically irrecov-
erable.
On the one hand, this issue can be resolved, in interpretation,
through adversion to the film's dominant mode of romantic irony,
with the romanticized culture of the folk coming under the sway of
the ironizing counterforces of modernist pastiche. But the contradic-
tory elements of this folk pastiche seem to be less a function of the
film's overarching tone, and more a dimension of its themes. Indeed,
these elements of the film work through a very particular interest in
ideas about innocence, which may be apprehended by recalling
Schiller's famous dictum on simple and sentimental poetry. Simple
poetry, according to Schiller, is innocent; sentimental poetry tries to
be innocent. The former embodies authenticity and naturalness with-
out self-consciousness, without ever thinking about it, while the lat-
ter strives to recover a simplicity that can only really be available be-
fore one has thought about it. It is difficult to reconcile Days of Heaven
as a whole with the antipodes of Schiller's polarity, but the dictum
bears a striking relevance to this film in which an extreme sophistica-
tion is brought to bear on materials that remain, to varying degrees,
mythological, childlike, or naive.
In these terms, the question seems to be—pace Schiller—how Days
of Heaven is able to avoid a crippling sentimentality. Assuming that it
does so, one answer may be that the film's stake in the value of inno-
cence is so powerful that conviction itself, in an a t m o s p h e r e of
hypersophistication, amounts to a preserve of innocence that sophis-
tication usually supplants. A comparison with Charles Laughton's The
Night of the Hunter (1955), an earlier exercise in recondite pastoral
from the American cinema, may clarify the point. The sensibility of
Laughton's feverish parable can be summed up as the unlikely cou-
pling of Huck Finn and Bertolt Brecht. Like Days of Heaven, The Night
of the Hunter laminates its agrarian iconography with the modernist
poetics of Brechtian distanciation, and the film charges its Manichean
allegory to hold off the innocence of childhood from the adultera-
tions of grown-up evils. Laughton's gothic tale of a crazed preacher's
pursuit of two children quickly turns comic; since the condition of
childhood is idealized so completely in the film, one can hardly be-
lieve that any evil could ever hold sway over it. But no viewer could
doubt the sincerity of the panegyrics to childhood delivered in folksy
soliloquy directly to the camera by the avenging angel, Rachel: "My
soul is humble when I see how little ones accept their lot. . . . They
abide and they endure." Rachel is played by Lillian Gish, and it is sig-
nificant that both Days of Heaven and The Night of the Hunter evoke
the silent cinema in their hymns to innocence. Though Laughton turns
to irony to keep his film from sentiment, he depends on conviction
alone to give it emotional coherence.
Malick's modernism is closer to Faulkner than to Brecht, and where
Laughton appears to find landscape interesting only as a site of ex-
pressionist stylization or projection, Malick sees it as an actual loca-
tion of the "natural." As we have seen, a large share of his film's
conviction derives from its exploratory, pensive, non-rhetorical images
of landscape. In the descriptive passages, innocence is taken as a given,
not something to be striven for, and the tragic sense of the film comes
from the inalienable segregation of these passages from the dramatic
core of the story—as if to suggest that innocence is everywhere around

us, yet completely inaccessible. Nor does Days of Heaven, despite its
keen interest in childhood as an image of the natural, idealize that
condition as the lingering presence of innocence in a post-lapsarian
world. Though at times one feels that the film is singing a lullaby to
Linda that she cannot hear,4 one knows she would not listen if she
could hear it—she's too bluff, impatient, committed to things as they
are. After the Fall, the film suggests in its high-biblical mode, we are
all equally lost, adults and children alike.
The film's treatment of the theme of innocence is inseparable from
its concerns with modernity, isolation, and the edging over of folk
culture into mass culture. The images of crowds that dominate the
first half of the film conjure both a "melting pot" idealism and a
Malthusian anxiety about burgeoning masses (fig. 7). The workers are
immigrants longing to participate in the American Dream, and the film
portrays them in terms familiar in celebrations of that mythology.
Shown in burnished light, captured in fluid, continuous tracking shots
that imply the harmony of the group, the crowds are envisioned as
cooperative masses, culturally different from one another—to judge
from the snatches of many different tongues we hear—but unified by
shared goals, mutual aspirations. The film is responsive to the poi-
gnancy of such images, even if it is also eager to portray the masses
as exploited workers.
These two attitudes need not be considered incompatible, to be
sure, but their relation becomes clearer if we consider the role of aes-
thetics in shaping early modern discourses concerning the rise of the
masses. In a brilliant study of the topic, Solitude and the Sublime
(1992), Frances Ferguson argues that the aesthetic category of the
sublime, an idea held over from antiquity, reemerged powerfully as
something of a reaction formation to the rise of mass culture in the
1700s. As formulated from Kant and Burke on, according to
Ferguson, the sublime was meant to stand as a preserve of powerful,
individual aesthetic experiences against the increasing deindividuation
of mass culture. As the forces of modernity seemed to produce more
and more people, it promised to enable some continued measure of
private experience, holding out the possibility of being solitary or in-
dividual, even amid a rampant crowd. The fundamental terms of the
category—traceable back to Longinus—are thus modernized by be-
ing redefined as an individual's experience of an infinitude of beauty—
with the crowd often standing in as a figural expression of this
Fig. 7. Among others: Community in Days of Heaven. Courtesy

of Photofest.
infinitude—a conception that reflects anxiety about how one can re-
tain individuality while mass experience consumes, commodifies, and
charts all domains of the social.
Especially considering the rhetoric of an American sublime (defined
in nearly textbook terms) that infuses Days of Heaven, these ideas seem
quite germane. The film is hardly a didactic tale of revolutionary so-
cial critique, but it does seem to suggest that, to the extent that re-
sistance to social oppression is possible in this historical context, the
individual develops such resistance through some mode of aesthetic
experience: Bill's moments of wandering, in the fields or through the
farmer's house, are as much about his growing disillusionment with
his own lot as with his admiring contemplation of natural wonders or
cultural artifacts. Indeed, the treatment of folk culture in the film pre-
sents it as an expansion of aesthetic experience, a logical outgrowth
of an inclusive and enlarging social sphere, as well as of the institu-
tionalization of labor in mass culture. With the onset of mass culture,
as Ferguson remarks, "[sjports, carnivals, games, and in general, the
notion of leisure as time off from work begin to look as aesthetic as
a work of art" (Ferguson 1992, 69). Days of Heaven itself may
aestheticize the varieties of folk culture it represents, but it also shows
an awareness that the cultural pastimes we repeatedly see the crowds
engaged in are, at bottom, a form of relaxation, a surcease from the

relentless work the masses are condemned to perform in administered
culture.
The genre of the romantic sublime (if genre it be) has supplied two
dominant images, that of the solitary wanderer—far from the mad-
ding crowd, and lonely as a cloud—and that of the ebullient throng.
Days of Heaven furnishes many variations of both images, as well as
expressing symbiotic attitudes toward them. At times solitude is tran-
scendent, at other times threatening; the crowds sometimes appear as
signifiers of communal bliss, at other times as harbingers of the loss
of selfhood. In the last scene of the film—a return to the city that
suggests the ultimate fearsome triumph of modernity—the institution-
alization of mass culture is registered with special force when Abby,
wandering the crowded streets, seems swept up by a group of soldiers
preparing for war, with the implication that she wall become a camp
follower.
Meamvhile, in a scene right out of Jane Eyre, Linda escapes from
the boarding school where she has been left and runs off with another
girl. This encounter culminates a series of meetings t h r o u g h o u t the
film between Linda and people she happens upon by chance and in-
stantly befriends—the woman in the field, the soft-shoe dancer, and
a few^ characters she mentions in her voice-over monologues. These
meetings are random, vagrant, fugitive, and this one in particular closes
the film with a poignant expression of unfulfilled contact, as \vc watch
the two girls run off into the distance, along a railroad track, and Linda
says in voice-over: "This girl, she didn't know where she was going,
or what she was gonna do . . . I was hoping things would work out
for her. She was a good friend of mine." xAs the character wiio is made
to bear so much of the film's thematic weight, Linda is a principle of
innocence, yet she is also quite sophisticated in her way: though she
is the loneliest character in the film, the one whose loneliness is most
pointedly expressed, she is also the one who longs most deeply for
contact. These haphazard encounters express that longing, just as her
final comment shows both her awareness of the other girl's plight and
her apparent obliviousness of her own tragic fate, since her words
could just as easily describe her own condition. In such moments, the
sublime effect doubles itself: it expresses, at once, a fear of isolation
(coupled with a longing for solitude), and a terror of being absorbed
in the crowd (coupled with a longing for communion). As a charac-
ter, Linda represents the duality most piercingly, even if one of the
things that makes it so acute is that she herself does not know it.
Unable to see their own experiences through the lens of self-reflec-
tion, the film's characters act out the tragedy of their fates, instinc-
tively and reflexively. It is as if the film has found a way to valorize
innocence without idealizing it, so that it can admire characters' art-
lessness while decrying the vulnerability and adversity that are its con-
sequences. The treatment of point of view in the film augments this
feeling, as when a reverse-shot reveals that a vantage point we had
thought was general is, in fact, the perspective of a character; or when
a shot such as Bill's envious gaze at the farmer's house, a point-of-
view tracking shot early in the film, is later repeated exactly, without
the grounding of the character's vantage point. Again and again, we
are reminded of the difference between what we are shown and what
the characters see, yet ultimately we are denied the satisfaction of feel-
ing ourselves privileged observers who are allowed to understand what
the characters cannot. Even the rifts between the narrative and the
descriptive interludes contribute to this distinction. If nature is a prov-
ince of the authentic or the undissimulating, to be regarded with genu-
ine awe, it is also a world apart, following its own course with dumb
indifference to human tragedy.
The sensibility of the film as a whole proceeds from the very ground
of self-reflection that eludes its characters, and it would doubtless lapse
completely into sentiment—in Schiller's sense of the word—if there
were not much about it that remained elusive. Dyed-in-the-wool Ro-
manticists from Blake to Wordsworth and beyond have celebrated
unitary innocence from a vantage point of self-reflexive double-con-
sciousness, of course, often positing a guileful simplicity or self-styled
primitivism as the medium for a rebirth of innocence. But the tragic
sense of Days of Heaven tells us that innocence cannot be reborn, only
longed for, and the enigmatic quality of the film attests that self-re-
flection—that condition to which innocence is sacrificed, in the name
of a higher understanding—is little compensation. To surrender in-
stinctual, unitary consciousness to the demands of a greater ^//-con-
sciousness, the film suggests, abjures nothing of the mysteries of
experience, and in watching Days of Heaven, with its elusive symbol-
isms, digressive forms, and mercurial senses of awe, we are made to
share again and again in the blindness and ignorance of its characters,
if not in their innocence.
NOTES
1. For a fuller discussion of theories of voice-over, see Sarah Kozloff's

distinction between first-person and third-person voice-over narrators
(Kozloff 1988, 41-101).
2. In an excellent article, Gilberto Perez is especially persuasive on the
film's distinctive uses of point of view: "The individual's point of view is made
to connote alienation." Perez has also influenced our discussion of the film's
unusual rhythms (Perez 1979, 104).
3. The idea of the bricoleur was introduced most influentially by Claude
Levi-Strauss in The Savage Mind, where he speaks of the bricoleur as an art-
ist who is able to fashion work from whatever fragmentary materials come
to hand, and who, in this practice, comes to signify a culture's sensibility
through the range of materials incorporated into the work. Modernist and
postmodern theorists and practitioners later adopted the idea in a variety of
contexts (Levi-Strauss 1967, 16-18).
4. This phrase, and much in the discussion of The Night of the Hunter
here, is indebted to Charles Baxter's essay on the film. Indeed, Baxter ex-
plicitly connects Laughton's film to Malick's work, though his reference is
to Badlands^ in the vein of lyric horror, Baxter argues, Malick's first film is
the only true descendant. "But really," he goes on, The Night of the Hunter
"is in a genre of its own: expressionist screwball terror" (Baxter 2000, 41).
CHAPTER 3
A Sense of Things:
Reflections on Malick's Films
SPACE, FIGURE, GROUND
In an open field, a man paints a billboard. Another man approaches

him. They talk, sputter, dispute. As it is framed and as it is executed,
the scene—from Badlands—exemplifies the blending of thoughtful de-
liberation and impromptu finesse that characterizes Malick's work. The
scene doesn't exactly come out of nowhere. The conflict it plays out
has already been established, as has the profession of Holly's father—
we've glimpsed a few of his signs earlier—and the scene sets up the
dynamic that results in his murder by Kit, during the next sequence
of events. Dramatically, the scene is integral to the film, yet it has an
otherworldly feeling, as if it were somehow out of place.
And, in some very literal sense, it is. Where is this field? The film's
credits suggest that it has been shot in Otero County, with Colorado
or New Mexico standing in for South Dakota. (There is an Otero
County in both states. Many sources say the film was shot in Colo-
rado, but these are often unreliable on other matters, and there is
nothing in the film to make the matter conclusive.) This is not so odd,
considered in light of Hollywood's typical economies of space. Cen-
tury City was erected in 1958 on the bacldots of Twentieth Century
Fox, and a large number of studio backlots had long since similarly
become shopping malls, parking lots, and theme parks. The space of
fantasy, the artificial settings of the studio backlots, had given way to
a new fantasy of space by the 1960s, one determined by a concep-
tion of location as authenticity. If, on occasion, Georgia had to
simulate Vietnam—as in John Wayne's stalwart paean The Green Berets

(1969)—such appropriations were still conventional e n o u g h to be
counted within the norm. In one way or another, all three of Malick's
films rely on a highly articulated sense of place, and all three use one
distinct location in place of another: A b e r t a , Canada, for Texas in Days
of Heaven, Queensland, Australia, for Guadalcanal in much of The Thin
Red Line, and Otero County in Badlands. T h o u g h it is convention
that enables such substitutions, Malick's insistent reversions to them
seem very much like a pattern, part of which entails moments of tra-
versal that reveal these substitutions as the displacements they are—
like the sudden snow showers in Days of Heaven, quirks of weather
far more characteristic of the climate of Lethbridge than of the Texas
Panhandle, that look to have been too dear to the eye of their beholder
to have been excised only in the name of simple veracity.
A field, then, in Colorado or New Mexico, is posited as a field in
South Dakota, on the assumption, perhaps, that a field is a field—an
"any-space-whatever," in Gilles Deleuze's eccentric parlance, signify-
ing the amalgam of contingency and exactitude that circumscribes the
depiction of space in cinema. Such qualities inhere in the rendering
of this field, which seems quite precisely in the middle of nowhere,
and without discernible relation to adjacent spaces, if any, though those
might have served the function just as well. Featurelessness, vacancy,
and an absence of boundary or coordinate are among the auguries this
field purports—a quiet, hovering, pinched foreboding. N o roads lead
in or out, if a space so indefinite, despite its autonomy, can be said to
have insides and outsides. Its relation to similar spaces, in this film so
full of unpopulated land, is ambivalent. Endless miles of sun-blanched
grass or arid dirt, they are more open and desolate; it is greener, and
emptier.
Kit has come to solicit Holly's father, who objects to Kit's seeing
his daughter. "You know Holly?" asks Kit. "Well, she means an awful
lot to me, sir." Kit stands with his hands in the back pockets of his
jeans, in a posture that suggests deference, even shyness—a James
Dean-like shyness—and he squints into the light as he looks up at the
father. Quietly implacable, the butt of a stogie clenched between his
lips, the father goes on painting the sign. The colloquy between them
initiates a particular concern with male conflict in Malick's work that
continues in the interactions between Richard Gere and Sam Shepard
in Days of Heaven, and in the first scene between Jim Caviezel and
Sean Penn in The Thin Red Line, a docile current of violence, aggres-
A Sense of Things 61
sion buffered by a kind of respect, passivity, even an obsequiousness,

that could have its roots in fear, envy, or a certain affection. The kill-
ing of the father in the next scene prefigures the awkward, ungainly
explosion of violence near the end of Days of Heaven, when the farmer
charges Bill with a pistol and Bill stabs him. In these films, this vio-
lence among men impends as a constant threat, complaisant when
repressed and clumsily regretful when avouched. "You're something,"
the father says, unyielding but still grudging a slack grin. Kit looks
pleased in spite of himself. "Takes all lands, sir," he mutters as he saun-
ters off. The exchange will be echoed at the end of the film, when
the police are taking Kit away, and one of them says, "Kit, you are
quite an individual." "You think they'll take that into consideration?"
Kit asks.
The question receives no answer, unless it is the exigent shot of
massed, effulgent clouds that ends the movie. Questions take on an
unusual force in this film, as emblems of a deracinated curiosity. The
unanswered question, it could be said, is the movie's definitive form
of expression. (The score of The Thin Red Line quotes Charles Ives's
composition "The Unanswered Question.") Kit answers Holly's ques-
tions about sex—"Is that all there is to it?"—with blank monosyllables,
but the questions she asks herself regarding her own future, as she
looks through her father's stereopticon, neither demand nor can have
any meaningful reply. The function of questions to inquire, search,
canvass, appeal, beseech, or solicit surrenders to their capacities to
assert, proclaim, or vindicate. When Kit asks the father, "You know
Holly?" he is not seeking information. He is aware that her father
knows her. Offhand as it is, the question, even its status as a ques-
tion, is part of a strategy—to demand attention, in order to abrogate
it—and when the father, countering that Kit is not to see Holly again,
says, "Understand?" he is not seeking a response. It is not, strictly
speaking, a question.
The immanent violence that charges the atmosphere of Badlands
is piqued by this string of questions, and the spaces that are the film's
settings provide a more than congenial backdrop against which they
can reverberate in their hollowness. These spaces call forth these ques-
tions; they have something in common with the field in a pivotal se-
quence of Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959)—in their openness,
their lack of stratification, the undifferentiated qualities of their light.
It has commonly been observed that the field in Hitchcock's film sig-
nifies a denial of the association between unfettered space and liberty.
Roger Thornhill is, if anything, more endangered, his struggle more

primitive, in this vast expanse of Midwestern cornfield than in the
confined and bounded enclaves of Madison Avenue. In a different way,
the same association is denied in Badlands, but more to the point is
a relation the film establishhes between geographical sameness and lo-
calized detail on the one hand, and between apathy and watchfulness
on the other. The land stretches away in all directions, or in as many
as a camera can show, u n b o u n d e d and undistinguished except by
markers like proliferating telephone poles that repeat the very sameness
that defines it. As people negotiate this space, they occasionally ldck
up dust behind them, but they seem to cast no shadows, and the light
does not change appreciably. Voices are clear, and relatively unmuffled
by the distances they have to travel, and though distance itself becomes
a quite literal obstacle to communication, it remains largely uninflected
here by ambient sounds—wind, or birdcalls. (This is especially strik-
ing by contrast to the highly layered soundtracks of the two later
films.) The camera uncovers variation amid this stifling homogeneity:
sudden and supple tricks of focus show that not every branch is alike,
or that blades of grass differ from one another. Yet, unstratified, the
land baffles intelligibility, poses questions of its own, and provokes
curiosity, but does not communicate.
The sign the father paints seems too artful for its purpose of ad-
vertising a feed-and-bait shop. Our view of it comes just after we have
seen a glimpse of Holly through the window of her music school, a
shot that suggests Edward H o p p e r in the symmetry of its framing, in
the interiority of its subject, in its precise molding of crepuscular light.
The view of the sign thrusts us to the opposite end of the movie's
spectrum of influence, evoking the kaleidoscopic color, cluttered com-
position, and garbled perspective of pop art (fig. 8). For much of the
scene the camera is kept in close, so it is only in the last shot that we
see how out of place, literally speaking, this sign really is. In that shot,
its appearance in the middle of the field is a shock. It departs so radi-
cally from the uniformity of the landscape in which it is embedded, it
can only be seen as a powerful form of address, but it courts no at-
tentions—far from roads or byways—and there is no one to see it. The
shot that reveals this distance issues from a distance itself, and from
an angle high and canted enough to pronounce a troubling absence
of horizon. This displacement of the establishing shot from the be-
ginning to the end of the sequence—a form of displacement emerg-
ing as a new convention of the time—gives it an insinuating gravity
Fig. 8. Kit with Holly's father against a pop-art background. Courtesy of

Photofest.
that is almost arch, and the shot lingers, portentous as an unanswered

question.
WHERE CREDIT IS DUE
After the last shots of Badlands—fanciful but laconic images of aerial

ascent that have a kind of stark, recessional effect—this credit appears:
"Written, Produced and Directed by Terrence Malick."
A film's credits serve many functions beyond providing background
information, citing participants in a film's production, or acknowledg-
ing debts accrued in its making. Outside the formal sphere of a film's
narrative framework, these extratextual signifiers may still comment
on that framework, or otherwise meaningfully interact with it, in note-
worthy ways. Certainly, the manner of a film's credits tend to date the
production, broadly speaking, since fashions in graphic design appear
to be relatively less fixed, at the same time that they are relatively more
orthodox, than other components of visual design in cinema. With

few exceptions, Hollywood films of the 1920s, 1930s, or 1940s em-
ploy title cards at the start of the film, in a credit sequence distinct
from the dramatic space of the movie's narrative, and with little at the
conclusion beyond the visual announcement of the film's end and,
perhaps, a display of the production studio's logo. By the end of the
1940s, and continuing through the present, these conventions shifted
and varied in ways congruent with, and evocative of, the many larger
changes taking place in American movies during this period.
A further look at deviations from this pattern is instructive. Con-
sider, for instance, how the abbreviated opening titles of Welles's Citi-
zen Kane (1941) and its extended, curtain-call closing credits mark it
at once as being different from the c o m m o n run of the films of its
day. The credits of musicals diverged perhaps more often from the
given model than those of other genres, as in, say, Sidney Lanfield's
Tou^ll Never Get Rich (1941), where the credits appear on a series of
billboards along a rural highway as the camera moves along the road;
or in the b e t t e r - k n o w n example of D o n e n ' s Singin' in the Rain
(1951), where the main actors, in outsized slickers, dance in an antic
rain shower under superimposed credits at the start of the film. These
examples should remind us that, far from being simple conduits of
information, a film's credits begin to establish the m o o d or style of
the piece to follow, serving as a prelude to the film itself—and it is
n o t surprising that the musical, that most self-reflexive of genres,
should pioneer the incorporation of the credits into the actual or vir-
tual spaces of the film's diegesis. (This tendency reaches its zenith in
Saul Bass's titles, as in Robbins and Wise's West Side Story [ 1 9 6 1 ] , in
which the camera exploring the streets of the city discovers the cred-
its painted like graffiti on the sides of garbage cans.) As early as
Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950), the incorporation of titles into the
narrative space of the film had begun to assert itself as a general con-
vention. In the first shot of that movie we find ourselves looking in
close-up at a curbside where the words "Sunset Blvd." are painted.
This legend serves to announce the film's title, but as the camera draws
crisply away, tracking backward down the boulevard, it takes its place
in the visual space of the film's setting, and the rest of the credits are
superimposed over this dynamic, steely shot. As the credits end, a fleet
of police cars speeds past en route to N o r m a D e s m o n d ' s mansion
where, as a cool, fey voice-over informs us, there has been a murder.
Again, it is not surprising that a film such as Sunset Boulevard—like
Singiny in the Rain, a Hollywood movie about Hollywood movies—

should so erode the barrier between credits and movie: among other
things, after all, credits are a kind of institutional imprimatur, a sort
of metacommentary on the circumstances of a film's production. Films
such as these that strive to comment on the circumstances of their own
production in a more epistemologically assertive way than ordinary
movies begin to integrate the credits into the film text as a means, in
part, to that end.
What is at stake is precisely the greater degree of self-consciousness
that emerges in the evolution of the Hollywood film. New kinds of
information enter the credits of movies in the New Hollywood, re-
flecting changes in attitude and circumstance that the new forms cer-
tified. The first change came with the superimposition of credits over
action—emerging in the late '40s (with Nicholas Ray's trilogy of the
time—They Live by Night [1948], In a Lonely Place [1950], and On
Dangerous Ground [1951]—as a suggestive test case), but conven-
tional by the early '70s, and suggesting an erosion of boundary, a blur-
ring of the line between institutional base and symbolic superstructure,
between corporate reality and commodified fantasy. During the stu-
dio era, there were fewer interests to credit; after it, there are more
people to thank—and Badlands pioneered a new credit born of an era
where movies can be made by private initiative and fiat: "The Pro-
ducer Wishes to Thank . . . " The hyper trophied credits of the block-
buster age—all those names crawling past, signifying all those barely
imaginable jobs behind the scenes, as in the interminable end credits
of Richard Donner's Superman (1978), one of the earliest and most
extreme examples—threaten to overwhelm the fiction with the back-
ground. Against this very threat rise the new forms, with their demands
of new attentions or inattentions, new habits of film watching: pri-
mary credits over action at the start, secondary credits rolling by end-
lessly over synergized music or meaningful silence at the conclusion.
Viewers may ignore the former and take the latter as permission to
leave—you can spot the real devotees now by how they pride them-
selves on sitting through the end credits—but the credits show, either
way, the expansion and diffusion of labor on which the movies are
predicated. This fact cannot be concealed—or else it surely would be—
but it can be formalized and thus, with luck, rendered transparent.
Spanning eras, Malick's movies run the gamut. Badlands begins
with a few credits over the scene where Kit meets Holly: producers
(Pressman/Williams, Jill Jakes), principal actors (Martin Sheen, Sissy
Spacek, and Warren Oates), and the title—which punctuates the first
shot of Kit and Holly together. Malick's name appears only as the first
end credit: "Written, Produced and Directed by . . . " N o studio in-
terest is named in the credits. More conventionally, Days of Heaven is
framed by credits of differing orders: the picturesque tableaux of the
opening titles and the extended scroll at the end, indicative of a more
official imprimatur, and stressing the proprietary role of the Paramount
studio ("A Gulf + Western Company"). Aside from a brief title card,
The Thin Red Line has no credits in the beginning; the images them-
selves announce the start, but the end credits are the most extensive
and intricate tabulation of talent, transaction, acknowledgment, com-
pact, and disclaimer of any of the three films. Malick's name appears
only once in the credits of the first two films, twice in those of The
Thin Red Line—by contrast to the higher-profile exponents of the new
auteurism, like Spielberg, whose name recurs sequentially in un-
expected places in the credits of his films, some five times, for instance,
in A.I. (2001) alone.
Credits can enunciate authorship in more than words: One thinks
of O r s o n Welles's spoken credits for The Magnificent Ambersons
(1942) or The Trial (1962); of the trademark placard for "Mercury
P r o d u c t i o n s " following the R K O moniker in his early films; or
of Woody Allen's white-on-black credits, harking back to I n g m a r
Bergman, yet stripped down to an anonymity severe enough to be-
come, itself, an assertion of authorship. The credits of Malick's movies,
like those of any film, mark them as products of their time and dem-
onstrate key facets of the relation they bear to more general conven-
tions of their day. In the '90s, for instance, it became more c o m m o n
for Hollywood movies to forego opening credits—a trend pioneered
by Apocalypse Now in 1979. If the conventions of classical Hollywood
credits functioned, in part, to establish the break between life and
movies right at the start, to usher the viewer in to the virtual space of
the film, then the New Hollywood's displacement of credits to the
end of the film suggests a more permeable sense of the relation be-
tween movies and life from the 1960s onward. If so, the growing ten-
dency to omit credits at the beginning of movies altogether marks yet
another turn in this development. Malick's extirpation of opening
credits at the start of The Thin Red Line plays up the prefatory feel-
ing of the film's first half hour, so that many viewers may find them-
selves waiting for the credits, for some announcement that the film
really is underway. Where other movies that dispense with opening
credits will typically start with a scene that thrusts the viewer into the
action—so that the absence of credits becomes a bid for a greater
immediacy—Malick aims for a quality of suspension. His credit se-
quences bend convention to individual expression, yet they also pro-
mote a certain authorial modesty, that sense of impersonality that is
so basic to this filmmaker's work.
THE NATURE OF NATURE
Stanley Cavell, in many of his moods, sees film as a medium that

incorporates the idea of nature as something we feel in our ordinary,
day-to-day experience, separate from intuition. That is, we perceive
aspects of nature as something both present to us and—this is
crucial—apart from us. Even lost to us, we could say, with the wind
in the trees and the rocks under our feet as reminders only of what
was once there. What is lost, perhaps, is a sense of nature in our-
selves. There was a time, maybe, when humans felt a connection with
nature—when nature, in its fullness of appearances and movements,
reflected us, revealed our own nature, and when we, in turn, reflected
nature to the world that surrounds us. This formulation, of course,
recapitulates a romantic notion of humans and nature as somehow
identical in essence, such that some mutuality is implied, and in this
scheme—perhaps this is what's appealing about it to some—there
is harmony. But what has happened to upset this relationship be-
tween humanity and nature, so that we no longer see nature in our-
selves, and nature no longer sees itself in us? Post-romantics and
anti-romantics will suggest that people ceased identifying with nature
at a moment when speech moved from imitation to representation;
so that we no longer enunciate the wind with breath and movement,
but rather name it, and in so doing invent an interval between the
wind and ourselves. We may differ, however, about exactly when this
occurred.
According to Cavell, the projection of film recalls (because it en-
acts) the rift between people and nature that follows speech: film
names things. The image resembles the physical world, but it neither
imitates nor reproduces it—thus, to watch a film is to bear witness to
our banishment from the mythical garden. And we might say that film
as a medium invokes our sense of loss more directly, profoundly, or
immediately than the other arts (including painting and photography)
because it registers not only the appearances of the world, but also
its movements—from weightlessness to gravity, brisk fragmentation to
slow stretching. And it does this through the medium of technology,
which first drove the wedge through that lost, imagined harmony.
Aside from this function of brute representation, film also enacts
or replenishes the fantasy lives of its viewers, at the same time that
it represents collective fantasies. In our lives, commonly, we may
project fantasy o n t o what we take to be reality. We long for what is
n o t before us, what is absent; and yet, the objects of this longing
depend on what is (or has been) present. H o w else would we know
what to desire? There exists, then, a dialectic between fantasy and
reality in inner experience—a dynamic that is also basic to the me-
dium of film, for film represents fantasy (images of the real) that
bears the appearance of reality (what ordinarily surrounds us). All
this implies that we do not experience reality apart from fantasy, or
fantasy apart from reality.
Cinematic experience does not simply reflect ordinary human ex-
perience, bound up in a dialectic between reality and fantasy. Film as
a medium, in its materiality, suggests a way back to nature—the pos-
sibility of reconciliation with the world—because it represents the
world itself as already both reality and illusion. If films are philoso-
phy (as Cavell believes they are), and if Malick's films are, among other
things, meditations on nature—we might say his films articulate a
certain philosophy of nature. In Being and Time, Heidegger describes
three aspects of nature: one that we perceive through deliberate use
of nature (the nature found "in natural products"), another that de-
rives from our impassive gaze u p o n nature (nature that is simply
"present at h a n d " ) , and still another aspect that is expressed in our
most intense feelings about nature (here we encounter "the power of
nature").
This last aspect of nature suffuses the landscape of The Thin Red
Line—figured by the voice-overs as much as by the rapturous record-
ings of the tropical location—to the extent that the film gradually
becomes symbolic of what Heidegger also calls "primordial nature."
More directly than Malick's other films, The Thin Red Line evokes
spiritual feelings about nature that are explicitly associated with other
spiritual longings, like the desire for communion with an absent Cre-
ator. The power of nature is revealed by the characters' senses of an
imperishable gap that separates them from their surroundings—an
awareness of nature as both present and absent—a consciousness that
is shared, as Cavell suggests, by the film spectator (this is the special

power of film as a medium).
The high-resolution images of nature in The Thin Red Line, marked
by sharpness of color and detail, are similar to 1960s American and
British photorealist paintings in the way they represent reality in a form
closer to a kind of calmed hallucination. The camera views its subject
in a seemingly incongruous manner: the island setting is rendered anti-
exotic, yet mysterious. These qualities also infuse the jungle paintings
of a proto-surrealist painter such as Henri Rousseau, whose work ap-
pears to have influenced the cinematography of The Thin Red Line.
There is, for instance, a stark thematic connection between Malick's
film and the 1894 Rousseau painting entitled War, which shows a
woman bearing a sword in one hand and a torch in the other, astride
a deep black horse stretched across a chromatic landscape. Strewn
across the bottom of the painting are the pale bodies, and body parts,
of dead men; and black ravens perched on the corpses, with blood
dripping from their beaks. A scene of violence is typical in Rousseau's
jungle paintings, though others like The Flamingos (1907) and Cas-
cade (1910) forgo such a narrative element. A unity of style among
all the paintings becomes clear when looking at the works that are
predominantly landscapes. Rousseau keenly observes the many grada-
tions of green that occur in the jungle, as well as the individuality of
each leaf or frond, and contrasts these tones with bright-colored blos-
soms, fruit, birds, and animals. The paintings are composed in a rig-
idly frontal manner, the visual line parallel to the picture plane—as are
many of the landscape shots in The Thin Red Line. The symmetry of
the compositions, along with a frequent disproportion between fig-
ure and landscape (most often the latter dominates), creates the dia-
lectics between simplicity and abundance, civilization and wilderness,
which are similarly achieved in Malick's film.
If The Thin Red Line evokes photorealist or even surrealist nature
painting, the visual style of Days of Heaven is modeled after the real-
ism of early twentieth-century American painters like Edward Hop-
per and Andrew Wyeth, in addition to the social documents of such
photographers as Walker Evans, Lewis Hine, and Dorothea Lange.
What all of these works share as a concern are the effects of moder-
nity on the relationship between humans and their environment; in
other words, the ways in which industrial culture—locomotives, fac-
tories, and cities, along with photography and cinema—may be seen
to displace humans from their sense of a connection with nature. This
separation recalls Heidegger's notion that nature is, in one of its as-
pects, merely "present at hand," whereby it fails to promote or induce
feeling. Modern technologies are both a condition for and effect of
such an aspect—effectively de-naturing the world through an appro-
priation of its resources; or in the case of the camera, t h r o u g h the
objectivity of its gaze. Nature no longer inspires; rather, it intrudes
u p o n a human world, much like the locusts that descend upon the
wheat fields in Days of Heaven. Malick's second film is an evocation
of the West-Midwest landscape after the decline of America's nine-
teenth-century fascination with nature—and, at the same time, a cri-
tique of t w e n t i e t h - c e n t u r y objective n ature—so it is fitting t h a t
painterly realism predominates in the film's style.
Wyeth's 1948 painting, Christina^ World, is indicative of the physi-
cal, and indeed metaphysical, spaces that are similarly represented in
Days of Heaven. The woman in the foreground of the painting (mod-
eled by Christina Olson, a neighbor of the Wyeths, who was partly
crippled at birth) is adrift in a wide field, reaching toward a distant
farmhouse that looms on the horizon. The awkward isolation of the
figure here, against an impassive landscape, is an image repeatedly
referenced in Days of Heaven; the remote house is also a motif in the
film (fig. 9 ) , signifying the comforts of privilege, as it does in the paint-
ing. Malick also suggests Wyeth in the way he concentrates on mo-
ments rather than the events that surround them, which may account
for the mutual quality of suspension hovering between these two art-
ists' works. The effect of this technique is different in Days of Heaven,
however, perhaps because the pregnant moment in Wyeth's work is
partially resolved by an autobiographical component of his paintings.
In the film, the frequency of autonomous shots that resist integration
with the narrative seem to function, in part, as a critique of the
medium's dispassionate recordings of nature—by turning what the
moment signifies upon the image itself. The resemblance between Days
of Heaven and Wyeth's paintings is most emphatically pronounced at
their surfaces: precision renderings, sepia tones, and austere compo-
sitions, yet the light is as delicate as air.
As a child, Wyeth studied drawing under the instruction of his fa-
ther, N . C. Wyeth, the well-known muralist and illustrator of children's
books. This explains a certain likeness of technique in the work of
father and son, but N . C. Wyeth's paintings are far less concerned with
the revelation of matter, the insinuation of memory. Instead, they
evoke drama and imagination—picturing fantasy—however realist their
Fig. 9. The house in Days of Heaven owes as much to Hopper and

Wyeth as to George Stevens's Giant (1956). Courtesy of Photofest.
style may be. N. C. Wyeth was himself a student of the author-illus-

trator Howard Pyle, one of several of Pyle's students who graduated
to famous careers, including Maxfield Parrish. In the sequence in
Badlands after Kit has killed Holly's father, when he douses the inte-
rior of the Sargis house with gasoline just before lighting it with a book
of matches, there is a brief shot of Holly leaving from the back door.
With one arm she is carrying a suitcase, and under the other is a print
by Parrish, Daybreak (1922).
This painting by Parrish is famous, in part, for its enthusiastic re-
ception. It has even been claimed that by 1925, one in four Ameri-
can middle-class homes displayed a reproduction of the painting. This
phenomenal success raises the question about what may account for
such wide appeal. The painting represents a pastoral scene that evokes
antiquity. Two classical columns trisect the picture plane vertically. In
the background, grand facades of mountains rise. A garland of foli-
age cascades down from the top. Two young, Pre-Raphaelite girls are
in the center foreground—one is lying on a marble floor, beside a blue
lake, while the other stands naked over her. The vista of the painting,
particularly in its visionary qualities (majestic composition, chromatic
hues, mythic glow), resembles a number of the landscape shots in
Badlands. The overwhelming affect of the painting is languor. Har-
mony and innocence are ascendant here, which may begin to account
for the painting's appeal. This sentiment connects with the spirit of
the 1920s, which was predominantly optimistic but also contained in
itself the fear of collapse. The decade of Fordism and the automobile,
of buying on credit or installments, also saw the decline of agrarian
culture, and the stock market crash of 1929.
The circulation of the painting is indicative of changes in the sta-
tus of art in the modern era. For one, the middle class becomes a
consumer of art, so that art is no longer the property of high culture.
But with such democratization, a crisis emerges in matters of taste and
value. (Clement Greenberg despises Parrish, for example.) Another
change is the partial erasure of distinctions between fine and applied
art. This recalls another painting in Badlands—the billboard painted
by Holly's father. It is unusual for an advertisement: a scene of do-
mesticated nature. The technique is flat, dispersed, without perspec-
tive, much like folk art. With its handmade character and vernacular
mode, the painting appears to be a lament for preindustrial society.
However different it may be from Daybreak in style, it nevertheless
conveys the same nostalgia for a lost Utopia.
The Utopian ideal is one in which man coexists with nature peace-
fully, productively. It is the fantasy of adventure stories like Swiss Family
Robinson, or Kon-Tiki, which Holly and Kit read aloud in their tree
house. The scene occurs in the forest idyll sequence of Badlands—
after the pair has escaped Fort Dupree and before they sojourn
through the Midwest. They build a tree house, scavenge for food, cut
wood and cook their food over an open fire, dance to the sound of a
portable record player, fish and bathe in the nearby river, and pretend
they are grown-up. Holly tries exotic combinations of makeup, while
Kit reads National Geographic. The scene recalls that final aspect of
nature described by Heidegger, the one in which humans only ac-
knowledge nature by their use of it. With this aspect, nature recedes,
but humans are blissfully unaware.
C O N C E R N W I T H CLICHE
A i abiding interest in cliche as a structure of human expression in-

forms Malick's work. His films express a fascination with the force of
received ideas. The u true-crime" angle of Badlands could be thought
to give it interest or relevance, but the film's originality relies as much
on the familiarity as on the oddity of the case it is based on. Largely
unresponsive to the lurid, tabloid dimensions of the material—the way
a director like Jonathan D e m m e , for instance, might have been—
Malick seems more interested in the small portion of the story that is
representative of some common experience than he is in the very great
deal of what's aberrational about it. The movie concerns identity taken
as a set of given categories—Kit wants to be James Dean, and Holly
thinks she's living a romance novel—and the relative coolness of the
treatment comes in part from a sense that such aspirations or fancies
are more common than not. In Godard's Breathless (1959)—a movie
that balances a similar coolness against a certain screechy didacticism—
Michel's wish to be "Bogey" is treated as part cute quirk and part
dangerous new pathology. By the time of Badlands, such loopy role
modeling may still be dangerous, but it is certainly no longer new, and
seems, in a way, the most harmless of the characters' oddments. It is
not what makes them killers—it's what makes them ordinary.
"Name's Kit Carruthers," says Kit in Badlands, introducing him-
self. "Believe I shoot people every now and then. N o t that I deserve
a medal." Here, it is the inflection that gives the cliche a large part of
its meaning. As delivered, the lines convey a weird, almost embarrassed
entropy, a sense of running down, like a deflating balloon. What starts
as a brag—on the order of "We're Bonnie and Clyde, we rob banksl"—
ends as a plaint. The proud pronouncement of the first sentence gives
way to the interiorized mutter of the third, as if there were little
difference between addressing another and talking to oneself. W h o said

he did deserve a medal? There is something paradoxical in this speech-
act: a gesture of self-censure by one completely lacking in superego.
In general, in Malick's work, talk bears a burden of randomness. The
lines are often brisk, flat, stripped down, and it is more important what
is between them than what is in them, if they have content in any
ordinary sense. " I ' m always looking out for you," says Bill to his little
sister in Days of Heaven, and Linda replies with muted sarcasm, "You
deserve a medal." What she really means is what Kit says about him-
self, that he does not deserve a medal, or would not, if medals were
really at issue. Language in Malick's films is a series of blunt
unappeasable actions, leveled by the characters against one another,
demands made in the partial knowledge of how ineffectual they are.
If at times we can't make out the words, we can perhaps still derive
their meanings, because the meanings are not contained in the words.
T h e speakers' relation to the words matters more than the words
themselves, and what the characters say is often arbitrary—they could
just as well be saying something else—while cliches, in their extenu-
ated, ready-made diffusion, are the vehicles of this vicissitude.
After Badlands, the concern with cliche in Malick's work is not
treated directly as a theme, but generalized as an interest in plots that
seem like composites of received ideas, and in the aspects of plots that
have less to do with singular events than with recurrent cycles, repeated
routines, habitual practices, "frequentive" action. 1 The voice-overs
illuminate a crucial dimension of this concern in their conflation of
public and private elements of expression. Holly's voice-over in Bad-
lands can be understood as nothing but a succession of breathless
cliches: "Little did I realize that what began in the alleys and backways
of this quiet town would end in the badlands of Montana." Her speech
is public to the extent that she speaks, addresses someone, but it is
private to the extent that her interlocutor is invisible—it is not exactly
us—and we do not know when, where, or even really why she speaks.
Cliche itself is public and social—a sphere of ideas, expressions, or
oaths made prosaic by widespread repetition, charged by its enemies
with depleting originality and, therefore, meaning. From that perspec-
tive, the problem would seem to be that it is too public, that it un-
dermines what is private in individuality, and for a writer like
Flaubert—whose whole career can be understood as a response to the
pressures of cliche—it is the pollution of the spirit, to be resisted tor-
turously (in early work like "Novembre") or acceded to bitterly (in
texts like Bouvard and Pecuchet or "A Dictionary of Received Ideas").
Malick is no friend to cliche, but his work engages the possibility

that it is a principal locus of human meanings, or source of identity.
His uses of voice-overs emphasize their status as forms of expression
situated somewhere between the public and the private, muting dis-
tinctions between cliched and original expression, or between reflex
and feeling. The voice-overs in Days of Heaven or The Thin Red Line
are oriented only a little less toward cliche than Holly's in Badlands,
yet they are credited, in the films, with some authentic feeling. Indi-
vidualism is a satirical theme of Badlands: People keep remarking that
Kit is "quite an individual," and in our knowledge of the triteness of
Kit's self-conception, we are led to see the inanity of these observa-
tions. But collectivism is the ideal of Malick's later films, and it relies
on a pool of shared expressions or ideas that only an outcast, or an
individualist, would insist on calling cliches.
HOLLYWOOD GOTHIC
A network of connections between Terrence Malick, David Lynch,

art director/production designer/director Jack Fisk, actress (and one-
time set dresser) Sissy Spacek, and costume designer/production de-
signer Patricia Norris is dense enough to make an observer begin to
feel somewhat paranoid. The more one considers these connections,
the more other, tangential relationships begin to emerge, less appar-
ent, though perhaps at least as suggestive. A Gothic effect, predicated
on doublings and echoes, yet pivoting on isolation and a sense of the
implosion of community, begins to emerge.
Malick and Lynch enrolled at the American Film Institute's Cen-
ter for Advanced Film Studies (now called the AFI Conservatory) in
1969, the year of its inception. A grand estate converted into a teach-
ing facility, looking a bit like Rochester's digs in Jane Lyre, fixed on a
hilltop overlooking Hollywood, the center was established in order to
train gifted individuals in filmmaking, with the larger purpose of sus-
taining a "film as art" practice in the United States. Made possible
by, yet also a reactionary response to, shifts occurring in the national
film apparatus—with the d i m i n u t i o n of the studios' power,
acknowledgement of the audience's heterogeneity, and increasing vi-
ability of alternative exhibition venues—the conservatory emerged in
tandem with the New Hollywood. The New Hollywood was also, in
its way, the point of departure for the New Gothic, pointedly reframing
this classic American mode for contemporary mass audiences.
With the support of the AFI, David Lynch made Fraserhead, re-
leased in 1977. An overtly Gothic tale with surrealist overtones, the
film also relied on the services of Lynch's longtime friend, Jack Fisk.
They met in high school, in Alexandria, Virginia. At the time, both
imagined themselves as painters, and they traveled to Europe together
in 1 9 6 5 , planning to study with the abstract expressionist artist Oskar
Kokoschka in Austria. However, they returned only fifteen days later,
disenchanted with Continental culture. It was, apparently, the Ameri-
can Gothic that they craved, and that Lynch, at least, realized in some
version in Fraserhead, initiating a career made up almost entirely of
variations on the Gothic mode. We can only imagine the eighteen-
minute short that Malick produced as his AFI thesis project {Lanton
Mills, 1971), but Lynch's self-styled, surrealist, and claustrophobic tale
is nothing if not hermetic and deeply personal, seemingly sprung di-
rectly from someone's unconscious. Spinning a grotesque fable that
harks back to nineteenth-century Gothic narratives from Caleb Will-
iams to Frankenstein and beyond, Lynch strives to forge a private
universe complete in itself, without clear, or at least without determin-
ing, reference to other types or genres. Malick's short film, report-
edly, invokes multiple genres (the Western, the heist film), is set in a
widely recognizable location (Los Angeles), and stars established ac-
tors. The only thing the two films might have in common is a shared
undercurrent of blanching irony. Yet Lynch's film seems not so much
to absent the Hollywood milieu as to abstract it; allegorically, it could
still be present. Thus, two modes of the New Hollywood emerged:
subjectivity as defense against Hollywood tradition (Lynch), and ob-
jectivity as surface e n g a g e m e n t with it (Malick). Both pivot on a
Gothic vision of the world as an interlocking network of references,
images, and ideas.
Before Fraserhead premiered in Los Angeles in 1 9 7 6 , Fisk had
served as art director for Malick's Badlands. Broadly speaking, the
films have something in c o m m o n in their looks—at least in their uses
of no-place as everyplace. Sissy Spacek's performance in Badlands is
her first important film role. In her characterization of Holly Sargis,
Spacek appears at once doelike and hardened—a screen presence that
embodies the distinctive tone of 1970s Newr Hollywood, with as much
sincerity of expression as ironic affect. In 1974, a year after the re-
lease of Badlands, Fisk and Spacek married. The same year marked
the release of Brian De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise, a Gothic
parody with production design by Fisk; Spacek would perform her next
important role as the title character of De Palma's subsequent film,

Carrie. Carrie White and Holly Sargis are types of the feminine
Gothic: innocent and murderous. It only remains to be seen, in ei-
ther case, which of these traits wins out.
In 1979, Fisk directed a movie called Raggedy Man, starring Sissy
Spacek and Eric Roberts, with Sam Shepard, who had just appeared
as the farmer in Days of Heaven. It was shot by Ralf Bode, who had
filmed Spacek's Oscar-winning vehicle, Coal Miner's Daughter, and De
Palma's Dressed to Kill just before this project. Spacek plays a divorcee
in a small town who finds a sailor (Roberts) sleeping on her porch one
day, and invites him to stay. Bittersweet attractions emerge, but the
sailor moves on. Clearly filming with a production designer's eye, Fisk
expends much effort in obtaining an impressively authentic 1940s
period atmosphere. The film is shot in wistfully muted dun colors, and
directed with a soft simplicity that grows touching in the course of
the movie. There are some quite beautiful shots: the seductive touch
of the lovers' hands meeting through the mesh of a pair of nylons he
has given her; a scene where the lights go out in a lightning storm
and the camera shifts to a different position in the r o o m with each
flash of lightning; and the long-drawn master shot where Roberts talks
on the phone to his fiancee's father, learning she has taken up with
another man, all this being relayed through reactions and the expres-
sions we see on the actor's face.
Ostensibly, the movie is a nostalgia piece, tapped into the great
American West-by-Midwest back-to-the-land trip. However, it takes
a jarring turn. After the sailor leaves, two locals move in on Spacek,
and the movie veers into Sam Peckinpah country, with horror-show
overtones of backwoods weirdness (shades of Straw Dogs, Deliverance,
Texas Chainsaw Massacre). In generic terms, this may n o t seem so
much of a reversion, since the Gothic wa form of the romance, or at
least an offshoot of it. In the context of p o s t - N e w H o l l y w o o d ,
though, it is a more telling shift. It is as if, in that time and place, the
Gothic mode was seen as the only acceptable end, the only honest
avenue, as if any other outcome would be compromise. And it also
makes most of the movie feel like a false start, which, in a way, it was:
except for some smaller ventures in directing later (including episodes
of Twin Peaks, the David Lynch television show), Fisk returned to art
direction and production design. H e worked mostly with Terrence
Malick and with David Lynch, whose movies often concern the role
of violence as the only form of sincerity left in the postmodern world.
In Fraserhead, Fisk appears as "The Man in the Planet," w h o pulls

the lever at the end of the film.
After completing Fraserhead, Lynch began production on The El-
ephant Man, the first film on which he worked with Patricia Norris,
w h o served as costume designer. H e r work in this film, oddly, can only
be described as extremely m o d e r n , despite the period settings and
details that characterize it. The same can be said for much of her de-
sign work to date. Among other ways, a modern sensibility is expressed
in the designs by their concerted lack of decoration and their exact-
ing sense of functionality—by the inscription of their shapes, forms,
and colors with a form of idealism: a character wears a suit that does
not appear to be his suit, or any suit, but every suit. (Compare with
the work of Sandy Powell, w h o has designed costumes for T o d d
Haynes's period pieces Velvet Goldmine [1998] and Far from Heaven
[ 2 0 0 2 ] : Powell's work is much more concerned than Norris's with
traditional verisimilitude, and it uses great ornamentation to simulate
the retro-realities being represented.) Interesting in itself as a style in
Hollywood—the design sensibility is closer to that of a Bresson film—
Norris's work is crucial to the sense, in the films she works on, in wiiich
a m o d e r n sensibility is being imposed on, or extrapolated from, an
imagined, and lost, era. Much the same effect is on view in Norris's
earlier work for Terrence Malick on Days of Heaven.
Norris worked with Lynch again as production designer on Blue
Velvet ( 1 9 8 6 ) , starring Dennis Hopper, whose next film as actor was
Black Widow ( 1 9 8 7 ) , directed by Bob Rafelson. Rafelson, who is ac-
knowledged in the credits of Days of Heaven, made a film in 1976
called Stay Hungry, which was the working title of Days of Heaven.
Rafelson often cast the character actor Harry Dean Stanton, w h o
starred in Two Lane Blacktop and some David Lynch movies (Wild
at Heart and The Straight Story, in wiiich Spacek also appears), and
who played the main character in Malick's Lanton Mills. Black Widow
was photographed in part by John Toll, who would ten years later
shoot The Thin Red Line. Toll's work on the Rafelson film includes
location shooting in Hawaii that can be seen as a poor cousin to the
cinematography on view7 in The Thin Red Line. The plot of Black
Widow involves " O n d i n e ' s c u r s e , " and Mary Woronov, of Andy
Warhol's factory, plays a supporting role. Ondine was also a legend-
ary figure in Warhol's factory, who sometimes referred to himself as
" T h e Pope of Greenwich Village." In 1984, Eric Roberts starred in
a movie called The Pope of Greenwich Village, directed by Stuart
R o s e n b e r g , w h o directed Malick's second feature-length script,

Pocket Money. Ondine appeared in several of Warhol's films, includ-
ing Chelsea Girls ( 1 9 6 3 ) , which was codirected by Paul Morrissey,
w h o would go on to make his own films under the Warhol brand
n a m e , including Trash ( 1 9 7 0 ) , in which Spacek made her screen
debut as an extra.
M o d e r n variations on the Gothic have internalized its traditional
concerns and externalized its effects. 2 Rather than represent actual
monsters, they tend to project the threat of a ^//^-monstrosity that
is unfathomed from within but imputed from without (Badlands,
Fraserhead). They concern a conflict between the individual's perspec-
tive on society, as one who hopes to annihilate or purify selfhood, and
the societal perspective on the individual (Taxi Driver, Blue Velvet)—
often in the form of punishments that can have n o clear consequences.
They celebrate both solitude and friendship {Days of Heaven, The Thin
Red Line), but find that individuals who are isolated or detachable
from society turn out to be monstrous, while those who are integrated
with it turn out to be vapid, or empty (Wild at Heart, Lost Highway).
Communities turn inward, as a defense against corruption, in an ef-
fort to reproduce a viable society on the model of the powerful indi-
vidual. As in the Gothic mode, so in the intricate set of relations we
have traced here, individual agency seems very much predicated on
hidden or oblique communal interaction, to the end of promoting
distinctive worldviews in which paranoia becomes, as it does as a by-
product of every hermetic system, a norm. This is a paranoia of just
the sort the Gothic trades in, where there are too many patterns to
decode, too many connections to understand, and what or w h o m you
already know remains mysterious.
Hollywood, as a location both mythic and actual, is a closed society.
The web-work of associations we have pursued here probably points
only to that fact. The films produced from it, however, build on ves-
tiges of the Gothic with the wish to express a new land of horror that
is, nevertheless, inarticulable; the films can only express something of
this horror through a return to a sublime that does not signify.
V A R I O U S SILENCE
Three silences: in the empty streets of a small American town in the

morning; in a single m o m e n t of wandering in the vast wheat fields of
the Texas Panhandle; in a period of agonized waiting in a forest on

an island in the South Pacific. In the town, a mourning dove coos,
and the motor of a truck hums; in the field, the wind ruffles the wheat.
But these sounds do not break the silence. They enter it, and become
part of it. The third silence—in that forest—is the most intense, the
least amenable to disturbance, so when it is broken, it seems almost
as if it can never resume. In Malick's films, silence is always present,
at least as an undercurrent, or as a kind of baseline against which ex-
perience is measured. All that is not silence, in these films, occurs as
a disruption of silence, if not an intrusion on it, and the wish to re-
vert to silence is a constant feeling that could be counted as longing,
if longing did not violate the principle of stillness that silence serves.
Especially in movies, and particularly in American movies, we're in-
clined to think of silence as a constant quantity, posing the threat of
dead air. Malick's films remind us of how varied silences can be—the
silence of absence, of thought, of waiting, tranquil, pensive, or tense—
and they propose the idea of silence as a kind of zero-degree. In most
American movies of the sound era, silence is feared, as a vacuum, and
anxiously covered over with program music, chatter, or increasingly loud
rounds of action. Malick's films reverse the usual hierarchy: especially
in Days of Heaven and TPje Thin Red Line, action is what happens be-
tween silences, what we have to get through to get back to the spaces
of reverie. Malick has taken seriously Gertrude Stein's claim, at the apo-
gee of modernism, that events "have lost their interest for people."
Malick's films look back to the silent cinema as a source of inspira-
tion. A key stylistic procedure of Days of Heaven, to alternate slow7,
sweeping long shots with still, sudden close-ups from a low7 angle, has
clearly been inspired by D o v z h e n k o ' s Earth ( 1 9 2 9 ) . An apparent
model for early sections of The Thin Red Line is Flaherty and Murnaif s
Tabu—and it seems significant that both of these antecedents came
at the pivotal m o m e n t in film history between silence and sound.
More generally, Malick's principles of visual construction and his de-
emphases on dialogue as a spur or a driving force to narrative sug-
gest a stance that might well appear fundamentally nostalgic if it did
not also seem so progressive in its modernist commitments. The cu-
mulative building of sequences, with frequent cutaways, or inserts of
shots for purposes of notation, gloss, description, or textural elabora-
tion, is often more in keeping with the demonstrative narration of the
silent cinema than with the headlong, undeviating storytelling styles
of the films' real provenance, the contemporary American cinema.
The role of language in the films takes on an exaggerated impor-

tance, paradoxically, by being rendered so peripherally—through
snatches or fragments of speech, barely audible murmurs, conversa-
tions at cross-purposes, bracketed by silences. Listening to Malick's
films, we can feel more attuned to the muteness and quiet that make
up the surround of language, its very air, than we are to the palpa-
bility of language itself. A typical exchange, from the section of Days
of Heaven when the itinerant workers are considering staying on with
the farmer after the season's end, runs as follows: "Are we gonna
stay?" "If she wants to." "You'd rather go?" "I'd rather be the King
of Siam. You put aspirin in this?" The brevity of expression implies
directness, but sleights of language—questions countered with ques-
tions, a loosening of referent, the eddy into cliche—subvert effects
of concision, transforming them into ellipsis. The camera pivots
around the two characters as they, in turn, rotate about each other
with every line they speak, literalizing in space the back-and-forth
rhythm of their speech, and a quick dissolve transports us from this
halting, elided interval to a long, essentially wordless sequence of a
kind of autumnal exaltation, as the migrants depart the farm. The
abridgements and truncations of speech pronounce an awareness of
language as symbolic action. Deprived of intrinsic meaning or sen-
sory substance, words take on significance as objects in space, trans-
mitted from body to body, decrements of the silences that swallow
them.
What do such silences convey? A restless patience, more than a reso-
lute incommunicability, perhaps. In a sense, Stanley Cavell is right to
argue that a silent film has never been made, but in another sense,
nearly every film is silent, at least to the extent that it requires the si-
lence of its spectators. The history of the cinema, says Serge Daney,
is the process of domesticating audiences, teaching them to sit still and
be quiet. But the failures of this process are integral to that history,
which begins to break down as the movies demand audible expres-
sions, even apart from speech, from their audiences—laughter, sobs,
shouts. Moreover, as Daney contends, the history of cinema has
evolved from an era of dynamic images attended by immobile specta-
tors, to static images (dictated by cliches and a dim memory of the
commerce they have fully subsumed), watched by mobile audiences
(in the advent of television). If Malick's films look back to the silent
cinema, they also reach out to the silent spectator. As reversionary
texts, their allegiance is to the watcher who still, even now, wishes to
be transfixed, but as modernist documents, they express an awareness

of the difficulty and rarity of that desire. In turn, dual registers divide
the films' silences: between indifference, resistance, withdrawal and
stillness, wonder, awe.
S Y N T O N I C RESEARCH I N C .
When Days of Heaven was nominated for an Oscar in 1979 for "Best
Sound Recording," the credit was disputed. Four sound mixers are
credited on the film, but the contribution of one of them was chal-
lenged by others. When the nominees were announced during the
awards ceremony, the phrase "remaining credits in controversy" was
u t t e r e d , for only the third time in the history of the Academy of
Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. (The other times were for the docu-
mentary Manson in 1972 and for the short subject Four Stones for
Kanemitsu in 1973.) In the event, the aw7ard did not go to Days of
Heaven, and it is not clear whether this dispute wras ever resolved. 3
That there was a controversy in the first place suggests the com-
plexity of sound in Days of Heaven, but it hardly conveys the real
significance of this fact, which points not just to the usual wrangling
between recording, mixing, and effecting sounds. I n d e e d , as the
credits attest, and as the experience of the film bears out, the con-
ception of the sound design included an unusual dimension from the
start. "Special e n v i r o n m e n t a l " s o u n d recording supplements the
more ordinary forms of film sound in Days of Heaven. As it happens,
this "special" sound was provided by an organization called "Syn-
tonic Research Incorporated." Currently based in Austin, Texas, this
company originated a famous series of recordings familiar to most,
the "Environments Series" of sixteen albums of many different acous-
tic stimuli, ranging from ocean weaves to country storms to (quot-
ing the company's website) "sounds of the Okefenokee Swamp so
realistic NASA chose them for the famous Voyager Gold Record."
T h e function of these recordings is not merely to reproduce sound
with accuracy; rather, the records are meant to create a calming ef-
fect, a sort of tranquilized ambience. They pioneered the kinds of
r e c o r d i n g that are sometimes played to placate crying infants or
nervous grown-ups. Indeed, they advertise themselves as "Psycho-
acoustic Nature Recordings."
Sound as environment is certainly a concept with relevance to the
aesthetic of Days of Heaven, though the "psycho-acoustic" nature of
this concept is less clear at first. What seems most significant about
the work of Syntonic Research is its evocation of a sort of post-coun-
terculture style of pop spirituality that, all unsuspected, thus makes its
way into Malick's film. Considered in tandem with developments in
stereophonic sound of the mid- to late '70s, the work of Syntonic
Research seems roughly in keeping with the move to expand sound
technologies into a generalized acoustical surround. Typically, this
expansion was achieved through newly multilayered tracks of sound,
originating from different speakers around the theater, and, most di-
rectly, by amplified volume to make the viewer feel wholly absorbed
by a film, visually and sonically. Yet Syntonic Research recordings make
claims for their own tranquility, by contrast with the acoustical force
and immediacy of other sound advances of the era ("Sensurround,"
for instance). In fact, though Syntonic claims that its recordings pro-
mote concentration and mental focus, they propose, in practice, an
odd outcome of the sonically elaborate layerings that characterize
them. A collage of sounds, with each one delicately audible as a sound
in itself, they neutralize this acoustic detail in a wash of spiritualized,
purifying white-noise. The sound is, thus, both precisely complex and
hazy—meant, at once, to alert the hearer to the textures of the au-
dible, and to relax, to calm, even to beatify.
A similar use of a found auditory text with associations of pop spiri-
tuality appears in The Thin Red Line. As the credits advise us, addi-
tional music in that film comes from "Francesco Lupica, Cosmic Beam
Experience." This is a reference to a cult recording of a sort that was
relatively common right after the '60s eruption of counterculture
trends, recognizable in a range of popular or semipopular forms from
Deodato to "Hooked on Classics." Initially marketed as the work of
one "Francisco" in 1976, produced in northern California, "Cosmic
Beam Experience" is an album that features four long compositions
and one short one, all relatively indistinguishable in a wash of orches-
tral proto-New Age music, with titles like "Heal Yourself and "Love
Sweet Love." The specter of transcendental meditation, it is not too
much to suggest, hovers over both Syntonic Research and the Cosmic
Beam Experience. What they signify in Malick's work is that quality
of inclusiveness that returns to a central theme. The ironic skepticism
so apparent in Badlands and still visible in Days of Heaven or even The
Thin Red Line makes it likely that the incursion of pop spiritualism
into these films will register with viewers, if at all, only subliminally.
And that, indeed, is just the point. In the films as a whole, especially
in concert with congruent effects (non-"psycho-acoustical" sound in
Days of Heaven, other music in The Thin Red Line), these signifiers
blend in as if they were integral to the wiiole ambience, and they have
the effect of diversifying the theme of transcendence in Malick's work.
Even taken as nothing more than emblems of a cheapened spiritual-
ity, they still point to an access of transcendence that is just barely vis-
ible, and nearly out of hearing.
FRAMING STARS
The second shot of George Clooney in The Thin Red Line seems
something like a tell. It is a close-up, in which there is no hiding the
fact that it is George Clooney—very much a type of the latter-day Hol-
lywood star: a highly contemporary figure in the extent and quality
of his current fame, certainly, but also something of a throwback, his
rugged good looks (to use a pertinent cliche) recalling stars like Clark
Gable, from before the days when Hollywood had begun to profit by
placing its own models of masculinity under conscious suspicion. What
makes Clooney most representative of the terms of current stardom
is his mysterious assumption of celebrity without aura: There is no
distinguishing Clooney iconography to speak of (as there was even of
Gable) and Clooney straddles boundaries of celebrity as if he is un-
aware of them, as if the old cultural hierarchies no longer matter—
mixing safe star vehicles with "edgier" indie projects (The Perfect Storm
and Out of Sight, One Fine Day, and Three Kings), migrating haplessly
from TV to movies and back again.4
Still, it is George Clooney, and in the age of mechanical reproduc-
tion—or after it—celebrity may be just what is left of aura. The sec-
ond shot of Clooney seems like a tell because it reveals the first shot
as a deferral (fig. 10). In The Thin Red Line, Clooney plays an officer
who appears in one scene, giving orders to his troops. In the first shot,
we see him from behind, at a distance; it could be anyone. The sec-
ond is the close-up; it could be no one else. Taken together, and in
the context of the film, the shots enunciate a clipped dialectic of in-
hibition and acquiescence. They don't show7 us George Clooney right
away, but since there is no alternative, they then show him in blunt
full view, with no further apologies but the ones indicated by the fact
that he disappears thereafter from the film, which is nearly at its end
anyway.
Such is the treatment of the all-star cast of The Thin Red Line. Stars
appear in jarring contexts, without introduction, and vanish just as sud-
Fig. 10. A star's a star for all that: George Clooney in The Thin Red Line.
denly. Though the recognition factor seems unavoidable, everyone has

the status of a cameo player, at least potentially, with the standard im-
peratives of star casting nowhere in force. In this film, clearly, there is
little point in assuming that an actor's status as star will affect his fate
as performer or character. In fact, up-and-comers like Adrien Brody
and John C. Reilly, who expected the film to showcase their talents,
expressed outrage or disappointment that their roles had been cut to
the bone in the finished version of the film. Actors of an older gen-
eration—John Travolta and Nick Nolte—are given little more prior-
ity in the film than fresher-faced aspirants like Jared Leto and Ben
Chaplin. Indeed, the schema of casting promotes an awareness of
generational shift by posing hangers-on of the New Hollywood (Nolte
and Travolta) against Wunderkinds of the indie age (Sean Penn)—and
all against the film's new discovery, Jim Caviezel.
Films that introduce new stars lay bare the function of the star as
commodity. The credit "Introducing Audrey Hepburn" at the start
of Wyler's Roman Holiday (1952) doesn't mean it is Hepburn's first
film—it's not—but, rather, that it is the one designed to make her a
star. A quintessential case of Hollywood lore like 'Tippi' Hedren in
Hitchcock's films of the '60s makes no secret of what film viewers
cannot help but know already, that the star is always a construct, cre-
ated as an image of individual personality for purposes of general com-
merce. Plucked from TV commercials and promoted as the last word
in waspish glamour, Hedren functioned in The Birds (1963) and
Mamie (1964) as a pure construct, down to the single quotes of her
name—Hitchcock's autotelic invention, without prior associations in
viewers' minds of the type usually prerequisite to stardom, thus en-
abling Hedren to become a sort of simulation, a virtual palimpsest,
rife with associations of previous stars: Grace Kelly, Kim Novak, and
Vera Miles all rolled into one. That Hedren's ready-made stardom was
not really fulfilled beyond her collaborations with Hitchcock—though
later rewarded in a fascinating way through the career of her daughter,
Melanie Griffith—only ratifies her status as a type of film star on the
cusp between the decline of the studio system and the rise of the New
Hollywood.
Two of Malick's films have featured patent "discoveries"—Linda
Manz as the little sister, Linda, in Days of Heaven and Caviezel in The
Thin Red Line. {Days of Heaven was also the debut film of Brooke
Adams and Sam Shepard, but they don't function in the movies simi-
larly to Manz and Caviezel, who inhabit special places in their respec-
tive films.) Both Manz and Caviezel contribute a sense of presence that
crucially defines the film's sensibility. With her clipped, hoarse voice,
and her gaunt face, looking at once childlike and weathered, waspish
and wizened, Manz embodies the union of innocence and worldliness
that infuses the spirit of Days of Heaven. Stories of her discovery on
the streets of Chicago point back to practically obsolete traditions of
Hollywood talent hunting, and promote a sense of the role as an ex-
tension of her identity, or her identity as an extension of the role, down
to the same name shared by character and actor. So complete was this
sense of identification that Manz made only a few films subsequently,
cast in at least one of them—Harmony Korine's Gummo (1997)—in
tribute to her appearance in Days of Heaven. Caviezel's career after
The Thin Red Line has pursued a more conventional stardom than his
austere, claustral presence in that film, carnal yet unearthly, seemed
to prefigure. Like Manz, Caviezel in The Thin Red Line represents a
notion of performance as a manifestation of the natural, giving prior-
ity to the cogency and weight of bodily presence over the professional
protocols of theatrical expertise or experience. On the evidence of the
films, what seems to have been of key importance in the casting of
these actors is their having been, formerly, unknown.
As constructed in their way as the image of 'Tippi' Hedren—and

as beneficial in the marketing of the films—the figures of Caviezel and
Manz nonetheless bespeak a concept of film performance at odds with
ordinary ideas of stardom. The latter are predicated on the construc-
tion and manipulation of images, creating networks of association or
patterns of mannerism that, over time, charge a star's presence with
familiarity and yield a compelling projection of individual personality.
Malick's use of stars is most significant in relation to familiarity. As
social types, stars typically affirm or even create given, dominant val-
ues of society, even if it is in the guise of seemingly trivial fashions of
dress or fads of speech and behavior. Malick's withdrawal in his work
from a simply affirmative or negative position in regard to dominant
social values—evidenced most broadly, perhaps, in his apparent lack
of interest in making films with contemporary settings—comes out
clearly in the attitudes toward stars that his films convey. For Days of
Heaven, Malick reportedly wanted John Travolta (Haller 1978, 2 5 -
26) but settled, perhaps grudgingly, for Richard Gere. During film-
ing, both Gere and Travolta were on the verge of stardom, but by the
time Days of Heaven was released late in 1978, Saturday Night Fever
(1977) had put Travolta over the top, while Gere still inhabited a kind
of midlevel territory, with stubborn pretensions to "serious" acting.
With Travolta, Days of Heaven would have been a very different movie,
and it is easy to imagine how Travolta's up-to-the-minute urban cocki-
ness might have complemented Linda Manz's streetwise pluck. But a
certain dissonance between Gere and Manz—a rising star with latter-
day method-style associations, a genuine urchin with a sweetly obsti-
nate naturalness—gives rise to effects much more in keeping, in the
end, with Malick's typical procedures as a filmmaker. These effects are
reminiscent, for instance, of the encounters between Sean Penn and
Caviezel near the beginning of The Thin Red Line: Despite Penn's
shaggy naturalism, his performances are nearly always attended by vis-
ible and virtuoso expenditures of effort, something actorly, while
Caviezel dispenses with m o o d , manner, gesture—typical accessories of
performance. His is a remarkably unadorned performance, shod of
detail or nuance except those that happen to arise from its context,
and it is as if, in juxtaposing such types, Malick is asking us to con-
sider the relation of acting and being.
The attitude toward stars that is expressed by these films implies,
as well, a spectrum of recognitions. In all these films, one may be aware
of how one's responses are abetted or mitigated by the orchestration
of human presences along a scale, as somewhat familiar, very familiar,

or wholly unfamiliar. Like Gere in Days of Heaven, Sissy Spacek and
Martin Sheen at the time of Badlandswere poised on the brink of that
new kind of stardom—emblematized later by Clooney—conferring the
usual rights and privileges, but less contingent on glamour or plain
old sympathy, the imperative of pleasing an audience in some direct
and uncomplicated way, than it might have been a decade before.
Spacek appeared as the doe-eyed nymphet of Michael Ritchie's Prime
Cut (1972), Sheen, even more uncannily, on television, where he'd
distinguished himself by playing sensitive versions of vilified types in
unusually respectable T V movies like That Certain Summer (1972)
and The Execution of Private Slovick (1974). Our vague awareness of
them, or memories of them from these roles, made the ordinary cra-
ziness of their characters in Badlands all the more troubling.
The father in that film, played by Warren Oates, is a specimen of
the ubiquitous character-actor, like Harry Carey, H e n r y Travers, and
Thomas Mitchell of a prior generation. Like those figures, or contem-
poraries such as Rip Torn, M. E m m e t t Walsh, Harry Dean Stanton
and, a little later, Dan Hedaya, Oates encapsulates whole social or
cultural histories in a single instant of presence. A walking sign-sys-
tem, he does not so much be as mean—signifying lanky taciturnity and
tight-lipped menace, coiled anger that never really explodes, or that
devolves into comical cowardice, recalling carousings with Peckinpah
or M o n t e Hellman, gonzo realism, and down-home surrealism. All
these connotations are there in a flash—leaving Malick to pursue his
polar quietudes—and in Days of Heaven, Robert J. Wilke as the farm
foreman serves a similar function, as do Travolta and Nolte in The Thin
Red Line, showing the extent to which the character-actor model has
impinged on the star topos.
The effects of these actors' presences, not just recognizable, but
meaningful as a m o m e n t of being in a decisive h u m a n history, are
converse to the effects of Manz's or Caviezel's presences, which they
exactly counterpoint. In a way, these positions, these categories that
emerge in relation to one another—the nearly known, the too-well
known, the unknown—collapse in the general typology of Malick's
broad characterizations, which nearly arways aspire to an inconspicu-
ous familiarity. Malick uses actors as if they were principles of a
Heideggerean "They"—that community of beings in which we find
ourselves, whom we recognize and do not recognize, and whose abun-
dance and stubborn everydayness make it harder for us to see through
to things in themselves, or to essential Being, but in whose presence

we might glimpse the constancy of those things, or that essence. There
is a matter-of-factness about Malick's use of actors, which does not
seem poised to make them comfortable in ordinary ways. Even in most
serene t h o u g h t , they never look as if they feel quite at h o m e ; they
cannot really connect to each other, or understand their roles in the
larger scheme. N o matter what roles they play, they're acting out a
precept like this one, from Heidegger, about the condition of the
"They" in its lostness: "Everyone is the other, and no one is himself
(Heidegger 1996, 120). To act, perhaps, relieves them of the burden
to be. But then, to judge from the stricken looks that play across their
faces from time to time, they want that burden back.
W I T H INTEREST
The nature of Malick's interest in the subjects he pursues in his films

may be indicated by this quotation, from a rare interview conducted
with him soon after the release of Badlands:
I wasn't trying to get across any messages with the film. It's not just to
tell a story You hope—though you really don't set out to do this—but
you hope that the picture will give the person looking at it a sense of
things. A feel for the way the world goes. I come away from a movie I
like with a sense of things. It's as though everything just falls into place
for a little while. It isn't as if you've been told anything you didn't al-
ready know. (Linden 1975)
Even in its voluble directness, the comment is a little hard to parse.

Usually, those artists who deny "trying to get across any messages"
are the same ones who claim that the main goal is "just to tell a story."
But if this interview is to be trusted, Malick denies that too. Instead,
he adverts to effects, defined in sensual, emotional terms—a "sense,"
a "feel." Even here, though, these effects have little to do with cre-
ation or transmission of unique or unprecedented impressions: "It isn't
as if you'd been told anything you didn't already know."
If, even just for the sake of argument, we take this account as a kind
of provisional credo, it helps to explain attitudes toward subject mat-
ter in Malick's three completed films, or as they may be extrapolated
from the roster of unfinished projects or works in progress with which
Malick has been associated over the years. A i interest in the Charles
Starkweather murders, migrant farming in Texas during the Wilson

years, or the battle at Guadalcanal in World War II is hardly mystify-
ing, since these are topics of considerable general interest—as opposed
to the more specialized interest of such subjects as, say, the semiotics
of Maria Montez (in films by or with Jack Smith) or, for instance, the
erotics of high-school swimming teams (as in John Polston's Swimfan
[2002]).
While Malick seems attuned to the general-interest qualities of his
subjects, he takes no particular pains to mine fresh impressions of
them. Gestures of scrupulous historical accuracy (like the publicized
use of an authentic sixty-three-year-old coal burner in Days of Heaven)
time and again abut casual anachronisms (Richard Gere's stylishly m o d
haircut, in the same film). A rangy grasp of implications of the films'
subjects—social, political, psychological, cultural, historical, or philo-
sophical—allows no particular approach to predominate in their treat-
ment. N o particularly unfamiliar angles on the topics emerge, as if
Malick is indeed unconvinced of his capacity to tell viewers "anything
that you didn't already know," and if the films bid for originality at
all, it is at the level of tonal inflection or localized observation—
cutaway shots to minute details, or stray moments of digression.
The idea that a film's prime achievement is to convey "a sense of
things," or "a feel for the way the world goes," leaves quite open the
sorts of materials one might choose to make films about. N o t only
are Malick's approaches to subjects notable for their range of inner
resources, the subjects themselves suggest a scope of interest, concern,
and curiosity. A chronology of unfinished or in-progress work (stitched
together from multiple sources) reveals an even greater range of pos-
sibility, as well as playing out further contours in the nature of Malick's
interests.
In the twenty years after Days of Heaven, Malick's film career be-
comes a virtual catalogue of competing interests. His first announced
project after Days of Heaven was a script with the working title of Q.
Some pre-production began on this project in the summer of 1978,
even before the September release of Days of Heaven. By that point,
what had begun as a "multicharacter drama set in the Middle East
during World War I" (Gillis 1995, 62) had been wholly consumed by
its prologue, set in a prehistoric netherworld. A special effects con-
sultant Malick hired said that the project was designed to conjure a
"surrealistic reptilian world" (62) presided over by a Minotaur whose
point of view guides the story. Despite the World War I setting that
suggests some connection to the interests of Days of Heaven, this

phantasmagorical conception—easy enough to imagine as a showpiece
among the Lucas-Spielberg fantasies of the day—is nearly impossible
to imagine as a follow-up to Malick's first two films, even against the
p r e c e d e n t of the " D a w n of M a n " p r o l o g u e t o Kubrick's 2001.
Whether or not the cessation of this project indicates any awareness
of its seeming discordance, Malick left it on hold in the fall of 1979.
H e has reportedly returned to it intermittently over the years, sug-
gesting an extemporaneous quality of his interests that also comes out
in his working methods more generally. This willingness to mull over
a project, to allow it to ripen over time, to put it aside and go back
to it, is reminiscent of the practices of two other directors who nursed
various projects at length over the years, and to whose work Malick's
bears other affinities—Kubrick's, in its qualities of perfectionism, and
Orson Welles's, in its ad-lib virtuosity.
T h r o u g h o u t the 1980s, in no apparent rush to make a film, Malick
worked on various screenplays. Rumor had it, from time to time, that
he was adapting Walker Percy's 1961 novel The Moviegoer (one report
claimed Tim Robbins and Julia Roberts had been cast and the film
was "in production"), or working on a script about the "Lost Gen-
eration," possibly another turn in the (2 project. The semiabsurdist
morality play of Percy's Southern Gothic novel might have proved an
apt vehicle for the maker of Badlands and Days of Heaven, wiiile the
interest in the marginalia of wartime cultures evident in Days of Heaven
and The Thin Red Line could have been given free reign in the "Lost
Generation" project.
The three scripts it seems clear Malick worked on in the 1980s,
in the light of speculation under which we must view^ them, all po-
tentially admit a characteristic sort of folk m o d e r n i s m . " H u n g r y
H e a r t " reportedly reworked a script by Robert Dillon, screenwriter
on a n u m b e r of n o t a b l e films, including two movies with Sissy
Spacek, Prime Cut and Richard Pearce's The River ( 1 9 8 4 ) , as well
as an unfilmed adaptation of the Irving Wallace novel The Fan Club.
" D e s e r t R o s e " adapted the 1 9 8 3 Larry M c M u r t r y novel of the
same n a m e , itself originating in a screen t r e a t m e n t according to
McMurtry's preface to the novel's 1984 edition (in which he makes
no mention of Malick's version). Tougher than Terms of Endearment
and less brittle than Hud or The Last Picture Show—three previously
filmed M c M u r t r y novels—Desert Rose's tale of a Las Vegas showgirl
and her daughter should have proved a departure for Malick, wiiile
perhaps letting him rhyme the landscapes of his native Texas with
those of Vegas's postmodern backdrops.
A project for which Malick wrote a treatment about Jerry Lee Lewis
reached the screen with a different script in 1989 as Great Balls of Fire,
directed by former avant-gardist {David Holzman'sDiary [ 1967]) and
t e m p o r a r y H o l l y w o o d insider Jim McBride. By m o s t accounts,
Malick's script was "darker" (Gillis 1995, 61), and it is easy to imag-
ine this chronicle of a hell-raiser's downfall as a telling companion piece
to Badlands. A project announced in 1992, a reportedly "loose" stage
adaptation (Lopate 1999) of Kenji Mizoguchi's 1958 masterpiece
Sansho the Bailiff to be directed by Andrzej Wajda, developed over a
period of at least two years: A report on its progress as of 1994 (Shteir
1 9 9 4 , 8 4 - 8 6 ) gives some indication that the enterprise was belea-
guered, and despite the extent of its development, it never came to
pass.
Unless, that is, one learns to regard preparation, conception, and
development as themselves a coming to pass, a form of fruition. Like
Welles's career, Malick's teaches the value of process over product.
During his fifty-year career, Welles's silences wêre sometimes enforced,
his projects actively discouraged, yet he completed exactly the same
number of films, a lucky thirteen, as Stanley Kubrick, the type of the
contemporary auteur with complete autonomy. Despite the exquisite
textures of Malick's finished films, in one way or another all three relate
ambivalently to the idea of completion. The polished surfaces do not
conceal the willfully unresolved tensions of plot, theme, style, and each
film pronounces some sense, to greater or lesser degrees, of open-
endedness. Scanning the chronology of Malick's projects, one is struck
by range and consistency, a recurrent interest in particular settings or
iconographies, a drive toward the familiar, evident in (among other
things) the relation to sources, or in the prominence of adaptations
of various types. O n e is equally impressed, at the same time, by a
quality of adaptability, a willingness to rove afield.
As of this writing (fall 2 0 0 2 ) , Malick's current project is reported
to be a script of "The English Speaker," an adaptation of the "Anna
O . " case study from Breuer and Freud's Studies in Hysteria. The rela-
tive difference of this project from the context of Malick's work to
date is not undermined by a premonition that this meditation on the
founder of the "talking cure" in psychoanalysis could very well recur
to Malick's interest in the psychology or philosophy of language as
human action. Both the difference and the recurrence are important,
signifying a will to enlarge, as palpably as a twenty-year hiatus from

filmmaking might signify not so much a lack, as an interest in the larger
world.
ANTONIONI AND MALICK: SURFACES OF

WORLDS
Malick's films, while highly regarded by critics and cinephiles, have

nevertheless posed difficulties with respect to their position within con-
temporary cinema, if not the history of film more generally. They
appear an odd fit in whichever category one may try to place them.
In some ways characteristic of American cinema—Hollywood or in-
dependent—they are ultimately too idiosyncratic in their uses of stars,
classical narration, industrial modes of production, and so on. Yet even
while they challenge the familiar conventions of Hollywood, the films
are deeply inflected by a certain ironic attitude and refusal of limits
that ring patently American. If Malick does not necessarily make films
for an exclusively or even specifically American audience, it is still the
case that his films are widely screened in America upon their release.
Conversely, this doesn't mean that in such cases he has a wide Ameri-
can audience. Often, Malick's films are regarded as highbrow works,
a designation that suggests they are not popular films after all, but
rather entries in the category of art cinema. Indeed, the modernist
character of the films, with their feeling for ambiguity, paradox, and
mystery, suggests an affiliation with the 1960s European cinema of
directors such as Godard and Resnais, Bertolucci and Antonioni—film-
makers whose work has posed similar challenges to national, cultural,
and historical categorization.
Of the directors mentioned, Antonioni may seem at first glance to
be the least connected to Malick's work, but a comparison between
the two turns out to be more suggestive than to the others named.
Malick's films attest to an existential crisis that pervades modern life,
as do the films of Antonioni, but their effect in this regard must be
contrasted with films like VAvventura, La Notte, VEclisse, and The Red
Desert. The dread of being that suffuses Antonioni's films is located
precisely in the bourgeois class—a positioning that does not always
translate quite so readily to American culture, a point which may ac-
count for the fact that the malaise in Malick's films is more diffuse,
hence less readable or interpretable. At the same time, the existential
concerns of Malick's films are, if anything, better integrated than in

Antonioni's work within the social and historical concerns of the films
themselves, however complex their relation to those contexts may be.
Malick and Antonioni share a conception about the role of charac-
ters in their films to the extent that each avoids the motivating influ-
ence of psychology. The construction of character is displaced from
the level of action to that of mise-en-scene, so that the characters ap-
pear as objects and function metaphorically. The effect of this strat-
egy is similar in both directors' films: it manifests a state of human
alienation, but does not necessarily ground this condition in a way that
privileges the human world over the natural world. Rather, Malick and
Antonioni suggest that, in modernity, everything is an object—and
that objects can preserve the mystery of the wôrld through their sen-
suous surfaces and invisible relations. Within this schema, interestingly,
Malick's films are decidedly less interested in the problem of female
subjectivity; an issue that is clearly a central concern of Antonioni's
work, as evidenced by the centrality of Monica Vitti in the Italian films
of the 1960s.
A connection also exists in the poetic address that both Malick and
Antonioni achieve. This mode seems to derive from the lyricism of
their cinematography, the use of the long take as an expressive device,
the ellipses within the narration. To compare the desert in Red Desert
or the park in BlowUp to, say, the fields in Days of Heaven or the town
at the start of Badlands may seem to be a stretch on the face of it.
Yet all are spaces where people wander, where this sense of aimless-
ness emerges as a defining feature of the locale. It is what these places
are there for. The shots of the empty streets at the end of VEclisse
find an answer in the shots of the empty streets at the start of Bad-
lands.
Consider the hillside of The Thin Red Line in tandem with the is-
land of VAvventura. From place to place there is, in the manner in
which they are observed, an affinity between these spaces. Wind, for
instance, is important to the setting of both: its sound, its invisible
influence, ruffling the grass and the trees, pervasive, unseen, unac-
knowledged. The wind makes these spaces seem at once animated and
fraught with a kind of entropy. Both locations are remote and rela-
tively self-contained, and if one is clearly dangerous while the other
was meant to afford privileged leisure, both remain spaces where, af-
ter a time, and seemingly as a matter of course, people are lost. The
lack of acknowledgment is critical: it has something to do with an-
other trait these two figures share—a quality of self-reflection that

forever withdraws, once asserted. It seems to be there in the first place
because neither one can help it, but severely mutes itself, finally, be-
cause both hold it in suspicion.
The gaze from both directors' cameras expresses, from time to time,
a sense of removal from the subjects that has been understood as cold,
detached, indifferent, or at least neutral. In both, these multiple senses
of removal interact dynamically, and if there are long stretches where
landscape, cityscape, or a human countenance is looked at as if it were
just itself, and nothing else, this will always give way, in a brief undo-
ing, to the sense that things are not just themselves—they also have
meaning. We realize this in the moment when an allegory that has
been resisted successfully presses itself suddenly forward: the moment,
for instance, when we know those deserts (in Red Desert or The Pas-
senger) are not just deserts, but images of sterility; when the clouds
at the end of Badlands signify more than we can comprehend; or when
we cut back to the dropped glass resting at the bottom of the lake in
Days of Heaven or to the torments of the crocodile in The Thin Red
Line. A clinical lyricism is often on view in the work of both film-
makers. Their compositions remark how hard it is to give an image
meaning, then how hard it is to keep it from meaning. In its sense of
the obduracy and expressiveness of the film image, their work figures
a kind of abstraction that is profoundly cinematic.
Cinema time, in the particular manner that it breaches the conti-
nuity and linearity of human time, is then able to convey aspects of
things that are not otherwise apparent. The standard categories of
time—past, present, and future—are confounded by cinema in its ca-
pacity to represent simultaneity. Cinema invents a unique polytemporal
structure that involves compression and expansion of time. Procedures
of alternation, fragmentation, and superimposition destabilize the
human perception of space. Cinema space is constructed by the shot
and by editing. Together, they often achieve a poetic effect in their
displacement of usual subject-object relations. A perfect example of
this may be found in The Thin Red Line.
Toward the beginning of the film, there is an emotive sequence
that begins with a shot of Witt looking over his shoulder, followed
by one of the children playing behind him. The next shot is of an-
other man (both he and Witt have deserted their company) touch-
ing a tropical bird that stands on his arm; cut to a close-up of Witt
looking down, with his head resting on his hand. This last shot
dissolves to a close-up of two pairs of hands on a bedspread, hold-

ing and caressing each other—the association of hands carries the
dissolve, but eliding of space and time has no apparent motivation.
An older woman is lying in a bed, obscured in part by the back of a
man in the immediate foreground, yet we see her reaching toward
a girl w h o also has one arm lifted; then a close-up of a birdcage in
front of an illuminated window r shade, with a pair of small birds
jumping inside; then a close-up of the dress the girl is wearing, which
has an intricate lace inset; then a close-up of the girl lightly touch-
ing the woman's chest before they embrace—the girl smiles calmly;
followed by a camera pan across the headboard of the bed, decora-
tive wallpaper, and a pendulum clock hanging on the wall, then tilt
up into the corner of the r o o m tow 7 ard the impossible ceiling—a
bright blue sky. The end of this shot is the beginning of a dissolve
t o the next one, a wide and long shot that takes in the blue ocean
and eventually finds Witt sitting alone on the rocky beach. It would
be easy to account for the sequence if we identify it with Witt as his
memory. But what is affecting is the impression of stilled, overlap-
ping time, and the identification of space with objects and gestures
that are at once here and there.
Antonioni's Identification of a Woman has a m o m e n t similar to the
above sequence, however more brief—it is only two shots. The first
shot is in the apartment of the main character, Niccolo, where he stares
at a stark white wall. It begins with him facing away from the cam-
era, and then a slow zoom over his shoulder until the wall completely
fills the frame. A dissolve reveals the second shot of his lover, Mavi,
w h o is standing naked beside a bathtub. She addresses the camera
directly with an offhanded remark about cellulite and, in voice-over,
Niccolo responds. Unlike the sequence in The Thin Red Line, it is
impossible to say whether the m o m e n t is a m e m o r y or fantasy—it
could be either, or something else altogether. The inscrutability of the
m o m e n t is what makes it also haunting. The extraordinary final shot
of Antonioni's The Passenger is also relevant here.
The films of Malick and Aitonioni exemplify a lyric potential of cin-
ema, calling attention to the way in which it is charged with radical
possibility. Cinema is most poetic at those moments it produces mean-
ings that cannot be translated into language, and thus it challenges
the hegemony of social institutions dependent on the instrumental-
ity oflanguage. Relationships between language and society, language
and power, are a central concern of 1960s structuralist philosophy—
continued in the discourses of postmodernity—and so it is not sur-

prising that films contemporary to this set of ideas might also reflect
them. These films tell us that cinema is, or can be, as much a form of
philosophy as it is a form of poetry.
"I DON'T FEEL ONE CAN FILM PHILOSOPHY"
Is Malick a philosophical filmmaker? He himself denies it: "I don't

feel one can film philosophy" (Linden 1975). But Stanley Cavell—
who, not incidentally, taught philosophy at Harvard while Malick stud-
ied there—implies something even more specialized, that Malick's
filmmaking realizes principles of the philosophy of Heidegger. In
making this claim, Cavell says he does not "wish to hide" (Cavell 1979,
xv) the knowledge that Malick translated Heidegger's 1929 text Vom
Wesen des Grundes into English, as The Essence of Reasons, in 1969.
The fact has been mentioned often in ruminations on a general philo-
sophical bent of Malick's films. This approach risks committing the
auteurist (and very un-Heideggerian) sin of enlisting an initiating
event, or an alleged point of origin, as a principal cause or ongoing
influence. Yet it would be as much a mistake to ignore The Essence of
Reasons translation altogether as it would to turn it into a ground, a
portent, or an inaugural gesture. The relevance for Malick's films of
his early work on Heidegger is not of a general order, but of a highly
localized and specific nature.
The title alone is suggestive. If not immediately concerned with the
question of "essence," Malick's films express a very direct interest in
causality. Each begins with an instant or a manifestation of violence,
the cause of which is at issue. Each pursues a narrative course that
suspends or reroutes the ordinary operations of causality in
storytelling. In Badlands, Kit's killing of Holly's father may not be
entirely causeless, but it remains shockingly unforeseeable, and the
flight that follows has no real object save escape. The conflict between
Bill and the foreman at the start of Days of Heaven induces accident
as motive, and the apparent object of the film's narrative shifts sev-
eral times in a short period—in what is, after all, a strikingly short film,
speaking relatively and considering the span of the plot. The initiat-
ing violence of The Thin Red Line precedes the start of the story, and
is both cosmic and social. In the film's first line, Witt muses, "What
is this war in the heart of nature?" A soldier who has deserted the army,
Witt is aware of universal conflict, an awareness that seems obliquely

related to the experience of the official, enforced violence that has sent
him AWOL.
Malick's introduction to his translation of Heidegger's work is re-
markable for its lucidity. What is especially noteworthy is that this rip-
ened articulacy, reflecting depth of t h o u g h t and long acquaintance,
is put into the service of defining, and even defending, Heidegger's
opacity. Writing about growing differences between Heidegger and
his mentor, Husserl, Malick remarks, "Which is to say, at the very least,
that we should not think it is clear what 'world' means and unclear
what c Dasein' means; we can be no clearer about one than we are
about the other" (Heidegger 1969, xiv). The sly turn at the end of
the sentence, after wê have been led to expect some illumination of
one term over another, goes nearly so far as to assert confusion as a
positive value. Malick returns forcefully to this theme later in the in-
t r o d u c t i o n , arguing that H e i d e g g e r ' s disparate concepts can be
grasped only when we place them in the system of his thought as a
whole: "Until then, it is confusing how one goes about understand-
ing him or, rather, how one decides when one has understood him and
whether one has understood him as others must" (xv-xvi). In the el-
egance of its balance, and the emphasis on its qualifications, the sen-
tence (like much of Malick's prose here) could claim Heidegger as its
model. The point is that this "confusion" lingers as a constructive pos-
sibility, that "it has its own discipline" (xvi). " A i d only if we know
how we stand related to [Heidegger]," Malick adds in the same pas-
sage, "will we also know what to make of our confusion." This will-
ingness to leave primary questions unresolved, to think of confusion
as a productive principle—to be " m a d e " something of—prefigures
fundamental themes and styles of Malick's work in film: the relation
of lucidity to obscurity, of clarity to disorder, of transcendence to
obliviousness.
Heidegger's contribution to the philosophy of reasons is to show
the basis of cause in transcendence. H e does so through a logic that
seems, characteristically, at once monstrously rigorous and formally
opaque. Heidegger is concerned with the relation of everyday exist-
ence to the sum and ground of Being, and though it is unclear that
such a relation can or should ever be verified, he often begins with a
proposition determined by it. A principle of sufficient reason, he says—
that is, a modest constituent of causality in everyday life, a sort of zero-
degree threshold at which things can make a little sense—can be
adduced only from a sphere of primordial Truth: "An essential rela-

tionship to something like 'reasons' dwells at the very heart of truth"
(Heidegger 1969, 19). Localized reasons for things can only be sin-
gular, unique, monadic, but they arise from a reservoir of truths that
can be either singular or universal, but must be "consonant," resolved
into an essential identity. Reasons are the traces of Truth in everyday
existence, which reveal the intentions of those who draw on them and
show a will to Truth that constitutes their own essence. From this
premise comes Heidegger's departure from philosophical tradition: "If
the essence of reasons has an inner relationship to the essence of truth,
then the problem of reasons can likewise be at home only where the
essence of truth derives its inner possibility, namely, in the essence of
transcendence" (29).
Despite the exacting turns of Heidegger's syntax, it is not precisely
clear where we are here: on the relatively hard ground of reasons,
truth, or even transcendence—whose ground may remain at least con-
ceptually solid—or in the inner sanctum of their essences, which must
be housed in some unlocatable elsewhere. Things have essences in the
first place, Heidegger typically assumes, because they do not have iden-
tity. No being is identical with itself because it changes over time, so
every being that manifests a stable objecthood must have some prin-
ciple within it that allows it to achieve a degree of sameness in its be-
ing—and that is, says Heidegger, its essence. Heidegger follows
tradition in conceiving transcendence as a condition that arises in the
relation between ordinary diurnal being and essential Being. But the
question of who or what transcends what or whom, and when, where,
or why, is less clear. Heidegger's take on the issue comprises a series
of fitful comings and goings, where every "subject" transcends Be-
ing in the mere fact of having a delimited, embodied self, and there-
fore not embodying Being itself; or where Being transcends itself by
moving out into the world, presumably in the form of embodied sub-
jects. "To be a subject means to be a being in and as transcendence
. . . What is surpassed is simply being itself" (Heidegger 1969, 3 7 -
39, italics in original).
In other words (to simplify considerably), transcendence is a two-
way street. The moment Heidegger adverts to a simple spatial meta-
phor—"Transcendence means surpassing" (Heidegger 1969, 35)—he
evokes a sort of bustling metaphysical traffic, in which the passenger
on the road to nirvana should not be surprised to meet Immanent
Being itself, speeding past in the opposite direction, in haste to
overtake the usual, the customary, and the regular. Where philosophi-
cal tradition, as well as c o m m o n usage, tended to view transcendence
as a special, largely inaccessible condition in which the subject rises
above the quotidian in a timeless instant of surpassing purity,
Heidegger redefines it as a common experience, present in the every-
day. It can signify a trajectory from essence to quotidian as fully as it
can signify the reverse movement. If, as Heidegger contends, "tran-
scendence means surpassing" in some literal way, then to walk past a
table means to transcend it. It becomes another of those "always-al-
ready" phenomena Heidegger is famous for insisting upon. With ev-
ery move we make, or every minute that passes, we could see ourselves
in a state of transcendence, because we are always surpassing something,
or something is surpassing us.
Similar senses of transcendence come to light in Malick's films. It
is not that Malick's work evinces any particular or defining interest in
the everyday (as Cassavetes's films do, for instance), only that he con-
stantly reminds us of the charge that infuses everything around us,
from the cosmic to the abject. H e does not do so, however, by striv-
ing to bring these things "to life"—as does, say, Joris Ivens in some
of his earliest lyric films, like The Bridge (1928) or Rain (1929), wiiere
the elements of everyday life seem animated by inner rhythms of their
own. More often than not, in Malick's films, objects appear inert, and
transcendence resides in a mute, reciprocal encounter between preg-
nable humanity and inanimate nature. The haunting recurrent shot
of a scarecrow in a field in Days of Heaven is an apt example. The image
has about it something of the grotesque or the uncanny. An absurd
effigy—an insensate imitation of human being—the scarecrow hangs
against an open sky vibrant with dusky light. It could be a puppet,
fashioned as a model by a god who did not hold humans in high re-
gard. Yet it endures, shot by shot, holding its place amid the beauties
of the world as if it would be one of them. With each shot its famil-
iarity confers a greater dignity, even in its grotesquerie, as we remem-
ber it is not the product of indifferent gods after all, but a thing made
by people who are no longer there. Something of the same kind could
be said of the closely related image of the stone dwarf we glimpse near
the end of the same film, in a series of shots that eloquently articu-
late a sense of the transcendent in the everyday. Amid the surround-
ings of the farmhouse, when no one seems at home, we glimpse the
dwarf, an empty gazebo, a whirring mill-fan, a potted plant in a shad-
owed corner. Some of these things we've seen before, in contexts that
gave them life and purpose, so that what is striking about them now,
even in the memory of having seen them before, is how bereft they
look—how abandoned or, we might even say, surpassed. For especially
in this film, where plans and schemes come to naught, where when-
ever people resolve to act they find themselves only acted upon, tran-
scendence seems present everywhere, yet available n o w h e r e . It is
indeed a Heideggerian sense of things. The apparent and uncharac-
teristic optimism of Heidegger's naming transcendence as a dimen-
sion of daily life may be belied by a tragic implication—that, for this
very reason, we can never really know it.
H O L L Y W O O D RENAISSANCE—WAX A N D W A N E
A capsule history of American filmmaking of the 1970s could be

written around Badlands and Days of Heaven. The arc described by
the trajectory of these films conforms to a standard understanding of
the period. Badlands is the kind of film that gets made fortuitously
when new possibilities—styles, powers, forces—are on the rise, and
Days of Heaven is the kind that gets made after those possibilities have
become entrenched. You can see the differences right there on the
screen—in the austere elegance of Badlands and the more polished,
less modest refinements of Days of Heaven. At least one high-profile
take on the decade, Peter Biskind's spasmodic exercise in gossip, Easy
Riders, Raging Bulls, has no trouble seeing Malick's career as entirely
representative of the wax and wane of the Hollywood Renaissance, but
though the two films chart a general course from indie to blockbuster,
they also articulate possibilities that were not, on the whole, pursued
elsewhere in the New Hollywood.
By most accounts, Badlands started with a script—not with a
"pitch" or a "concept" that forged a "deal" or a "package." Ed Press-
man, an independent producer with one mildly impressive credit, Brian
De Palma's art-horror thriller Sisters (1973), was persuaded to front
$350,000 for the shoot. The new twist in indie production of the time
was the large number of films made, essentially, on speculation, with
no guarantee of distribution, but with the hope of taking advantage
of the "product shortage" caused by crises in the studio base of the
industry (Cook 2 0 0 0 , 3 3 1 , 4 2 2 - 2 5 ) . One result was a rise in private
compacts with exhibitors, or "four-wâlling" deals for screenings, the
route followed in the release of Sisters, which was making its way
through the American South with publicists in towT to promote it as

late as 1975 (Biskind 1 9 9 8 , 2 7 9 ) . A new model was the so-called
"showcase" opening, preferably at a prestigious nontheatrical venue—
museum or archive—with filmmakers present to field questions from
the audience, to garner attention for the film before wider distribu-
tion was attempted. This was the model followed with Badlands. The
film wâs given a prominent screening at the New York Film Festival
in fall 1 9 7 3 , and was subsequently shown (on April 4, 1974) at the
Kennedy Center of the American Film Institute in Washington, D.C.,
in a screening introduced by Malick himself. By the time the film was
released that same April, it had a reputation among insiders. Pauline
Kael's negative review in The New Yorker was published weeks before
the opening, yet it aired a peevish tone that must have puzzled her
readers, since this tone was ordinarily reserved for her forceful dissents
from established critical opinion. In this case, clearly, no general con-
sensus could have been reached yet, and what Kael was obviously re-
sponding to was the film's pre-release "buzz"—a new concept, in its
way, though the word would not gain real currency for another fifteen
years.
The producers' risk on Badlands paid off Warner Brothers, one stu-
dio eager at the time to buy and distribute independent films to com-
pensate for the " p r o d u c t shortage," b o u g h t Badlands for nearly a
million dollars—twice the cost of production, according to Variety
(though Biskind claims this amount barely covered production costs).
It was the largest sum to that date that the studio had paid for ac-
quiring an independently made film (after paying half to two-thirds
of that sum for the purchase of Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets). Sig-
nificantly, for the acquisition of Badlands, the studio outbid a com-
peting interest, Cinema 5 Ltd., a company in the business of acquiring
and distributing independently made films—and a predecessor, as an
influence on indie cinema, of the Miramax of the 1980s and early
1990s. b This victory of a stagnating studio over a brash new7 organi-
zation created specifically to answer New Hollywood's needs makes
it harder to conceive of the " n e w " forces as always unquestionably
triumphant in this whole sequence of events. Soon after this defeat,
Francis Ford Coppola purchased Cinema 5 in the hope of distribut-
ing his own films, but the company failed nonetheless (Cook 2 0 0 0 ,
136). All of this suggests that the history of the Hollywood Renais-
sance, so often written as a stirring account of new beginnings, could
just as easily be written as a series of endings and failures. In Holly-
wood, sometimes, you can't tell the vibrant from the moribund.
If the production of Badlands is a case study in the rising currents

of indie filmmaking in the '70s, Days of Heaven suggests something
of how studio filmmaking accommodated the new trends. According
to Biskind, the project began as a "deal," discussed on a celebrity jun-
ket to Cuba (Biskind 1998, 296). As the film went into production
in 1976, under the working title Stay Hungry (a title swiped by Bob
Rafelson for his 1976 film of that name), Variety referred to it as an
"indie pic." 6 The currency of the term as of that early date is strik-
ing, but the fact is that the film was financed, from the start, through
a cooperative agreement between a successful free-agent producer
(Bert Schneider) and the head of Paramount Pictures (Barry Diller).
At a time when commentators were already lamenting the decline of
the New Hollywood auteur—in the wake of Spielberg's Jaws (1975),
the success of wiiich is often cited as the turning point—this kind of
collaboration between independents and studios marked a blurring of
a boundary that had been crucial in forging the sensibilities of the New
Hollywood. It was a kind of synergy not unheard of in Hollywood's
history—the examples of Walter Wanger and David O. Selznick come
to mind—but by the late 1960s, the split between indie progressive -
ness and studio backwardness had become a point of honor and an
article of faith. In an important sense, Days of Heaven is a chapter in
the subversion of this polarity.
Shot with new technologies of camera and sound, the film boasts
a high-tech gloss that, especially combined with its experiments in
form and structure, places it a m o n g the most oddly characteristic
films of that time, along with, say, New York, New York, One from
the Heart, Dressed to Kill, The Shining, and American Gigolo. It shares
with such films a new commitment to the importance and value of
^.reproduction. T h o u g h no reconstruction of this creative process
is really possible, involved parties speak of Malick's "finding" the
movie after filming, over a two-year period of editing. Such pro-
tracted work on the film after shooting would have been unthink-
able in the studio years. It was made possible by the blending of ideas
concerning creative autonomy, produced by the indie revolution,
with the sustenance of studio resources. For a while, this synthesis
resulted in a new7 kind of movie, of wiiich Days of Heaven may be
the most impressive specimen.
Patterns of the film's release also reveal changing, or changed,
attitudes toward films as creative commodities. Citing the film's
commercial potential, representatives of Paramount did not preview7
Days of Heaven at festivals, pointedly withholding it from the New
York Film Festival, a venue that had been so crucial in the presenta-
tion of Malick's previous film.7 Instead, in honor of its high-tech pedi-
gree, the film was given specialized "road show" exhibition in selected
venues. For these showings, it was blowm up to 70 m m and shown
with six-track stereo sound, with programs distributed at screenings
and reserved tickets often sold in advance. This mode of exhibition
was a short-lived sidelight of the boom in high-concept filmmaking
of the late '70s, and such other distinctive films as Cimino's The Deer
Hunter (1977) received a similar treatment in their initial runs. It is
significant that such efforts to validate the new films looked back to
the age of the show palace, or to the "legitimate" theater. At this criti-
cal turning point, the new mavericks were trying to recapture the aura
of an earlier age of movies; the consolidation of new technologies pro-
duced new nostalgias. N o wonder it didn't last.
V E R S I O N S OF MALE BEAUTY
The notion of male beauty can only serve as a kind of referent; it

is too general and singular for whatever may be signified in reality. In
its search for a form, it bypasses time altogether—it evades the par-
ticular and differential—so that it may be seen to arrive inevitably at
myth. As a mythic idea, male beauty transcends culture and history,
yet we only perceive it in such instances. The classical art of ancient
Greece considers the male body as a vessel of civic and humanistic
ideals (duty, honesty, self-sacrifice). These representations are appro-
priately static and therefore (or at least so they seem to imply) un-
available for desire—made rational by their construction to fore-
ground values of wholeness and coherence. In the romanticist art of
eighteenth- or nineteenth-century Europe, however, the male has an
earthly body that contends with nature. The representations of male
beauty are heroic; at the same time they are melancholy—expressing
intensity of feeling amidst broken or partial order.
Painting and sculpture, regardless of their intrinsic values, are given
to idealization, if only because they do not represent real bodies, un-
mediated by the subjectivity of an artist. Thus the technological arts
of the twentieth century—photography and cinema—may be seen as
uniquely capable of representing male beauty. This is true of the latter
more than the former, perhaps, as photography renders bodies static
in a way that allies its procedures with those of the other media. Only
in cinema, then, do we glimpse real male bodies that inhabit both

space and time ( m o v e m e n t is essential t o a certain kind of male
beauty). But they are not real bodies—actually, they are projections
of bodies—and so once again male beauty is elusive, even in cinematic
representation, which had, as early as the experiments of Muybridge,
claimed to apprehend it.
In all of Malick's work, there is one shot that directly denotes erotic
attraction—the shot of Abby, walking in the fields, as seen through
the lens of the farmer's telescope. The shot is characteristically reti-
cent, as we see it before we see the farmer looking, and though the
shot is an iris, making us aware of Abby as the object of someone's
gaze, we do not know it signifies the farmer's desiring look until the
next shot. It has none of the psychosexual intensity of the gaze in a
quintessential instance like Hitchcock's Vertigo, though it remains sig-
nificant that it is a shot of a man looking at a woman with longing.
Longing is expressed, somehow, in all of Malick's films, but it always
seems strangely defused, as if even those who feel it know it isn't real.
In general, the characters are apprehended by the camera's gaze with
a kind of distant tenderness, yet there is something in these films' ways
of looking at men, especially in light of their apparent withdrawal from
a concern with the erotics of looking, that demands a more extended
commentary.
From the start of Badlands, Martin Sheen appears in a white, tight-
fitting T-shirt and dirty blue jeans that suggestively gather around his
crotch. Later, he adds a denim jacket and we see that he wears a pair
of cowboy boots. His mop of hair is messily parted to one side, with
pushed-up bangs and long sideburns that complete the rebellious look.
High cheekbones structure his broad face, and his complexion is re-
markably smooth. Sheen is handsome. He comports a weary expres-
sion, wiiich may be explained in part by the heaviness of his eyelids.
But occasionally he squints in a way that mobilizes warmth and hu-
mor (sometimes the squint is combined with a cock of the head or
an upward nod). H e has a pronounced chin, and a goofy way of let-
ting his jaw drop wiiile his clear blue eyes do all the charm work.
His grin is too small for his face, in a way that seems boyish; yet
the WTinkles around his eyes, and the folds beneath them, belie any
notion of youthful innocence. He is an adult without adulthood. From
the moment he appears on-screen, we see him constantly in motion:
kicking a paper bag, stomping on a can, lighting a cigarette, tossing
an apple core, and so on. H e has a buoyancy that also seems languid.
As if conscious of his own restlessness, he stuffs his hands in his pock-

ets, but to no real effect. When he walks he sways, like a hoodlum in
a Broadway musical—the motion begins in his hips, transfers to his
shoulders, and ends in his swinging arms. He is not always mobile,
however; sometimes he appears still, or more precisely, frozen. In every
case, the idea is the same: waiting for something that never happens.
He moves in order to pacify himself, or to possess himself (when he
sleeps, he crosses his arms).
His body is at its most sexy in the forest ("Marble Hall") sequence,
after Kit and Holly run away together. Naked apart from his cutoff
shorts, he fishes in a stream and hunts rabbits, all the while showing
off a well-defined musculature; but the eroticism is complicated by the
Huck Finn parody, a sequence straight from a children's book (fig.
11). Sheen's brute masculinity is most interesting whenever it collides
with a contradictory gesture: the doyenne-like way he crosses his legs,
for instance, and the carefulness he brings to extinguishing a cigarette.
He also has a curious habit of pursing his lips. More often than not,
we see him at a distance (there are less than a handful of close-ups of
him) and isolated in the frame. The most striking of these composi-
tions is a shot of him ambling in a desert landscape—arms out-
stretched, slung over the rifle across his back, his head hanging
forward. It is a reference to a shot of James Dean in Giant; which is,
in turn, a reference to countless paintings of Christ on the cross.
In Days of Heaven, Richard Gere seems to be at pains to conceal
the desperation of his character, yet he remains a figure of pathos any-
way. From the opening scene, he behaves like an innocent who has
just received a life sentence, pushing against the edges of the frame
in fits of anxiety and aggression. It is impossible to say if he under-
stands his ordeal. His smug arrogance suggests an intellectual of sorts,
while his boyish curiosity and occasional bewilderment make him seem
unwitting—more a victim, less a perpetrator, of some deception. If he
is a dupe, he is certainly a beautiful one. In the close-up shots of him,
he exudes a smoldering sexuality, but the eroticism never quite takes
hold. Time and time again, he is reduced to a mere presence in a
dominant landscape.
Throughout the film, he combines a watchman-like posture with
the tracking movements of a gamekeeper. Formal and automatic, his
body is emblematic of the modern. He moves according to a program,
or as if to the programmed beats of a discotheque (how would John
Travolta have played this part?): a flick of the wrist, a deliberate turn
Fig. 11. Versions of male beauty: Martin Sheen in Badlands. Courtesy of

Photofest.
of the head, a slight bounce when he stands. His body almost always
works in miniature. The gestures are rhythmic, closed off, and indica-
tive of fashion modeling more than of itinerant labor. When he walks,
for instance, there is a stylish delay before each step—a small twist and
thrust of his hips. In the only moment his body appears liberated from
constraint, he is playing spontaneously in a river with black dogs

and a red ball. The sequence registers as a fantasy by the lack of
encumbrance and self-consciousness.
Gere has a sense of his own sexiness. H e conveys this as he runs
his hand sensually through his wavy hair, or when he seems pleased
by his dancelike strut. Yet the beauty of his face may be too much for
him to master. His features are modeled in a way that suggests Ro-
man sculpture—a portrait of an ambitious senator, perhaps. His face
is broad and made imposing, demonstrative, by the bluntness of his
large nose and the fullness of his lips, not to mention his dark, nar-
row eyes (charged with electric energy). H e has an expressive smile
that, though reticent, is generously wide, and comical for the two front
teeth that protrude. But almost always, his expression is resolutely
impassive, as if he is trying to defend himself against the gaze of oth-
ers—against the threat of their desire.
The first shots of Jim Caviezel in The Thin Red Line are of him row-
ing in a dugout. H e is tall and lean, with a smooth physique. His body
would suggest an aesthetic, perhaps, if it were not for his broad and
muscled shoulders (fig. 12). In the Melanesia!! idyll sequence that
opens the film, he wears loose, standard-issue trousers that hang eroti-
cally low on his waist, emphasizing the length of his bare torso. H e
wears nakedness w i t h o u t a trace of self-consciousness. His wide
mouth—along with his large, oval eyes—balances slightly elongated
and symmetrical features. The eyes are dark, or seem so in relation to
his short, jet-black hair. Between his nose and upper lip there is an
elegant cleft; and there are the refined cheekbones, set high to form
a shallow plateau under his eyes. To say his face is pretty would not
be wrong, but it would be better to say it is beautiful.
At certain moments, he achieves an astonishing expression. His face
registers simultaneous grief and delight, poised at such moments be-
tween a sob and a smile. More typically, he expresses little—a blank-
ness that seems to emanate from an inner serenity, something captured
by the frequent close-ups that regard him. The camera observes him
closely, while he stares intensely at something beyond the frame.
Rather than a participant in the action, his character is a witness to
the world (the gaze testifies to Being). H e will perform the same ges-
tures as the other men, but always in a slower, more contemplative
fashion, such that he seems to occupy a space and time altogether
different from theirs. When he reaches out to one of them—in the
m o m e n t he rinses a dying soldier's head, for instance—his touch is
Fig. 12. Versions of male beauty: Jim Caviezel in The Thin Red
Line. Courtesy of Photofest.
deliberate and tender. When he looks at them, his countenance sug-

gests that of a benevolent lover.
Eventually, Japanese soldiers surround him in a clearing. He looks
upward to the sky, then directly at the camera as it draws nearer; in a
quick cut to a low angle, his body is catapulted violently backward.
The last shots of Caviezel are of him swimming underwater with chil-
dren. In the transparent blue liquid, his beautiful body could seem
balletic—all limbs and movement—but it is too wondrously free of

gravity.
A problem with representations of the male body as an object of
desire is found in the cultural identification of male gender with power.
Malick addresses this problem specifically, by interrogating the notions
of duty and virtue that typically correspond with representations of
male beauty. Sheen may resemble James Dean, but he lacks the spon-
taneity and vulnerability that characterize Dean's ambiguous perfor-
mances. Sheen is not a rebel himself; he is too vacant for that. Rather,
he is compelled to imitate popular images of masculinity, as much to
steal from their eroticism as to enter into their rhetoric of individual-
ism.
Malick also observes in Gere's identification with cover model
images of male beauty a bid t o assume social privilege. T h e
commodification of male beauty by the fashion industry has the odd
effect of associating the male body with the more traditional objecti-
fication of the female body, in turn leading to the availability of the
male body for both male and female desire. It is precisely the prob-
lem of homosexual desire that Malick reveals in the passive-aggressive
beauty that Gere cultivates. Gere wants to be included in a system that
permits all forms of desire in the service of capital, yet he also wants
to protect his status as a heterosexual male. Malick is premonitory then
in his casting of Gere, wiiose later role in Paul Schrader's American
Gigolo may be the most trenchant depiction of postmodern male nar-
cissism.
If Malick handles the beauty of Sheen and Gere with confidence,
in relation to the question of desire and power, he seems less assured
with Caviezel. There is a striking resemblance between Caviezel in The
Thin Red Line and Christ images in religious icon paintings—a simi-
lar rigidity, order, and proportion define their features. As a result, it
appears Malick is interested in, or insufficiently critical of, the spiri-
tual aura that surrounds Caviezel. If considered another way, how-
ever—in relation to a question of beauty and the sublime—it becomes
apparent that Malick sees Caviezel's beauty as an alternative to the
structures of appearance and domination in contemporary culture.
For the Romantics, beauty was distinguished from the sublime; un-
like beauty, the sublime exceeded virtue and was recalcitrant to duty.
Thus the sublime was transcendent, because it was closer to divinity.
In the twentieth century, however, the Romantic sublime is converted
by kitsch into an aspect of bourgeois, sentimental fantasy. It is this
condition—the secularization of the sublime—which modernism re-

sponded to when it retreated to the beauty forms, with the assump-
tion that such forms might preserve the transcendent (even if they
could no longer express it). But if modern art struggles to communi-
cate under the weight of abstraction, it certainly does not show a path
to liberation. What Malick discovers in Caviezel is an idea for the dis-
sipation of vulgarity and simultaneous restitution of communication.
It is a simple idea: Caviezel's sensuous body affords pleasure at the
same time his austere features provoke aesthetic contemplation. The
body returns the sublime; the intellect holds the sublime.
BRAVING T H E ELEMENTS
Elemental imagery infuses Malick's work: earth, air, fire, water. The
meanings of these images are too various to lend themselves to easy
classification, but some associations recur. Earth signifies commun-
ion—the concord of the workers at the harvest in Days of Heaven, or
Linda's fantasy of her future in the same film: "I could be a m u d
doctor . . . Talk to the trees. In dreams they'd talk back to m e . " A r
signifies transcendence, the "aerial aspirations" that the characters in-
cline toward, and that Malick's wide shots of open sky yearn to prom-
ise. 8 Fire means redemption, of sorts. Principle of a Yeatsian "terrible
beauty," the fire that consumes Holly's house in Badlands or the fire
that follows upon the plague of locusts in Days of Heaven brings a
catharsis that promises a new liberty, a release (fig. 13). But the prom-
ise is short-lived: redemption inflicts evasion, transcendence entails
failure, c o m m u n i o n implies catachresis. For many artists, a turn to
elemental imagery marks a return to fundamental things, a stripping
away of inessentials. For Malick, the essential is as much part of a com-
plex as any other idea. Stripping away only reveals further notions for
contemplation, and Malick's images, in one of their dimensions, are
nodes of thought.
Water may be the most suggestive element in this pattern, for
Malick associates it repeatedly with d e a t h , especially with the
martyred deaths of vulnerable or helpless parties. The shooting of
Holly's dog in Badlands, the killing of Bill in Days of Heaven, and
the death of Witt in The Thin Red Line describe an arc of related
imagery across the three films. Where typical taxonomies of symbol
emphasize the life-giving properties and sustaining associations of
Fig. 13. Earth, air, water—fire: The plague of locusts in Days of Heaven.
water, these scenes emplace images of water in a nexus of mortifica-

tion. The dead dog is dumped in a lake; a slight lingering of the shot
that shows this encourages a certain indignity. We watch the bundled
corpse float—as we'll later watch Bill's dead body float—and we may
recall this with the next image of water in the film, a few scenes later,
as the camera tracks around a clump of vegetation sprouting from a
lake, initiating the sequence where Kit and Holly take up quarters
in the woods. That shot, in turn, is recalled in Days of Heaven, in-
troducing that film's penultimate sequence. Except for a silvery glim-
mer tingeing the shot of the later film, the two shots are nearly
identical. In their sudden expansiveness, they suggest an opening—
like the breathtaking first shot of the train crossing the bridge in Days
of Heaven—though the stately, circular movement of the camera
threatens to close it off. In fact, these shots may have influenced simi-
lar ones at the start of Kubrick's The Shining (1980), and though
without the overt menace of Kubrick's images, their qualities of ca-
paciousness combine with troubling notes of portent. They are im-
ages of sustenance: the water nourishes the vegetation that grows
from it. But the water also surrounds, and flows unceasingly with a
tranquility that is also an indifference. A version of this shot ends
The Thin Red Line, and after the death of Witt, it seems mournful,
even though it signifies unceasing life in the light of mortality. Water
gives life, maybe, but these stunted arboreal clumps that grow out
of the water—just what kind of life is this?
The scene of Bill's death culminates invocations of the themes of
Stephen Crane throughout Days of Heaven. The film's nature imag-
ery, despite its evident beauty, still reflects, at times, a Crane-like im-
peachment of nature's indifference. After the killing of the farmer,
when Abby, Bill, and Linda take flight, Linda speaks of what she sees
on land from the boat they're traveling on: "You could see people on
the shore . . . Maybe they were calling for help, or dumpin' somebody
or somethin'." The lines bring to mind Crane's story "The Open
Boat" (1898), where the ocean figures as a symbol of cosmic indif-
ference. The men stranded in the boat can see people on the shore,
but amid their trial by water, they cannot decode the signals the people
transmit to them from land. Only when the water yields them up, and
they return to solid ground, do they feel that "they could then be
interpreters"—to quote the startling last line of this tale that had not,
until this point, seemed to be about interpretation. In Days of Heaven,
Bill, pursued by the law, heads for the lake, but as he wades through
the water, he turns back to land, where he sees a well-dressed man
watching him run. The man gives no sign of interest; his gaze is im-
passive. But Bill, as desperate as Crane's castaways, must think he sees
a gesture of solace from that quarter, for he begins to run toward the
man, with a savage gratitude as if he expected to be saved. He is not
spared; and in the moment he is shot, we cut for an instant to a van-
tage point under the water, as Bill falls toward the camera. It is an
extraordinary shot: mercurial, brutal, and sad. The immediacy of it is
appalling. Falling toward us, Bill's body breaks through the water's
surface, causing wild, convulsive, beautiful undulations. In the next
instant, this sudden turbulence is past. We see, in a long shot, that
the water has regained its calm, and it bears Bill's corpse along on its
slow, perpetual current. On the shore, Linda does a quick little jig of
grief before reverting to a benumbed attitude that mimics the sea's
complacence.
Witt's death in The Thin Red Line transpires in a scene modeled on
the one from Days of Heaven. In both cases, the plot establishes some
exculpatory circumstance—Bill has killed a man, Witt is at war and
might kill his own murderers—just to make the point that every death
is an injustice. Surrounded by enemy soldiers, Witt waits, watches. A
long moment passes before he begins to raise his rifle, and is gunned
T
down. We have no way of knowing whether the raising of the gun,

or the killing, is decision or reflex. There is a quick cut on the shot—
we barely see the Idlling—to a low angle of looming trees, and then
an underwater shot of Witt swimming with natives. The rhythms of
the editing here are ordinal, continuous, as if Witt had fallen from one
shot into the next. For an instant, the film wants to fantasize his death
as a reversion to primordial happiness, but the next shot cuts off this
optimism—it shows Witt's grave. Fire, air, water, earth: harbingers of
life, all resolve in death.
NOTES
1. The term "frequentive" comes from the narrative theory of Gerard

Genette, referring to the representation of habitual rather than specific dra-
matic action. In one of the best treatments of Badlands, Brian Henderson
draws upon some of Genette's ideas to analyze the film's narrative and sty-
listic structures (Henderson 1983, 44).
2. The treatment of the Gothic here has been influenced by Frances
Ferguson in her chapter on "The Gothicism of the Gothic Novel" (Ferguson
1992, 97-113), and Sedgwick (1986), in general.
3. Background on the dispute may be found in Variety, April 16, 1979.
4. For discussion of the concept of the "star" in theoretical terms, see Dyer
1979, especially 38-98.
5. See Variety, November 7, 1975.
6. See Variety, September 2, 1976.
7. A source at the studio is quoted as defending holding the film out of
the festival on the grounds that "it's a great commercial film." See Variety,
September 15, 1978.
8. The phrase in quotes is owed to Alan Spiegel, from his fine article on
Badlands and Days of Heaven (Spiegel 1980, 140).
CHAPTER 4
In Production:
On the Work of Style
No "reputable literary critic," writes Susan Sontag in her essay "On

Style," "would care to be caught defending as an idea the old antith-
esis of style versus content" (Sontag 1966, 15). We have all learned
that style and content in a work of art bear an organic relation to each
other, she asserts, though in practice they remain often spoken of as
if content were the baseline for discussion and style a mere embellish-
ment, an afterthought. It is significant that Sontag's own essay is
largely devoted to a humiliation of content, to subjugating it to the
status of style. It is equally noteworthy that, after defining her terrain
as that of the "literary," she ranges breezily across the arts, as if the
styles of Sternberg, Welles, and Riefenstahl were products of the same
kinds of processes as those of Dante, Shakespeare, Chopin, Dreiser,
and Genet.
In On the History of Film Style, David Bordwell traces early neo-
Kantian reactions to the cinema that tried to define its "essence"
chiefly by distinguishing it from the other arts—themselves granted
an essence by virtue of their distinctions from each other. An agenda
of such debates, in books like Gilbert Seldes's The Seven Lively Arts
(1924), was often simply to defend film as art, to smuggle this poor
relation into the exclusive sorority of the "sister arts." Discussing
Andre Bazin's resistance to this model of understanding, Bordwell
writes that because of its recording capacity, cinema is "not the seventh
art. . . [It] is a medium first, an art only secondarily" (Bordwell 1997,
72). Clearly, what has always made film's status as art problematic is
its industrial basis, and Bordwell, accordingly, emphasizes the history

of technology in his account of film style.
Yet Bordwell's definition of style, congruent with the heritage of
traditional aesthetics, differs very little from Sontag's, which states:
"Style is the principle of decision in a work of art, the signature of
the artist's will" (Sontag 1966, 32). Bordwell, meanwhile, offers this
proposition: Style is "a film's systematic and significant use of tech-
niques of the medium" (Bordwell 1997, 4). Both definitions empha-
size choice in ways that trouble the writers' larger arguments. Sontag
not only flirts openly with the "intentional fallacy," but also reverts
to the discredited notion of content, in her implication that this "prin-
ciple," this "will," is somehow "in" the work, apparently manifest as
an element of its contents. Bordwell, for his part, transfers volition
from persons onto films—a perfectly legitimate slippage if its intent
is to reflect the collaborative or unconscious dimensions of film-
making—and then absents the whole issue by arguing that "the his-
tory of film style is a part of what is broadly taken to be the aesthetic
history of style" (Bordwell 1997, 4). Once the effect of style has been
extrapolated as a consummated outcome from the causes of means or
method, the substitution of aesthetics for technology follows, it seems,
as a matter of course.
Style is always the end of a process, and all the critic can really do
is try to reconstruct that operation from the evidence of a finished
work, or comment on it as if it were an end in itself. Bordwell puts it
this way:
The task facing the student of style . . . is one of reconstruction. On

the basis of surviving films and other documents, the historian recon-
structs a choice situation. This becomes a node within a hypothetical
network of purposes and functions, problems and solutions and new
problems, schemas and revisions and rejections (Bordwell 1997, 156).
Despite the authority of the rhetoric, it does seem that the reconstruc-
tion of style must always be, at best, "hypothetical" for Bordwell. Yet,
if this effort is always inadequate—since we can never get back, as the
deconstructionists reminded us, to the "scene of writing"—it is par-
ticularly deficient in film criticism because of two key aspects that dif-
ferentiate film style from that in o t h e r arts. First, technological
mediation is a determining constituent upon a film's composition, not
an incidental factor in its dissemination—as it could be said to be, for
instance, in literature. And second, in the industrial model of film
In Production 117
production, the malting of a film proceeds in clearly defined phases.

Behind most films, at least, there is a script, a kind of blueprint in
which the style of the film typically is not, or at least not fully, present.
Thus, the emergence of film style occurs, in part, as a dialogue among
this prior text, technical determinants, or limits that are often beyond
anyone's control, and—if the formulation has n o t begun to sound
ludicrous in this context—the "artist's will."
O t h e r arts are, of course, constrained by parallel circumstances.
Writers work t h r o u g h drafts and painters do sketches toward more
polished work, but such cases will not ordinarily entail a leap from one
medium (script) to a fundamentally different one (film). And scripts
figure differently in theater, where they may still be thought of as blue-
prints for execution, but are not realized finally, once and for all, in a
given performance, as they are in film. The special circumstances of
film call for a materialist theory of style, one that accounts for the work
of production.
The decisive role of chance, error, or improvisation—three versions
of happenstance that influence nearly every film's production—may
further clarify the issue. A misprint in a book is unlikely to be attrib-
uted to a writer's style, but what about, for instance, when the rain
machines on the set of Hitchcock's Mamie (1964) wet the backdrops
of a set, making them look faker than they otherwise would have?
Some will interpret the evidence of this contingency in the film—the
weirdly luminous flat with the painted ship at the end of M a m i e ' s
m o t h e r ' s street—as proof of the director's senility, or his growing
blindness to cinematic fashion. Others will see it as an emblem of the
film's delirious expressionism, finding deliberation, if nowhere else, in
the fact of Hitchcock's decision to leave the shot in. The mistakes of
notoriously bad directors—from Ed Wood to Joel Schumacher—are
not taken as mere glitches in transmission, but as definitive dimen-
sions of those filmmakers' styles—or antistyles, as the case may be.
Errors in the work of masters are even m o r e suggestive. W h e n
Hitchcock's roving camera in the boldly stylized Rope (1948) bumps
into a candelabra, and we watch the prop wobble haplessly on-screen
as the camera tracks backward away from it, we are less likely to view
this as a mark of incompetence than as a gesture of playful indiffer-
ence, or self-reflexive accident. The m o m e n t says what Hitchcock's
films often say: Don't forget there's a camera here.
In Days of Heaven, in a shot as Bill departs the farm, the boom mike
drops prominently down into the frame. There it is, right on-screen—
a mistake, pure and simple, and almost every movie has them. They
are more significant than misprints in a book precisely because they
signify the ineluctable materiality of a film's production, as it intrudes
into the finished product. That filmmakers are expected to erase such
intrusions from their work is something like a corollary to the idea
that literary texts exist ideally, somehow, apart from their printed
manifestations in any given instance. In the case of an artist like Malick,
the significance of these issues is amplified. As evidenced by an exami-
nation of Malick's working methods, his films are products of a very
distinctive approach to filmmaking that makes the development from
script to film central to the process by virtue of an emphasis on chance
and improvisation in production and postproduction. This chapter,
while far from realizing a material theory of style, demonstrates how
Malick's style emerges as an evolving process of labor in the produc-
tion of his work.
This conception of style as process seems always to be held in rela-
tively low esteem, despite its wide acceptance as an inevitable feature
of production. The critical reception of certain films by otherwise
admired directors as disparate as Jean Renoir, Orson Welles, John
Cassavetes, and Mike Leigh has often been provoked in differing ways
by biases against overtly improvisational methods in filmmaking. Even
where one might expect sympathy, one often finds hostility to such
approaches. Peter Biskind, who has at times in the distant past ex-
pressed some support for the development of film art, joins forces with
the m o n e y m e n in his estimation of Malick's procedures. In Easy
Riders, Raging Bulls, Biskind says of the editing phase in the produc-
tion of Days of Heaven, "Malick was famously indecisive. O r just
meticulous, depending on who's footing the bill" (Biskind 1998, 298).
A similarly philistine reaction arises from, of all quarters, an interview
with Steven Soderbergh, an independent American filmmaker one
would have supposed to be receptive to Malick's methods—assuming
those methods were known or understood. Soderbergh's comments,
though, suggest that they are not: "There was a lot of dialogue in the
script [of Days of Heaven], but when they got on the set Terrence
Malick would go, ' D o n ' t say anything.' When you look at the film
you realize that he ended up having to write all that voice-over in post-
production because nobody said anything, so nobody knew what was
going on! . . . Sometimes it's better not to know too m u c h " (Hillier
2 0 0 1 , 268). Soderbergh's anecdotal report suggests that his respect
for the film is lessened by these alleged exigencies of p r o d u c t i o n ,
In Production 119
though he does not pause to ask why, with all that available dialogue—
of unimpeachable quality, as dialogue, as it happens—Malick suppos-
edly told the actors not to speak it.
Badlands, in its way Malick's most assured film, is the least illus-
trative of what otherwise appear to be the director's characteristic
methods. By contrast to the extreme differences between script and
film of Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line, there is almost no dif-
ference between extant scripts of Badlands znd the finished film. Those
involved with the production, in discussing the making of the film,
speak of a zealous quest for verisimilitude that was, they claim, cru-
cial to the shoot. In a star biography of Martin Sheen, for instance,
Sheen recounts an anecdote about getting on his hands and knees to
remove beer can pop-tops from the ground before shooting a scene
at a gas station, because these would have been anachronistic if caught
on film (Riley and Schumacher 1989, 19). In an interview for her own
star bio, Sissy Spacek speaks of being encouraged to do "painstaking
research" (Emerson and Pfaff 1988, 36) of the period for her part,
b u t also of being coached in " M e t h o d " styles of improvisation in
building her character. These accounts suggest a meticulous fidelity
to a preexistent concept in the making of the film, while also prefig-
uring a m o r e free-form improvisation that comes to the fore in
Malick's subsequent films.
Nestor Almendros's detailed professional autobiography, Man with
a Camera (1984), is an invaluable source of information on the pro-
duction ofDays of Heaven. According to Almendros, the film was shot
in Canada over a period of seventy-three days, in the fall of 1976.
Almendros himself was the chief cinematographer for the greater part
of this period, but when he had to leave to shoot Francois Truffaut's
The Man Who Loved Women (1977), Haskell Wexler replaced him for
the final two weeks of shooting. Wexler shot the final sequences of
the film set in the city after Bill's death, as well as sundry pickups and
the exterior sequence in snow. The latter fact is especially striking,
because though this sequence has the feeling in the film of having been
a happy accident, Almendros confirms that it was planned—a point
that a reading of the shooting script seconds—and, indeed, that the
crew worried an "Indian Summer" in A b e r t a that fall would hold off
snow and make filming of the scene impossible.
Nevertheless, by Almendros's report, much that happened on the
set of Days of'Heaven was, if not accidental, improvisatory and experi-
mental. The unifying theme of A m e n d r o s ' s commentary is his focus
on risks the production ran in trying out new things, experimenting

with cinematography by natural lighting or improvisation in perfor-
mance. " B o t h actors and camera were improvising," he remarks
(Almendros 1984, 177). Other accounts explain the Canada location
in strictly practical terms: The harvest season was over in Texas, so
Canada offered itself as a viable alternative location. But Almendros
provides another explanation: "In Canada we could avoid certain
u n i o n limitations that are stringent in California" ( 1 7 3 ) . I n d e e d ,
Almendros says, in Hollywood at that time, he could not have been
hired for the project at all, presumably due to union restrictions. A
key motif of A m e n d r o s ' s narrative involves conflicts between himself
and Malick on the one side, in their quest for novel uses of film tech-
nology, and the Hollywood union technicians on the other, with their
fallback tendencies to do things the old ways:
[T]he crew (which I did not choose) was made up of old-guard, typi-
cally Hollywood professionals. They were accustomed to a glossy style
of photography . . . They felt frustrated because I gave them so little
work. The normal practice in Hollywood is for the gaffer and grip to
prepare the lighting beforehand, so I found arc lights set up for every
scene. Day after day I would have to ask them to turn off everything
they had prepared for me. I realized that this annoyed them; some of
them began saying openly that we didn't know what we were doing,
that we weren't "professional." (Almendros 1984, 170)
According to Almendros, Malick b r o u g h t to the set of Days of

Heaven an extensive knowledge of both the aesthetics and technol-
ogy of photography, as well as of painting. Models for the film's vi-
sual style, by A m e n d r o s ' s report, encompassed silent film (especially
Griffith and Chaplin, who used natural light in o u t d o o r shooting),
photo-reportage (especially the work of Lewis H i n e , w h o m Malick
mentioned to A m e n d r o s as a model and whose work appears in the
title credits sequence), and classic American painting—Wyeth, Hopper,
and others (though the shots of the farmer's mansion, often cited as
Hopperesque, owe as much to George Stevens's film Giant [1956]).
O n e example A m e n d r o s gives of Malick's support of photographic
experimentation has to do with shooting interiors with natural light
by windows. This example squares with the account of Peter Biskind's
peevish informant on the set of Badlands, who mocks Malick for hav-
ing attempted similar effects in that film, and apparently succeeded
in talking him out of it. Working with Eric Rohnier on The Marquise
In Production 121
ofO . . . (1976), Almendros had already assayed the elegant, Vermeer-

like effects of this kind of use of natural light, but Malick, Almendros
says, wanted to go even further. Where Rohmer had used some back-
g r o u n d lights to prevent severe light contrasts in the composition,
Malick eliminated them, producing shifting chiaroscuro effects in a
number of the interiors. H e r e , Almendros testifies to Malick's pho-
tographic expertise. This kind of shooting requires a wide-open lens
that severely restricts depth of field, and while many directors might
not have taken this limitation into account, according to Almendros,
Malick staged many sequences on the same visual plane to correct for
this deficiency.
A reading of the script for Days of Heaven shows that even in pre-
production, Malick was attentive to matters of photographic tech-
nique. H e refers in the script, for instance, to uses of stock footage in
one sequence of harvesting, to uses of time-lapse photography in an-
other, and to shooting day-for-night in the scene where Bill and Abby
tryst beside the river by night. Day-for-night is a procedure in which
filters are used to give an impression of darkness while still enabling
filming by natural daylight. A m e n d r o s reports that the technique was
used for several scenes in the film, though he himself disliked it be-
cause, in his opinion, even new polarizing filters did not darken the
sky sufficiently to produce a convincing illusion of nighttime. In shoot-
ing, says Almendros, they solved this problem by using predominantly
high angles in these scenes, thus rendering the sky and the horizon
invisible.
Moreover, Almendros's account suggests that the sequence involv-
ing Bill and Abby's nocturnal meeting, which the script dictates be
shot day-for-night, did n o t in the end use this technique. Rather,
Almendros says the scene illustrates one of the most distinctive pho-
tographic techniques of the film, having been shot at "magic hour."
"Magic h o u r " is a term Malick uses throughout the script to signify,
as Almendros defines it, a twenty-minute period of intensified lumi-
nosity between sunset and nightfall. Malick uses the term in the script
without explanation, principally in scenes of frolics in the fields be-
tween bouts of work, as when the little girl (Ursula in the script, Linda
in the film) wanders the fields alone in a spirit of solitary curiosity.
A m e n d r o s comments:
The light really was very beautiful, but we had little time to film scenes
of long duration. All day we would work to get the actors and the cam-
era ready; as soon as the sun had set we had to shoot quickly, not losing
a moment. For those few moments the light is truly magical, because
no one knows where it is coming from . . . Malick's intuition and daring
probably made these scenes the most interesting ones visually in the film.
And it takes daring to convince the Hollywood old guard that the shoot-
ing day should last twenty minutes. (Amendros 1984, 182)
Almendros mentions some technical by-products of this strategy of

shooting. The need to vary exposure while shooting in "magic h o u r "
produced a negative of differing tonalities, so that "certain scenes were
really like a patchwork of different bits and pieces" ( A m e n d r o s 1984,
183) in the daily rushes. Biskind, eager to portray the Days of Heaven
shoot as a chaotic, hit-or-miss bungle, seizes on this fact to argue, with-
out attribution to a source, that "it was clear it wasn't working, looked
like bad Playhouse 90" (Biskind 1998, 297). Almendros's firsthand ac-
count, however, is casual about the issue, implying that he and the
director knew that such defects would need to be corrected in the
lab—and Almendros goes on to acknowledge the technician who suc-
cessfully achieved these adjustments. Similarly, Biskind's contention
that "shooting often didn't start until late in the afternoon, allowing
for only a few hours of daylight before it got too dark to continue"
( 2 9 7 ) makes n o m e n t i o n of the deliberate experimentation with
"magic h o u r " shooting. A m e n d r o s puts the same point in a differ-
ent way, suggesting meticulous preparation rather than blundering
delay. The nearly flawless elegance of the finished film would appear
to bear out A m e n d r o s ' s version.
Days of Heaven was the first film to employ Panaglide, a prototype
of the Steadicam ( A m e n d r o s 1984, 176). At first, Malick wanted to
shoot the whole film with this technique. A m e n d r o s suggests that
their "initiation" into the technology was an uneasy one, and he im-
plies that much footage was shot with the Panaglide camera and then
discarded because it showed "too much virtuosity" (177)—a striking
comment in relation to this film of such casual bravura. In the film,
most sequences using moving camerawork look as if they have been
accomplished with traditional dollies and tracks. Only two sequences
make any pronounced use of the Panaglide that is readily visible to
the eye. The first is a scene in the field between Linda and a woman
she has met, where the camera is kept in close, very intrusive in its
presence, and the harsh rasp of stalks of wheat scratching against one
another nearly drowns out their speech. The effect is of an assertive
immediacy, as it is in the other scene to make use of the Panaglide,
when Bill and Abby meet secretly by the river. There, the feeling of
In Production 123
immediacy is offset by the camera's dizzying whirl around the char-

acters as they, in turn, move warily around each other. The technique
correlates visually to the psychology of the scene, reflecting both the
intensity of the characters' emotional connection, and their growing
disaffection. Disorienting cuts further contribute to the sense of in-
stability in the scene, an effect determined in part, Almendros says,
by the use of the Panaglide camera: "There were times," he comments,
"when it was impossible to cut to another shot without breaking con-
tinuity" (177)—presumably, because the fluid movement of the
camera removed the reliable spatial coordinates required for traditional
editing patterns. At least in this scene, Malick uses this disadvantage
for effect, cutting on pirouetting movement to shots with the cam-
era moving in opposing directions. The hard cuts create a kind of
vertigo, as we lose sight of where the characters are in relation to each
other, just as they are losing sight of it.
Another side effect of the Panaglide related to editing, Almendros
points out, is the obvious one that material filmed in long, continu-
ous sequence shots is difficult to shorten. Almendros describes a com-
plex long take of Linda moving from the mansion's third-floor terrace
to the ground floor, and then into the back of the house, combining
a crane shot with hand-held camerawork to follow the subject. The
shot was not used in the film, apparently, because it contained refer-
ences to material that had been edited, but the shot itself could not
be edited. This point is especially relevant to the fact that Malick's
improvisation and experimentation continued throughout the editing
phase of production. It is certainly possible that Malick scaled back
uses of the Panaglide camera to enable greater freedom in the edit-
ing, as a result of shifts in attitude toward the material that clearly took
place in the course of the film's making.
We know such shifts occurred because of major differences between
the script and the finished film. Despite their indisputable significance,
however, these differences by no means bear out claims that the film's
story was somehow up for grabs until late in postproduction. Biskind's
representative version of this claim is not even the most extreme one:
"Malick decided to toss the script [in shooting], go Tolstoy instead
of Dostoevsky, wide instead of deep, shoot miles of film with the hope
of solving the problems in the editing room" (Biskind 1998, 297).
The odd tone, breezy and rancorous, does not lend itself to scholarly
interest, and the claim, despite its air of authority, is undocumented.
Piling anecdote on rumor on dish, Biskind relies almost entirely on
his own interviews with Hollywood players, giving no indication,
therefore, of having read any books—leaving aside, of course, the

works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky—let alone A m e n d r o s ' s autobiog-
raphy or Malick's script. Indeed, contrary to well-entrenched rumor,
nearly every scene in the film, and every line of dialogue—excepting
Linda's voice-overs—occur in a revised draft of the screenplay, prob-
ably the shooting script, dated June 2, 1976. (This manuscript makes
note of an earlier draft registered with the Writer's Guild of America
on April 14, 1976.) In no sense can this script be said to have been
"tossed." Based on comparison of the script with the finished film, it
is clear that what happened was a refraining, a reorientation, mainly
involving shifts of emphasis, punctuation, and especially texture, and
remarkably suggestive of Malick's procedures as a filmmaker and his
aspirations as an artist.
The primary development from script to film involves a rigorous
compression. The plot, even in most of its details, remains the same,
but nearly every scene that remains in the film has been stripped down,
rendered in a severely distilled form. A major change occurs at the
start. In the script, the opening scenes in the city are extensive and
detailed. It begins with a long, raw comersation among workers at
the steel mill, talking lewdly about women who work there. The scene
sets up a motif of raunchy conversation throughout the script, signi-
fying a bold, bawdy naturalism that has been all but eliminated from
the film. The one remnant of it is Bill's remark to Abby about the
farmer "looking at your ass as if you were a whore"—a line that, in
the film, sounds jarring apart from the framing context it has in the
script. In the script, Bill has a brother named Sam, who is involved in
shady dealings, ambushed in the first scenes, and shot (with distant
echoes of the ambush at the start of Deadhead Miles). Bill, himself
beaten in the scuffle, witnesses the killing and kneels beside his dying
brother, in a scene of direct, intense emotion, weeping and begging
him not to die. After the brother's death, in a scene in a freight yard
with Abby, Bill says there is nothing to keep them in the city any
longer, and declares that they are heading west.
The opening of the film, as throughout, is far less traditionally de-
tailed than in the script, but more complex in terms of its causality.
The ordeals of the city are sketched visually rather than verbally, in a
few economical shots. The character of the brother is omitted entirely,
and the flight from the city, rather than being a fairly arbitrary choice,
is directly motivated by the accident involving the foreman. In a way,
the causality is tighter, but it is also more oblique. What would have
In Production 125
taken about fifteen minutes of screen time if filmed as written is in-

stead concentrated into a few minutes in the actual film. This proce-
dure of consolidation prevails throughout the rendering of the script
on-screen. At 120 pages, with much prolonged action without dia-
logue, the script as written would have resulted in a film well over two
hours in length, while the actual movie is well under two hours. The
film's achievement of an epic scope, while retaining an intimate scale,
is much illuminated by the comparison of script and film.
Countless scenes in the script that are fully wrought and psycho-
logically detailed are, in the film, rendered with a scrupulous spare-
ness. Consider, for instance, the scene in the film where the farmer
declares his love for Abby. It comes amid a leisurely stretch while the
pacing shows little pressure to build—as opposed to the script, which
remains entirely committed to conventional principles of dramatic
m o m e n t u m . In the film, the m o m e n t seems sudden and sweetly sur-
prising. The two are in the woods together, when a gentle close-up
shows the farmer placing his hand on Abby's. "I think I love you,"
he says gently. A reverse shot of Abby shows her looking startled and
moved. She averts her eyes and replies, "What a nice thing to say."
The shot is held a m o m e n t longer before we cut to the next scene.
The lines of dialogue appear almost as spoken in the script, and are
even comparably placed in the development of the narrative, but their
context is completely different. They occur against an extended dia-
logue between Abby and the farmer, while they are engaged in a game
of throwing things at targets. In the context of the dialogue, the
farmer's line is still surprising, but less directly revelatory. H e says,
"You're so beautiful." Abby replies as in the film, but does so as she
makes a toss in the game they are playing, and she cries in delight as
she hits the target. The two go on talking after that. Thus, the ex-
change is far less weighted than it is in the film, more casual, even as
it serves the same function in the story, that of revealing the farmer's
feelings. This is the kind of remorseless distillation pursued in realiz-
ing the script throughout the film.
The characters of Bill and Abby are developed in the script much
as they are in the film, but the characters of Linda and the farmer are
radically different, starting with their names. These parallel shifts fur-
ther support the feeling of affinity that emerges between these two
characters in the film. In the script, Linda is called Ursula, and de-
scribed as curious about the world but rash and careless. A minor
character, she does not narrate the story in the screenplay, though her
character is more traditionally developed there. She speaks directly, for

instance, of her feelings of isolation on the farm, and we are to un-
derstand her misbehavior as a reaction to those feelings. The clash
between Ursula's coarseness and the aristocracy of her lifestyle after
they move into the farmer's mansion, barely sketched in the film, is
played out fully in the script as a major theme of class and character.
In the script, she longs to escape the restraints of this lifestyle, and
when the flying circus conies to the farm, she takes up with a young
member of the troupe named George, whom she hopes will take her
away with him. At the end of the script, she escapes from the board-
ing school, as in the film, but instead of running off with another girl,
she meets up with George. There is still a sense of irresolution, as in
the film, but since Linda's final encounter in the script develops from
a previous encounter, the final scene brings a greater sense of closure.
A scene that follows this one, however, suggests some resistance to
this closure, as if prefiguring a turn to the more distinctive rhythms
of the film. We cut to a man at work in the fields, someone who has
not previously appeared in the script. H e hears a birdcall, looks up at
the sky, and then goes back to work. The scene seems intended to
evoke a poignant sense of life's cycles, to suggest the continuation of
perennial rounds of shared strife and contentment, even after the lo-
calized convulsions of the plot. A number of alternative scenes follow
this conclusion, one of which suggests a shifting attitude toward the
character of Ursula, perhaps a stage in her conversion to the Linda of
the film. In the alternate scene, we see Ursula years later, in a field
with her husband and children. She hears the cry of prairie chickens—
the same cry many characters have heard throughout the film—and
she pauses for a moment, then returns to her family. This ending has
some of the same bittersweet feeling as the shot of the anonymous
man hearing the birdcall, but the shift to Ursula and the recurrence
of the motif of the prairie chicken's call intimate a growing sense of
her importance, as a character, to the main themes of the film. As re-
alized on film, especially through the medium of Linda's voice-over,
this transformation turns the little girl from a crude, mean child into
the moving and radiant creation of the film.1
The farmer appears in the script as Chuck, the son of a Russian im-
migrant. The character is depicted in great detail, including flashbacks
of his past life. The main event of his past involves the death of his
father, and we are to understand this event as a driving force behind
his financial success as a farmer. H e is very much a type of the self-
In Production 127
made man of American lore, with shades of Gatsby or a character out

of late Cather. In the context of the script, Chuck's childhood sets
up a parallel between him and Bill—both of w h o m have experienced
their father's death by water. Bill, who says he held his father in con-
tempt, recalls his father's drowning in Lake Michigan. This affinity
between the farmer and Bill, barely touched on in the film where it is
replaced by parallels between Linda and the farmer, is a prominent
theme of the script. Chuck's death at the end of the script parallels
that of Bill's brother, at the beginning, and Chuck's feeling of betrayal
by Bill, and ultimate forgiveness of him, is much more palpable in the
script than in the film. Chuck's dying words, spoken to his foreman
(called Benson in the script), ask for Bill's forgiveness, and Abby's, and
an earlier dialogue between Bill and Chuck deals with Chuck's bitter
accusation about Bill's deception of him.
This dialogue is gone in the film, where the action is made more
ambiguous and arguably more complex by being rendered primarily
through visuals. Indeed, this shift of focus from the verbal to the visual
is the principal determinant on the treatment of the script on-screen.
In the early scenes in the fields in the script, for instance, dialogue
denotes the expansive feeling of the spaces, as characters comment at
length on the openness and freedom of the wilderness. In the film,
this dialogue is absent, replaced by the visual set pieces that convey
the same feeling. As a conventionally well-made script—with its faults,
to be sure, such as the uncertainty of the ending—the Days of Heaven
screenplay gives little sense of the audacious narrative experiments and
formal innovations of the finished film. A few lyric interludes of na-
ture are described in the script, but they often have explicit thematic
or ideological ramifications there that barely come through in the film.
Malick speaks explicitly of the immigrants as being pathetic in the
script, a characterization much at odds with the relatively idealized
portraits of the film. In a description of one lyric interlude, Malick
mentions the animals to be photographed in the scene, and then com-
ments portentously that they cannot suspect the fate that awaits them
when they will later be killed by rakes and flails. There is no sense in
the script of the visual rhythms that give the film so much of its dis-
tinctiveness. A study of the script suggests, then, that much of this
achievement must have been discovered in the process of shooting and
editing.
A comparison of the script and the film suggests some improvisa-
tion on the set, to the extent that some scenes appearing in the script
take place at different locations in the film, or that lines are transposed
among scenes and even among characters. Discussing the film's mak-
ing, Brooke Adams (who plays Abby) testifies to having shot much
more footage than appeared in the final cut: "I kept asking myself,
'What happened to that scene? How could he have cut it there?'"
(Buckley 1978). The script she auditioned with, Adams says, was very
literary, in the manner of Thomas Hardy, and her interview implies
that this script was largely adhered to during shooting, which suggests
that much of the compression took place in the editing phase of pro-
duction. Nick Nolte echoes the witness of many of Malick's actors,
however, when he speaks of various forms of improvisation on the set
of The Thin Red Line. He says that Malick would shoot multiple takes
with variations on the action, sometimes improvising, sometimes ob-
serving silence, sometimes reciting lines shouted by the director from
behind the camera.2 This account squares with Adams's description
of being filmed in shooting Days of Heaven, with Malick shouting
apparently random and clearly unscripted directions at her as the
camera ran.
What we have been calling improvisation could also be termed,
more simply, revision. A study of a third-draft script for The Thin Red
Line, bearing dates spanning from June to October 1997 (thus very
close to the time of shooting), shows that the development of that
project was indeed a painstaking process of rethinking and reviewing.
This script contains differently colored pages to denote earlier versions,
suggesting the existence offive prior drafts, and it marks major changes
with an asterisk. On the first page appears a report on revisions from
the previous version, mainly noting that about half a dozen charac-
ters from the earlier draft have been combined with other characters
in this one. Clearly, a primary issue in the construction of the script
is the collation of its many characters—more than thirty, with at least
six quite fully developed. The condensation of characters continued
after this draft in production. In the script, there are two officers, Stein
and Staros, and it is Stein who has a conflict with Colonel Tall when
he resists Tail's command to order his men to advance into battle. In
the film, Stein disappears, and the conflict is transposed to Staros.
Otherwise, the intricate relationship between the script and the film
is difficult to unravel. Scenes that are crossed out in this version of
the script appear in the finished film, while other scenes that have been
added to this draft, obviously to clarify plot points or flesh out char-
acters, do not. What seems clear is that, as with Days of Heaven, Malick
In Production 129
went into production with a fully developed script, a strong plot,

rounded characters, brilliant dialogue, and a traditionally "well-made"
structure, and came out with a very different film. Like the Days of
Heaven script, that of The Thin Red Line appears quite literary. Both
begin with epigraphs: in Days of Heaven, a q u o t e from H a m l i n
Garland's "Boys Life on the Prairie" (an epigraph also printed in the
press kit and in programs for the film in its road-show exhibitions);
and in The Thin Red Line, a passage from William Manchester's war
memoir, Goodbye Darkness. Much closer to James Jones's original novel
than the finished film, the script supplements Jones's gritty dialogue
with p u n g e n t , acrid riffs that hark back to the peppery argots of
Malick's earliest scripts, infusing Jones's full-blooded naturalism with
a streak of surrealism.
The realization of The Thin Red Linens script on film is less a mat-
ter of compression than in the case of Days of Heaven. Indeed, at nearly
three hours, the film has a running time roughly equivalent to what
the script's would have been, if filmed as written. Moreover, the struc-
ture of the film is broadly identical to that of the script. Each of
Malick's films has a tripartite structure, typically beginning in stasis,
evolving toward flight, and reverting, after some calamity, to the ini-
tial state. In the first two films, this plays out through settings—the
movement from city or town to the wilderness, and back. In The Thin
Red Line, this structure is reoriented. Broadly speaking, the film is built
around preparations for combat, the battle itself, and its aftermath.
In terms of the larger pattern, though, it is significant that the film
begins with a fantasy of escape—Witt's time among the Melanesians
as an A W O L soldier. In the script, Witt goes A W O L later, after ten-
sions between him and the officer, Welsh, have been established in an
extended introductory scene. In the film, a truncated version of this
scene appears after Witt has returned to the unit—a return that is more
causally integrated in the script, where officers decide against court-
martial to keep morale from dropping. Such institutional background
of the military bureaucracy, a theme of the script, is absent from the
film, where Witt's appearances have a protean, magical quality, making
him a sort of spectral, shamanic figure.
This quality has some basis in the script, in a battle scene where Witt
appears suddenly, and the men in rounds of salty dialogue note his
impulsive return. As with the treatment of the Days of Heaven script,
so here the verbal dimensions of the script are largely sacrificed in favor
of visual rendering. Yet the key visual elements of the film are all
grounded in the script. The interaction with the crocodile that begins
and ends the film on an enigmatic, allegorical note occurs in the script
as a brief and literal scene. O n occasion in the script, Malick notes
background nature imagery of the type that is brought into the fore-
ground in the film. The second scene in the script, for instance, is said
to end with a peripheral close-up of a crab. Moments of visionary in-
tensity in the film—Bell's memories of his wife or Witt's radiant vision
of his Kentucky home—appear in the script in more grounded form,
as dreams, for instance. U n m o o r e d in the film from their direct
psychological motivations, these scenes cast a dreamy light upon the
film as a whole. Even the voice-overs, absent from the script, have clear
sources there, as in a dialogue in a trench between Bell and Fife (a
main character of the script whose role is much diminished in the film),
where they discuss the meaning of life and war.
A crucial source of information on Malick's working methods on
The Thin Red Line is an extended interview with the film's cinema-
tographer, John Toll. Toll's remarks are especially interesting in com-
parison to A l m e n d r o s ' s c o m m e n t a r y on the s h o o t i n g of Days of
Heaven. While Almendros testifies to Malick's depth of photographic
knowledge, for instance, Toll suggests that Malick's twenty-year ab-
sence from filmmaking left gaps in his knowledge of new technolo-
gies (Pizzello 1999, 45). However, Toll suggests he picked up on these
developments "quickly and intuitively," and indeed, like Days of
Heaven, The Thin Red Line is marked by a notably high-tech relation
to the cinematic apparatus. Two technologies Toll discusses at length,
in the midst of an account remarkably detailed in technical terms, are
the Steadicam and the A<:ela crane, both instrumental in achieving the
sweeping quality of the combat scenes. "Magic h o u r " shooting, Toll
says, was kept to a minimum: "We shot relentlessly every day, in ev-
ery conceivable lighting condition, from seven in the morning until
it got dark at 6 P.M. Yes, there are magic-hour shots in the film, but
only because we had to keep shooting until it got dark" (Pizzello
1999, 56). This account contrasts with Almendros's description of
painstaking setups for brief periods of shooting on the set of Days of
Heaven.
Of two key instances of preparation for production that Toll re-
counts, one coincides with A m e n d r o s ' s narrative. According to Toll,
he and Malick used an anthology of paintings for inspiration in con-
ceiving the film's compositions—Images of War: The Artist's Vision of
World War II (McCormick and Perry 1992). Taken together with
In Production 131
references to other paintings or films apparent on-screen, this insight

confirms the allusive dimension of Malick's visual style, certified as well
by Almendros's comments on the uses of Hopper or Hine in Days of
Heaven. Also in pre-production, says Toll, some scenes were visually
plotted in storyboard form. In response to the interviewer's comment
that Malick "isn't big on s t o r y b o a r d s " (Pizzello 1 9 9 9 , 4 6 ) , Toll
counters that the scene on the brig was storyboarded. His suggestion
that this preparation was prompted by production exigencies implies
that it was the exception to the rule, t h o u g h storyboard artists are
prominently credited among the film's crewmembers. Asked about
other forms of preparation, Toll replies that "there were a lot of con-
versations" (46) and extensive location scouting that resulted in clear
ideas about uses of coloration in the film's palette. Indeed, Toll chose
to shoot in "true anamorphic" rather than Super-35 mm format for
more accurate dailies, perhaps to secure these color effects, but by
contrast to the expectation of optical lab correction on the answer-
prints of Days of Heaven that A m e n d r o s describes.
Despite these preparations, on the whole, Toll characterizes Malick
as a cinematic improviser, an impression substantiated by the compari-
son of the script with the film. One hundred days of shooting included
eighty in Queensland, Australia, and, according to Toll, "20 more days
of unscripted improvisations" (Pizzello 1999, 56) in Guadalcanal. This
ratio clearly favors shooting of the script above improvisation, but Toll
gives little indication of knowledge of the drastic changes from script
to film. Indeed, he speaks of the film at times as if it were a faithful
rendering of the script (and it is probable that at the time of the inter-
view, Toll had not yet seen the final cut of the film). Specifically, Toll
comments, "the characters in this story are very well drawn and di-
verse" (45). This remark holds true of the script, but not of the film,
where the concept of character is dramatically reconceived, and char-
acters are presented more as types than as psychologically detailed
individuals. Elsewhere, Toll says, "while we were shooting the picture,
Terry and I kept talking about how interior the narrative was . . . Terry
wanted the viewers to know what was happening within the minds of
the characters without necessarily presenting these thoughts through
dialogue" (45). This observation is noteworthy for two reasons. First,
unlike the previous comment, it is much more evocative of the film
than of the script, which is heavily based in dialogue and rather ob-
jective in its approach to storytelling. Second, Toll's comment makes
no mention of the voice-overs that become such a basic element of
the film's style, especially in relation to its qualities of interiority. It

seems clear that what Malick discovered in the process of shooting was
precisely the interior dimension of his material, which subsequently
became the film's primary focus.
This conclusion is supported further by Toll's suggestion that the
"ethnographic aspect" (Pizzello 1999, 62) of the Guadalcanal shoot
came to interest Malick greatly, though it was given no attention in
Jones's novel. In the script, Witt's encounter with the Melanesian
natives is sketched in a brief paragraph, which describes the tranquil
Melanesian village and Witt's reaction to the peace and harmony of
the people. These points come through in the film, where this scene
is given great emphasis by being made a long, lyric prologue. Noth-
ing in the script warrants such emphasis, nor validates the expansive
development of this scene in production—where among other things,
Toll reports, Malick commissioned the National Geographic photog-
rapher Reuben Araronson to head up a filming unit to shoot exten-
sive "anthropological" (Toll's term) footage. Especially considering
Toll's claim that the three weeks of shooting at Guadalcanal were given
over entirely to "unscripted improvisations," it seems reasonable to
assume that this dimension of the project, nearly invisible in the script,
emerged near the end of shooting. Al of this suggests that Terrence
Malick is practically unique as a commercial American filmmaker:
a director for whom invention does not end with script or pre-
production, but continues through shooting and editing in ways that
fundamentally alter initial conceptions.
Critics and commentators may be excused, of course, for finding
the end products wanting, as does David Thomson in his entry on
Malick in the updated edition of his A Biographical Dictionary of Film
(2002). In earlier editions, Thomson went so far as to call Badlands
the most impressive debut since Citizen Kane, an oft-repeated judg-
ment. Less enthusiastic about Days of Heaven, Thomson pronounces
The Thin Red Line a complete failure, pretentious and "arty." Inter-
estingly, this opinion is based on a knowledge of the script, which
Thomson rightly declares a fully wrought and well-made piece of
writing that could have made a fine film. True enough, but less easy
to excuse is a critical unwillingness to confront the implications of
Malick's filmmaking practice—especially in the case of Thomson, who
had the benefit of being able to compare script and film. Whatever
one's conclusions, in fact, such comparison reveals a distinctive ap-
proach to filmmaking. This, in turn, yields a style that seems at once
In Production 133
directed—in its way—and improvisatory, focused and exploratory, as

if the safety net of the well-made script was in fact what enabled the
adventurous departures from it. It is rooted in a clear conception of
style as process, of direction as revision, and it gives us, as great films
must, a sense of things, like no other.
NOTES
1. It is often claimed as a matter of fact that Linda Manz improvised the

voice-overs. We have been able neither to substantiate nor disprove this claim,
though the sophistication of the monologues, in our view, makes it more
likely that the voice-overs resulted from collaboration between Manz and the
director. Moreover, some of the voice-overs develop from Ursula's dialogue
in the script, as when she talks about her feeling of isolation on the farm, a
speech that figures as part of Linda's dialogue about feeling isolated on the
river in the film, and about the ghostliness of sounds coming from the shore.
2. The source for this information is admittedly not a scholarly one: Us
weekly magazine, January 18, 1999.
Filmography
LANTON MILLS (1971)
A short film presented as a thesis at the Center for Advanced Film

Study, American Film Institute, Los Angeles, California. Written, pro-
duced, and directed by Terrence Malick. With Harry Dean Stanton.
18 minutes.
DEADHEAD MILES (1972)
A Paramount Production
Directed by: Vernon Zimmerman
Produced by: Vernon Zimmerman and Tony Bill
Screenplay by: Terry Malick
Associate Producer: John Prizer
Editor: Danford B. Greene
Music: Tom T. Hall
Costumes: Richard Bruno
Assistant Directors: Fred Brost and Russell Vreeland
Production Manager: Jack Bohrer
Cast
Cooper Alan Arkin

Tramp Paul Benedict
136 Filmography
Bad Character Hector Elizondo

Durazno Oliver Clark
Red Ball Rider Charles Durning
Pineapple Larry Wolf
Old Man Barnard Hughes
Auto Parts Salesman William Duell
Hostler Madison Arnold
Woman with Glass Eye Loretta Swit
Waitress Donna Anderson
Juicy Brucey Allen Garfield
Foreman Dan Resin
Donna James Diane Shalet
Johnny Mesquitero Bruce Bennett
Second State Trooper John Milius
Chicken Farmer Bill Littleton
Truck Driver Tom Waters
Ida Lupino Herself
George Raft Himself
Used Car Dealer Bill McCutcheon
The Boss Avery Schreiber
Old Sam John Steadman
Some sources report a limited release in 1982.
Color. 93 minutes.
POCKET MONET (1972)
A First Artists Production

A Warner Brothers Release
Directed by: Stuart Rosenberg
Produced by: John Foreman
Screenplay by: Terry Malick
Based on the novel Jim Kane, by J. P. S. Brown. Adapted by: John
Gay
Musical Score by: Alex North
"Pocket Money" [song] written and performed by: Carole King
Director of Photography: Laszlo Kovacs
Edited by: Bob Wyman
Art Direction: Tambi Larson
Set Decorator: Darrell Silvera
Filmography 137
Associate Producer: Frank Caffey

Technical Advisor/2 n d Unit Director: James Arnett
Production Manager: Arthur S. Newman, Jr.
Assistant Director: Mickey McCardle
Script Supervisor: John Franco
Men's Hair Consultant: Hank Moonjean
Titles by: Modern Film Effects
Sound: Lawrence Jost, Bud Grenebach
Makeup: Richard Cobos
Costumes: Jim Linn
Sound Effects by: Edit Rite Inc.
Locations by: Cinemobile
Casting by: Lynn Stalmaster
Cast
Jim Paul Newman

Leonard Lee Marvin
Bill Garrett Strother Martin
Stretch Russell Wayne Rogers
Juan Hector Elizondo
Adelita Christine Belford
Ex-Wife Kelly Jean Peters
Chavarin Greg (Gregory) Sierra
Uncle Herb Fred Graham
American Prisoner Matt Clark
Ministerio Publico Claudio Miranda
Technicolor. 108 minutes.
BADLANDS (1974)
A Pressman/Williams Presentation
A Jill Jakes Production
A Warner Brothers Release
Written, Produced, and Directed by: Terrence Malick
Executive Producer: Edward R. Pressman
Photography: Brian Probyn, Tak Fujimoto, Steven Larner
Editor: Robert Estrin
Associate Editor: William Weber
138 Filmography
Assistant Editor: Marion Segal

Art Director: Jack Fisk
Associate Art Director: Ed Richardson
Production Manager: William Scott
Sound Effects: Sam Shaw
Associate Producer: Lou Stoller
H a i r / W a r d r o b e : Dona Baldwin
Casting: Diane Derfner
Assistant Directors: John Broderick, Carl Olson
Production Mixer: Maury Harris
Assistant Camera: Tony Palmieri
Production Secretary: Penny Richardson
Art Work: Joan Mocine
Autos: Gary Littlejohn
Set Dresser: Ken Hilton
Original Music Composed and Conducted by: George Tipton
"Musica Poetica" by: Carl Orff and Gunild Keetman
"Trois Morceaux En Forme De Poire" by: Erik Satie
Theme "Migration" by: James Brown
"A Blossom Fell" ( H . Barnes—H. Cornelius—D. John), sung by:
Nat "King" Cole (Courtesy of Capitol Records)
"Love is Strange" (M. Baker—B. Smith—M. Robertson), sung by:
Mickey and Sylvia
Production Assistants: Connie Lee Stone, Paul Marcus, Rich Cook
Stunts: George Fisher
Music Editor: Erma Levin
Re-recording Mixer: John Wilkerson
Gaffer: Jack English
Boom Man: D o u g Crichton
Best Boy: D o u g Knapp
Locations by: Cinemobile
Titles, Opticals, and Processing by: Consolidated Film Industries
Recorded by: Glen Glenn Sound
Cast
Kit Martin Sheen

Filmography 139
Holly Sissy Spacek

Father Warren Oates
Cato Ramon Bieri
Deputy Aan Vint
Sheriff Gary Littlejohn
Rich Man John Carter
Boy Bryan Montgomery
Girl Gail Threlkeld
Clerk Charles Fitzpatrick
Boss Howard Ragsdale
Trooper John Womack, Jr.
Maid Dona Baldwin
Gas Attendant Ben Bravo
The Producer Wishes to Thank:
The American Film Institute
Melvin James Arthur Penn
James Nelson Bert Schneider
Wallace Woolf Irvin Kershner
Charlotte Jakes
And the People of Otero County for their help and cooperation.
Color. 97 minutes.
DATS OF HEAVEN (1978)
Starring: Richard Gere

Brooke Adams
Sam Shepard
and Linda Manz
Costumes Designed by: Patricia Norris
Music Composed and Conducted by: Ennio Morricone
Edited by: Billy Weber
Art Director: Jack Fisk
Director of Photography: Nestor Amendros
Executive Producer: Jacob Brackman
Produced by: Bert and Harold Schneider
Written and Directed by: Terrence Malick
140 Filmography
Costarring Robert Wilke

with
Jackie Shultis Stuart Margolin
Tim Scott Gene Bell
Richard Libertini
Additional Photography: Haskell Wexler, A.S.C.
Additional Music: Leo Kottke
Color Consultant: Bob McMillian
Re-recording Mixer: John Wilkinson
First Assistant Director: Skip Cooper
Technical Advisor: Clenton Owensby
Casting: Diane Crittenden
With the Assistance of:
Barbara Claman
Judy Lamb
Karen Grossman
Geno Havens
Elinor Renfield
Terry Bolo
Second Unit Director: Jacob Brackman
Title Design: Dan Perri
Additional Editors: Caroline Ferriol, Marion Segal, Susan Martin
Special Sound Effects: James Cox
Set Decorator: Robert Gould
Script Supervisor: Wally Bennett
Dolby Consultants: Steve Katz, Philip Boole, Clyde McKinney
Special Stills: Edie Baskin
Production Manager: Les Kimber
Second Assistant Directors: Rob Lockwood, Martin Walters
Second Unit Photography: Paul Ryan
Second Unit Management: Coulter Adams
Special Assistants to the Director: Peter Broderick, Nancy Kaclik
Executive Assistant to Bert Schneider: Blue Andre
Assistants to the Producer: Michie Gleason, John Chesko, Michael
Burns, Leslie Cox
Special Environmental and Sound Recording: Syntonic Research Inc.
Sound Effects by: Neiman Tillar Associates
Filmography 141
Music Editors: Dan Carlin, Jr., Ted Roberts

Sound Effects Editors: Colin Mouat, Charles Campbell
Music Mixer: Robert Glass, Jr.
Sound Effects Mixer: John Reitz
Coordinators: Gabriella Belloni, Enrico De Melis, Denny Bruce
Music Recording Engineers: Sergio MarcotuUi, John lies, Sandro Fois
Assistant Editors: Roberta Friedman, George Triorogoff
Editorial Consultants: Jeffrey Schneider, Dessy Markovksi, Tikki
Goldberg
Glen Glenn Sound Crew:
Robert Thirlwell
Jean Miller
Peter Gregory
Joe Wachter
MGM Supervising Engineer: Chet Luton
Negative Cutter: Barbara Morrison
Special Effects: John Thomas, Mel Merrells
Set Construction: Get Set
Men's Wardrobe: Jered Green
Camera Operators: John Bailey, Rod Parkhurst
Still Photographer: Bruno Engler
Sound Mixers: George Ronconi, Barry Thomas
Boom Men: Lewis Hogue, Glen Lambert
Gaffer: James Boyle
Best Boy: Malcolm Kendall
Electrician: Andy Wilson
Key Grip: Clyde Hart
Dolly Grip: Frank Merrells
Senior Accountant: Edward Hill
Location Accountant: Heather Mclntosh
Prop Master: Alan Levine
Hair Stylist: Bertine Taylor
Makeup: Jamie Brown
Painter: John Lattanzo
Transportation Captain: Don Nablo
Driver: John Brumby
Special Camera Assistants: Kent Remington, Bob Eber
142 Filmography
Wranglers:
John Scott
Isabella Miller
Reg Glass
Bob Wilson
Joe Dodds
Dixie Gray
Assistant Propmaster: Barry Merrells
Production Secretaries: Michelle Shapiro, Marilyn Tasso
Time-Lapse Photography: Ken Middleham
Special Audio Assistants: Allan Byers, Robert Burton, Al Splet
Research:
Irene Malick
Susan Vermazen
Rosalia Purdum
Peter Neufield
Nathalie Seaver
Harmonica: Rick Smith
Stunt Flying: Erin Talbott, Joe Watts
"Enderlin," written and performed by: Leo Kottke
"Swamp Dance," words, music, and performance by: Doug Kershaw
"Carnival of the Animals—The Aquarium," by: Camille Saint-Saens,
performed by: the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra
Title Sequence Photos:

Lewis Hine
Henry Hamilton Bennett
Frances Benjamin Johnston
Chansonetta Emmons
William Notman
Edie Baskin
Lenses and Panaflex Camera by: Panavision
Recording by: Glen Glenn Sound
With Special Thanks to:
Deborah Eisenberg Patricia Norris
Redd Foxx Gordon Radley
Jill Jakes Bob Rafelson
Filmography 143
Joe Kelly Greta Ronninger

Tom Kobayashi Wallace Shawn
Stuart Margolin Ian Underwood
Roger Mayer Wallace Wolf
and the Lethbridge Hutterite Communities
Cast
Bill Richard Gere

Abby Brooke Adams
The Farmer Sam Shepard
Linda Linda Manz
The Farm Foreman Robert Wilke
Linda's Friend Jackie Shultis
Mill Foreman Stuart Margolin
Harvest Hand Tim Scott
Dancer Gene Bell
Fiddler Doug Kershaw
Vaudeville Leader Richard Libertini
Vaudeville Wrestler Frenchie Lemond
Vaudeville Dancer Sahbra Markus
Accountant Bill Wilson
Headmistress Muriel Jolliffe
Preacher John Wilkinson
Farm Worker King Cole
An O.P. Production
For Chris, Susan, and Dauna
Metrocolor. 93 minutes.
THE THIN RED LINE (1998)
Directed by: Terrence Malick

Screenplay by: Terrence Malick
Based upon the novel by: James Jones
Produced by: Robert Michael Geisler, John Roberdeau, Grant Hill
Executive Producer: George Stevens, Jr.
Director of Photography: John Toll, A.S.C.
Production Designer: Jack Fisk
144 Filmography
Edited by: Billy Weber, Leslie Jones, Saar Klein

Casting by: Dianne Crittenden
Music by: Hans Zimmer
Costume Designer: Margot Wilson
Associate Producer: Michael Stevens
From Phoenix Pictures
In Association with George Stevens Jr.
A Geisler-Roberdeau Production
Unit Production Manager: Grant Hill
First Assistant Director: Skip Cooper
Second Assistant Directors: Karen Estelle Collins, Simon Warnock
2 n d Second Assistant Director: Jennifer Leacey
Production Manager: Vickie Popplewell
Art Director: Ian Gracie
Location Manager: Murray Boyd
Camera Operator/Steadicam Operator: Brad Shield
First Assistant Camera/Focus Pullers: Darrin Keough, Brett Matthews,
Frank Hruby
Second Assistant Camera/Clapper Loaders: Dugal Campbell, Rachel
Fairfax
Gaffer: Mick Morris
Best Boy Electric: Gary Hill
Electricians: Paul d i m m i n g , Stephen Gray, Miles Jones
Key Grip: David Nichols
Dolly Grip: Mick Vivien
Libra Head Technician: Tim Cousins
Grips: Jorge Escanueala, Greg Tidman
Grip Assistants: Simon Boag, Mai Booth, David Connell
Akch Crane Technicians: Michael Gough, Mark Willard
Scaffolder: Simon Ambrose
Scaffolding Assistant: Mick Casey
Sound Mixer: Paul "Salty" Brincat
Boom Person: Rod Conder
Second Boom Person: Gary Dixon
Cable Person/Additional Boom: Steven King
Video Split Operator: Mark Holtenmann
Filmography 145
Assistant Art Director: Jeff Thorp

Art Department Coordinator: Jenny O'Connell
Standby Props: Robert Moxham
Assistant Standby Props: Peter Kodicek, Katie Sharrock
Set Decorator: Darryl Porter
Property Master: Richie Dehne
Set Decorators: Richard H o b b s , Suza Maybury
Props Buyer/Set Pressers:
Rolland Pike
Rev D u n n
Sophie Tarney
Brock Sykes
Storyboard Artists: Mark Lambert Bristol, David Russell
Lead Prop Maker: Dick Weight
Model Makers: Mark Powell, Gary Sherline, Trevor Smith, Dallas Wilson
Sculptor: Guideo Helmstetter
Graphic Artist: Mandy Willaton
Graphic Artist Assistant: Matthew Willaton
Assistant to Art Department Coordinators: Mick Plummer
Art Department Assistants:
Steve Davey
Patrick Moyles
Barry Thompson
Sam Ward
Art Department Runners: Michael H u n t , Joanna Robinson
A D R (Sydney): Andy Abillard
Costume Supervisor: Kerry Thompson
Military Webbing Supervisor: Phil Eagles
Key Standby Costumer: Julie Barton
Standby Costumers: Michael Davies, Kate Green, Peter O'Halloran
Military W e b b i n g Standby C o s t u m e r : Angi Vellikovic, M a t t h e w
Kintman
Props Costumers: Ken Barnett, Chantelle Cordey
Costume Assistants:
Lisa Collins
Tarnie Wilkie Smith
Cheryl Tootell
Goy Siriporn Wongwatawat
146 Filmography
Military Webbing Assistants:

Clare Budd
David Cartmill
Mitch Morris
Sally Wilson
Costume Construction: Sandi Cichello
Military Webbing Advisor: Jim Dedman
Los Angeles Cast Liaison: Nanrose Buchman
Postproduction Supervisor: Jessica Alan
Film Editor: Clarinda Wong
Supervising Sound Editors: Andy Nelson, Anna Behlmer
Music Supervisor: Rosanna Sun
Music Editors: Lea Scott, Adam Smalley
We omit here second unit crews and Los Angeles Postproduction crews.
Cast
Pvt. Telia Kirk Acevedo

Witt's Mother Penny Alen
Melanesian Visitor Benjamin
Lt. Col. Billig Simon Billig
Pvt. Peale Mark Boone Junior
Cpl. Fife Adrien Brody
Pvt. Henry Norman Patrick Brown
Pvt. Witt Jim Caviezel
Pvt. Bell Ben Chaplin
Capt. Bosche George Clooney
Capt. Gaff John Cusack
Capt. Thome Jarrod Dean
Pvt. Coombs Matt Doran
Pvt. Weld Travis Fine
1st Lt. Band Paul Gleeson
Sgt. Keck Woody Harrelson
Cpl. Queen David Harrod
Sgt. Becker D o n Harvey
Japanese Prisoner Kengo Hasuo
Assistant Pilot Ben Hines
Pvt. Carni Danny H o c h
Pvt. Sico Robert Roy Hofmo
Filmography 147
Melanesian Man Walking Jack

Pvt. Ash Tom Jane
Melanesian Villager Jimmy
Capt. Staros Elias Koteas
Melanesian Woman with Child Polyn Leona
2nd Lt. Whyte Jared Leto
Medic #2 Simon Lyndon
Pvt. Icl. Earl Gordon Macdonald
Japanese Pvt. #1 Kazuki Maehara
Marina Marina Malota
Pvt. Floyd Michael McGrady
Pvt. Icl. Doll Dash Mihok
Japanese Officer #1 Ken Mitsuishi
Japanese Pvt. #4 Ryushi Mizukami
Pvt. Tills Tim Blake Nelson
Crewman Larry Neuhaus
Lt. Col. Tall Nick Nolte
Japanese Pvt. #6 Taiju Okayasu
Japanese Soldier Takamitsu Okubo
Marty Bell Miranda Otto
1st Sgt. Welsh Sean Penn
Sgt. Storm John C. Reilly
Pvt. Massi Larry Romano
Sgt. McCron John Savage
Japanese Prisoner #2 Kazuyoshi Sakai
Japanese Officer #3 Masayuki Shida
Pvt. Train John Dee Smith
Cpl. Jenks Stephen Spacek
Pvt. Icl. Bead Nick Stahl
Japanese Pvt. #7 Hiroya Sugisaki
Japanese Pvt. #3 Kouji Suzuki
Japanese Pvt. #2 Tomohiro Tenji
Brigadier General Quintard John Travolta
Japanese Pvt. Terutake Tsuji
Pvt. Icl. Dale Arie Verveen
2nd Lt. Gore Steven Vidler
Melanesian Guide Vincent
Pilot Todd Wallace
Pvt. Hoke Will Wallace
Japanese Officer #3 Joe Watanabe
148 Filmography
1st Scout Simon Westaway

Medic #1 Dan Wylie
Toung Japanese Yasuomi Yoshino
Additional Music: Francesco Lupeca, Cosmic Beam Experience
T h e Director and Producers wish to thank the following for their
assistance
Penny A l e n Daniel Aukin
H e n r y Bamberger Walter H.Bradford
Ray Elliott Lukas Haas
Eryna Heisler Kevin Heisler
Gloria Jones Jamie Jones
Kaylie Jones Randall Duk Kim
Darrell Kirkland Harold Lee
Donal Logue Francine Meisler
John McNees Barry McPaul
Robert Miranda Viggo Mortensen
Amanda Nelligan Lindy Neuhaus
David Paschall Jason Patric
Barry Patterson Jace Phillips
David Pratt John Price
Bill Pullman Jason Rabe
Robert L. Rosen Mickey Rourke
Martin Sheen Thomas Sumners
Billy Bob Thornton Cary Phillips Turner
Harley Williams John Womack Jr.
Brother Zephaniah Time Zinneman
The Community of Port Douglas, Queensland, Australia
The People of the Solomon Islands
The Choir of All Saints, Honiara
The Melanesian Brotherhood
The Staff and Crew of "The Lane Victors"
The City of San Pedro, California
Guadalcanal Veterans Association
Aus Film
Australian Pacific Film and Television Committee
Film Freight International
Travel Too
Queensland Ambulance Service
Filmography 149
Filmed on location in Queensland, Australia, Guadalcanal, Solomon

Islands, and San Pedro, California.
Filmed in Panavision and Technicolor. 170 minutes.
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Index
Adams, Ansel, 46 visual models for, 62, 71-72

Adams, Brooke, 128 voice-over in, 17-18, 74
Agee, James, 3-4 Balasz, Bela, 48
Age of Consent (Powell), 49 The Ballad of Cable Hogue
Alexander Nevsky (Eisenstein), 28 (Peckinpah), 6
Allen, Woody, 66 Barry Lyndon (Kubrick), 37
Amendros, Nestor, 119-23, 130 Bass, Saul, 64
Atman, Robert, 45-46 The Beguiled (Siegel), 6
American Beauty (Mendes), 37 Being and Time (Heidegger), 14,
Anerican Film Institute (AFI), 2, 68
75-76, 102 Biographical Dictionary of Film
American Gigolo (Schrader), 110 (Thomson), 132
Antonioni, Michelangelo, 93-96 The Birds (Hitchcock), 86
The Apartment (Wilder), 37 Biskind, Peter, 102-3, 118, 120,
Apocalypse Now (Coppola), 24, 66 122-24
Araronson, Reuben, 132 Black Widow (Rafelson), 78
Arkin, Aan, 2-3 Blake, William, 57
"A Blossom Fell" (Cole), 10
Badlands (197r4), 8-23 Blow-Up (Antonioni), 94
camera work in, 20, 112 Blue Velvet (Lynch), 78
credits in, 65-66 Bode, Ralph, 77
critical appraisal of, 102, 132 Bonnie and Clyde (Penn), 7-12, 17,
depiction of space in, 59-63, 94 23
dialogue in, 18-19, 73-74 Bordwell, David, 115-16
literary models for, 14 Bound for Glory (Ashby), 45
music in, 9-10 "Boys Life on the Prairie" (Garland),
production of, 101, 119 129
158 Index
Breathless (Godard), 73 Day of Wrath (Dreyer), 49

Brecht, Bertolt, 53 Days of Heaven (1978), 33-57
The Bridge (Ivens), 100 camera work in, 49-50, 81, 112,
Brigman, Anne, 46 122-23
Brody, Adrien, 85 credits in, 46-47, 66
Buffalo Bill and the Indians (Atman), depiction of space in, 94
45 dialogue in, 74, 81
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid literary models for, 23-24, 33, 113
(Hill), 6, 8 music in, 39-40
production of, 103, 119-28
Camus, Abert, 14 soundtrack of, 82-83
Carrie (De Palma), 77 visual models for, 46, 69-70, 80,
Cascade (Rousseau), 69 120
Cassavetes, John, 118 voice-over in, 36-39, 75
Cat Ballou (Silverstein), 5 Deadhead Miles (Zimmerman), 2-5
Catch-22 (Nichols), 3 Dean, James, 15, 106
Cather, Willa, 24, 29, 33, 43 The Deer Hunter (Cimino), 104
Cavell, Stanley, 14-15, 40, 51, 67- Deleuze, Gilles, 60
69, 81, 97 Demme, Jonathan, 73
Caviezel, Jim, 28, 85-87, 108-11 Desert Rose (McMurtry), 91
Chaplin, Ben, 28, 85 Dillon, Robert, 91
Chelsea Girls (Morrissey and Warhol), Dirty Harry (Siegel), 5
79 Dirty Larry and Crazy Marry
Chimes at Midnight (Welles), 28 '(Hough), 8
Chion, Michel, 38-39 Double Indemnity (Wilder), 37
Christina's World (Wyeth), 70 Dovzhenko, Aeksandr, 29, 49
Cinema 5 Ltd., 102 Dressed To Kill (De Palma), 77
Cisse, Souleymene, 49 Dreyer, Carl, 49
Citizen Kane (Welles), 64 Drive, He Said (Nicholson), 5
Clift, Montgomery, 28 Dunaway, Faye, 18
Clooney, George, 84
Coal Miner's Daughter (Apted), 77 Earth (Dovzhenko), 80
The Color of a Brisk and Leaping Day Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (Biskind),
(Munch), 30 " 101,118
Cool Hand Luke (Rosenberg), 5 The Edge of the World (Powell), 49
Coppola, Francis Ford, 39, 102 Eliot, T. S., 52
Cosmic Beam Experience. See Lupica, Fraserhead (Lynch), 76, 78
Francesco The Essence of Reasons (Fleidegger),
Crane, Stephen, 29, 33, 113 1,97
Curtis, Edward S., 46 Evans, Walker, 69
Daney, Serge, 81 The Fan Club (Wallace), 91

Davis, Rebecca Harding, 33 Faulkner, William, 53
A Day in the Country (Renoir), 49 Ferguson, Frances, 54-55
Index 159
Filmex (Los Angeles Film Exposition), In a Lonely Place (Ray), 65

2 In Parenthesis (Jones), 28
Fisk, Jack, 75-78 In Search of Lost Time (Proust), 36
Five Easy Pieces (Rafelson), 18 Ivens, Joris, 100
The Flamingos (Rousseau), 69
Flaubert, Gustave, 74 James, Henry, 23, 29, 33, 43
Ford, John, 49 Joyce, James, 52
Friedkin, William, 39 Julia (Zinnemann), 30
From Here to Eternity (novel by Jones), Junior Bonner (Peckinpah), 6
28,30
From Here to Eternity (Zinnemann), Kael, Pauline, 102
28 Kon-Tiki (Heyerdahl), 15, 72
Korine, Harmony, 30
George Washington (Green), 30-31 Kottke, Leo, 9, 52
Gere, Richard, 87, 106-8, 110 Kubrick, Stanley, 91-92
Giant (Stevens), 15, 106
Goodbye Darkness (Manchester), 129 La Jetee (Marker), 37
"A Good Man is Hard to Find" The Land of the Pharaohs (Hawks), 4
Lange, Dorothea, 69
(O'Connor), 4
Lanton Mills (1971), 2, 76
Gothic mode, 75-79
The Last Detail (Ashby), 8
Grand Illusion (Renoir), 24-25
Laughton, Charles, 53
The Gravy Train (Sharrett), 5
L'Avventura (Antonioni), 94
Great Balls of Fire (McBride), 92
Lawrence, D. H., 43-45
The Great Waldo Pepper (Hill), 45
L'Eclisse (Antonioni), 94
Green, David Gordon, 30
Leigh, Mike, 118
The Green Berets (Kellogg and Wayne), Lemmon, Jack, 18
60 Leto, Jared, 85
Gummo (Korine), 86 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
(Agee and Evans), 46
Hedren, Tippi,' 85-86 Little Big Man (Penn), 6
Heidegger, Martin, 14, 20, 68, 70, Lolita (Kubrick), 10
73, 88-89, 97-101 Lost Highway (Lynch), 4
Heraclitus, 28 The Loved One (Richardson), 10
Hine, Lewis, 46, 69 "Love is Strange" (Mickey and
Hitchcock, Alfred, 86, 117 Sylvia), 10
Hombre (Ritt), 6 Lupica, Francesco, 83
Homer, Winslow, 43 Lupino, Ida, 5
Hopper, Edward, 62, 69 Lynch, David, 39, 75-78
Identification of a Woman The Magnificent Ambersons (Welles),

(Antonioni), 96 66
Images of War: The Artist's Vision of Mailer, Norman, 29
World War II (McCormick and Malick, Terrence
Perry), 130 acts in his film, 3In.6
160 Index
Malick, Terrence {continued) Nicholson, Jack, 18

atttitude toward stars in films of, The Night of the Hunter (Laughton),
84-89 53
cliche and films of, 73-75 Nolte, Nick, 85, 88, 128
compared to Antonioni, 93-97 Norris, Patricia, 75, 78
influence of, 30-31 North by Northwest (Hitchcock), 61
influences on, 29-30
male beauty in films of, 104-11 Oates, Warren, 88
nature as theme in films of, 67-73, O'Connor, Flannery, 29
111-14 On Dangerous Ground (Ray), 65
as philosophical filmmaker, 97-98, Ondine, 78-79
100-101 "On Style" (Sontag), 115
silence in films of, 79-82 On the History ofFilm Style (Bordwell),
on subjects of his films, 89 115
translation of Heidegger by, 1,97- "The Open Boat" (Crane), 113
98 Ordet (Dreyer), 49
uncompleted projects of, 90-93 Orff, Carl, 10-11
working methods of, 115-33 Owen, Wilfred, 25
The Manchurian Candidate
(Frankenheimer), 10 Paramount Pictures, 66, 103
Man with a Camera (Amendros), Parrish, Maxfield, 71-72
119 The Passenger (Antonioni), 96
Manz, Linda, 86 Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid
Mamie (Hitchcock), 86, 117 (Peckinpah), 6-7
The Marquise ofO... (Rohmer), Penn, Arthur, 9, 29
120-21 Penn, Sean, 87
McCabe and Mrs. Miller (Atman), Perkins, Anthony, 18
45,47 Perpetual Peace (Kant), 28
The Member of the Wedding Petulia (Lester), 18
(Zinnemann), 30 Phantom of the Paradise (De Palma),
Modernism, 13, 28, 43-45, 50-56, 76
7 2 , 7 8 , 8 0 - 8 2 , 9 3 - 9 4 , 110- Play It As It Lays (Perry), 18
11. See also Postmodernism Pocket Money (Rosenberg), 5-8
Morricone, Ennio, 9, 39, 46, 52 The Pope of Greenwich Village
The Moviegoer (Percy), 91 (Rosenberg), 78-79
Munch, Christopher, 30 Popeye (Atman), 4 5 ^ 6
Murnau, F. W., 29 Postmodernism, 5, 51-52, 77, 9 6 -
"Musica Poetica" (Orff), 9 97, 110. See also Modernism
Pound, Ezra, 52
Nashville (Atman), 4 Powell, Michael, 49
New Hollywood cinema, 7, 14, 17, Pressman, Ed, 101
51, 65-66, 75-77, 101-1 Pretty Poison (Black), 8, 18
New York Film Festival, 102-4 Prime Cut (Ritchie), 88, 91
Index 161
Psycho (Hitchcock), 12, 38 Sokurov, Aeksandr, 49

Puzzle of a Downfall Child Solitude and the Sublime (Ferguson),
(Schatzberg), 18 54
Sontag, Susan, 115-16
Rafelson, Bob, 78 Spacek, Sissy, 75-79, 88, 119
Raft, George, 5 Spielberg, Steven, 66
Raggedy Man (Fisk), 77 Stanton, Harry Dean, 78
Rain (Ivens), 100 Stay Hungry (Rafelson), 78
The Red and the White (Jansco), 24 Stein, Gertrude, 80
Red Desert (Antonioni), 94 Stevens, George, 30
Red River (Hawks), 8 Stevens, George, Jr., 30
Reilly, John C , 85 The Stranger (Camus), 14
Remarque, Erich Maria, 29 Studies in Classical American
Renoir, Jean, 49, 118 Literature (Lawrence), 43
Riis, Jacob, 46 Studies in Hysteria (Breur and Freud),
Rio Lobo (Hawks), 6 92
The River (Pearce), 91 The Sugarland Express (Spielberg), 8
The River (Renoir), 49 The Sundowners (Zinnemann), 30
Roberts, Eric, 77-78 Sunset Boulevard (Wilder), 37, 64
Rohnier, Eric, 121 Superman (Donner), 65
Roman Holiday (Wyler), 85 The Swiss Family Robinson (Wyss), 15,
Rope (Hitchcock), 117 72
Rousseau, Henri, 69 Syntonic Research Incorporated, 82-83
Sansho the Bailiff (Mizoguchi), 92 Tabu (Flaherty and Murnau), 28, 80

Satie, Eric, 11 Taxi Driver (Scorsese), 7, 10, 2 1 , 23
Saturday Night Fever (Badham), 87 Taylor, James, 10
Save the Tiger (Avildsen), 18 That Obscure Object of Desire
Saving Private Ryan (Spielberg), 24 (Bunuel), 37
Schiller, Friedrich, 52-53 They Drive by Night (Walsh), 4
Scorsese, Martin, 23 They Live by Night (Ray), 17, 23, 65
Scott, George C , 18 Thieves Like Us (Airman), 8, 45
The Search (Zinnemann), 30 The Thin Red Line (1998), 23-29
The Seven Lively Arts (Selcies), 115 camera work in, 25, 27, 95-96
Sheen, Martin,'88, 105-6, 110, 119 credits in, 66-67
Shepard, Sam, 77 critical appraisal of, 132
The Shining (Kubrick), 112 depiction of space in, 94
Sinclair, Upton, 45 music in, 83
Singin' in the Rain (Donen), 37, production of, 128-32
64-65 visual models for, 69, 80, 130
Sisters {De Palma), 101 voice-over in, 26-27, 75
Sjostrom, Victor, 29, 49 The Thin Red Line (novel by Jones),
Soderbergh, Steven, 118 24, 28, 30, 129
162 Index
Thomson, David, 132 Weld, Tuesday, 18

Tipton, George, 10 Welles, Orson, 66, 91-92, 118
Toll, John, 130-32 "The Westerner" (Warshow), 6
Trash (Morrissey), 79 West Side Story (Robbins and Wise),
Travolta, John, 85, 87-88 64
The Trial (Welles), 66 Wexler, Haskell, 119
"Trois Morceaux en Forme de Poire" What Is Called Thinking? (Heidegger),
(Satie), 9 15
True Grit (Hathaway), 6 Whitman, Walt, 23, 33, 43, 45
Twain, Mark, 24, 33, 43, 45 The Wild Bunch (Peckinpah), 6, 11
Two Lane Blacktop (Hellman), 7, Wilke, Robert J., 88
31n.2, 78 The Wings of the Dove (James), 23,
2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick), 29
38,91 Wise Blood (O'Connor), 4
The Wizard of Oz (Fleming), 38
Ulysses (Joyce), 28 Wordsworth, William, 57
"The Unanswered Question" (Ives), Wurlitzer, Rudy, 7
61 Wyeth, Andrew, 69-70
Wyeth, N. C , 70-71
Vampyr (Dreyer), 49
Vertigo (Hitchcock), 105 You'll Never Get Rich (Lanfield), 64
You Only Live Once (Lang), 17
Wajda, Andrzej, 92
War (Rousseau), 69 Zimmerman, Vernon, 2
Warner Brothers, 102 Zinnemann, Fred, 30
About the Authors
JAMES MORRISON teaches literature and film at Claremont McKenna

College. He is the author of Passport to Hollywood, a critical study, and
Broken Fever, a memoir. He is currently completing a study of mass
culture and the sublime in Hollywood movies, has published several
short stories, and is at work on a novel.
THOMAS SCHUR received his bachelor's degree in film at North

Carolina State University, and now studies film in the M.F.A. program
at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, where he also teaches film-
making and film studies. He has made several short films and videos,
and is currently at work on a sequence of films inspired by the stylistic
model of haiku poetry.

Films of Terrence Malick

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PAREGERC£) Westport, Connecticut

The paper used in this book complies with the

Fig. 1. Ignoble savages: Kit and Holly in the woods. Badlands. 16

Trying to assess the achievement of Terrence Malick in the wake of

crustations of legend that have gathered around his name, fraught

ment and engagement, aesthetic distance and emotional power, that

pronounced than Altman's Thieves Like Us (1973), and its melodrama

The lack of a single volume on the work of Terrence Malick is par-

1. In David Cook's Lost Illusions, Malick is discussed briefly in a section

Yvonne Tasker's Fifty Contemporary Filmmakers, despite its evident range,

before the precedent of his absurdist turn in Nichols's Catch-22

from time to time in a spirit of Joycean exuberance. Much about the

Simpson, a character dressed as a corn dog, or a billboard featuring

a series of counter-undulations, divided principally between those films

nessman chimes in irritably, in his high-pitched drawl: "Oh—let's just

as a key technique, establishing dual tracks of characters' speech, in

ADRIFT IN A WORLD OF OBJECTS: BADLANDS

Looking forward from Pocket Money, as some reviews indicate, the

Released in spring 1974, Badlands comes late in the sequence, so

"awkwardly moving a bust from a piano to a stand, or trying out a

By the time existentialism installed a version of detachment as a

cific reference to Malick and Heidegger. According to Cavell—an-

discovered, or discovered how to acknowledge, a fundamental fact of

Cavell is speaking here of Days of Heaven, trying to account for the

Fig. 2. James Dean as psychopath: Martin Sheen as Kit in Badlands. Cour-

a lid," Holly announces in the field next to Cato's house—in a va-

acknowledge that such detachment, even when based in the refuges

WAR IN NATURE: THE THIN RED LINE

ality. They expose with the single-mindedness of sober, unyielding

Fig. 5. In battle: The Thin Red Line. Courtesy of Photofest.

and because exposition is presented so elusively, the faces take on

establishment of covenant, accord, or law. On the other hand, the film

INFLUENCES AND INFLUENCE

Malick's influences are so obvious, so much on the surface, that they

The example of Fred Zinnemann, an influence as convincing as any,

extent that virtually n o critic reviewing the film failed to mention

1. It was screened twice on March 22, 1985, with respectable turnouts,

The opening sequence of Days of Heaven, in quick strokes that seem

literature, Days of Heaven evokes a sense of place at once mythic and

The first sequence of the film follows a season of labor in a wheat

indirection, stillness against motion, nonchalance against weightedness.

much of his work is to synthesize forms of modernist distanciation with

advances of the last thirty years—multichanneled sound, stereophonic

Cavell wants to understand speech as an element of sound, sound as

the owner's—and d o n ' t any of you go up around there either!" This

Fig. 6. Solitude: Days of Heaven. Courtesy of Photofest.

ample in question, for instance, the confrontation among the foreman,

D. H . Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) de-

kind of energetic cosmology in Days of Heaven, and the film's way-

(From this perspective, Popeye is best read as an effort to defamiliarize

of labor, from country to city. As a whole, the film demythologizes

representations of nature as luminous, awe-stricken, and awe-inspir-

SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE THEME

One of the key critical problems of Days of Heaven emerges most

core of the story—as if to suggest that innocence is everywhere around

Fig. 7. Among others: Community in Days of Heaven. Courtesy

engaged in are, at bottom, a form of relaxation, a surcease from the

1. For a fuller discussion of theories of voice-over, see Sarah Kozloff's

SPACE, FIGURE, GROUND

In an open field, a man paints a billboard. Another man approaches

simulate Vietnam—as in John Wayne's stalwart paean The Green Berets

sion buffered by a kind of respect, passivity, even an obsequiousness,