144115003X Malick PDF

Terrence Malick
Terrence Malick
Film and Philosophy
Edited by
Thomas Deane Tucker
and
Stuart Kendall
The Continuum International Publishing Group
80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038
The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX
www.continuumbooks.com
Copyright © 2011 by Thomas Deane Tucker and Stuart Kendall
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,
or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Terrence Malick, film and philosophy / edited by Thomas Deane Tucker & Stuart
Kendall.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4411-5003-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1-4411-5003-X (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Malick, Terrence, 1945—
Criticism and interpretation. I. Tucker, Thomas Deane, 1962- II. Kendall, Stuart.
PN1998.3.M3388T47 2011
791.43023’3092–dc22
2010048884
EISBN: 978-1-4411-4027-2
Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India

Printed and bound in the United States of America
Contents
Notes on Contributors vii
Chapter 1: Introduction 1
Stuart Kendall and Thomas Deane Tucker
Chapter 2: Voicing Meaning: On Terrence Malick’s Characters 13

Steven Rybin
Chapter 3: Terrence Malick’s Histories of Violence 40

John Bleasdale
Chapter 4: Rührender Achtung: Terrence Malick’s

Cinematic Neo-Modernity 58
Thomas Wall
Chapter 5: Worlding the West: An Ontopology of Badlands 80

Thomas Deane Tucker
Chapter 6: Fields of Vision: Human Presence in

the Plain Landscapes of Terrence Malick and
Wright Morris 101
Matthew Evertson
Chapter 7: The Belvedere and the Bunkhouse:

Space and Place in Days of Heaven 126
Ian Rijsdijk
Chapter 8: The Tragic Indiscernibility of Days of Heaven 148

Stuart Kendall
Chapter 9: Darkness from Light: Dialectics and The Thin Red Line 165
Russell Manning
vi Contents
Chapter 10: Song of the Earth: Cinematic

Romanticism in Malick’s The New World 179
Robert Sinnerbrink
Chapter 11: Whereof One Cannot Speak: Terrence Malick’s

The New World 197
Elizabeth Walden
Bibliography 211
Index 217
Notes on Contributors
John Bleasdale is a film scholar and Professor at Università Ca’ Foscari

Venezia.
Matthew Evertson is an Associate Professor of English at Chadron State

College in Nebraska and a scholar of American literature with a specialty
in the literature of the Great Plains. He is the author of numerous arti-
cles on Stephen Crane, Willa Cather, and Teddy Roosevelt. His book
Strenuous Lives: Stephen Crane, Theodore Roosevelt and the American 1890s
will be published by University of Alabama Press in 2011.
Stuart Kendall is an independent scholar working at the intersections of

visual and critical studies, poetics and theology. In addition to numerous
articles and reviews, he is the author of Georges Bataille, a critical biog-
raphy, published by Reaktion Books, and the editor and translator of
eight volumes of diverse writings in visual and critical studies by Georges
Bataille, Jean Baudrillard, Maurice Blanchot, René Char, Guy Debord,
and Paul Eluard.
Russell Manning is a Postdoctorate Fellow at the Institute for Citizenship

and Globalisation at Deakins University in Australia.
Ian Rijsdijk teaches a variety of film studies and media courses at The
Center For Film and Media Studies at University of Capetown. He is cur-
rently working in the field of ecocriticism and film.
Steven Rybin is an Instructor of Film at Georgia Gwinnett College. He

received an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Film Studies and Philosophical
Aesthetics from the School of Interdisciplinary Arts at Ohio University in
Athens, Ohio, after completing his MA in Film Studies from Emory
University in 2005. He has taught classes in film aesthetics, art cinema,
film authorship, film history, and interdisciplinary courses on the arts.
viii Notes on Contributors
He is the author of The Cinema of Michael Mann (Lexington Books, 2007)

and Nicholas Ray in Hollywood: Cinephilia and Film Authorship (forthcom-
ing in 2011).
Robert Sinnerbrink was awarded his Ph.D. on Hegel, Heidegger, and the
Metaphysics of Modernity at the University of Sydney in 2002. During his
postgraduate research period he spent six months studying at the Hum-
boldt Universitaet in Berlin. He has taught philosophy at a number of
institutions, including the University of Sydney, UTS, UNSW, The College
of Fine Arts, and Macquarie University. He is currently Lecturer in Phi-
losophy at Macquarie University in Sydney Australia. He is Chair of the
Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy and book review coedi-
tor for the journal Critical Horizons: A Journal of Philosophy and Social
Theory.
Thomas Deane Tucker is a Professor of Humanities at Chadron State

College in western Nebraska. His research and teaching interests are in
philosophical aesthetics, continental philosophy, and cinema studies.
His work has appeared in journals such as Studies in French Cinema, Film-
Philosophy Journal, and Enculturation. He is the author of Derridada: Duch-
amp as Readymade Deconstruction (Lexington Books, 2008). It is the first
text to explore Duchamp’s work in the context of the theories of Derrida
and deconstruction. He is currently working on a book titled The Logic of
Indifférance.
Elizabeth Walden is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Cultural Stud-

ies at Bryant University in Smithfield, Rhode Island. Her recent work
addresses emerging notions of materiality and posthuman collectivities
in film and visual culture.
Thomas Carl Wall is an English professor at National Tapei University of

Technology in Taiwan. He received his Ph.D. from the University of
Washington. His interests are in the Twentieth-Century World Litera-
ture, Twentieth-Century Continental Philosophy, Film Theory, History
of Literary Criticism, and History of Western Thought. He is the author
of Radical Passivity: Levinas, Blanchot and Agamben (SUNY Press, 1999).
Chapter 1
Introduction
Stuart Kendall and Thomas Deane Tucker
In the preface to his book The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of
Film, first published in 1971, philosopher Stanley Cavell acknowledges
his gratefulness to Terrence Malick.1 Cavell thanks a number of other
friends and colleagues, as well as his wife, in the same pages, so the com-
ment is almost unremarkable. It is in fact a comment that would only
become remarkable a few years later, after Terrence Malick had written
and directed some of the most astonishing films produced during our
times.
When Cavell first published his remark, Malick was 28 years old and a
recent graduate of the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. Cavell—
seventeen years Malick’s senior—had been his professor in philosophy
at Harvard in the mid-1960s and the two had stayed in touch as Malick
sought and found his way from philosophy into film or, as this volume
proposes to explore, from philosophy into a certain kind of filmmaking
relevant to philosophy. In the second enlarged edition of his book,
published in 1979, Cavell again references Malick, this time in
connection with some passages from Martin Heidegger’s What is Called
Thinking? that strike Cavell as particularly helpful to understanding
Malick’s then recent second film, Days of Heaven as well as to under-
standing the main subject of Cavell’s work, the ontology of film. Cavell’s
book links a celebrated contemporary American philosopher and an
inchoate contemporary American filmmaker in a unique and paradoxi-
cal relationship: here the teacher thanks his former student and refer-
ences that student’s film work as an illustration of his own philosophical
ideas. But who has taught whom, what, and when? What is the relation-
ship between the philosopher and the filmmaker? This question reso-
nates biographically—proposing an ongoing friendship between these
2 Terrence Malick
two significant culture-makers—but also and perhaps more importantly

as a question posed between film and philosophy.
Cavell’s remarks signal the appropriateness of asking philosophical
questions about Terrence Malick’s works as well as the aptness of explor-
ing the philosophical themes and problems posed by and examined in
Malick’s works. While it is not too much to claim that any film—no matter
how derivative or aesthetically valueless—may provide fodder for a cer-
tain kind of inquiry that can be understood as philosophical, it is also not
too much to claim that Malick’s films offer privileged sites for this kind of
inquiry. Malick’s background in philosophy and the evidence offered by
the films themselves invites this style of interrogation. It is already a philo-
sophical question to ask if the films demand this kind of questioning. But
this is not the kind of question for us to pursue here in this introduction.
Our goal here is simply to sketch some of the possible relations between
film and philosophy and to outline some of Terrence Malick’s biographi-
cal itineraries, particularly as they relate to his engagements with film and
philosophy.
The practices of film and philosophy have in fact benefited from sev-
eral different kinds of relationship over the past one hundred years and
more. There have been films that unfold in a philosophical register, films
about philosophical problems, and films that endeavor to function as
philosophy. The greatest films arguably often engage in subtle and com-
plex ways with the most challenging questions of human life and thus
tread willfully into territory traditionally occupied by philosophers and
theologians.
Cinema has of course also attracted the interest of a number of philoso-
phers and been written about in a philosophical key by an even larger
number of film commentators, critics, and, occasionally, filmmakers.
Sergei Eisenstein arguably occupies as significant a place among
aestheticians as he does among filmmakers. Since cinema has been the
dominant art form of the twentieth century, it is not surprising that it
should figure prominently in the works of philosophers interested in aes-
thetic concerns. What is perhaps more surprising is that these philosophers
have so rarely agreed upon relevant questions pertaining to the relation-
ship between film and philosophy or even the basic nature of the medium
and the ways in which it might be approached. This diversity of opinion
is occasionally obscured by the assured literary and intellectual style of
some philosophers and even, one might observe, some philosophical
approaches. Despite this apparent will to uniformity, philosophical
Introduction 3
approaches to film studies remain diverse in method, orientation, and

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

aspect of his craft as a filmmaker. It is remarkable, in short, that such
care has been left to speak for itself.
Interviews with the casts and crews of his films, such as those available
on the Criterion Collection DVD releases of Days of Heaven and The Thin
Red Line, for example, shed some light on Malick’s materials and work-
ing methods without fully explaining them. The bits and pieces of infor-
mation they offer serve in some ways only to deepen the enigmatic nature
of the objects—the films—themselves. Technical and biographical details
in cases like this beg hermeneutic questions: what kind of information or
insight is helpful in approaching films in general and Malick’s films in
particular? How should Malick’s films be situated or contextualized most
productively?
These questions have proven to be very vexing for Malick’s critics, both
casual and concerted. Some critics affiliate him with the New American
Cinema of the 1970s—with Arthur Penn, Robert Altman, and Bob
Rafelson, for example—others affiliate him more strongly with the
European Art Cinema of the 1950s and 1960s. Two of the book-length
works devoted to Malick—Hannah Peterson’s edited collection The
Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America and Lloyd Michaels
Terrence Malick—adopt a “literary” approach to their subject.4 David
Davies’ edited volume on The Thin Red Line, by contrast, appears in a
series of works in which philosophers write on film. Undoubtedly these
approaches are both valid and helpful, perhaps equally so.
Biographical Itineraries
Terrence Malick was born on November 30, 1943 in either Ottawa,

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

me was how violence erupted and ended before you really had time to
understand what was happening.”6 He also describes being trained in
civil defense against a nuclear attack.
As a student at St. Stephen’s Episcopal High School in Austin, Malick
performed in plays, played football, and was an excellent student. Dur-
ing the summers through high school and college, he worked the wheat
harvests north from Texas into Canada. He also worked in the oil fields
and in a railyard. After high school, Malick went on to study philosophy
at Harvard, as we have already noted, with Stanley Cavell. Following grad-
uation from Harvard—summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa—in 1965,
Malick won a prestigious fellowship to continue his studies in philoso-
phy as a Rhodes Scholar at Magdalen College, Oxford. His major profes-
sor there was Gilbert Ryle, but the two apparently did not agree on the
direction of his work. Malick abandoned his fellowship after only one
year and found employment as a journalist for the New Yorker, Life, and
Newsweek. In the fall of 1967, the New Yorker sent Malick to Bolivia to cover
the trial of Régis Debray, the French philosopher who had been a mem-
ber of Che Guevara’s revolutionary cadre, but nothing came of the story.7
The following spring Malick continued to write, contributing to the obit-
uaries of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy for the New Yorker,
among other pieces.
In 1968, Malick taught philosophy as a lecturer at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology and in 1969 he published The Essence of Reasons,
a translation of Martin Heidegger’s Vom Wesen des Grundes with an
informed and astute critical introduction and notes. The book appeared
in the prestigious Northwestern University Press series Studies in Phenom-
enology and Existential Philosophy. These endeavors would suggest that
Malick intended to pursue a career as a professor of philosophy, despite
having abandoned his studies in Oxford. Apparently, however, his expe-
riences in front of the classroom were not positive ones. In his interview
with Barbara Walker for Sight and Sound, Malick said flatly: “I was not a
good teacher; I didn’t have the sort of edge one should have on the stu-
dents, so I decided to do something else.”8 That something else was film
school.
In 1969, Malick enrolled in the American Film Institute’s Center for
Advanced Film Studies (now the AFI Conservatory) in Los Angeles. David
Lynch and Paul Schrader were there at the same time and the place
seems to have been an incubator for the New Hollywood. Friendships he
formed there have followed Malick through his professional career, most
6 Terrence Malick
notably perhaps his friendship with a high school friend of David Lynch,
Jack Fisk.9 Fisk has been either Art Director or Production Designer on
all of Malick’s films to date. While working with Malick on Badlands, Fisk
met Sissy Spacek (the female lead in the film). The two were married a
year after Badlands was released. Fisk has spent the majority of his career
in Hollywood directing his own films and working as a production
designer for friends like Malick, Lynch, and Brian De Palma.
Malick is thus a member of the first generation of filmmakers substan-
tially formed by film school. This generation had access to a wider variety
of films, produced over a longer period of time in more countries than
any previous generation of filmmakers. This exposure profoundly
shaped the texture of their films as well as the direction of the industry.
Speaking with Michel Ciment in 1975, Malick was circumspect about
AFI: “Today I would certainly not be accepted [into the program], but at
the time it wasn’t well known, and they accepted just about anyone.”10
Two years later, in 1971, Malick wrote, produced and directed his thesis
film, an 18-minute Western called Lanton Mills starring himself, Warren
Oates, and Harry Dean Stanton. The film was screened in New York after
Badlands in 1974 but has been out of circulation ever since.
While still at film school, through the efforts of his agent, Michael
Medavoy, Malick worked as a writer and script doctor. He contributed to
early drafts of Dirty Harry, directed by Don Siegel in 1971, and Drive, He
Said, Jack Nicholson’s directorial debut, in the same year. In 1972, Vernon
Zimmerman directed Alan Arkin in a film called Deadhead Miles written
by Malick and Stuart Rosenberg directed Malick’s script for a Western
called Pocket Money, a Paul Newman vehicle also starring Lee Marvin.11
Under the pseudonym David Whitney, Malick wrote The Gravy Train,
directed by Jack Sharrett in 1974. Malick’s work on these films and
undoubtedly others evidences the openness of the post-studio world of
the New Hollywood. It is all but unimaginable that a film-school student
might have access to an agent with access to productions like these today.
Through his studies at the AFI, Malick seems to have entered the slip-
stream of the New Hollywood at both a personal and professional level.
During this period, Malick was engaged to and married a woman named
Jill Jakes who would later become a municipal court judge in
California.
While working as a writer, Malick also began writing his own debut
feature, Badlands, a film loosely based on the 1958 Charles Starkweather,
Caril Anne Fugate killing spree. By the summer of 1972, Malick and his
friend Edward Pressman had each raised half of the money needed to
Introduction 7
produce the picture, which was filmed in about six weeks in southeast
Colorado, the Dust Bowl, and South Dakota. The independent produc-
tion cost around $350,000 dollars, working with a nonunion unit and
relatively unknown principle actors, Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek, but
the team ran out of money halfway through the shoot and Malick had to
return to writing other screenplays before completing the project. Lack
of funds forbid much improvisation either with the actors or with the
visual elements of the film, which remains the most obviously scripted of
Malick’s works. Many of the principle thematic and stylistic elements that
characterize Malick’s oeuvre are already present in Badlands: a plot
derived from the popular American imagination; a complex and prob-
lematic voice-over narration; the considered use of diegetic and nondi-
egetic sound; a contrast between nature and civilization rendered in
stunning visual images; and symbolically loaded visual elements, most
notably fire and rivers, among other things. The film was a critical suc-
cess upon its debut at the New York Film Festival in the spring of 1974.
The film ultimately cost about $950,000 to complete and Warner Brothers
bought the distribution rights for around $1.1 million, but it only made
its investors a slight return.
Malick explored a variety of follow-up projects over the next few years,
eventually agreeing to work with Bert and Harold Schneider and Para-
mount Pictures on Days of Heaven. Malick took great care in casting the
principle actors in the film, settling with Richard Gere and Brooke
Adams, when John Travolta and Genevieve Bujold were unavailable, and
persuading Sam Shepard to take his first major role as an actor. None of
these actors were as well known then as they are today. Days of Heaven was
filmed in Alberta, Canada, over 73 days in the fall of 1976. Nestor
Almendros was the cinematographer during the first part of the shoot
but had to leave before filming was completed, having previously agreed
to shoot François Truffaut’s The Man Who Loved Women. Haskell Wexler
completed the final two weeks of shooting following the visual prece-
dents established by Almendros.12 The shoot was a complex and chal-
lenging one, made all the more complex as Malick and Almendros
experimented with different techniques for filming with natural light
and different ways of working with the actors. (During this period, Malick
and Jill Jakes were divorced.)
Malick’s script had been highly refined, full of details of character, but
as filming progressed Malick felt free to improvise, focusing on natural
elements that caught his eye and asking his actors to film scenes without
dialogue. Then Malick spent two full years editing down the large mass
8 Terrence Malick
of footage this process had generated. Voice-over narration was added to

the final edit of what had become a largely silent film.
When it was finally released, in 1978, Days of Heaven was nominated for
four Academy Awards: Patricia Norris for Costume Design, Ennio
Morricone for Original Score, John K. Wilkinson, Robert W. Glass,
Jr., John T. Reitz, Barry Thomas for Sound, and Nestor Almendros for
Cinematography. Nestor Almendros won the Oscar for cinematography.
The film also won best picture at Cannes in 1979 and Malick won best
director there and at the New York Film Critics Circle.
Following Days of Heaven, Paramount Pictures offered Malick a produc-
tion deal. Around this time Malick met a fledging producer named
Bobby Geisler. In his Vanity Fair article Robert Biskind describes their
working relationship in terms that shed light on Malick’s personality as
well as his physical bearing:
He and Geisler had hit it off and began meeting at Los Angeles restau-
rants little frequented by celebrities, such as the Hamburger Hamlet
on Sunset and Doheny, where they sat in back batting around ideas.
Malick, about 35 then, was bearish and bearded. He had the beef-eating
habits of a boy raised in Texas and Oklahoma; as he talked he wolfed
down hamburgers, two at a time. Malick invariably wore jeans and a
seersucker sport coat a little too small for him. It gave him a slightly
Chaplinesque air. Geisler kidded him that it looked like the seersucker
jacket that Kit Carruthers—Sheen’s Starkweather surrogate—stole
from a rich man’s house in Badlands.13
The two of them started planning a film about John Merrick, a.k.a. the
Elephant Man, and Malick began work on an enigmatic and expansive
film about the origins of life, with the working title Q. Malick dropped
the Merrick project when David Lynch released his version of the story
in 1980 and spent more time working on Q, drafting and redrafting the
script and even sending a camera crew out to capture images of the Great
Barrier Reef, Mount Etna, and Antarctica.14 During this period Malick
was dividing his time between Los Angeles and Paris. He shared an apart-
ment with his then girlfriend, Michie Gleason, on the rue Jacob in Paris
while he was working on Q and she was directing a film called Broken
English. Both his enthusiasm for Q and his relationship with Gleason
seem to have foundered around the same time in the early 1980s.
Within a year he had begun a new relationship, with a French woman,
Michèle Morette, and begun what would be a protracted absence from
the film industry. Malick and Morette married in 1985 and moved, with
Introduction 9
Alexandra, Morette’s daughter from a previous relationship, to Austin,

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

screenplay, best picture, and best director—but failed to win any.
After The Thin Red Line, Steven Soderbergh asked Malick to work on a
script for a film about Che Guevara with Benicio del Toro, informed at
least in part by Malick’s 1967 trip to Bolivia during Régis Debray’s trial.
But that film was not to be: Steven Soderbergh himself would ultimately
rewrite and direct the project as a two-part film Che, in 2008.
During this period, Malick turned to producing. He and his old friend
Edward Pressman established Sunflower Productions. Between 1999 and
2007, Malick served as producer or executive producer on seven fictional
and documentary films including films by Michael Apted, Zhang Yimou,
Robert Redford, David Gordon Green, and Hans Petter Moland. He also
wrote the screenplay for an Italian production released in 2002 as
Bear’s Kiss.16
In 2005, Malick released The New World, a version of the Pocahontas
story, starring Colin Farrell, Christopher Plummer, Christian Bale, and
an unknown 15-year-old actress, Q’orianka Kilcher, as Pocahontas. New
Line Cinema produced The New World for $40 million. Emmanuel
Lubezki’s cinematography was nominated for an Academy Award and
Kilcher’s performance was widely praised but critics were oddly lukewarm
about the film.
Malick’s most recent film is Tree of Life starring Brad Pitt and Sean
Penn. The much-delayed project is scheduled for release in May 2011.
And as of this writing Malick is already working on another picture, this
one starring Ben Affleck, Rachel McAdams, and Rachel Weisz, among
others. The as yet untitled film has been announced for release in 2012,
but given Malick’s perfectionism and pace in the editing room, that date
seems more hopeful than realistic.
These biographical itineraries outline a complex and occasionally
ambivalent figure, a man devoted to his craft as a filmmaker but also
informed by a broad range of experiences outside the film business.
Over the course of his careers—as a student and teacher of philosophy,
as a journalist, and as a filmmaker—Terrence Malick has evidenced a
deep and broad knowledge of history, philosophy, religion, art, music,
literature, and, of course, film. He has also of course confirmed an abid-
ing love of and devoted attention to the natural world. This combination
of interests is rare among contemporary filmmakers and indeed in con-
temporary culture in general, where success is generally predicated on
specialization. Malick by contrast appears to be a kind of compulsive
generalist, keenly interested in specific but disparate threads of cultural
Introduction 11
production and capable of weaving those threads together into com-

plexly satisfying cultural objects.
Given Malick’s careful and detailed attention to his works, it is hardly
surprising that he has completed only four films in thirty-seven years.
What is more surprising is that Malick has remained consistently, if not
constantly, active in the film industry over these same years as both a
writer and a producer. While it is clear that his own films—the films he
has written and directed—stand apart from these other projects, the
other projects reveal a more worldly figure than Malick’s films do on
their own.
Over the years Malick has worked closely with a small group of regular
collaborators, like production designer Jack Fisk, while consistently draw-
ing on a wide range of talent in each new film. He has worked with estab-
lished Hollywood stars and unknown actors, often skillfully using both
types of actor toward different ends. Malick, in other words, radicalizes
the auteur principle by creating contexts wherein collaboration is com-
plex and vital to the finished product, the film.
Partly for this reason and despite many often noted and prominent
similarities, we should remember that Malick’s films are remarkably dif-
ferent. His handling of similar—even in some cases identical—materials
from film to film, varies greatly. While it is possible to distill a worldview
and general problematic from Malick’s films as an oeuvre, doing so is not
as easy as many critics and commentators seem to believe. Naturally we
hope that the chapters that follow provide some help in understanding
Malick’s films and framing what is sure to be an ongoing discussion about
them.
Notes
1
Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Cinema (1971)
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), xiv.
2
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert
Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 280.
3
At the Rome Film Festival in October 2007, Malick presented a few clips of
Italian films that had influenced him along with two clips from his own films,
Badlands and The New World. For an evocation of this presentation see www.
lavideofilmmaker.com/blog/2009/07/05/terrence-malick-interview-
rome- film-festival/ (accessed October 15, 2010).
4
See Hanna Peterson, ed. The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America
(2nd ed.) (London: Wallflower Press, 2007), 2–3; and Lloyd Michaels Terrence
Malick (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), xii.
12 Terrence Malick
5
Biographical details of Malick’s life, sparse as they are, can be found in Peter
Biskind’s “The Runaway Genius,” Vanity Fair 460 (December 1998), 202–20; in
Michaels, Terrence Malick, 13–20; and in the two interviews with Malick
reprinted in Michaels; among other sources. Biskind reports that Malick was
born in Ottawa, Illinois. Malick himself seems to claim he was born in Waco,
Texas (see Michaels, Terrence Malick, 105).
6
Michel Ciment interview with Terrence Malick, Positif 170 (June 1975), 30–4;
reprinted in translation in Michaels, op. cit., 105–13.
7
See James Morrison and Thomas Schur, The Films of Terrence Malick (Westport:
Praeger, 2003), 2.
8
Sight and Sound 44.2 (Spring 1975), 82–3; reprinted in Michaels, Terrence
Malick, 102–5.
9
See Morrison and Schur, The Films of Terrence Malick, 75–9.
10
Michel Ciment interview, op. cit., 105.
11
A draft of the script is reportedly available in Los Angeles at the Margaret
Herrick Library of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences. See
Morrison and Schur, The Films of Terrence Malick, 2.
12
See Nestor Alemendros’ autobiography, Man with a Camera (New York: Farrar,
Straus, Giroux, 1984).
13
Biskind, “The Runaway Genius,” 202–20.
14
See ibid.
15
See ibid.
16
Malick’s contribution is uncredited.
Chapter 2
Voicing Meaning: On Terrence Malick’s

Characters
Steven Rybin
The worlds of Terrence Malick’s films are vibrantly sensual, open-ended

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

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

theoretical and historiographical inquiry, and can be dealt with only cur-
sorily here.2 Nevertheless, some notion of the classical film character
helps throw Malick’s fictional human beings into relief. In the classical
cinema, the goal-directed protagonist forms the backbone of the story,
and the narration gradually reveals the retrospective cause-and-effect
chain of events resulting in the achievement of the goal. The protagonist
is defined by a fairly coherent set of psychological traits, and his or her
action and behavior tends to flow naturally and expectedly from this set.
Even the world of the classical film seems tailor-made for the protagonist
and the meanings for which the protagonist eventually comes to stand.
In classical cinema, characters work to “take over the narration,” as David
Bordwell phrases it, holding together the disparate and inherently frag-
mented pieces of celluloid through which films are constituted through
a causal and psychologically plausible chain of action and effect.3 The
active and accomplishing protagonist serves to join, and then hold, the
world of the classical narrative film together.
A concrete example from Malick’s 2005 film The New World may begin
to show us the contrasts between this director’s unique film practice and
the causal schemas of classical cinema. Near the beginning of the film,
Voicing Meaning: On Terrence Malick’s Characters 15
Captain John Smith (Colin Farrell) leads an expedition to meet the

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

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

film is, for example, different than the photograph. For Sobchack, the
photograph is more akin to “transcendental phenomenology,” for, like
Husserl, the father of that branch of philosophy, the photograph
describes only the basic structure of perceptual experience wherein con-
sciousness already possesses the necessary means through which to medi-
ate and negotiate phenomena.5 That is, like the abstract, static, and
transcendental consciousness of Husserl’s phenomenology, the photo-
graph never becomes:
In the still photograph, time and space are abstractions. Although the
image has a presence, it neither partakes of nor describes the present.
Indeed, the photograph’s fascination is that it is a figure of transcen-
dental time made available against the ground of a lived and finite
temporality. Although included in our experience of the present, the
photograph transcends both our immediate present and our lived
experience of temporality because it exists for us as never engaged in
an activity of becoming. Although it announces the possibility of becom-
ing, it never presents itself as the coming into being of being. It is a
presence without a past, present, future.6
We will do well to remember that film is, of course, mechanically enabled

by the 24 photographic frames per second that generate, in the appara-
tus of the projector, the illusion of motion. Thus for Sobchack, although
Husserl’s transcendental consciousness informs the basic structure of
the cinema—that is, the individual frame in its static presence—in
cinema this structure is always animated, made existential, through the
existence of the filmstrip’s frames across time and in motion (both the
illusory motion of the film on the screen and the very real, mechanical
motion of the filmstrip along the projector track that enables the
former).
In Malick’s films, particularly his work since Days of Heaven, the cam-
era’s autonomy—its “being and becoming” in film time and film space,
independently although always in relation to the film character—is
insisted upon. In Malick’s work the camera’s sensuous relationship to the
landscape becomes salient. Examples include the shots of the natural
landscape throughout Days of Heaven, images that are not always tethered
to a human perspective. In particular, one striking sequence in the film
uses time-lapse photography to show the sprouting of a seed as it becomes
a plant, something our eyes cannot see in quite the same way without the
18 Terrence Malick
assistance of the cinema. And in the sinuous tracking shots of The Thin
Red Line, which often sail above soldiers pressed to the ground during
the heat of battle, we see the camera moving beyond the position of a
character in order to investigate some aspect of cinematic geography
that only it has the power to see. Sometimes the camera’s ability to per-
ceive what human agents cannot is implied in a stylistically more modest
manner, as in the opening image of Badlands, in which we see a shaft of
light emerging through a window behind Holly (Sissy Spacek), suggest-
ing a world of experience that exceeds her own, called to light by the
cinema’s perceptual apparatus. In other sequences it is editing that assists
the camera in wresting shots free of narrative articulation and character
psychology, as in the sequence of jump cuts from The New World analyzed
above. At other times, the camera’s autonomy is suggested through meta-
phors that it helps the viewer produce independently of character: In the
climactic sequences of Days of Heaven, for instance, Malick dramatizes a
locust plague on a farm and the ensuing attempt to burn away the
destroyed crop. The motif of fire during this sequence—intensely pre-
sented by the film’s exquisitely composed cinematography—suggests
biblical themes of the apocalypse that the characters, at this moment in
the narrative, are hardly occupied with; it is the viewer’s privilege to infer
these meanings from the camera’s luminous presentation of the filmic
world.
In the hands of a film poet such as Malick—whose films are paradig-
matic of what Sobchack calls existentially “mature” films that tap into
the complex poetic possibilities of film time and space—cinema itself
becomes a different way, relative to human perception, of seeing in
space and becoming through time.7 For Malick, then, film is more
than merely an illustrative instrument for pictorially constructing the
causal chains of narrative and the psychological comportment of
characters. The sensual world of image and sound—the worlds of
Malick’s films—exceeds any single interpretation, diegetic or other-
wise, that might be ascribed to it, even as its rhythms, compositions,
and gradations enable those interpretations. This slight asymmetry
between human perception (whether that of the spectator’s or that of
the character’s) and the film camera’s perception guarantees cine-
ma’s imagery and sounds a function beyond that of serving as the
ground for human agency and action. In Malick’s hands cinematic
landscapes become a rich reservoir of potential meaning, producing
as his films do a surplus of visual and sonic sense to which viewer—
and character—may respond.
World and Worlding, Earth and Striving
This contrast between the efficiently constructed classical narrative film

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

ongoing and revelatory ways. Heidegger writes:
Truth happens in the temple’s standing where it is. This does not mean
that something is correctly represented and rendered here, but that
what is as a whole is brought into unconcealedness and held therein.
To hold (halten) originally means to tend, keep, take care (hüten).
Truth happens in Van Gogh’s painting. This does not mean that some-
thing is correctly portrayed, but rather that in the revelation of the
equipmental being of the shoes, that which is as a whole—world and
earth in their counterplay—attaints to unconcealedness.9
Heidegger’s concept of the “world” of the artwork is neither representa-

tional nor precisely aesthetic. His concern is not whether the world of
the peasant has been “correctly” depicted according to the current mea-
sure of sociological or historiographical knowledge regarding the actual
peasants whose lives Van Gogh implied in his depiction of the shoes.
Neither is Heidegger interested in aesthetics, at least insofar as “aesthet-
ics” refers to an experience informed by knowledge of the historically
prevailing formal and stylistic laws of a given artistic domain. Instead,
Heidegger is intrigued, not by some knowledge that precedes the exis-
tence of the artwork, but rather with how truth happens in the historically
situated work of art (and we may regard an artwork as “historically situ-
ated” so long as it continues to offer a vital experiential frame for at least
a segment of humanity at a moment in and across history). As R. Raj
Singh points out, it is the existence of the historical artwork “which
attains and sustains around itself a unity of paths and relations . . . The
world is described as a unity of various basic directions and relations
which grants definition to human realities . . . The openness that governs
all significances and defines all relations is the world.”10 It is the open,
ongoing, and indeterminate relationship with the artwork—rather than
an objective knowledge about the aesthetic object that has already been
established—that intrigues Heidegger.
It is crucial for Heidegger, then, that the “world” of the artwork, and
indeed of humanity itself, be regarded not as an objective, already exist-
ing entity. The world does exist objectively, of course, describable, for
example, through scientific means of measurement. Likewise, the art-
work also offers a “unity of paths and relations,” the contours of which
may be objectively described (through formalism, for example, which in
film studies has been most fruitfully represented by the neoformalist
paradigm).11 However, the meaning that might be generated through

these paths and relations—a meaning that claims a world—is held forth
as an “openness” that is encountered every time a historically situated
self encounters a work of art. Heidegger’s curious phrase “the world
worlds,” familiar from Being and Time and also present in the artwork
essay, gestures toward this idea. “The world worlds,” Heidegger writes in
the artwork essay, “and is more fully in being than the tangible and per-
ceptible realm in which we believe ourselves to be at home.”12 In turn,
the “worlding” of the world—the revelation of a meaningful world
through the activity of the interpreting, historically situated self in rela-
tion to the interpretable, historically situated artwork—is the counter-
pole of what Heidegger calls “earth,” which is world concealed, or the
discursively generated world existing only in a state of as-yet-unarticulated
potential. “Earth” is the potential inherent in all material, sensual reality,
that which forms the ground for meaningful human existence. In the
creation of the artwork, material is used, but as Heidegger suggests, it is
never used up: the special quality of the poetic artwork is that it lets us
engage with the luminous sensuality of materiality (“earth”) at the very
same time as it becomes a “world.” This is what allows the process of world-
ing to remain ongoing: sensuous earth never settles into rigidly consti-
tuted world. (As Heidegger discusses in another essay, to exhaustively
master earth under the sign of a world would result in enframing, wherein
the ongoing potential of earth is concealed through instrumental objec-
tivity. This is the danger of all formalisms.)13 The interplay continues
every time the art work is confronted by a self.
What is the cinema’s earth, its materiality? The traditional arts have
their own kind of “earth” that they “set up,” to use another Heideggerian
phrase, through the work of the art object. As Heidegger says, “To be
sure, the sculptor uses stone just as the mason uses it, in his own way. But
he does not use it up . . . the painter also uses pigment, but in such a way
that color is not used up but rather only now comes to shine forth.”14 In
terms of film, it may be useful to confront the question of its “earth,” or
potential, through those constitutive compositional properties of the
medium that do not function exclusively as vehicles for narrative infor-
mation. The “invisible style” of most classical narrative films tends to
efface both the saliency of directorial poetic choices as well as the mate-
riality of the film image (whether in its celluloid or digital forms) in favor
of using film as a vehicle for efficiently communicated narrative informa-
tion. Such films do not explore the spatial and temporal phenomeno-
logical richness that, as Sobchack has shown us, is always a possibility in
22 Terrence Malick
films. In Heidegger’s terms, the sort of cinema that wholly reduces image
and sound to the vehicles of narrative information constitutes a world
without earth, a world enframed; to extend his metaphor further, it is a
cinema of masonry rather than sculpture. In poetic cinema, however,
while stories are frequently still told, the tight join that binds narrative to
image and sound is loosened. The shape of a film’s sound and vision may
continue to cue us to recognize important narrative events and their
development, but the “earth” of the cinema—its grounding in the sensu-
ous luminosity of the unfolding projection of the celluloid strip or the
digital display of the video disc—shines forth in a rather more indetermi-
nate manner. Whereas many films want to show us an objectively consti-
tuted and already-imagined world (hence the frequently unsympathetic
comparison of literature to cinema, wherein the former supposedly
allows more imaginative space for the reader), poetic cinema reminds us
that we still have the power to imagine—to “world”—a world.
The aforementioned sequence from The New World is one moment in
which a Malick character, awash in the affective luminosity of the earth,
strives to voice—to “world”—meaning. Indeed, the water Smith and his
cohorts travel on toward the forest in which the native Americans live
offers a path away from the European colonizers, who project the already-
worlded world of Europe onto the earthy American landscape; Smith
envisions a better world, and his rapturous encounter with Pocahontas
and the Powhaten tribe offers the potential of a new worlding. All of
Malick’s films, however, feature sequences in which characters attempt
to wrest together new meaning out of the sensually dispersive design of
Malick’s poetic cinema.
One sequence in Badlands offers a particularly telling example of both
character’s and viewer’s confrontation with Malick’s filmic worlds. Holly,
enjoying a respite from her journey with the serial killer Kit (Martin
Sheen), looks into her father’s stereopticon, a protocinematic device in
which still images are put into motion, one of the few childhood posses-
sions this young girl has brought with her. The images she views are vistas
of various historical spaces and times, some of them easier to date than
others: the Sphinx, a steamboat in a lake, a mother with child, several
Victorian women, and a large family gathering in front of a house. Viewed
in series, there is no already articulated causal connection between this set
of images; the stereopticon tells no precise story. Holly herself voices the
meaning of these paratactic images, however, in a way that is not unlike
our own viewing of a Malick film.15 As she looks at the images, we hear
Holly say (as she looks back at this moment retrospectively, a doubling of
the spectatorship we see within the film frame itself) the following words:
“It hit me that I was just this little girl, born in Texas, whose father was a
sign painter, who had only just so many years to live. It sent a chill down
my spine and I thought, where would I be this very moment if Kit had
never met me? Or killed anybody? This very moment.” Holly reaches a
level of self-consciousness at “this very moment”—a moment she steals
away from both Kit’s murderous journey and the forward thrust of the
narrative’s gradual development—that is hardly even glimpsed elsewhere
in her narration. As Barbara Brickman has suggested, “In this one small
interlude, we see the female teen simultaneously as spectator and as
storyteller.”16 Simultaneously, too, Malick shows us both the material earth
(the stereopticon and its images) and the immaterial world (the signifi-
cance Holly gives to what she sees) without effacing one or the other. For
Malick, as for Heidegger, earth enables world, but world does not erase
earth. In turn, Malick’s film itself echoes Holly’s stereopticon; the photo-
graphs Holly animates through this protocinematic device remind us of
the material of the film medium itself, prompting us to recognize the
materiality that always underpins our worlding of interpretive discourse
upon watching a film.
Days of Heaven includes a similar sequence in which a young female
narrator encounters an open-ended experiential frame that might
enable her to express a world. While Holly’s viewing occurs through an
old, precinematic technology, Linda confronts the moving image in the
form of Charlie Chaplin’s film The Immigrant (1917). Linda is the sister
of Bill (Richard Gere), who travels to the Texas Panhandle with his lover
Abby (Brooke Adams) in the hopes of finding the wealth and success
that has remained elusive through the backbreaking labor that has
defined their lives. After Abby begins an affair with a landowner known
only as the Farmer (Sam Shepard)—she and Bill all the while clandes-
tinely masking their relationship with one another—a brief respite (the
“days of heaven” of the title) from their alienated labor becomes possi-
ble. The exhibition context in which young Linda views The Immigrant is
a traveling circus that has crashed on the Farmer’s land during these
leisurely and short-lived “days,” and it evokes earlier practices of cinema
exhibition wherein films would often be projected in a vaudeville con-
text. In this context, the tactile, immediate qualities of particular images
in the Chaplin film are emphasized over the classical narrative cinema’s
standardized regulation of sensuous experience. Chaplin’s film here
becomes part of Linda’s larger haptic experience with the surrounding
environment: more than any other character in the film, and even more
24 Terrence Malick
than Holly throughout much of Badlands (whose interpretive efforts

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

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

point of entry into the dynamic and interpretively contested world of the
films. Before we can even get our spatial bearings in The New World, for
example, the film introduces the voice of Pocahontas praying to her
Earth Mother, her arms upheld against the blue sky, as iconic and spiri-
tual an image of existential striving as exists in this, or any other, direc-
tor’s oeuvre. However, the poetics of the voice in Malick does not
ultimately serve to represent Heidegger’s notion of “striving” in pictorial
terms that might be described through formalist terminology. Striving
instead ultimately functions in Malick’s cinema as the interplay between
audible voice-over, which makes an interpretive claim about the world
viewed, and visible filmic world itself, which may or may not bend to the
interpreter’s will. Striving in Malick is thus a drama largely played out in
the liminal, experiential relationship between the first-person voice-
overs and the diegetic world of the films (although the drama, of course,
extends to the spectator’s own heightened experience of Malick’s film
poetry).
In this sense, the voices of Malick’s first-person narrators tend more
toward Michel Chion’s notion of the semi-acousmêtre, or the not-yet-seen-
voice which is unmoored in a subjectivity.18 Chion suggests that in most
narrative cinema, “there are not all the sounds including the human voice.
There are voices, and then everything else. In other words, in every audio
mix, the presence of a human voice instantly sets up a hierarchy of per-
ception . . . the presence of a human voice structures the sonic space that con-
tains it [italics Chion’s].”19 In most films, the voice is situated in the body
of the character, and emerges from conventional dialogue scenes; such
visual-aural matching ensures that we take what we see on the screen as
finalized, aesthetically organized phenomena that the film as image-
producing apparatus has already mastered. The voice-over (or, to use
Chion’s word, acousmêtre), on the other hand, unmoors itself from the
body from which the voice emanates, and thus has more widely varie-
gated powers to either enhance, or disturb, our epistemological mastery
of the film’s visual track.
Chion has termed the omniscient voice the acousmêtre, the “not-yet-seen”
voice, the voice which functions, quite often, extradiegetically. For Chion,
the purest sort of acousmêtre is the voice that never appears in the diegetic
world or the film frame; bodiless, unmoored in the contingent realm of
reality, this kind of voice—present in films Chion uses as examples, such
as The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (Fritz Lang, 1933), The Fog (John Carpenter,
1980), and The Saga of Anatahan (Josef von Sternberg, 1953)—masters
the visual world that it is heard to author, possessing “the ability to be
everywhere, to see all, to know all, and to have complete power . . . ubiq-
uity, panopticism, omniscience, and omnipotence . . . The acousmêtre is
everywhere, its voice comes from an immaterial and non-localized body,
and it seems that no obstacle can stop it.”20 The acousmêtre figures the
voice as complicit with standardized cinema’s attempts at visual mastery
(or enframing), and complements this mastery with linguistic knowledge
moored in a subject whose Being is never called into question. Malick’s
narrators, however, do not possess the full power of the acousmêtre; they
fall in a second category mentioned above, “semi-acousmêtres,” Chion’s
phrase for a voice-over which cannot fully master what is seen. This is
because they are not masterful subjects; Malick’s characters are instead
on a journey toward becoming subjects, and it is in their voiced articula-
tion of meaning that their subjectivity begins to find expression.
In some cases, these expressions work in and against limits. In Bad-
lands, from the very first frames of the film depicting the character in her
bedroom playing with her dog, Holly’s voice-over is associated with a
body that we can see and, furthermore, a body that has already been
disciplined by the space of the family home within the fictional world.
There is, however, a temporal disjunction between what we see of Holly
and what we hear, given that she narrates the events seen in the film
from some unknown point in the near future. The gap between visible
reality and voiced, retrospective meaning in Malick’s films generates the-
matic ambiguity rather than epistemological certainty, and suggests that
Holly still possesses the potential to become something other than what
her social milieu has hitherto allowed her to be. On the soundtrack,
Holly’s first voice-over begins to tell us of her past: that her father kept
her parents’ wedding cake in the refrigerator for a decade (or “ten whole
years,” as she endearingly tells us) prior to the death of her mother, and
that he only threw it out upon burying his wife (“after the funeral he
gave it to the yardman”). This bizarre detail seems significant, a clue to
the character of the father (as is the subsequent detail, that the father
“could never be consoled by the little stranger he found in his house,”
the little stranger being Holly herself) and yet the viewer of Badlands will
never know her father very well. Perhaps Holly herself lacks knowledge
of her emotionally distant father; at any rate, Holly often remains an
enigma to us and thus the precise meaning of her relationship with her
father also remains opaque. As the stereopticon sequence later in the
28 Terrence Malick
film shows, Holly’s own past gradually becomes a question for her (rather
than a naturalized part of her quotidian experience), and those moments
of her voice-over narration that tend toward introspection suggest a striv-
ing toward self-understanding, an interplay between embodied existence
and worlded significance.
In this respect, Malick does not represent the striving of Holly, or any of
the other characters in his films, in straightforward terms, as an existen-
tial struggle that is resolved through the completion of the plot. He
instead sets in motion an interplay between voice and visible world that
is not settled by the conclusion of the film’s narrative, but remains ongo-
ing in the viewer’s experience.
A close look at the opening sequence from The Thin Red Line will be
useful in order to push the relationship between the meanings Malick’s
characters voice and Heidegger’s notion of striving further. After a brief
title sequence, The Thin Red Line opens with the image of an alligator
descending into the water. The camera, tilted at a slight high angle,
moves closer to the alligator, at first tracking the forward movement of its
descent, and then lingering for a few seconds, after it is submerged
under the water, on the layer of moss floating on top of the water and the
remaining ripples and swirls on the water’s surface. This opening shot’s
emphasis on downward movement is inverted in the next two images,
the first of the trunk of a tree and shafts of light shining on the ground
in front of it (the mise-en-scène guides our eye upward through the light
which reminds us of the sky above, out of frame), while the second is
aimed upwards at the sky’s light cutting through the tree’s leaves. These
three shots outline a pattern—both stylistic and thematic—which will
recur throughout the film. At times The Thin Red Line will keep us firmly
on the ground, near the depths toward which the alligator in the open-
ing image submerges itself, concerned with the material, embodied
experience of its soldiers (and certain of the soldiers will express a world-
view that would keep us firmly on the ground, too, for some come to
express that war makes them feel like nothing more than material, or
“just dirt,” as one unnamed character terms it). Apart from a brief glance
at a military map of the Guadalcanal wielded by a general early in the
narrative, the film gives us no cartographic mastery of the land these
soldiers traverse; most of the time we know only as much as they do. Yet
at other times—in a way that the second and third shots discussed above
indicate—both the film and certain characters within it express a yearn-
ing for something above and beyond this earthly realm, but which might
nevertheless help explain their immediate experience of war.
These images of nature also introduce an equally important motif

that reverberates throughout the film, the motif of interpretation itself.
In the third shot discussed above, the camera’s gaze toward the sky is
coupled by a voice-over. Many critics, in their search for a central pro-
tagonist that would make the film seem more conventional than it
really is, mistakenly attribute this voice to the character of Witt, who
will be introduced to the film shortly after this sequence. However, the
voice actually belongs to a soldier named Train, played by John Dee
Smith, who does not appear on the film’s visual track for another
15 minutes. As a character, we will never know him very well. “What’s
this war at the heart of nature?” Train asks on the soundtrack. “Why
does nature vie with itself? The land contend with the sea?” In rhyme
with this voice, posing at once both a question and an implicit interpre-
tation of nature’s significance (the voice apparently believes in a war in
nature), Malick presents us with a fourth shot, again of a tree, with a
vine wrapped tightly around it, filmed by the camera in a high-angle
shot that tilts further upward. It would appear as if Train’s implicit
interpretation of nature is affirmed on the film’s visual track with this
image of vine and tree in conflict, in war. Yet it is better to say, in fact,
that what the film is affirming is only the validity of his question: Yes,
war—or something we would like to name war—would appear to
emerge from nature, as we see in this image of a vine choking a tree. Yet
is it nature naming war, or us?
It appears, Malick’s first shots seem to be telling us, that Train’s is a
question worth asking; at the very least, nothing in what he says is neces-
sarily refuted in the images we see. The images, while affirming the
validity of the question, do nothing to provide closure to it through an
answer. A distance exists between our language and the space of nature,
and indeed the experiential space of the film world itself, for as the
film’s next 3 hours will repeatedly remind us, Train’s question, and the
assumptions contained within it, can only be asked of nature, never
answered by it. The earth, to return to Heidegger’s concept, offers only
the potential of a world for Malick’s characters; it is through their striv-
ing that the characters must unconceal a world, to perform the work of
aletheia (a knowing that, for the Greeks, is the revelatory “uncovering of
beings,” in Heidegger’s phrasing).21 In this way, The Thin Red Line serves
not simply to illustrate or depict Heidegger’s concept of striving; it
opens up the potential of strife within the experience of both character
and viewer, in this case in terms which prompt us to query the nature
and source of evil.
30 Terrence Malick
Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit have recognized this relation of the
film’s voice-overs to its presentation of nature (and indeed to all the
phenomena into which the voices inquire), writing that “the film’s
response [to the questions posed through the voice-overs] will be non-
discursive. Language raises questions which, Malick’s film suggests, lan-
guage may be inherently unable to answer.”22 It would appear that the
characters themselves understand this. Even if their striving is never set-
tled, some at least reach a point of contemplative acceptance of the fact
of the necessity of striving itself for meaningful human existence. Near
the end of the film, Train’s voice appears again on the soundtrack. This
time he does not read nature as a parallel to war. Instead, he affirms that
his voicing of meaning is a subjective projection, and that earth remains
in play even as an individual attempts to world its meaning. “One man
looks at a dying bird and sees nothing but unanswered pain,” Train’s
voice tells us. “Another man sees that same bird and feels the glory—
feels something smiling through it.” Train’s voice-over here reminds us
that while we may always be born into a worlded world (like the newborn
bird seen earlier in the film, struggling to walk on a terrain it does not
know) our experience of nature need not be burdened with already
articulated symbolic meaning. In other words, we can never reach a
point where nature’s mystery is foreclosed—finally worlded—by human
experience. Earth is, rather, open to multiple readings, or our own
expressions of a world. Train’s lines here summarize, perhaps more than
any other single moment in Malick’s cinema, the unique interplay of
earth and world—the striving—that exists in each individual’s attempt to
interpret sensuous experience.
If striving is the struggle to world a world, the very title of Malick’s most
recent film, The New World, suggests fulfillment in this task rather than
ongoing strife. What is most striking about the connection Smith and
Pocahontas develop in the first act of the film is that their attempt to
forge a new world through their relationship hardly appears to be a
struggle at all. In the sequences depicting the beginning of Smith’s and
Pocahontas’s rapturous relationship, landscape and character seem
joined in ecstatic sublimity and contemplative reverie. Smith’s voice-over
appears just prior to this sequence; recalling his vision of democracy pro-
jected toward the American landscape earlier in the film, he defines the
essence of the Powhaten tribe, and Pocahontas herself, in rigid and
rather patronizing terms:
They are gentle, loving, faithful, lacking in all guile and trickery. The
words denoting lying, deceit, greed, envy, slander, and forgiveness
have never been heard. They have no jealousy. No sense of possession.

Real. What I thought a dream.
In the extended cut of the film, released on DVD in North America in

late 2008, Malick presents this idealization of the Powhaten as an exten-
sion of Smith’s desire to erase his old identity as a scoundrel (and per-
haps erase also the less than ideal motivations of European colonialism).
The director adds a voice-over in which Smith tells us that his lyrical
tryst with Pocahontas functions as personal redemption: “They trust me
as a brother. I, who was a pirate who lived to steal what I could. I am a
free man now.” As Lloyd Michaels points out, the sequence which fol-
lows depicts Smith’s and Pocahontas’s love in a “montage of close-ups
(relatively rare in Malick’s cinema) without any dialogue,” registering
“the progress of their intense love, consecrated by the surrounding
splendor of nature.”23 Scored to the sweeping music of Wagner’s Das
Rheingold overture (which appears at several different junctures in the
film), it is almost as if Malick and his characters have established a “new
world” that the human figures in all of his previous films have struggled
to find. The first-person voice-overs of both Smith and Pocahontas com-
plement this idea, speaking as they do in assertive and singular terms
rather than inquisitive and fractured ones. At one point Pocahontas
intones, “Two no more. One.” At another Smith says, “There is only this.
All else is unreal.”
But as soon as this mythical romance ends, the question of its poten-
tially illusive nature begins. The voice-overs in the film, sure of meaning
in the first act, become more inquisitive and unsettled later on. Through-
out the second half of the film, both Smith and Pocahontas question the
reality of the love they have experienced. Malick’s extended cut makes
this idea particularly salient. During their second meeting—a short inter-
lude during one of Smith’s envois with native traders—Pocahontas speaks
in a fragmented voice-over paired on the visual track with images of her
and Smith enjoying each other’s presence in the wilderness: “True . . .
shut your eyes. Is this the man I loved . . . there . . . so long? A ghost. Come.
Where are you, my love?” One of the most acousmatic properties of the
film is that Pocahontas begins speaking English in her voice-over before
she learns any substantial portion of the language within the diegesis,
and certainly that rupture is felt to no greater effect than in this sequence.
Her voice, owing to the fact that it does not temporally match with the
images we see, suggests that Pocahontas herself is not so much a partici-
pant in as a spectator of these images. Her subjectivity intervenes as a
crucial component in assessing the truth of what we see. Yet like Smith’s
32 Terrence Malick
own doubts about the veracity of what he has experienced with the Pow-
haten, the possibility remains that Pocahontas’s memories reflect only
her own desire for a new world, rather than the sure confirmation that
her tryst with Smith—who she regards as something like a “ghost” as she
recalls her romance with him—has indeed established that world.
The Voice’s Opportunity
Malick’s voices function less as sure guides for the viewer to follow
through the film’s narrative, then, and more as living and breathing exis-
tential subjects who search for openings that might allow them the
opportunity to voice original and creative interpretations of the world in
which they find themselves inscribed (whether this be through the retro-
spective narration in Badlands and Days of Heaven or the present-tense
inquiries into the world that characterize the multiple voices we hear in
The Thin Red Line and The New World). We can conclude this chapter by
showing how this search, in fact, is itself a struggle in Malick’s cinema,
one that is both enabled and limited by the social worlds depicted in the
films.
No other Malick film gestures toward this idea better than The Thin Red
Line. The film reflects the American army’s rigidly hierarchal structure in
World War II in its imaginative use of filmic space in a sequence early in
the film. The soldiers in the story find themselves having to answer to the
directives of their superiors, which for most of them is the fiery Colonel
Tall (Nick Nolte). The camera’s revelation of space on the ship carrying
the soldiers to the Battle of Guadalcanal enhances our idea of the army’s
hierarchy of power: At once driven by its horizontal momentum across
the water that collectively carries all of the men to the Guadalcanal, the
ship is also a vertical structure, its various levels occupied by men of dif-
ferent ranks of power. In the first sequence on the ship, Nolte’s Colonel
Tall stands looking across the ocean at the island, while below him Sean
Penn’s Sergeant Welsh admonishes Witt (Jim Caviezel) for going AWOL.
Also beneath the ship are Captain Staros (Elias Koteas) and the various
men who answer to his authority, including Private Bell (Ben Chaplin).
Each of these characters confronts death in a way unique to him, but the
ranks of the characters, vividly embodied by the various levels of the ship
that carry them to war, remind us that they do so from positions on a
social hierarchy enabled by different degrees of agency.
What is unique about Malick’s cinema, however, is its ability to insist
upon this unequal social hierarchy and yet at the same time show us how
characters can yearn to express meaning that might transcend the social
strictures into which they have been both existentially and physically
inscribed. The already-worlded social hierarchy in which Malick’s char-
acters find themselves does not determine, and is not confirmed by, the
meanings they strive to articulate. This insistence on uncertainty and
indetermination is unusual for a director of historical films. Unlike char-
acters in most historical films made in Hollywood, Malick’s characters,
who all exist in vividly recreated visions of historical epochs in the
American past, do not function to “hold together” the historical world of
America under the sign of a single truth that might provide the viewer a
myth for understanding the meaning of history. As Adrian Martin has
written, “Malick’s characters are never wholly there in their story, their
history, their destiny: they float like ghosts, unformed, malleable, subject
to mercurial shifts in mood or attitude, no more stable or fixed than the
breeze or the stream.”24 In Heidegger’s terms, their existences can be
understood as various searches for authentic meaning (as opposed to the
familiar meanings that enframe quotidian life), or an original experi-
ence that leads to meaning that did not previously exist in the world.
Voiced meaning in Malick is, in other words, never socially or historically
overdetermined, even as lived lives in his films are ineluctably caught up
with already established ways of doing and making and even as they are
structured in narratives that tell stories that are in a certain sense delim-
ited by what we already know of American history (this is particularly
true of Badlands, The Thin Red Line, and The New World, all films based,
however loosely, on real events). Instead, voicing meaning becomes for
Malick’s characters the effort to imagine another world, to creatively
envision how the historical world in which they find themselves might be
otherwise.
A passage from Malick’s own translation of Heidegger’s 1969 volume
The Essence of Reasons offers one more tantalizing clue in our exploration
of the philosophical underpinnings of Malick’s approach to the charac-
ter’s struggle to find a space from which to voice original meaning. It is
in this text that Heidegger suggests the effort to world a world requires
an opportunity:
There is no way that being, or nature in the widest sense, might become
manifest if it could not find the opportunity to enter a world. Thus we
say that being can, and often does, make an entrance into a world. “Enter-
ing a world” is not an event that takes place within (or outside) the
realm of being but something that “happens with” being. And this
34 Terrence Malick
happening is the existing of Dasein which, as existing, transcends.

Only if, within the totality of being, a being “is” to some greater extent
because it gets involved in Dasein’s temporality can we speak of its
“entering a world” having an hour and day. And being can manifest
itself only if this prehistoric happening, which we call transcendence,
happens, i.e., if being of the character of Being-in-the-world breaks
into the entirety of being.25
Heidegger’s concept of Dasein refers to a being-in-the-world aware of its

own transience and able to give meaning and significance to its experi-
ences in the finite amount of time it has within the world. Dasein is not
a guaranteed outcome of living, but rather an achievement of human
beings; deriving from the capacity for choice, it results when a human
being stakes out significance in and through the temporal frame of
embodied existence. As such, Dasein is the product of human striving,
and different social and historical contexts may enable the search for
Dasein in different ways. As Heidegger shows in The Essence of Reasons,
Dasein can only world another world when given—or when it finds—the
opportunity to do so. The “opportunity” is that concrete moment in
which Heidegger’s abstract, de-embodied notion of “Being” finds its con-
crete, embodied “hour and day,” its luminous opportunity to make a
meaning that will hold forth the earth in the possibility of making a new
world.
As Klaus Held has suggested, Heidegger conceived Dasein’s experi-
ence of time as “originally experienced time,” time that yields new sig-
nificance in the experience of an individual.26 In this respect, Malick’s
cinematic sense of “opportunity” offers us another way to conceive how
his work is somewhat different from the usual plot-driven narrative film.
Events in Malick’s films are not burdened with the function of conveying
the significance of shifts in narrative or character behavior because nar-
rative suspense is eschewed in favor of contemplative reverie, sublime
rapture, and thematic ambiguity. As we have seen, because Malick’s films
avoid the familiar patterns of the classical narrative film and because
they skirt the trappings of clear character psychology, we do not wonder
what a character’s action means in the plot. Instead, we are given to con-
template what it means existentially, that is, how a particular action or
moment in a character’s life works to form that character’s identity—or,
in keeping with Heidegger’s phrasing, how that moment allows, or per-
haps does not allow, the character an opportunity to signify new mean-
ing out of the already worlded-world. “Opportunity,” in Heidegger’s
sense, comes alive in Malick’s films not as a depicted fact of the story that
illustrates Heidegger’s concept. Instead, the temporal qualities of the
medium, in Malick’s hands, allow for the director to poetically construct
the encounter between the human being and its opportunity to recog-
nize the meaning of its self, to find its “hour and day”—its concrete,
phenomenal opportunity to make new meaning. Alternatively, at certain
moments in the films (particularly in Badlands), the films show human
beings falling short of Dasein, that is, missing their hour and their day to
voice new meaning (even as Malick shows that “hour and day” to us in his
images and sounds). Given that Malick is working in a temporal medium,
he is uniquely equipped not simply to show the actions that merely con-
firm the meaning in and of the social world, but indeed to allow the
space and time to contemplate the landscapes which form the ground
for the emergence of the reasons which will justify later action and trans-
formation of the world.
In The Thin Red Line, the director dramatizes the experience of war, an
experience that would also appear impersonal and atomizing, given not
only the already mentioned fact of the army’s hierarchal social structure,
but also because World War II involved confrontations motivated by
nationality and territory rather than individuality. Nevertheless, as Malick’s
film makes clear, war is made up of individuals who exist in very particular
times and spaces. Malick does not channel his characters’ reflections into
mythical statements on the meaning of war. Like Holly’s encounter with
the stereopticon in Badlands, which offers her an opportunity to rumi-
nate on her own past, or Linda’s retrospective narration of her experi-
ences with her now-dead brother Bill, war offers certain characters in The
Thin Red Line the concrete opportunity to contemplate the meaning of
their lives and past experiences, particularly where that past involves the
very question of mortality which arises in war.
For example, early in the film Witt goes AWOL to the Melanesian
islands, a brief moment of open and contemplative reverie in stark con-
trast to the rigid structure of the army and the violence of battle. In one
of the sequences on the island, Witt discusses, with another soldier, the
death of his mother, a memory that his time on the island has apparently
given rise to: “I couldn’t find nothin’ beautiful or uplifting about her
going back to God. I heard of people talk about immortality, but I ain’t
seen it.” The flashback which is paired with this dialogue makes clear
that it is not an objective depiction of the past but rather a subjective
memory of Witt’s that may have no correspondence with reality in some
of its details; this memory, enabled by the opportunity to contemplate
36 Terrence Malick
his existence that the Melanesian islands give him, is a reflection in the
deepest sense of the world, given that it emerges from within the reflect-
ing human subject (in this case Witt). It begins with a long shot of an
older woman lying on a bed (who we presume to be Witt’s mother) raises
her hand to a young child, while a young man (possibly Witt) sits and
watches; in the background of the image, a bird hops in a cage, as blue
light washes out the windows (perhaps, in Witt’s memory, this blue light
functions as a synecdoche for the heaven to which he believes his mother
has passed). The flashback proceeds to close-ups of the bird, and of the
young girl (we hear, on the soundtrack, her heartbeat). We never learn
who this girl is; in the next image we see her embracing the young man
we believe to be Witt, and in the final image the camera tilts upwards to
the ceiling of the bedroom. It is at this point that the image of the bed-
room fades into a superimposition of the blue ocean of the Melanesian
paradise in which Witt sits.
This brief sojourn on the Melanesian islands opens up for Witt the
opportunity—“the hour and day,” presented to us by Malick in these rich
images of a natural paradise—to reflect upon the meaning of death, a
brute empirical fact of war that patriotism tells us finds its meaning in
the nation, but which Witt attempts to define in more personal, and
original, terms. Indeed, his memories remain so personal that certain
motifs in his flashback (the young girl, and the bird in the cage) are
never given a concrete explanation by either the director or the charac-
ter. Nevertheless, Witt’s brief opportunity to reflect on the meaning of
his life colors the balance of the film, for mortality (and this “immortal-
ity” which some have told him exists) remains something Witt desires to
know. In large part this desire drives his interactions with others and
what he calls his “love for Charlie Company,” including his calm care for
wounded soldiers and his spiritual conversations with the nihilistic Welsh.
His effort throughout the rest of the film is to extend his original experi-
ence of time—his reflection on his mother’s death on the Melanesian
islands, and his effort to approach his own death with her sense of
“calm”—into his experience of war itself.
Does Witt succeed in this regard? Some commentators think so; Simon
Critchley has suggested that Witt ultimately finds a “calm” in the face of
death that eludes other characters in the film (and indeed most human
beings).27 As illuminating as Critchley’s reading is, I would like to sug-
gest that while it is possible for us to ascribe this meaning to Witt’s
demise, the character’s own expression of what his death means remains
a private fact that he takes with him to his end. Witt’s death, like all
deaths, is ambiguous. It seems intended as a sacrifice to protect the lives,

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

remains unsettled.
* * *
New worlds expressed by characters in Malick’s films are thus always pre-
carious. Even as (indeed, because) they amplify Heidegger’s concepts of
earth, world, and striving in the liminal relationships between film char-
acter and filmic world, the voiced meanings of Malick’s characters even-
tually give way to the possibility of different perceptions and expressions
of the world. At the end of Badlands, Holly is, alongside Kit, arrested and
put in chains, and yet we last see her flying in an airplane in the sky, per-
haps the beginning of a new adventure. The last image of Days of Heaven
presents Linda walking toward the composition’s vanishing point along-
side a set of train tracks that guide her toward the future. The final shot
of The Thin Red Line—of a coconut sprout nestled in the water—functions
as both a memorial to the voiced meanings foreclosed by death but also
the ongoing effort to remember old worlds through the creation of new
ones. And the elation Pocahontas (and the viewer) feels at the end of The
New World is palpable; one senses that the character, who rapturously
roams through a cultivated English garden with her half-Powhaten, half-
English son as the sounds of Wagner wash over the film’s images, has
indeed found a new world. At the same time, however, the viewer knows
that the real Pocahontas is dead and that the promise of equality and
democracy between and among natives and Europeans was not met. In
all of these finales, the human effort to strive is not closed down or super-
ficially resolved by the narrative’s end. Instead, each moment again con-
firms how Malick’s cinema functions as an experiential and poetic frame
through which the viewer may encounter the phenomenological fact of
striving itself. This encounter occurs in wresting together the meaning of
Malick’s film poetry through the viewer’s effort of interpretation, but
also in watching Malick’s characters make their own heroic efforts at
shaping light, sound, and movement into philosophical significance.
Notes
1
I refer here to Thinking through Cinema: Film as Philosophy, ed. Murray Smith and
Thomas E. Wartenberg (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006).
2
For a sample of the critical literature in film theory on character, see Murray
Smith, Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1995) and Lloyd Michaels, The Phantom of the Cinema: Character
in Modern Film (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998).
3
David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood
Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Routledge, 1985), 63.
4
Michel Chion, The Thin Red Line: BFI Modern Classics (London: British Film
Institute, 2004), 13.
5
Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1991), 58–63.
6
Ibid., 59.
7
Ibid., 255–6.
8
Robert Sinnerbrink, “A Heideggerian Cinema?: On Terrence Malick’s The
Thin Red Line,” Film-Philosophy 10, no. 3 (2006), 26–37. Accessible online at
www.film-philosophy.com/2006v10n3/sinnerbrink.pdf
9
Martin Heidegger, “On the Origin of the Work of Art,” Poetry, Language,
Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 54.
10
R. Raj Singh, “Heidegger and the World in an Artwork,” The Journal of Aesthetics
and Art Criticism 48, no. 3 (Summer 1990), 217.
11
The neoformalist paradigm is represented by the work of David Bordwell and
Kristin Thompson. See, in particular, Kristin Thompson, Breaking the Glass
Armor: Neoformalist Film Analysis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1988).
12
Heidegger, “On the Origin of the Work of Art,” 43.
13
See Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” The Question Concern-
ing Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 115–54.
14
15
Adrian Martin, “Things to Look Into: The Cinema of Terrence Malick.” Acces-
sible online at www.rouge.com.au/10/malick.html
16
Barbara Brickman, “Coming of Age in the 1970s: Revision, Fantasy, and Rage
in the Teen-Girl Badlands,” Camera Obscura 22, no. 3 (2007), 26.
17
18
Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1999), 28.
19
Ibid., 5.
20
Ibid., 24.
21
22
Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity
(London: BFI Publishing, 2008), 134.
23
Lloyd Michaels, Terrence Malick (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 93.
24
Martin, “Things to Look Into: The Cinema of Terrence Malick.”
25
Martin Heidegger, The Essence of Reasons, trans. Terrence Malick (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1969), 89, 91.
26
Klaus Held, “Phenomenology of ‘Authentic Time’ in Husserl and Heidegger,”
International Journal of Philosophical Studies 15, no. 3 (September 2007).
27
See Simon Critchley, “Calm: On Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line,” The
Thin Red Line: Philosophers on Film, ed. David Davies (London and New York:
Routledge, 2009), 11–28.
Chapter 3
Terrence Malick’s Histories of Violence

John Bleasdale
Fire
A fire rages through the films of Terrence Malick. In Badlands, a family

home is doused in petrol and set alight; the piano, the sheet music, the
food, the furniture, a doll’s house and a child’s bed with its forlorn china
doll are all devoured by the raging flames—as is the corpse of the mur-
dered father, lying in the cellar, silhouetted against the fire. In Days of
Heaven, the fires of industrialization are exported from the furnaces of
Chicago to the oceanic farmland, fed by a feckless young worker, who is
fated to spread both fire and destruction despite his best efforts. In her
voice-over, his young sister, Linda reports a prophecy from “some guy
named Ding-Dong,” “the whole Earth going up in flames [ . . . ] there’s
gonna be creatures running ever which way; some of them burning, their
wings burning” and a day of judgment will come. Sure enough later, the
fields of the rich landowner will go up in flame, an apocalyptic blaze, a
night of hell to contrast (and define) the days of heaven, whirling in the
black night to the industrial sounds of the steam tractors. But it is also a
cleansing fire, ridding the earth of one plague (locusts) by voluntarily
accepting the depredations of another.
In The Thin Red Line, the fires increase as the attack continues, reduc-
ing the paradisiacal grassland and verdant jungle to a charred and smok-
ing battlefield. The enemy camp is torched by the flamethrowers of the
victorious American soldiers after the battle. A moment of violence, but
also a cauterizing of memory, an erasing and, as in Badlands, a strategy to
rewrite the scene of a crime, or crimes. In The New World, fire is a primi-
tive but dangerously effective weapon of war. The fire arrows of the indig-
enous population fight against the firearms of the European settlers and
the confrontation, despite our privileged knowledge of the outcome,
does not seem uneven, nor the result inevitable. A house within the stock-
ade is set ablaze and panic spreads, the settlers desperately attempting to
Terrence Malick’s Histories of Violence 41
extinguish the flames. In their turn, and once strengthened by reinforce-

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

rivers are the same river: all fires, the same fire. The central role of nature
and landscape in his films, the almost fetishistic lingering over the details
of household objects, the ornaments, the wind chimes, the toys and
knickknacks, the cutlery and bird cages go together to create a coherent
and consistent universe, at once tangible and mysterious, in which
Malick’s films operate. Likewise the cinematic grammar is also strikingly
consistent: the use of voice-over(s), prolonged sequences of images with-
out sound, a heavy emphasis on music and the trademark magic hour
photography.
Yet this said, Malick’s four films each deal with very different periods in
American history, tracing American violence backwards into the past, via
a series of conflicts, spanning from the seventeenth-century origin story
of modern America in The New World through to the apotheosis of
American cultural dominance on the cusp of the 1960s in Badlands.3
These conflicts are generational, political, military, or familial. They can
be significant and world-changing, or domestic and tabloid. They are
always known, in some cases famous, based on real events or at least
recognizable.4 The conflict is ultimately expressed, though not resolved,
with violence.
Although there is pyromania in the appreciation of the beauty of fire,
Malick could never be accused of sadism, despite the many incidents of
violence portrayed in his films. Compared to his treatment of fire, vio-
lence offers little in the way of aesthetic lingering. For Malick there is no
John Woo-like ballet, nor Peckinpahesque Grand Guignol, neither are we
treated to the operatic violence of Sergio Leone nor the flip dark humor
of Quentin Tarantino, or the literal overkill of Oliver Stone.5 Rather,
violence in his world is often sudden, almost always in real time, usually
panicked and clumsy, rarely going as planned, almost accidental, seldom
enjoyed and almost never beautiful: except when it co-opts (usually as a
postmortem postscript) the elemental beauty of fire.
Malick’s cinema is rife with conflict and portrays violence in various
forms. His central characters are murderers and arsonists, soldiers and
warriors; but the world itself is also perceived as violent—there is an
intrinsic “war at the heart of nature” as it is characterized by Pvt. Witt.
The world is a hostile place. Nature is dangerous, “red in tooth and claw”
(the crocodiles and locusts) or aloof (the horses and the birds). Charac-
ters, tribes, C Company (“I love C Company,” Witt says. “They’re my
people”) and nations vie with each other, fight and kill each other, for
wealth, for love, for power, for sex, or for motives that aren’t themselves
understood and cannot be readily articulated. Sergeant Welsh reduces
everything to “property. The whole fucking thing’s about property.”6
Taken literally, Welsh’s reasoning is most fitting to the last two films
which involve combat specifically related to the ownership and occupation
of land. In The Thin Red Line, the ownership is of an island and ultimately
of a hill, whose worth seems randomly assigned. “Nobody wants this
island. The Japs just put an airfield there,” General Quintard tells Col.
Tall. In The New World, the real estate seems insignificant, a fragile look-
ing fort on an ill-chosen muddy patch of ground, but the battle is over
the start of America itself. In the trailer (but not in the film), a line of
dialogue from Captain Newport, played by Christopher Plummer, makes
the stakes explicit: “I beg you, let not America go wrong in her first hour,”
although the “going wrong” is not so much losing the battle, as fighting
it in the first place.
The writing of history, the telling and retelling of conflict, is also a
moment of conflict, as various narrators attempt to control the sporadic
violent episodes of the narrative, seeking to justify, explain, contain, or
romanticize what is happening. All the films feature narrative voices.
The first two films feature adolescent female voices who speak tangen-
tially to the events and actions of the film. The latter films are choral
works, featuring multiple voices, which are frequently unidentified and
often willfully fusing and confusing. In Badlands, Kit (Martin Sheen)
records a mendacious confession, claiming that he and his teenaged
girlfriend Holly are going to commit suicide, and sets up the record
player outside the house, before throwing a lit book of matches onto the
petrol. Holly (Sissy Spacek) narrates that he left the record playing over
and over for the District Attorney to find. “He was gambling for time,”
she says in a cliché typical of her narration. It is an early attempt to con-
trol and direct the narrative of violence. And yet, with Kit and Holly long
gone, the fire rages, consuming not only the evidence of murder and the
scene of the crime, but also the record player and the false narrative it
plays thus belying Holly’s narration. Kit is unable to control his own nar-
rative. Rather than a rebel without a cause, Kit is a pontificator without a
point of view, a philosopher without a coherent philosophy. And anyway,
his violence speaks much louder than anything he wants to say. Despite
the taping and recording of banal observations, the burying of artifacts
and the last-minute kiln, it is Holly who has the privilege of speaking and
surviving, and they are not on the same page: “In the end, the sadness
44 Terrence Malick
emanating from the film partially comes from the fact that Kit’s most
well-placed biographer, Holly, is living another life. So his story dries up
without leaving a trace.”7 Although, Kit’s violence remains as something
loud, it is ultimately incomprehensible. When Kit kills Cato, Holly nar-
rates: “Kit never did tell me why he shot Cato, he said even talking about
it could bring bad luck.” It is something done, suddenly and there is a
strong suspicion Kit not only won’t say, but actually can’t say why he
killed Cato.
Violence is something that takes even its perpetrators by surprise. Pvt.
Doll’s revelation in The Thin Red Line: “I killed a man, the worst thing you
can do, worse than rape,” is an almost stunning statement of the obvious
and remarkably preserves his innocence as a young man who has been
thrust into a world of conflict he barely understands. His internal verbal-
ization, his immediate apprehension of what he has just done, is in stark
contrast to the evasions and romanticizing, the prayers and philosophiz-
ing of the other characters. Doll’s realization is not of some grandiose
“war at the heart of nature,” but a sudden realization of the banality of
the violence around him.8 The fact that he shoots a stretcher bearer
seems deliberately to set him up in direct opposition to Witt, who at that
point in the film is working as a stretcher bearer. Doll says “and no one
can touch me for it.” It is violence without consequence, without punish-
ment and therefore without meaning, which is an anathema to Witt who
seeks meaning constantly. This doesn’t stop Doll from understanding
that it is still “the worst thing you can do.”
And yet his revelation is also in contrast to what he actually says out
loud: “I got me one of ’em.” This bravado is understandable and is noth-
ing compared to the delusions of Col. Tall’s pronouncements of the
same action over the sound power. The clumsy chaotic action is “Beauti-
fully conceived, beautifully executed,” Col. Tall goes on to compliment a
platoon leader (Lt. Whyte II) who we have seen killed in the first seconds
of the assault: “Young Whyte led beautifully.” Any attempt to find mean-
ing on Witt’s part has to negotiate not only Doll’s apprehension of mean-
inglessness but the self-serving fictions of those who stand to profit by
violence, such as Col. Tall. For the Homer-quoting Tall, violence is beau-
tiful, operating on a grandiose scale of grand narrative, but as the film
moves on there is a strong possibility, what with the island-hopping
wanderings of his discouraged men and the anxiety about wives left at
home, that Tall and his men are in the domestic tragedy of The Odyssey
rather than military epic of The Iliad. Hill 210 is a rather low-key Troy,
after all. However, Hill 210 is the “property,” both the location and the
apparent motive for the violence we see in the film and it is to the “prop-
erty” of violence that we now turn.
War at the Heart of Nature
“I was raised in a violent atmosphere in Texas. What struck me was how

violence erupted and ended before you really had time to understand
what was happening. Take, for instance, Lee Harvey Oswald’s murder by
Ruby: it took place in a flash,” Malick says in one of his rare interviews to
Michel Ciment. “Kit and Holly—and in this respect they are truly
children—don’t think that death is the end. It’s a ‘crossing to the other
side.’ ”9 This suddenness of violence exists in all his films. The murders
seem to happen almost by accident in Badlands and Days of Heaven.
Holly’s father is popped. John Smith’s tormentor, Wingfield, is dis-
patched with Rubylike alacrity in The New World and despite the briefing
and the slow build up, the first two on-screen deaths which begin the
battle in The Thin Red Line take the commanding officer and the audi-
ence by surprise.
The speed of violent death, its summary quickness, drains it of cine-
matic gloss and romantic glamour. We know Willem Defoe’s death in
Platoon is significant because it takes over a minute of screen time to hap-
pen.10 The slow motion (and the elegiac music of Samuel Barber’s Adagio
for Strings) gives us time to feel and to fully take in what has happened.
For Malick, like Pvt. Doll and later Bell who repeats Doll’s sentiments, if
there is something shocking about violence, it is not blood gushing from
fresh wounds or bodies caught in a hail of bullets, rather, it is the banality
of violence, which stands jarringly at odds with its catastrophic conse-
quences. It is over before it has begun.
Michel Chion argues that Malick’s portrayal of violence, like his por-
trayal of sex, is typified by restraint: “violence is at once very present [ . . . ]
and unreal, both because it is hardly or never mentioned and because the
director avoids any overly explicit display of its effect on bodies, such as
corpses, the impact of bullets, blood flowing and wounds.”11 However, it is
not so much that Malick looks away, rather he shows it in real time. He
does not beautify the moment, nor does he resort to a conventional cine-
matic grammar of violence. Dying might be slow, as in the case of Cato and
the wounded man Welsh tends, but murder is quick.
In The Thin Red Line, Malick delays the violence for the opening sec-
tion of the film. The first two on-screen deaths occur at 44 minutes and
42 seconds. We witness the campaign alongside the soldiers of C Company
46 Terrence Malick
as they go from ship to shore, through jungle, and from the river to the
hill that they will spend most the film trying to take. In doing so, we expe-
rience the war in reverse, seeing first the tortured and executed GIs and
then the wounded by the river, before we witness any actual violence. We
see the consequences before we see the action. The soldiers are trauma-
tized before they get thrown into the action. One burly soldier is seen
vomiting white bile and being relieved of duty and sent down the line as
the others wait for the order to advance. And yet when the violence
begins, it is shocking and sudden, despite our preparation. The battles
are conveyed with a mixture of Steadicam shots, running alongside the
soldiers and a montage of very brief shots, which show explicit violence
(bullet wounds, neck wounds, arterial spray, blood on grass, a man crawl-
ing his hands bloody and burnt) but all very briefly. Each battle is a series
of very quick murders.
Watching The Thin Red Line against Saving Private Ryan, something that
was inevitable since the films were released within months of each other,
is to see two filmmakers with diametrically opposed visions of violence.12
Spielberg, a poet whose métier is destruction, describes violence with an
exhaustive completeness, with wit and fervor, making his film (especially
the first- and last-half-hour sections) a visceral experience for the viewer.
His camera partakes in the war, juddering and frenetic and bloodied.
During the Normandy beach landings that open his film, we are sub-
jected to what seems like a breakdown of narrative, a veritable anatomy
of physical destruction, but what is actually happening is the outbreak of
a series of mininarratives, vignettes as one second a man can be alive and
lucky and another, he can be dead, or horribly wounded. These moments
coalesce until a recognizable movement can be organized (simply get-
ting off the beach) and the grand narrative (including that of the good
war in historical terms) can be resumed, arcing, or morphing from Matt
Damon’s eponymous Private Ryan, to his old age self (played by Harrison
Young) and the present day, and everything making sense and, finally,
being worth it.
By contrast, the question of the value, purpose and politics of the con-
flict are almost completely absent from Malick’s film. The whole of the
Pacific theater is reduced to the taking of a single hill (“three folds of
ground and then the hill”—Captain Staros is explicit). The violence is
instigated by men whose primary concern is not the somberly greater
good, as proposed by, among others, the historian Stephen Ambrose,
the war to end all wars, but promotion, as in the case of Colonel Tall, or
simply survival, as in the case of Pvt. Bell, who finds himself in an infantry
company and on the island by unlucky accident.
Whereas memory and memorials are vital in Saving Private Ryan serv-
ing as the film’s own raison d’être, the graves and the letters of dead men
of The Thin Red Line transmit nothing and are not passed on—in the case
of Sergeant Keck, the letter is not even written.13 Although the confusion
of battle is portrayed in both films, for Spielberg, this is a temporary,
exceptional, and ultimately justifiable breakdown. In the context of
grieving mothers and somber and noble generals who reach back
through a textual history (letters once more) for their moral authority,
the mission ultimately makes sense and justifies the violence and the
sacrifice.14 The soldiers and officers of Malick’s army must go forward
but they are impelled by no sense of a greater calling, or historical
moment. The outside world, for Malick’s soldiers, only exists in brief
flashbacks of an ultimately unfaithful wife and a dying mother. It is aston-
ishing that these two elements are the only back story anyone gets in the
film.15
The characters stripped of context are not even given a visible enemy
for much of the film. They are left alone in the world, rarely talking to
each other, and even when they do, they do so mainly in unanswered
monologues.16 They are aware of unseen watchers who could stand in for
the audience itself. General Quintard tells Col. Tall, “Someone’s always
watching.” More vitally, the unseen enemy could always be watching.
One of Welsh’s last observations—“you’re in a box, in a moving box”—is
true both of his feelings of entrapment and his position as a character
trapped in the visual field of the cinema screen.
In the first half of the film, without a visible enemy, C Company appear
to be attacking the hill, not so much as a military position as the actual
hill itself. They are literally at war with the world and the hill, in turn, is
attacking them. For a good part of the attack all we see are muzzle flashes
from the hill and later, when the Japanese do appear, they emerge from
camouflaged foxholes, springing from the ground, or being killed in
their dens. Mostly, keeping his camera level with the men, the soldiers
creep through the tall grass, hide in rivers and, in one shot, a Japanese
soldier has been literally blasted back into the earth. In the psychosis of
battle, “Hit the dirt” soon becomes “this is what you are—dirt—dirt.”
When Bell calls in artillery coordinates at the turning point of the battle,
we are given no shot of the artillery firing (as we have been given ear-
lier), but rather a shot of the sky as if it is the sky that will now smite the
hill: sky against land, fire against river, the war at the heart of nature.
The beauty of the landscape is deceptive. Hills shoot back and the sky
rains death. The shot of the traumatized bird during the battle might
seem like a mawkish and sentimental view of nature and the bad things
48 Terrence Malick
men do to it, if it wasn’t put alongside the shot of the angry snake that
rises in front of the soldiers who cringe before it. Witt is Malickian in that
he is a character similarly alive to the beauty of the world around him,
but it makes him no less violent. Nature (and an appreciation of nature)
does not automatically equate with nonviolence. Witt can gaze soulfully
at the sky, but he is keen to participate in the battle. When other soldiers
notice nature, it is a violent or defensive nature that mirrors their own
violence: the crocodile which the men capture or the moment when a
soldier lying prone in the grass touches a plant leaf that defensively,
almost magically, closes up at his touch. Indeed, Tall’s view of violence
inherent in nature—“nature is cruel”—complements Witt’s view of the
“war at the heart of nature.”
In The New World, violence also exists in the context of what is primarily
perceived as a hostile, though beautiful, environment. Here again, vio-
lence is motivated by Welsh’s “property.” Whereas the hill’s significance
or otherwise is left to the pondering of in-the-know military historians
(the name “Guadalcanal” is always text related, a word glimpsed on a
map or read out in Col. Tall’s orders), The New World foregrounds the
contested territory in its title, the animated map-drawing of its title
sequence and in its rewriting of its familiar origin story. The settlers on
arriving set about building a stockade, felling trees to do so. Their pres-
ence seems much more primitive than the ordered society of the “natu-
rals” who witness their arrival with anxiety, bemusement, and curiosity.
The first murder is motivated by another kind of property, or more accu-
rately different cultural versions of property. The individual, private and
finite property of the Europeans—property that can be stolen and has to
be violently defended—conflicts with the communal property and rela-
tive prosperity of the indigenous population. The Europeans survive
only through the generous intercession of the Princess. The tiny fort is a
toehold on a massive continent; the epic (as in The Thin Red Line) lives
on the ground of the trivial.
The battle between the natives and the colonists when it finally takes
place is a hurried series of skirmishes, sometimes breaking down into
spitting and slanging matches. Gunshots echo hollowly under a vast sky.
The violence is confusing and panicked and inglorious. It is also
inconclusive. Further battles will take place; future massacres can be
anticipated. Victory is not due to violence nor technology but rather to
deceit (the seizing of Pocahontas) and the fortuitous return of Captain
Newport and more colonists and equipment. European America is saved
and ensured by the timely arrival of the cavalry.
“[A]bout the Most Trigger Happy Person I had Ever Met”
The films of Terrence Malick are populated by a series of violent inno-

cents. In Days of Heaven, Bill (played by Richard Gere) is a sweet-faced
drifter, full of fun—“he’d entertain us,” Linda says—whose occasional
bursts of bad temper precipitate him into impetuous violent acts which
he immediately regrets. The first crime, an attack on his foreman, at the
very beginning of the film sees him flee the scene immediately with an
almost childlike panic and abandon, as he will later flee the murder of
the Farmer (Sam Shepherd), scaring the horse away in his panic. When
he actually premeditates murder, he is unable to commit it, firing his
gun into the ground rather than into the back of the Farmer’s skull as he
clearly contemplates doing.
Witt, in The Thin Red Line, might at first appear blessed with a Nazarene
pacifism, a Saint Huck imbued with an innocence whose wide-eyed
apprehension of nature seems, initially, at odds and in opposition to any
act of violence and World War II that rages around him. We first see him
attempting to avoid the fighting, having gone AWOL and hiding out in
an apparently peaceful village, a typically temporary and fragile redoubt
of peace and innocence for Malick. Later we see him serving in a stretcher
outfit, tending to wounded men as part of his punishment for his former
desertion, but tending to the suffering with a diligence and tearful empa-
thy. At the river, his ministrations to a wounded man look like a form of
baptism. However, Witt, despite his wistful musings, begs Captain Staros
to be reinstated and given back his rifle so that he can participate in the
fighting. His sacrifice at the end of the film is triggered by an act of
aggression; he raises the rifle to fire at an enemy who is attempting to
take him alive.17 His violence itself is curiously innocent. Even as he flees
the tightening circle of enemy troops he whoops and hollers like a boy
out hunting, or a child only playing at war.
It would be a push to portray Captain John Smith, the mercenary of
The New World, and our first male protagonist in that film, as an innocent.
He is obviously a man who has seen many things, closer to First Sergeant
Welsh’s matured Blakean experience than Witt’s innocence. Smith is
recognized as the only “professional soldier” among the colonists. He
arrives in America in chains and “under a cloud” as a mutineer and only
escapes the hangman’s rope because of the patrician grace (and pragma-
tism) of Captain Newport. He is the armored man, in one scene almost
a robot of war, and generically, as the film’s publicity misleadingly mir-
rored, his role initially appears to be that of the action hero, the fighter,
50 Terrence Malick
the capable man of violence. During the battle scenes, he moves through
the mêlée with unusual speed, grace, and capability. However, with the
casting of another innocent face, akin to Martin Sheen, James Caviezel,
and Richard Gere, the troubled and vulnerable boyishness of Colin
Farrell seems deliberately at odds with his fearsome reputation. Smith
hovers at the edges of the venal and greedy society of the Europeans and
his initial and then later disgrace, from our point of view, elevates him as
that most stock of cinematic heroes, the Outsider.
He is also the only colonist who comes to have a relationship with and
an understanding of the “naturals.” Having been captured after a singu-
larly suicidal foray into the territory of the natives, he is reborn through
a nonact of violence. This is a highly significant moment of missing vio-
lence, a violence-shaped gap. Like the nonmurder of the Farmer in Days
of Heaven when Bill fires his gun into the ground, it rehearses the moment
of violence, the possibility of violence and then, at the last moment, with-
draws. In Badlands, Kit will also not murder people (the rich man, the
architect, and the police), but here the nonact only renders the actual
murders he does commit more fickle and meaningless. There are also
the missing murders of the suicidal frontal assault in The Thin Red Line,
which we will discuss later.
In not dying, Smith is born again and is allowed a second childhood.
We see him playing games with the other men, being taught to speak,
being tended by the women. Although play here (and throughout
Malick’s cinema) is significantly not really a childish activity nor prepara-
tory to life, but a fundamental expression of living.18 Through his rela-
tionship to the unnamed Pocahontas, Smith is the recipient of innocence.
Like Witt, he too enjoys his brief sojourn of peace in an apparent idyll of
the “natural’s” village. However, like Witt he returns to “his people,” he
turns away from the peace and love promised by Pocahontas and returns
to his tribe, and ultimately and deceitfully runs away, escaping the
dilemma of his divided loyalties and compromised position. It is an act of
moral cowardice (though a more experienced and successful escape
than Bill’s in Days of Heaven) which serves perhaps to clarify Witt’s puz-
zling behavior as a brave embracing of both violence and innocence. He
embodies the central thesis of the film, that the discovery of America was
in fact a missed opportunity. “Did you find your Indies, John?”
Pocahontas/Rebecca asks him at the end of the film. “I may have sailed
past them,” he replies. In fact, the title of the film reverses the orthodox
perspective, allowing us to see England as the “New World” and Rebecca
as the true explorer.
On the other end of the historical time line, Badlands portrays the
Brave New World of youth, giving us perhaps Malick’s most in-depth
portrait of the violent innocent. A genre-challenging piece of work, the
film represents a True Romance, a road movie, a portrait of a serial killer,
and a period piece. This generic ambivalence mirrors the inability of the
characters themselves to decide on an identity. Kit Carruthers is the
young garbage man who falls in love with Holly, a 15-year-old schoolgirl.
A fabulist with an ever-ready story to tell and an opinion about every-
thing, Kit carelessly invents his own narrative and projects a breezy indif-
ference, as he fakes his signature and casually lies about without much
hope of being believed. His insanity seems to exist in his inability to fully
understand the world and his place in it. The hyperrationalism of faking
his signature, for instance, shows a fundamental misunderstanding of
identity and is after a moment’s reflection clearly paranoid nonsense. As
he lies awake at night in a bed, which is tiny enough to have been his
boyhood bed, listening to a noise which sounds like someone holding a
seashell to his ear, we are aware of a fundamentally immature man whose
attraction for Holly is not that of the predatory pedophile but of an
undeveloped boy-man who is unaccomplished at and perhaps even unin-
terested in sex.19 Kit is trying out roles: the star-crossed lover, the cowboy,
the guerrilla, and the well-to-do man, until his capture which seems to
finally settle him in a socially recognized role with which he is satisfied:
James Dean. Ultimately, he fits into the pantheon of troubled and trou-
bling American adolescents from Huckleberry Finn to Holden Caulfield,
a figure threatened by and yet compelled toward adult definitions of civi-
lization and maturity, caught between lighting out for the territories and
growing up in a world of phonies.
The world he occupies seems at first as idyllic as the Americana bill-
board Holly’s father is painting. But there is a casual violence, mostly
expressed toward animals. A few dead dogs turn up, one by the side of
the road at the very beginning. Holly’s father, in a preemptive attempt to
stymie the burgeoning romance, shoots Holly’s dog; Holly herself kills
her fish when it gets sick and Kit’s job at the feedlot looks brutal and
brings him into contact with dead animals. Kit’s killing of Holly’s father
feels like a mistake, a bungled getaway. “I got it all planned,” he says, but
there is a feeling of panicked improvisation. Kit’s eyes stare as widely as
his victim’s, playing Holly’s father as the warning gunshot echoes louder
than he anticipated. The murder is quick and unglamorous. Warren
Oates, playing Holly’s father, dies on the carpet, letting himself down
with one hand. This is not the blood spouting balletic fantasy of Oates’
52 Terrence Malick
final shoot-out in The Wild Bunch.20 The banality of the dialogue in the
immediate aftermath underlines a disturbing normalcy of the death. “I
found a toaster” Kit blandly comments to Holly as he returns from
depositing her father’s body in the cellar. When she slaps him, it feels
like she is fulfilling a necessary stylistic gesture, something she’s read in
a magazine, rather than a genuine loss of temper. The murder allows
them to enter an adult world but without having achieved emotional
maturity. As if to prove this, Holly walks the rooms of the house smoking
what would have been presumably a forbidden cigarette. The splashing
of petrol around the house is the only moment when the camera becomes
involved in the action a series of swinging handheld shots which evoke
the panic and hurry of Kit as he seeks to erase what he has done.
The murders which follow vary stylistically. The shooting of the bounty
hunters does go according to a rehearsed plan this time and reveals a Kit
who has become capable. The reason for this could well be that they occur
on his turf, not only in the literal sense of occurring within the bounds of
his tree-house complex, a setting which hangs uncomfortably between
Tom Sawyer and anticipations of Vietnam, but also because they occur
within his narrative space, delivering a more conventionally recognizable
Hollywood action scene. The outnumbered hero ambushes the sneaky
invaders of the Edenic hideaway. Holly tells us, “he had heard them whis-
pering about how they were only interested in the reward money.”
The bloody realization of this fantasy is, however, the exception. The
other murders are more akin to the first, clumsy, panicked, fast, and
banal. Kit kills people almost without meaning to and runs away (like
Bill) scared of the consequences of his actions without showing remorse.
He doesn’t dislike people, he isn’t angry at them, or even necessarily
threatened. He chats amiably with the young couple (Holly and Kit’s
more conventional doppelgangers) before he sends them into a cellar
and shoots them.21 After shooting Cato, he opens the door for him to let
him back into the house and chats as amiably as he did before he shot
him. After disposing of the body, he seems visibly upset but it is a self-
contained childish tantrum, a petulant kicking of stones and immature
gesticulating. There is no adult emotion. Adulthood is represented by
the wearing of hats: Holly’s father, the police men and the architect
(Malick himself in a famously unintended cameo). Kit tries a hat on him-
self on leaving the rich man’s house, but it signals his downfall, an over-
reaching moment, which will be resolved upon his capture when the
deputy snatches his hat and throws it out of the car window, to reveal the
true Kit, the one that looks like James Dean, an “individual.”
The violent innocents of Malick’s cinema present a paradox analo-

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

filmed and seen from a certain light. The famous magic hour photography
presents a world which is distinctly, almost oddly, beautiful. The very title
of Days of Heaven asserts an aesthetic goal which could be a subtitle to all
of Malick’s films. All his films exist outside to a unique extent.25 Badlands
places the murders in a beautiful series of locations, horizons are cut
straight, and formalize the space. Throughout all the films, houses fea-
ture as ruined, burnt down, or derelict shells or invaded as an alien
space. The characters exist in an outside world of natural forces, the long
grass and jungle of The Thin Red Line, the prairie of Days of Heaven, the
prelapsarian wilderness of The New World, and the badlands of, well, Bad-
lands. The characters are for the most part unaware of the beauty around
them. Holly prefers the exotic sights of the stereopticon to the world
around her. The workers are too tired and worn out to appreciate the
view, the soldiers and the colonials too terrified or too venal, digging in
the mud for gold. But for some occasional characters, such as Witt and
Pocahontas and, through her, John Smith, the beauty of the world is
given as a secret, a vision which we share as an audience.
Yet, it is in this world that the violence happens; it is in this beauty that
murder and war take place. This beauty, Malick is careful to assert, is not
in opposition with violence. The crocodile that slips under the water at
the beginning of The Thin Red Line is in its own element as much as Witt
and the village children swimming in the nearby sea. Witt’s initial
response to the village in the opening scene is that it is a place without
violence though he is told by the local woman, who seems none too com-
fortable talking to the soldier, that the children “fight all the time.” The
soldiers might well find the village peaceful but it is unlikely that that is
how the villagers see them. They are after all soldiers from a foreign
land. On his return visit, he sees, as if for the first time, human skulls and
skin diseases, which confirm that the village was in the world and had its
own violent history. Likewise the villagers of Pocahontas’s settlement are
not pacifists. Their living with nature in no way exonerates them or
excludes them from violence. They have a warrior class and their threat
to kill the unarmed Captain Smith is real enough. They go to war against
the settlers with every intention of wiping them out.
For Malick, violence is a fact of the world. It is not glamorous or note-
worthy. It is not an extraordinary moment which needs to be glorified,
or slowed down, or frozen. It is something which is breathtakingly banal
in its ordinariness and its ubiquity. Bill’s violent death when he is gun-
ned downed in the river is perhaps the only exception when his face in
entering the water forms a kind of death mask, but the moment is over
with shocking speed and he becomes just a body floating in the river.
In fact, the key moments on which all of his films hinge are the pockets
of nonviolence, the space where a violent act could fit but which is mirac-
ulously left open. The unusual moment when violence is there as a
choice but is not taken despite the risks that that might later entail. Bill
not murdering the Farmer has already been mentioned. Even Kit’s final
surrender, after not having killed three or four other people in a blaze of
glory, is a generically challenging and strange moment of nonviolence.
The Thin Red Line might be unique among war films in placing its key
moment of heroism as in an officer’s refusal to attack, when ordered.26
The New World allows for the creation of America because of the nonkill-
ing of Smith and a failed (but credibly possible) massacre of the
Europeans. In this way, Malick refigures innocence as an active choice
not to commit purposeful evil, rather than a simple ignorance of evil and
shows us a coherent vision of a world of violent innocence.
Notes
1
The use of matches also echoes the famous transition in Lawrence of Arabia from
the extinguished match to the sunrise in the desert. Here Malick cuts to the
water.
2
The phrase is borrowed from James Wierzbicki, “Sound as Music in the Films
of Terrence Malick,” Poetic Visions of America: The Cinema of Terrence Malick,
ed. Hannah Patterson (Wallflower Press: London, 2003), 114.
3
At the time of writing, The Tree of Life is yet to be released. Also note that I am
commenting on The New World, extended version of 172 minutes, though this
does not seriously impact on my comments as the plot remains substantially the
same.
4
Malick’s films all feature real moments in American history: the discovery of
the new world, the outbreak of World War I, the Guadalcanal campaign and
the Charlie Starkweather murders.
5
Both Tarantino and Stone have obviously been influenced by Badlands in their
own films on murderous young couples. Both Natural Born Killers and True
Romance were scripted by Tarantino and the former was directed by Oliver
Stone.
6
Welsh’s conclusion in the novel stems from the character’s socialism. But
deeper still is the idea that violence is about carving out a place in the world.
Property, owning a place and also belonging to a place, is an important opposi-
tion in Malick’s first two films: the homeowners versus the rootless Kit in
Badlands and the Farmer versus the itinerant Bill in Days of Heaven.
7
Michel Ciment, interview in Positif, reprinted in Lloyd Michaels, Terrence Malick
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 109.
56 Terrence Malick
8
It is not his last realization. Almost immediately afterward he will witness the
death of Sergeant Keck who has his backside literally blown off when he pulls
the pin out of a grenade on his own belt. The step between the ridiculous and
the sublime in this situation is short indeed, as this “dumb recruit mistake”
(Keck’s own summation) is refigured by Witt as an act of valiant self-sacrifice.
“You didn’t let your brother down,” he comforts the dying man.
9
Quoted in Michaels, Terrence Malick, 110.
10
He is shot in a separate scene, but when he reappears being chased by Viet
Cong, his death scene occupies approximately a minute and a half of screen
time. Witt is killed in a matter of a split second.
11
Michel Chion, The Thin Red Line (London: BFI, 2004), 16.
12
Saving Private Ryan was released in the USA in July 1998 and The Thin Red Line
was released in December 1998.
13
Witt’s grave is a place that reveals only emptiness to Welsh and C Company
march past a well-tended graveyard on their way to another boat and perhaps
another island, with hardly a glance. I disagree with Michel Chion’s assump-
tion that the end of The Thin Red Line sees the men returning home, “they’re
particular war over” (33). For me, there is no indication that they might not
have to fight a whole series of very similar battles. The film appears to suggest
this via its very circularity. The end sees them simply back on the boat.
14
The clattering of the typing pool, which succeeds the gut-wrenching battle
scenes, mirrors the film’s own procedure of contextualizing violence, literally
via text. Corpses become letters of condolence. As well as the letter which is
written and rewritten and passed on through the platoon, there is the Civil
War letter the general reads as justification for the mission he is proposing.
The direction is two way as violence goes into text, text can also go into vio-
lence as Captain played by Tom Hanks literally sets up a textbook defense
taking his ideas of sticky bombs, and so on from the General Infantry Mans’
Manual.
15
Also, Colonel Tall makes an offhand comment about his son that is con-
temptuously dismissive of broader emotional context. Ironically, given that
both men conflict vigorously in the film, both Col. Tall and Captain Staros are
identical in perceiving kinship with the men with whom they fight. Col. Tall
implies that Captain Gaff is a surrogate son, and Staros states “you are all my
children.”
16
Chion, The Thin Red Line, 58.
17
See ibid., 61 for a translation of this moment.
18
See also the scene of the soldiers running into the sea and Witt swimming with
the native children (which later is remembered as a kind of aquatic afterlife
immediately after he is killed) in The Thin Red Line.
19
Malick makes an uncharacteristically crude joke in shooting Holly next to a
sign which reads “Bait,” but Sissy Spacek is never made to look sexy in the style
of Faye Dunaway, an obvious archetype in Bonnie and Clyde. She is always more
of a pal than anything to Kit, who nicknames her with the asexual “Red.”
20
Warren Oates’ Lyle Gorch in The Wild Bunch takes 2 minutes 40 seconds from
first being shot to die. Much of that time is spent twirling as he is shot again
and again.
21
Whether Kit actually kills them or not is left open, but they certainly don’t try
and escape and there are no further signs of life. In the real-life incident, the
couple were killed. See Jack Sargeant, Born Bad: The Story of Charlie Starkweather
and Caril Anne Fugate (London: Creation Books, 1996).
22
For a full account see David A. Price, Love and Death in Jamestown: John
Smith, Pocahontas and the Heart of a New Nation (New York: Knopf, 2003).
23
The rain pours later and is suitably dampening of the spirits as the one sadistic
character of the film has a moment of emotional breakdown.
24
Michaels, Terrence Malick, 105.
25
See Adrian Martin, “Things to Look Into: The Cinema of Terrence Malick”
www.rouge.com vol.10 (2007), www.rouge.com.au/10/malick.html
26
This is in stark contrast to Saving Private Ryan’s insidious attack of pacifism, or
even not shooting prisoners, as either cowardly or stupid. The German soldier,
who is released rather than shot, is the man who kills Captain John Miller.
Subsequently, he is killed in cold blood by the coward Cpl. Upham (Jeremy
Davies), who thus redeems himself (?).
Chapter 4
Rührender Achtung :1 Terrence Malick’s

Cinematic Neo-Modernity
Thomas Wall
Es giebt Augenblicke in unserm Leben, wo wir der Natur in Pflanzen, Mineralen,

Thieren, Landschaften, so wie der menschlichen Natur in Kindern, in den
Sitten des Landvolks und der Urwelt, nicht weil sie unsern Sinnen wohlthut,
auch nicht weil sie unsern Verstand oder Geschmack befriedigt (von beyden
kann oft das Gegentheil statt finden) sondern bloß weil sie Natur ist, eine
Art von Liebe und von rührender Achtung widmen.2
As preposterous (and as pretentious) as this may seem I believe that the

best general commentary3 on the films of Terrence Malick is by Friedrich
Schiller (1759–1805), in particular his perhaps overly familiar essay “Über
naive und sentimentalische Dichtung” (“On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry”)
published in three installments in 1795–1796 in his own journal Die
Horen,4 but also his lengthier “Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des
Menschen” (Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man) published at just about
the same time and in the same journal. The prima facie case for my the-
sis is already apparent in the quotation above, the first sentence from
“On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,” in which the raw elements for a
Malick film appear:
Augenblicke in unserm Leben (“moments in our life” [and I emphasize

“moments”] [Augenblicke]): Is it not true that in Malick’s films there is
a primacy of shots over scenes; parataxis over narrative continuity; a
gaze from an actor accompanied by a voice-over reflection as opposed
to a suspenseful “what happens next?” expression or a shot-reaction-
shot?5
der Natur in Pflanzen, Mineralen, Thieren, Landschaften [ . . . ] nicht weil sie

unsern Sinnen wohlthut, auch nicht weil sie unsern Verstand oder Geschmack
Terrence Malick’s Cinematic Neo-Modernity 59
befriedigt (von beyden kann oft das Gegentheil statt finden) sondern bloß weil sie
Natur ist (“Nature in plants, minerals, animals, and landscapes [ . . . ] not
because it gratifies our senses, nor yet because it satisfies our understand-
ing or taste (the very opposite can occur in both instances), rather, sim-
ply because it is nature”): John Ford might have been enthralled by
Monument Valley and John Huston by the Ulanga River, but Malick sees
individual rocks (minerals), plants, and animals in their own autonomy.
Ford and Huston see landscapes as iconic or dramatic settings for a story.
In a Malick film, innumerable shots exist of fish swimming, buffalo graz-
ing, wheat germinating, grass swaying, and so on, but none of these con-
stitute a setting for anything in any classically Hollywood sense as I shall
argue. They are part of a different intellectual regime. They are not shot
in order to be put to work as part of a story. Are they mere “distractions”?
Well, if narrative continuity is not the predominate aspect of the film
then they (the shots of plants, minerals, landscapes, children, etc.) are
not distractions; they are simply and suddenly “striking”: because they
are simply “nature.” Something else may be at issue in a Malick film.
Natur in Kindern (“nature in children”): Holly (Sissy Spacek) in Badlands,
Linda (Linda Manz) in Days of Heaven, and above all Pocahontas
(Q’Orianka Kilcher) in The New World are, granted, perhaps not techni-
cally children but they are childlike at least in some ways (I will come back
to this). Further, there are bona fide children in idyllic scenes in both The
Thin Red Line and The New World.
in den Sitten des Landvolks und der Urwelt (“in the customs [habits, ways
of being] of country folk and primitives [the primeval world]”): Cato in
Badlands; the factory and immigrant workers in Days of Heaven; the
Melanesians in The Thin Red Line as well as the ordinary GIs who have
come to take (the Americans) or defend (the Japanese) Guadalcanal;
and, of course, the Algonquin in The New World.
Shots (as opposed to scenes); rocks, plants, animals, and landscapes
(as opposed to settings); children and childlikeness, and the customs
and ways of being of country people, GIs, Japanese soldiers, and “primi-
tives” (none of whom are merely secondary characters in a narrative):
are these not the elements of a Malick film? All he needs next is a story—a
killer and his girl, a con artist and his weak-willed girlfriend, an historic
event in a major war, a love story between an adventurer who is an inte-
gral part of the birth of a nation (an empire even) and a young woman
who will witness the destruction of her nation. And yet, before we get to
these stories, there is more.
I will quote Schiller’s sentence in Julius A. Elias’s English translation
with commentary and emphases. I apologize for splitting hairs in the
60 Terrence Malick
translation but I believe it is important. Both Schiller and Malick (if I am

not mistaken) are interested in a specific experience that precedes any
judgment, story, or history; an experience that would then be sentimental-
ized in a way that Schiller explains and that I will expand upon through-
out these remarks:
There are moments in our lives when we dedicate (widmen: in the sense
of dedicating a book; or to devote one’s time or attention) a kind of
love and tender respect (rührender Achtung: touching, moving, heart-
rending attention as in “to mind” or “to heed” in the sense “mind the
gap!” on subway cars) to nature in plants, minerals, animals, and land-
scapes, as well as to human nature in children, in the customs of coun-
try folk (Landvolks) and to the primitive world (der Urwelt: the primeval,
antediluvian world), not because it gratifies our senses, nor yet because it
satisfies our understanding or taste (the very opposite can occur in both
instances), rather, simply because it is nature [emphases mine].6
That by which we are struck with tenderness and attentiveness are not
flowers, rock formations, or animals themselves but to the nature that is
in them; the nature that is in children, or even, Schiller says later in the
same paragraph, the nature that is in “monuments of ancient times over
which we linger” (“den Denkmälern der alten Zeiten verweilet”). The word
“nature” could be understood as “character” or “temperament” (it is not
altogether clear, but he is clearly playing with several possible senses of
the word).7 Hence we are not to think of Schiller as an ecologist; he is an
idealist philosopher as well as a poet writing in the immediate wake of
Immanuel Kant’s Critiques in which he had immersed himself.8 His
friends at this time include Kant himself, Goethe, Hölderlin, and
Hegel.
The nature that Schiller speaks of throughout the entire essay will only
provoke the intended effect if it is alloyed to the naïve “in the broadest
meaning of the word” (here again, Schiller creates a category à la Kant
only to immediately stretch its possible meanings)9 making it divine
(Götterscheinung). The effect interrupts the satisfactions of both our
understanding and our senses, Schiller says; it does not necessarily satisfy
either mind or body (and may even be repulsive to either), but it ten-
derly attracts our attention; it is the naïve character in, or naïve tempera-
ment in . . . whatever. Moreover, it is quite obviously a state of tension that
Schiller is pinpointing since there is on the one hand the rührender (the
tender, the tranquil, the heartfelt—a state of languid attraction to . . . )
and on the other hand the abruptness of the Achtung (the attentive
respect for and distancing from . . . ).
It is this divided, conflicted, unsettled state of being that—when com-
bined with ideas—Schiller names “sentimentalisch” (which has always been
translated into English as “sentimental” but which is in fact a neologism
[and I would not be surprised to learn that Schiller himself coined the
term]). German already has the word sentimental which corresponds
neatly to the English. “Sentimentalisch” means “subjective, reflective” and
is a rarely used technical term from literary study. (I find the word in my
Cassel’s dictionary but not in my portable Langenscheidt.) Malick’s char-
acters—from Holly to Linda to Witt, Welsh, Tall, and Staros to Smith,
Radcliffe, Rolfe, and Pocahontas herself—are nothing if not subjective
and reflective. And they are nothing if not internally divided and con-
flicted (Pocahontas being a special case of this internal conflict as I will
explain) and also separated from the non(internally) conflicted naively
natural beings which, Schiller writes, “surround us like a continuous
divine phenomenon” (eine beständige Götterscheinung umgeben sie uns).10
The difference between the two temperaments, the naïve and the
reflective, is nowhere more clearly visible than in poetry. There are poets
who are naïve and poets who are sentimentalische. The former include
among others Goethe, Molière, and Shakespeare; Dante, Tasso, and
Ariosto; above all, Homer. The latter include among others Schiller him-
self, Hölderlin, Swift, Fielding, Kleist, and, above all, Milton. In a lengthy
footnote (note “r” in the Elias translation), Schiller distinguishes between
the two and subdivides the sentimentalische into three genres:
Sentimental is distinguished from naïve poetry, namely, in that it [the

sentimental] refers actual conditions at which the latter [the naïve]
halts, to ideas, and applies ideas to actuality. Hence it has always [ . . . ]
to contend simultaneously with two conflicting objects, i.e., with the
ideal and with experience, between which neither more nor less than
just these three following relationships can be conceived of. Either it is
the contradiction (Widerspruch: opposition, conflict) with actual condi-
tions, or it is its correspondence (Übereinstimmung: overall at-oneness of
mood, feeling, tone) with the ideal, which is the preferred attitude of
mind, or it is divided between the two. In the first case it is satisfied by
the force of the inner conflict, by energetic movement (energische Bewegung);
in the second, it is satisfied by the harmony of the inner life, by dynamic
calm (energische Ruhe);11 in the third, conflict alternates with harmony,
calm alternates with motion.12 This triadic state of feeling gives rise to
62 Terrence Malick
three different modes of poetry to which the customary names, satire,

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

scratched the surface of Schiller’s remarkable essay) theoretical machin-
ery from 1795–1796, I will proceed through the films briefly one-by-one
always with the background question: Is there a Schillerian potential
important to, or appropriate to, our era which Malick has realized and is
developing?
Badlands
Holly (Sissy Spacek) is a simple baton twirling country girl, Landvolk,

whose handsome and deviously charming boyfriend, Kit (Martin Sheen),
turns out to be a murderer who kills her father in front of her eyes, his
own friend (who may have been his best or only friend), and others who
are complete strangers. She is naïve and she now finds herself torn from
her natural place in the world and is involved in a deadly and compli-
cated situation. In love with Kit and apparently resigned to her fate, she
reflects. Her voiced-over reflections give the film its oddly comic quality
because she is not an especially insightful commentator. After the trou-
ble begins Holly resorts to cliché: “The world was like a faraway planet,
to which I could never return.” She remains quite consistently within
cliché throughout. Lloyd Michaels, in his insightful book on Terrence
Malick, says that Holly “lulls you into a kind of moral torpor.”16 This is
precisely what ought not happen in sentimentalisch reflection. That which
the presence of the naively natural ought to inspire in the energetic calm
(energische Ruhe) of reflection is a “kind of satisfaction in nature [which]
is not aesthetic but moral; for it is mediated by an idea, not produced
immediately by observation.”17 (Let us bear in mind here that this is an
eighteenth-century morality, not that morality of, say, twenty-first-century
America where to be moral is to be laden with “values.” In the eighteenth
century the moral has more to do with a refined sensibility, lawfulness,
and a certain accord between inner and outer. Malick’s are not “value
films,” which may contribute to their lack of broad appeal.)
Alas for Holly (and the audience), the mediating idea which would
produce a moral feeling (in her) and a moral satisfaction (in the audi-
ence) is corrupted; she is incapable of forming the refined moral accord
that would enable her to gain psychological insight into herself, Kit, and
their predicament. Instead she mimetically submits to her own naïve
idea of how a country girl like herself should discuss herself, her life, and
her fate. Terrence Malick himself, in a rare interview, says of her: “Holly’s
southernness is essential to taking her right. She isn’t indifferent about
64 Terrence Malick
her father’s death, but she wouldn’t think of telling you about it. It
wouldn’t be proper. You should always feel there are large parts of her
experience she’s not including because she has a strong, if misplaced,
sense of propriety. You might well wonder how anyone going through
what she does could be at all concerned with proprieties. But she is.”18
The Schillerian aesthetic education that ought to produce a moral sense
of the world when one reflects on how one has been separated from
one’s childhood, from the naively natural, from the divine element that
surrounds us—that breach into which ideas flow—backfires. I do not
think that this is so much Terrence Malick ironically refuting Schiller as
it is satire—one of Schiller’s modes of sentimentalische Dichtung which
occurs when the actual and the ideal are in conflict. There is humor in
Badlands but it is tender and never either derisive or nihilistic humor.
Neither is Malick nihilistic about Kit, also a country person—simple, at
first, but then corrupted in the most serious possible way. Malick describes
him as among many in the Midwest who “get ignored there and fall into
bad soil. Kit did, and he grew up like a big poisonous weed.”19
Badlands, Malick’s first “experiment” with Schillerian ideas, was a sat-
ire, as he intended. He says, in the same interview: “There is some
humor in the picture, I believe. Not jokes. It lies in Holly’s mis-estimation
of her audience, of what the will be interested in or ready to believe.”
Schiller writes: “The poet is satirical if he takes as his subject alienation
from nature and the contradiction between actuality and the ideal (in
their effect upon the mind both amount to the same thing).”20 Yet,
Malick remains a cinema artist interested in both the naïve and the
sentimentalische, whether their complicated relation/nonrelation mis-
fires or not. The latter (the sentimentalist), according to Schiller’s
canonical definition, seeks lost nature while the former (the naïve) sim-
ply is nature. In this, his first major film, the audience is dependent on
the thoughts of a child (or a young adult who retains a childlikeness)
and Malick, again in the same interview, says that his influences “were
books like The Hardy Boys, Swiss Family Robinson, Tom Sawyer, Huck
Finn—all involving an innocent in a drama over his or her head. I
didn’t actually think about those books before I did the script, but it’s
obvious to me now.” Perhaps he did not think of Schiller, but it seems
clear to me that Malick is, right from the start of his film career, seek-
ing naïveté—in the childlike, the young in country folk, in animals,
plants, and in the landscapes that appear throughout Badlands. Per-
haps he was not reflectively seeking Schillerian ideas in the Badlands
story but, naively (unreflectively), is, himself, Schillerian. I cannot say
for sure, but it could surely be to some degree one, the other, or a
combination of both.
Days of Heaven
As in Badlands, a childlike narrator, this time Linda (Linda Manz), maybe

12 years old, speaks to the audience of herself, her brother, Bill (Richard
Gere), and his girlfriend, Abby (Brooke Adams). Quoting Lloyd Michaels
again, this narrator “stimulates you to imaginative and aesthetic
alertness.”21 I grant you, her stimulating reflections do not reach the
poetic elevation of a Schiller or a Hölderlin,22 but there is an element of
freedom which is missing from Holly’s voice-over narrative, and it is the
idea of childlike freedom that Malick is interested in. In fact, viewers of
Days of Heaven must begin to become accustomed to the fact that Malick
is not interested in the dramatic story or the psychology of his characters
so much as the idea of . . . this or that. (This had already begun in
Badlands as Malick deliberately avoided re-creating an era in American
history and wanted to create a fairy-tale like feeling, a childlike idea of
the places that Holly and Kit, “lost in nature,” might find themselves.)23
Having fled Chicago, Linda, Bill, and Abbey find themselves lost in
nature as they (city people) ride a train along with numerous other
migrant workers (again, Landvolks) into (according to the story) the
Texas panhandle (but which in fact is Alberta, Canada). The locale is not
so much either Texas or Canada as it is the idea of a place—any place
whatever—where one might grow wheat and where such a story might
unfold. And, in the course of the film the audience will be both impressed
with what shows up on the screen—the dazzling shots of the train cross-
ing the bridge in silhouette against a brilliant sky, the grazing buffalo,
the wheat fields, that ominous scarecrow silently guarding the crops,
Linda’s face in the firelight, Bill’s (Richard Gere’s) beautiful profile
against the sky, and so on (all shot in natural light, without lens filters
which is characteristic of Malick’s cinematography)—and, at the same
time, the audience will be time cheated out of a full psychological under-
standing of what has corrupted Bill, why Abby remains with him, and
what might become of Linda and Abby when it is all over. On the other
hand, what more is there to understand? Bill and Abby are corrupt; the
Farmer (Sam Shepard), whose name we never even learn, is deceived;
and Linda is observant, imaginative, and nonjudgmental. Suffering does
not necessarily enlighten a person and corruption certainly does not
66 Terrence Malick
(unless a further stage is reached). Those who suffer most may well speak
only in clichés, and the morally corrupted are doubtless incapable of
insightful reflection, as Malick says in the same interview.24 Abby, Linda
tells us, “blamed herself” and “vowed to live a good life” after the scheme
backfires. Is that not what a young woman like her might very well think
to herself word for word? Even more than this, we may say that the char-
acters in a Malick film are not only lost in nature but also astray in their
own stories, otherwise than historical (this will be especially true in The
Thin Red Line). Kit does not know, as it were, how a “famous” criminal
should behave (and shows himself to be, Malick has said in the inter-
views already cited, an Eisenhower conservative as well as a glamour-boy)
just as Holly miscalculates her role as the angel of history, the witness to
an infamous killing spree. Linda is too young and playfully imaginative
to grasp the scheming desperation of Bill (who anyways knows very little
of himself except that he’s “never gonna make a big score” and that he’s
“not the brightest guy in the world”) nor Abby’s despair at her own weak-
ness caving into the vile plot. Rather than lash these character to their
stories, to the history they are a part of, by means of psychology, ideology,
irony, or any of the demands of dramatic structure (in theater or film)
since the time of Schiller, he leaves them free to remain astray. Malick can
be said to waste the historical potential of his films just as he wastes the
talents of his A-list actors (again, in The Thin Red Line, especially). If he
did not waste the talents of Martin Sheen, Sissy Spacek, Linda Manz,
Richard Gere, Brooke Adams, and John Caviezel is was because each was
relatively unknown at the time of the films and so their star quality would
not interfere with Malick’s intentions to present ideas of certain “types.”
His concerns are neither historical nor psychological. He could never
make so hypotactic a film as The Longest Day or Double Indemnity or Bonnie
and Clyde or Dances with Wolves. Instead he presents something which by
comparison is, at least initially, confusing and disarming.
The tension, the breach between the suddenly appearing, tenderly pre-
sented, and attention-getting shots of plants, minerals, animals, children,
and migrant workers relaxing in the fields and the parsimonious presen-
tation of dramatic scenes that would allow us to understand these charac-
ters and their fates (despite the fact that Malick has expressed his
admiration for Elia Kazan, George Stevens, and Arthur Penn)25 is the
essence of a Schillerian conflict. For Schiller this conflict—or the parti-
tioning, the breaching, of the (Kantian harmony of the) faculties as a
whole—is everything; for any number of critics (and many in the audi-
ence I suppose) the breach is vapid.26 There is a breach between the
dramatic and the pictorial precisely because we get both but neither domi-
nates the other. Mimetic fidelity to narrative location, era, and to psycho-
logical motivation are each subtracted so that we are presented with the
ideas of place, nature, alienation, the drama of corruption, and reflection.
Each element of the various conflicts is set free. Conflict is everything
because of Schiller’s conception of the naïve work of art. At the very end
of Letter XV of his Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (Letters
on the Aesthetic Education of Man) Schiller describes the ancient Greek
statue that had been named the “Juno Ludovici.” The statue (known
today as the “Juno Ludovisi”) is both august and charming. She is indiffer-
ently, playfully, indolently at once both the womanly goddess and also the
godlike woman. Schiller ends the letter as follows: “Durch jenes unwider-
stehlich ergriffen und angezogen, durch dieses in der Ferne gehalten,
befinden wir uns zugleich in dem Zustand der höchsten Ruhe und der
höchsten Bewegung, und es entsteht jene wunderbare Rührung, für
welche der Verstand keinen Begriff und die Sprache keinen Namen hat.”
Roughly translated: “Irresistibly carried away and attracted by the quality
(referring to her womanly charm), kept off at a distance by the same qual-
ity (referring to her godly dignity), we also find ourselves at the same time
in a state of the greatest repose and greatest agitation, and the result is a
wonderful sympathy (or tenderness, emotion) for which the understand-
ing has no idea and language no name.”27
This is precisely the state of rührender Achtung which Schiller pinpoints
in the first sentence to his “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry” quoted
above. The statue is not a simple representation of either the divine or
the human; it is a double representation in which neither the impression
of the divine nor the impression of an attractive woman predominates
hence the double movement (dissociation and allure): the double state
of utmost attentive respect on the one hand and tender, heartfelt emo-
tion on the other for which there is no concept, no word. This is a sort of
Blanchotian Neuter, a state where competing faculties neutralize each
other’s drive for satisfaction and predominance. In Malick’s films there
is the splendid (to say the least) cinematography but at the same time we
are kept at an emotional distance from the characters and their emo-
tions and drives. Malick has never even filmed a kiss.28
Days of Heaven is not satire; it is rather quite elegiac: the mixed mode in
which there is conflict at times (the two killings, the plague of locusts, the
conflict between the Farmer and Abby, between Abby and Bill) and at
other times harmony as when the migrant workers relax with their sports
and their books or when they have completed the harvest and are able to
68 Terrence Malick
celebrate; or when the main characters enjoy the visit from the flying
circus and later when Bill goes away, leaving Abby and Linda to enjoy
their idleness. Even more elegiac and even more richly Schillerian will be
his next quite broadly respected if not commercially successful film (and
I will come back to this “breach” as well).
The Thin Red Line
Twenty years later the theater darkens, we see a title, and we faintly hear
the sounds of birds chirping followed by the great shot of an alligator but
with a sinister organ playing a dark chord instead of any natural sound. It
is in fact rare that in Malick we get both a shot of nature along with its
diegetic sounds as we do on the Nature or National Geographic channels.
Malick is not trying to “capture” the natural world but to show us glimpses
(Augenblicke) of what are, for us, to be filled in with ideas. The ideas are
not, or are not necessarily, metaphors. One must be cautious. The skillful,
slow but resolute creeping of the alligator may be a sign for something in
particular: the American troops advancing up the hill on Guadalcanal
later on, the possible movements of the Japanese in the jungle; perhaps,
but I doubt it. It is just much an abstract figure, or a symbol of an alligator’s
style of naturalness, as it is a representation of reality. The alligator is just
there on the screen, as the Juno Ludovici is just there before our eyes and
just as the Americans are (or will be) there and just as the Japanese and
the Melanesians already are. They all just are and they are tenderly impres-
sive because they are—each of them is—simply nature (bloß weil sie Natur
ist). Following the alligator’s submersion into the algae stained water we
hear again the sounds of nature as we see a majestic tree and then hear
what the subtitles name “Angelic voices” (the divine presence in natural
things?) followed by a young man reflecting in a southern voice (a young
man from the country?) a series of not entirely naïve questions: “What is
this war at the heart of nature?” (He could be referring to a war of some
sort within nature itself or to the war versus the Japanese of which he is
and is not a part; that is, he could be referring to a war within his own
“nature.”) “Why does nature vie with itself? The land contend with the
sea?” he asks. And so on as the camera records majestic, divine light
(Götterscheinung) streaming through dense, cathedral-like vegetation. The
voice then begins to speculate: “Is there an avenging power in nature?
Not one power but two?” This is something new for Malick’s narrators:
philosophical speculation. The narrator here—Witt of course—is not the
first in Western culture to speculate on a primordial dualism. Malick’s
narrators are becoming more “educated,” in Schiller’s sense of the word.

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

nial world. But, from the Schillerian categories I am employing, the
Greeks, the Melanesians, and the Algonquin are the past—“our” childhood
which “we” moderns, “we” nihilists, have lost—and also they are “another
world” as Witt says to Welsh, or they are in fact “the new world” as Smith
will imply when he will tell Pocahontas in Malick’s next film that he has
“sailed past” his “Indies,” the “new world” he sought. (Smith had already
found his new world and his tragedy will be that he will have lost it yet
again [from a Schillerian perspective]).
The place of the “ancients” in Schiller’s text and in Malick’s films is
complex. Quoting from the essay again: “In them we see eternally that
which escapes us, but for which we are challenged to strive, and which,
even if we never attain to it, we may still hope to approach in endless
progress.”30 They are “our” past, our childhood. They are nature, simple,
naïve; “we” are culture, complex, reflective. When the complex is in the
presence of the simple, complexity is effectively neutralized. We see the
Melanesians moving seamlessly from work to play to work; both work
and play are simply activities; they are not starkly differentiated. We see
them together walking and singing: Is it a religious procession? A cele-
bration? Some other type of ritual? Witt tells the Melanesian mother that
the children never fight, but she objects that they always fight when they
are at play. Witt is unable to make distinct and conceptual what he
witnesses.
Malick’s cinematic representation of the Melanesians is purely idyllic.
To be sure, the Melanesians have a culture: they eat certain foods in cer-
tain ways, they have language, construct shelters, they sing and the
children play structured games. Yet, as shot by Malick and as understood
by Schiller, their culture has neither improved nor corrupted their natu-
ral simplicity. Nature and culture for them are not categorically distinct.
They appear to Witt, to the audience, as both divinely human and
humanized divinities. Finite and infinite are not distinguished as they
are for “us” moderns.
Hölderlin, who wished to distinguish between the Greeks and the
moderns in his “Anmerkungen zur Antigone,” writes: “Für uns, da
wir unter dem eigentlicheren Zeus stehen, der nicht zur zwishen dieser
Erde und den wilden Welt der Totan innehält, sondern den ewig
menschenfiendlichen Naturgang auf seinem Wege in die andre Welt .”
Roughly translated: “For us, who stand beneath a more authentic Zeus
who not only maintains limits between this earth and the savage world of
the dead, but also the eternally misanthropic nature of the path to the
other world.”31 The language is harsh and the contrast is stark because it
is the very starkness of modernity itself and its regime of rigid differentia-
tion between life and death, the divine (the infinite) and the mortal (the
finite), work and play, nature and culture, war and peace, child and
adult, and so on. “Ours” (Schiller’s and Hölderlin’s) is the modernity of
(a certain) Kant, the categorically decided and ruled world.32 Malick’s
film in the very next scene presents the regimented, differentiated,
highly complex, and hierarchical world of the military as emblematic of
modernity as its starkest; the film shifts abruptly from a world at one
(Übereinstimmung) to a world at war (a world at odds with itself; fighting
itself), and we meet something of a cynical and conflicted spokesman for
modernity and its starkness: Sergeant Welsh.
Welsh represents the idea of modernity in its crudest forms and its
functional nihilism, yet his is a contradictory character. He speaks more
or less mechanically of a world “blowing itself up as fast as anybody can
arrange it,” of “looking out for yourself” as the only pragmatic ethos, and
of the “this world” as the only world. Later he will repeat that the war
(and everything else in the modern world) is “all about property.” And
yet he is the Mother. Witt is “just another mouth to feed.” Before we meet
him Welsh has arranged for Witt to avoid the stockade (or, we can imag-
ine, worse since Witt has gone AWOL previously) and tells him that he
may be his best friend, which he may well be. Why else would a sergeant
risk commanding a soldier whose commitment is highly questionable at
best? What is more, later on in the film it is Welsh who brings morphine
to the soldier in agony even while under intense enemy fire, and he then
refuses to be rewarded for it, as we can imagine an archetypical mother
would do for a child (any child). On the other hand, Witt, who has just
returned from the paradisiacal Melanesian village, is suspiciously con-
frontational and archetypically macho. He says he is “twice the man”
Welsh is and can “take anything” the Sergeant “dishes out.” I mention
this to note that Witt has not undergone a “conversion” experience, and
I believe that is why Malick puts these words in Witt’s mouth immediately
after his days AWOL. Playing with and imitating “primitives” is not the
path to “our” return to naïveté. (Smith in The New World will suffer this
alienation as well.) The way “back” will pass through ideas (not through
mimesis alone) to the ideal. And I add that I can in this scene in fact
imagine John Caviezel in the role of Welsh, caring for his men (even the
most difficult of them), and Sean Penn in the role of Witt standing up to
72 Terrence Malick
him like some “tough guy.” The scene is a chiasmus and it relates to the
antimetabole which, I shall argue below, structures the whole of Malick’s
next film.
I will close this section with discussion of Col. Tall (Nick Nolte). He is
a character out of Hölderlin; he is Oedipus at Colonus, wandering alone
under a godless sky, passed over for advancement. His path to the other
world will be menschenfiendlichen (misanthropic), because it will not be
tragic or glorious. Not tragic because we moderns, Hölderlin came to
realize with his own failed Empedocles, are incapable of tragedy; or, if you
like, that is our tragedy. Col. Tall reflects (in voice-over) that he is “dying
as slowly as a tree” after which Malick allows him to lead his platoon up
the hill and successfully accomplish the mission only to abandon him in
medium long shot, exhausted and limply seated in a chair—without
voice-over reflection, without diegetic sound. He is merely (i.e., to say,
purely [bloß], nakedly, exposedly) the idea of “Schicksallose” (without des-
tiny) which “unsere Schwäche ist” (“is our weakness”), as Hölderlin writes
later in the same passage (already cited). The remainder of the cast—an
impressive A-list of actors—are disindividualized, their potential star
qualities are neutralized since their destinies are not the issue as they are
ordinary GIs, common people, Landvolks, who wander in and out of
scenes in the elegiac bulk of the film—an alternation between harmony
(shots of plants and animals, the wandering old Melanesian man, memo-
ries of home, etc.) and conflict (the battle scenes, the dear John letter,
the confrontation between Tall and Staros [Elias Koteas]).
The New World
(This film is in one respect the most effective melodrama I have seen
since Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life (1959) if only because the perfor-
mance of young Q’Orianka Kilcher is at least as effective as that of
Juanita Moore’s. We see both Pocahontas and Annie from beginning to
end of their films, each film ends in the death of their characters, and
the audience is tempted to think that the films are really “about” either
Captain John Smith (Collin Farrell) or Lora Meredith (Lana Turner),
each played by “star” actors while Kilcher and Moore were “unknowns”
at the time.33 Melodrama is not a Schillerian category but it is as much a
part of this film as are the idyllic and elegiac aspects. (I am not claiming
that Malick is working from Schiller’s essay as if it were a cookbook!)
The New World is an antimetabolean reconfiguration of Schillerian cat-
egories all of which are present here in spades: the ancient “naturals” (the
Algonquin) and the moderns (the English settlers), the naïve and the
reflective, playful childlikeness and sobriety of intention, phusis and techne,

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

turning point would be reached. The successful establishment of
Jamestown was a similarly epochal turning point. But history will not be
the focus of the film. Metahistory, perhaps: the ancient versus modern
conflict. But even if that were true we might see the film end with a mon-
tage sequence of a prosperous Jamestown, or of a dispirited Algonquin
nation, or an ironic twist on these.
John Smith is the modern reflective adventurer whose frame of mind
appears to be one of rührender Achtung when faced with the “naturals”
and certainly with Pocahontas herself. He is torn between tenderness
(attraction) and attentiveness (mindfulness, respect, distance). But
Pocahontas is no Juno Ludovico; she is a young woman every bit as reflec-
tive as he. Her attitude to him blends with her attitude to the Mother
(the divine). If anything, he, Captain John Smith, is her “Juno Ludovico”:
“A God, he seems to me . . . What else is life but being near you . . . Two
no more . . . One . . . One . . . I am . . . I am.” It is her reflections which
open the film with her invocation of the Mother; it is she who loses her-
self among the English, alienates her own people, and is disowned by her
father. She loses contact with the Mother. She is alone. It is she who
becomes “cultured,” “refined,” and becomes herself a cultural icon when
she visits England as guest of the King and Queen; it is she who in the
end finds the Mother again while still in England, and it is she who says
“now I know where you live.” It is she who “returns” to the naïveté that
she herself once was. Malick quite, quite deliberately ends the film with
appealing shots of her turning cartwheels and so forth. She is a child
again, but also a woman, herself a mother with the Mother “eine beständige
Göttererscheinung umgebem sie uns, aber mehr erquickend als blendend” (“sur-
rounding us like a divinity, but more exhilarating than blinding”)34 at her
English estate, not in her native world. Pocahontas, alone among Malick’s
“moderns” (but she is, in the end, indifferently both ancient and mod-
ern, both naïve and reflective, child and adult), is exhilarated (erquickend)
rather than in a conflicted tender respect (rührender Achtung). But she
cannot tell us of it in an intellectually satisfying manner. She is neither a
speculative poet nor a speculative philosopher. She is not Schiller.35 She
is (was) a young woman whose life is all too amply recorded in history,
legend, myth, and cartoons.
To be sure, as a background, Malick plays out the latent Aristotelianism
of Schiller’s treatise. Namely, that the primeval people, the ancients (the
Greeks, the Melanesians, the Algonquin), represent nature which when
perfected by art (meaning, in Aristotle, techne or useful [as opposed to
“fine”] art)36 or, for Schiller, by culture (by the modern ideals of Reason
and Freedom)37 will become the ideal. Dutifully, Malick has one of the
English settlers shout that “this land was made for such as will improve
it!” as a violent confrontation begins to develop between the Algonquin
and the settlers. However, the English settlers seem just as “naturally”
developmental, hierarchical, differentiated, sober, divisive, and propri-
etary (when an Algonquin, who knows nothing of “ownership,” noncha-
lantly picks up a hatchet and carries it off, he is summarily—that is,
immediately, without reflection, as if it were a natural reaction—shot by
a settler) as the Algonquin seem “natural” to Smith: peaceful, integrated
into their environment, animal (“like a herd of curious deer”), without
any jealously, but willing to defend their land (Smith says that “although
they live in peace they are strong and would not allow their own land to
be taken away” (my? Smith’s? Malick’s? emphasis; that is, they would
quite naturally [unreflectively] defend “it,” their land), and so on. The
English women wear high-heeled shoes and heavy dresses without think-
ing about it as Pocahontas learns. In short, not all that the “moderns” do
is done reflectively; much is done nonreflectively, without thinking,
without inner conflict; that is to say, naïvely. Malick quite deliberately
presents the English as if they too were “naturals,” antediluvian, without
their knowing it, without their reflecting on it. They themselves are the
naïve, just as are the Algonquin, the Melanesian, das Landvolks, children,
and the childlike (as is Smith in the scenes where he learns how to fight
and play and have his body decorated by the Algonquin). In the scenes
in London we see the English amusing themselves, carrying on with
activities, and so forth as if like a “tribe.” When the Algonquin ambas-
sador who accompanies Pocahontas later inspects the English garden
and its geometrically trimmed trees, he appears (to my eye) to be as
reflective as is Smith upon his arrival in “Virginia.”
Quite obviously, this equation does not lead to a jubilant reconcilia-
tion, nor to an Aufhebung, nor to a New-Age (or High Modernist) tran-
scendental pathos. The Algonquin and the English settlers kill each
other (for a time, then they stop) just as the Americans and the Japanese
kill each other in The Thin Red Line. Satisfying transcendental pathos,
like satisfying dramatic pathos, or like satisfying epochal pathos, is not at
the center of Malick’s intentions (with the single curious exception of
Pocahontas’s “return” to the Mother while she is in England which I
[and filmmaker Mark Cousins] find quite emotionally fulfilling.38 I am
not sure what to make of this except that, like David Lynch and his
“Laura” [Sheryl Lee] from Twin Peaks, Malick may have “fallen” for his
76 Terrence Malick
Pocahontas. In any case . . . ). At the center of The New World is what I call
the antimetabolean reconfiguration of Schillerian categories and which
leads me to my closing remarks.
Remarks on Malick
Rather than satisfying epochal, transcendental, or dramatic pathos, view-

ers of Malick films are offered nonspeculative intelligence. They will not
get pragmatism, cynicism, nihilism, ideology, structuralism, postmodern
pastiche, postcolonial critique or psychoanalysis. They will not get phi-
losophy. They will not get a Kantian experience of the beautiful per se.39
If anything, Malick is the new guardian of nonspecific intelligence, naïve
intelligence—a new intelligence? If his films are not always commercially
successful and also not always critically successful (as I mention above) it
is because of a “breach” that he quite deliberately leaves open, if I am not
wrong. This is not to say that Malick’s films are not vulnerable to cynicism,
pragmatism, ideology, and so on. On the contrary, in a certain way Malick
foregrounds their vulnerability to . . . whatever critique . . . in the same way
that a myth or a fairy tale might.
But why? Why Schiller? Why nature and culture? Why naïve activity,
tenderness, and attraction on the one hand and reflective distance on
the other? Why ancient and modern, indifferentiation and divisiveness,
harmony and conflict, simplicity and complexity? Why the binary, anti-
thetical Schillerian schemata at all? I can only conclude that Malick tends
to preserve the breach between the naïve and the sentimental which
produces the double state of rührender Achtung, the guiding thread for
my reading of the films. When the satisfactions of the intellect are neu-
tralized (and likewise the satisfactions of the senses) then the divine play
of nature (including human nature) and culture, sensation and Reason,
simplicity and complexity, is possible. The divine play is not the Kantian
agreement of the faculties nor is it a primordial harmony. Divine play is as
inherently unsimple as is the play of the Melanesian children who are
“always fighting” when they are playing. Schiller is slightly different from
Kant (and Malick from his contemporary Hollywood). Malick’s films are,
in a sense, playfully indecisive, which may irritate many, to be sure. But
perhaps, having put Schiller’s categories into play throughout his film
career, Malick really believes that we ourselves are at our most human
when, divinely playing, we are simultaneously fighting the regime of
categorical differentiations which all too starkly defines “our” modernity
and opens the horizon of a dissatisfied Neo-Modernity where Schiller
had hoped for “endless progress.”
Notes
1
I leave these words of Schiller in their German to allow some play in the transla-
tion to English. The play is integral to my reading of Malick.
2
Friedrich Schiller, Über naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung, 7. (I am working
from the handy and inexpensive Reclam edition which preserves the anti-
quated spelling of the eighteenth century.)
3
Specific commentaries on Malick are numerous. There are three book-length
monographs on Malick’s works as a whole: The Films of Terrence Malick by James
Morrison and Thomas Shur (2003); The Cinema of Terrence Malick edited by
Hanna Patterson (now in a second edition, 2007); and Terrence Malick by Lloyd
Michaels (2009). There are two books on The Thin Red Line alone by Michel
Chion (2004) and a collection edited by David Davies (2009). There is an
important chapter devoted to The Thin Red Line in Leo Bersani and Ulysse
Dutoit’s Forms of Being (2004). And there are a dozen or more quite fine essays
available only online. There must be even more work on Malick of which I am
not aware. I mention this because the unusual amount of attention and intel-
ligence devoted to the filmmaker is a part of my thesis.
4
Widely anthologized (at least in part), the essay sets up the familiar opposition
between the naïve and the sentimental in poetry, “ancients” (for Schiller,
Hölderlin and others, the Greeks) and “moderns,” and a host of other all-too-
familiar associated oppositions such as nature and culture, simple and reflective,
sensation and intellect, body and spirit, and so on. Students of the history of
literary criticism will recall the formula: the naïve poet is nature; the sentimen-
tal poet seeks nature. In this chapter I take Schiller’s essay seriously, formulas
and all.
5
Michel Chion, The Thin Red Line: BFI Modern Classics (London: British Film
Institute, 2004), 12–13. Chion writes: “Malick’s film places diverse elements
side by side, without seeking to answer the question posed by their juxtaposi-
tion” and so on (in comparison and contrast to Godard).
6
Friedrich Schiller, “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,” German Aesthetic and
Literary Criticism: Winckelmann, Lessing, Hamann, Herder, Schiller and Goethe, ed.
H. B. Nesbit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 180.
7
Schiller, although a very schematic and complex thinker, nonetheless toys with,
stretches, and complicates his key terms in ways that may frustrate many and
that have annoyed the great systems-theorist Niklas Luhmann who writes sum-
marily: “Schiller is no rigorous thinker” (Art as a Social System, 355 n. 46). That
may be, but play, recreation, and lack of a certain kind of rigor are part of a
regime of indistinction and conflict which is integral to Schiller’s (and
Hölderlin’s) thought of a future modernity different from Luhmann’s for
whom there exist, in effect, only “systems” and the void.
The word “Nature” in Schiller (and others of that era) would require lengthy
commentary (as does the word “moral”; it may well be that the best specific
commentators on Malick may be specialists of that era that separates Kant from
Hegel). The word in Hölderlin has received an unprecedentedly virtuoso com-
mentary by Martin Heidegger in his essay on “As when on holiday” in Elucidations
of Hölderlin’s Poetry, 67–99 as well as in Maurice Blanchot’s detailed response to
Heidegger in his essay “The ‘Sacred’ Speech of Hölderlin” from The Work of
Fire, 111–31.
78 Terrence Malick
8
H. B. Nisbet, “Introduction” to German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism, 20–4.
9
Schiller, “in weitester Bedeutung des Worts,” Über naïve und sentimentalische Dich-
tung, 7 (“On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,” 180). He does not then proceed
to specify the possible “breadth” of the word. He leaves the comment at play.
10
Schiller, “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,” 181; Über naïve und sentimentalis-
che Dichtung, 9.
11
Simon Critchley in his essay “Calm” (in David Davies, ed., The Thin Red Line,
11–27) has identified the mood of calm as fundamental to our understanding
of Malick’s The Thin Red Line. In the essay he places the calm in proximity to
Wallace Stevens’ poetry and to Heideggerian Angst. In my chapter I am argu-
ing that the calm is part of a Schillerian poetics which I believe more nearly
corresponds to Malick’s overall project.
12
Note well that in this third genre (elegy) there is no overall satisfaction. Instead
we must presume an “alternation” between the satisfaction of harmony (idyll)
and the satisfaction of conflict (satire). Hence we must imagine that in the
elegiac (which I believe governs the bulk of Malick’s films) there is a dissatis-
faction, bisatisfaction; a competition of satisfactions, or a split (undecided)
satisfaction, or perhaps a double satisfaction. At any rate, Schiller leaves it
open.
13
Schiller, “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,” 294; Über naïve und sentimentalis-
che Dichtung, 67.
14
James Morrison and Thomas Shur, The Films of Terrence Malick (Westport:
Praeger, 2003), 53. See pp. 52–8 for their full discussion of Malick’s “self-con-
scious” modernism.
15
Critchley, “Calm,” 27 n. 1.
16
17
Schiller, “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,” 181.
18
This is from the interview with Beverly Walker from Sight and Sound, reprinted
in Michaels, Terrence Malick, 103–4.
19
Ibid. Note, if it is not already obvious, Malick’s equation of Kit with a bit of
ecological debris, rather than as psychologically complicated.
20
21
22
Pocahontas’s invocations of “the Mother” throughout The New World, on the
other hand, do (to my ear) naively approach something of the idea of the
sublime simplicity of language (in the presence of the “sacred”) that Hölder-
lin strives for especially in his “Wie wenn am Feiertage” (“As when on holiday”),
in Werke (München Wien: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1990), 88–90.
23
From the interview with Michel Ciment from Positif, reprinted in Lloyd
Michaels, Terrence Malick, 105 and 109.
24
Ibid.
25
Ibid., 111.
26
Lloyd Michaels records many of the negative reviews of Days of Heaven in his
Terrence Malick, 39–45.
27
Friedrich Schiller, Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen, Briefe XV.
28
But he comes oh so satisfyingly close in a scene in The New World between
Smith and Pocahontas. This scene is not so much a tease as a deliberate
strategy with regard to the psychologically satisfactory visuals of classic cinema.

Dissatisfaction is an element of his cinematic art. Michel Chion notices this in
his book, The Thin Red Line. He writes the following of Days of Heaven: “The
main story, a classic love triangle (Abby, Bill, the farmer) is treated in a repeti-
tive, confused and distant way, without generating any interest in the feelings
of Abby or Bill. On the other hand, every time the character of the little girl—
the extraordinary Linda Manz—or the local people—workers, farmhands and
priests—appear, the film becomes more expansive” (18).
Likewise, in his very fine essay, “Things to Look Into: The Cinema of
Terrence Malick,” Adrian Martin writes that “[i]t is hard to define the decisive,
dramatic moment when things happen in Malick’s films. When exactly does the
relationship between Bill (Richard Gere) and Abby (Brooke Adams) fall apart
in Days of Heaven (1978)?”
The same may also be said for the lovers in Jean- Luc Godard’s Le Mepris (1963)
except that the omission is rather more foregrounded in his film. In Malick, it
is rather more incidental (in my opinion).
29
30
Ibid.
31
Hölderlin, Werke, 664.
32
I emphasize “a certain Kant” since Kant was also the way out of this impasse as
Schiller, Hölderlin, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and others would (or would
hope to) realize. Kant would be “reinvented” by each (and others including
Gilles Deleuze (before “reinventing” Nietzsche) in his Kant’s Critical Philoso-
phy: The Doctrine of the Faculties (trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara
Habberjam). In any case, again, specialist of the era would be better suited to
untangling this “knot.”
33
Filmmaker and author Mark Cousins reports that he cried when viewing the
film, even repeatedly: “Praising The New World” (in Peterson, ed., The Cinema of
Terrence Malick), 192–8.
34
Schiller, Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, 9.
35
But her speech, as previously noted, is, I believe, genuinely evocative of
Hölderlin (see note 22 above).
36
Aristotle, Physics, trans. R. P. Hardie and R. K. Gaye, The Complete Works of
Aristotle, Volume One (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), Bk. 2.
37
See note 29 above.
38
Mark Cousins, “Praising The New World” (in Peterson, ed., The Cinema of Ter-
rence Malick), 192–8.
39
It is certainly obvious that the rührender Achtung experience I have discussed
throughout is as close as possible to Kant’s analysis of the beautiful and the
sublime from his Critique of Judgement. Schiller is working from a Kantian tem-
plate and he refers to Kant in his notes to “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry.”
However, it is clear that he is interested in a different potentiality, something
other than the regime of taste that interests Kant. For both men understand-
ing and sensation are neutralized. For Kant this allows one to experience a
harmony of the faculties; for Schiller it allows one to experience the breach
itself (and whatever that might mean).
Chapter 5
Worlding the West: An Ontopology of

Badlands
Thomas Deane Tucker
A specter haunts the films of Terrence Malick. We can beckon it gener-

ally as “metaphysics,” but it properly answers to the name of Martin
Heidegger. It is well known that before he ventured into the world of
filmmaking Malick’s first vocation was philosophy with a special avoca-
tion for Heideggerian ontology. After graduating from Harvard in 1965,
he studied philosophy as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford’s Magdalene
College. There he ambitiously tried to convince his perhaps ill-matched
advisor, Gilbert Ryle, to allow him to write his doctoral thesis on the con-
cept of “world” in the writings of Heidegger, Kierkegaard, and
Wittgenstein. Ryle—being a good dyed in the wool English ordinary lan-
guage philosopher—would have none of that continental nonsense and
Malick left Oxford, without taking his degree. He next took a short stint
at MIT teaching Hubert Dreyfus’ Heidegger course while Dreyfus was on
sabbatical leave. Malick eventually enrolled in the inaugural class of the
Center for Advanced Film Studies in Los Angeles, graduating with an
MFA in 1969, but not before he had visited Heidegger in Germany and
translated Vom Wesen des Grundes as The Essence of Reasons published by
Northwestern University Press that same year. In 1973 he completed his
first feature film, Badlands, and thus his transition from a Heideggerian
philosopher to a Heideggerian film-philosopher began. In a career span-
ning forty years, he has made a total of only five feature films, all of them
explicitly metaphysical in tone and each implicitly evoking the spirit of
Heidegger in some way or another.1
It is Stanley Cavell, Malick’s philosophy honor’s thesis advisor at
Harvard, who first summoned Heidegger directly from one of his films.
Writing in The World Viewed on Days of Heaven, Cavell says that the imagery
Worlding the West: An Ontopology of Badlands 81
in the film “invokes a formal radiance” that strikes him as the “realization
of some sentences from Heidegger’s What is Called Thinking?,” a work in
which Heidegger further ruminates on the relation between beings and
Being. There, Heidegger states:
According to Plato, the idea constitutes the Being of a being. The first
service man can render is to give thought to the being of beings, and
that is first of all to pay it heed . . . the word [being] says: presence of
what is present . . . A mountain that lies before us may serve as an
example. We give our attention to the mountains that are there, not in
respect to their geological structure or geographical location, but only
in respect of their being present. What is present also has entered into
what was already unconcealed: the mountain range lies in the land-
scape . . . The presence we have described gathers itself in the continu-
ance which causes a mountain, a sea, a house to endure and, by that
duration, to lie before us among other things that are present . . . The
Greeks experience such duration as a luminous appearance in the
sense of illumined, radiant self-manifestation.2
Cavell goes on to argue that Malick has “found a way to transpose such
thoughts for our meditation,” by making this Heideggerian ontological
thought visible on film through acknowledging that “objects participate
in the photographic presence of themselves” as the fundamental essence
of film’s photographic basis. Thus the cinematic image is transfigured
into philosophy.
Cavell further states that Malick’s films contain a “metaphysical vision
of the world,” one that expresses the natural affinity between metaphysics
and cinematic representations. As Mark Furstenau and Leslie MacAvoy
point out in their essay “Terrence Malick’s Heideggerian Cinema: War
and the Question,” Malick has created a uniquely metaphysical cinema,
one which contains the possibility of not only presenting its representa-
tion, but of “drawing attention to the fact of its representing” and thus
“serves as a medium for addressing the philosophical problem of pres-
ence or being.”3 The task of such a cinema, they argue, is to “address
both the inherent reflexivity of the film image, as well as the potential
consequences of a metaphysical thinking in which the world is under-
stood to have been grasped through its representation.”4 Cavell believes
that Days of Heaven fulfilled this task; Furstenau and MacAvoy find that
The Thin Red Line also realizes it—it will be my argument in this chapter
that Badlands does so as well.
82 Terrence Malick
In this chapter, I want to explore the metaphysical landscape opened

in Badlands by paying particular attention to the tenuous connection
between ontology and topos that Derrida, stimulated by Heidegger,
named ontopology, which he defined as “an axiomatics linking indissocia-
bly the ontological value of present-being [on] to its situation, to the
stable and presentable determination of a locality, the topos of territory,
native soil, city, body in general.”5 I hope to show how Malick investigates
the scene of human existence, what Cavell calls the “arena between earth
and heaven,” within the locus of the Western landscape as an ontopo-
logical space in the film. I will also examine how he invites us to meditate
upon the landscape’s significance as bound to the particular and subjec-
tive situatedness of the human being who occupies it, traverses it, or
merely scans it from a solitary vista.
The World is Enough
Before I actually delve into Badlands, I’d like to begin with a refresher on
Heidegger’s concept of world. Heidegger opens The Fundamental Concepts
of Metaphysics with a prolonged reflection on an enigmatic fragment by
the romantic poet Novalis: “Philosophy is really a homesickness, an urge
to be at home everywhere.”6 Heidegger meditates on this theme, turning
philosophy into an alien demand, or rather the demand of an alien refu-
gee to be returned to his home. Yet, a philosopher is supposed to be at
home everywhere and feels this enigmatic urge to return precisely
because he is not at home everywhere in the world. But what is the mean-
ing of this enigma? Heidegger writes:
To be at home everywhere—what does this mean? Not merely here or

there, nor even simply in every place, in all taken together one after
the other. Rather, to be at home everywhere means to be at once and
all times within the whole. We name this within the whole and its char-
acter of wholeness the world. We are, to the extent that we are, . . .
always waiting for something. We are always called upon by something
as a whole. This “as a whole” is the world.7
The place to which our homesickness drives us is back to the world as a

whole. To Heidegger, this concept of world as a whole means that human
beings are restlessly driven to return to Being as a whole; our very being
is this restlessness. Yet, even as we restlessly depart toward this whole,
something more fundamental holds us back:
We have somehow always already departed toward this whole, or bet-

ter, we are always on the way to it . . . we are somehow simultaneously
torn back to something, resting in gravity that draws us downward. We
are underway to this “as a whole.” We ourselves are this underway, this
transition, this “neither the one nor the other” . . . What is this oscillat-
ing to and fro between this neither/not? . . . We name it finitude.8
Heidegger muses that finitude is our fundamental way of being; it is what

first situates us each as solitary individuals in the world. It is the proper
task of philosophy as homesickness to meditate upon these relations
between world, finitude, and individuation:
This demand to be at home everywhere . . . is nothing other than a

peculiar questioning about the meaning of this “as a whole” which we
call world. What happens here in this questioning and searching . . . is
the finitude of man. What occurs in such becoming finite is an ultimate
solitariness of man, in which everyone stands for him- or herself as
someone unique in the face of the world.9
Homesickness is the fundamental attunement of philosophizing and

Heidegger distills this attunement further under the name of “metaphys-
ics”: “Metaphysics is a questioning in which we inquire being as a whole,
and inquire in such a way that in so doing we ourselves, the questioners,
are also thereby included in the question, placed in the question.”10 This
conscious pursuit of our own being—the ability to question or take a
stand on our being by making it a subject for consciousness—seems to be
uniquely human and, if Heidegger is right, our primordial way of com-
porting to the world.
Metaphysics then is at the heart of our primary, preobjective percep-
tual experience of our surrounding environs and the objects that they
contain. Each time we encounter anew an object in the world, our pri-
mary encounter dredges up with the object a whole significantly mean-
ingful world-context in advance of our stripping down the object to its
naked, abstract objectivity (which we do by assigning to it its own distinc-
tive properties in order to isolate it from its environmental surround-
ings). Our natural perception and understanding of the world is
therefore preontic. To use one of Heidegger’s examples, let’s consider a
lectern in a classroom. As a teacher walks into the room and approaches
the lectern, she first experiences the lectern ambiguously within the
world as a “horizon of disclosure.”11 Though she moves toward the
84 Terrence Malick
lectern with a definite purpose in mind (to deliver a lecture), the lectern
is first oriented in and orients for her the world in its entirety. She will
eventually focus on the lectern as a piece of purposeful equipment, neu-
tralizing it within the world by abstracting it from the gestalt of natural
perception to locate it as a primary object situated in the surrounding
environs of the classroom. Heidegger names this prejudgmental primary
experience and process of distillating the environmental significance
found in our initial encounter with things worlding. Worlding is a pro-
cess, a verb:
The world is not the mere collection of the countable or uncountable,

familiar or unfamiliar things that are just there. But neither is it a
merely imagined framework added by our representation to the sum
of such given things. The world worlds and is more fully in being than
the tangible and perceptible realm in which we believe ourselves to be
at home. World is never an object that stands before us and can be
seen. World is the ever-nonobjective to which we are subject as long as
the paths of birth and death, blessing and curse keep us transported
into being . . . By the opening up of a world, all things gain their linger-
ing and hastening, their remoteness and nearness, their scope and
limitations.12
As Dasein, we already have an implicit understanding of world; the world

is “always already unveiled” with our existence. But, in our average every-
day goings-about in the world we tend to encounter familiar things and
man-made objects (what Heidegger calls “equipment”) of practical con-
cern in ways in which the world as a background framework is incon-
spicuous (since the world itself is never an object); the world as a whole
tends to withdraw behind the veil of everydayness and becomes unfamil-
iar, although we continue to implicitly understand that it is there as an
enframing backdrop. In his introduction to The Essence of Reasons Malick
himself summarized Heidegger’s thinking about world this way:
Where Heidegger talks about “world,” he will often appear to be talk-

ing about a pervasive interpretation or point of view which we bring to
the things of the world. This, in any case, has been the view of many
commentators. But there is little sense in speaking of a “point of view”
here since precisely what Heidegger wants to indicate with the concept
is that none other is possible. And there is no more sense in speaking
of an interpretation when, instead of an interpretation, the “world” is
meant to be that which can keep us from seeing, or force us to see, that
what we have is one.13
World, then, is not merely a collection of objects, such as lecterns and

desks in a classroom. World is, to paraphrase Julian Young, Dasein’s
“thrownness,” the situation into which every human being is born where
a world is already made before him. Dasein is always already being in a
world, yet since world is the sum and totality of our concerns and mean-
ing, “the horizon of all our horizons,” it is camouflaged within itself: “in
daily life what vanishes from our existence are the ‘simple and essential’
meanings which establish our ‘position in the midst of beings’ and give,
thereby, meaning and direction to our lives.”14
One of the ways a world can be made explicit and visible again is
through an encounter with a work of art. Earlier in “The Origin of a
Work of Art” from the above passage Heidegger argues that a work of art
can also be a worlding because it “sets up” a world for us by opening it
and keeping it “abidingly in force.” For Heidegger, the way an artwork
sets up a world has nothing to do with aesthetics and everything to do
with metaphysics (an artwork is first and foremost a being), particularly
because the “work” of an artwork is to disclose, as opposed to represent
or reproduce, the truth of a particular thing and allow it to emerge into
the “unconcealedness of its being.” Art is nothing less than “truth setting
itself to work.”
In this section of “the Origin of a Work of Art” Heidegger labori-
ously and rigorously works through two related metaphysical ques-
tions: (1) What is the “thingly” character of a mere thing (such as a
stone)?; and (2) What is the “work” character of a work (artwork)? He
is most keenly after the answer to the second. He proposes to get at the
answer through the intermediate category of “equipment” since any
piece of equipment is a man-made thing shaped for some useful, work-
ing purpose. The question then becomes “What is the ‘equipmental-
ity’ of equipment?” He chooses a pair of shoes as his example of
equipment. But then he does something that at first strikes the reader
as odd. Rather than describing an actual pair of shoes and its various
uses or explaining how a cobbler makes shoes, Heidegger instead uses
an artwork to illustrate the equipmental quality of equipment. Here
Heidegger gives us his famous example of a painting by Van Gogh of a
pair of well-worn peasant shoes.
Heidegger doesn’t see this pictorial representation as a mere image or
reproduction of peasant shoes. Since Van Gogh’s painting is neither a
86 Terrence Malick
piece of equipment nor a mere thing but instead is a type of work, he

views it as nothing less than a “happening of truth” in which the underly-
ing essence, that is, the being, of the shoes can be uncovered and there-
fore the world of the peasant recovered with them. In his encounter with
the painting, Heidegger claims to discover not only the equipmental
quality of the shoes as reliable pieces of everyday equipment but also
something about the work-being of the painting as a work of art, that is,
the world incarnated in the work. He lets the painted pair of shoes
“emerge as a thing that has been brought forth” by Van Gogh to speak of
its interconnectivity to the rustic, earthy yet dignified world of the peas-
ant woman who lives in them, replete with passages describing her slowly
and heavily trudging in them through fields “swept by a raw wind,” and
her “uncomplaining anxiety as to the certainty of bread” in her everyday
life.
This peasant’s world can only be disclosed to us in the artwork because
of our own prior understanding of world in general.15 Heidegger sums
up the work of this painting this way:
Van Gogh’s painting is the disclosure of what the pair of equipment,

the peasant shoes, is in truth . . . In the work of art the truth of an entity
has set itself to work. “To set” means here: to bring to a stand. Some
particular entity, a pair of peasant shoes comes in the work to stand in
the light of its being . . . The nature of art would then be this: the truth
of beings setting itself to work.16
Heidegger’s point in using the Van Gogh example is to show us that art
can bring us “suddenly somewhere else than we usually tend to be,”
namely, a world.17 An artwork belongs to world, but it also opens up and
puts it on display. The role of the artwork is not to create but rather “to
“make expressly visible,” to “thematize” a world which is already in exis-
tence” and which is already implicitly understood by Dasein in his everyday
encounters with the entities that exist within it.18 A work of art can reopen
the world by clearing a way for us beyond the work’s “thingly structure”
to interrogate our implicit, veiled understanding of the world camouflaged
within our everydayness to help an explicit, conscious awareness of the
world as the frame and support for the very objects and entities we
encounter in everyday, practical life emerge. So even though an artwork
can neither create nor recreate the world, it can quite literally reset the
world for us in our consciousness. In other words, an artwork can world.
But a world does not set upon itself; it needs a ground upon which to
stand. For this ground, Heidegger proposes the term earth. Yet, in
Heidegger’s vocabulary this innocuous word has nothing to do with

either clumps of dirt or the spinning globe circling the sun we call our
terrestrial home; like world, it too is a metaphysical term. A work sets up
a world only by “setting forth” the earth as the ground that juts through
the world. While the essential characteristic of world as a process is open-
ness, earth is closed and incomprehensible:
The earth is the spontaneous forthcoming of that which is continually

self-secluding and to that extent sheltering and concealing. World
and earth are essentially different from one another but never sepa-
rated . . . But the relation between world and earth does not whither
away into the empty unity of opposites unconcerned with one another.
The world, in resting upon the earth, strives to surmount it. As self-
opening, it cannot endure anything closed. The earth, however, as
sheltering and concealing, tends always to draw the world into itself
and keep it there.19
Here, Heidegger gives us the example of the Greek temple. A Greek

temple sitting on a rocky hill sets up a world for the ancient Greek—her
culture and religion—that is still open to us to rediscover today. How-
ever, the temple is grounded on the earth, a site of the ancient Greek’s
everyday, practical day-to-day life that is no longer open for us as modern
people to live. When we enter the temple today, we might be able to feel
the holiness of the temple as a house of worship—since it once and
might still house a God—just as an ancient Greek worshipper once did.
But we probably would have a hard time recreating what Eliade called
the original hierophany that sanctified the ground upon which it is built
in the first place.
It is within this push and pull between earth as concealment and world
as unconcealment that an artwork finds its unity: not an aesthetic unity,
but a metaphysical one as a striving for truth as unconcealedness. But
truth itself is essentially this striving between earth and world, since
unconcealedness is never an existential state existing in the work but is
always “happening” in the conflict between the work’s opening a world
and this same world’s concealment in earth.
Worlding the Badlands
In the “Age of the World Picture” Heidegger states that the essence of the
modern age is the fact that the world can become picture. This doesn’t
mean that we have developed a new picture of the world, but that for the
88 Terrence Malick
first time in history world can truly be grasped as a picture.20 If this is true,
then there is no more emblematic world-picture making apparatus of
our age than the cinema. Early in Badlands Malick paints the world pic-
ture of the entire story when Holly, in a voice-over narration flatly states:
“Little did I realize that what began in the alleys and backways of this
quiet town would end in the badlands of Montana.” The cinematic envi-
ronment of the title congeals around the two lovers throughout the film,
creating what Ben McCann calls a person-environment correlative that
constantly reminds us of the mutuality between self and place.21 The
badlands of North America are scattered throughout parts of Nebraska,
Wyoming, Montana, South and North Dakota, and Saskatchewan.
“Badlands” is the English translation of the Lakota Sioux word makhóšiča,
a word used to describe an arid terrain that is tricky to traverse because
of loose sand, rugged canyons, multiple toadstools, scarce water, and rap-
idly eroding layers of soft sediment. The Badlands National Park website
describes the treacherous beauty of the South Dakota badlands this way:
The bizarre landforms called badlands are, despite the uninviting

name, a masterpiece of water and wind sculpture. They are near des-
erts of a special kind, where rain is infrequent, the bare rocks are
poorly consolidated and relatively uniform in their resistance to ero-
sion, and runoff water washes away large amounts of sediment. On
average, the White River Badlands of South Dakota erode one inch
per year. They are formidable redoubts of stark beauty where the deli-
cate balance between creation and decay, that distinguishes so much
geologic art, is manifested in improbable landscapes—near
moonscapes—whose individual elements seem to defy gravity. Erosion
is so rapid that the landforms can change perceptibly overnight as a
result of a single thunderstorm.22
The utter inhospitality of such a landscape has long been inviting to out-
laws and renegades seeking refuge from both justice and injustice. The
badlands have rarely been a passive backdrop detached from the often
violent human dramas that unfolded in its landscape.23 Butch Cassidy
and the Wild Bunch blazed countless trails through the inaccessible and
remote Wyoming badlands, moving through them with a familiar ease to
elude and hide out from numerous posses. In 1890 a group of Lakota
Sioux ghost dancers escaped to the badlands west of the Black Hills in
South Dakota as a religious refuge to practice the ghost dance while the
U.S. army was suppressing it on the reservations. These types of individuals
move fluidly through the dry, crumbled, and jagged terrain of the
badlands. To paraphrase Basso, not only do they occupy the landscape of
the Badlands, but the landscape also occupies them.24 It’s as if the geo-
logical history of the badlands as “an old story in the arid and semi-arid
regions of the West [that] always happens in rocks that are relatively non-
resistant erosion and . . . always starts with a scarp” also serves as an apt
description of their interaction with such a landscape.25
Kit too is depicted as one of these individuals—a scarp in Badlands arid
setting—yet he seems barely interested in the picturesque open tableaus
through which he and Holly travel. This is because Kit is well placed in
the landscape—that is, he seems to belong to the vast geography of the
badlands which serve as both the narrative space and action place of the
film. Yet Malick links Kit and the landscape together to signify a particu-
lar sense of “place” or topos as opposed to reducing landscape to mere
space or background scenery. Furthermore, Kit is unaffected by the land-
scape as he passively experiences the large geographical scales of the
high plains. For example, at the point when he and Holly begin their
off-road escapade across the plains, Holly narrates how Kit passively tells
her to simply “enjoy the scenery” (which she does). But Kit himself
becomes a precise anchoring point (but, as I shall argue later, not a
ground) for us in the surrounding landscape. Topography in Badlands is
important because Kit’s presence situates it for us as belonging to the
world. Not necessarily the world of a casual crime spree killer (I will
explore neither his psychology nor his morals here) but one that is much
more familiar to us—the American West as a fugitive landscape. Malick’s
landscape setting in this film is not simply the picturesque as seen
through the eyes of Kit or Holly—like Van Gogh’s peasant shoes, it is a
picture of a world.
Kit especially stands out as a scarp in Malick’s widescreen framed
landscape shots when accompanied by Holly’s voice-over narration in
which she imagines Kit rapturously moving through the empty spaces of
the badlands as if he were at home there. For example, in one sequence,
Malick’s camera pans across the vast prairie horizon until we see Kit in
full frame, silhouetted from behind, standing on the prairie at the
western edge of South Dakota staring toward Montana with his rifle
straddling his shoulders. Malick frames Kit in such a way that his out-
stretched arms are even with the horizon, as if he were hanging from its
edge. Malick’s camera then lingers on Kit’s silent posture as if he were a
scarecrow, an alien piece of equipment made to appear at home stand-
ing as a sentry in the solitude of the natural surroundings while disrupting
90 Terrence Malick
and frightening the natural inhabitants of the terrain. The camera then
cuts to a medium shot of Kit from the front, his arms now straddling the
opposite horizon. What follows next are a series of shots of a mountain
in the far off distance, a pheasant, a lizard, a lightning tinged storm
cloud, and a grounded hawk. The last shot in the sequence is a long shot
of Kit, arms still straddling both his rifle and the horizon, as he turns in
the dusk light to walk back toward Holly as her voice-over meditates
upon their isolation in which she confuses their solitude for the placeless
feeling of loneliness: “We lived in utter loneliness. Neither here nor
there. Kit said that ‘solitude’ was a better word cause it meant more
exactly what I wanted to say.”
Later, Kit spins a bottle to decide in what direction to go next. When
the bottle won’t spin on the hard, rocky ground, Kit exclaims, “If I’m
worth a damn, I’ll pick the right direction, if not, well then I don’t care.”
When he finally does choose, he decides to head in the direction of the
mountains of Saskatchewan, “a magical land beyond the reach of the
law.” This push and pull between fate and decision is a good example of
Kit’s earth and world in strife in which “the world is the clearing of the
paths that of the essential guiding directions with which all decision
complies. Every decision, however, bases itself on something not mas-
tered, something concealed, confusing.”26
Holly, on the other hand, seems to be placeless in the open landscape.
She sees nature itself as charged with emotional potential. Unlike Kit,
she is affected by the landscape precisely because she has a mythical and
romantic view of nature as picturesque and inviting (she is, after all, only
15 years old). She imagines nature as a type of Eden, a playground where
she and Kit will be the sole occupants with neither father nor mother to
restrain them. For example, just after Kit shoots and kills her father,
Holly tells us in her narration that “we hid out in the wilderness, down by
a river in a grove of cotton woods. It being the flood season, we built our
house in the trees with tamarins’ squalls and willows laid side by side to
make a floor. There wasn’t a plant in the forest that didn’t come in
handy.” This first refuge is not the world of the badlands, but a lush for-
ested oasis complete with a river flowing along its borders reminiscent of
the island to which Huck Finn first escaped from his father. Her Edenic
description of this world, however, is undercut by the shot of a dead tree
floating down the river that accompanies the voice-over. Here, Malick
uses the counterpoint between sound and image to bring world and
earth into strife. Later in the same scene, as Holly and Kit sit on a platform
they built by lashing logs together between three trees, Holly reads a
passage from Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon Tiki about the rhythm of the raft’s
logs as the crew approach a chain of islands in the open sea. Thus, in her
imagination Holly equates their own native, stationary log raft stuck on
an island hidden in the earthy prairie sea with a much more exotic craft
sailing through the open ocean worlds away.
For Kit, this treed landscape is just another confining and concealing
space—like his bedroom in town, the garbage truck and the feedlot
where he worked, Holly’s house—where he is constantly under the threat
of siege from any direction in the open world surrounding the hideout.
He “handily” uses the forest plants to build Viet Kong styled camouflaged
ambush pits and various ominous looking booby traps. He drills with a
rifle and practices commando skills, knowing that sooner or later the law
is coming for them. Later, as Kit fishes in the river near their tree house,
we find out that their Edenic wilderness is only a few hundred meters
away from a major highway. This wilderness turns out to be more like
Thoreau’s Walden Pond than Huck Finn’s island. The pair is actually
discovered by a pedestrian walking and smoking along the riverbank
(while observing Kit comically shooting fish that he failed to catch with
his homemade net).
Another scene in which Kit’s world and earth are in conflict is when
Kit drives out on the prairie to confront Holly’s father about his forbid-
ding her to see him. Her father is painting a large billboard sign that
doesn’t look as if it is even remotely close to a road or highway. The bill-
board advertises a feed store, and, painted in a primitive, folk-art style,
depicts an idyllic farm complete with grazing sheep, corn planted in
neat, tidy rows, chickens, a pond stocked with fish, a white picket fence
surrounding a cottage, a farm couple, and an airship flying overhead.
Yet, just to the left of the fish pond a painted panel has been removed
and is set on the ground leaning against the billboard. The incom-
pleteness of the painting suggests a world, perhaps even one Holly would
recognize, yet the missing panel, grounded on the earth, suggests that
this type of world is closed to the young lovers. The contrast here between
the pastoral world of the sign and the reality of Kit and Holly’s lives in the
bleak backwaters town of Fort Dupree could not be more striking.
As Kit approaches and mumbles “sure looks pretty,” Malick’s camera
shows us the entirety of the sign so that through the breach we see just a
hint of the landscape behind it jutting into an immense, infinite blue sky
punctuated by drifting white clouds. Malick complicates this double
convocation of earth-world and world-earth further in the next shot
where he frames Kit so that his body transects the earth of the sign and
92 Terrence Malick
the world beyond seen through the missing panel with a plumber’s line
dangling in the opening over his shoulder. Here Kit’s world is momen-
tarily plumb with his own self-image as Holly’s father mutters to him,
“You somethin’,” and Kit replies with “It takes all kinds sir” then casually
walks back to his car.
Whereas Holly’s imaginary nature is always devoid of human contami-
nation (outside of her and Kit), Kit’s nature is filled with human pres-
ence. In fact all of the open spaces in the film occupied by Kit are marked
by the presence of man, whether it be the billboard that Holly’s father is
painting, Cato’s house, a railroad track and trestle, an oil derrick, or an
army base—all situated in the vast expanse of open prairie. For instance,
in the scene when Kit shoots Cato, Kit is situated in a plowed field as he
fires the fatal shot. Even when Kit and Holly leave the highway in fear of
roadblocks and drive westward through “desert and mesa, across endless
miles of open range” they use the telephone wires as path markers to the
mountains of Montana. For a man on the run, Kit does little to avoid
running into other people or to cover his tracks across the landscape.
Subjectile
In another sense, the person-environment relationship between Kit and

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

serve as a support.27
As Heidegger does when explaining world, Derrida turns to the code of

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

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

visual field, it is not clearly separated from the nonvisual. For example,
when we hear a car horn in the distance, although we cannot see the
car, it is still part of our visual field. What we do not “see” is still an ele-
ment of the “seen.” Conversely, the horizon consists of the unseen
within the visible field: “what we see is always in certain respects not
seen: there must be hidden sides of things, and things ‘behind us,’ if
there is to be a ‘front’ of things and things ‘in front of’ us, in short,
perception.”32
The body itself becomes another field or anchor for every object of
perception. The act of seeing in normal space consists of anchoring the
gaze on an object to isolate it from the field of surrounding objects, to
posit it as a figure. In concentrating your eyes on the isolated object, it
does not anchor itself there for you; rather, you become anchored in it.
These two steps of isolation and anchorage are not two distinct processes
but a continuous activity of plunging deeper into the object: “I continue
inside one object the exploration which earlier hovered over them all,
and in one movement I close up the landscape and open the object.”33
Our gaze pierces the inner horizon of an object so that it is seen against
the horizon of surrounding objects. The horizon is what assures the sig-
nificance of the object in the course of the gaze. It discloses the object of
the gaze while allowing the other objects to recede to compose the hori-
zon through which the primary object may be distinguished. This opera-
tion does not entail a discordant objective comparison of detail from the
memory of a previous view, but is instead continuous and embedded in
the thickness of time.
In contrast to ordinary space, cinematic space is not an independent,
continuous spatial gestalt. In the only passage specifically about film in
the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty supports this claim: “When
in a film, the camera is trained on an object and moves nearer to it to
give a close-up view, we can remember that we are being shown the ashtray
or the actor’s hands, we do not actually identify it. This is because the
screen has no horizons.”34 Merleau-Ponty is of course talking about the
action space of the film as opposed to the screen space, but this distinc-
tion is not without its ambiguities. On one hand, the cinematic object
exists on the surface of the screen as a real object of perception in ordi-
nary space with natural spatial characteristics. On the other hand, in
apprehending objects as images in the action space, they cease to func-
tion in real space and dissolve into spatial discontinuities that lack the
elements of ordinary space. The latter is expressed by the absence of
96 Terrence Malick
depth in the spaces of a film, while the real height and breadth felt in the
perception of screen objects embodies the former.
In the spatial arrangement projected into the action space of a film,
the viewer sees a simultaneous presence of both objects and movement
as immanent without a specific ground or field. The spatial gestalt in a
film is never given in the embodied intentionality of a subject projecting
himself into the world, but instead is projected for her. Since its images are
projected from behind, a film can continually refer to only the screen
itself, without ever really transcending the two-dimensional frame to
establish inner horizons. This projection arranges objects on the screen
as mutually exclusive to one another. All of a film’s spatial elements
merely coexist as opposed to implying one another. It is because of this
lack that it is somewhat misleading to talk about the role of “depth” in a
film. Merleau-Ponty defines depth as “the dimension in which things or
elements envelop each other.”35 There is no depth in cinematic repre-
sentation as Merleau-Ponty defines it, but only height and breadth. None
of the projected objects on the screen ever “envelop” one another in the
visual process, but are instead only juxtaposed in the memory of the
spectator. The spectator simply “recognizes” objects of previous shots
from memory and constructs the spatial relationships by referring to his
knowledge and memory of depth in the lived world. These juxtaposi-
tions are provoked by the perception of height and breadth, which are
given to cinematic objects as real objects in ordinary space, and supple-
ments the absence of depth.
This indicates that cinematic space functions primarily on two tempo-
ral levels. On the one hand, it is protentional as the film’s action space
reels toward the future. On the other hand, this future is always foreseen
as it is projected onto the screen space; we know that it must end within
the space of the screening. This protensive finality always refers us to a
past, not a present. Within the present space and time of a film, the
viewer must always rely on the retention of the past in order to construct
figures in the absence of a field on the screen. This means that cinematic
spatial perception is constructed objectively and is always secondary to
temporality. For instance, when a camera shifts perspective from a sta-
tionary medium shot to close-up, it creates a pseudotranscendence in
which immanent objects stand out only ostensibly from a background.
The immanent object (or figure) is always given in the absence of a
ground which would make this transcendence possible. The viewer, then,
must continually posit himself as the only ground in relation to the entire
screen space/action space of the film as a figure, meaning that his own
body becomes a significantly expressive space. It is this interplay, and
consequently the crossing-over/back-again between screen and action
spaces, that constructs a pseudospatial gestalt in a film and in which
space gives way to place.
In his essay “A Phenomenological Aesthetic of Cinematic Worlds”
Christopher S. Yates associates Malick’s cinematography with just this
sort of phenomenological approach to cinematic space:
Malick likewise breaks with traditional cinematography by favoring

point-of-view shots over establishing shots. In most feature films, estab-
lishing shots are used to provide an objective glimpse at the scene of
coming action. Malick, however, prefers to make his transitions from
shot to shot by revealing the line of action as that which a given char-
acter is witnessing and is already immersed in. His intentionality, then,
is to provide a subjective emphasis in his shot selection . . . the empha-
sis on cinematic point-of-view allows the world, in the language of phe-
nomenology, to give itself to our consciousness. As an artist, Malick is
intuitively aware that the work of his art can accomplish a convergence
of viewer intentionalities concerning the truth of the world with his
own. He thus prepares the way for a fusion of horizons resulting in an
aesthetic experience that looks through the screen to a field of existen-
tial reflection.36
We feel this “fusion of horizons” most intently during the chase sequence
in which Kit finally gives himself up to a local sheriff and his deputy.
Malick cuts back and forth between cars racing across the empty land-
scape to Kit looking at himself in the rearview mirror. In this sequence,
Malick constantly violates the 180-degree convention of continuity edit-
ing, making screen direction so inconsistent that we really have no sense
of the direction in which Kit is speeding away. However, we get the sense
that no matter what is in the frame—be it the two cars side by side crash-
ing through a fence, Kit checking his hair in the mirror, or the deputy
leaning out the window to fire a rifle—what Malick is showing us is Kit’s
point of view leading up to his almost random decision to give himself
up. This scene culminates with Kit stacking rocks into a small cairn to
mark the place in the otherwise featureless landscape where he was
caught, thus authorizing his own destiny by signing the terrain with its
own substance.
98 Terrence Malick
Conclusion: Dwelling
Heidegger emphasizes that to “dwell” as a human being means to exist

in finitude, as a being-toward-death but yet at the same time to transcend
our finitude through waiting for and preserving what is beyond the hori-
zon of finitude. The concept of dwelling, the Da of Dasein, or the there of
being-there, “assigns importance to the forms of consciousness with which
individuals perceive and apprehend geographical space.”37 It entails
being situated between earth and sky, or what Heidegger calls the four-
fold.38 Malick figuratively presents this subjectile in the closing scenes of
the film by taking us somewhere he has not yet shown us as an isolated
space—the sky. The film closes with Kit and Holly in shackles being flown
in an airplane back to civilization to face justice. They now fly over the
landscape they had just in the days previous slowly traversed by car. No
longer in charge of their destiny, they are instead being hurled through
the sky, a place Heidegger dubs “the abode of the gods.” But Kit draws
the earth and sky back together when, admiring the hat of the officer to
which he is shackled, he asks him where he got it. “State” the officer
utters. “Boy I’d like to buy me one of them.” The officer responds with
“You’re quite an individual Kit.” As Holly looks on, Kit in deadpan retorts
“You think they’ll take that in consideration?”
I think it is important to notice that Kit’s last words in the film are not
about shoes, but about a hat, especially one that he connects to his own
authority as an individual. Early in the film Kit had been the subject of
derision for the quirky boots he wears, derision that, in his own mind,
confirmed his unique individuality. Now a hat, an object that sits on top
of his head oriented toward the sky, especially a policeman’s, would com-
plete his own picture of the authority of his distinctive individualism.
The last shot of the film travels through a cloud-swept sky with the sun
barely peeking above the clouds. Though we have not come quite full
circle, we recognize an affinity between the earthly landscape where we
have been the entire film and the skyscape of the closing shot; we still
don’t know what direction we are headed—whether it’s east or west,
whether we are traveling toward the sunrise or sunset. We are simply in
the world.
Notes
1
As of this writing Malick’s oeuvre as a director consists of Lanton Mills (a short,
1969), Badlands (1973), Days of Heaven (1978), The Thin Red Line (1998), The
New World (2005), and The Tree of Life (forthcoming, 2011).
2
Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking? (New York: Harper Perennial,
1976), 235–7.
3
Adrian Martin, “Approaching the New World,” The Cinema of Terrence Malick:
Poetic Visions of America, ed. Hanna Patterson, 2nd ed. (London: Wallflower
Press, 2007), 182.
4
Ibid., 182.
5
Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of Debt, The Work of Mourning & The
New International (London: Routledge Classics, 2006), 102–3.
6
Martin Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World Finitude, Solitude,
trans. William McNeil and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1995), 5.
7
Ibid., 5.
8
Ibid., 6.
9
Ibid., 8.
10
Heidegger’s definition of metaphysics includes an implicit critique of its fail-
ure to properly investigate Being as such. Hence, his metaphysics is an attempt
at overcoming traditional metaphysics.
11
Julian Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001), 23. Young offers here a very succinct definition of world: “In
sum, then, ‘world’ is the background, and usually unnoticed understanding
which determines for the members of an historical culture what, for them,
fundamentally, there is. It constitutes, as it were, the entry conditions, the
ground plan, the ‘being of beings,’ which something must satisfy in order to
show up as a being in the world in question.”
For a definition of “horizon” let me note here one offered by Christopher S.
Yates: “ ‘Horizons’ denotes, with Hans-Georg Gadamer, the specifically herme-
neutical character of our experience of the world. This is opposed to a
metaphysically conditioned ideal of knowledge and does not take interpreta-
tion to be a purely epistemic or noetic event. ‘Horizon’ is akin to ‘situation,’
the locus of understanding in terms of our own projects and questions.” See
note 6 of “A Phenomenological Aesthetic of Cinematic Worlds,” Contemporary
Aesthetics 4 (2006), www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.
php?articleID=394#FN14
12
Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter
(New York: Harper & Row), 43.
13
Martin Heidegger, The Essence of Reasons, trans. Terrence Malick (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1969), xv.
14
Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art, 32, 39, 37.
15
In an interesting parallel, the first time we meet Kit he is on his garbage route
trying to sell a pair of discarded shoes he has found for a dollar. These shoes
look remarkably similar to the ones Van Gogh painted. When the man asks Kit
what size they are, he responds “Your size.”
16
Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 35.
17
Ibid.
18
Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art, 33.
19
20
Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans.
William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 129–31.
100 Terrence Malick
21
Patterson, The Cinema of Terrence Malick, 81.
22
www.us-parks.com/badlands-national-park/geology.htm
23
24
Keith H. Basso, “ ‘Speaking with Names’: Language and Landscape among the
Western Apache,” Cultural Anthropology 3, no. 2 (May 1988), 99–130.
25
www.us-parks.com/badlands-national-park/geology.htm
26
27
Jacques Derrida and Paule Thévenin, The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud, trans.
Mary Ann Caws (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), 77.
28
Ibid.
29
www.eskimo.com/~toates/malick/art6.html
30
Christina B. Kennedy, “The Myth of Heroism: Man and Desert in Lawrence of
Arabia,” Place, Power, Situation, and Spectacle, ed. Stuart C. Aitken and Leo
E. Zonn (Maryland and London: Rowman and Littlefield, 1994). As cited in
Ben McCann, “ ‘Enjoying the Scenery’: Landscape and the Fetishisation of
Nature in Badlands and Days of Heaven” in The Cinema of Terrence Malick, 78.
31
Ibid.
32
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), 277.
33
Ibid., 67.
34
Ibid., 68.
35
Ibid., 265.
36
Christopher S. Yates, “A Phenomenological Aesthetic of Cinematic Worlds,”
Contemporary Aesthetics 4 (2006), www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/
pages/article.php?articleID=394#FN14
37
Keith H. Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western
Apaches (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), 106.
38
Chapter 6
Fields of Vision: Human Presence in the

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

his nature trope, where close and compelling human interaction is played
against a backdrop of verdant, often overwhelmingly, lush landscapes. In
The Thin Red Line (1998) the characters love, fight, and die in tangles of
Edenlike greenery, and in The New World (2005), the thick coastal forests
await the colonizer’s axes. In this latter film especially, we open with
Europeans subsumed by the canopy, desperate to carve out a pattern of
settlement in a sea of untamed forest, while the natives blend in har-
mony with the old growth. By the end of the film, Pocahontas has been
transplanted across the ocean, chasing her child through a carefully
carved English garden maze. Throughout these films are images that
assert man’s desire to control and contain the natural world that is crowd-
ing all around him.1
Malick began his cinematic exploration of man’s place in the universe,
however, by looking not to environments with closed-in nature where
102 Terrence Malick
humans are surrounded by trees and swamps and oceans and hills, but
to the featureless plains that serve as the stage for Badlands (1973) and
Days of Heaven (1978). In these films Malick explores the tenuous human
presence on a blank horizon: a towering home standing proud above
waving wheat fields upon the Texas plain, for example, or a single oil
derrick pitched against the backdrop of the Wyoming flatlands. “At the
very edge of the horizon we could make out the gas fires of the refinery
at Missoula, while to the south we could see the lights of Cheyenne, a city
bigger and grander than I’d ever seen,” proclaims Holly Sargis (Sissy
Spacek) in a voice-over late in Badlands as the killers near the Montana/
South Dakota border. Though this feat would be geographically impos-
sible, Malick clearly wants his viewers to consider the vastness of this
open landscape set in contrast to the confined, conflicted, and violent
lives of its inhabitants.
In exploring landscapes such as these, Malick’s early films touch upon
a theme that has long been expressed in the literary tradition of the
Great Plains. One thinks of the most famous writer in this genre, Willa
Cather, for example, who describes a young Jim Burden encountering
the prairie for the first time in her groundbreaking 1918 novel My
Ántonia:
There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no

hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint
starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the
material out of which countries are made. [ . . . ] I had the feeling that
the world was left behind, that we had got over the edge of it, and were
outside man’s jurisdiction.2
In this scene the ten-year-old Jim, leaving his lush Virginia hill country
behind after the deaths of his parents, feels utterly alone and exposed on
the flat landscape. As if being orphaned were not enough, the plains com-
plete his isolation. “If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter,” he
continues. “Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out.”
There are many similar moments throughout Cather’s work, and other
writers of the plains, that offer echoes of images and sentiments cap-
tured in Malick’s first films.3 Another Nebraska writer, however, much
less known than Cather, offers perhaps the most fruitful literary counter-
point to Malick. Wright Morris (1910–1998), after all, came of age in the
transition from American literary realism to modernism, and he grapples
with many of the same metaphysical and existential questions that Malick
Fields of Vision: Terrence Malick and Wright Morris 103
often confronts. Moreover, Morris, like Malick, explored these themes

across multiple mediums; in addition to writing novels and short stories,
he wrote literary and philosophical criticism, and he was a prominent
photographer in his own right.4 Several of his earliest works combine in
an innovative mix of images/photographs and words—and his writing,
in general, places great emphasis on the themes of “looking” and, as he
described it, moments that reveal the “camera eye” of narrative perspec-
tive. Moreover, Morris wrote about people and events that were contem-
porary with Malick’s first two films (unlike Cather, for example, whose
works are set in a much earlier period of the settlement of the West).
Beyond the subject matter, Morris’s technique brings to mind Malick.
Sparse on dialogue, his narratives are often confounded rather than
clarified when characters choose to speak. While honing in on very pre-
cise images and symbols meant to convey a larger impression of man’s
place in nature, Morris tends to resist a “straight telling,” perplexing his
readers in the same way viewers may at times feel during a Malick film,
with scenes and images that don’t seem to fully relate to the primary
plot, and endings that resist closure. Finally, like Malick, Morris enjoyed
great critical success, but never earned much of an audience; critics often
refer to him as one of the most underappreciated American authors in
the twentieth century.5
The work that prompts the most obvious comparison with Malick is
Ceremony in Lone Tree (1960), Morris’s eleventh novel, and a sequel, of
sorts, to his 1956 National Book Award winning The Field of Vision. Both
novels explore the influence of America’s frontier mythology as it applies
to characters caught up in the consumer culture of the 1950s, and the
mainstream American values and behaviors that have emerged in the
postwar era. The main conflict in both novels involves the contrasting
choices of the key male protagonists: Walter McKee, a successful, if con-
ventional, Nebraska businessman with a modern split-level in the sub-
urbs outside Lincoln, Nebraska—with a beautiful wife and family but a
dull, conforming existence—and his childhood friend, Gordon Boyd, a
“self-unmade man” who has failed in his various attempts as a writer and
artist, but who earns grudging admiration from Boyd and others in the
unconventional choices he has made in trying to break away from his
small town, rural upbringing. Lone Tree serves as the destination drawing
a large cast of additional characters for the ninetieth birthday of the son
of the town’s founding father, and sole remaining inhabitant, Tom
Scanlon. Hovering in the background of this “ceremony” is a startled
nation’s reaction to one of the first mass murders in the postwar era,
104 Terrence Malick
loosely based upon eight-day killing spree across Nebraska and Wyoming
by the teenage misfit Charles Starkweather in January of 1958, the same
events that inspired elements of Badlands.
Both the film and the novel explore the cause and effect of this erup-
tion of violence in otherwise unremarkable young men in uneventful
communities. What motivates Kit Corruthers (Martin Sheen) to kill in
Badlands is never fully understood. When asked by the patrolmen who
finally captures him if he “likes people,” Kit replies “they’re okay.” Per-
plexed, he asks “then why’d you do it?” Kit, and Malick as far as that goes,
never provide a satisfactory explanation for such thoughtless violence.
The young killer in Ceremony in Lone Tree, Charlie Munger, is clearly pat-
terned on Starkweather, and articulates more clearly his frightening
motivation, one that Kit likely shares. “What troubled McKee, more than
the threat to his life and the murders, were the few words the boy had
said. ‘I want to be somebody.’ ”6 McKee, 61 years old, captures his genera-
tion’s fear of dealing with this unpredictable youth culture. He describes
a scene where a group of wild teenagers in a “souped-up Ford” had tor-
mented him one day on the highway: “the grinning faces of those young
hoodlums scared him more than he dared to admit. McKee had recog-
nized the nameless face of evil—he recognized it, that is, as stronger
than the nameless face of good.”7
The panic caused by the seemingly random and meaningless trail of
violence of Charlie Munger in Ceremony at Lone Tree reflects the hysteria
that erupted in Nebraska, and nationally, at the time of the Starkweather
killings, and in scenes depicted in Badlands. As Holly explains in voice-
over against a montage of newsreel-like images of communities readying
for the killers:
The whole country was out looking for us—for who knew where Kit
would strike next. Sidewalks cleared out. Stores closed their doors and
drew the blinds. Posses and vigilance committees were set up from
Texas to South Dakota. Children rode back and forth from school
under heavy guard. [ . . . ] People left their lights on when they went
to sleep.
This sense of fear and panic is captured throughout Ceremony in Lone

Tree, foregrounded by the postwar comforts that McKee and several of
his family members are hoping to protect. His wife forces him to keep all
the lights on in their modern new suburban home “with the glass on
three sides of it. The house was set off by itself, which was what they had
wanted, but with the lights lit up it looked like a factory and attracted
more attention than if they had been out. But you couldn’t tell that to
Mrs. McKee. ‘If I’m going to be shot, I want to know who it is.’ ”8
The anxiety captured in Ceremony in Lone Tree does not just revolve
around this new form of inexplicable youth violence and revolt; the novel
spends a good deal of time exploring the Cold War angst of the nuclear
era. Traveling north from Mexico toward Nebraska to make the birthday
celebration in Lone Tree, Gordon Boyd tries to get a room in a small
town near the Nevada/Utah border, only to find the hotel completely
filled with spectators hoping to catch the early morning blast of an atomic
bomb at the nearby test range. The owner relents and allows Gordon to
stay in her son’s room, asking as he signs the register if she should mark
“wake for bomb.” This phrase becomes a running joke throughout the
rest of the novel, which Boyd uses to spell out the irony of the mix of
security and uncertainty that marked the Eisenhower era: the specter of
unpredictable mass destruction in the midst of great economic expan-
sion and growing American might. Boyd speculates on the meaning of it
all as he tries to sleep:
WAKE BEFORE BOMB? How did one do it? Was it even advisable? The
past, whether one liked it or not, was all that one actually possessed:
the green stuff, the gilt-edged securities. The present was that moment
of exchange—when all might be lost. Why risk it? [ . . . ] To wake
before the bomb was to risk losing all to gain what might be so little—a
brief moment in the present, that one moment later joined the past.9
This symbol of the atomic bomb representing, Gordon Boyd imagines,
“the meeting point, the melting point of the past confronting the pres-
ent,” touches upon similar issues of “time” and “being” that flow through-
out Malick’s oeuvre, and which fuels Kit’s own desire to leave his “mark”
on the world around him (as will be explored later). Moreover, while the
Cold War subtext may be less visible in Badlands, one must wonder, as
Morris more overtly speculates in his writing, if the background of poten-
tial mass destruction does not fuel the kind of violence that ultimately
sweeps up Kit and Holly. The film alludes to these tensions, such as when
Holly asserts that “it was like the Russians had invaded” as communities
mobilize in fear of the young fugitives. Late in the film, when they near
the Montana border, Holly proclaims “Kit was glad to leave South Dakota
behind and cursed its name. He said that if the communists ever dropped
the atomic bomb, he wished they’d put it right in the middle of Rapid
City.”
106 Terrence Malick
Kit’s destructive impulse here might be fueled less by Cold War angst
and more by small-town boredom, but such allusions remind viewers of
what a tumultuous era these young outlaws confronted. Like the descrip-
tions of many isolated, rural regions in the fiction of Wright Morris,
Malick wants to present a sense of decay and lack of opportunity for
young people in their home town. When Kit loses his job hauling trash
and is forced to work at the local cattle feedlot, we see scenes of him
squeezing cows into a chute and herding them into pens interspersed
with images of a sick “downer cow” and then Kit standing upon its stiff
body.10 Such imagery clearly reinforces Kit’s notion of being trapped in
this dying, rural backwater; if not sifting through cluttered, materialistic
existence of the town as a garbage man, he finds himself being “penned
in” and domesticated as a laboring “cowboy,” quite in contrast to the
Western myth upon which such “cow towns” are generally constructed.
Being only 15, Holly appears similarly trapped, as reflected in the image
of her huge fish in its small bowl (and later seen gasping for air as she
tosses it into her back garden), but unlike Kit—no longer in school and
with no family so speak of—she suffers under the thumb of the typical
teen authority figures to which Kit must appear an exciting alternative.11
By this point in the film “Fort” Dupree appears less like a protective
embattlement on the exposed frontier, and more as small-minded prison
from which these young lovers feel compelled to escape. After Holly’s
father (Warren Oates) shoots her dog as a punishment for seeing Kit
and then throws the body off of a bridge into the river, (implicitly the
same river that Holly and Kit have used as a staging ground for their
romance, and which later will serve to forefront their idyllic escape into
the wilderness), we cut to Holly peering out of a fortlike aperture in the
second floor of a red-stone building with “McKenzie School of Music”
across the window, looking everything like a prisoner, as her voice-over
explains that her father “made me take extra music lessons every day
after school. [ . . . ] He said if the piano didn’t keep me off the streets,
maybe the clarinet would.”
It is at this very point in the film that the flat landscape becomes a fac-
tor in revealing the “problem of being,” as Morris frames it, for Kit and
Holly. We cut from Holly looking forlornly out of the music school win-
dow to an open landscape with a brilliant blue sky, trailing with fluffy,
chromium-white clouds hovering over the short grasslands, abruptly bro-
ken perpendicularly by a large, colorful billboard that Holly’s father is
painting. Aside from Kit’s car, and the father’s truck parked near the
workspace, the landscape lacks all reference to humans or human
activity—even the roadway that must necessitate the billboard in the first
place.
As Kit, eating a peach, casually approaches the father painting the
sign, we get a better look at the scene promoting “Kauzer’s Feed and
Grain,” filled with a fanciful, idyllic farm yard scene complete with white
chickens, yellow chicks, a green background, and a pond full of colorful
and happy fish (quite the opposite of the earlier images of Holly’s gasp-
ing pet). In the lower left corner of the billboard we see “Friendly” and
then the blank section that Holly’s father is working on. Nothing being
depicted in the sign squares with the reality of life for these young lovers
in Fort Dupree, and this “false advertising” set in contrast to the wide
open landscape and the high white clouds makes a profound statement
about how hard it will be for the young lovers to find any acceptance in
the conventional borders of what the billboard depicts; their freedom
exists beyond the margins of the father’s controlled fantasy of a rural
domestic space. “What you think would happen to her if she stuck around
with you Kit, a guy like you?” the father asks, representing the stern voice
of authority fearful of the directionless impulses of the younger “James
Dean” generation. “She’d get along okay,” Kit responds, “And if she
didn’t she could take off.”
Unconvinced by Kit’s sense of freedom and movement, the father for-
bids him to see his daughter again, telling him he’s really “somethin’,” to
which the departing Kit replies “Takes all kinds, sir.” This catch phrase
has deeper meaning in this context than would first appear: more and
more it will take “all kinds” to make up the post–World War II society,
and the father’s understandable reluctance to let his young daughter
hang out with this wannabe rebel will prove to be his fatal misreading of
this younger generation. Meanwhile, Kit’s response represents both a
challenge to accept youth culture, including rebels without much cause
(“takes all kinds”) and a lingering respect for the positions in authority
(“sir”), even as the older generations of this region, descendents of those
who settled in these high plains, are wary of the very freedom and adven-
turous opportunity that brought them west in the first place. It took “all
kinds” to homestead areas like South Dakota, and such endeavors them-
selves were predicated on the kinds of risks that Holly’s father is unwill-
ing to allow her to be exposed to.
After Kit departs the father, gesturing farewell with his back turned in
another combination of both challenge and respect, we cut to a lengthy
view of the colorful sign in the lower left corner of the frame and those
high-minded clouds and blue sky stretched out across the vast horizon,
108 Terrence Malick
suggesting the flight about to take place. Permission having failed, Kit
next encounters the father at his home and violently, if respectfully,
insists. “I’ve got a gun, sir” he tells the father, and he’s taking Holly with
him. When the father continues down the steps to call the authorities,
Kit commands him to stop. “Suppose I shot you? How’d that be?”
In a film where language is so sparse, such unique expressions stand
out, just as those tall structures we see repeatedly silhouetted against the
flat landscape. Kit has a tendency to say “How’d that be” in circumstances
where the recipient of the question actually has little choice; it’s a system
of inquiry where the answer is already foreordained. Holly’s father stub-
bornly refuses to imagine how it would “be” to get shot by Kit—unable to
fathom a youngster actually challenging authority in such a violent way
(the Starkweather killing spree is often cited as a certain loss of inno-
cence for a nation that would never look at its disturbed youth in the
same naïve way).
Those who do not understand that it takes “all kinds” will likely have
some trouble adapting to how it will “be” to live in the shadow of the
looming counterculture. Ignoring the threats, the father soon discovers
the reality of Kit’s existential question; shot twice in the chest, he crum-
bles to the floor with no words, just a look of astonishment on his face as
he continues to stare at his young killer. This contrasts sharply with the
later confrontation of another respected male authority figure, the
wealthy homeowner, who—perhaps having heard the widespread news
of these young killers—has less trouble imagining how it would “be” if he
didn’t allow the young man to take his car. “We’re gonna take the
Cadillac,” Kit informs him. “How’d that be?” “Just fine,” he says, offering
no resistance to Kit, losing only his hat in the process.
Because Kit speaks so infrequently, viewers are asked to pay attention
to what he says. When Kit first introduces himself to Holly at the begin-
ning of the film, he asks if she would like to go for a walk, and she naively
asks “what for?” His response is “Oh—I got some stuff to say.” The ques-
tion of voice, of identity, and the need to define oneself through speech
and action are central in much of the fiction of Wright Morris as well (his
characters’ dialogue is similarly rare and often confounding). The idea
that Kit has something to say, and the citizens of Fort Dupree, such as
Holly’s father, are not willing to listen, reiterates the linguistic trap that
the young lovers find themselves in.12 Film scholar Adrian Danks has
explored this idea in Malick’s films, especially Badlands, whose unusual
tone, he argues, while “always distanced and never quite immediate” is
supported, in part, by the two young lovers and their “incisive but
impenetrable characterizations.” Kit, in particular, is driven by his need

to “say something”; to stand out and make a “mark” on society:
Unknown and lost in a small backwater town at the start of the film, Kit
consistently attempts to record or mark their murderous adventure:
on a recorded 45; on a Dictaphone; by a monument of rocks at his
roadside capture; in a book belonging to Holly; in a time capsule bur-
ied roadside or floated high in to the air by a balloon; in a suicide note;
by leaving his body to science; and by his unemployment registration
and his criminal record.13
We could add to this collection of “markings” his suggestion that he

and Holly smash their hands with a rock to commemorate their first
sexual encounter by the river (instead, he picks up a small rock to mark
the occasion) or by tossing his cigarette lighter and his pen and comb to
the mob of authorities who surround him in the hangar after his cap-
ture. As Danks puts it, the characters in Badlands are “given no sense of
distance, nor placed in a position that can possibly transcend their lim-
ited understanding of the world.” The film, he argues, is “a paean to
identity, lost motivations, of what it means to be in the world and the dif-
ficulty of making a mark.” Of course, Morris’s Charlie Munger shares
this same desire to “be somebody,” and make people take notice of his
impact on their surroundings.
If Kit first introduced himself to Holly by convincing her he had “things
to say,” their final separation after his capture also pivots on speech and
making a mark. Leaning on a squad car next to Holly, both in shackles,
once again “captured” by the forces of authority, he says “Boy we rang
the bell, didn’t we?” Marveling at the way their adventures captured such
nationwide attention, he then pauses, as if recognizing the cost of their
actions, and connects the two main characters who had confronted how
their futures might “be” given the choices Kit gave them. “I’ll say this,
though, that guy with the deaf maid, he’s just lucky he’s not dead too.”
He says this in wonderment, as if it had nothing to do with his own
actions. “Course, uh, too bad about your dad.” In a film where speaking
and being heard are so pivotal, his final words to Holly resonate with a
chill: “We’re gonna have to sit down and talk about that some time.”
Holly gives no response, Kit looks off into the distance, and we cut to an
image of the plane landing that is about to take them both away to face
their respective punishments.
110 Terrence Malick
What might Kit want to talk to Holly about in this regard? Fate? Chance?
How the father’s “being” came to expire at his hands, and not the wealthy
homeowner? How would that be? Who is in control? Of course critics
have long trolled this film and others for Malick’s philosophical lean-
ings, pointing, especially, to Heidegger’s theories on “being” and “time.”
Such a theoretical exploration is beyond the scope of this study—and
the specific elements of Heidegger that Malick seems to employ are bet-
ter left to those experts—but such analysis confirms to me that Malick’s
films play with landscape as a means of exposing characters (and there-
fore the viewer) to moments of such ontological contemplation.14 As the
epigraph at the beginning of this study suggest, Wright Morris had the
same notion in mind—that the horizontal plains offer a vital space for
exploring this “problem of being,” and, more simplistically (visually and
symbolically), that characters will find little terrain from which to escape
the elements of their own existential dread. The narrator in The Home
Place (1948), Clyde Muncy—a marginally successful novelist who can no
longer afford to live in New York City with his wife and two children—has
returned to his boyhood home in Lone Tree, Nebraska, seeking shelter
and a less frenzied environment for his family. As he tells his elderly
Uncle Harry, who still lives and works on the Home Place, “There is no
grass in New York, no yards, no trees, no lawn swings—and for thousands
of kids not very much sky. They live in cages.”15
Despite his attempt convince himself that rural Nebraska might offer
new opportunities and freedom, Clyde’s own “writer’s eye,” having been
away from the plains for sometime, consistently dwells upon the bleak-
ness of the landscape, while the “camera eye” depicts actual images of
old buildings, trees, and other features of the region that Morris himself
had shot; they add a haunting sense of decay and hard use on the open
prairie, artifacts of the streams of people who have come to settle, then
moved on. The name “Lone Tree” itself testifies to this idea of both isola-
tion and defiance in the open landscape. Riding into town with his aged
uncle, Clyde muses “there was a rolling sea of grass, and a lone tree, so
the story goes, where they settled the town. They put up a few stores, fac-
ing the West and the setting sun like so many tombstones, which is quite
a bit what a country store has in mind.” These “high false fronts” are like
graves inscribed with “a few lines of fading inscription” that testify to
their many purposes over the intervening years. Like the water tank near
the railroad, or those tall elevators—or a single tree standing tall in the
grass—each addresses this “problem of being,” as Clyde puts it. “Of
knowing you are there. On a good day, with a slanting sun, a man can
walk the edge of his town and see the light of the next town, ten miles
away. In the sea of corn, that flash of light is like a sail. It reminds a man
the place is still inhabited.”16 Holly’s envisioning the “lights of Cheyenne”
in Badlands seems to cover similar territory in this regard.
If Malick’s background as a philosophy major can help us to better
“read” some elements of his films, Morris’s own theoretical writings may
also inform his fictional treatment of these issues. Feeling that obsession
with the past and a crippling devotion to nostalgia has harmed his own
writing and that of other Americans, in 1958 Morris published a critical
exploration of American literature, The Territory Ahead, trying to assert
what contemporary writers (Hemingway, Wolfe, Fitzgerald, Faulkner)
have been able to successfully glean, and what they also need to break
away from, in responding to the American literary tradition (Thoreau,
Whitman, Melville, Twain, and Henry James). “For more than a century
the territory ahead has been the world that lies somewhere behind us, a
world that has become, in the last few decades, a nostalgic myth,” he
argues in the foreword.17 By the end of the book he draws the conclusion
that for modern writing to truly matter, it must transcend nostalgia and
find innovative ways to use the past in refiguring the present, rather than
inexorably dwelling in a naïve sense of former times and former peoples.
This emphasis on “time” and “being,” though not explicitly beholden to
the continental philosophy that clearly influences Malick, nonetheless
echoes the “Heideggerian” interests we see expressed in Badlands and
Days of Heaven. “The man who lives in the present—in his own present—
lives to that extent in both the past and the future,” writes Morris at the
conclusion of his study. “The man who seeks to live elsewhere, both as an
artist and as a man, has deceived himself. This is an old deception. It is
one of the crowded provinces of art.”18
Morris explored this idea of landscape, time, and nostalgia more fully
in The Field of Vision (1956), and then returned to these themes and char-
acters four years later in Ceremony in Lone Tree. The very title of the first
novel reveals its interest in how we view not only the present landscape,
but our past decisions and accomplishments, selectively narrowed
through our “Field of Vision.” Here Morris gathers a small cast of char-
acters drawn together to witness a bullfight in Mexico: the comfortably
consumerist, middle-class couple from Nebraska (Lois and Walter
McKee), her father, Tom Scanlon, a famous founder of the tiny Nebraska
backwater called “Lone Tree,” and Gordon Boyd, Walter’s childhood
friend whom he has always admired, and who once vied for the affection
of Lois. Walter’s obsession with Gordon (who escaped rural Nebraska,
112 Terrence Malick
but who has hardly found success or happiness in his life) is illustrated in
the fact that he named his own son Gordon, and his grandson, with them
at the bullfight, is also named Gordon (Jr.). As Joseph J. Wydeven puts it,
this book is primarily focused on “Boyd’s struggle for the mind of young
Gordon McKee, who has been captivated by Scanlon’s stories of the
mythic West. Boyd, believing that the past is a trap, wants to free Gordon
from the deadening effects of nostalgia and the resulting bland, middle-
class life of his grandparents.”19
The parts of The Field of Vision and Ceremony in Lone Tree that relate most
clearly to our study of the cinema of Malick are those scenes focused on
the settlement of the West, on the establishment of communities such as
Lone Tree set against the otherwise inhospitable plains, and the relation-
ship between present inhabitants and this landscape, as well as the “terri-
tory,” as Morris would put it, both behind (in the past) and ahead (the
future, if there is the promise of one). The chapters devoted to Scanlon’s
perspective throughout The Field of Vision focus upon a series of harrow-
ing, apocalyptic memories that the old man recounts of trying to guide a
wagon train of settlers across a startlingly inhospitable landscape. “From
the butte tops he could see almost forever, but that was all he saw. It
looked just about as empty, every-where, except that to the west it looked
even worse. He could see the slopes and hollows where even greasewood
didn’t grow.”20 Impressionistic and cloudy through his nearly 90-year-old
eyes, what we can piece together includes a series of mishaps where the
settlers find themselves completely exposed in a rocky region of desert
buttes with few supplies and no water, desperately baring their fingers to
the bone digging in the dry earth of an arroyo—there are deaths,
buzzards, and hints of cannibalism. Scanlon’s language imparts the same
biblical cast we find in Days of Heaven, only in this case the landscape is
demonized: “They went off toward Hell, but seeing how it looked from
the bottom of the canyon, they skirted around it, since the Devil didn’t
want them any more than the Lord. And the thing about Hell was that
you had to go in, if what you wanted was out.”21
Somehow Scanlon made it out of “hell,” returned to Lone Tree, and
never felt compelled to leave again; both books suggest that he has spent
the bulk of his days contemplating the empty flatlands from the pro-
tected perspective of the Lone Tree hotel. His father, Timothy Scanlon,
had helped to found Lone Tree, and established the only hotel there, a
three-story structure that, like the single cottonwood that the town was
named after, served as a defiant mark of upright existence against the
otherwise flat landscape (and, like the tree, which had long since died,
would remain standing long past its actual use, petrified in time, a
reminder of when its interior passageways pulsed with life). Timothy
Scanlon’s wife had named the town. “In her opinion, it was how it looked.
A lonely tree in the midst of a lonely plain.”22 Her son, Tom Scanlon, is
the last remaining resident. “His father had opened the West, his brothers
had closed it, and his children had gone East.”23
Where the old man found a kind of comfort in the preserved isolation
of the past on the plains, his daughter, Lois, found the isolation unbear-
able. In a chapter devoted to her perspective in Ceremony in Lone Tree, she
confesses that as a child “she couldn’t bear to look out in any direction
and see nothing but the empty plain, or after it has snowed or rained a
little, the tangle of buggy tracks in the road. [ . . . ] When she read about
the Pole and people locked in the ice and Commander Byrd at Little
America, she knew just as well as the explorers what is was like.”24 Eventu-
ally Lois would follow those tracks out of town, moving “East,” if only to
the suburbs of the state capitol in Lincoln. Her husband, Walter, suf-
fered a similar sense of incompatibility with the flat landscape as a child.
At one point in The Field of Vision, he bitterly imagines the “origin of spe-
cies” needed to survive on the treeless plains, where the reality of day-to-
day life hardly squared with the “log cabin” mythology of western
settlement: “ . . . that took trees, and there were no trees on the plains.
Only heroes, sheroes, villains, and lumberyards.” Instead, settlers had to
import the raw materials of survival, eventually constructing “clapboard”
houses “on the ground, but not in it, with an air of having been brought
out on a freight car, from somewhere better, in order to prove that life
could be worse.” The houses stand defiant on the plains, “the ornamen-
tal ball on the lightning rod an act of protest, a finger shaken at the way
the heavens were run,” but, nonetheless, impermanent: “Temporary. A
nomad’s refuge where nothing like a tent would anchor, the permanent
shelter being the storm cave out in back. A hole in which to hide, like a
ground hog, from the elements.”25
One did not choose to live in such places “in spite” of this exposure,
McKee speculates, but “because of it,” and he could never seem to evolve
the necessary defiance to try and adapt to the terrain. Later in the novel
McKee recounts his experience of traveling down to the panhandle of
Texas to do some work with family there. His dust bowl vision is quite in
contrast to The Farmer’s Eden in Days of Heaven (the mechanized pro-
duction methods outlined in the film, including the wholesale planting
of entire sections for harvest, rather than letting some lay fallow, would
eventually lead to the erosion problems Walter encounters in that very
114 Terrence Malick
region a decade or so later). McKee’s memories of the trip are filled with
references to tall objects contesting the clouds on the empty landscape:
“He’d waked up in Amarillo where the sky was supported on these giant
posts. Oil derricks. Highest things he’d ever seen.”26 Or the homestead
with a single house lit up against the otherwise featureless landscape, the
view out of his window of endless strips of plowed fields. Echoing Holly’s
sense of seeing the refinery lights in Cheyenne hundreds of miles away,
Walter recalls that “on the tractor at night he could see the lights, thirty
miles away, where oil had been found, and in the dawn light the rabbits,
as if blinded by it, would get caught in the discs.” This last image recalls
the prairie critters fleeing from the intrusive harvest equipment in Days
of Heaven.
Exposed on the plains, Walter finds the place disorienting. “What was
wrong? Space. He had no way of measuring it.”27 He describes huge
clouds of dust, drifting like smoke, which would slowly make their way
north over his boyhood home in Nebraska—and eventually all the way to
New York. In trying to defy nature on the plains, humans tend to defile
or destroy it, Walter suggests. Then he describes taking a trip to a neigh-
boring farm, the Gudger’s place, to help butcher a hog. “They saw the
Gudger tree, sticking up like a sail, long before they got to it. The bleak
gabled house, with the boarded windows, was like a caboose left some-
where on a siding, and behind this house the sky went up like a wall. The
world seemed to end.”28 Recalling his role in killing the hog, McKee, all
these years later, witnessing the matador’s work in the bull ring, associ-
ates such destructive violence as part of the “field of vision” he has been
forced to confront across the flatlands of his youth—for him, the solu-
tion was to marry Lois, move to the suburbs and try to hide in the terrain
of a conventional life.
What made old man Scanlon stay in Lone Tree, then, well after the
town had failed to live up to its three-story aspirations, and had been
abandoned as anything more than a railroad checkpoint? As others
recoil from the vulnerable isolation and exposure on the open land-
scape—such as Holly, late in Badlands—others thrive, such as Kit, who
seems to be having more and more “fun” the further they press into the
desolate landscape. Nearing his ninetieth birthday, Tom Scanlon seems
quite at home isolated on the plains, preserved like a specimen in the
crumbling Lone Tree Hotel, still the tallest structure in town, where he
lives all alone. In the incredibly evocative opening of Ceremony in Lone
Tree, Morris vividly captures a sense of one man’s “being” in the face of
the otherwise barren landscape by describing his absence, tracing his daily
life worn into the very fabric of hotel. “Come to the window,” the open-
ing passage commands. “The one at the rear of the Lone Tree Hotel.
The view is to the west. There is no obstruction but the sky. Although
there is no one outside to look in, the yellow blind is drawn low at the
window.” The narrator then describes a fly trapped in the blind, the way
the loose pane rattles when the train passes by, and the blind sucks
inward. Clearly Morris wants us to think, once again, of the “field of
vision” offered to us through the narrowed perspectives of our lives:
At a child’s level in the pane there is a flaw that is round, like an eye in
the glass. An eye to that eye, a scud seems to blow on a sea of grass.
Waves of plain seem to roll up, then break like a surf. Is it a flaw in the
eye, or in the window, that transforms a dry place into a wet one? Above
it towers a sky, like the sky at sea, a wind blows like the wind at sea and
like the sea it has no shade: there is no place to hide.29
The narrator then describes an old horsehair sofa drawn up near the
window—a worn quilt used when the couch is occupied, and an ashtray
filled with cigar butts “around it, scattered like seed, are the stubs of half-
burned kitchen matches.” We follow a trail of ashes down the hall. We
see a coat hanging in the lobby, shoes under the stove. Everywhere are
clues to the man’s presence, though “he is not there now, but the sagging
springs hold his shape. He has passed his life, if can be said he has lived
one, in the rooms of the Lone Tree Hotel.” At various places you will find
signs of the man: his chair, or a bed, “drawn to the window facing west.
There is little to see, but plenty of room to look.”30 What Scanlon views
through the window is similar to what Malick presents us within his
frame: an open space to contemplate our place in the universe, in the
continuum of time, and in the moment of being, but confined within the
edges of what we can view in that instant:
In the blowouts on the rise are flint arrowheads, and pieces of farm
machinery, half buried in sand, resemble nothing so much as artillery
equipment, abandoned when the dust began to blow. The tidal shift of
sand reveals one ruin in order to conceal another. [ . . . ] The empti-
ness of the plain generates illusions that require little moisture, and
grow better, like tall stories, where the mind is dry. The tall corn may
116 Terrence Malick
flower or burn in the wind, but the plain is a metaphysical landscape

and the bumper crop is the one Scanlon sees through the flaw in the
glass.31
Such framing of the landscape occurs repeatedly in Badlands as well.

When Kit and Holly are forced to flee their Edenlike refuge in the woods,
they similarly find themselves exposed repeatedly to open skies and end-
less prairie—and their relationship soon begins to wilt unsheltered in
the elements. Objects standing proud of the flat landscape will take on
added significance throughout the rest of the film, such as the ramshackle
house that Kit’s friend Cato lives in, completely isolated and surrounded
by fields, an exposure that proves fatal to Cato. When the young couple
arrives later, Kit marches them out into the broad field, then down into
a storm cellar. As they descend beneath the earth, a tall, ramshackle
wooden windmill crowds the corner of the frame. Kit shoots at them
through the cellar door then turns to run with Holly, both figures and
the windmill standing out distinct against the darkening blue sky. Kit
reaches out for Holly’s hand at one point, but she does not take it.32
Headed into the badlands, Kit increasingly finds himself isolated.
The final act of the film, with the authorities closing in, plays out
completely across an open landscape with the big sky bearing witness,
stressing repeatedly a sense of vastness to which the actions of the fugi-
tives appear so insignificant. In a typical scene we find Kit cooking over a
campfire at sunset while Holly studies a map. “That’s Montana over
there.” This is followed by perhaps the most iconic image in the film, a
long panning shot of the horizon (ostensibly looking toward Montana)
until we come upon Kit, staring off into the sunset, his back to us, his
rifle slung across his shoulders and his arms outstretched like a scare-
crow (or someone being crucified), contemplating the vast expanse in
front of him (not unlike Tom Scanlon’s obsession with gazing out his
westward window). We cut to a close-up of his face, and then to the high
clouds along the horizon, a sharp mountain in the purple distance, of
animals foraging in the grass—wild turkey, a lizard, a hawk—then, appro-
priately enough, storm clouds. “We lived in utter loneliness. Neither
here nor there,” Holly laments. “Kit said that ‘solitude’ was a better word
cause it meant more exactly what I wanted to say. Whatever the expres-
sion, I told him we couldn’t go on living this way.”
Days of Heaven, like Badlands and much of the writing of Morris, also
places great emphasis on this notion of vulnerability, and of verticality set
against the broad horizon, exposing the inhabitants in various moments
of “being.” Upon fleeing the city, Bill (Richard Gere) and Abby (Brooke
Adams) and Linda (Linda Manz) are shown hopping a freight, and then
we are treated to a magnificent long shot of the steam train crossing a
fragile looking trestle, the locomotive and the cars in beautiful silhouette
against a high sky, seeming to escape the very top of the frame. The next
shots are of the train zipping through the plains, eventually stopping at
a depot in Texas with several of those tall grain elevators (in this case
painted bright red) that Morris is so fond of referencing. We soon see
the trio joined with dozens of other workers making their way by both
truck and horse-drawn wagon toward the Farmer’s large spread. In order
to mark their passage, Malick presents a breathtaking panning shot of
the caravan tracking through a flat landscape with only clouds overhead
and grass and wheat beneath. As they slowly approach the right edge of
the frame, the camera pans with them as they cross under a tall wooden
arch suspended between two upright timbers, carved at the tops like
wheat stalks: this is heaven’s gate.33 The image is startlingly incongruous
due to the expansive, unfenced landscape—there is really no reason for
the arch, or for passing beneath it, other than its function as a marker, a
claim; we are now entering the Farmer’s dominion. As if to punctuate
the concept fully, the caravan continues and the shot slowly pans to
reveal the Farmer’s house in the distance—a tall, castlelike structure with
a long flagpole out front, and whipping flags on the turrets, and a whirl-
ing windmill to top it all off. Whether a question of “vanity” or “being,”
as Morris might put it, these images compel the viewer to take notice.34
Indeed, throughout the rest of the film the drama that unfolds among
the protagonists is staged in relation to varying degrees of elevation.
When the Farmer (Sam Shepard), signals that it is time to begin harvest,
the camera is at his feet looking up. Bill and Abby and Linda and her
newfound friend spend some of their happiest hours walking through
the wheat—here the camera is up above, or at shoulder height, so that
the actors nearly swallowed up in the growth. Chasing a peacock one day,
Abby skitters up hill toward the Farmer’s house—prominent in the upper
left area of the frame. Suddenly the Farmer, who has been lying unseen
in the grass, sits up. “Excuse me,” says a startled Abby. “I forgot where I
was.” The Farmer entreats her, “No worry. Where you from?” Those in
power stand proud of the landscape, hold the high ground, know their
place and make their presence known to others—and once the scheme
of wining the Farmer’s heart is underway, several shots will focus on the
lighted window of his upper-floor bedroom, standing out like a beacon
in the night—often with Bill looking longingly from below. Similar
118 Terrence Malick
moments occur throughout the film: the Farmer and his accountant fig-
uring up their yield while sitting at a fancy table, couch and umbrella set
in stark contrast to the surrounding plains; shots of a scarecrow standing
tall on the isolated landscape, silhouetted in the sun; images of a white-
curtained gazebo residing all by itself in the middle of nowhere (deco-
rated in the same elaborate scrollwork as the house); an image of Linda
flying a kite high above the endless plains; a scene of prairie golf with a
flag fluttering prominently in the foreground as the target; a time-lapse
sequence of a sheaf of wheat germinating then forcing its way up through
the flat soil, followed by lovely shots of rippling, ripening wheat; and a
lone tree standing prominent amidst the waves of grain. The one excep-
tion to this urge to rise above the landscape comes from the perspective
of the child. In a shot of Linda lying in a field, with her face to the earth,
we hear her voice-over. “I’ve been thinking what to do with my future. I
could be a mud doctor. Checking out the earth, underneath.” Perhaps
this signals an innocent desire not to dominate the landscape, but to live,
instead, in harmony within it.
The Farmer’s house itself represents the most important vertical cue,
however. Following a scene where Bill contemplates “accidentally”
shooting the Farmer as they are out on a hunt, we cut to a scene of them
plucking pheasants with the house looming tall behind them. “You seem
jumpy today,” the Farmer says. Before Bill can answer, two planes from a
flying circus suddenly tear through the blue sky directly over the house
toward the viewer. The relationship between the inhabitants of this flat
landscape and the upper reaches of their lives are ever present and inte-
gral to the drama that unfolds. Just after Abby agrees to stay on at the
farm, we cut to a scene of the Farmer up on his parapet, his wind-driven
dynamo whipping with frenzy behind him, as he stares down longingly
at Abby crossing the farmyard to the bunkhouse. Of course, it is from
this same platform that the Farmer spies Abby and Bill as they embrace
each other tenderly near the end of the film, just as Bill has come to
realize that she no longer loves him, and he must depart.35 The furious
propeller of the dynamo accentuates the Farmer’s wrath, and the next
shot is from below, looking up to the Farmer in the turret, as he stares
directly at the camera in unbridled rage. Before he can act, a swarm of
locusts is shown rising up in front of the house, obscuring it in the thick
cloud of insects. In his final act of tragic passion, the Farmer runs
upstairs to the bedroom and grabs Abby, then ties her to a pillar at the
bottom of the house, signifying that her position has fallen inexorably
back to earth.
Once the Farmer decides to let the crops burn, the lush and welcom-
ing plains that had seemed so much like heaven at the start now repre-
sent a hellish wasteland upon which the inhabitants all feel supremely
exposed. Unable to start his motorcycle in an attempt to flee, Bill is easily
tracked by the Farmer who comes after him with a gun. Their final strug-
gle plays out like all of the scenes in the film, standing vulnerable above
the relentless landscape. The departing shot of the farm is of Bill and
Abby and Linda packing up the Farmer’s car and leaving the house,
standing prominent and untouched on the blackened landscape—now
just a shell, like those empty structures in Morris’s novels, leaving only
remnants of the former lives, since departed. They exit through the
smoldering arches—the gates of heaven have fallen and the high plains
have reclaimed their territory. In an ironic reversal of Kit and Holly—
who were forced out of the river and woods to their exposure and even-
tual capture in the badlands of Montana—Bill, Abby, and Linda flee the
flatlands and attempt to escape down the river itself. In the tangled brush
along the banks Bill takes his final flight into the water, unable to dodge
the bullet that sends him face down into the river, a final gesture of the
futility of trying to rise above the earth where, ultimately, all eventually
descend.
As we approach the moment of Kit and Holly’s capture in Badlands, we
find a similar emphasis on this sense of exposure and isolation. Driving
at night the expanse of the plains is even more pressing, as they make
their way, their headlights marking just a little patch of existence in the
vast darkness, heightening her sense of doom. “The dream has ended,”
sings Nat King Cole on the radio as the camera slowly pulls away reveal-
ing the movements of the two lost lovers dancing in their headlights,
then being swallowed up by the black prairie night, one of the most
touching depictions of vulnerability in all of cinema. With the sunrise,
Holly tells us that “Kit knew the end was coming.” The final shots that
initiate Kit’s chase and then capture stress repeatedly this notion of his
defiant “standing proud” of the flat terrain. A panning shot of the car
crossing the featureless plains settles in on a tall oil derrick out in the
middle of nowhere, a sure sign of modern civilization thrusting itself up
from the flatlands (and tapping into the terrestrial layers of time
below.)
The natural landscape of short grasses, foraging animals, and tall
mountains in the distance has now become the stage upon which Kit’s
final act is to be written, and the imagery throughout the resultant chase
reminds over and over again the intrusion of this young rebel upon a
120 Terrence Malick
revealing landscape: he swerves around cows at high speed, he twangs

through barbed wire fences with a patrol car fast on his heels. Utterly
exposed on the badlands, he has no way to escape, and his final shot of
freedom brilliantly asserts this fact. He stops his car along the road, then
stands up on the hood, marking him the tallest thing on the horizon, the
fierce white clouds once again brilliantly set against the vast blue sky.
Completely exposed, he fixes his hair. Puts on this hat. Checks his pulse.
He gathers up some rocks to mark the spot on this otherwise featureless
terrain of his capture. We wait with Kit staring down the long dirt road,
the mountain way in the distance, until finally the authorities crest the
hill and bear down on the fugitive, a final moment of being.
At this point it is worth exploring what this specific landscape actually
means in relation to the larger vision of the film itself, especially as it
marks the scene of Kit’s capture. Anyone who has visited one of the many
areas of the West or Midwest defined geologically as “badlands” will find
little of that actual landscape in this film. Such areas generally have steep,
craggy, and forbidding slopes, and rock formations that make them dif-
ficult to cross on foot, let alone in a Cadillac. The soil is often loose, dry,
sandy, or slippery with scree—or it is impassibly sticky with clay or gumbo
soil, sometimes with geothermic features that make the landscape bub-
ble and ooze and stink. Such regions are inevitably arid, sparse of vegeta-
tion, and pock-marked with extensive erosion by wind and flash floods.
There are formations like these in southern South Dakota (Badlands
National Park) as well as in Montana (Makoshika State Park), but nei-
ther of these badlands are close to the geographical locations Holly and
Kit supposedly cross. Indeed, the actual area where Starkweather was
captured outside of Douglas, Wyoming, is not really a noted “badlands”
region either (and he was captured on a paved highway). The chief char-
acteristic of all these terrains—both in the film and in the real-life events
upon which it was loosely based—is that of flatlands: arid short-grass
prairie and plains.
The reason for this discrepancy is clear. Badlands was shot primarily in
Otero county in southern Colorado, nearer to New Mexico than any part
of South Dakota, Wyoming or Montana, a lack of “geographic realism”
that might otherwise distract viewers were it not for the fact that Malick’s
“badlands” serves as primarily a metaphor rather than a mise-en-scène.36
Similarly, we must allow for a suspension of disbelief when we view Bill
and Abby snuggling in a snow-dusted Texas Panhandle in the middle of
harvest season (usually in June); Days of Heaven was filmed in Alberta,
closer to the territory and terrain that Kit was pressing to reach in
Badlands. Again, the actual location is not important; the landscape pro-
vides the opportunity to express the conflicts between the characters, or
to heighten the sense of the relationship those characters share with
their surroundings. In this sense, Malick is interested in the “badlands”
as an element of human, rather than physical geography. Nature, after
all, is neither good nor bad, but simply indifferent. In this case Holly and
Kit’s relationship with the world around them renders their environ-
ments throughout the film as “badlands,” except for their short and idyl-
lic time spent near the river. Actual geographic badlands would at least
offer some places to hide or escape from the pursuit of others; the lands
that finally expose Holly and Kit are “bad” precisely because they offer
no such respite—instead, travelers across such flat landscapes will easily
attract attention to their vulnerable plight, symbolic of the exposed ter-
rains we all must cross at certain points in our lifetimes.
The early films of Terrence Malick, and much of the fiction of Wright
Morris, brilliantly combine this exploration of both the interior and
exterior “badlands” that none, ultimately, can escape. They focus atten-
tion on that rupture of time, place, and being in which we stand exposed
to the world that surrounds us. Such works compellingly capture the ten-
sion of humans—with their limited “field of vision,” framed across the
vastness of their unmarked landscape—and their desire to make an
impact and leave traces of their tenuous existence upon the territory
they temporarily inhabit.
Notes
1
See David Sterritt, “Film, Philosophy, and Terrence Malick’s The New World,”
Chronicle of Higher Education, January 6, 2006, B12–13, http://web.ebscohost.
com. Sterritt offers this appraisal of Malick’s career upon the highly antici-
pated release of The New World: “He’s fascinated with the world of nature, and
he sees the personalities and behaviors of his characters as phenomena no less
‘natural’ than the environments surrounding them. The New World affords
him a perfect opportunity to examine contrasts between the notion of a time-
less harmony with nature, represented by American Indian society, and the
post-Enlightenment idea of taming and harnessing nature to accomplish
humanly determined goals, as the English Colonists do.”
2
Willa Cather, My Ántonia (The Willa Cather Scholarly Edition) (Lincoln: Univer-
sity of Nebraska Press, 1994), 8.
3
See Helen Thorpe, “The Man Who wasn’t There,” Texas Monthly, December
1998, http://web.ebscohost.com. Writing about the mixed and sometimes
perplexed reception of Days of Heaven, Thorpe argues that “people who knew
the movie history felt it was patched together, but others saw an epic told in a
122 Terrence Malick
fantastically sparse style, as if some offbeat poet had brought to life a Willa
Cather novel.”
4
Photo-texts include The Inhabitants (1946), God’s Country and My People (1968),
Love Affair—A Venetian Journal (1972), and Wright Morris: Photographs and Words
(1982). Photo collections include Wright Morris: Structures and Artifacts, Photo-
graphs, 1933–54 (from the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery show at the University
of Nebraska, 1975), The Wright Morris Portfolio (1981), Time Pieces: The Photo-
graphs and Words of Wright Morris, March 16–May 15, 1983 (from an exhibition
at The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1983). Aperture Press pub-
lished Time Pieces: Photographs, Writing and Memory in 1989. Morris’s most
recognized combination of photography and fiction is The Home Place (1948).
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art regularly exhibits Morris’s work,
noting that he “made his mark on the fields of both writing and photogra-
phy—a multimedia man avant la lettre—and left a strong imprint in the Bay
Area through his teaching at San Francisco State University.” In September
2010 they held a retrospective “Where was the Home Place? Wright Morris at
100” (www.sfmoma.org/events/1712).
5
Two of his novels won the national book award (1957 for The Field of Vision and
1981 for Plains Song), and he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in pho-
tography in 1942 and 1946, as well as several awards and fellowships with the
National Endowment for the Humanities (1976) and The Arts (1986), includ-
ing a Life Achievement Award. See “Wright Morris” Contemporary Authors
Online, February 25, (2004), http://galenet.galegroup.com:
Wright Morris was often referred to as one of America’s finest and most
neglected living writers. Born near the geographical center of the nation,
Morris explored and defined what it means to be American in more than forty
works of fiction, photography, and criticism since 1942. Though these works
received “the general indifference of the reading public,” as Jonathan Yardley
noted in the Washington Post Book World, Morris garnered substantial critical
acclaim and a number of coveted awards, not only for individual novels . . . but
also for his life’s work.
6
Wright Morris, Ceremony in Lone Tree (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
2001), 48.
7
Ibid., 50.
8
Ibid., 48.
9
Ibid., 33.
10
See Barbara Jane Brickman, “Coming of Age in the 1970s: Revision, Fantasy,
and Rage in the Teen-Girl Badlands,” Camera Obscura 22, no. 3 (2007), 25–59.
Brickman offers a telling analysis of Holly’s reaction to Kit in these opening
montages, as the voice-over suggests a kind of James Dean rebel, while the
images themselves depict a young man trapped in the least romantic occupa-
tions imaginable, literally surrounded by garbage and then shit. Brickman
shows that the images—of Kit working cows, and of Holly’s fish “gasping for
life” mirror the entrapment they feel as young lovers in Fort Dupree, while
also foreshadowing their future as they try to break free, only to find themselves
pursued and unable to escape society, ending the film in chains, literal and
symbolic.
11
See Ron Mottram, “All Things Shining: The Struggle for Wholeness,
Redemption and Transcendence in the Films of Terrence Malick,” The Cinema
of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America (London: Wallflower Press, 2003),
13–23. In his retrospective essay on Malick, Mottram argues that “The real
issues raised by the war were submerged by the rapid growth of a consumer
economy, the American response to communism, and the alienation of young
people from mainstream American values and behavior. Kit and Holly are
signifiers of this alienation taken to the extreme” (23).
See also Helen Thorpe “The Man Who wasn’t There,” where she reinforces this
notion that Badlands is essentially viewed from the perspective of the struggling
and entrapped adolescents, revealed especially in Holly’s voice-over:
Narrated in a deliberately eccentric manner by Sissy Spacek . . . the movie

conflates violence with sexual awakening. “I wanted to do a film on what it
meant to be fourteen in the Midwest in 1958,” Malick told Women’s Wear
Daily in 1974 . . . “I think there are things you’re open to as an adolescent that
close up forever afterward. I wanted to show a kind of openness, a vulnerabil-
ity that disappears later, when you get a little savvier.”
12
See Hannah Patterson, “Two Characters in Search of a Direction: Motivation
and the Construction of Identity in Badlands,” The Cinema of Terrence Malick:
Poetic Visions of America (London: Wallflower Press, 2003), 24–36. Patterson
offers a lengthy analysis of the construction of Kit’s personality, and how what
he has to “say” bears upon his relationship with Holly and her own motivations
and identity. Despite his assertion that he has a lot on his mind to share with
Holly, Patterson argues that there is little evidence of such communication. “It
is in his attempts to speak then—his urgent need to display his words to
others—that he actually reveals his faltering sense of identity” (28).
13
Adrian Danks, “Death Comes as an End: Temporality, Domesticity, and Pho-
tography in Terrence Malick’s Badlands,” Senses of Cinema (2000), http://
archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/00/8/badlands.html
14
See John Rhym, “The Paradigmatic Shift in the Critical Reception of Terrence
Malick’s Badlands and the Emergence of a Heideggerian Cinema,” Quarterly
Review of Film and Video 27, no. 4 (2010), 255–66. In this recent review of the
philosophical underpinnings of Malick, Rhym points to a typical exegesis that
relates to this particular element of my study: “Kit’s imposition of himself on
the various everyday objects around him reflects his detachment from their
conventional contextualization as he attempts to recontextualize the world
around him in a fashion suitable to his own mediated fantasies” (257). Rhym’s
long exploration is a good review of much of the complex and extensive work
that has been done on Malick in this specific area of inquiry.
15
Wright Morris, The Home Place (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 6.
16
Ibid., 76.
17
Wright Morris, The Territory Ahead: Critical Interpretations in American Literature
(New York: Atheneum, 1963), Foreword, n.p.
124 Terrence Malick
18
Ibid., 230.
19
Joseph J. Wydeven, “Wright Morris,” Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 206:
Twentieth-Century American Western Writers, First Series, Gale Group (1999),
222–33, http://galenet.galegroup.com
20
Wright Morris, The Field of Vision (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1974), 144.
21
Ibid., 189.
22
Ibid., 47.
23
Ibid., 45.
24
Morris, Ceremony in Lone Tree, 238.
25
Morris, The Field of Vision, 103.
26
Ibid., 126.
27
Ibid., 129.
28
Ibid., 131.
29
Morris, Ceremony in Lone Tree, 3.
30
Ibid., 4.
31
Ibid., 4–5.
32
See Hannah Patterson, “Two Characters in Search of a Direction.” Patterson
explores this scene fully in her study, complete with stills to illustrate, and simi-
larly finds the landscape a key component to the dynamic of the characters
and their relationship to their surroundings. “As the two girls move away from
the camera across the field, we are struck again by the relatedness of the four
characters brought together amid this vast rural expanse, their diminutive
statures stressed by the size of the dwarfing wind machine” (34).
33
The religious themes that run throughout Days of Heaven, from its title to the
comparisons of Bill/Abby to the biblical faux siblings of Isaac/Rebekah and
or Abraham/Sarah, have received extensive treatment by film scholars. Per-
haps the most recent and most thorough exploration is offered by Hubert
Cohen in “The Genesis of Days of Heaven,” Cinema Journal 42, no. 4 (2003),
46–62.
Even so, few critics have addressed the actual words spoken by the Russian
Orthodox priest in his blessing of the crop just prior to its harvest. “For a
thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch
in the night” (Psalms 90.4). This selection of verse suggests, once again, that
Malick wants us to consider not only the impending destruction of this earthly
heaven, of which Psalm 90 is chiefly concerned, but also of issues of time and
temporality—touching upon the themes that this paper has explored earlier
in Badlands, as well as Malick’s well-known interest in the philosophies of
Heidegger. Like Morris, Malick chooses to emphasize man’s fleeting time on
earth, and his subsequent attempts to register something of permanence
within that narrow timeframe. The passage that the priest is about to intone,
therefore, takes on some significance as the film cuts away from his liturgy to
the scenes of actual harvest: “Thou carriest them away as with a flood; they are
as a sleep: in the morning they are like grass which groweth up. In the morn-
ing it flourisheth, and groweth up; in the evening it is cut down, and withereth”
(Psalms 90.5–6).
34
See Ben McCann, ““Enjoying the Scenery”: Landscape and the Fetishisation
of Nature in Badlands and Days of Heaven,” The Cinema of Terrence Malick:
Poetic Visions of America (London: Wallflower Press, 2003), 75–85. McCann’s
essay touches upon many of the issues raised in my study in regard to the
human interaction with landscape in both films here under consideration:
Placing the human protagonists within the widescreen frame, the subsequent
dwarfing of their proportions by the natural surroundings is symbolic of their
powerlessness against nature; the lack of human perspective and influence
within the greater scheme of things. It also demonstrates how the scenery con-
stantly changes for Holly and Kit during their journey, yet nature’s monumen-
tality remains unaltered. This is best exemplified by the Farmer’s home on the
prairie in Days of Heaven, which is positioned within the totality of the land-
scape, making explicit this isolation. Framing his landscape vistas more majes-
tically through the use of widescreen also makes important statements about
the futility of human intervention or impression upon the landscape. (79)
35
See Carole Zucker, “ ‘God Don’t Even Hear You,’ or Paradise Lost: Terrence
Malick’s Days of Heaven,” Literature/Film Quarterly 29, no. 1 (2001), 6. Zucker
explores this scopophilia throughout the film, arguing that Bill and the
Farmer are engaged in a power struggle of “possession” waged primarily
through what they “look” at. “Bill’s first point-of-view shot contains the Farm-
er’s land and animals. As the narrative progresses his looks incorporate
everything he covets, everything that belongs to the Farmer—his house, his
possessions, and finally, his wife. The Farmer’s possession of Abby begins when
he views her through his telescope.”
36
See Chris Lukinbeal, “Cinematic Landscapes,” Journal of Cultural Geography 23,
no. 1 (2005), 3–22. In this study, Lukinbeal explores film from the standpoint
of a professor of geography, focusing upon issues of “place, space, spectacle
and metaphor” as they are addressed in cinema. Filmmakers have to decide
what kind of role they want the landscape to play in their overall vision—
either as a realistic backdrop for the main action of the characters, which
takes precedence (and for which you do not want the scenery to be a distrac-
tion), or for the landscape to serve a larger visual and perhaps symbolic
purpose in the film’s overall presentation—to call attention to itself:
Cinematic realism seeks to strengthen this disregard by ontologically bridging

the divide between real and reel. As long as suspension of disbelief is main-
tained the viewer’s attention is on the narrative and not on the physical land-
scape. Suspension of disbelief is destroyed when geographic realism is not
maintained. In effect, the viewer figures out the narrative is lying, that the
landscape is not really the location being depicted. (17)
Chapter 7
The Belvedere and the Bunkhouse: Space

and Place in Days of Heaven1
Ian Rijsdijk
Making Sense of Days of Heaven
Reviews of Terrence Malick’s films are often characterized by two types of

comment: first, that the films are enigmatic and ambiguously symbolic,
and secondly, that they are poetic and aesthetically overwhelming. As
Gilberto Perez wrote at the time of its release, Days of Heaven (1978)
“drew mixed and largely uncomprehending reactions from the review-
ers. Some resorted to the old rule—if you don’t know what it means,
praise the photography—while others advanced glib and unwarranted
interpretations.”2 Pauline Kael, for one, was as unimpressed by Days of
Heaven as she had been by Badlands (1973): “The film is an empty Christ-
mas tree,” she wrote, “you can hang all your dumb metaphors on it,”3
while David Denby even declared it “one of the most . . . senseless movies
ever made.”4 Such responses troubled Martin Donougho in 1985 (when
it must have seemed as if Malick was gone for good) who was moved to
write: “the most puzzling thing is that there has been little attempt to
understand [Days of Heaven] at all, as if there were no problem in per-
ceiving what it means.”5 The complaints of pretension against Malick
and the defense of his films point toward one area of Malick scholarship
that has blossomed particularly vigorously since his “return” to filmmak-
ing with The Thin Red Line (1998): Malick as philosopher, and the philo-
sophical examination of those films he has directed (as writer/
director).6
Perhaps this is all Stanley Cavell’s fault. In his foreword to the enlarged
edition of The World Viewed (written in 1979)—and at the moment that
The Belvedere and the Bunkhouse: Days of Heaven 127
Malick quietly disappeared from the Hollywood scene—Cavell makes

this tantalizing digression into Days of Heaven:
Shall we try expressing the subject as one in which the works and the
emotions and the entanglements of human beings are at every moment
reduced to insignificance by the casual rounds of earth and sky? I think
the film does indeed contain a metaphysical vision of the world; but I
think one feels that one has never quite seen the scene of human exis-
tence—call it the arena between earth (or days) and heaven—quite
realized this way on film before.7
Cavell’s “fragmentary reading” is both powerful and poetic—later he

describes human beings in the film “reduced in significance . . . crushed
by the fact of beauty left vacant”—but also inconclusive.8 For those seek-
ing further illumination, Malick’s legendary reticence no doubt added
to the open-endedness of Cavell’s contemplation, but in hindsight (and
with two further Malick films to discuss) Cavell’s reading of Days of Heaven
is an early attempt by a philosopher (of the academic sort) to engage
with Malick’s films.
The departure point here—the leaping off, as it were—is my interest in
expanding on Cavell’s brief reading of the film through more concrete
analysis, to try to understand the film’s extraordinary singularity (sug-
gested by Cavell in largely impressionistic language). Several elements of
the film have aroused the interest of critics and theoreticians, but the two
most frequently discussed are the cinematography and Linda’s voice-over.
In this chapter, I want to examine the structuring of space in the film,
particularly the way in which space is related to place (e.g., the factory
and the Farmer’s house) and, in turn, to character. It is Malick’s framing
and reframing—through editing and camera mobility—that destabilizes
the film’s apparently serene surface of “golden hour” cinematography
and poetic realism, and helps develop the drama of looking and desiring
that eventually boils over into rage and murder at the film’s end.
I would also like to consider the idea of place beyond the confines of
aesthetics (“what a beautiful place,” usually framed as landscape in cin-
ematography) and perspective (as in “what takes place in the narrative”),
and accept a broader cultural sense of place. The Belvedere and its sur-
rounds—so territorialized by the narrative components of dialogue, cin-
ematography, set design, and editing—becomes a place, personalized by
the increasing intimacy of the characters, their glances and gazes across
128 Terrence Malick
the porous boundary between inside and outside. When Bill enters the
house while Abby and the Farmer are away on honeymoon, the tranquil-
ity of the scene seethes with anxiety and tension as Bill, stealthy as a
burglar, finally crosses the threshold into the hallway and moves around
inside. The fluid camera movement (loosely from Bill’s point of view) is
punctuated by stiff, formal compositions (like the decanter and glasses)
as our view of the space is overlayed with Bill’s perspective as Abby’s lover
(and coschemer) as well as articulating the deep class division on the
farm. Furthermore, the frequent cutaways to workers on the farm,
Linda’s meeting with the character Ding-Dong on the train, and the fan-
tastical intervention of the flying performers point to what anthropologist
Arturo Escobar proposes is “the emplacement of all cultural practices,
which stems from the fact that culture is carried into places by bodies.”9
This view of human bodies and human perceptions as “emplaced” can
be usefully applied to theories of the moving image by thinking carefully
about the meanings of “space” and “place” in contemporary usage. Edward
Casey argues that, “once it is assumed (after Newton and Kant) that space
is absolute and infinite as well as empty and a priori in status, places
become the mere apportionings of space, its compartmentalizations.”10 It
is this philosophical inheritance that leads to the binarism where the “uni-
versal” (space) occupies one end, and the “local” (place) holds the other.
Casey writes:
The idea of transformation from a “sheer physical terrain” and the

making of “existential space”—which is to say, place—out of a “blank
environment” entails that to begin with there is some empty and
innocent spatial spread, waiting, as it were, for cultural configurations
to render it placeful. But when does this “to begin with” exist? And
where is it located?11
Casey’s inquiry into the subordination of place by space echoes in cer-

tain respects inquiries into the position of the subject in cinema. In some
theories, and in most popular writing on cinema, the space of the image,
through its visual and aural verisimilitude, is assumed to be a priori, as
“being” before the viewer sees it. However, as the narrative progresses,
and the characters’ relation to their world develops, the viewer develops
a sense of place, of how characters relate to their environment, change
the places in which they find themselves and move between places.
Casey’s phenomenological thesis concludes in terms that offer an inter-
esting approach to “understanding” and not just “perceiving” Days of
Heaven: “as places gather bodies in their midst in deeply encultured ways,
so cultures conjoin bodies in concrete circumstances of emplacement.”12
With this in mind I want to examine a brief sequence from Days of Heaven
within in the context of certain theories of narrative space in cinema,
and for this I need to return (briefly) to Stanley Cavell.
(Mis)Reading the Movies
Writing of his observations of the films that contributed to The World

Viewed, Cavell explains:
I was always aware that my descriptions of passages were liable to con-

tain errors, of content and sequence. I have not attempted to correct
such errors in this reprinting, wanting neither to disguise the liabilities
of the spirit in which the work was composed nor to disguise the need
for a study of what may be remembered in any art and for a study of how
using an analyzing machine may modify one’s experience of a film.13
Moreover, in his preface of 1971, he notes that, “a few faulty memories

will not themselves shake my conviction in what I’ve said, since I am as
interested in how a memory went wrong as in why memories that are right
occur when they do.”14 In examining the following brief sequence from
Days of Heaven, I will invoke Cavell’s caveat before returning to the scene
of the crime with a fuller view via the aid of modern viewing technology
(widescreen television, DVD, and newly “restored” editions of films).15
What struck me immediately after watching the film for the first time
was that it appeared to be an epic, but was not epic at all. Gone with the
Wind, Ben Hur, Dr Zhivago, Giant—these were the epics of traumatic
affairs set against the sweep of history that I knew. Even the gloom of
Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon was (as Spartacus had been) set amidst massed
ranks of extras, marching, fighting, and dying to dramatic effect, while
the prolonged agony of the titular heroes was exhausting. Days of Heaven
promised a Giant—dramatic landscapes, secret love, betrayal, the slow
passage of time—and yet the narrative was breathless at times as scenes
were trimmed bare in an almost perfunctory fulfillment of narrative con-
tinuity (consider, for example, the economy of the scenes where the
Farmer proposes to Abby, followed by Bill and Abby discussing the pro-
posal). It featured four protagonists, but very few other characters who
said more than a few lines. Death was a rare occurrence, and banal when
130 Terrence Malick
it happened, and you weren’t quite sure whether you liked this character
Bill enough to care about him when he died.
The film’s Western visions—of wheatfields and the margins of the
prairie—were a far cry from Ford’s singular re-creation of Monument
Valley that supplied many of the conventional images of the Western
landscape.16 What animosity should have existed between the individual
hero and “the system” was constantly undermined by either the furtive,
sympathetic mumblings of Linda in voice-over, or else the fact that the
Farmer—even as he exploited the workers—didn’t seem like such a bad
guy. As Joan McGettigan has subsequently written: “In a series of rever-
sals, the film introduces and even elevates characteristics of the western,
and then reveals them as illusions.”17
The more I thought about it, the more I felt that Malick’s filming of
space was crucial to the film’s power. Watching the film a second time I
noticed what I thought at the time was a very interesting cut. (See
Appendix for a transcript of the scene.) I have not been fortunate
enough to see Days of Heaven at the cinema, and these early viewings of
the film were from a VHS copy played on a regular television in the early
1990s. In the times I viewed it subsequently I used that same VHS copy
on a variety of television monitors, none of which had a widescreen or
letterboxing facility. As a result, the flagpole in shot B of the transcript
(Figure 1) was not visible as the edges of the frame were missing in the
television format. My view of the sequence was, therefore, that (1) the
Figure 1 The Belvedere (Days of Heaven, 1978. The Criterion Collection,

2007)
Farmer walks out of his house toward the camera, and (2) the workers
walk out of their house toward the camera (Figure 2).
Therefore, because of the contiguity of the shots and, hence, the loose
matches on action, one could assume that the two structures faced one
another. The similar shot scale also suggested that they were relatively
close to one another, and so, when the traveling shot of the trucks in shot
C (Figure 3) revealed the Farmer’s house in extreme long shot, one was
Figure 2 The Bunkhouse (Days of Heaven, 1978. The Criterion Collection, 2007)
Figure 3 The Workers Arrive (Days of Heaven, 1978. The Criterion Collection,
2007)
132 Terrence Malick
suddenly aware (1) of the profound distance between the owner’s house
and the workers’ bunkhouse, and (2) that the worker’s bunkhouse did
not in fact face the owner’s but rather faced away, thereby masking the
lives of the workers from the owner (and vice versa). Rather than facing
the people who work for him, the Farmer looks out over them, surveying
them from a distance as he does the fields of wheat they will harvest for
him. When the foreman offers his terse response to the question, “Whose
place is that?” the strict separation of labor and capital reiterates in dia-
logue what is simultaneously suggested through the construction of
diegetic space. We might like the Farmer, but the organization of the
shots tells us we should never forget his status relative to the itinerant
workers he exploits in order to make him “the richest man in the
panhandle.”
When I got to watch a good DVD copy of the film on a television with
widescreen capability, I was annoyed to see that I had been wrong: the
flagpole is visible in shot B, and so there is no “trick” in the sudden
appearance of that expanse of ground and the bunkhouse facing the
“wrong” way. Part of my theory of the film lay in tatters, I thought.
However, the more I thought about the film and rewatched it (another
luxury not available to Cavell in 1971), the more I realized that my origi-
nal thoughts were not wholly invalidated by the revelation of a full-screen
view of the film. To begin with, other elements of the cinematic language
prompted me to consider more carefully the relationship between narra-
tive and the construction of diegetic space. In the extreme long shot (C)
the Farmer is a tiny speck in the distance but his white shirt radiates bril-
liantly, a vivid yet distant “eye-stop” in contrast to the cluttered but drab
foreground. And, in shot D, just how crunchy is that apple, given how far
away he stands from the camera? It was not just the organization of
diegetic space that was provocative, but shot composition and the use of
sound too suggested a deployment of film language more complex than
describing the simple action of workers arriving at the farm. What I
thought was a trick was really a more subtle but no less manipulative use
of camera mobility and the perceived spatial relations between contiguous
shots.
Extensive study has been devoted to the film’s sound design and
voice-over by, among others, Janet Wondra and Charlotte Crofts. How-
ever, I would like to outline some of the theories that have a bearing
on the understanding of spatiality in film (including the convention
of shot/reverse shot editing) with the following statement by Julian
Hochberg (as cited by Bordwell et al. in The Classical Hollywood Cinema)

in mind: “The task of the filmmaker . . . is to make the viewer pose a
visual question, and then answer it for him.”18 In this sequence from
Days of Heaven, one could argue that the editing gives the wrong answer
to the question, or at least forces the viewer to pose the question a
second time.
Suture, Cognitive Mapping, and Reframing
Hollywood narrative filmmaking depends largely on creating the illusion

of spatial unity and continuity of action in the diegesis through conven-
tions such as shot/reverse shot, eyeline matches, synchronized sound,
and sound fidelity; but Days of Heaven fractures these conventions in criti-
cal ways, creating apertures within the narrative that provoke the viewer
not only to “fill in the spaces,” but also to question the ways in which the
film structures meaning for the viewer.
In film textbooks, students are usually taught the two rules of angles
that govern field/reverse field setups (as opposed to shot/reverse shot as
I will explain). The 180-degree rule, structured around an imaginary axis
that connects two actors across which the camera may not move, pro-
duces structured diegetic space so that spectators can orientate them-
selves correctly in relation to the characters and the space. The
30-degree rule proposes that no shot takes place within that angle from
the point of view of the previous shot, preventing “jump cuts” which
would introduce a false point of view into the space.19 Two theories con-
cerning how we are able to understand the field/reverse field in film are
valuable in contextualizing this sequence from Days of Heaven: suture
and cognitive mapping.
In exploring these two ideas, I make no claims that a specific tech-
nique is pioneered by a filmmaker (in this case Malick) or that s/he
frames a particular theory better than another filmmaker, as is often the
case with film theorists and historians.20 Rather, I am interested in how
these theories can help one to understand the ways in which screen
space is constructed, not because one theory works better than the other,
but because with both one gains a greater understanding of films for
their duration (as opposed to just a scene or a shot) and film styles (as
opposed to just one film or mode of film production). In this instance,
an understanding of how the sequence of the workers’ arrival produces
meaning allows one to follow multiple interpretive strands through the
134 Terrence Malick
films without relying on hierarchy of character and dialogue (which Mal-

ick eschews through the relative paucity of dialogue and the frequent
dislocation of Linda’s voice-over from the coterminous action
on-screen).
Both theories seek to answer the same question, framed by Bordwell
thus: “1. A character looks offscreen. 2. A second character looks off-
screen in the opposite direction. From this pair of shots, the spectator
typically infers that the two areas are more or less contiguous and that
the characters are looking at each other. How are we to explain these
inferences?”21 Suture uses Lacanian psychoanalysis to describe realiza-
tion of offscreen space as absence, thereby producing a traumatic frac-
ture between presence and absence which requires the suturing of the
spectator back into the illusory unity of the image. Cognitive mapping,
based in cognitive psychology, holds that, through making and testing
hypotheses using patterns of knowledge, or schemata, the spectator con-
stantly constructs and reconstructs or discard his/her perceptions of the
world. In film terms, the spectator responds to contiguous images by
evaluating their relation according to a variety of possible patterns and
conventions: narrative context (what’s happening in the story), other
filmic cues (such as sound or dialogue), or continuity of action, for
example.
The theory of “suture” has experienced a rather bumpy ride in film
scholarship. After entering mainstream film scholarship through the
essay “La Suture” by Jean-Pierre Oudart in 1969, it was seized upon by
Daniel Dayan in Film Quarterly (1974), and elicited a forceful rebuttal by
William Rothman in the same journal a year later. Screen then published a
dossier of articles in 1977, including a translation of Oudart’s original
essay, “Cinema and Suture.” From here the theory has been applied and
critiqued in a variety of contexts, notably by Stephen Heath, Kaja
Silverman, David Bordwell, and Edward Branigan.22
Watching the shot from Buster Keaton’s 1926 film The General that
Oudart describes, one senses the delicious surprise of the Confederate
troops creeping up (or is it forward?) into the bottom of the frame, and
the viewer’s awareness of a second, ghostly, point of view at play.23 Oudart
articulates his surprise in this oft-quoted passage:
This unreal space which a moment ago was the field of [the specta-
tor’s] jouissance has become the distance separating the camera from
the protagonists who are no longer present, who no longer have the
innocent “being-there-ness” of a moment ago, but instead have a

“being-there-for-ness.”
Phrased in this way, the idea of an “innocent” space, complicated by the

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

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

test hypotheses about a string of shots, the viewer often knows each shot’s
salient spatial information before it appears.”28 In addition, each new piece
of information prompts the spectator to produce a new “cognitive map”
of the diegetic space, and also offers a framework to test ruptures in the
diegesis (like Branigan’s “impossible place,” Žižek’s “interface,” or effects
such as the split screen).29
Ultimately, suture and cognitive mapping are two theories that demon-
strate how we make sense of the disjointed illusion of reality of cinema:
as Branigan asserts, “Every theory of framing is an attempt to describe in
the broadest sense how the mind handles ‘discontinuity’—a perceived
break, a difference, or caesura.”30 Branigan, in fact, offers the most use-
ful approach to understanding the editing choices in this scene and their
effect on the narrative. In his book Narrative Comprehension and Film he
demonstrates that what appears to be a simple shot/reverse shot through
a window in Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps is, in fact, a “false” perspec-
tive: the window bars in the first shot remain in the same relation to the
frame in the second shot (thereby undermining the “new” point of view
of the second shot).31 Branigan argues:
The important point is that the graphics of the screen complete a pat-
tern in parallel with the completion of a coherent pattern in the story
space. In such a situation, screen space neither directly opposes nor
reinforces story space, nor is it neutral; instead it complements story
space. I will therefore call this an “integrated match” between the two
shots. It is a moment in which our top-down processing of space—our
expectation of what an invariant space in the story world should look
like under a particular transformation—is smoothly integrated with
our bottom-up perception of the new shapes on the screen.32
This more nuanced version of the cognitive mapping theory supports

the claim that the sudden appearance of space between two places on
the screen (the Belvedere and the bunkhouse) does not completely shat-
ter the spectator’s attempt to map the space of the diegesis, but rather
requires the spectator to reconcile the space that should be there with
the space that is there. Malick uses a compound shot of the bunkhouse
to reveal the contiguity of offscreen space while using the shift in per-
spective of the cut to delineate the diegetic space of the farm: its territo-
rial boundaries are established before the girl asks her obvious question
of the foreman.
138 Terrence Malick
This process of recognition and inquiry—a cognitive double take—

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

Heaven from the moment Saint-Saëns’ parlor piece “The Aquarium” rises
on the soundtrack and the montage of carefully reframed black-and-white
photographs begins. Is the choice of music an ironic comment on natu-
ralism’s scientific observation of the human condition, or (in its “classi-
cal” orientation) an explicit contrast to the folk music that will be heard
later in the film, supplementing the class conflict apparent in the
narrative?36
The opening shot (excluding the skillful appending of a still shot of
actress Linda Manz to the title montage) suggests Charles Sheeler’s pre-
cisionist painting American Landscape (1930) with its chimney stacks,
ashen sky, and solitary figure almost lost against the mountainous factory
(the man may or may not be Bill, given that he’s allegedly late for work
in the ensuing scene). This establishing shot, along with the shot that
follows—of workers (mostly women) scavenging for scrap metal—firmly
establishes place: space in relation to class and gender. Style and story
are in accordance, until we enter the factory’s thundering, fiery interior
and meet Bill.
A handheld camera follows Bill as he repeats a weary circle of shovel-
ing coal and tossing it into a furnace, while a foreman barks alongside,
audible only intermittently. One of Bill’s coworkers (played by Malick
himself) mouths, “You’re late” which is wholly inaudible: one only
“learns” what the dialogue is by watching the film on DVD with subtitles.
It is in the argument between Bill and the foreman that Malick makes his
first significant departure from filmic convention. “Rather than privileg-
ing intelligible dialogue,” Crofts notes, “the film utilizes a sound perspec-
tive which frustrates the narrative desire of the spectator—we do not
know what their argument is about or whether Bill’s blow leaves the fore-
man alive or dead.”37 It is an almost Godardian tactic, and one finds
oneself straining to hear a word over the pounding machinery before
realizing that the words do not matter—the fact of Bill’s action does. Bill
is defined by action and noise: even as a sacker on the farm he is sur-
rounded by tractors, harvesters, threshers, and furnaces.
140 Terrence Malick
If, as Heath notes, “the voice is the point of the unity [of sound an
image]: at once subservient to the images and entirely dominant in the
dramatic space it opens in them” then the consequence of this
incident is profound.38 Without Bill’s side of the dispute, or Linda’s
defense of her brother, the spectator is unsure what to think of Bill,
or the clash of victimized laborer and exploitative capital that
the scene suggests. Things aren’t helped by Linda either. Instead of
explaining the action on-screen, or even establishing a temporal
relation to the narrative, Linda’s voice, “provides a counterpoint,
directing our attention subtly to the separation between knowledge
and power, voice and vision, vision and knowledge.”39 As Crofts notes,
Malick not only subverts the centrality of the human voice in film
sound, ironically by conforming to realist expectations of sound and
proximity, but also challenges the “imperative of synchronization” by
which sound recreates the “real” through the wholesale reconstruc-
tion of the soundtrack.40
The two scenes of Bill in the foundry and the workers arriving at the
farm play out inside the first 8 minutes and clearly foreground the com-
plex relationship between sound and image that develops through the
film. Both scenes force the spectator to reevaluate conventions of spatial
representation (in terms of sound and editing) while the voice-over
undermines not only the authority of the narrator (Linda ignores or
does not comment on the coterminous image) but also the narrator’s
place in relation to the narrative (where or when is Linda making her
comments?).
The result is a complicated treatment of the film’s themes: class con-
flict, engagement with the natural world, and the deterioration and
emergence of American myths. The film’s theme of class conflict, for
example, is complicated by several factors. If Bill and the Farmer are
representatives of the opposition between labor and capital, then the
conflict they represent is already over. Bill cannot have what the Farmer
has by overwhelming him in a class war; he can only have it by substitut-
ing himself for the Farmer. In this sense, the film is closer to Richard
Slotkin’s proposition that “in the West, both capitalists and workers are
descendants of the conquering race who ‘explored the West and reared
a golden empire.’ ”41 Slotkin cites sociologist Emma Langdon, whose
1905 investigation into the Western labor wars of the late 1890s found
the laborers, “of the characteristic frontiersman type, come not so much
to find work as to seek a fortune. Rough, ready, fearless, used to shifting
for themselves; shrewd, full of expedients; reckless, ready to cast every-

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

over from Linda that actually confirms the action: “He knew he was
going to die.”
Shortly thereafter, Abby and Linda are seen herding peacocks, and in
a wide shot of Linda the camera finally rests, as it does so often in the
film, on the solitary majesty of the house. The Farmer, hidden from view
as he lies in the grass, rises up and greets Abby. Once again, the proxim-
ity of the house is a surprise, reminding the spectator that there is no
fence around the house. The barriers of class and wealth are intangibly
articulated, voiced by the foreman but without the visible referents to
make his warning spatially unambiguous. Later, it is the Farmer who
“invades” Abby’s space by spying on her through his telescope as she
works in the fields. The viewer sees exactly what the Farmer sees by the
mask over them lens mimicking the telescope’s field of vision in a gaze
that is “both classed and gendered.”44
Malick’s arrangement of privileged places, and the slow erasure of
the boundaries delineating those places, reaches a climax when Bill is
given caretakership of the house. Like Kit in Badlands when he walks
through the Rich Man’s house (another nameless member of the ruling
establishment), Bill seems in awe of what he sees, curious and, at the
same, reluctant to move anything or even make a noise. He seems
uncertain how to behave, as if propriety has momentarily got the better
of him. Significantly, Bill crosses the threshold of the Farmer’s house
while Abby and the Farmer share their honeymoon: he crosses into the
realm of his desires and ambition at the moment he begins to lose Abby.
Notably, too, the gamboling, irrepressible Linda is nowhere to be
seen.
The house—based upon Edward Hopper’s painting House by the Rail-
road (1925)—is the film’s central site of emplacement.45 “Sublimely
rootless,” in John Orr’s words, and architecturally alien, the house is
also entirely American in its declaration of infinite possibility, one man’s
citadel in an endless expanse of tamed land with its wilderness driven
out or shot for sport.46 While a hubristic display of mastery over nature
(its construction is entirely illogical in such terrain), it is also a reposi-
tory of European classical learning, an oasis of advancement where Abby
will attempt drawing, and Linda will briefly encounter academic
education.
On their first night, the Farmer asks Abby if “all this feels strange” to
her, to which she mutely nods her head. Two brief static shots follow
before they depart on their honeymoon and the Farmer suggests that
Bill move his things into the house. First there is a low-angle shot of a lit
window which one assumes is the bedroom window: for the first time, we
know there are inhabitants, and we can only assume that it is Bill who is
looking up at that time of night. There follows a close-up of a locust on
a leaf, a foreshadowing of the events to follow and a clear indication that
the tragedy has more to do with the flawed marriage just consummated
than nature wreaking its revenge on industrial man.
In the scenes I have examined here, one can see how an awareness of
the film’s style can take the spectator beyond the mere appreciation of
beauty or the disapproval of abstraction. In the factory scene, sound is
used to deny the spectator an opportunity to make easy assumptions of
character and motivation while Linda’s voice-over dislodges the author-
ity vested in voice-over narration and lets it roam metadiegetically, in the
present, in anticipation, and in retrospect. The workers’ arrival at the
farm confirms the spatial organization of the farm in terms of class to
which the “integrated match” draws our attention while the subsequent
scenes efficiently trespass into the space of the Belvedere, using careful
reframing and narrative ellipsis. Rather than striving for a unity of sound
and image, the framing and cutting produces apertures in the narrative
requiring a search for meaning by the spectator rather than delivering
meaning to the spectator.
A series of looks develops within the diegesis based on class and gen-
der, but also cognizant of fundamental American myths (the frontier
and its disappearance) and historical conditions (Abby’s ongoing jour-
ney aboard a train full of more doomed lovers). Central to this complex
of looks is the organization of space on-screen and the emergence of
places in which the characters’ relations to one another and their rela-
tion to the world in which they find themselves are determined. The
tragic misinterpretation of Bill’s farewell to Abby by the Farmer which
ultimately results in the deaths of both men is not a bitter irony at all, but
an inevitable outcome of the character’s emplacement, secured by the
subtle deployment of editing and cinematography.
APPENDIX: Days of Heaven (Sequence Transcript)
This scene depicts the arrival of the migrant laborers at the wheat farm.
The scene starts at 6'27" and finishes at 7'29".
Shot Visual Image Dialogue Sound, Music, Writing
A [A] Wheatfields, evening. A motley array of vehicles Motors running; then the clatter of cart
00:06:27 moves past a stationary eye-level camera. Horse-drawn wheels and horses whinnying becomes
00:06:42 carts and early trucks are piled with migrant workers. more apparent.
00:06:56 [B] The camera begins to move, tracking and following Insects and frogs are heard. At 6'52", the
00:07:06 a cart in the procession camera begins its upward movement and
dissolve [C] As the skeletal wooden entrance comes into shot, from here the sounds of the insects and
the camera cranes upward, revealing the low rolling frogs grow louder. By the end of the shot,
hills of wheat and, eventually, the farm house that the trucks and carts are almost “drowned
stands prominently in the distance. out” by the sounds of animals.
B Long Shot of the Farmer’s house from a slightly low As the image of the house emerges, so the
00:07:06 angle. The car and flag to the left of the house are visi- sound of the wind-generator on the roof
00:07:13 ble. The Farmer stands on the porch. He walks down is heard.
the steps toward the camera. The Farmer is heard stepping down the
wooden steps.
C [A] Long Shot of a house (the workers’ house) with Geese heard. Motors heard before the
00:07:13 geese in the foreground. Two men emerge from the trucks enters the frame.
00:07:19 house. The camera is stationary until the truck we saw A child’s voice is also heard.
00:07:24 briefly earlier enters the frame from the left Noise grows as more vehicles enter the
[B] The camera tracks with the truck, revealing the frame.
Farmer’s house in the distance.
D Long Shot, again at a slightly low angle: the Farmer The “wind-generator” is heard.
00:07:24 looks on and bites into an apple. A bite is taken out of an apple.
00:07:29
E Long Shot: The camera follows a truck into the frame Linda’s friend: So whose place Trucks and general noise of people get-
00:07:29 from the right, and then tracks Ursula as she gets down is that? ting down from the trucks.
00:07:38 and asks the question. The Farmer’s house is visible in Foreman: The owner’s—don’t
the distance, the laborer’s house middle-frame on the any of you go up around there
left. either.
Notes
1
While the house in Days of Heaven is never named, Malick’s original script from
1976 includes the following description: “EXT. BELVEDERE. At the center of
the bonanza, amid a tawny sea of grain, stands a gay Victorian house, three
stories tall. Where most farm houses stand more sensibly on low ground, pro-
tected from the elements, ‘The Belvedere’ occupies the highest ridge around,
commanding the view and esteem of all.” The name is loaded with meaning
given its derivation: bel (Italian—beautiful) + vedere (from Latin—to see).
2
Gilberto Perez, “Film Chronicle: Days of Heaven,” The Hudson Review 32, no. 1
(1979), 97.
3
Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies: A Guide from A–Z (New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, 1982), 137.
4
Vlada Petric, “Review of Days of Heaven,” Film Quarterly 32, no. 2 (1978–1979), 37.
5
Martin Donougho, “West of Eden: Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven,” Post
Script 5, no. 1 (1985), 17.
6
The terminology of film criticism draws one into some knotty problems in
theories of the moving image. For example, “filmmaking” in this context
implies a modern sense of the auteur—a director whose name is used to posi-
tion a film within a given market. In this context, one should not overlook
Malick’s involvement in other film projects in the years between the release of
Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line, as well as his role as producer in recent
years (e.g., Endurance (1999, dir. Leslie Woodhead, Bud Greenspan); The
Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition (2000, dir. George Butler);
Xingfu shiguang [Happy Times] (2000, d/ Yimou Zhang); The Beautiful Country
(2004, d/ Hans Peter Moland); Undertow (2004, dir. David Gordon Green);
and most recently, Amazing Grace (2006, dir. Michael Apted).
7
Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed (enlarged edition) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1979), xiv–xv. Cavell admits that Malick had translated
Heidegger years before (though he does not admit that he knows Malick
himself).
8
Cavell, The World Viewed, xvi.
9
Arturo Escobar, “Culture Sits in Places: Reflections on Globalism and Subaltern
Strategies of Localization,” Political Geography 20 (2001), 143.
10
Edward S. Casey, “How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of
Time: Phenomenological Prolegomena,” Senses of Place, ed. Steven Feld and
Keith H. Basso (Sante Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1996),
14.
11
Casey, “How to Get from Space to Place,” 14.
12
Casey, “How to Get from Space to Place,” 46.
13
Cavell, The World Viewed, ix. Noël Burch makes a similar admission in his book
Praxis du Cinema (1969, trans. Helen R. Lane as Theory of Film Practice London:
Secker & Warburg, 1973), 31 n. 1.
14
Cavell, The World Viewed, xxiv.
15
The Criterion Collection released a restored DVD version of Days of Heaven in
2007.
146 Terrence Malick
16
See Edward Buscombe’s deft deconstruction of an image from My Darling
Clementine in which he notes the incongruity of sagura cactuses in Monument
Valley (“Inventing Monument Valley: Nineteenth-Century Landscape Photog-
raphy and the Western Film,” in Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video,
ed. Patrice Petro [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995], 107).
17
Joan McGettigan, “Days of Heaven and the Myth of the West,” The Cinema of
Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America (2nd ed.), ed. Hannah Patterson
(London: Wallflower Press, 2007), 52.
18
David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood
Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960 (London: Routledge, 1985), 59.
19
The extreme mobility of the camera, in concert with increased video-game
point-of-view perspectives and the influence of performer-oriented shooting
styles in music video, has made the jump cut far more common in contempo-
rary film.
20
See, for example, Jean-Pierre Oudart’s analysis of Bresson in “Cinema and
Suture,” Screen 18, no. 4 (1977), 35–47; Noël Burch’s analysis of Renoir in
“Nana, or Two Kinds of Space,” in Theory of Film Practice (17–31), or even Barry
Salt’s exhaustive investigations of technique in early cinema in “The Early
Development of Film Form,” Film Form 1, no. 1 (1976), 91–106, and “Statistical
Style Analysis of Motion Pictures,” Film Quarterly 28, no. 1 (1974), 13–22.
21
David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (London: Routledge, 1985), 110.
22
Daniel Dayan, “The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema,” Film Quarterly 28, no. 1
(1974), 438–51, and William Rothman’s “Against ‘the System of Suture,’ ”
451–68, can both be found in Movies and Methods (vol. 1), edited by Bill Nichols
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). Kaja Silverman, The Subject of
Semiotics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). Stephen Heath, Questions
of Cinema (Bloomington: Indian University Press, 1981). Edward Branigan
provides an excellent summation and exploration in Projecting a Camera:
Language-Games in Film Theory (New York: Routledge, 2006), 133–45.
23
Oudart, “Cinema and Suture,” 41.
24
Branigan, Projecting a Camera, 291–2 n. 81.
25
Branigan, Projecting a Camera, 294 n. 84.
26
Oudart, “Cinema and Suture,” 37.
27
Heath, Questions of Cinema, 43.
28
Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, 112.
29
Heath writes: “ ‘Impossible,’ of course, is here decided in respect of the ‘pos-
sible’ positions of the observer moving about, the disturbance involved seen as
a disjunction of the unity of narration and narrated, enunciation and
announced” (Questions of Cinema, 49). Slavoj Žižek, The Fright of Real Tears:
Krzysztof Kieślowski between Theory and Post-Theory (London: British Film Insti-
tute, 2001), 52–4. M. Night Shyamalan’s opening shot of Unbreakable is an
excellent example.
30
Branigan, Projecting a Camera, 143.
31
Edward Branigan, Narrative Comprehension and Film (London and New York:
Routledge, 1992), 56–60.
32
Branigan, Narrative Comprehension and Film, 60.
33
Branigan, Narrative Comprehension and Film, 61.
34
Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Motion Pictures (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publish-
ing, 2008), 124–33. Overall, however, Carroll’s analysis places too little
emphasis on sound for my liking. See also Malcolm Turvey’s analysis of a
sequence from Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt in Doubting Vision: Film and the
Revelationist Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 117–20.
35
Heath, Questions of Cinema, 36, 37.
36
For further examination of Malick’s use of this particular piece, see Richard
Power, “Listening to the Aquarium: The Symbolic Use of Music in Days of
Heaven,” 103–11, and James Wierzbicki, “Sound as Music in the Films of
Terrence Malick,” 112–24, both in Patterson (ed.), The Cinema of Terrence
Malick.
37
Charlotte Crofts, “From the ‘Hegemony of the Eye’ to the ‘Hierarchy of Per-
ception’: The reconfiguration of sound and image in Terrence Malick’s Days
of Heaven,” Journal of Media Practice 2, no.1 (2001), 25. It is remarkable how
many critics and scholars assume that Bill kills the foreman.
38
Heath, Questions of Cinema, 55.
39
Janet Wondra, “A Gaze Unbecoming: Schooling the Child for Femininity in
Days of Heaven,” Wide Angle 16, no. 4 (1994), 9.
40
Crofts uses two key texts in this regard: Michel Chion’s The Voice in Cinema,
edited and translated by Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1999); and Mary Ann Doane’s essay, “Ideology and the Practice of Sound
Editing and Mixing,” Film Sound: Theory and Practice, edited by Elizabeth Weiss
and John Belton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 54–62.
41
Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century
America (New York: Atheneum, 1992), 162.
42
In Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation (1992), 162.
43
Janet Wondra, “Marx in a Texas Love Triangle: ‘Marrying Up’ and the Classed
Gaze in Days of Heaven,” Journal of Film and Video 57, no. 4 (2005), 3.
44
Wondra, “Marx in a Texas Love Triangle,” 6.
45
Hopper’s etching American Landscape (1920) is clearly an early model for
House by the Railroad. In the etching the perspective emphasizes the cattle
crossing the railroad track in the foreground, an unsubtle motif for the demar-
cation between domestic and agricultural space. While the house is still grand,
it erupts into full Victorian eccentricity in the later painting, standing in soli-
tude against a curious, murky sky.
46
John Orr, Contemporary Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
1998), 176.
Chapter 8
The Tragic Indiscernibility of Days of Heaven

Stuart Kendall
In Cinema 2: The Time-Image, the second volume of his philosophical

excavation of the history of cinema, Gilles Deleuze claims that, in post–
World War II cinema, many of the dichotomies that animated, guided,
and structured pre–World War II cinema dissolved into a new regime of
images, characterized above all by what Deleuze, following a typology
borrowed from Henry Bergson, calls the time-image. In the time-image,
the distinctions between different types of images—subjective and objec-
tive, imaginary and real, physical and mental, actual and virtual—no
longer function in the same way, or carry the same weight. An indiscern-
ibility or indeterminability emerged at the core of the cinematic endeavor,
where the real became a spectacle and the spectacle began to cohere
into a separate reality. “The indiscernibility of the real and the imagi-
nary, or the present and the past, of the actual and the virtual, is defi-
nitely not produced in the head or in the mind, it is in the objective
characteristic of certain existing images which are by nature double.”1
The exploration and provocation of this indiscernible or indetermin-
able realm became the primary terrain of cinema. Thus, according to
Deleuze, the image in postwar cinema is always open, always available to
something other than itself, and always in oscillation with that potential
meaning.
Deleuze catalogs images of this type—and there are several kinds—as
time-images because the temporal register of the image has overtaken its
affective value, the value that had been, in his interpretation, predomi-
nant in pre–World War II cinema. The temporal nature of the image
comes to the fore as the image becomes indiscernible, as it shifts between
potentialities: subjective, objective, real, imaginary, actual, virtual, dream,
fantasy, and so on. In a time when nothing is certain about the image, we
are left with the temporality of the image, which only serves to undermine
The Tragic Indiscernibility of Days of Heaven 149
its stability even further. This is also to say that time falls into fragments as
the image loses its affective meaning and its stability. Prewar cinema had
been content to explore the realm of the affective register of action. Post-
war cinema on the other hand opened a wide range of cinematic worlds,
alluring in their ultimate indiscernibility and endless fragmentation.
Deleuze links this new emphasis in cinematic practice to the post–
World War II era because, as he says, “in Europe, the post-war period has
greatly increased the situations which we no longer know how to react to,
in spaces which we no longer know how to describe.”2 Filmmakers and
film theorists, like Carl Dreyer and Antonin Artaud, had of course already
begun to explore the potential of the time-image in the late 1920s and
early 1930s and the style had begun to become pervasive with the work of
Orson Welles and Yasujiro Ozu. But Deleuze’s historical point is still com-
pelling. The post–World War II era brought massive changes to the orga-
nization of European cities, industries, and cultural landscapes, changes
that European cinema harnessed the time-image to explore, if not neces-
sarily reflect. But the time-image is not wholly or solely a European phe-
nomenon nor is it a phenomenon solely linked to war ravaged urban
landscapes, as Deleuze suggests.
Deleuze does not mention Terrence Malick in Cinema 2: The Time-Image
but Malick’s work—and Days of Heaven in particular—can easily serve as
an illustration of one or several of Deleuze’s concepts. Days of Heaven
consists less of a series of shots linked into a continuum determined by
spatial or psychological realities (however purely filmic) as in the
Hollywood style, than of a series of distinct shots gathered into a dialecti-
cal progression of contrasts. Malick rarely establishes spaces or stages
conversations with standard or familiar cinematic forms. His images fol-
low one another in unorthodox and unexpected ways.
In Malick’s cinema, seemingly objective or opaque images of nature—of
birds and other beasts, of flowing waters and grasses, of clouds—are
often inserted into scenes and sequences, or bookend them, without
apparent purpose but with a memorable and affecting allure. Enormous,
washed out skies hang empty over almost barren landscapes. Fields of
grain waver in the wind without conveying the joyous relief of harvest
plenty. However beautiful they may be, it is a mistake to interpret Malick’s
images of nature as benevolent or beneficent. His animals are often
glimpsed in flight. Skittish horses haunt his scenes, often with an air of
menace that deepens as the film plays on. The powerful beauty of these
images in particular often overwhelms the narrative sweep of his films.
At another level, his films are frequently overloaded with potentially
150 Terrence Malick
gratuitous references to historical events and philosophical, religious,

and literary materials, sources and topics. These extratextual references
further burden his slender narratives and scenes, leaving viewers won-
dering just what they should make of the film as a whole.
Indiscernibility thus appears and operates in several ways across
Malick’s oeuvre and Days of Heaven in particular. Indeed, Malick’s cine-
matic style employs a number of effects and tropes that serve to destabi-
lize our understanding of and expectations about the diegetic action.
Malick’s prominent use of voice-over is one of the most obvious of
these effects. In Days of Heaven, Linda, the young girl, provides the voice-
over, occasionally commenting on the action we see on-screen without
necessarily explaining that action. Her comments are often at variance
with our perspective on the action. A clear instance of this occurs near
the beginning of the film just after Bill has injured or perhaps killed his
boss at the steel mill. We see Bill, Abbey, and Linda running through the
railway yards, most likely running away from the law, but Linda’s voice-
over suggests that they are running off on an adventure, “searching for
something,” as she says. The variance between the two perspectives might
be explained by Linda’s youth (perhaps she sees things this way, or Bill
explained it to her in this way), but it nevertheless puts us on our guard.
We cannot quite trust her interpretation of or comments about the
events presented in the film. Yet in our experience of the typical or tra-
ditional use of voice-over narration, if we cannot trust the narrator, whom
can we trust?
The music has a similar destabilizing effect. Malick uses the “Aquarium”
section from Camille Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals (1886) early
and late in Days of Heaven to convey a flowing, dreamlike effect over those
portions of the film, as if we were entering and leaving a dream. The
aquatic element is also visually persistent throughout the film, both in
images of streams, pools, and rivers, and in flowing material forms, from
the flowing liquid steel at the mill to the fluidity of the grasses, waving in
the wind on the plains.
The dreamlike element is also present in other visual effects. Some
scenes and settings are based on familiar paintings or other visual
artifacts. The film opens with a montage of photographs from the turn
of the century—some very well-known photographs by Lewis Hine,
H. H. Bennett, and others—and includes shots clearly modeled on
iconic American paintings like Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World and
Edward Hopper’s House by the Railroad, as well as images and situations
reminiscent of paintings by Pieter Breughal the Elder, Gustave Courbet,
and Jean-François Millet. These familiar images and tableaux linger in the
mind with a greater force than less scripted images, but they linger with an
air of unreality. They are so overloaded with visual impact that they border
on parody or pastiche. The historical appropriateness of these images
saves them from falling into parody. Their consistency saves them from
pastiche. But they nevertheless serve simultaneously as both visual distrac-
tions and attractions in the film. If we merely admire the visual beauty of
Malick’s images, without appreciating their references and referential
depth, at least to some extent, we have surely missed half of the film. Simi-
larly, however, if we concentrate our engagement or interpretation of the
film on our reading of Malick’s visual sources we have undoubtedly misin-
terpreted the film, which is clearly rooted in the physical world presented
in its images. The galvanizing power of the familiar images from the his-
tory of visual arts and culture lingers like a dream and too the displace-
ment of these images, the fact that they do not quite add up to a consistent
explanation or interpretation of the film—that they perhaps do not even
contribute to such an interpretation—enforces the enigmatic effect of a
dream.
The dreamlike effect is also continued in other visual elements. In the
second half of the film, roughly after the visit of the flying circus, Days of
Heaven becomes more persistently a film about watching. Much of the
film consists of characters watching either things or other people. Bill
and the Farmer are the characters who most frequently engage in this,
but it is not exclusive to them. When we first see the Farmer, he is watch-
ing the arriving workers from his house. Bill and Abbey sneak out at
night to be alone, away from the Farmer’s gaze. When they return, the
Farmer tells Abbey that he was looking for her. Later, most damningly,
the Farmer watches Bill and Abbey from the rooftop, when they are
down at the stables. But there are many other examples.
Watching here is often watching from a distance and it is often accom-
panied by silence or at least noncommunication, either as a result of the
physical distance or due to some other factor, like diegetic noise. Images
and sounds thus do not quit correspond, though only in the voice-over
do they appear in consistent contrast to one another. As in a dream, we
can watch, or the characters can watch, but we, and they, often cannot
hear what is being said. Our gazes share a motivated insistence: what do
these things mean?
Bill’s fight with the foreman at the beginning of the film is a good
example of this. We witness the argument but we cannot hear what is
said. Another, more complex example, is offered by the moment Bill
152 Terrence Malick
returns to the farm prior to his confrontation with the Farmer. As Bill
approaches the house, he glimpses Abbey dancing on the back porch
through a window divided into two windowpanes. We see his reflection
framed in one windowpane, and we see Abbey, as he does, framed in the
other. To complete the group, the Farmer sees Bill through another win-
dow at this same moment, but Bill does not see him. The image of the
Farmer is not part of the image of Bill, nor is it logically contiguous with
it. We simply see Bill looking through a window at Abbey then the Farmer
looking through a window. None of the characters can or even could
hear any of the others if anything was said, but the images define their
relationships and the distances between them. It is particularly poignant
to see Bill and Abbey framed separately in the two windowpanes, kept
apart, knowing as we do that she is happy with the Farmer and thus emo-
tionally separated from Bill.
The pace of the narrative in Days of Heaven also has a destabilizing
effect. The film seems to lope and leap along, with characters lazing one
minute before bursting into action in the next. Some events—like the
Farmer’s courtship of Abbey—proceed at an almost methodically regu-
lar or expected pace. Other scenes or sequences rush toward a conclu-
sion, as in Bill’s fights with both the foreman and the Farmer, which are
over almost as soon as they began. At another level, we might say that
while some scenes and sequences have a clear and definite sense, even a
violent dramatic effect within the narrative, as in the fight with the fore-
man, other images, scenes, and sequences are far more ambiguous, as in
the images of the flora and fauna of the farm, the scenes of migrants at
work or play, and the sequence with the flying circus.
All of this in mind, we might say that Days of Heaven seems to oscillate
between clarity and confusion, action and ambiguity, or dream and
reality, though none of these poles should be taken as definitive for
any given image or scene. The visual and aural landscapes of the film
both complete and compete with one another, from within the narra-
tive space and beyond it. And the visual effects themselves, the visual
references and framing, as well as the overt beauty of some images,
hardly help clarify the sense of the film; quite the opposite in fact.
Everything seems intended as a device of destabilization and disarticu-
lation, an evocation, as we have seen, of what Deleuze calls the
indiscernible.
Similar gestures, tropes, and effects are also present at the level of the
narrative and thematic content, not only in terms of pace and internal
sense, but in terms of external references and sources.
In The Films of Terrence Malick, James Morrison and Thomas Schur make
the paradoxical claim that “Malick’s influences are so obvious, so much
on the surface, that they are ultimately difficult to credit. His films seem
to subsume influences by telegraphing them.”3 Extending these claims
only a little, we might say that Malick so transforms his sources that any
consideration of the sources themselves will not be instructive. To a lim-
ited extent, I am prepared to agree with Morrison and Schur. Malick’s
films are indeed so filled with references, small and large, obvious and
obtuse, that the clear and direct influence of no single source seems to
hold sway over any given film. Indeed, his films might best be viewed as
palimpsests in which a number of sources have been woven seamlessly
together, woven together so seamlessly in fact that many of his sources
have remained relatively obscure to casual viewers and overlooked in the
literature about Malick’s work.
In his Guide to Kulchur, Ezra Pound claims, “the domain of culture
begins when one HAS ‘forgotten-what-book.’ ”4 Malick’s films certainly
speak from this kind of cultural space. But this should not be taken
as justification for ignoring his sources. Indeed ignoring Malick’s
sources—or treating them as if they were all functionally equivalent to
one another—has the effect of decontextualizing his films. In contrast to
Morrison and Schur, I would like to contend that the overdetermination
of Malick’s films, the specific way that they are loaded with source materi-
als as well as the specific ways that some of those sources have been trans-
formed, both through modification and through simple juxtaposition
with other sources, constitutes one of the core gestures of Malick’s filmic
oeuvre.
In short, though I agree with Morrison and Schur that Malick’s films
cannot be understood through reference to any single influence or
source—philosophical, literary, or visual—I believe that the specific
sources of his work as well as the specific uses that he makes of those
sources are key elements of his filmic endeavor. Given the range and
density of Malick’s source materials as well as the distance of those
sources from materials typically enjoyed by aficionados of contemporary
American film, it is unsurprising that these sources should be relatively
underappreciated in the scholarly literature devoted to Malick. At
another level, while adaptation is a significant area of research in film
studies, intertextuality of the kind that characterizes Malick’s films
remains relatively understudied.
Malick’s films do in fact betray an astonishing array of source materi-
als, ranging from the histories of fine art and photography to European
154 Terrence Malick
and American film, classic and contemporary, among the visual sources,
and classical and modern literary, philosophical and religious texts
among the written. While many accounts of Malick’s work often situate
him alongside other American filmmakers of his immediate genera-
tion—the generation that went to film school in the 1960s and began
making films in the 1970s, filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford
Coppola, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, David Lynch, Brian De Palma,
and others—Malick’s films arguably have far more in common with sev-
eral masters of European cinema—Antonioni, Godard, Tarkovsky, for
example—than with his American contemporaries.5 But Malick’s visual
references extend far beyond the confines of cinema. As we have already
observed, Days of Heaven opens with a montage of photographs from the
turn of the century and includes shots modeled on iconic American
paintings as well as images and situations reminiscent of paintings by
Pieter Breughal the Elder, Courbet, and Millet.
Despite this range, the literary and religious references in the film are
arguably more significant. Perhaps most prominent among these are the
references to biblical materials. The title of Days of Heaven, for example,
derives from Deuteronomy 11.21, in which Moses gives the command-
ments of the Lord to the people of Israel: “so that your days and the days
of your children may be multiplied in the land that the Lord swore to
your ancestors to give them, as long as the days of heaven are above the
earth.” This, however, hardly explains the action of the film or the rela-
tionship of the title to the work.
The title is among the most enigmatic devices deployed in the film.
What or when exactly are the days of heaven mentioned in the title? Are
they the days that Bill repeatedly promises to Abbey once they get “fixed
up”? As stand-ins for Abram and Sarai, and as Americans propelled across
the plains by Manifest Destiny, Bill and Abbey are searching for their
own promised land. These days of heaven might motivate the film as a
whole. Even the Farmer’s actions are motivated by his search for a happi-
ness that wealth alone cannot provide.
The days of heaven may also be the days of leisure enjoyed by Abbey
and Linda on the farm after Abbey marries the Farmer—days bookended
by two periods of flight from the law. Linda’s voice-over makes it clear
that these were days of true happiness for everyone involved. If these
were the days of heaven referenced by the title, they were short lived and
disrupted by economic circumstances, fate, or chance.
As a story narrated by Linda, the film is also a story of her youth, which
seems to have come to an end with her brother’s death. Her childhood,
in other words, might correspond, however darkly or ironically, with the

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

keep the true nature of his relationship with Abbey a secret. In the film,
Linda explains that “people will talk” if Bill and Abbey don’t pose as
brother and sister, though obviously people do talk precisely because of
this pose, leading Bill into a fight with one of the other workers in the
migrant camp. In the film, it is unclear whether Bill and Abbey are mar-
ried or simply lovers. In their deliberation over the Farmer’s proposal to
Abbey, Bill wonders whether anyone would know the truth of the situa-
tion but them, settling on the notion that no one would. If Bill and Abbey
were married, this concern would be more serious, as Abbey’s marriage
to the Farmer would then be illegal. But the question is never truly clari-
fied. Even in the scenes when we see them embrace, we never see them
actually having sex, though this level of intimacy is strongly suggested if
not explicitly implied. The primary point here is that the relationship
between Bill and Abbey, and by extension, the plot that unfolds with the
Farmer derives from a biblical source, where this plot makes sense, rather
than from a modern source, wherein it arguably does or would not.
The biblical book of Ruth also contains elements echoed in Days of
Heaven. Ruth is the story of a destitute young woman named Ruth who is
essentially saved by a rich man, named Boaz. Boaz first glimpses Ruth in
his fields, after she “has been on her feet from early this morning until
now, without resting even for a moment.” Boaz “said to his servant who
was in charge of the reapers, ‘To whom does this young girl belong?’ ”(1.5).
Boaz then asks Ruth to stay and continue working his fields. Ruth is
relieved by and respectful of his willingness to help her. Later, Ruth
relates the incident to her mother-in-law, Naomi, with whom she lives,
and Naomi encourages her to place herself at Boaz’ feet as he sleeps on
the threshing floor (3.4). Though Naomi is suggesting that Ruth seduce
Boaz so as to secure his aide, the scene is not unduly manipulative and
Boaz does not simply have sex with her. He takes appropriate steps to
marry her in the eyes of the community. Ruth and Boaz have a son, Jesse,
who takes his place in the genealogy of David, the future king of Israel.
The story is thus a story of one woman and her family, but it is also part
of the story of the nation of Israel. The Farmer’s sensitivity to Abbey’s
destitution derives from the story of Ruth and Boaz.
Days of Heaven also obviously derives in part from the parable of Cain
and Abel, from Genesis 4, though the film reverses the parable in one
significant way. In the parable, Abel is the “keeper of the sheep” and
Cain the “tiller of the ground.” When Abel found favor with the Lord, his
brother Cain became jealous. “Cain said to his brother Abel, ‘Let us go
out to the field.’ And when they were in the field. Cain rose up against
his brother Abel, and killed him” (4.8–9). In the film, the Farmer, rather
than the herder, is the victim, slaughtered amidst his ruined harvest. At
the time of the murder, the Farmer is not Bill’s brother; he is his brother-
in-law. Bill, as Cain, does become a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth,
though he may already have brought this curse upon himself through
his potentially fatal fight with the foreman in the Chicago factory. We will
return to this topic below. The parable of Cain and Abel nevertheless
remains a powerful reference in the film, particularly as a meditation on
guilt and innocence, murder and sacrifice.
The apocalyptic imagery of the film—first present in the fires of the
forge and the rivers of flowing steel, then in Linda’s account of her
friend Ding Dong’s prophecies, and later in the locusts and the fire
that consumes the harvest—also obviously derives from biblical sources.
The locusts echo the eighth plague that the Lord visited upon Egypt in
Exodus 10.
The Lord brought an east wind upon the land all that day and all the
night. When morning came, the east wind had brought the locusts.
The locusts came upon all the land of Egypt and settled on the whole
country of Egypt such a dense swarm of locusts has had never been
before, nor ever shall be again. They covered the surface of the whole
land, so that the land was black; and they are all the plants in the land
and all the fruit of the trees that the hail had left; nothing green was
left, no tree, no plant in the field, in all the land of Egypt. (10.13–15)
As significant as these Judeo-Christian religious references are to the

content and orientation of Days of Heaven, they are not the only sources
for the film, not by any means. As Lloyd Michaels demonstrates rather
conclusively in his Terrence Malick, portions of Linda’s voice-over mono-
logue and portions of the main theme and handling of Days of Heaven
derive from Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885).6 Huck
and Jim light out for the territories on the river that runs down the cen-
ter of American life in much the same way that the central characters in
Days of Heaven set off on their own series of adventures. It is in fact diffi-
cult to overemphasize the importance of water in Malick’s oeuvre and of
the river in Days of Heaven. One of the first images in the film is an image
158 Terrence Malick
of women combing through trash on the banks of a trickling stream run-

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

coded as a modern American film, a film concerned with the industrial
era in the United States.
This kind of re- or decontextualization is operative with regard to
almost all of the sources discussed above. Indeed, while Days of Heaven
may reference biblical stories and themes, among other stories, it is
clearly and pointedly set in the industrial Midwest and the agrarian Texas
panhandle in 1916.
The historical setting of Days of Heaven is itself significant, not only as a
mark of distance from our own times, but also as a moment marked by
internal division within American history. We see Bill working both in a
steel mill and on a farm. The farm uses industrial technologies like trac-
tors and harvesters, but it also employs an army of migrant workers, and
neither the industrial technologies nor the farm hands seem out of place.
The film merely presents technology on the farm, it doesn’t condemn
that technology, nor does it condemn the life lived by the workers. On
the contrary, in many ways Days of Heaven seems to eulogize that moment
in American history and the way of life pursued by those workers. This is
most clear in Linda’s voice-over comments about Bill during the harvest
festival. While all of the other workers are preparing a feast, laughing,
dancing, and rough-housing in a good-natured way, Linda says that Bill
doesn’t fit in, that he has gotten tired of living like that. The comments
clash with the joyousness of the workers on-screen, suggesting that we
might be meant to condemn Bill’s dissatisfaction, his ultimately fatal
ambition for a better life, even though that ambition is the essence of the
American dream.
While we might first be tempted to interpret the film as a naturalistic
tract on the evils of industry or capitalism, or both, we cannot settle on
this interpretation without distorting the overall balance of elements in
the film, without in other words, overemphasizing this theme in the film
at the expense of other thematic elements. Bill clashes with the foreman
in the steel mill and with the Farmer. But both of these clashes are per-
sonal, rather than political or economic in motivation, though, in
another sense, we might say that Bill’s clash with the Farmer was ulti-
mately created by the economic disparity between them rather than by
true personal animosity.
More significantly though, and as I have already suggested, Malick’s
treatment of the migrant workers is almost loving: it is certainly apprecia-
tive in its level of carefully observed detail. The migrants work hard but
they are not miserable. They are treated harshly—as when Bill and Abbey
160 Terrence Malick
are docked by the farm foreman for wasting bushels of wheat—but they
are not slaves and this theme does not reappear in relation to other char-
acters. Malick’s portrait of the migrants recalls John Steinbeck’s use of
similar settings in his dust bowl writings but Steinbeck is much more
interested in observing the injustice of the social and political systems
that surround his characters than Malick seems to be. Malick shows us
his characters at work and rest, at play and in religious service, as in the
blessing of the wheat. This is a comprehensive and affectionate portrait
of a people and a place and time rather than a stock treatment of social
or economic injustice. Malick’s use of medium and long shots in depict-
ing the migrants, rather than close-ups, helps to both maintain the ano-
nymity of the individuals and strengthen our sense of the commonality
of experience or communal cohesiveness of the group. Days of Heaven, in
other words, will disappoint viewers looking for a tale of social or eco-
nomic oppression or nascent class-consciousness.
The main characters also play both with and against their types. As the
Farmer, Sam Shepard is appropriately aloof and apparently emotionally
naïve as the rich farmer. He is aloof from his workers but also curious
about them. We first see him from a distance but he is soon seen among
the workers and he is interested enough in them and open enough to
them to fall in love with one of them, Abbey. He tells her that he thought
a man “just had to get used to being alone,” but this is an unexpected
perspective from a wealthy and successful man, and hardly in keeping
with a portrait of a harsh or aristocratic boss. The Farmer is portrayed as
an innocent, caught in a situation that he does not deserve.
Richard Gere’s Bill too is unexpected. He is a hot-headed schemer, a
man of resource and violence, but he is also a dedicated lover and
brother. He leaves the farm after it becomes clear that Abbey has feel-
ings for the Farmer, but he returns the following season riding a fancy
motorcycle obviously hoping for some kind of reconciliation. Even
though he kills several men in the course of the film (including his final
shoot-out with the police), we don’t leave the film with the sense that Bill
is a bad guy.
Looking at these two characters we might simply say that they are fully
fleshed, realistically depicted human beings, rather than the kind of
stock types that one encounters in more conventional films. But I don’t
think this is quite true. It seems more accurate to suggest that they simply
play both with and against their types, that they are, in other words, char-
acters built out of internal and external contradictions. Internal contra-
dictions include, for example, the fact that Bill is at once thoughtful and
rash, always looking out for Linda and Abbey even as he rushes from one
dream to the next. External contradictions develop as the characters
respond to situations and interact.
Malick uses strategies of doubling and repetition as means of compari-
son through contrast but also as means of creating ambiguity and, in
Deleuze’s term, indiscernibility. Characters and even gestures double
one another within films and across Malick’s oeuvre. Situations are
repeated to reinforce one another and build signs from film to film but
also, perhaps just as often, to drain them of any certain meaning. Malick’s
young female characters all do cart wheels, for example, as a clear sign
of joyous physical freedom. Rivers, oceans, and streams recur as enig-
matic scenes and signs of change. But other instances of repetition and
doubling have a more enigmatic effect.
In Days of Heaven, Bill and the Farmer are doubles, compared both
implicitly and explicitly, and Bill in particular repeatedly faces similar
situations. Bill tells Abbey about the first time he saw her and both Linda
and the Farmer reflect on the Farmer’s first impressions of Abbey. Bill
and the Farmer also both juggle as a way to amuse and impress the girls.
But these points of comparison seem trite if we attempt to grant them
any weight. Surely every man has recounted his first sight of his beloved
to her and every woman listened to similar reflections on her meaning
in different men’s lives. Bill and the Farmer are of course also presented
in stark contrast to one another. Bill has no money at all, big dreams but
no prospects. The Farmer is the richest man in the panhandle, accord-
ing to his accountant. Bill is as quick to see an angle or argue a point, as
the Farmer is generous with his wealth. In the end, they share our com-
mon fate.
Bill’s repeated acts of homicide offer another surprising example of
ambiguous repetition. Assuming Bill killed the foreman at the steel mill
at the beginning of the film, he kills both of his bosses, but this surface
similarity belies vast differences in circumstance. Bill’s fight with the
foreman seemed utterly spontaneous. We don’t know if he had been on
the job for a day or a month before the conflict broke out, but it was
decided in an instant. Bill’s conflict with the Farmer, on the other hand,
was obviously overdetermined. In search of its roots we might recall the
moment in the field when the farm foreman docked Bill and Abbey pay
for wasting wheat. Even at that moment the foreman treated Bill and
Abbey with hostile suspicion. The murder of the Farmer might have
been motivated by this lasting conflict, or by more recent and serious
developments, by either jealousy or greed, but the murder itself may also
162 Terrence Malick
have been an accident or an act of self-defense. The Farmer came look-

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

distance that denies us conclusive insight into the characters or actions
of the film but that also opens the space in which our own judgment can
become active. For the Greeks, this distance was the distance of disen-
chantment, the distance of an uncomfortable community of secular citi-
zens examining figures from its religious history: spectators at a religious
theater who had almost, but not quite, lost their faith.
Significantly, Greek tragedies do not simply combine religious and
philosophical motifs: they are works of religious theater, dependent
upon the faith of their audience, as well as being nascent philosophical
dialogues, studies in argumentation and persuasion, discourses on and
illustrations of philosophical problems. This is an important point that
we often overlook in our haste to understand these works on the basis of
our own secular theater. Something similar occurs in our approach to
the films of Terrence Malick, whose works are philosophical examina-
tions of elements of our own national gospels, though they are never
simply philosophical tracts. As Malick’s films demonstrate, America is a
secular nation that nevertheless has its sacred cows—national notions,
narratives, and nostalgia, which Malick offers up for examination and,
ultimately I think, sacrifice.
We can, I think, conclude by observing that Days of Heaven is clearly,
and profoundly, more than the sum of its sources, only some of which
have been sketched here, and that Malick doesn’t simply transform his
source materials: he tears them to shreds. He puts them into impossible
combinations, combinations that should more rightly be understood as
confrontations, confrontations that empty his sources of clear and dis-
tinct identity. Christian themes and characters conflict within classical
structures in contemporary, or roughly contemporary, settings. The
images are at once highly scripted in terms of overt reference to a rich
array of visual culture—paintings, photographs, and films—and poi-
gnantly, often sublimely, beautiful in a purely indexical sense. Images of
animals and landscapes seem simultaneously empty and full of meaning,
valuable as pure presence and haunted by powerful symbolic forces.
Voices and music echo and undermine the images in turn, redirecting
our understanding of the action or recasting it entirely.
Malick’s cinema is a cinema of discontinuities, designed with a distinct
purpose. Comparison with Godard is again instructive. In his early films
in particular, Godard developed strategies, derived from Brecht, of dis-
rupting the continuity of his films in an effort to create critical conscious-
ness in his viewer. For Godard, these strategies included a number of
164 Terrence Malick
visual elements, like absurdly long dolly and pan shots in Week-end, and
sound elements, like discontinuous voice-over or sound. Godard’s films
occasionally have an intentionally flat, pop art quality that provides evi-
dence that he is at once not going to fool the audience and fooling his
audience. In Malick, this flatness is reinvented as distance on the classi-
cal model, and the techniques and strategies of disruption are reinvented
based on the needs of Malick’s plots and purposes.
In a far more aggressive and holistic way than Godard, but in a manner
consistent with the Greeks, Malick opens a tragic dimension in his films
by stuffing them with information, with discourse, with all the languages
that attempt to define his times. His films are thus open to myriad inter-
pretations—Marxist, psychoanalytic, literary, cinematic (history of cin-
ema), environmental, religious—they activate all of these discourses or
registers of information, not in an attempt to exhaust them, but in an
effort to split them apart, to fracture them through a nonbinding mon-
tage. The disruption of cinematic continuity, the evocation of the indis-
cernible, is the provocation of a tragic vision, in the Greek sense of tragedy.
This is the source of the power of Malick’s cinema.
Notes
1
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert
Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 69.
2
Ibid., xi.
3
James Morrison and Thomas Schur, The Films of Terrence Malick (Westport:
Praeger, 2003), 29.
4
Erza Pound, Guide to Kulchur (New York: New Directions, 1970), 134.
5
For a typical treatment of Malick’s work within American cinema see Ryan Gilbey,
It Don’t Worry Me: The Revolutionary American Films of the Seventies (New York: Faber
and Faber, 2003).
6
Lloyd Michaels, Terrence Malick (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois
Press, 2009), 43.
7
Heraclitus, Fragments, trans. Brooks Haxton (New York: Penguin, 2001), § 41.
8
My understanding of Greek tragedy owes a great deal to the writings of Jean-Pierre
Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet. See in particular their book Myth and Tragedy
in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone Books, 1988).
Chapter 9
Darkness from Light: Dialectics and

The Thin Red Line
Russell Manning
One of the important things about watching good films is their ability to
provoke questions beyond their surface plot. Good films, as with good
Art raise questions and seem to reveal an extra layer upon examination.
It is what separates a good director from an ordinary one. Admittedly no
director can save an abysmal script but often a director, working with
their own script can do more than entertain their audience. They can
reveal something to the viewer that changes the way the viewer sees. This
then becomes film as philosophy because the film has made the world
more interesting and perhaps even more complex. Terence Malick, in
his films to date, does this effortlessly.
This extra layer also can therefore allow us to make more subtle and
refined judgments about everyday life, something we may miss if we are
not “tuned in” to what the film is revealing. The interaction with these
good films, similar to reading a provocative poem may entice us to make
connections between diverse subjects of discussion. These are, at first
glance unusual, but after some careful thinking can be strongly and
apparently associated. For example, when we watch the Superhero we
can be drawn through the action on the screen to ask questions about
what constitutes heroism, justice or questions about the nature of evil.
Good films do this seamlessly. It is as if there are ideas on the screen wait-
ing to emerge; ideas that give the film this extra layer, a dimension
emerges so we may talk about them long after leaving the cinema. Teas-
ing these ideas out in this way is to think dialectically. Thinking is not a
unified, one way activity. Conclusions are never fresh, immediate
thoughts in our head. They are a clash of intelligent, articulate but often
opposing or conflicting ideas that we bring together to reach a different
(some might even say higher) state of mind. These good films set up
166 Terrence Malick
discussion that moves away from simple analysis of the plot and charac-
ters or explosions, car chases, and sex scenes. To return to our Super-
hero example. We may ask if their actions are just when they beat
information out of a suspect or summarily kill an enemy before they
have a chance to defend themselves. These are never simple conclusions
even though an indiscriminate audience may cheer at their actions.
We will approach Terence Malick by paying attention to some very
simple points. When we carefully investigate his elegiac war film a Thin
Red Line, what emerges, I will argue, may draw our attention to three
things. First, the film invites us to rethink the war genre film as it has
been asserted over time. We do this by trying to draw interpretation
and inconsistencies out from beneath the surface of the film, to make
films reveal what (feels like) they have been concealing from us. For
example, the iconic image of the heroic soldier slaying the evil enemy
for the greater good is not a fair, accurate or any way total account of
what war or war films might actually be saying to us. In Malick’s war
film the majority of characters suffer from anxiety and insecurity
brought on by their involvement in the war. The war “at the heart of
nature” is measured as anxiety and security, which constantly plays out
on the screen through Malick’s camera. It is as if as the film unfolds it
comes with its own in disguised contradictions, in which the subject
on-screen has a fatal flaw, that through closer examination we may be
able to discover. Malick’s camera and poetic voice-over in this sense
teases out a dialectical struggle the soldier is having as he fights. There
is a tension between what they are doing and what they are thinking.
They act so brutally and so instinctively for self-preservation and vic-
tory. But inside they are pondering much deeper and darker ques-
tions. They see an evil residing in their quest and hence darkness in
light.
Secondly, if we carefully think through some key scenes in the film we
can see that we can use this rethinking of the war-film genre to preserve
something positive that lies at the heart of the war film. What I mean
here is we can grasp something in the war film that teaches us more
about human behavior than a traditional war film. When we bring these
contradictions forward we learn more than just about the film; we learn
interesting and useful things about the world around us. When the hill is
taken in the film we cannot honestly sit back and say we showed the
enemy a lesson because the enemy becomes distinctly human, we see the
pain of their lost youth and the trauma of what they have been asked to
do. We confront the war at the heart of nature first hand.
Darkness from Light: Dialectics and The Thin Red Line 167
Finally we can take what we have learnt by thinking about the contradic-
tions in the war film and apply it to the general world. This is the philo-
sophical beauty of Malick’s work. It reveals contradictions about the world
around us. It is as if we enter into a conversation or a dialogue with the
film that challenges us to think about a catalogue of issues that are bigger
than the film itself. We talk about the philosophy of the film. The camera
and the voice-over become instructional as well as entertaining. We may
even derive some working knowledge and application about philosophi-
cal concepts such as Truth or Justice as a result of entering into an
exchange with Malick’s important film. Dialectics is a method of argu-
ment whereby two contrary positions are brought together in contest with
the aim of developing a more truthful—or at least—more usable ideas.
To return to the idea of the typical war hero we can grasp dialectical
thinking in action. Take, for example, the iconic war-film hero: John
Wayne’s Col. Mike Kirby in Ray Kellogg’s 1968 The Green Beret’s. Even
though Wayne has all the features of the traditional action hero (strong,
tough, single-minded) we see that he can never be wholly admired because
the viewer cannot ignore the obvious political arguments that were being
waged at the time. America’s war in Vietnam complicates our ability to
make a singular assessment of character and his motivation in this film.
Was he a war hero or a warmonger? He was both because parts of his char-
acter are worthy and virtuous while other parts of his character are not.
There clearly is a tension in the character that we can see dialectically.
In philosophical terms there are two schools of thought. One suggests
that we can find fixed, immutable, and universal truths. The second
thinks that truths are not the really important factor at play, but the
usability or practicality of ideas maybe. What I will claim here is that film
is an excellent tool for fostering discussions about the changing and
unchanging as we have seen with the John Wayne character. When we
look at some of the key scenes of A Thin Red Line we find the traditional
war genre film “moving” ideas from a hidden or concealed position to
one of a higher form testimony that this type of thinking challenges and
enlightens at the same time. This does not happen in the hands of a more
direct or traditional film director and this is why I am claiming that Malick
brings ideas alive by giving us an opportunity to think dialectically.
“What is the war at the heart of Nature”—Witt
I am going to argue Malick is a dialectical film maker par excellence and

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

War films often paint the world as black and white, good and evil as if the
minds of the viewers are already made up. However this “us and them”
dichotomy can be countered through a careful consideration of what it
might be like to hold a contrary view or a different position, which is to
think dialectically. Malick affords this type of Socratic thinking. Thus at
the opening of the film when Witt (James Caviezel) is living with the
Solomon Islanders in their paradise we are immediately challenged to
ask ourselves some very philosophical questions. We do not ask when is
the war going to start, but why are these innocent people so happy? The
war becomes an intrusion, announced by the arrival of the ship into the
frame of the film and the defeated look on Witt’s face.
So what is the war at the heart of nature? All Malick’s films are punctu-
ated by shots of natural surroundings.1 The Thin Red Line opens with a
shot of a crocodile, one of natures great “products.” Let us think this
through dialectically. An animal that has survived for over 200 million
years begins a film about a species that has tried to kill each other for a
couple of hundred thousand years, yet we think of ourselves as the supe-
rior species. Malick might be offering us here a comment on the fragility
and precarious nature of human existence when compared to the more
“eternal” and successful crocodile. The war at the heart of nature is the
war for survival at the hands of whatever forces we subject ourselves to. It
is, seen this way, a dialectical struggle as the environment issues its chal-
lenges. Man, in this light is cast as a player in a drama much bigger than
we can imagine. We are, through Malick’s eye, asked to turn our atten-
tion to this challenge. We can never win this war against nature. How-
ever, we can look at the crocodile and imagine and argue and hypothesize
thoughts that perhaps were hidden behind the way we usually think. Many
people sitting in the cinema will be responding to the crocodile with
thoughts like “dangerous” or “primitive.” But remember this is a war film
and as such the crocodile could also reveal a statement implied by Malick
that after the war moved on and many were killed, turned insane or
irreparably wounded. Yet the crocodile slipped into the water and swam
away unconcerned and untouched. When we think about the film in this
way we can bring these more challenging conclusions about the war-film
genre to the surface. This form of synthesis allows us to shed more light
on what the film means or reveals or instructs. Socrates would have won-
dered how just the war was.
Now as previously stated the war-film genre seems to often lead us to
not conclude this. We may even be impatient to get the crocodile off the
170 Terrence Malick
screen and cut to the soldiers, to get the real film started. But Malick
wants to take his time, or more importantly to show how time is always on
the side of nature, its slow glacial impervious account, that man so rudely
attempts to control.2 The war at the heart of nature is always lost to time
as we can never capture time except for fleeting moments of reflection
and memory. The problem is that we think we do, we have control and we
have fixed knowledge of things, but as we will see below control and
knowledge are always open to challenge. And there is no better way to
see knowledge and control explored than by looking at how command-
ing soldiers think and act.
Show Me How to See the Things the Way You Do:

The Sophistry of Command
In The Thin Red Line the notion of the nature and meaning of command
becomes very central. Each relationship between the soldiers suggests
that the commanding officer is to be critically reflected upon. Here dia-
lectical argument is beautifully exposed by Malick as the camera juxta-
poses the conflicting points of view of the commander and the
commanded. The film raises the question about legitimacy and authority
of those in command as Plato did in many of his dialogues. Plato loathed
sophistry which he saw as a deceptive form of argument. Plato was espe-
cially suspicious of argumentative bullies who won arguments by bluster.
We will look at one critical encounter between Captain Staros (Elias
Kotas) and Lieutenant Col. Tall (Nick Nolte). As the dialectical viewer
“works” through these scenes we see opposed points of view but through
our privileged position as observers of their confrontation we can con-
clude that they are both talking about different versions of the same
topic; loyalty. Staros’ humanistic attitude toward his men is that of the
part and Tall’s holistic attitude to victory is one of the whole. Saros wants
to preserve the life of his men, Tall wants victory at any cost. Saros is calm
and refined, Tall is apoplectic and agitated. The dialectical argument
about who we should be primarily loyal to unfolds as the battle relent-
lessly claims lives on both sides. The argument draws out the equal por-
tions of strength: loyalty to the individual or to the state; a classic
philosophical argument. The powerful effect of Malick’s camera is that
it brings out the tension between both sides and opens a space in the
film for this to be played out. The astute viewer takes in both sides at
once, letting the idea strengthen and gain traction until we see that the
war film here is peripheral to a much larger and more primal battle.
Tall’s attitude through the taking of the bunker represents the attitude
of a nationalistic militarism where death in battle is conceived as a his-
torical necessity for the nation and victory. He makes his point forcefully
and powerfully, but we know, because of the voice-over, that he is wracked
by personal bitterness over his nonpromotion that was given earlier in
the film. Staros sees the waste of each individual as a personal affront to
his connection with the men he has worked and fought with for two and
a half years. Here we have a dialectical exchange where the viewer is
privileged to a trade between one character arguing holistically and the
other responding from an individual standpoint. The construction of
the scene will finally preference Saros, as Malick’s camera cuts between
the inept attempt to take the bunker and the insanity this action is pro-
ducing as well as the lives it is claiming, the minds it is frying. Here com-
mand comes under question because there seems to be limited justice in
the way Tall has gone about victory. It is sophistry in command that moves
us further away rather than closer to some truth about the battle.
The viewer is asked to work through this argument, taking both points
of view. If we are attuned to a philosophical way of thinking here we can
make conclusions about this scene in a more informed frame of mind.
Malick’s sentiment is clearly with Staros as he privileges Staros with the
movement of the camera, the reversion to slow motion, the evocative
soundtrack, and the juxtaposition with the shots of nature. We can empa-
thize with Tall’s predicament and that he has issues of his own, but
because we also have access to Staros’ view as well we do our own dialecti-
cal analysis. And now the idea emerges that this battle to take the bunker
is not going to immediately bring forth a hero and all will be well. But
Malick slowly presents a dialectical analysis with his camera. In the early
stages of the interchange Malick gives us a view from behind the Japanese
machine gun nest that shows the suicidal nature of Tall’s orders. After
Tall decides to assess the situation for himself a young soldier dies in
Staros’ arms. As the boy dies we see the sun poke through the trees jux-
taposed with a soldier holding his ears and screaming. As he dies the
camera slows down, the camera lingers on some dead leaves on a tree. At
his moment of death the dissolve of his dying face is replaced by Tall
walking into the battle. Here we could say Malick is accusing Tall of cul-
pability, that the fragility of life and the taking away of young life is not
just the necessary causality of war but the refusal to see the war from nay
other, grander perspective.
As Tall imposes himself on this scene we are privileged to his voice-over
that reveals he is also dying inside. He says “Shut up in a tomb, cant lift
172 Terrence Malick
the lid.” This access to Tall’s necrophobic thought leads really to the view
that this is no simple documentation of World War II battle, but the con-
fused and complex attempt by men trying to understanding at a much
higher level the place that they are in, its immense fragility, and the love
and stress that emerges in times of inconceivable stress. Tall is on the
surface one hundred percent soldier, but on the inside he is a man torn
apart.
As Staros talks about the net way to process in the taking of the ridge,
Malick allows us back into the insane world of Sergeant McCron (John
Savage) as he plays in the dirt. McCron has crossed the Thin Red Line
into madness, but his descent is a result of Tall’s insistence of their
involvement in the futility of capturing the bunker by regular military
tactics. As this scene ends we are in the advantaged position of being able
to critique both Staros’ and Tall’s dilemma simultaneously. The result is
we know more about the sophistry of command and how it often leads us
to valor or madness. Here is Malick’s cinematic philosophy. The weaving
together of viewpoints and attitude, the juxtaposing of images and coun-
terpoints allows us to think through the scene as an argument that con-
tains multiple sides, perspectives, and inputs. We can begin to understand
how thinking itself is not a binary process of right/wrong or good/bad.
The subtleties and nuances of these scenes display the fundamental
problem with thinking itself. Conclusions are difficult to universalize.
Truth is slippery. It has to be worked at. Malick brings these concerns
onto the screen as revelation.
We can now see that the application of a dialectical methodology takes
us to a different place for our thinking. To extend and build upon this
we will now turn to a different form of dialectical thinking that invites us
to see how A Thin Red Line might teach us something about one of the
greatest dialecticians in philosophical history.
Hegelian Dialectics and the Unhappy Souls
G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) was a notoriously difficult philosopher to

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

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

traumatized men are merely and essentially that, men. Their appeal to
be recognized by us sear their images into the frame as they are overrun,
murdered, tortured, and treated as subhuman. The film makes it very
difficult for us to see victory as absolute or final. We are never fully victo-
rious. Hegel’s dialectical analysis sees us move toward a higher under-
standing, our ideas are sharpened and enhanced. Malick’s camera does
exactly the same thing. To further this thought we will now turn to
Hegel’s celebrated Master/Slave dialectic.
Each Standing in Each Other’s Light:

Masters and Slaves and the Hegelian Dialectic
Hegel’s most famous piece of dialectical analysis tells the story of an

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

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

Karl Marx said in the nineteenth century that all struggles are class strug-
gles and we can see that Malick makes certain we see the working class
soldiers of the United States in their rawness and innocence. Their
naivety resonates within Malick’s voice-overs or in their simple dialogues
with each other. Recall the moment before the landing on the beach
when a scared and innocent Edward B. Train (John Dee Smith), too
young to die and scared witless of it says “I wanna own an automobile
when I get out.”
These words haunt us because the startled looks of his fellow soldiers
could be read as the knowing of their exploitation, their impending
death for a cause that they are not quite settled with. While the immi-
nent battle could be filled with heroic anticipation and statements of
how fearless and patriotic these soldiers could be Malick chooses to film
this with uncertainty and foreboding as the camera moves through the
ship catching conversations of the ignorance and unsettled nature that
these soldiers are in.
What is this battle taking place for? The battle for Guadalcanal was a
battle for “dirt” because it was seen as a vital piece of land in the trans-
port route between Japan and the Australia/Pacific. In the central part
of the film we witness the prize of the U.S. soldiers realized as they storm
the hill being resisted by a bunch of young and very frightened Japanese
soldiers. Malick’s camera here lingers on the insanity and traumas of the
battle as the Japanese solders capitulate. We see the Japanese’s as van-
quished, but more so as alienated from their humanity, reduced to total
victims of the their countries imperialism, but at the same time ridiculed
and shamed, tortured and humiliated by the American version of Impe-
rialism. Here Malick makes negative light of the victory. His camera
shows us the depressing result of what this battle for a small strip of land
in the Pacific really was. The result is the tortured, psychotic, fractured
effect on real human lives. While the generals talk of victory and the poli-
ticians talk of glory, Malick’s camera talks of human suffering. The
Marxists notion of the “negation of the negation” is here. We feel elated
at the negation of the Japanese but our elation is quickly tempered by
the negative aspects of our victory and the realization of its broader con-
sequences. This is the dialectic in action.
Malick’s camera affords us a personal account of how this victory is
always some form of defeat. There is an inherent contradiction in what
178 Terrence Malick
we see here and what we are supposed to feel. There is no glory here, but
we are left with a sour taste in our mouth that these young men on both
sides have been reduced to this.
This form of the dialectic is how Marxists saw the history of the world
always spiraling forwards. At the bottom of the political chain working
class, poor men were enlisted to fight for causes that their so-called supe-
riors had encouraged them to do. Marxian dialectics encouraged us to
take a political stance in the historical struggle and in a way Malick’s
camera does that. Nobody is innocent. There are no real simple answers
to be had here. The world is a contradiction and a struggle. Philosophy
attempts to untangle it but sometimes finds itself becoming even more
entangled through its exploration. The Thin Red Line helps make that
tangle even more sumptuous and enticing to think about. It shows us
that in the moment of light, darkness is waiting to be revealed. Thinking
about the film takes us to another level of thinking itself. This is the dia-
lectic in action. It is worth repeated viewings.
Notes
1
Consider the caged chicken in Badlands, the shots of the fields in Days of Heaven,
or the natural habitats in The New World.
2
For an excellent discussion of this idea in Malick’s work see www.film-
philosophy.com/vol6–2002/n48critchley (accessed on February 2010).
Chapter 10
Song of the Earth: Cinematic Romanticism

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

“innocence of becoming,” as Nietzsche once said).
How, then, to approach this enigmatic and untimely work? Celebrated
and criticized at once as Hollywood’s most elusive auteur, Malick’s work
has always attracted an ambivalent mixture of critical admiration and
mixed box-office success.4 The New World is no exception, presenting a
strikingly poetic evocation of one of America’s founding myths, the story
of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith. Following nineteenth-century
tradition, Malick renders the latter as a romantic tale of thwarted love,
misguided ambition, and spiritual reconciliation; but unlike tradition,
he lingers on the ambiguous dimensions of intercultural conflict,
explores diverging attitudes toward nature between Old and New Worlds,
and shifts the narrative focus toward the usually neglected marriage
between Pocahontas/Rebecca and tobacco grower John Rolfe. Despite
its apparent shift into the genre of historical epic, it resonates deeply
with his other, generically idiosyncratic works—Badlands (USA 1973),
Days of Heaven (USA 1978), and The Thin Red Line (USA 1998)—by pre-
senting a mesmerizing philosophical meditation on our relationship
with nature, our experience of mortality, and the nature of love. Indeed,
if The New World can be understood as historical, spanning the founding
of Jamestown in Virginia in 1607 to Pocahontas’s death at Gravesend,
England, in 1617, it is history in the form of mythic poetry (akin to how
The Thin Red Line presents the historical Battle of Guadalcanal in a man-
ner evoking Homer’s Iliad).5
With this emphasis on myth in mind, I shall approach The New World as
a work of cinematic romanticism that attempts to transform the familiar
Pocahontas legend by presenting the historical encounter between Old
and New Worlds in the register of poetic myth rather than historical fact.
In the words of Pocahontas/Rebecca, The New World seeks to “sing the
story of our land”; it is a “song of the earth” in a romantic key, evoking
not only Heidegger and Nietzsche but Emerson and Cavell. The film’s
central romantic narrative—the love triangle between Pocahontas/
Rebecca, John Smith, and John Rolfe—has an important allegorical
meaning in at least two registers: the possibility of a successful marriage
or cultural exchange between Old and New Worlds, and the possibility of
achieving a kind of reconciliation with nature—our own mortal nature
as well as the nature upon which we depend—that would sustain any
such intercultural reconciliation.
At the same time, the film attempts to present an “impossible” experi-
ence fusing mythic history, intensively subjective reflection, and a
Song of the Earth: The New World 181
metaphysical perspective in which nature itself speaks. This audacious

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

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

renewing its original promise. In short, I want to suggest that the audac-
ity—but also questionability—of Malick’s romanticism is to rejuvenate
the Pocahontas myth not only to retrieve the possibility of reconciliation
between cultures, but to suggest the possibility of a “New World” in which
human dependence upon nature is acknowledged as the basis for any
enduring intercultural or historical reconciliation.
The Pocahontas Legend
The difficulties involved in writing about Malick’s idiosyncratic films are

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

to such an extent that the original ‘facts’ (if they are certain enough to
be worthy of the name) have been distorted and obscured.”15 The basic
historical elements of the tale are as follows.16
In 1616, explorer and adventurer Captain John Smith, one of the early
colonists in Jamestown, Virginia, recounted in a letter how some ten years
previously a young teenage girl called Pocahontas, daughter of Powhaten,
chief of the Algonquian Indians, intervened to save his life after he was
captured and taken to Powhaten’s residence at Werowocomoco, 12 miles
from Jamestown.17 Smith describes how after a feast with the chief, he was
forced to lie down across two large stones, with natives poised above him
ready to beat him to death with clubs, until Pocahontas intervened and
his life was spared. In all probability, Smith was subjected to a traditional
ritual involving a symbolic death and rebirth that would initiate him into
the community; and Pocahontas was most likely performing her pre-
scribed role in intervening and sparing his life (the stylized presentation
of this legendary event in Malick’s film suggests precisely this kind of
“symbolic” death and rebirth ritual).18 Over the following year, the lively
Pocahontas (a nickname in Algonquin meaning “wanton one” or “play-
ful one”) develops friendly relations with the colonists, reportedly visiting
the colony to trade food and furs or to play games with the local boys (her
cartwheels are mentioned); though she greatly admires Captain Smith
and frequently talks with him, there is no suggestion of any romantic
relationship between them. In 1609 Smith is forced to return to England
(due to serious injuries sustained from a gunpowder explosion), where
he remains for the rest of his life. Upon her next visit to Jamestown
Pocahontas is told that Smith has been killed.
In 1613 Pocahontas is kidnapped and held for ransom by an enterpris-
ing Jamestown resident, Captain Samuel Argall. She returns to Powhaten
in 1613 in exchange for part of the ransom and some English prisoners
and arms in his possession. She moves to another settlement, Henrico,
where she begins her education in the Christian faith, then meets and
starts a relationship with tobacco planter John Rolfe. After a raid on
Powhaten’s territory by Sir Thomas Dale (leader of Henrico) and his
men, bent on extracting the remaining ransom from Powhaten, the
Algonquians attack and the Englishmen respond by burning houses,
burning villages, and killing a number of natives. Pocahontas is eventu-
ally released, explains that she has been treated well while in captivity,
and that she wants to marry John Rolfe. Powhaten consents and the
Englishmen withdraw, the marriage between Pocahontas, now baptized
as Rebecca, and Rolfe (in July, 1614) signaling a welcome end to hostili-
ties between the colonists and the natives. Smith, a deeply religious man,
explains his reasons for marrying a “heathen” as being for the good of
the plantation, the good of the colony, and for the greater Glory of God
(a line quoted directly during an important scene in the film).
Sir Thomas Dale leads an important expedition back to England in
1616 to secure financial support for the Virginia Company and brings
along a dozen Algonquian Indians, including Pocahontas/Rebecca, to
ensure maximum publicity for the cause. Accompanied by husband and
child, Pocahontas’s arrival in England, as the “Indian Princess,” is the
subject of great interest (one of the few contemporary portraits of
Pocahontas shows her in Tudor dress). She is received at court of King
James I, introduced to the Royal Family and to the best of London soci-
ety. While in London, she learns that Captain Smith is in fact alive and
has a meeting with him. At first too emotional to speak, Pocahontas/
Rebecca later addresses him as “father,” a term to which Smith objects
but upon which she insists. In March 1617, Rolfe and his wife planned
to return to Virginia, but Pocahontas/Rebecca fell gravely ill at the com-
mencement of their return journey. She reminds Rolfe, distraught at
the prospect of her impending death, that “all things must die,” and
that “it was enough that their child should live.” She succumbed to her
illness and was buried in a churchyard at Gravesend, England. She was
22 years old.
From Mythic History to Cinematic Poetry
How to retell this romantic tale of the encounter between worlds, of the
possibility of experiencing a new worlds or one’s own world anew, in a
skeptical and spiritless age? Critics have generally tried to resist The
New World’s romantic naivety (through irony or skepticism) or restricted
it to autobiography.19 Here I would like to propose an alternative inter-
pretation of this naivety, and a response to the critical ambivalence it
provokes.
First we should reflect on what it means to describe the film as “naïve,”
which in everyday speech refers to someone who lacks worldly experi-
ence, who is ignorant of the way of the world, or perhaps “otherworldly”
in his or her vision of things. In an aesthetic context, however, we can
speak of a naive style, which refers to a conscious attempt to produce this
kind of untutored, spontaneous, childlike, or “primitive” vision of the
186 Terrence Malick
world or treatment of subject matter. Critics of The New World, however,

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

nated against the water’s surface reflecting the sky, followed by an image
of Private Witt serenely paddling his canoe on the water’s surface, greet-
ing the local fishermen, a beautiful new world that serves as idyllic back-
drop for the violent encounter between worlds that is soon to follow.
These subaquatic images have featured regularly in Malick’s films, for
example, Bill’s extraordinary death scene in Days from Heaven (1978),
which shows, again from below the water’s surface, as it were the reverse
sequence, from life to death: Richard Gere’s face crashing into the water
after having been fatally shot in the back.21 Crucial scenes from The New
World will also feature water or a return to water, Pocahontas/Rebecca
praying to her Mother/Spirit, or at the end of the film, standing, fully
clothed, joyously smiling having been immersed in water at the moment
her spirit is released in death, or the concluding images of water running
over rocks before the final sublime shot of treetops swaying in the wind.
The opening image of The New World, accompanied by gradually swell-
ing horns announcing Wagner’s famous “Rheingold” prelude, features
naked figures swimming amidst fish and against the sunlit surface of the
water.22 Momentarily we glimpse a beautiful young woman, her face seen
from an underwater perspective, her hand gently touching the water’s
surface. The extended cut of the film dwells on the figure of young girls,
one in particular, swimming gracefully beneath the surface, with a voice-
over, possibly hers, that continues: “Dear Mother, you fill the land with
your beauty. You reach to the end of the world. How shall I seek you?
You, the great river that never runs dry.” We cut to an image of strong,
young men, seen again from beneath the water’s surface, pointing
intently off into the distance. The next shot reveals three ships, imposing
and grand, entering the harbor and announcing the central contrast of
the film: between the New World, that is also a mythic world immersed
in nature, and the Old World, that is an historical world of the colonial
settlers who have come to establish the first permanent colony on these
shores (an intertitle announces that we are about to enter (Western) his-
tory: Virginia, 1607). The images of the ships’ occupants, commanders,
sailors, and the like, show a mixture of responses, from wariness, and
caution to amazement and wonder.
A porthole image—a frame within the film frame—shows the ships
sailing into harbor from yet another perspective beneath the surface of
things. From a darkened background we see a handsome face emerge, a
prisoner in chains peering out toward the world, then gazing skyward,
hands outstretched, echoing the image of Pocahontas worshipping in
188 Terrence Malick
the prologue; his purpose here, however, is not to worship but rather to
catch the water dripping down on his face from the grill up on deck. The
images of Pocahontas and Smith, however, are already linked and
twinned; the contrasts between freedom and constraint, community and
exile, new and old worlds, already deftly set into motion.
The film cuts back to the excited figures on shore, running from their
village to a higher vantage point from which they can see the strange
apparition. Our attention is drawn to one character in particular,
Pocahontas, whose perspective and response frames that of her people
and of the film itself, gazing in amazement as the ships sail closer to
shore. The film cuts back to the handsome prisoner on the ship, peering
again through a porthole, an image that neatly frames another of long-
boats heading toward the shore, as he smiles in joyful anticipation. These
two are destined to meet, their worlds to collide, their fates to entwine;
yet this is an encounter whose outcome cannot, as yet, be anticipated,
nor one in which our background knowledge of the legend or subse-
quent history of Pocahontas and John Smith is supposed to figure in our
response. It is a moment preparing for an encounter between worlds,
between myth and history, an encounter that the film signals shall be
presented in a manner that is naive, mythic, and poetic rather than doc-
umentary, historical, or political. Let us add an encounter between
worlds that raises the question of marriage, a question presented in a
romantic key, as the Wagnerian prelude, the first of three appearances of
this same prelude in the film, vividly attests.
The second time the Wagner prelude appears is to signal the blossom-
ing of love between Pocahontas and John Smith, a nuptials already
hinted or prefigured in the opening sequence of the film.23 Another
voice-over by Pocahontas begins, again evoking or questioning her
Mother/spirit: “Mother, where do you live? In the sky? The clouds? The
sea?” We see images of the interior of a hut, filled with smoke and statues
(one of the many varieties of interior dwellings to be found in The New
World, as well as in The Thin Red Line), and of Pocahontas worshipping
the sky. An image of the roof of the hut, open to the sky but framed by a
small windowlike opening, releasing smoke, rhymes with but also inverts
the earlier image of Smith’s vision of the windowlike opening above the
hold of the ship, a grilled prison cell opening into which water would
drip down to his face. “Give me a sign,” says Pocahontas, “We rise. We
rise.” Like smoke from a fire or clouds from the sea, the spirit rises into
the firmament; love takes flight, spanning immeasurable distances. In
the extended version of the film, we see an image of Pocahontas’s actual

mother (played by Irene Bedard), face painted white and reciting a rit-
ual incantation, followed by lyrical and poignant images of Pocahontas
and John Smith, their wordless, expressive love beginning to flower, with
all the exhilaration, joy, and fear that involves: “Afraid of myself. A god
he seems to me.” Her growing self-understanding is figured in a moving
vignette showing Pocahontas regarding her image in a broken shard of
mirror, laughing delightedly at her image. “What else is life but being
near you,” the voice asks, as they regard a book together, Smith showing
her pictures of that wonder of the Old World, the city of London.
Pocahontas’s growing recognition of her love for Smith, and for the
potential transgression this might entail, is signaled in her reflections on
how they appear to others in her community, and the knowledge that
this blossoming love is nonetheless fated not to last: “Do they suspect?
Oh, to be given to you. You to me.”
The voice-over here and throughout this sequence is punctuated by
images of trees, water, birds soaring; a rapturous fusion of nature, spirit,
and becoming: “Two no more. One. One, I am. I am,” as images of water
appear once again along with treetops reaching for the sky, images of
Pocahontas and Smith together. The E flat major “drone” of the Wagner
prelude has swelled to its fullest intensity by this point, as we cut to an
image of a Powhaten native calling to one of the pair, at which point
Smith now begins to speak, narrating how he was suddenly freed by the
King, and told he would be sent back to his own people, in order to tell
them that they could stay until the spring, after which “they were to go
back from where they came.” Against images of Pocahontas taking plea-
sure in the scent of drying tobacco leaves and giving thanks to the sky,
Smith is returned to fortresslike Jamestown, bearing food and gifts for
the coming winter. The music fades and finally stops as he is lead into the
gray, muddy, and depressing fort, the Wagnerian prelude replaced by
the sound of barking dogs and a desolate whistling wind.
The Wagnerian prelude has shifted here from an anthem announcing
the theme of encounter between old and new worlds, and the linked
fates of Pocahontas and Smith, to the accompaniment and expression of
their burgeoning love, their realization of the limits and impossibility of
this love. It communicates Smith’s return from the other world, his idyl-
lic sojourn with Pocahontas and life within the Powhaten community—
“there’s only this, nothing else is real”—to the stark reality of his other
life as soon-to-be commander of a derelict and dying colony. Wagner’s
190 Terrence Malick
romantic theme, which first announced the encounter between Old and
New Worlds, has shifted into an anthem for a vibrant but impossible love;
the irreconcilable clash between worlds that demands that both Smith
and Pocahontas sacrifice their love for the sake of community and tradi-
tion, conquest and colonization.
Indeed, it is precisely this theme of marriage as expressing the possibil-
ity of a reconciliation between Old and New Worlds, but also of the
discovery—or recollection—of another way of inhabiting the earth, that
holds various parts or elements of The New World together. Marriage—or
better, remarriage, as is the case with Pocahontas/Rebecca—unites aes-
thetically the allegorical dimensions of the Pocahontas myth. The “natu-
ral” marriage between Pocahontas and Smith is superseded by the
“cultural” marriage between Rebecca and Rolfe. Indeed, it is only with
Rolfe (farmer and cultivator), rather than Smith (leader and adven-
turer), that the nuptials between naturalized culture and cultivated
nature can be fleetingly realized.
This romantic myth of “impossible” marriage is what enables Malick to
hold open, in a space of poetic wonder, the possibility of a world other
than either the Old or the New. This would be a genuinely “New World”—
experienced through Malick’s immersive cinema—grounded upon a
renewed relationship with the earth, without which the possibility of
mutual recognition between worlds degenerates into conflict and domi-
nation. This knowingly romanticist gesture—proposing an aesthetic
mythology in order to heal the breach of reason and feeling, nature and
culture—captures the heart of Malick’s supposed “naivety.” The New
World is a knowingly mythic recasting of the Pocahontas/Rebecca story
as a poetic meditation on what marriage between cultures, but also
between human culture and nature, might mean.
In Praise of Cinematic Romanticism
Let us consider the extraordinary concluding sequence of the film, fol-

lowing Rebecca’s poignant parting from Smith in the English gardens
and her emotional reconciliation with Rolfe (“my husband,” she whis-
pers). With the film’s third recitation of the Rheingold prelude, its origi-
nal mythical meaning in Wagner’s opera has now been effectively
reversed.24 As we have seen, we hear it the first time at the beginning of
the film, accompanied by underwater images of fish and native figures
swimming, followed by images of the arrival of the Colonists’ ships, much
to the amazement of the “naturals” watching from shore. The second

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

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

torical detail and aesthetic mythology, intimate subjectivity and “inhu-
man” nature. The audacity of The New World’s romanticism is to allow,
through cinematic poetry, nature to reveal or disclose itself as a “sub-
ject,” as a participant in this mythic history. This is a perspective that
requires all of Malick’s cinematic art to make meaningful, something we
might affectively experience, or that might even provoke us to thought—if
only we are open to this possibility.
Viewed from our historical perspective, this romanticism is know-
ingly untimely, in Nietzsche’s sense: acting against the prejudices of the
age in favor of a time to come. Malick’s romantic naivety is a refusal of
the “worldliness” that would presume to know the meaning of the his-
torical and cultural conflict between worlds, or indeed between human
worlds and the earth upon which they depend. This is signaled explic-
itly in the extended “director’s cut” of The New World, which is pref-
aced by a quotation from Captain John Smith warning that those who
think they have experienced Virginia “do not understand or know
what Virginia is.” Malick’s romantic naivety remains true to Smith’s
warning against the arrogance of historical worldliness—and Smith
should know, having renounced nature and love in favor of history
and conquest, but in the process having “sailed past” his true Indies,
as Pocahontas/Rebecca remarks. Indeed, we still do not know, as
Heidegger once observed, what worlds are; let alone how to under-
stand the birth of worlds, or how to foster their flourishing in a man-
ner consonant with the acknowledgment of human plurality and
finitude.
That this is a risky aesthetic undertaking is undeniable, for it conflicts
with our shared skepticism toward “the New”: a skepticism characteristic
of our sense of historical disappointment following the collapse of
Enlightenment hopes—or what Nietzsche famously called “European
nihilism.” Malick rejuvenates this possibility of experiencing the New—
an American sublimity, we might say—through the poetic power of
myth. We can experience this mythic history, however, only aesthetically,
through cinematic poetry, and then only fleetingly. In the film’s final
rhapsodic sequence, the fusion of musical and visual sublimity give way
to the sound of water running over rocks, of insects and bird song,
and of wind whistling through the treetops. Malick’s “song of the
earth” is thus an aesthetic challenge to our historical skepticism, which
always treats romantic naivety—our openness to the experience of new
worlds—as untenable and unworldly.
194 Terrence Malick
Notes
1
Malick’s fifth film, Tree of Life, is due for release in late 2011.
2
Lloyd Michaels, Terrence Malick (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 84.
Simon Critchley, for example, remarks of The New World: “Very sadly, I have
come to the view that the less said about the latter the better.” Critchley does
not reveal the basis for his dismissal of the film (27).
3
Adrian Martin, “Approaching the New World,” The Cinema of Terrence Malick:
Poetic Visions of America, ed. Hanna Patterson, 2nd ed. (London: Wallflower
Press, 2007), 218.
4
Martin Flanagan, “ ‘Everything a Lie’: The Critical and Commercial Reception
of Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line,” The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic
Visions of America, ed. Hanna Patterson, 138–9.
5
A point well made by Simon Critchley: “If we cast the Japanese in the role of
the Trojans, and Guadalcanal in the place of Troy, then The Thin Red Line
might be said to recount the prehistory of American empire in the same way
as Homer recites the prehistory of Hellenic supremacy” (12).
6
Simon Critchley, Very Little . . . Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature,
revised edition (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 99–114. Critchley
offers a different account of romantic naivety than that which I discuss here
with reference to The New World. For Critchley, the “naïveté of romanticism is
the conviction that the crisis of the modern world can best be addressed by
art,” in particular through poetry, or the marriage of philosophy and litera-
ture in the novel as the ideal romantic poetic form (1997, 99). Malick shares
this romantic naivety concerning the power of art but transposes it to film as
the ideal romantic poetic form.
7
Martin, “Approaching the New World,” 213.
8
For a critical analysis of these ambivalent responses to The New World see
Robert Sinnerbrink, “From Mythic History to Cinematic Poetry: Terrence
Malick’s The New World Viewed.” Screening the Past, Issue 26: Early Europe
(December 2009), www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/26/early-europe/
the-new-world.html
9
James Morrison and Thomas Shur, The Films of Terrence Malick (Westport:
Praeger, 2003), 199.
10
Lee Hwanhee, “Terrence Malick,” Senses of Cinema, 2002, http://archive.sense-
sofcinema.com/contents/directors/02/malick.html
11
12
Lloyd Michaels notes that “Malick had been working with Benicio del Toro for
some time on a biopic about Che Guevera when the project foundered for
lack of financing” (81). He is currently completing a film titled The Tree of Life
with Sean Penn and Brad Pitt (replacing Heath Ledger). Due for release at
the end of 2011, The Tree of Life is a tale of innocence and experience set in the
1950s Midwest; it is simply described as “a cosmic epic, a hymn to life.”
13
Pocahontas and John Smith (1924, Bryan Foy), Captain John Smith and Pocahontas
(1953, Lew Landers), Pocahontas (1994 animated film, Toshiyuki Hiruma
Takashi), Disney’s Pocahontas (animation film, 1995), and the Disney sequel,
Pocahontas II: Journey to a New World (1998).
14
Pocahontas (USA 1995). At least one commentator has claimed that the Disney
version is a primary reference for Malick’s The New World, a claim based largely
upon the emphasis on the romantic involvement between Pocahontas and
Smith and the appearance of actors (Irene Bedard and Christian Bale) from
the Disney version in Malick’s film (in which Bedard plays Pocahontas’s
mother and Bale her husband John Rolfe) (see Macdonald 2009, 100–1). It
seems far more likely that the romantic story between Pocahontas and Smith
is taken up because it serves Malick’s artistic purposes: first, because it allows
Malick to explore the theme of love in more depth than in his previous films
(the love triangle between Pocahontas, Smith, and Rolfe recalling, but also
differing from, that between Abby, Bill, and the Farmer in Days of Heaven); and
secondly, because it also provides the opportunity to develop the allegorical
significance of the theme of marriage and the possibility of reconciliation
between cultures, or more deeply, between human culture and nature.
15
Edward Buscombe, “What New in The New World?” Film Quarterly 62, no. 3
(Spring 2009), 35.
16
I draw here on the accounts of Buscombe (2009), D’Entremont (2007). See
also Woodward (1969).
17
Popular usage substitutes the Algonquin term for “chief” (Powhaten) with the
name of Pocahontas’s father (Wahnunsunackock). Pocahontas’s actual name
was Matoaka.
18
As noted by Michaels (2009) and Martin (2007). For a historian’s critique of
the historical distortions in Malick’s romantic rendering of the tale see
D’Entremont (2007).
19
See Sinnerbrink, “From Mythic History to Cinematic Poetry.”
20
As Adrian Martin notes, this verse is an example of Malick’s remarkable use of
preexisting versions of the Pocahontas tale, in this case echoing and rework-
ing “a poem by that great on-the-spot theorist of silent film, Vachel Lindsay
(1917),” titled, “Our Mother/Pocahontas” (2007, 215). Lines from Lindsay’s
poem—“We rise from out of the soul of her” and “Because we are her fields of
corn—are directly referenced in the voice-over to Malick’s film. The New World
also resonates with the kind of imagery, sympathy for Pocahontas, and renun-
ciation of English/American and Western European ancestry to be found in
the Lindsay poem (2007, 215). Malick, however, submits it to a subtle rewrit-
ing: Lindsay takes Pocahontas to be the “sacred mother” figure, whereas in
The New World Pocahontas is a seeker searching for her Mother, “the ‘spirit’
whom she invokes in order to sing the story of our land’ ” (2007, 215).
21
The film also features a suitably romantic-aquatic signature piece, “Aquar-
ium,” from Saint-Saëns’ Le Carnaval des Animaux.
22
The prelude to Das Rheingold begins with the three Rhine maidens swimming
beneath the surface of the water. They mock the ugly Alberich, a Nibelung
dwarf, who steals the famous Rhine gold they were supposed to guard. In
stealing the Rhein gold, which can only be acquired abandoning love in favor
of wealth and power, he fashions a magic ring that gives its bearer the power
to rule the world. It is not difficult to discern the parallels in Malick’s recasting
of this mythic scene to the Virginian tidewater region, which commences with
native American water maidens and the arriving colonists (including,
196 Terrence Malick
ironically, John Smith) embodying Alberich’s rejection of nature and love in

favor of power and wealth. It is also used, to quite different effect, in Werner
Herzog’s marvelous Nosferatu (1979).
23
The other piece of music used to articulate the relationship between
Pocahontas/Rebecca and Smith is from Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23.
24
As mentioned above, this prelude evokes the moment in Das Rheingold “when
the mythical character Alberich, a Nibelung dwarf, steals the river Rhine’s
golden treasure, renouncing love in favor of wealth and power” (d’Entremont
1024).
25
Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed, enlarged edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1979), 214.
Chapter 11
Whereof One Cannot Speak:

Terrence Malick’s The New World
Elizabeth Walden
Invocation
Terence Malick’s film The New World (2005) opens with an inverted image
of trees and sky, a reflection in water, which foreshadows, perhaps, the
upending of our expectations of the world we will encounter in the film.
Soon thereafter we hear the voice we will come to recognize as that of
Matoaka, the daughter of the Powhaten chief popularly known as
Pocahontas.1 The voice says “come spirit, help us sing this story of our
land. You are our mother. We need this field of corn. We rise from out of
the soul of you.” Then we see Pocahontas shot from a low angle as she
gestures overhead to the sky.
Malick’s narrators are never obviously authorial and often evince views
shaped by limited or transient perspectives. The separation of the voice-
over from the image of the Pocahontas creates ambiguity as well because
it severs voice and speaker, language from image, a move which has
become the hallmark of Malick’s mature style. Nevertheless, I want to
address this invocation as offered in good faith. The film, I propose, does
indeed seek to “sing the story of our land.” I recognize that this may
seem an unlikely claim for a contribution to a volume on Malick and
philosophy. An invocation evokes a connection to an oral tradition of
myths and stories more than philosophy.2 But, this film, I suggest, makes
a philosophical intervention through that gesture and encourages us to
think philosophically about myths and stories in relation to a modern
approach ostensibly distinct from such. Malick sides with myth, I argue,
not against a modern view of the world, but after having undermined the
self-assurance of the modern exception, the idea that the modern point
of view bears a relationship to the world essentially distinct from that of
myth. In the end, I think that Malick attempts to show us something in
198 Terrence Malick
his film whereof one cannot easily speak: though our ways of knowing
the world are material forces within it, the world is nevertheless irreduc-
ible to their terms and, importantly, this ought to be a cause of wonder,
even humility, before it.
Myth and History
The New World seems to address its subject matter from two seemingly
incompatible approaches: myth and history. And it approaches both, not
casually, but with great intention, suggesting a unified, if not initially
clear purpose. If we take the invocation in good faith—if the film seeks
to “sing the story of our land,” we enter into the realm of myth or legend.
But how are we to regard such? How do we know if it has hit its mark? We
moderns regard myths as inaccurate or mystified accounts of the facts of
the matter, a fanciful mistelling of history or natural science. Of course,
we are accustomed to fiction and yet fiction and myth are not the same
thing. Fiction makes no claim to truth, while myths are often meant to be
explanatory.
If the film itself indicates a relation to myth by opening with an invoca-
tion, this relation is redoubled by the fact that the central narrative of
The New World is also mythic. The film presents the familiar legend of
Pocahontas and John Smith as lovers. Pocahontas, according to the leg-
end, saved her beloved’s life, throwing herself upon him, when her
people sought to kill him. But historical consensus is that Pocahontas
and John Smith were never lovers, despite what Smith claimed some
17 years after the fact, and that Smith misinterpreted what happened to
him: what he took for a near death experience was probably part of a
ritual accepting him into the tribal community.3 Malick depicts the
frightening confusion during Smith’s capture and acceptance into the
tribe, and so gives a sympathetic, but historically plausible, representa-
tion of Smith’s experience. But the film clearly suggests that there was a
great love between Pocahontas and John Smith. And the story of that
love is at the center of the film, even after Smith has set out for parts
unknown.
In an interview on National Public Radio, The New World’s producer,
Sarah Green, said, “if the legend hadn’t lasted as powerfully as it has, I
don’t think we’d have gone there. But that legend has lasted, and it’s
very resonant, and like the great legendary affairs, it has a power of its
own.”4 I think that the “resonance” that Green mentions, the “power” of
Whereof One Cannot Speak: The New World 199
the legend, contributes something an attempt to set the record straight

regarding the relationship would not be able to capture. But recall that
the story the invocation addresses is “the story of our land,” not of indi-
viduals. The film is called The New World, not Pocahontas and John Smith.
So we may surmise the historical inaccuracy, the legend of Pocahontas
and John Smith, is present in the service of telling “the story of our land,”
the new world the film explores.
The film does not simply present us with myth, however; it purports to
treat historical figures and events: Pocahontas, John Smith, John Rolfe,
and the founding of Jamestown. And except for the legend of the love
between Pocahontas and John Smith, the film is deeply dependent upon
the historical record.5 The film shows familiarity with the literature of its
subject, both the history and the first-hand accounts of colonists; we
know Malick sought advice from a range of expert sources. The costumes
and artifacts were made out of period appropriate materials, often with
period tools. He researched flora and fauna, planting a strain of heritage
corn for the film, rather than using more common engineered varieties.
Malick hired linguist Blair Rudes, an expert in language revitalization,
the reconstruction of lost languages, to recreate the Algonquian lan-
guage of the historical Powhaten peoples, which was lost as the Powhatens
were decimated and driven from the land.
Malick is committed, as well, to capturing material reality in rich and
natural detail in his films. To this end he avoids artificial lighting and
effects. He prefers the use of handheld cameras. The only digital effect
in the film was an animated insert of a Carolina Parakeet that is extinct,
but would have been seen at the time the story was to have taken place.
Malick’s foregrounding of myth in the film’s invocation suggests sym-
pathy with the world of myth, but how this is so and how the film “sings
the story of our land” requires that we move in two different directions:
first, in the next section, we dig deeper into the specific world of the film.
And then, in the section that follows, we will consider Malick’s mythic
relationship with philosophy and the concept of world he encountered
there.
Two Worlds
Malick’s use of both myth and history create a film world which engages
at the level of representation a distinction that is recapitulated thematically
in the film itself in the meeting of the Powhaten and the Jamestown
colonists and the two cultures they represent.
200 Terrence Malick
After the invocation that begins the film, the titles are shown. If
Pocahontas has already invoked the world of the Native Americans, we
next confront the radically different world of the Europeans. We see
maps in the style of the period showing the Atlantic and the American
coast, we see unknown areas fill in as the corollary, we presume, of explo-
ration, we see botanical drawings and drawings of wildlife and engrav-
ings of natives in pitched battle with colonists.
In the difference between the world of the invocation and the titles,
Malick contrasts the oral culture of ritual and gesture, the human
stretched out between earth and sky and the culture of the book, the
map, the engraving, with the human directing its representations as if
from the outside. The “story of our land” concerns these seemingly
incommensurable worlds in contact.
Malick makes the difference between these worlds palpable. Except
for the enchanting “Indian princess,” Pocahontas, the members of the
Powhaten tribe are represented as almost shockingly “other.”
Native American critic Leo Killsback connects these depictions to a
lineage of racist cinematic imagery:
The European arrival to The New World is much like the astronauts’
arrival on The Planet of the Apes. There seems to be no sign of intelli-
gence. Although there are beings that do possess both human and
animal characteristics, for the most part they are as wild as the deer
and as pitiful as toddler children in need of guardians . . . The random
movements of the Powhatan people were akin to those of monkeys, or
like the indigenous people depicted in the latest King Kong. They
lacked any sophistication or anything human.6
As Killsback indicates the physical comportment of the Native Americans

is especially striking. At the first meeting between the Native Americans
and the colonists, the former appear distinctly animalistic.7 They make
animalistic hoots, their first inclination is to smell the colonists, their
highly decorated appearance is deeply strange. They are high-strung and
jumpy: the voice-over confirms that they seem “timid—like a herd of
curious deer.”
Yet, despite the shock that the images produce, I do not think that
Malick’s imagery is racist, nor do I think that he implies any hierarchy
between these cultures—indeed, just the opposite. I think that he is try-
ing to respect both the radical difference between these cultures and the
nature of the difference. Malick represents two different people with

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

the story of our land, not to be relegated to Disney and its youthful
audience.
Showing the World: A Myth about Terrence Malick,

Philosophy, and Filmmaking
A set of biographical facts about Terrence Malick and his relationship to

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

understanding of the tradition of skepticism and a concept of the ordi-
nary that leads to a complex engagement with the Henry David Thoreau,
Ralph Waldo Emerson, literature, film and daily life. Malick undoubt-
edly got from Cavell a rich sense of what the analytic tradition in philoso-
phy could do, which included an open and productive engagement
between analytic and continental philosophy.
One can imagine the excitement, when Malick, upon winning the
prestigious Rhodes Scholarship, followed his interests to Britain, the
spiritual home of Analytic Philosophy, where Wittgenstein developed his
best work. The opportunity to work with Gilbert Ryle, a leading Ordinary
Language Philosopher, heavily influenced by Wittgenstein, must have
felt like drawing nearer to the source. It is said that Wittgenstein’s physi-
cal mannerisms lived on in even the fourth generation of his acolytes.11
And one can imagine the crushing disappointment of having his project
idea, so clearly inspired to a great degree by Wittgenstein, belittled by
Ryle as insufficiently philosophical.
Malick’s project on the concept of world in Kierkegaard, Heidegger
and Wittgenstein, is the sort of project that he could have worked on
with Cavell, with this latter’s generous understanding of the implications
of Wittgenstein’s work. Ironically, it seems the closer Malick drew to the
world that nurtured Wittgenstein’s thought, the further he was from the
rich ferment of the ideas that fueled his interests.
Wittgenstein’s work has the strange distinction of inspiring schools of
thought that drew wildly disparate implications from his work. Ryle’s
masterwork, The Concept of Mind, for example, seeks to explode a myth he
famously refers to as “the dogma of the Ghost in the machine.”12 Accord-
ing to such, we have both bodies and minds: there is some sort of mental
substance that exists separately but analogously to body. Now mind/body
dualism has been attacked from many quarters that need not be rehearsed
here, but Ryle’s particular response is of interest for understanding his
version of the legacy of Wittgenstein. The problem with the concept of
mind, according to Ryle, is not that it is part of an incorrect theory, or
that it perpetuates an ideology, but that it involves a “category mistake.”
The concept of mind is a “dogma” that “represents the facts of mental
life as if they belonged to one logical type or category . . . , when they
actually belong to another.”13
Ryle clarifies that “a myth is, of course, not a fairy story. It is the presen-
tation of facts belonging to one category in the idioms appropriate to
another. To explode a myth is accordingly not to deny the facts but to
204 Terrence Malick
re-allocate them.”14 So a myth is an attempt to represent the truth, but

one which founders on confusion about the sort of thing that one is talk-
ing about and the rules that apply to such talking. In the case of the
concept of mind: “certain sorts of operations with the concepts of men-
tal powers and processes are breaches of logical rules.”15
We can imagine then that the concept of world may seem to Ryle to be
something akin to mind, a concept which seems deeply significant only
as a result of a category mistake. We can imagine an analogy based on
Ryle’s famous example of someone misunderstanding the logic of the
concept of “university”:
A foreigner visiting Oxford or Cambridge for the first time is shown a

number of colleges, libraries, playing fields, museums, scientific
departments and administrative offices. He then asks “But where is the
University? I have seen where the members of the Colleges live, where
the Registrar works, where the scientists experiment and the rest. But
I have not yet seen the University in which reside and work the mem-
bers of your University.” It has then to be explained to him that the
University is not another collateral institution, some ulterior counter-
part to the colleges, laboratories and offices he has seen. The University
is just the way in which all that he has already seen is organized. When
they are seen and when their coordination is understood, the University
has been seen . . . . He was mistakenly allocating the University to the
same category as that to which the other institutions belong.16
So perhaps the concept of “world” is like “University” in Ryle’s view: to

the degree that it appears to refer to something distinct from the many
things “in” the world it is nothing but a detour to myth and “windy
mysticism.”17
Ryle’s notion of philosophy does not seek to produce rich explana-
tions of complex human concerns, but, rather, “is the replacement of
category habits by category-disciplines,” that is, an unmooring of bad
intellectual habits that lead one astray from the appropriate logic of a
concept.18 He admits that he himself is guilty of such bad habits and his
work is a form of self-therapy: “Primarily I am trying to get some disor-
ders out of my own system. Only secondarily do I hope to help other
theorists to recognize our malady and to benefit from my medicine.”19
The idea of philosophy as a sort of therapy comes directly from
Wittgenstein, who talked of philosophy as waging “a battle against
the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”20 Ryle is
clearly influenced by the dramatic admonishment to philosophy that

Wittgenstein gives at the end of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
The right method of philosophy would be this. To say nothing except

what can be said, i.e. the propositions of natural science, i.e. some-
thing that has nothing to do with philosophy; and then always, when
someone else wished to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to
him that he had given no meaning to certain signs in his propositions.
This method would be unsatisfying to the other—he would not have
the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy—but it would be the
only strictly correct method.
My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me
finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through
them, on them, over them. (He must, so to speak throw away the lad-
der, after he has climbed up on it.)
He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world
rightly. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.21
This would seem to be the final word on the matter. World as apart from
specific things in the world is, in Wittgenstein’s terms, nonsense and
ought then to be passed over in silence. This cannot be the end of the
matter, however. For it is difficult not to read the end of the Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus as ironic. It seems precisely philosophy’s business to
talk about that “whereof one cannot speak.” Certainly, Ryle’s The Concept
of Mind is such a venture in talking at great length about that “whereof
one cannot speak.” But leaving that aside, something else of interest
appears in Wittgenstein’s struggle with the limits of sense: a fascinating
gap opens between showing and saying, between language and appre-
hension. “What can be shown cannot be said,” Wittgenstein says.22 Lan-
guage directs us, in this formulation, beyond language. Unlike many of
his followers, Wittgenstein does not restrain himself from nonsense. For
he recognizes that everything of value lies beyond the limit he has drawn
in language: “The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the
world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is
no value—and if there were, it would be of no value.”23
So, we can talk sensibly neither of ethics nor of God.24 And for the
Logical Positivists and Ordinary Language Philosophers of Ryle’s
stripe this made perfect sense—we should cleanse the language of
metaphysical notions and explode philosophical myths. But this is not
where Wittgenstein stands. He concludes, rather: “there is indeed the
206 Terrence Malick
inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical.”25 And, “Not how the
world is, is the mystical, but that it is.”26
Both Ryle and Wittgenstein agree that philosophy must draw limits to
sense. The difference between them is that Ryle seems more contented
with such limits, more able to accept the therapy that philosophy pro-
vides than Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein seems endlessly ambivalent about
such. (He, like Malick, left Britain without his degree.) His work is always
straining at the limits of sense, even to the degree that he writes aphoris-
tically, refusing the appearance of completion. Malick, on the other
hand, on this telling, makes the choice to bypass such limits altogether.
By turning to filmmaking, he is able to explore the world as something
that shows itself, as something of value that cannot be reduced to what
can sensibly be said about it.
Conjuring the World
Malick’s transition from philosophy to filmmaking, an attempt to “show

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

ences. All other propositions, including this one, are nonsense. It is the
propositions of natural science that manifest the specialness of the mod-
ern relationship to the world on the model of modern exceptionalism.
And yet in order to secure philosophically their distinctiveness from all
other ways of engaging the world, everything else must be seen as non-
sense, that is everything of value, including value itself. In order to prove
itself, modern exceptionalism sacrifices everything, even the world, even
the human.
If Wittgenstein was restrained at the end of the Tractatus about the true
status of philosophy, he is less so in a note left out of the typed manu-
script of his Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough. Philosophy is unavoidably
involved in magic. Rush Rhees, his editor, notes that Wittgenstein him-
self was unhappy with these remarks and wanted them stricken. Rhees
says, “I think we can see why”:
I think now that the right thing would be to begin my book with
remarks about metaphysics as a kind of magic.
But in doing this I must neither speak in defense of magic nor ridi-
cule it. What it is that is deep about magic would be kept.—In this
context, in fact, keeping magic out has itself the character of magic.
For when I began in my earlier book to talk about the “world” (and not
about this tree or table). Was I trying to do anything except conjure up
something of a higher order by my words?27
Wittgenstein recognizes that his own use of the term world, to conjure
up something is akin to magic. The Tractatus, the very book that launched
so many projects to cleanse philosophy of metaphysical thinking, is a
book of magic, beginning with its own invocation of the world (which, he
says, “is everything that is the case.”28 Its attempt to keep magic and myth
from our language is a magic spell. Modern culture differs from other
cultures only in disavowing its magic and in believing that nature is
reducible to what it makes of it.
The world that Malick conjures for us is a natural world. It exceeds
human interest, it escapes our narratives and our forms of knowledge.
But we are within it, not outside of it. All attempts to characterize the
world are forms of myth, provisional, incomplete. This is not a way of
belittling them however, for Malick. Nor is it a naïve call to return to
some premodern era, with its “inseparability of natures and societies.”29
It is a call to a world that can be acknowledged as having intrinsic
value—a world that can indeed be shown and shown as wondrous.
208 Terrence Malick
The New World
We all know what happens after the period that the film depicts, the
period of the early settlement of the Americas. In the near term, the
Powhaten and other coastal tribes are decimated through war and dis-
ease and driven from their land; in the longer term the indigenous peo-
ple of the continent are subject to genocidal destruction and followed by
injustice. Knowledge of this history haunts the film for the viewer, but
Malick directs our attention elsewhere. Killsback’s evident disgust with
The New World raises a legitimate question: is it possible to treat any part
of this history without acknowledging the subsequent history of geno-
cide and injustice? My inclination is to say, No! To ignore what is set in
motion during this era is to perpetuate its misdeeds. But my apprecia-
tion of Malick’s film is such that I think, in this case, the answer is, yes.
And I say this primarily because I think that the reflex of shame concern-
ing the subsequent history often perpetuates the cultural chauvinism of
the modern exception. It typically seems a foregone conclusion that the
culture of advanced technology and modern science would be victorious
over other cultures it encounters; the regret is over the violence and
destruction and the loss of difference. But rarely does an honest recon-
sideration of modernity take place. Malick’s focus on the moment of
early contact, however, encourages us to reconsider the anthropological
symmetry between the two cultures. It undermines our naïve belief in
the modern exception and asks us to go beyond shame to rethink our
understanding of culture itself and its relation to nature. This is of spe-
cial significance at a time in history when we see the results—global
warming, species destruction, resource wars—of the relation to the world
upon which the modern exception depends: a view of the human subject
as outside of nature, a view of nature as that which corresponds to the
propositions of the natural sciences, a nature whose meaning is exhausted
by our knowledge of it and which exists, hence, merely as a resource for
our use.
At the end of the film, Pocahontas meets with John Smith again in
England, having learned that he is still alive. Pocahontas had been
trapped by her exclusive love of Smith, which cut her off from her people,
from her land and from her spirituality, even from her identity. Meeting
with Smith releases her. She listens to him and watches him. He is noth-
ing special. If at one time he “appeared as a god to her,” now he is just a
man, and a rather sad man at that. “Did you find your Indies, John?”
Pocahontas asks. “I may have sailed past them,” he responds in a rare
moment of personal insight. She ends up walking away. She is released

from her entrancement with Smith and the world itself seems changed.
She embraces John Rolfe as her husband, Rolfe who is shown waiting
and watching and learning from her. “There is that in her I shall not ever
know,” he admits. And at the same time there in her corset, in the mani-
cured formal garden in England, we hear her voice say, “Mother, now I
know where you live.” As she gets over the fantasy of Smith’s exceptional-
ism, she is returned to the relationship with the world with which the
film began.
There are many “new worlds” that the film presents. There is the new
world of the Americas for the settlers and the new world that the Native
Americans must encounter first as a new element in their landscape, and
then as the new conditions of their survival. For Smith and Pocahontas
there is the new world that they represent to each other as lovers. For
Pocahontas there is the new world that she embodies as she changes
from Motoaka into Rebecca and travels from village, to fort, to her pre-
sentation to the Queen. But I think that the New World that Malick wants
to show us is the one that Pocahontas evokes at the beginning and the
end of the film. The world that is new each time we lift ourselves from
our human concerns to regard it with appropriate wonder and humility,
the world which is there around us in its material specificity all the time,
the world that cannot be properly known, but must be shown . . . or
sung.
Notes
1
Neither name is used in the film. Knowledge of her identity seems presumed.
She is christened Rebecca, while living with the colonists.
2
The epic poem The Odyssey begins “Sing to me of the man, Muse.”
3
Roy Crazy Horse, “The Pocahontas Myth,” http://powhatan.org/pocc.html
(accessed July 27, 2010).
4
Kim Masters, “ ‘New World’ Offers New Take on Pocahontas,” National Public
Radio, December 21, 2005.
5
Jamestown1607, Org. www.jamestown1607.org/newworldfilming.asp (accessed
July 27, 2010).
6
Leo Killsback, “The New World Review,” Wicazo Sa Review 21, no. 2 (Fall 2006),
197–201.
7
The Powhaten already had some limited contact with Europeans; the film rep-
resents the first contact with the Jamestown settlers.
8
I take the idea of anthropological symmetry from Bruno Latour, who argues
that we need a truly symmetrical anthropology that would allow us to move
210 Terrence Malick
back and forth between modern and nonmodern cultures, as I believe Malick
encourages us to do, 91–2.
9
Simon Critchley, “Calm—On Terrence Malick’s ‘The Thin Red Line’,” Film-
Philosophy 6, no. 38 (December 2002), www.film-philosophy.com/vol6–2002/
n48critchley
10
Ibid.
11
Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), vii.
12
Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1949),
15–16.
13
Ibid., 16.
14
Ibid., 8.
15
Ibid., 8.
16
Ibid., 16.
17
Martin Heidegger, of course, distinguishes between beings and Being in just
this way. I am not addressing the role of Heidegger in Malick’s work because
it is beyond the scope of this paper and because it has been treated well in so
many other essays on Malick. Ryle has a complex relationship to Heidegger,
which is fascinating in its own right. In his review of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit,
Ryle recognizes the significance of Heidegger’s work but ended saying that in
Heidegger’s hands phenomenology was “heading for bankruptcy and disaster
or will end in self-ruinous Subjectivism or in windy mysticism.”
18
Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 9.
19
Ibid., 9.
20
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (New York: Macmillan, 1953), 109.
21
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1981), 6.53–7.
22
Ibid., 4.1212.
23
Ibid., 6.41.
24
Ibid., 6.42 and 6.432.
25
Ibid., 6.522.
26
Ibid., 6.44.
27
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough (Cottage Denton near
Harleston Norfolk: Brynmill Press, 1979), v–vi.
28
Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 1.
29
Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1993), 91–2.
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Index
acousmêtre (not-yet-seen-voice) 26–7 Bardot, Brigitte 158

action space 94, 95, 96 Barry Lyndon
Adams, Brooke 7, 23, 65, 66, Kubrick, Stanley 129
79n28, 117, 162 Basso, Keith H. 100n24, 100n37
aesthetic mythology 181, 192–3 Bear’s Kiss
aesthetics, motif of 2, 20, 26, 54, Bodrov, Sergey 10
62, 64, 65, 97, 126, 127, 179, Bedard, Irene 189, 195n14
181, 182, 185–6, 190–3 being
Affleck, Ben 10 Being and 81
Almendros, Nestor 7, 8, 12n12 camera and 17
Altman, Robert 4 and transcendence 34
American Film Institute, Ben Hur
Los Angeles 1 Wyler, William 129
Center for Advanced Film Bennett, H. H. 150
Studies (now the AFI Bergson, Henry 148
Conservatory) 5, 6, 80 Bersani, Leo 30, 39n23
Antonioni Michelangelo 154 Forms of Being 77n3
Apted, Michael 10 biographical itineraries 4–11
Ariosto, Ariosto 61 Biskind, Robert 8, 9, 12nn5,
Arkin, Alan 6 13–15
Artaud, Antonin 149 Blanchot, Maurice 77n7
artwork and world, relationship Bleasdale, John 40
between 20–2, 25, 85–6 Bonnie and Clyde
Penn, Arthur 56n19, 66
Badlands Bordwell, David 14, 39nn3, 11,
dwelling and 98 134, 136, 146nn18, 21, 28
Malick, Terrence 3, 6–7, 8, 11n3, Branigan, Edward 134, 135, 138,
13, 18, 22, 24, 25, 27, 32, 33, 35, 146nn22, 24–5, 30–3
38, 40, 41, 42, 43–4, 45, 50, 51–3, Narrative Comprehension and
54, 55nn5–6, 59, 63–5, 102, 104, Film 137
105–10, 111, 114, 116, 119–21, Brecht, Bertolt 62, 163
122–3n10, 123n11, 180 Breughal, Pieter 150, 154
subjectile and 92–7 Brickman, Barbara Jane 23,
worlding of 87–92, 178n1 39n16, 122n10
Bale, Christian 10, 73, 195n14 Brooklyn Academy of Music 9
Barber, Samuel Bujold, Genevieve 7
Adagio for Strings 45 Burch, Noël 146n20
218 Index
Buscombe, Edward 146n16, 183, Cohen, Hubert 124n33

195nn15–16 conflict, motif of 29, 61–2, 64, 66–7,
69, 71–5, 121, 140–1, 161, 180,
calm, motif of 36–7, 61, 63, 73, 182, 190, 193
78n11, 170 Contempt
camera 37, 89–90, 117, 171 Godard, Jean-Luc 158
autonomy of 17–18 Coppola, Francis Ford 154
as being and becoming 17 Courbet, Gustave 150, 154
gaze of 29 Cousins, Mark 79nn33, 38
mobility 138, 146n19, 174 Critchley, Simon 36, 39n27, 62,
revelation of space by 32 78nn11, 15, 194nn2, 5, 6
in sensuous relationship to Crofts, Charlotte 132, 139, 140,
landscapes 17–18 147nn37, 40
Cannes film festival 8
Carroll, Noël 138, 147n34 Dances with Wolves
Casey, Edward 128, 135, Costner, Kevin 66
145nn10–12 Danks, Adrian 108, 109, 123n13
Cather, Willa 121n2 Dante 61
My Ántonia 102 Dasein 34, 84, 85, 86, 93, 98
Cavell, Stanley 2, 11n1, 19, 80, 81, Davies, David 4, 77n3
126–7, 129, 145nn7–8, 13–14, 192 Dayan, Daniel 134, 146n22
The World Viewed: Reflections on Days of Heaven
the Ontology of Film 1, 126, 129, criticism of 129–33
196n25 gaze in 139–43
Caviezel, James 50, 169 making sense of 126–9
Caviezel, Jim 9 Malick, Terrence 1, 4, 7–8, 13, 17,
Caviezel, John 66, 71 18, 23–4, 32, 38, 40, 41, 45, 49, 50,
Chaplin, Charlie 23, 25 53, 54, 55n6, 59, 65–8, 79n28, 80,
Che 81, 98n1, 102, 111, 112, 114, 116–19,
Soderbergh, Steven 10 121n3, 124n33, 125nn34–35, 149,
Chion, Michael 15, 26, 39nn18–20, 178n1, 180, 183, 187
45, 56nn11, 13, 16–17, 77nn3, reframing in 138
5, 79n28, 147n40 suture and cognitive mapping
Ciment, Michel 6, 12nn6, 10, 45, in 133–8
55n7, 78n23 tragic indiscernibility of 148–64
cinematic realism 125n36 De Palma, Brian 6, 154
cinematic romanticism, in The New Deadhead Miles
World 179, 190–3 Zimmerman, Vernon 6
mythic history and cinematic Debray, Régis 5, 10
poetry and 185–90 Defoe, Willem 45
Pocahontas legend and 183–5 Deleuze, Gilles 3, 11n2, 152, 161,
cinematic space 18, 94, 95, 96 164nn1–2
phenomenological approach to 97 Cinema 2: The Time-Image 148, 149
cinematography see camera Denby, David 126
class conflict, motif of 140–1 D’Entremont, John 195nn16, 18
classical cinema 14, 23 Derrida, Jacques 3, 82, 92, 93, 99n5,
cognitive mapping 133–8 100nn27–8
Index 219
Deuteronomy 154, 155 finitude 83, 98, 193

dialectics 167–72 fire, as motif 40–5
Hegelian, and master and first-person voice-over 15, 24, 26, 31
slave 175–6 see also voice-over
Hegelian, and unhappy Fisk, Jack 6, 11
souls 172–5 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 111
Marxian 177–8 Flanagan, Martin 194n4
Die Horen 58 Fog, The
Dillon, Robert 9 Carpenter, John 27
Dirty Harry Ford, John 59
Siegel, Don 6 Fugate, Caril Anne 6, 53
Dixon, Franklin W. Furstenau, Mark
Hardy Boys, The 64 “Terrence Malick’s Heideggerian
Doane, Mary Ann 147n40 Cinema” 81
Donougho, Martin 126, 145n5
Double Indemnity Gadamer, Hans-Georg 99n11
Wilder, Billy 66, 138 Geisler, Bobby 8, 9
Dr Zhivago General, The
Lean, David 129 Keaton, Buster 134, 135
Dreyer, Carl 149 Genesis 155, 156–7
Drive, He Said Gere, Richard 7, 23, 49, 50, 65,
Nicholson, Jack 6 66, 79n28, 117, 160, 187
Dutoit, Ulysse 30 Giant
Forms of Being 77n3 Stevens, George 129
dwelling, motif of 98 Gilbey, Ryan 164n5
Glass, Robert W. Jr. 8
earth 29 Gleason, Michie 8
of cinema 21–2 Godard, Jean-Luc 154, 158, 163–4
and world 21–5, 30, 86–7, 91–2 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von
Eisenstein, Sergei 2 60, 61
elegy, motif of 62, 66–7, 78n12 Gold Rush, The
Elias, Julius A. 59 Chaplin, Charlie 25
English-Speaker, The (forthcoming) Gone with the Wind
Malick, Terrence 9 Fleming, Victor 129
equipment, equipmental quality Gravy Train, The
of 85–6 Sharrett, Jack 6
Escobar, Arturo 128, 145n9 Great Balls of Fire!
Evertson, Matthew 101 McBride, Jim 9
existential space 94, 128 Green Beret’s, The
Exodus 157 Kellogg, Ray 167
Green, David Gordon 10
Farrell, Colin 10, 15, 50, 72 Green, Sarah 198
Faulkner, William 62, 111 Guevara, Che 10
field/reverse field 133–9
Fielding, Henry 61 Hail Mary
film phenomenology 14–18 Godard, Jean-Luc 155
Film Quarterly 134 Hanks, Tom 56n14
220 Index
harmony 61, 62, 67, 72, 76, 78n12, moving 23

79n39, 101, 118, 139, 172 of nature 28–9
Heath, Stephen 134, 136, 138, 140, porthole 187, 188
146nn22, 27, 29, 147nn35, 38 still 17, 22
Hegel, G. W. F. 60, 172 time- 148–9
Heidegger, Martin 3, 14, 19–21, 25, Imitation of Life
26, 28, 29, 39nn9, 12–14, 17, Sirk, Douglas 72
21, 25, 77n7, 80, 82–7, 93, 98, indeterminability 19, 20, 22, 33,
99nn2, 6–10, 12–13, 16–17, 148, 162
19–20, 100n26, 110, 124n33 indiscernibility 148–64
“Age of the World Picture” 87 innocence, as motif 49–55
The Fundamental Concepts of innocent space 135
Metaphysics 82 Irreversible
“On the Origin of the Work of Noé, Gaspar 138
Art” 19, 85
Vom Wesen des Grundes (The Essence Jakes, Jill 6, 7
of Reasons) 5, 19, 33, 34 James, Henry 111
What is Called Thinking? 1, 81 The Wings of the Dove 158
Held, Klaus 34, 39n26 Jones, James
Hemingway, Ernest 111 The Thin Red Line 9, 53
Heraclitus 3, 164n57 jouissance, of spectator 134–5
Heyerdahl, Thor
Kon Tiki 91 Kael, Pauline 145n3
Hine, Lewis 150 Kant, Immanuel 3, 60, 71,
Hitchcock, Alfred 79nn32, 39
The 39 Steps 137 Kazan, Elia 66
Hochberg, Julian 133 Keaton, Buster 134, 135
Hölderlin, Friedrich 60, 61, 65, 70, Kendall, Stuart 1, 148
72, 77n7, 79n31 Kenji, Mizoguchi 9
Homer 61 Kennedy, Christina B. 94,
Odyssey 44, 158 100nn30–1
homesickness, motif of 82–3 Kennedy, Robert 5
Hopper, Edward Kilcher, Q’orianka 10, 15, 59, 72
American Landscape 147n45 Killsback, Leo 200
House by the Railroad 142, King Kong
147n45, 150 Jackson, Peter 200
horizon 94–5, 99n11, 116 King, Martin Luther 5
fusion of 97 Kotas, Elias 168
Husserl, Edmund 17
Huston, John 59 landscape 35, 42, 47–8, 98,
125nn34, 36
idyll, motif of 50, 51, 59, 62, 70, and character 30
72, 78n12, 91, 106, 107, 121, cinematic 18
187, 189, 191, 192 human presence in plain 101–21
illusional space 94 presentation of 16
image 31, 36, 151, 152 relationship with camera 17–18
construction 15, 17 subjectile and 93
Index 221
world and 88–92 Merrick, John 8

Lang, Fritz 27, 158 metaphysics 80–3, 85, 87, 99nn10–11,
Langdon, Emma 140 102, 116, 127, 181, 182, 205, 207
Lanton Mills Michaels, Lloyd 31, 38n2, 56n9,
Malick, Terrence 6, 98n1 57n24, 63, 65, 78nn16, 21, 26,
Lawrence of Arabia 164n6, 194nn11–12, 195n18
Lean, David 55n1 Terrence Malick 4, 12n5, 77n3, 157,
Lee, Hwanhee 183, 194n10 179, 194n2
Lee, Sheryl 75 Millet, Jean-François 151, 154
Lewis, Jerry Lee 9 Milton, John 61
Life 5 Moland, Hans Petter 10
Lindsay, Vachel Molière, Jean Baptiste Poquelin 61
“Our Mother/Pocahontas” 195n20 Tartuffe 9
Lubezki, Emmanuel 10 Moore, Juanita 72
Lucas, George 154 moral authority 47
Luhmann, Niklas 77 moral feeling 63
Lukinbeal, Chris 125n36 Morette, Michèle 8, 9
Lynch, David 5, 6, 8, 75, 154 Morricone, Ennio 8, 41
Morris, Wright 3, 101, 102–3, 106,
MacAvoy, Leslie 108, 110, 117, 121, 122nn4, 6–9,
“Terrence Malick’s Heideggerian 123nn15–17, 124nn18, 20–31
Cinema” 81 Ceremony in Lone Tree 103–5,
Malick, Terrence 145n6 111–13, 115–16
The Essence of Reasons 5, 14, 19, 80, 84 The Field of Vision 103, 111, 112,
see also under individual films 113–14, 122n4
Malle, Louis 9 The Home Place 101, 110–11
Manning, Russell 165 Plains Song 122n5
Manz, Linda 59, 65, 66, 79n28, The Territory Ahead 111
117, 139 Morrison, James 12nn7, 9, 10 62,
Martin, Adrian 33, 39nn15, 24, 78n14, 164n3, 181
57n25, 79n28, 99nn3–4, 179, The Films of Terrence Malick 77n3,
181, 194nn3, 7, 195nn18, 20 153, 194n9
Marvin, Lee 6 Mottram, Ron 123n11
Marx, Karl 177
master and slave and Hegelian naïve poetry and sentimental,
dialectics 175–6 difference between 61
McAdams, Rachel 10 narrative cinema 16, 23, 26
McCann, Ben 88 National Public Radio 198
“Enjoying the Scenery” 125n34 Natural Born Killers
McGettigan, Joan 130, 146n17 Stone, Oliver 55n5
McMurtry, Larry natural trope 101
The Desert Rose 9 naturalness, motif of 7, 10, 14, 15, 24,
Medavoy, Michael 6, 9 36, 48, 50, 54, 61, 63, 64, 68–70,
melodrama 72, 138 72–5, 83–4, 89–90, 95, 101, 119,
Melville, Herman 61, 111 121n1, 125n34, 139–41, 159, 169,
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 3, 94, 95, 96, 176, 180, 190–1, 199, 205–8
100nn32–5 see also landscape
222 Index
neo-modernity, cinematic 58–63 see also landscape

Badlands and 63–5 Peterson, Hannah 100nn21, 23, 38,
Days of Heaven 65–8 123n12, 124n32
The New World 72–6 The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic
The Thin Red Line 68–72 Visions of America 4, 11n4, 77n3
New Line Cinema 10 Petric, Vlada 145n4
New York Film Critics Circle 8 Phoenix Pictures 9
New York Film Festival 7 Piccoli, Michel 158
New Yorker 5 Pitt, Brad 10, 194n12
Newman, Paul 6 place 127
Newsweek 5 subordination, by space 128
Nicholson, Jack 6 see also landscape
Nietzsche, Friedrich 193 Planet of the Apes, The
Nisbet, H. B. 78n8 Burton, Tim (2001 version) 200
Noé, Gaspar 138 Shaffner, Franklin J. (1968
Nolte, Nick 9, 170 version) 200
Norris, Patricia 8 Plato 81, 168, 170
Nosferatu Platoon
Herzog, Werner 196n22 Stone, Oliver 45
nostalgia 53, 111, 112 Plummer, Christopher 10, 43
Pocahontas
Oates, Warren 6, 51, 56n20, 106 Disney 16
offscreen space 136 Pocket Money
180-degree rule 133 Rosenberg, Stuart 6
ontopology, of The Badlands poetic cinema 22, 37
dwelling and 98 porthole image 187, 188
subjectile and 92–7 Pound, Ezra 164n4
worlding and 87–92 Guide to Kulchur 153
opportunity, sense of 32–8 Power, Richard 147n36
ordinary space 94–5 Pressman, Edward 6, 10
Orff, Carl 41 Price, David A. 57n22
Orr, John 142, 147n46 protagonist 16, 94, 117,
Oswald, Lee Harvey 45 125n34, 134
Oudart, Jean-Pierre 135, 136, in classical cinema 14–15
146nn20, 23, 26 search of 29
“La Suture” 134 Psalms 124n33
Palance, Jack 158 Rafelson, Bob 4

Paramount Pictures 7, 8 real space 94, 95
parataxis 15 Redford, Robert 10
Penn, Arthur 4, 66 reflective and naïve, difference
Penn, Sean 9, 10, 71, 176, 194n12 between 61
Percy, Walker reframing, motif of 138, 143
The Moviegoer 9 Reitz, John T. 8
Perez, Gilberto 126, 145n2 Rhym, John 123n14
person-environment relationship 88, Rijsdijk, Ian 126
92, 94 Roberdeau, John 9
Index 223
romantic naivety 181–2, 185–6, 193, Segovia, Andrés 4

194n6 self and artwork 21
Rome Film Festival 3, 11n3 self-consciousness 23, 173, 175
Rosenberg, Stuart 6 semi-acousmêtres 26, 27
Rothman, William 134, 146n22 sensuousness, motif of 15–17, 21–5,
Rudes, Blair 199 30, 186
Russian Ark sentimental (sentimentalische) 61
Sokurov, Aleksandr 138 genres of 61–2
Ruth, biblical book of 156 Shakespeare, William 61
Rybin, Steven 13 Sharrett, Jack 6
Ryle, Gilbert 3, 5, 80 Sheeler, Charles
American Landscape 139
Saga of Anatahan, The Sheen, Martin 7, 22, 43, 50, 63,
Sternberg, Josef von 27 66, 104
Saint-Saëns, Camille 139 Shepard, Sam 7, 23, 49, 65, 117, 160
Carnival of the Animals 150, 195n21 Siegel, Don 6
Salt, Barry 146n20 Sight and Sound 5, 53, 78n18
Sansho the Bailiff 9 Silverman, Kaja 134, 146n22
Kenji, Mizoguchi 9 Singh, R. Raj 20, 39n10
Sargeant, Jack Sinnerbrink, Robert 19, 39n8, 179,
Born Bad: The Story of Charlie 194n8, 195n19
Starkweather and Caril Anne Slotkin, Richard 140, 147nn41–2
Fugate 57n21 Smith, John Dee 29, 177
satire, motif of 62, 64, 73, 78n12 Smith, Murray 38nn1–2
Savage, John 172 Sobchack, Vivian 16–17, 19, 21,
Saving Private Ryan 39n5–7
Spielberg, Steven 9, 46, 47, 56n12, Socrates 168
57n26 Soderbergh, Steven 10
Schiller, Friedrich 3, 59–62, 64, 66, Sokurov, Aleksandr 138
70, 77nn1–2, 6–7, 78nn9–10, 13, space 128, 130
17, 20, 27, 79nn29–30, 34, 39 conversion into place 138, 141
“Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung diegetic 132, 133, 137
des Menschen” (Letters on the innocent 135
Aesthetic Education of Man) 58, 67 offscreen 136
“Über naive und sentimentalische representation of 32, 54
Dichtung” (“On Naïve and screen 137, 138, 143
Sentimental Poetry”) 58 unreal 134, 135
Schneider, Bert 7 Spacek, Sissy 6, 7, 18, 43, 56n19, 59,
Schneider, Harold 7 63, 66, 102, 123n11
Schrader, Paul 5 spectatorship 23, 96, 134–6, 138, 139,
Schur, Thomas 12nn7, 9, 10, 62, 140, 143
78n14, 164n3 Spielberg, Steven 9, 46, 47, 154
The Films of Terrence Malick 77n3, Staiger, Janet 39n3, 146n18
153, 194n9 Stanton, Harry Dean 6
Scorsese, Martin 154 Starkweather, Charles 6, 53, 104
Screen 134 Steinbeck, John 160
screen space 137, 138, 143 Sterritt, David 121n1
224 Index
Stevens, George 66 56nn11–13, 18, 59, 62, 66,

Stevens, George, Jr. 9 68–72, 75, 77n3, 78n11, 81,
still photograph, significance of 17 98n1, 101, 126, 166–7, 180,
Stone, Oliver 42, 55n5 183, 186–7, 194n5
strife, voicing 26–32 Marx’s dialectical materialism
Studies in Phenomenology and Existential and 177–8
Philosophy series 5 sophistry of command in 170–2
subjectile, motif of 92–7 war nature in 167–70
subjectivity 16, 26, 27, 30, 31, 35, 82, 30-degree rule 133
93, 97, 175, 182, 193 Thomas, Barry 8
Sunflower Productions 10 Thomas, D. M.
suture, theory of 133–8 The White Hotel 9
Swift, Jonathan 61 Thompson, Kristin 39nn3, 11, 146n18
Thoreau, Henry David 111
Tarantino, Quentin 42, 55n5 Thorpe, Helen 121n3, 123n11
Tarkovsky, Andrei 154 time-image 148–9
Tasso, Torquato 61 time-lapse photography 17
tenderness, motif of 60, 64, 66–9, Toro, Benicio del 10
73, 74, 118 transcendental consciousness 17
Testament of Dr. Mabuse, The transformation, motif of 35, 128, 137,
Lang, Fritz 27 153, 158, 163, 180, 191–2
The Immigrant Travolta, John 7
Chaplin, Charlie 23, 24 Treasure Island
The Longest Day Fleming, Victor (1934 version) 53
Annakin 66 Haskin, Byron (1950 version) 53
Marton, Andrew 66 Tree of Life
Wicki, Bernhard 66 Malick, Terrence 10, 55n3, 98n1,
Zanuck, Darryl F. 66 194nn1, 12
The Man Who Loved Women True Romance
Truffaut, François 7 Scott,Tony 55n5
The New World Truffaut, François 7
cinematic romanticism and 190–3 truth, Heidegger on 20
Malick, Terrence 10, 11n3, 13, Tucker, Thomas Deane 1, 80
14–16, 18, 22, 26, 30–2, 33, 38, Turner, Lana 72
40, 42, 43, 45, 48, 49, 54, 55n3, Turvey, Malcolm 147n34
59, 62, 69, 72–6, 78nn22, 28, Twain, Mark 111
101, 121n1, 178n1, 179–82 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,
myth and history and 198–9 The 64, 157
from mythic history to cinematic Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The 64
poetry 185–90 Twin Peaks
Pocahontas legend in 183–5 Lynch, David 75
Thévenin, Paule 100nn27–8
Thin Red Line, The Vernant, Jean-Pierre 164n8
Hegelian dialectics and 172–6 Vidal-Naquet, Pierre 164n8
Malick, Terrence 4, 9–10, 13, violence, histories of
18, 28–30, 32–3, 35–8, 40, 41, fire as motif and 40–5
43, 44, 45–8, 49, 50, 53, 54–5, innocence and 49–55
Index 225
war and nature and 45–8 Wild Bunch, The

voice-over 7–8, 13, 15, 24–31, 37, Peckinpah, Sam 52, 56n20
40, 42, 65, 72, 88–90, 106, 118, Wilkinson, John K. 8
122n10, 123n11, 127, 130, 132, Wittgenstein, Ludwig 3
134, 140, 143, 150, 151, 154, 157, Wolfe, Thomas 111
159, 164, 166, 167, 171, 177, Wondra, Janet 132, 141, 147nn39,
186, 188, 189, 195n20, 200 43–4
voicing, of meaning 13–14 Woodward, Grace Steele 195n16
film phenomenology and 14–18 world 99n11
opportunity and 32–8 as whole 82–3
strife and 26–32 and worlding 19–25, 84–5, 87–92
world and worlding and 19–25 Wydeven, Joseph J. 112, 124n19
Von Kleist, Heinrich 61 Wyeth, Andrew
vulnerability, motif of 50, 76, 114, Christina’s World 150
116, 119, 121, 123n11 Wyss, Johann David
Swiss Family Robinson 64
Wajda, Andrzej 9
Walden, Elizabeth 197 Yardley, Jonathan 122n5
Walker, Barbara 5, 78n18 Yasujiro, Ozu 149
Wall, Thomas 58 Yates, Christopher S. 99n11, 100n36
Wallace, Alexandra “Ecky” 9 “A Phenomenological Aesthetic of
Warterberg, Thomas E. 38n1 Cinematic Worlds” 97
Washington Post Book World 122n5 Yimou, Zhang 10
Weisz, Rachel 10 Young, Julian 85, 99n14, 18
Welles, Orson 149 Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art 99n11
Wexler, Haskell 7
Whitman, Walt 111 Zimmer, Hans 41
Whitney, David see Malick, Terrence Zimmerman, Vernon 6
Wierzbicki, James 55n2, 147n36 Zucker, Carole 125n35

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Terrence Malick

Copyright © 2011 by Thomas Deane Tucker and Stuart Kendall

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

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Notes on Contributors vii

Chapter 2: Voicing Meaning: On Terrence Malick’s Characters 13

Chapter 3: Terrence Malick’s Histories of Violence 40

Chapter 4: Rührender Achtung: Terrence Malick’s

Chapter 5: Worlding the West: An Ontopology of Badlands 80

Chapter 6: Fields of Vision: Human Presence in

Chapter 7: The Belvedere and the Bunkhouse:

Chapter 8: The Tragic Indiscernibility of Days of Heaven 148

Chapter 10: Song of the Earth: Cinematic

Chapter 11: Whereof One Cannot Speak: Terrence Malick’s

John Bleasdale is a film scholar and Professor at Università Ca’ Foscari

Matthew Evertson is an Associate Professor of English at Chadron State

Stuart Kendall is an independent scholar working at the intersections of

Russell Manning is a Postdoctorate Fellow at the Institute for Citizenship

Steven Rybin is an Instructor of Film at Georgia Gwinnett College. He

He is the author of The Cinema of Michael Mann (Lexington Books, 2007)

Thomas Deane Tucker is a Professor of Humanities at Chadron State

Elizabeth Walden is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Cultural Stud-

Thomas Carl Wall is an English professor at National Tapei University of

two significant culture-makers—but also and perhaps more importantly

approaches to film studies remain diverse in method, orientation, and

consideration Malick both reportedly and obviously devotes to every

Terrence Malick was born on November 30, 1943 in either Ottawa,

observed: “I was raised in a violent environment in Texas. What struck

of footage this process had generated. Voice-over narration was added to

Alexandra, Morette’s daughter from a previous relationship, to Austin,

seven academy awards—cinematography, editing, original score, sound,

production and capable of weaving those threads together into com-

Voicing Meaning: On Terrence Malick’s

The worlds of Terrence Malick’s films are vibrantly sensual, open-ended

phenomenology may help Malick’s viewers see themselves as making

Malick and Film Phenomenology

The question of what constitutes a film character is, of course, a vast

Captain John Smith (Colin Farrell) leads an expedition to meet the

Smith’s vision of the American landscape as a ground upon which to

that is not determined by (even as it includes) its characters. In this the

We will do well to remember that film is, of course, mechanically enabled

World and Worlding, Earth and Striving

This contrast between the efficiently constructed classical narrative film

architects or the qualities of Van Gogh’s visual composition, function in

Heidegger’s concept of the “world” of the artwork is neither representa-

paradigm).11 However, the meaning that might be generated through

than Holly throughout much of Badlands (whose interpretive efforts

doctor,” certainly a more creative occupation than the alienated labor

It is the first-person voice-over that offers the viewer a particularly vibrant

These images of nature also introduce an equally important motif

have never been heard. They have no jealousy. No sense of possession.

In the extended cut of the film, released on DVD in North America in

The Voice’s Opportunity

happening is the existing of Dasein which, as existing, transcends.

Heidegger’s concept of Dasein refers to a being-in-the-world aware of its

deaths, is ambiguous. It seems intended as a sacrifice to protect the lives,

meaning of The Thin Red Line—the meaning of World War II itself—

Terrence Malick’s Histories of Violence

A fire rages through the films of Terrence Malick. In Badlands, a family

extinguish the flames. In their turn, and once strengthened by reinforce-

prominence as a familiar feature of his psychic landscape. Perhaps, all

War at the Heart of Nature

“I was raised in a violent atmosphere in Texas. What struck me was how