Can Terry Malick tell a joke?

The serious and the absurd in Terrence Malick's Lanton Mills.

by Theresa Schwartzman
When Terrence Malick donated a copy of his thesis film Lanton Mills to his alma
mater, The American Film Institute, he stipulated that scholars be allowed to view the
film in the AFI library in Los Angeles, but nowhere else. The film cannot be copied or
checked out. The inaccessibility of this film subtracts one more piece from the puzzle
of what people often call the enigma of Terrence Malick a director who has only
made three films, with a 20 year gap between the second and the third, who
notoriously refuses to give interviews, and has it written into his contracts that he will
do no publicity. In fact it has become almost a clich to call him the J.D. Salinger of
cinema.
In this void of biographic or other information to help us decipher the puzzle of
Terrence Malick, Lanton Mills stands as a cult-object of desire for diehard Malick
scholars and fans. If you search for the film online, you find numerous sites that
reveal only the cast list and a mistaken running time of 12 minutes (it actually runs
17). No hint to the film's substance, or even its genre. Pounding away further on the
Internet yields a near-desperate appeal from an Australian film librarian, trying to find
a copy of the film for a patron in 2001. A little more surfing unearths several members
of the My Space Malick fanclub who claim Lanton Mills as their favorite film,
though nothing on the site hints that they have actually seen it. So when I screened the
film on VHS at a little monitor in the AFI library, I felt like a birdwatcher who had
glimpsed some rare near-extinct species, a bird I hoped would harbor secrets.
What struck me most about Lanton Mills in the context of Malick's other work was
simply how endearing it is. Badlands, Days of Heaven, and The Thin Red Line are
often described as works of genius inscrutable, philosophical, sublime, but
certainly not endearing. In contrast, Lanton Mills is marked by a goofy, sprawling,
messy humor that puts it squarely in the comedy genre, and much of its comedy
resides in Malick's own touching performance as a slow-witted cowboy buffoon.
Lanton Mills is a Western. Sort of.
The sparse plot recounts the story of two cowboys (Terrence Malick as Tilman and
Harry Dean Stanton as Lanton Mills) who set off on horseback to rob a bank. On
the way, they stop to see their boss, the Old Man, only to discover he has been
murdered by another cowboy, John Sparks (Warren Oates). After Oates announces his
claim to fame as the slowest gun in the West Stanton cursorily shoots him (an easy
feat given cowboy Sparks' leisurely draw time!). It seems to take forever for Oates to
die, and his dying is punctuated by lots of nonsensical banter and funny business. At
last the two protagonists ride off again through the scrubbrush. There is a fade-toblack and in the next shot reveals our two heroes riding their horses in the middle of
traffic on Wilshire Boulevard. A muscle car follows slowly behind them, and there is
no hint to whether or not the cowboys are surprised by their new surroundings. They
enter the bank, a glass-doored, orange-carpeted behemoth, and suddenly they seem to
notice they're out of place. Gun cocked, Stanton falteringly declares Nobody get

upset now! in a voice so soft no one hears him. Meanwhile, Malick delightedly grabs
publicity brochures and office equipment off the desks, apparently thinking that they
are some form of money. With the help of their antiquated guns, the two finally
succeed in robbing a teller of two sacks of petty cash, but not before he pushes the
emergency button. The film ends with the two cowboys fleeing from the LAPD. The
cops shoot Stanton dead and then shove a handcuffed Malick into a police cruiser.
What makes this sudden time shift intriguing is its uncertain parameters. Have the
cowboys actually time-traveled, falling out in a world completely foreign to them? A
comment the Malick character makes when he hears the police sirens belies this idea.
He mutters wryly: Well, it all goes to show, you can't hear radar. His familiarity
with radar raises the possibility that the cowboys have been living in the 20th
century the whole time, simply confining themselves in some isolated rural area
where they can make believe it's 1885. On the other hand, later dialogue implies that
the Malick character has never seen an automobile. The clues to the nature of the time
shift point in opposite directions, leaving the cowboys' status in Los Angeles an
insoluble problem. Perhaps we might glean something of Malick's intent in a rare
published interview with the director (1975 Sight and Sound) where he explains that
in Badlands: I tried to keep the 1950s to a bare minimum. Nostalgia is a powerful
feeling; it can drown out anything. I wanted the picture to set up like a fairy tale,
outside time, like Treasure Island.
A plot summary cannot do justice to the experience of watching LANTON MILLS.
Visually, it is rich in elements that would become Malick's trademarks. Daylight
assumes a tactile presence though here it is not the diffuse magic hour light (i.e.,
malick-light) of later films, but a bold late afternoon sun that streams through leaves,
creating shadow and dappled highlight on the characters' faces. The camera angles
tend to be either wide or wider, even in dialogue scenes. Also familiar from Malick's
later films is the attention to landscape and nature a few hens strut past Warren
Oates as he is shot and a humongous pig noses around him as he dies.
But what makes Lanton Mills feel completely different from Malick's later work is its
unrestrained, anarchic comedy. In the 1975 Sight and Sound interview, with reference
to Badlands, Malick makes a distinction: There is some humor in the picture, I
believe. Not jokes. In Lanton Mills, there are jokes, plenty of them. Though the jokes
play out in an absurdist, disconcerting key, they still make us laugh (or at least shake
our heads with a puzzled smile). The joking begins right away, in the musical score
that Malick himself composed, a score that sounds more appropriate to a Pink Panther
film than a Western. Over shots of cowboys riding hard through the prairie, Malick
places lounge music featuring twangy electric guitars and a tongue-in-cheek melody
that warns the viewer that we're about to embark on a long shaggy-dog story. Lanton
Mills keeps the viewer in a perpetual expectant, nervous titter. The film's nature as
shaggy dog story is also announced in a bit of early dialogue, after Stanton invites
Malick to ride out on the bank job. Starkly silhouetted in the afternoon light as he
saddles up his horse, Malick asks (in a totally over-the-top Western twang):
You like a particular kinda joke?
Stanton (wearily, expecting the worst): What kind?
Malick: Well, you hear the one about the rabbit? This rabbit, see --Lanton (cuts him off abruptly): Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I did hear that one.

I should note that Lanton Mills is an extremely talky film and most of that talk
teeters on the edge of vaudeville or jabberwocky. When our heroes first meet Warren
Oates' character, he introduces himself like this: Name is John Sparks and I'm a
bumblebee. But we never find out what it is that makes Oates a bumblebee it's a
joke without a punchline. Later as Oates lays dying, he nevertheless pops up to chat
whenever he has something interesting to add to the conversation. Then he lays back
down placidly, so we're never really sure if he has made his final exit. Malick asks
him if he can take his gun when he dies, Oates graciously agrees, and Malick steals it
anyway, along with the dying man's pocket watch. The scene pure burlesque, and
throughout the dialogue Malick munches happily on a large round piece of food that
is either a loaf of bread or a melon.
In fact, all this nutty talking starts to figure into the plot as tension arises between
Stanton and Malick over talk vs action. Stanton is forever trying to get a move on
towards the bank job, while Malick's character operates as a restraining force on the
forward movement of the story. He constantly stops things from happening with his
nonsensical patter. In one of the first lines of the film, Stanton tells Malick, in the
patronizing tone one uses with half-wit sidekicks: I'd give a great deal to be able to
stand here and talk all day but the old man has big plans about hitting a bank.
The tension between stasis and motion crystallizes when Malick and Stanton sit under
a tree cooking up some cowboy coffee. Malick suggest they should bury their
things (an idea about defying time that will reoccur in Badlands), including an old
photo of a Victorian lady, because: Somebody dig this up 100 years from now, they
won't know any more about this lady than you or me. And we'll come back some day
maybe and they won't be any different, but we will. Stanton reacts with exasperation:
I just know two things, one thing, you haven't got any sense. Apparently not noticing
the put-down, Malick announces he might as well do his big bird.
Reminiscent of the place of songs in classic Hollywood musicals, the whole film
seems to halt for the extraordinary dance sequence of Malick's big bird. Malick
careens down a hill, arms pumping like a chicken, legs and hips ambling rhythmically
in a slow jig. He dances with nave abandon, and then, without warning, his dance
turns into a dejected walk. He slumps, his gaze hanging down, while his stomach
hangs out. He stops still, looks around aimlessly as if unsure what to do next, then
goes back into the big bird strut. Malick's faltering, starting & stopping dance carries
on for nearly a minute.
In Lanton Mills, as in the Commedia dell'Arte, each character is denoted by an
expansive idiosyncratic physicality, with exaggerated mannerisms and tics. Malick
himself assumes a loping, clownish gait, as well as a habit of fiddling compulsively
with objects, either brushing off invisible insects, or throwing down a half-smoked
cigarette with such vehemence he seems to believe it is alive. On the other hand,
Warren Oates's performance is marked by exaggerated daintiness. When our heroes
first meet Oates on the porch of his homestead, he says howdy to them and then
carefully pauses. He slowly strolls to the door, holding his body in perfect Greek
contrapposto, allowing the tiniest hint of a private grin to play across his lips. While
he dangles one hand near his gun, he keeps the other raised and slightly turned out, as
if he's holding a teacup. In Warren Oates' balletic stroll, there is a distant echo of those
long, hard pauses perfected by actors like John Wayne when they want to make sure

the force of their words sinks in. Only in Lanton Mills, the long, hard pause has
evolved into a kind of drag.
While Oates' feyness perhaps suggests his character is gay, it also works to negate and
mock the excessive masculinity of actors in classic Westerns. In this heady mix, Harry
Dean Stanton plays the straight man, the only character you could actually imagine
encountering in a real Western. But even Stanton's performance occasionally slips into
a tentative mode that suggests he is only rehearsing for a Western, rather than living
one. For instance after shooting Oates, Stanton sniffs his hands curiously as if
unfamiliar with the smell of gunpowder. Then he wanders around the ranch shooting
his pistol into the air, trying out different poses as he goes. At the end of the film,
before he dies, the cop asks Stanton why he did it and Stanton replies: I dunno. I
always wanted to be a criminal, I guess, just not this big of one. A line that might
easily have been spoken by Kit in Badlands, another character who seems trapped in
a role not entirely of his own making.
In an interview about The Thin Red Line, Nick Nolte offers an anecdote to explain
Terrence Malick's working method: Terry would come to me and show me a few
pages he'd written, and I'd read this wonderful poem. I'd say: "That's great, Terry, but
it's six pages." He said: "Yes, take those six pages and edit it down to what you would
say." So I would edit it down, show it to Terry and he'd say "It's a bit long" I'd end up
with one or two lines out of six pages.
Watching Lanton Mills, you begin to suspect that what distinguishes it from Malick's
later work is simply the fact that he never bothered to edit it down. Here perhaps
lies the dividing line between jokes and what Malick called some humor, between a
shaggy dog story and the Kierkegaardian absurd. The substance is the same, but one
points in the direction of laughter, the other towards reflection. It's a strange dividing
line. While Lanton Mills never approaches the metaphysical ambivalence of Malick's
later films, the trembling state that gives them their power to awe, I can't help
regretting that Malick, the endearingly foolish Big Bird, stopped letting us in on all
his best jokes.
Lanton Mills, dir. Terrence Malick (1969)
Lanton: Dean Stanton, Tilman: Terrence Malick, Gunman: Warren Oates, Phantom:
Lash Larue, Mute: Tony Bill, Teller: Paul Ehrman, 1st cop: Ken Smith, 2nd cop; John
Schmitz, Camera: Caleb Deschanel, Music: Terrence Malick, Editor: John Palmer,
Producer: John Roper
http://www.rohstoff-filmmagazin.org/contributions/Terence_Malick_Schwartzman.html