Professional Documents
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Films of Terrence Malick
Films of Terrence Malick
JAMES MORRISON
AND
THOMAS SCHUR
Morrison, James.
The films of Terrence Malick / James Morrison and Thomas Schur.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-275-97247-X (alk. paper)
1. Malick, Terrence, 1943 Criticism and interpretation. I. Schur, Thomas. II. Tide.
PN1998.3.M3388M67 2003
791.43'0233'092—dc21 2003045597
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.
Copyright © 2003 by James Morrison and Thomas Schur
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be
reproduced, by any process or technique, without the
express written consent of the publisher.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2003045597
ISBN:" 0-275-97247-X
First published in 2003
Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881
An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.
www. praeger. com
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Copyright Acknowledgment
The authors and publisher gratefully acknowledge permission to reprint the following:
"Review of The Thin Red Line;" Film Quarterly 53, no. 1 (Fall 1999). Copyright © 1999 by
the Regents of the University of California. Reprinted from Film Quarterly by permission of
the University of California Press.
The authors thank Claremont McKcnna College for financial support in the completion of
this project.
You hope that the picture will give the person looking at it a sense
of things.
—Terrence Malick
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Contents
Illustrations ix
Preface xi
CHAPTER 1 1
Things Make Themselves Known:
An Overview of Malick's Work
CHAPTER 2 33
Streams of Consciousness, Spools of History:
Days of Heaven
CHAPTER 3 59
A Sense of Things: Reflections on Malick's Films
CHAPTER 4 115
In Production: On the Work of Style
Filmojjmphy 135
Bibliography 151
Index 157
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Illustrations
NOTES
EARLY WORK
Malick's first major work to enter public view was a translation of Mar-
tin Heidegger's The Essence of Reasons, published in 1969. Complete
with a beautifully wrought preface and an abundance of insightful criti-
cal notes by the translator, the book presents nothing to suggest that
it is in any sense a false start. As far as we are aware, it remains the
definitive English translation of this key work. It gives every indica-
tion of initiating the career of a philosopher, and a distinguished one
at that (indeed, Malick taught philosophy at the Massachusetts Insti-
tute of Technology for one year in 1968). An unreconstructed
auteurist would probably rush to the conclusion that it did in fact
initiate just that, and that Malick is nothing less, or more, than a phi-
losopher with a camera. There are some grounds for this conclusion
(Malick, by the way, was taken to task by some reviewers for translat-
ing "grundes" as "reasons" in his edition, instead of as "grounds"),
but there are also some reasons to resist it. For now—we will return
to this translation for further discussion later—it is sufficient to note
that this evidence suggests Malick was not to the camera born, that
he could well have pursued other avenues, that he came to film
through the mediation of other interests, and that his responsiveness
to cinema as a medium, and his achievements within it, remain in-
flected by a range of concerns and dispositions—aesthetic, intellectual,
and philosophical. He does not, this is to say, boast the single-
mindedness of so much of the "film generation."
2 The Films of Terrence Malick
For a time, Malick did in fact pursue other avenues. During this
same period, reportedly, he wrote journalism for Life, Newsweek, and
The New Yorker, though none is credited to him in those magazines.
By one account, he was assigned a piece on Regis Debray (Handelman
1985, 106); another source says it was Che Guevara (Gillis 1995, 64),
a project which he worked on but never finished. These accounts, for
whatever reason, appear to have a polemical intent, to lay groundwork
for a finding of sloth, or for the charge of Malick's being a chronic
nonfinisher. From an examination of primary sources, however, all that
is apparent is that the almost classical proportion of Malick's career
to date—three films, a veritable trilogy, pursuing clearly defined the-
matic trajectories, stylistic experiments, and tonal registers, from irony
to romantic irony to full-fledged if tragic lyricism, as if working
through a conscious design well known in advance—is visible only by
hindsight, though perhaps still the product of a deliberate hand.
At the American Film Institute, where Malick enrolled as a mem-
ber of the first class in 1969, he made at least one film that remains
on record, an eighteen-minute short called Lanton Mills. This film was
screened in New York in 1974, after the premiere of Badlands but
before that film's national release (Haskell 1974, 83). Sometime there-
after, however, the institute filed a stipulation that Lanton Mills was
not to be screened. In 1972, a script by Malick was made into a film
called Deadhead Miles. Whether or not it was ever released through
any ordinary channels remains unclear. One Internet source says it was
released in 1982, but no substantiating record of this has been found
elsewhere. In 1985, Deadhead Miles was shown at "Filmex" (the Los
Angeles Film Exposition),1 and a print of it was available in the archive
of the University of California at Los Angeles until 1994, when it was
withdrawn. The film's director, Vernon Zimmerman, says that it is
unavailable in any format, as far as he is aware, and simply cannot be
seen. (Asked to comment on the film itself for this project,
Zimmerman replied with Malick-like laconicism: "No.")
A first draft of the script, however, is available in the Margaret
Herrick Library of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences
in Los Angeles. From a reading of the script and knowledge of the
cast, Deadhead Miles is difficult to imagine, and those associated with
it appear to have little interest in recalling it. Alan Arkin played the
main role, according to an extant cast list. This character is emphati-
cally described as a backwoods type with a bayou drawl, so it is diffi-
cult to imagine the very urban-seeming Arkin in the part, especially
Things Make Themselves Known 3
classical forms in music, but though Malick clearly shares such aspi-
rations, that does not prevent these selections from clashing with the
other pieces of music found in the film—Mickey and Sylvia's "Love
Is Strange" and Nat "King" Cole's "A Blossom Fell." Snatches of the
"Migration" theme, apparently composed for the film by James Tay-
lor, and brief glints of the original music by George Tipton, r o u n d
out what by rights should appear to be a fragmentary, diffuse score.
In practice, however, this variegated composite seems to be very
much of a piece, expressing the shifting moods of the film while cre-
ating, in the consistency of its deployment, a unified effect. Where the
music functions as something more than conventional punctuation it
tends to serve both as ironic commentary and intransitive interjection,
both mute and breathless. Badlands takes its place among the more
influential films of its day—notably the otherwise quite different Taxi
Driver—dealing in forms of irony that seem unloosed from subject
or object, causeless or short-circuited. The use of Orff's music over
shots of a burning house sets up a kind of emotional disconnect, even
if the commentary of the music on the images is, if anything, all too
clear. Both music and image express, here, an awesome, horrific gran-
deur, a kind of terrible beauty, given its due as one of the rhetorical
high points of the film. The sequence, unresolved formally at least to
the extent that the musical piece remains unfinished, gives way with
emphatic fluidity to a m o m e n t of deliberate bathos: a shot of a locker
in a high school hallway, as Holly (Sissy Spacek), who is running away
with Kit (Martin Sheen), the boy who has killed her father and burnt
down the house, narrates a voice-over in her affectless Texas drawl:
"Kit made me get my books from school so I wouldn't fall behind."
Clearly, this is no ordinary irony—or at least, it's not the kind of
irony to be found even in progressive American movies of the '60s,
like John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate (1961), Stanley
Kubrick's Lolita (1962), Tony Richardson's The Loved One (1965),
or Bonnie and Clyde. For one thing, it distances itself from overt
parody or satire, and its wry, laconic detachment is not incompatible
with ineffable notes oflyric passion (though this could perhaps be said
of Lolita, too)—as if to recognize a vitiating continuity among the
beautiful, the ugly, the sublime, and the ridiculous.
What marks Badlands as so decisive a break from the movies that
came before it is precisely the quality of its detachment. The line of
films it culminates deals to varying degrees in irony, satire, or parody,
but Badlands is just about alone a m o n g them in articulating some
Things Make Themselves Known 11
sense of the link between the characters' alienation and its own atti-
tudes of ironic detachment. A fictionalized reconstruction of the ac-
tual 1950s m u r d e r spree of Charles Starkweather and Caril-Ann
Fugate, the film's treatment of these true-crime materials is note-
worthy chiefly for what it refuses to do with them—and the feeling
of the whole film, in a way, is determined by a refined, strangulated
aloofness. It refuses, for instance, to solicit any special sympathy for
the murder victims (perhaps assuming, unlike other films in this group,
that we will already feel such sympathy). By contrast to the stylized,
balletic, protracted, and overblown portrayals of violence that were
current at the time (in films like Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild
Bunch), renderings of violence in Badlands are quick, blunt, unpre-
dictable, and truncated, with an unusual emphasis on the still, terrible
aftermath. Withdrawing from the more sensational aspects of the real-
life crimes, Badlands places them on mordant view as if they were to
be understood as in some way generally representative, or as if some-
thing remotely comic were discernible about them.
What's meant to be funny, it seems, is the very extremity of the char-
acters' estrangement from their own actions, and at first glance, with
the conflict between the inflammatory content and the steely, placid,
insulating tone, the film confronts us with a highly cosmopolitan view
of provincial, backwoodsy abjection. The uses of Orff and Satie, cer-
tainly, among other formal elements, bespeak a high-art milieu much
removed from the atmosphere of the film's settings. At a key turning
point, Kit and Holly arrive at the home of a rich man, w h o m they
briefly take hostage, and t h o u g h the form and content of the film
remain as divided from each other as adjacent echo chambers, the
scene opens up a meaningful channel between them that alters the
tenor of the film as a whole.
"We needed supplies so we stopped at a rich man's house," says
Holly in her slightly breathy, matter-of-fact monotone. "Kit said it'd
be better than going into the downtown." T h o u g h the scene marks
a crucial turn in the film, the voice-over that introduces it is charac-
teristic in its homespun chatter and fussy logic. The house is occu-
pied only by the rich man and his deaf maid, who react to Kit and
Holly's intrusion with a careful, solemn, fearful deference that sug-
gests the fugitives' reputation has preceded them. Part of what gives
the scene a special status in the film is that, nearly two-thirds of the
way through the movie, it provides the first opportunity for a reality
check. It is just about the only time we hear Holly speak to anyone
12 The Films of Terrence Malick
but Kit, apart from the voice-overs themselves and a brief scene with
her father early in the film. "They say I got him wrapped around my
finger," she unexpectedly tells the rich man, "but I never told him to
shoot anybody." The scene before this one has shown a series of styl-
ized, sepia-tinged images of lawmen in pursuit of the fugitives, but
this comment is the only glimpse we get into Holly's outlook on their
public notoriety. By contrast to a film like Bonnie and Clyde, in which
the gang's manipulation of their own public image is a central theme,
Badlands treats the theme only obliquely and elliptically. It is more
interested in the outlaws' sense of themselves as passive victims than
in their role as active agents.
The real significance of the scene is to show Holly and Kit in an
alien cultural environment. The house is a space of entombed seclu-
sion—somewhat akin to the Bates house in Hitchcock's Psycho
(1960)—filled with Victorian paintings, busts and sculptures, stately
mantels and clocks, well-kept artifacts signifying richness of every
stripe. In a way, oddly dreamlike as the scene is, the house figures as
an oneiric amplification of Holly's lost home: The shot that introduces
it is of a cupola, parallel to an earlier shot of Holly gazing from an
upper window in a cupola of her own house, and Kit's manner with
the rich man reverts to the belligerent respect he showed Holly's fa-
ther just before shooting him, down to repeating the same passive-
aggressive phrase: "How'd that be?" In another sense, the house is a
conceptual extension and practical opposite of the hovel presided over
in an earlier episode by Kit's friend, Cato, an enclave also distinguished
chiefly by the quality of the objects it contains. As Cato, shot by Kit,
bleeds to death in a corner, Kit remarks contemptuously of the tools,
wheels, old radios, and gimcrack mechanical devices that clutter the
room, "Look at all this junk." In the rich man's house he is less di-
rect in his estimation but wanders through the space gazing at ob-
jects, even touching or poking them, with much the same dazed, irate
manner.
The stifled comedy of the scene comes from its atmosphere of ar-
bitrary waiting and from dry observation of Kit and Holly's wan ef-
forts to make use of the objects in the rich man's house. The camera
pans across a pre-Raphaelite canvas as we hear an eerie keening
sound, the source of which is identified as we cut to a shot of Holly
running her finger around the rim of a fine crystal glass. Kit rings a
bell and then, gazing blankly into the camera, announces, "Next time
I ring this bell means it's time to leave." Another shot shows Holly
Things Make Themselves Known 13
understand it—but only that he has traded in one set of cliches for
another.
Earlier versions of this plot, even when they present their outlaws
as helpless victims of a system (as in Lang's Tou Only Live Once [1937]
or They Live by Night), treat the plot itself, typically, as a cautionary
tale, and what distinguishes the N e w Hollywood cycle from earlier
manifestations is its palpable mistrust of social critique, a skepticism
that both enables and prods the ironic postures the films variously take
up. Bonnie and Clyde, for instance, retains some of the victims-of-a-
system pathos, but conceives society as an aggregate of lies, hypocri-
sies, cliches, and shams perpetrated by vulgar functionaries or
grotesque hucksters—and a few J o h n Ford " c o m m o n folk" types
thrown in with a marked lack of conviction. By no means are the crimi-
nals seen as odious threats to decent society, and though Badlands has
no interest in converting its main characters into folk heroes, its feel-
ing of detachment hinges in part on a distinct indifference to the so-
cial-problem dimensions of the material. Kit and Holly are seen as
significant neither as menaces to social welfare nor as representatives
of social pathology. Their pertinence seems more directly existential-
ist; what they manifest is, to paraphrase Cavell, a reduction in signifi-
cance itself.
The problem is not that Kit and Holly are estranged from their own
subjectivities. Despite their affectlessness and even their relative pas-
sivity, their senses of themselves as subjects are all too apparent. Nearly
every word they utter is the expression of an opinion, a reflection, a
memory, a chimera, a hope, a grudge, an idea, an expectation, a wish,
or some other effect of inner experience. The whole point of Holly's
voice-over narration—that odd amalgam of romantic cliches, dime-
novel pieties, fervent convictions, and spacey reasonings—is to sug-
gest a constant u n d e r c u r r e n t of t h o u g h t and feeling that never
manages to intervene in, and certainly does nothing to halt, the re-
morseless progression of the action. The uncanniest moments of the
voice-over occur when Holly blithely reveals information that alters
our senses of her own relation to the action—as in the strangely poi-
gnant scene where she gazes through her father's stereopticon and,
over hauntingly random images of a fanciful past, speculates about the
man she will marry, showing that she does not expect it to be Kit; or
when she reveals, near the end of the film, that she has married the
son of her lawyer after her trial. The only moment when this ribbon
of words makes real contact with the Mobius strip of the action is when
Holly says in the voice-over that she is going to leave Kit, and we then
18 The Films of Terrence Malick
see his response on screen—and this is also, significantly, the only time
Kit expresses real rage in the film. For his part, Kit commits two mono-
logues to record in the course of the film—both of which manage to
be at once florid and taciturn—and they reveal a mix of psychotic self-
importance, aggrandizing modesty, and cracker-barrel philosophizing.
Yet neither are Holly and Kit akin to the lineage of film characters
of the time who are so alienated they just want to feel something, even
if it's something terrible—such as George C. Scott in Richard Lester's
Petulia (1968), Faye Dunaway in Jerry Schatzberg's Puzzle of a Down-
fall Child (1968), Jack Nicholson in Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces
(1970), Tuesday Weld in Frank Perry's Play It As It Lays (1972), Weld
and Anthony Perkins in Pretty Poison, or Jack L e m m o n in John G.
Avildsen's Save the Tiger (1973). Nor does the authenticity of this feel-
ing appear to be what is at stake, since its inauthenticity is made so
clear from the start, so much a part of the film's mordantly comic
ambience. If Kit and Holly are not narcissists in any salient or clinical
sense—and the film is about as interested in traditional psychological
explanations as Heidegger was—they might as well be, for it is the
outer world of objects, more than the domain of subjects, that is out
of joint in Badlands. Kit and Holly are adrift in a world of objects,
and from the beginning, the film asks us to pay close attention to how
the relations among the characters are mediated by their own relation
to objects, 5 which is, from the start, defined in terms of aggression.
In the first scene, impulsively quitting work early on his job as a gar-
bage collector, Kit throws a piece of rubble back at his coworker, Cato,
who has thrown it at him. Fired from his job, Kit is pelted by the fore-
man as he walks off. When Kit and Holly play in a field adjacent to
Cato's hutch, their game entails throwing scraps of detritus at each
other.
The superficially playful overtones of some of these interactions dis-
sipate as one considers them in sequence, and in relation to the blunt,
inexpressive language that connects subject to object, concept to per-
cept. "I found a toaster," says Kit, returning from the cellar where he
has stowed the body of Holly's father. "I got my d o g , " the foreman
yelps after his incitement of pelting Kit, when Kit briefly turns back
to him. "I almost stepped on the chicken," says Holly soon after the
two have taken refuge in their native outpost. "We d o n ' t need this,"
remarks Kit, tossing aside a rusty birdcage as they are leaving the out-
post. "[Kit] shot a football," Holly narrates in voice-over, as we watch
the action described, "that he considered excess baggage." "I found
Things Make Themselves Known 19
the dog Holly's father shoots and dumps in the lake, the dead chicken
and the chicken Kit and Holly bring to C a t o , another d o g Holly
glimpses from afar as she wanders outside the millionaire's house.
Because these creatures are actually sensate, by contrast to the inert
yet mysteriously responsive objects of which they are living analogues,
they hover between the subjective and objective worlds, viewed dis-
tantly—except for a sudden close-up of the dog as it is shot, the one
m o m e n t when the film confronts violence head-on—with a cumula-
tive, unspoken sense of sorrowing, swelling up from some undisclos-
able place, for the cruelties these obtuse and pliant beings must endure,
or to which they must submit.
A curious slackening occurs at the end of Badlands, perhaps deriv-
ing in part from the fact that Holly's voice-over becomes less frequent
in the final scenes, but conveying, in any case, an odd land of reces-
sional effect. It is as if we are moving ever further away from these
people at w h o m we have gazed so intensely for so long, and at the
same time seeing things about them we hadn't divined before. Holly's
affectlessness turns into sadness, and we suddenly find ourselves see-
ing from her point of view; the last shot, through the windows of a
plane, into the folds of ineffable clouds, is from her perspective. Kit's
narcissism becomes a form of charisma, and although we are not en-
couraged to be charmed by him, the officers who have arrested him
genuinely seem to be. At the same time, the strict, precisionist focus
of the film loosens; we see fleeting details, unrelated to Kit's arrest or
Holly's fate, of the military base to which the two have been conveyed.
Apprehended, Holly and Kit are suddenly glimpsed in a definable
context, while before they had been fully visible only apart from one,
where they had hoped to subsist (figs. 3-4). In these final scenes, it
seems almost as if the film has lost interest in them, or wants us to
know they have lost their hold on us; certainly, it intends to give us
no further access to them. Instead, there is a sense of release, expressed
with such casual attentions that we may wonder how they ever gained
their hold on us to begin with. The feeling of sadness is palpable, de-
spite the comic turns of Kit's performance for those who have cap-
tured him.
The quality of the film's ironies is closer in sensibility to that of other
films of the time in this concluding segment than it is earlier in the
film. The ending of Taxi Driver, for instance, suggests comparisons.
After an explosion of violence at the end of that film, too terrible to
be cathartic, Travis Bickle becomes a hero, celebrated in the media
and recognized with respect by a woman who had previously spurned
Figs. 3-4. We begin to lose sight of Kit and Holly: The ending of Badlands.
Courtesy of Photofest.
Things Make Themselves Known 23
him. Scorsese hedges bets by leaving open the possibility that this coda
is somebody's nightmare, but the satirical tenor is unmistakable. In
both cases, the theme of celebrity is introduced as if it had been the
crucial element all along, and the turn in the films' structures opens
them up, frees them from the accusation of didacticism by opposing
competing tones, and makes it hard to see what stance either film, in
the end, is taking. Only the visceral emotional and physical violence
of Taxi Driver keeps it, too, in its sly ironies, from seeming "cold,"
and the bleak moralism of the film's outlook manages to encompass
allegory, irony, and shock value. The turn at the end of Badlands is
ironic structurally, but less so tonally; it pursues the possibility that
any attitude adopted by the film is really just another stance, provi-
sional or rhetorical, one that could change in the next minute, accord-
ing to circumstance.
In a similar sense, the scene at the rich man's house, tonally reve-
latory as it is, is structurally also a bit digressive. It flirts with the di-
gressiveness that becomes central to the storytelling of Days of Heaven,
which features an insistent scene (Bill wandering alone through the
farmer's house) that echoes it quite directly, and another (the appear-
ance of the flying circus) that opens a similarly self-reflexive lens upon
that later film, with its themes of work, play, class, and migration. The
desolation of the ending of Badlands suggests that the irony that has
guided so much of the film's sensibility has been deemed something
of a dead end, and Days of Heaven reverts to a kind of romantic irony,
as if to escape the bind. Whether or not it managed to do so for its
maker may be inferred, perhaps, from the twenty years of silence that
followed.
Whatever the relation of Malick's most recent film to his first two,
a basic tension between irony and ardency informs Badlands and Days
of Heaven. The outlaw-lovers-on-the-run template of Badlands splits
the difference between the socially conscious romanticism of They Live
by Night and the counterculture mythmaking of Bonnie and Clyde,
while Days of Heaven weds Whitman's poetic ideal of the democratic
vista to the interior landscapes of Henry James, with a plot that evokes
The Wings of the Dove and ends with a quasi-biblical plague of locusts.
Days of Heaven's sources may principally be classically literary, includ-
24 The Films of Terrence Malick
ing Mark Twain and Willa Cather, but the film shares some of the
aestheticist detachment of Badlands, a cool distanciation that inheres
in the formalist rigor of its imagery and the inexorable languor of its
violence. In Days of Heaven, aesthetic distance resides in a complex
system of modernist narrative ellipses, but collides with an aesthete's
passionate lyricism, much as in Badlands the continuing hope of in-
nocence, still visible in quicksilver nature, meets the seeming inevita-
bility of corruption.
In Malick's most recent film, this tension is all but gone. The Thin
Red Line, based on James Jones's 1962 novel, pursues the strains of
ardent feeling of the director's earlier work but, without seeming to
renounce it, forsakes the irony. The core of the film follows an Ameri-
can battalion's fight against the Japanese for a hill at Guadalcanal, and
although this core provides dramatic grounding for the movie, it is
flanked at both ends, beginning and end, by stretches of storytelling
so fragmentary, so mercurial, they're nearly abstract. If in Badlands
Malick sought the stringency of a tone poem, and in Days of Heaven
the breadth of a ballad, in The Thin Red Line, the director aspires to
the impersonal grandeur of the epic. In each set of narrative possibili-
ties, Malick finds the same association between pain and ecstasy, but
in the earlier films the dialectic bred a certain agitation, while in The
Thin Red Line, it has resolved into a strange tranquility. Narrative here
remains tied to archetype, a set of given patterns self-consciously re-
combined, arranged with the impartial sophistication of a chronicler
attuned to the grid work of collective unconsciousness, but the fer-
vently self-reflexive turns of the story, as complex as ever, are no longer
fully in the service of an ironic skepticism. The Thin Red Line is an
antiwar movie, but unlike other antiwar movies it superficially re-
sembles, from the hallucinatory inferno of Apocalypse Now (1979) to
the gung-ho kitsch of Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan (1998), it is
almost entirely free of anger or bitterness. Its battle scenes are poeti-
cally matter-of-fact, among the most powerful ever filmed, but its cri-
tique of the ethos of war appears to derive from a vantage point of
ultimate quiescence, and in that regard, The Thin Red Line is unique
among American war films.
In its picture of combat, The Thinh Red Line falls somewhere be-
tween Renoir's Grand Illusion (1937) with battle scenes put in, and
Jancso's The Red and the White (1968) or Saving Private Ryan with
the savagery distilled. The representations of battle in The Thin Red
Line do not shirk the need to confront ferment or unspeakable besti-
Things Make Themselves Known 25
war film. Frequently we are shown effects before causes, badly wounded
men, for instance, before the fighting itself.
The uses of voice-over in the film similarly contribute to the con-
struction of character, synthesizing impersonal chronicle with stream -
of-consciousness poetics. In Malick's previous films, the voice-over was
perhaps the clearest gauge of irony, revealing the distance between the
limited perspectives of the characters and the mordant self-reflexivity
of the narration. In Badlands, Holly's patter of dime-novel cliches trips
over a steely procession of tersely contrapuntal images, while in Days
of Heaven the little sister, Linda, spoke artlessly meditative monologues
that surprise in their patchwork assembly as surely in what they show
she does not know as in what they show she does. These voice-overs
ask to be seen, in part, as pastiches—of a penny-dreadful false con-
sciousness or of a kid's tough, slangy talk—yet despite the irony of
their deployment, they also comment on the poignancy of mis-
recognition and the vulnerability of the ignorant, the innocent, or the
impressionable. The sentiments that characters utter in voice-over in
The Thin Red Line could also easily be heard as cliches. "What is this
war in the heart of nature?" is the first sentence we hear, murmured
earnestly by the AWOL soldier, Witt (played by Jim Caviezel), at the
start of the film. "I was a prisoner, you set me free . . . I drink you
Things Make Themselves Known 27
like water," says the private, Bell (played by Ben Chaplin), in an inte-
rior monologue addressed to his wife. "You are my sons," thinks the
officer, Staros (played by Elias Koteas), leaving his battalion, "my dear
sons. I carry you inside m e . "
These musings are delivered with real, direct conviction, and they
are not counterpointed by action or images, as the voice-overs in Days
of Heaven or Badlands often are. They are elliptical, however, fleet-
ing and fragmentary, and they no more function to convey standard
exposition than the voice-overs of Malick's previous films do. Indeed,
so dispersed are they across the film's many characters—at one point,
as we're looking at the lifeless face of a half-buried Japanese soldier,
we hear a rumination in what we can only assume to be the dead man's
voice—and so ephemeral are they, so moody and mercurial, they serve
something like the opposite function of a traditional voice-over. Far
from seeming to grant any privileged access to the interior lives of the
characters, these voice-overs make those interior lives seem more
mysterious than they would otherwise. They are the fragments of
thoughts, prayers, letters h o m e , yet as these forms bleed into each
other, and as the voice-overs blur the boundaries of inner and outer—
at times, what begins as a line of spoken dialogue ends as a voice-
over—their address seems finally constant. All the men, together or
alone, even at the height of battle, and even if they think they are
addressing God or one another or absent lovers, are really talking only
to themselves. Their musings would have to be rejected as cliche only
if we, as listeners, insisted upon reverting them to a public form, and
they claim a measure of their pathos from their forthright platitude,
showing a hopeful perseverance of the private, even in the grip of the
ultimate, when selves are lost. They are the shards of lost, fleeing voices
that, even if we are somehow privy to them, cannot be heard in the
real world.
A m o n g other things, The Thin Red Line is a mosaic of faces, and
the use of actors is determined by the narrative impulse to collectiv-
ism—though the jarring appearance of "stars" sometimes undermines
this impulse. The dominant scales of the film's perspectives are long
shots and close-ups, and by combining these extremes, Malick syn-
thesizes the epic and the intimate. The close-ups work by principles
of Eisensteinian typage, shots sometimes gone too quickly to afford
recognition of the actor's face, and sometimes lingering, held to sug-
gest an oblique, obtuse meaning beyond the visible. Because the nar-
rative follows no single character as its focus, the viewer is repeatedly
surprised by the reappearance of characters in unexpected contexts,
28 The Films of Terrence Malick
NOTES
sive, zonked-out concern, and then, put off by Kit, leaves. It is an uncanny
moment.
7. This concise formulation of the Heideggerean dilemma is courtesy of
Irving Massey; for Heidegger, according to Massey, perception of difference
precedes perception of identities as an article of bad faith. Massey himself
argues against the Heideggerean position: "Things exist individually . . . but
we force a relation on them" (see Massey 1976, 145, and for the quote, 102).
8. The correspondents are Vernon Young and Gilberto Perez. Young, who
had liked Badlands, loathed Days of Heaven, referring to it as "overblown"
and "mendacious." See Hudson Review 32.3 (fall 1979): 326-31.
CHAPTER 2
Streams of Consciousness,
Spools of History: Days of Heaven
T H E A C K N O W L E D G M E N T OF SILENCE
man pursues Bill, unrelenting, Bill sideswipes his head with a tool and
falls on him, then, realizing the extent of his injury, pulls away. The
hand-held camera dizzily circles the foreman's contorted face; a cut-
away shot shows a fire-red ingot crashing slowly to the ground; and
a final shot, symmetrically framed, glowing with molded shafts of light,
shows Bill running off into the distance. On this image we fade, slowly,
to a still, tranquil shot of Bill's little sister, Linda (played by Linda
Manz), in a bower of daisies, a field both shadowy and drenched in
sun. Her voice over the images links the two shots: "Me and my
brother—it used to be just me and my brother . . . He used to amuse
us, he used to entertain us."
The girl's voice is brisk, knowing, matter-of-fact; if it registers at
all the impact of the extraordinary event we have just witnessed, it does
so only obliquely, subtly—in the initial stammer, say, in the delivery
of the lines. Throughout, the seeming directness and spontaneity of
Linda's sporadic monologue clashes with the circuitous logic of the
action, which it does little to explain. The viewer can resort to specu-
lation in order to substantiate motive—understanding the accident,
for instance, as a haphazard consequence of one man's hostility and
another's temper. But the withholding of background circumstance
lends the event something of the indefinite gravity of archetype—as
if it were to be accepted only as a given fact, in need of no elabora-
tion, a simple inevitability, if not a narrative convenience.
The following shots continue to establish an erratic, mercurial
rhythm. Abby (played by Brooke Adams), whom we recognize from
the scene of the women working in the stream, reclines uneasily in a
bed in a dark, dusky chamber, her brow caressed by Bill. The shot is
brief, still, and the two mumble in low voices. "Things aren't always
going to be this way," says Bill. A sudden cut to a low, exterior angle
shows Bill, Abby, and Linda running heedlessly into the depth of the
frame. Again we hear Linda's voice-over, now tinged with a rumina-
tive chattiness, oracular but childlike: "For a long time all three of us
been goin' places . . . lookin' for things, searchin' for things." A gui-
tar riff of folk music commences casually, at odds with the grandilo-
quence of the main score, while a breathtaking shot of a distant train
streaming over a suspension bridge under a wide, bright sky initiates
a transition from the city to the country, where the three have fled to
seek refuge.
Only a few minutes into the film, an intricate series of symphonic
drifts, counterpointed effects, have been laid out—directness against
36 The Films of Terrence Malick
the shots that show the farmer (played by Sam Shepard) gazing long-
ingly at Abby (played by Brooke Adams), Linda's voice-over resumes:
"This farmer, he didn't know when he first saw her, or what it was
about her . . . Maybe it was the way the wind blew through her hair."
Later, after Bill has overheard a doctor telling the farmer that he has
only a year to live, a quick close-up of the farmer lying alone in his
bed is accompanied by another of Linda's voice-overs: "He knew he
was going to die . . . You're only on this earth once, to my opinion
you ought to have it nice." Whether stiltedly poetic or childishly philo-
sophical, these voice-overs give us little grounding in the plot. In each
case, the question of how Linda has come by the information she so
blithely imparts is left unanswered.
Two main conventions of cinematic voice-over are defined by the
positioning of the narrator.1 In some cases, a dramatic situation mo-
tivates a narrator to tell the story the voice-over recounts, as in Billy
Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944), the prologue to Donen's Singin'
in the Rain (1951), or Bunuel's That Obscure Object of Desire (1977).
In such instances, the narrative is typically rendered as flashback, with
the voice-over explaining the story's events in the past tense from a
clearly defined present tense, as we see the events unfold, and the
voice-over is often addressed to other characters in the film. In other
cases, perhaps more conventionally, the voice-over issues from a con-
ceptually oriented, nonliteral space, without clear reference to a dra-
matic situation or a definable tense, as in Wilder's The Apartment
(1960), Chris Marker's La Jetee (1962), or Stanley Kubrick's Barry
Lyndon (1975). In these instances, the voice-over serves a more strictly
narrative function. The speaker is, in a much more direct way, func-
tioning as a narrator, and even when the voice is that of a character
in the film, as in The Apartment, the question of when or from where
the voice is speaking is not addressed in the discourse of the narra-
tive. The use of the past tense implies that the voice-over's relation
to the story's events is retrospective, but a high degree of convention-
alism typically renders the device of the voice-over as relatively trans-
parent—except in famous, anomalous examples of films that exploit
the conceptual character of the device in order to "lay it bare," as it
were—such as Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950) or Sam Mendes's
American Beauty (1999), where the voice-over, in both cases, turns
out to be that of a character who is murdered in the plot.
What Malick does with Linda's voice-over in Days of Heaven is to
employ, on the whole, the second of these conventions, but to ren-
der it in a way that implicates the first. If Malick's achievement in so
38 The Films of Terrence Malick
despite appearances nothing had ever really changed, and both fulfill
and acknowledge the silences from which they derive, and on which
they c o m m e n t . In that sense, they are true to the spirit of Stanley
Cavell's remarks on "the acknowledgement of silence" as an effect of
film sound:
I have in mind not the various ways dialogue can stand at an angle to
the life that produces it; nor the times in which the occasion is past when
you can say what you did not think to say; nor the times when the
occasions for speech is blocked by inappropriateness or fear, or the
vessels of speech are pitched by grief or joy. I have rather in mind the
pulsing air of incommunicability which may nudge the edge of any ex-
perience and placement . . . spools of history that have unwound only
to me now, occasions which will not reach words for me now, and if
not now, never . . . This reality of the unsayable is what I see in film's
new release from the synchronization of speech with speaker, or rather
in its presenting of the speaker in forms in which there can be no speech.
(Cavell 1979, 148)
in the field, the foreman strides up to her and docks her pay for some
minor infraction. When Bill objects on her behalf, the foreman qui-
ets the objection by threatening to fire them both.
Most obviously, the scene registers the injustice of the workers' sub-
ordination—"They didn't need you," Linda comments dourly in one
of the voice-overs, "they'd ship you right out of there and get some-
body else"—but its less obvious point is more narratively implicated.
Malick introduces a key motif of the plot in this strange mix of di-
rectness and obliquity. The foreman's paternal, protective relation to
the farmer translates into his hostile suspicion of Bill and Abby. In its
way, the point is indeed quite direct: Because of the farmer's offhand
inquiry about Abby, the foreman targets her in the next scene for
punishment. Yet it is rendered, here, in an emphatically sideward
manner. In the close-up shot of the farmer's query, the foreman's
presence is signified only by his stoic mumble offscreen, diminishing
the literal connection between this moment and its consequence.
One outcome of such dislocation of cause from effect is to require
the viewer to complete the connections between the terms. Another
such outcome, more important in the film as a whole, is to deny uni-
lateral or unilinear connections among causes and effects. In the ex-
Streams of Consciousness, Spools of History 43
CLASSIC VS. M O D E R N
new." What is this feeling, what is new about it, and how is it that
the "modern American books"—which should by rights define it—
instead no longer participate in it? The crabby ellipses of Lawrence's
style, enabling at once authority and diffidence, do not allow for easy
answers. It seems clear, however, that he wants to mark out as "clas-
sic" the period in American literature from the end of the revolution
to the time of the Civil War. According to Lawrence, in fact, there is
a distinction between the "Pilgrim Fathers," who thought they were
escaping into freedom, and the "modern Americans tortured by
thought," who believe they have discovered a homeland, yet whom
the genuine freedom of "wholeness" still eludes.
"Classic" American literature, then, according to Lawrence, lies be-
tween the innocent idealism of the colonies and the jaded integrity
of the states. The latter apotheosis, for Lawrence, is no less idealist
than its heritage, but the period between that propitious origin and
its ultimate fulfillment is given a special status in Lawrence's
macrohistory of America's cultural evolution. It comes after the shack-
les of Europe have been thrown off, and before those of "America"
as such, as a fully defined national identity or cultural ideal, have been
secured, and so it shows exactly what Lawrence wants America to il-
lustrate: a concept of freedom as endless quest, unfettered by ideol-
ogy, and pursued in a spirit of naivete without sentiment, a mood of
extremity without self-consciousness, with an awareness that the goal
is delusion.
"Displacement hurts"—but it is also, evidently, the raw material of
"wholeness." Or, at any rate, it can be the bane of the "conscious self
that will let the "deepest self emerge, to realize that "IT"—the
"whole American self—arises in the recognition that displacement is
an essential condition of being. Neither the soul in flight nor in re-
pose can perceive this, Lawrence suggests, only the soul poised be-
tween flight and rest. He uses the word "classic" to mean not just old
and venerated, but harmonious and balanced, even if what draws him
so powerfully to these "old" American books is how they display the
balance of crisis acknowledged, not avoided, and the sloppy harmony
of the urge to embrace the negative en route to some final affirma-
tion—to cry "No!" in Thunder (to paraphrase Melville on
Hawthorne), even if all the world would have you say "Yes."
It is disconcerting to hear Lawrence speak of the "negative ideal
of democracy," and then go on to revel in this visionary fantasia of
"deepest" selves and "whole" American souls. One finds little of this
Streams of Consciousness, Spools of History 45
folksy classicism and classy kitsch (and the numerous contexts into
which it has been appropriated since the film's release, from previews
for other films to television commercials, attests to its quality of adapt-
able mimicry), as if it were simulating an archetype so pervasive in the
collective imagination that it could not be traced back to its origin.
In its dreamy solemnity, the score achieves the effect of having been
heard before—even if one is hearing it for the first time; likewise, the
photographs seem meant to appear as if already seen, even if one is
unaware of their referents. They inhabit the sphere of the "mythic,"
insofar as they seem to exist outside time, out of place, yet to evoke
relatively local moods, styles, periods.
Nor does Malick oppose the images of arcadian pastoral to those
of wretchedness and despair. Rather, he casts them both in the same
mythically sepia glow, as part of the same construct, to show an
America that has forged itself from myths of celebration as well as
myths of penitence—days of heaven and days of hell.
Malick's film is structured around polarities that shape the tradi-
tional frontier mythology so widely resonant in American culture: city
and country, civilization and wilderness. The film starts in the hellish
city and moves to the paradisiacal country—the journey made pos-
sible by the quintessential machine-in-the-garden, the railroad train.
But the escape, the film reminds us, is an element of the myth, not a
departure from it, and the machine extends its reach into every ves-
tige of the idyll. The cycle of the harvest is shown in all its elemental
glory, but into the midst of it, bluntly and with forthright didacticism,
Malick cuts a shot of a blazing furnace, the emblem of what the char-
acters think they have left behind. Thematically transparent, but for-
mally enigmatic, this intrusive shot announces the juxtaposition of a
highly modern sensibility upon the materials, and although this sen-
sibility is pervasive, its intent seems to be to amplify the classic mate-
rials it shapes, not to counter them. Such formal correlatives of this
sensibility are relatively rare in the film—certainly by comparison to a
film like McCabe and Mrs. Miller.
Though these fleeting moments in Days of Heaven are striking, it
is primarily an elusive yet pervasive quality of tone that gives them their
weight. To call this tone romantic irony conveys both its synthetic
quality and its atavistic tendencies. Malick may not be inclined to
counter, in any direct or simple way, romantic myths of the land with
ironic assertions of self-consciousness; still, the point of that editorial
insert, the intercut shot of the furnace, is clearly to assert continuities
48 The Films of Terrence Malick
Every picture shows us not only a piece of reality, but a point of view
as well . . . The physiognomy of every object in a film picture is a com-
posite of two physiognomies—one is that of the object, its very own,
which is quite independent of the spectator—and another physiognomy,
determined by the viewpoint of the spectator and the perspective of the
Streams of Consciousness, Spools of History 49
picture. In the shot the two merge into so close a unity that only a very
practiced eye is capable of distinguishing these two components in the
picture itself (Balasz 1970, 89-91)
It is just this "unity" that leads some theorists to deny the descriptive
valence of cinematic images. Description, in film, would apparently
require some interval between self-evident object and self-effacing
viewpoint, even if every but the most naive viewer knows that the phe-
nomena making up the perceptual field, at least in a fiction film, are
always determined by a process of conception, selection, and arrange-
ment. Because photographs do not usually tell a story over time, the
unity of "reality" and "point of view," object and subject, inheres to
make the p h o t o g r a p h available as representation. T h e very acts of
conceiving, capturing, displaying, and exhibiting the photograph all
participate in that "unity," and in photography, we could say, to show
is to describe. In film, subject and object, perspective and reality, are
in constant flux, both caught in a temporal process that supplants the
unity between them. To put it another way: A film need not pause
for description, but a photograph wsuch a pause.
Clearly, of course, many films do pause for description—think of
ethnographic or scenographic films, many documentaries, or the work
of the great nature poets of the cinema, from Sjostrom to Murnau,
Dovzhenko, Renoir (in A Day in the Country [1936] or The River
[ 1 9 5 1 ] ) , Drever (in the exteriors of Vampyr [ 1 9 3 1 ] , Day of Wrath
[ 1 9 4 3 ] , and Ordet [1955]), or Michael Powell (sporadically from The
Edge of the World [1937] to Age of Consent [1968]), to John Ford,
Souleymene Cisse, or Aleksandr Sokurov, and including Malick. What
Malick does in Days of Heaven is to conjure exactly the kind of inter-
val between the one who sees and what is seen that theorists have tra-
ditionally found lacking, and to do so at both formal and narrative
levels. Formally, Malick makes us constantly aware of perspective, by
intercutting images of landscape with characters who appear to be
looking at something. Yet our awareness remains arrested at a formal
level, since the literal anchorage of perspective is frequently snatched
away, when it turns out that what we are seeing is not, after all, from
the point of view of the character we thought it was. We are constantly
made aware of people gazing, but can never really be sure what they
see, or if we are seeing what they see. How, after all, could we possi-
bly know? Among its many illusions, the cinema makes available the
impression of shared vision, and part of the grandeur of Malick's land-
scapes comes from his use of that capacity—in our sense of the film's
50 The Films of Terrence Malick
Pace Cavell, this sense of conviction in the film may be Malick's way
of letting objects speak for themselves—of showing them as they have
been glimpsed, without worrying about making them look particu-
larly new or strildngly distinctive; on the contrary, it seems clear they
are usually meant to function as visual echoes. When Cavell speaks of
how Malick's art reveals the participation of objects in their own pho-
tographic representation, he may get at crucial features of this art—
the clarity and precision of Malick's descriptive scenography, the
tendency to combine a neo-Romantic identification of self and nature
with elements of a postmodern objectivism (a la Robbe-Grillet, if he'd
ever had a Chateaubriand phase). But it remains unclear, in this con-
text, what Cavell thinks Malick has done that is different from what
any other filmmaker might do: D o objects, as Cavell suggests, always
participate in their own representation? If so, then in what sense is
Malick's treatment special? What Cavell misses is the thematic dimen-
sion of Malick's landscape description. The ache of this film (and of
The Thin Red Line) comes from its sense that the beauty it displays
is, in fact, not apprehensible by the modern subjects who dwell within
it, if it ever was. Late in the film, Bill and Abby sneak out for a tryst
and wade through a river, drinking champagne. When Bill drops his
glass in the water, it is noted only in passing. Later, however (in a shot
akin to the insert of the furnace), Malick emphatically cuts back to it:
that abandoned glass, resting at the bottom of the river, in a spectral
glow of moonlight. People may leave their traces on the land, the shot
seems to say—and the film as a whole shows us the devastation of such
traces—but they can never truly join with it.
The descriptive passages of the film remain apart from those more
strictly narrative to a degree nearly unheard of since the days of silent
cinema. Malick depends on this separateness for the film's distinctive
rhythms much as he relies on their reversionary character to synthe-
size them into an organic whole. A romance of the land can merge
with a modernist ballad of disillusionment if it harks back to the clas-
sic era of the movies, the film shows us, and to that end, Malick oc-
casionally risks cliche in the lyricism of his landscapes—as, for instance,
in one of the nature montages that appears in the film, in a time-lapsed
image of a flowering plant. The romantic irony of Malick's vision in
this film stands in contrast to the shallow skepticism of the " m o d e r n "
film of the 1970s Hollywood renaissance. In Days of Heaven, Malick
attempts w4iat Lawrence counseled: to find the "new feelings" in the
"old" models, and to make that displacement unite.
52 The Films of Terrence Malick
out self-consciousness, without ever thinking about it, while the lat-
ter strives to recover a simplicity that can only really be available be-
fore one has thought about it. It is difficult to reconcile Days of Heaven
as a whole with the antipodes of Schiller's polarity, but the dictum
bears a striking relevance to this film in which an extreme sophistica-
tion is brought to bear on materials that remain, to varying degrees,
mythological, childlike, or naive.
In these terms, the question seems to be—pace Schiller—how Days
of Heaven is able to avoid a crippling sentimentality. Assuming that it
does so, one answer may be that the film's stake in the value of inno-
cence is so powerful that conviction itself, in an a t m o s p h e r e of
hypersophistication, amounts to a preserve of innocence that sophis-
tication usually supplants. A comparison with Charles Laughton's The
Night of the Hunter (1955), an earlier exercise in recondite pastoral
from the American cinema, may clarify the point. The sensibility of
Laughton's feverish parable can be summed up as the unlikely cou-
pling of Huck Finn and Bertolt Brecht. Like Days of Heaven, The Night
of the Hunter laminates its agrarian iconography with the modernist
poetics of Brechtian distanciation, and the film charges its Manichean
allegory to hold off the innocence of childhood from the adultera-
tions of grown-up evils. Laughton's gothic tale of a crazed preacher's
pursuit of two children quickly turns comic; since the condition of
childhood is idealized so completely in the film, one can hardly be-
lieve that any evil could ever hold sway over it. But no viewer could
doubt the sincerity of the panegyrics to childhood delivered in folksy
soliloquy directly to the camera by the avenging angel, Rachel: "My
soul is humble when I see how little ones accept their lot. . . . They
abide and they endure." Rachel is played by Lillian Gish, and it is sig-
nificant that both Days of Heaven and The Night of the Hunter evoke
the silent cinema in their hymns to innocence. Though Laughton turns
to irony to keep his film from sentiment, he depends on conviction
alone to give it emotional coherence.
Malick's modernism is closer to Faulkner than to Brecht, and where
Laughton appears to find landscape interesting only as a site of ex-
pressionist stylization or projection, Malick sees it as an actual loca-
tion of the "natural." As we have seen, a large share of his film's
conviction derives from its exploratory, pensive, non-rhetorical images
of landscape. In the descriptive passages, innocence is taken as a given,
not something to be striven for, and the tragic sense of the film comes
from the inalienable segregation of these passages from the dramatic
54 The Films of Terrence Malick
infinitude—a conception that reflects anxiety about how one can re-
tain individuality while mass experience consumes, commodifies, and
charts all domains of the social.
Especially considering the rhetoric of an American sublime (defined
in nearly textbook terms) that infuses Days of Heaven, these ideas seem
quite germane. The film is hardly a didactic tale of revolutionary so-
cial critique, but it does seem to suggest that, to the extent that re-
sistance to social oppression is possible in this historical context, the
individual develops such resistance through some mode of aesthetic
experience: Bill's moments of wandering, in the fields or through the
farmer's house, are as much about his growing disillusionment with
his own lot as with his admiring contemplation of natural wonders or
cultural artifacts. Indeed, the treatment of folk culture in the film pre-
sents it as an expansion of aesthetic experience, a logical outgrowth
of an inclusive and enlarging social sphere, as well as of the institu-
tionalization of labor in mass culture. With the onset of mass culture,
as Ferguson remarks, "[sjports, carnivals, games, and in general, the
notion of leisure as time off from work begin to look as aesthetic as
a work of art" (Ferguson 1992, 69). Days of Heaven itself may
aestheticize the varieties of folk culture it represents, but it also shows
an awareness that the cultural pastimes we repeatedly see the crowds
56 The Films of Terrence Malick
ter, Linda represents the duality most piercingly, even if one of the
things that makes it so acute is that she herself does not know it.
Unable to see their own experiences through the lens of self-reflec-
tion, the film's characters act out the tragedy of their fates, instinc-
tively and reflexively. It is as if the film has found a way to valorize
innocence without idealizing it, so that it can admire characters' art-
lessness while decrying the vulnerability and adversity that are its con-
sequences. The treatment of point of view in the film augments this
feeling, as when a reverse-shot reveals that a vantage point we had
thought was general is, in fact, the perspective of a character; or when
a shot such as Bill's envious gaze at the farmer's house, a point-of-
view tracking shot early in the film, is later repeated exactly, without
the grounding of the character's vantage point. Again and again, we
are reminded of the difference between what we are shown and what
the characters see, yet ultimately we are denied the satisfaction of feel-
ing ourselves privileged observers who are allowed to understand what
the characters cannot. Even the rifts between the narrative and the
descriptive interludes contribute to this distinction. If nature is a prov-
ince of the authentic or the undissimulating, to be regarded with genu-
ine awe, it is also a world apart, following its own course with dumb
indifference to human tragedy.
The sensibility of the film as a whole proceeds from the very ground
of self-reflection that eludes its characters, and it would doubtless lapse
completely into sentiment—in Schiller's sense of the word—if there
were not much about it that remained elusive. Dyed-in-the-wool Ro-
manticists from Blake to Wordsworth and beyond have celebrated
unitary innocence from a vantage point of self-reflexive double-con-
sciousness, of course, often positing a guileful simplicity or self-styled
primitivism as the medium for a rebirth of innocence. But the tragic
sense of Days of Heaven tells us that innocence cannot be reborn, only
longed for, and the enigmatic quality of the film attests that self-re-
flection—that condition to which innocence is sacrificed, in the name
of a higher understanding—is little compensation. To surrender in-
stinctual, unitary consciousness to the demands of a greater ^//-con-
sciousness, the film suggests, abjures nothing of the mysteries of
experience, and in watching Days of Heaven, with its elusive symbol-
isms, digressive forms, and mercurial senses of awe, we are made to
share again and again in the blindness and ignorance of its characters,
if not in their innocence.
58 The Films of Terrence Malick
NOTES
A Sense of Things:
Reflections on Malick's Films
Spacek, and Warren Oates), and the title—which punctuates the first
shot of Kit and Holly together. Malick's name appears only as the first
end credit: "Written, Produced and Directed by . . . " N o studio in-
terest is named in the credits. More conventionally, Days of Heaven is
framed by credits of differing orders: the picturesque tableaux of the
opening titles and the extended scroll at the end, indicative of a more
official imprimatur, and stressing the proprietary role of the Paramount
studio ("A Gulf + Western Company"). Aside from a brief title card,
The Thin Red Line has no credits in the beginning; the images them-
selves announce the start, but the end credits are the most extensive
and intricate tabulation of talent, transaction, acknowledgment, com-
pact, and disclaimer of any of the three films. Malick's name appears
only once in the credits of the first two films, twice in those of The
Thin Red Line—by contrast to the higher-profile exponents of the new
auteurism, like Spielberg, whose name recurs sequentially in un-
expected places in the credits of his films, some five times, for instance,
in A.I. (2001) alone.
Credits can enunciate authorship in more than words: One thinks
of O r s o n Welles's spoken credits for The Magnificent Ambersons
(1942) or The Trial (1962); of the trademark placard for "Mercury
P r o d u c t i o n s " following the R K O moniker in his early films; or
of Woody Allen's white-on-black credits, harking back to I n g m a r
Bergman, yet stripped down to an anonymity severe enough to be-
come, itself, an assertion of authorship. The credits of Malick's movies,
like those of any film, mark them as products of their time and dem-
onstrate key facets of the relation they bear to more general conven-
tions of their day. In the '90s, for instance, it became more c o m m o n
for Hollywood movies to forego opening credits—a trend pioneered
by Apocalypse Now in 1979. If the conventions of classical Hollywood
credits functioned, in part, to establish the break between life and
movies right at the start, to usher the viewer in to the virtual space of
the film, then the New Hollywood's displacement of credits to the
end of the film suggests a more permeable sense of the relation be-
tween movies and life from the 1960s onward. If so, the growing ten-
dency to omit credits at the beginning of movies altogether marks yet
another turn in this development. Malick's extirpation of opening
credits at the start of The Thin Red Line plays up the prefatory feel-
ing of the film's first half hour, so that many viewers may find them-
selves waiting for the credits, for some announcement that the film
really is underway. Where other movies that dispense with opening
A Sense of Things 67
credits will typically start with a scene that thrusts the viewer into the
action—so that the absence of credits becomes a bid for a greater
immediacy—Malick aims for a quality of suspension. His credit se-
quences bend convention to individual expression, yet they also pro-
mote a certain authorial modesty, that sense of impersonality that is
so basic to this filmmaker's work.
because it registers not only the appearances of the world, but also
its movements—from weightlessness to gravity, brisk fragmentation to
slow stretching. And it does this through the medium of technology,
which first drove the wedge through that lost, imagined harmony.
Aside from this function of brute representation, film also enacts
or replenishes the fantasy lives of its viewers, at the same time that
it represents collective fantasies. In our lives, commonly, we may
project fantasy o n t o what we take to be reality. We long for what is
n o t before us, what is absent; and yet, the objects of this longing
depend on what is (or has been) present. H o w else would we know
what to desire? There exists, then, a dialectic between fantasy and
reality in inner experience—a dynamic that is also basic to the me-
dium of film, for film represents fantasy (images of the real) that
bears the appearance of reality (what ordinarily surrounds us). All
this implies that we do not experience reality apart from fantasy, or
fantasy apart from reality.
Cinematic experience does not simply reflect ordinary human ex-
perience, bound up in a dialectic between reality and fantasy. Film as
a medium, in its materiality, suggests a way back to nature—the pos-
sibility of reconciliation with the world—because it represents the
world itself as already both reality and illusion. If films are philoso-
phy (as Cavell believes they are), and if Malick's films are, among other
things, meditations on nature—we might say his films articulate a
certain philosophy of nature. In Being and Time, Heidegger describes
three aspects of nature: one that we perceive through deliberate use
of nature (the nature found "in natural products"), another that de-
rives from our impassive gaze u p o n nature (nature that is simply
"present at h a n d " ) , and still another aspect that is expressed in our
most intense feelings about nature (here we encounter "the power of
nature").
This last aspect of nature suffuses the landscape of The Thin Red
Line—figured by the voice-overs as much as by the rapturous record-
ings of the tropical location—to the extent that the film gradually
becomes symbolic of what Heidegger also calls "primordial nature."
More directly than Malick's other films, The Thin Red Line evokes
spiritual feelings about nature that are explicitly associated with other
spiritual longings, like the desire for communion with an absent Cre-
ator. The power of nature is revealed by the characters' senses of an
imperishable gap that separates them from their surroundings—an
awareness of nature as both present and absent—a consciousness that
A Sense of Things 69
separation recalls Heidegger's notion that nature is, in one of its as-
pects, merely "present at hand," whereby it fails to promote or induce
feeling. Modern technologies are both a condition for and effect of
such an aspect—effectively de-naturing the world through an appro-
priation of its resources; or in the case of the camera, t h r o u g h the
objectivity of its gaze. Nature no longer inspires; rather, it intrudes
u p o n a human world, much like the locusts that descend upon the
wheat fields in Days of Heaven. Malick's second film is an evocation
of the West-Midwest landscape after the decline of America's nine-
teenth-century fascination with nature—and, at the same time, a cri-
tique of t w e n t i e t h - c e n t u r y objective n ature—so it is fitting t h a t
painterly realism predominates in the film's style.
Wyeth's 1948 painting, Christina^ World, is indicative of the physi-
cal, and indeed metaphysical, spaces that are similarly represented in
Days of Heaven. The woman in the foreground of the painting (mod-
eled by Christina Olson, a neighbor of the Wyeths, who was partly
crippled at birth) is adrift in a wide field, reaching toward a distant
farmhouse that looms on the horizon. The awkward isolation of the
figure here, against an impassive landscape, is an image repeatedly
referenced in Days of Heaven; the remote house is also a motif in the
film (fig. 9 ) , signifying the comforts of privilege, as it does in the paint-
ing. Malick also suggests Wyeth in the way he concentrates on mo-
ments rather than the events that surround them, which may account
for the mutual quality of suspension hovering between these two art-
ists' works. The effect of this technique is different in Days of Heaven,
however, perhaps because the pregnant moment in Wyeth's work is
partially resolved by an autobiographical component of his paintings.
In the film, the frequency of autonomous shots that resist integration
with the narrative seem to function, in part, as a critique of the
medium's dispassionate recordings of nature—by turning what the
moment signifies upon the image itself. The resemblance between Days
of Heaven and Wyeth's paintings is most emphatically pronounced at
their surfaces: precision renderings, sepia tones, and austere compo-
sitions, yet the light is as delicate as air.
As a child, Wyeth studied drawing under the instruction of his fa-
ther, N . C. Wyeth, the well-known muralist and illustrator of children's
books. This explains a certain likeness of technique in the work of
father and son, but N . C. Wyeth's paintings are far less concerned with
the revelation of matter, the insinuation of memory. Instead, they
evoke drama and imagination—picturing fantasy—however realist their
A Sense of Things 71
of matches, there is a brief shot of Holly leaving from the back door.
With one arm she is carrying a suitcase, and under the other is a print
by Parrish, Daybreak (1922).
This painting by Parrish is famous, in part, for its enthusiastic re-
ception. It has even been claimed that by 1925, one in four Ameri-
can middle-class homes displayed a reproduction of the painting. This
phenomenal success raises the question about what may account for
such wide appeal. The painting represents a pastoral scene that evokes
antiquity. Two classical columns trisect the picture plane vertically. In
the background, grand facades of mountains rise. A garland of foli-
age cascades down from the top. Two young, Pre-Raphaelite girls are
in the center foreground—one is lying on a marble floor, beside a blue
lake, while the other stands naked over her. The vista of the painting,
particularly in its visionary qualities (majestic composition, chromatic
hues, mythic glow), resembles a number of the landscape shots in
Badlands. The overwhelming affect of the painting is languor. Har-
mony and innocence are ascendant here, which may begin to account
for the painting's appeal. This sentiment connects with the spirit of
the 1920s, which was predominantly optimistic but also contained in
itself the fear of collapse. The decade of Fordism and the automobile,
of buying on credit or installments, also saw the decline of agrarian
culture, and the stock market crash of 1929.
The circulation of the painting is indicative of changes in the sta-
tus of art in the modern era. For one, the middle class becomes a
consumer of art, so that art is no longer the property of high culture.
But with such democratization, a crisis emerges in matters of taste and
value. (Clement Greenberg despises Parrish, for example.) Another
change is the partial erasure of distinctions between fine and applied
art. This recalls another painting in Badlands—the billboard painted
by Holly's father. It is unusual for an advertisement: a scene of do-
mesticated nature. The technique is flat, dispersed, without perspec-
tive, much like folk art. With its handmade character and vernacular
mode, the painting appears to be a lament for preindustrial society.
However different it may be from Daybreak in style, it nevertheless
conveys the same nostalgia for a lost Utopia.
The Utopian ideal is one in which man coexists with nature peace-
fully, productively. It is the fantasy of adventure stories like Swiss Family
Robinson, or Kon-Tiki, which Holly and Kit read aloud in their tree
house. The scene occurs in the forest idyll sequence of Badlands—
after the pair has escaped Fort Dupree and before they sojourn
A Sense of Things 73
through the Midwest. They build a tree house, scavenge for food, cut
wood and cook their food over an open fire, dance to the sound of a
portable record player, fish and bathe in the nearby river, and pretend
they are grown-up. Holly tries exotic combinations of makeup, while
Kit reads National Geographic. The scene recalls that final aspect of
nature described by Heidegger, the one in which humans only ac-
knowledge nature by their use of it. With this aspect, nature recedes,
but humans are blissfully unaware.
C O N C E R N W I T H CLICHE
HOLLYWOOD GOTHIC
With the support of the AFI, David Lynch made Fraserhead, re-
leased in 1977. An overtly Gothic tale with surrealist overtones, the
film also relied on the services of Lynch's longtime friend, Jack Fisk.
They met in high school, in Alexandria, Virginia. At the time, both
imagined themselves as painters, and they traveled to Europe together
in 1 9 6 5 , planning to study with the abstract expressionist artist Oskar
Kokoschka in Austria. However, they returned only fifteen days later,
disenchanted with Continental culture. It was, apparently, the Ameri-
can Gothic that they craved, and that Lynch, at least, realized in some
version in Fraserhead, initiating a career made up almost entirely of
variations on the Gothic mode. We can only imagine the eighteen-
minute short that Malick produced as his AFI thesis project {Lanton
Mills, 1971), but Lynch's self-styled, surrealist, and claustrophobic tale
is nothing if not hermetic and deeply personal, seemingly sprung di-
rectly from someone's unconscious. Spinning a grotesque fable that
harks back to nineteenth-century Gothic narratives from Caleb Will-
iams to Frankenstein and beyond, Lynch strives to forge a private
universe complete in itself, without clear, or at least without determin-
ing, reference to other types or genres. Malick's short film, report-
edly, invokes multiple genres (the Western, the heist film), is set in a
widely recognizable location (Los Angeles), and stars established ac-
tors. The only thing the two films might have in common is a shared
undercurrent of blanching irony. Yet Lynch's film seems not so much
to absent the Hollywood milieu as to abstract it; allegorically, it could
still be present. Thus, two modes of the New Hollywood emerged:
subjectivity as defense against Hollywood tradition (Lynch), and ob-
jectivity as surface e n g a g e m e n t with it (Malick). Both pivot on a
Gothic vision of the world as an interlocking network of references,
images, and ideas.
Before Fraserhead premiered in Los Angeles in 1 9 7 6 , Fisk had
served as art director for Malick's Badlands. Broadly speaking, the
films have something in c o m m o n in their looks—at least in their uses
of no-place as everyplace. Sissy Spacek's performance in Badlands is
her first important film role. In her characterization of Holly Sargis,
Spacek appears at once doelike and hardened—a screen presence that
embodies the distinctive tone of 1970s Newr Hollywood, with as much
sincerity of expression as ironic affect. In 1974, a year after the re-
lease of Badlands, Fisk and Spacek married. The same year marked
the release of Brian De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise, a Gothic
parody with production design by Fisk; Spacek would perform her next
A Sense of Things 77
V A R I O U S SILENCE
S Y N T O N I C RESEARCH I N C .
When Days of Heaven was nominated for an Oscar in 1979 for "Best
Sound Recording," the credit was disputed. Four sound mixers are
credited on the film, but the contribution of one of them was chal-
lenged by others. When the nominees were announced during the
awards ceremony, the phrase "remaining credits in controversy" was
u t t e r e d , for only the third time in the history of the Academy of
Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. (The other times were for the docu-
mentary Manson in 1972 and for the short subject Four Stones for
Kanemitsu in 1973.) In the event, the aw7ard did not go to Days of
Heaven, and it is not clear whether this dispute wras ever resolved. 3
That there was a controversy in the first place suggests the com-
plexity of sound in Days of Heaven, but it hardly conveys the real
significance of this fact, which points not just to the usual wrangling
between recording, mixing, and effecting sounds. I n d e e d , as the
credits attest, and as the experience of the film bears out, the con-
ception of the sound design included an unusual dimension from the
start. "Special e n v i r o n m e n t a l " s o u n d recording supplements the
more ordinary forms of film sound in Days of Heaven. As it happens,
this "special" sound was provided by an organization called "Syn-
tonic Research Incorporated." Currently based in Austin, Texas, this
company originated a famous series of recordings familiar to most,
the "Environments Series" of sixteen albums of many different acous-
tic stimuli, ranging from ocean weaves to country storms to (quot-
ing the company's website) "sounds of the Okefenokee Swamp so
realistic NASA chose them for the famous Voyager Gold Record."
T h e function of these recordings is not merely to reproduce sound
with accuracy; rather, the records are meant to create a calming ef-
fect, a sort of tranquilized ambience. They pioneered the kinds of
r e c o r d i n g that are sometimes played to placate crying infants or
nervous grown-ups. Indeed, they advertise themselves as "Psycho-
acoustic Nature Recordings."
Sound as environment is certainly a concept with relevance to the
aesthetic of Days of Heaven, though the "psycho-acoustic" nature of
A Sense of Things 83
this concept is less clear at first. What seems most significant about
the work of Syntonic Research is its evocation of a sort of post-coun-
terculture style of pop spirituality that, all unsuspected, thus makes its
way into Malick's film. Considered in tandem with developments in
stereophonic sound of the mid- to late '70s, the work of Syntonic
Research seems roughly in keeping with the move to expand sound
technologies into a generalized acoustical surround. Typically, this
expansion was achieved through newly multilayered tracks of sound,
originating from different speakers around the theater, and, most di-
rectly, by amplified volume to make the viewer feel wholly absorbed
by a film, visually and sonically. Yet Syntonic Research recordings make
claims for their own tranquility, by contrast with the acoustical force
and immediacy of other sound advances of the era ("Sensurround,"
for instance). In fact, though Syntonic claims that its recordings pro-
mote concentration and mental focus, they propose, in practice, an
odd outcome of the sonically elaborate layerings that characterize
them. A collage of sounds, with each one delicately audible as a sound
in itself, they neutralize this acoustic detail in a wash of spiritualized,
purifying white-noise. The sound is, thus, both precisely complex and
hazy—meant, at once, to alert the hearer to the textures of the au-
dible, and to relax, to calm, even to beatify.
A similar use of a found auditory text with associations of pop spiri-
tuality appears in The Thin Red Line. As the credits advise us, addi-
tional music in that film comes from "Francesco Lupica, Cosmic Beam
Experience." This is a reference to a cult recording of a sort that was
relatively common right after the '60s eruption of counterculture
trends, recognizable in a range of popular or semipopular forms from
Deodato to "Hooked on Classics." Initially marketed as the work of
one "Francisco" in 1976, produced in northern California, "Cosmic
Beam Experience" is an album that features four long compositions
and one short one, all relatively indistinguishable in a wash of orches-
tral proto-New Age music, with titles like "Heal Yourself and "Love
Sweet Love." The specter of transcendental meditation, it is not too
much to suggest, hovers over both Syntonic Research and the Cosmic
Beam Experience. What they signify in Malick's work is that quality
of inclusiveness that returns to a central theme. The ironic skepticism
so apparent in Badlands and still visible in Days of Heaven or even The
Thin Red Line makes it likely that the incursion of pop spiritualism
into these films will register with viewers, if at all, only subliminally.
And that, indeed, is just the point. In the films as a whole, especially
in concert with congruent effects (non-"psycho-acoustical" sound in
84 The Films of Terrence Malick
Days of Heaven, other music in The Thin Red Line), these signifiers
blend in as if they were integral to the wiiole ambience, and they have
the effect of diversifying the theme of transcendence in Malick's work.
Even taken as nothing more than emblems of a cheapened spiritual-
ity, they still point to an access of transcendence that is just barely vis-
ible, and nearly out of hearing.
FRAMING STARS
The second shot of George Clooney in The Thin Red Line seems
something like a tell. It is a close-up, in which there is no hiding the
fact that it is George Clooney—very much a type of the latter-day Hol-
lywood star: a highly contemporary figure in the extent and quality
of his current fame, certainly, but also something of a throwback, his
rugged good looks (to use a pertinent cliche) recalling stars like Clark
Gable, from before the days when Hollywood had begun to profit by
placing its own models of masculinity under conscious suspicion. What
makes Clooney most representative of the terms of current stardom
is his mysterious assumption of celebrity without aura: There is no
distinguishing Clooney iconography to speak of (as there was even of
Gable) and Clooney straddles boundaries of celebrity as if he is un-
aware of them, as if the old cultural hierarchies no longer matter—
mixing safe star vehicles with "edgier" indie projects (The Perfect Storm
and Out of Sight, One Fine Day, and Three Kings), migrating haplessly
from TV to movies and back again.4
Still, it is George Clooney, and in the age of mechanical reproduc-
tion—or after it—celebrity may be just what is left of aura. The sec-
ond shot of Clooney seems like a tell because it reveals the first shot
as a deferral (fig. 10). In The Thin Red Line, Clooney plays an officer
who appears in one scene, giving orders to his troops. In the first shot,
we see him from behind, at a distance; it could be anyone. The sec-
ond is the close-up; it could be no one else. Taken together, and in
the context of the film, the shots enunciate a clipped dialectic of in-
hibition and acquiescence. They don't show7 us George Clooney right
away, but since there is no alternative, they then show him in blunt
full view, with no further apologies but the ones indicated by the fact
that he disappears thereafter from the film, which is nearly at its end
anyway.
Such is the treatment of the all-star cast of The Thin Red Line. Stars
appear in jarring contexts, without introduction, and vanish just as sud-
A Sense of Things 85
Fig. 10. A star's a star for all that: George Clooney in The Thin Red Line.
Courtesy of Photofest.
cannot help but know already, that the star is always a construct, cre-
ated as an image of individual personality for purposes of general com-
merce. Plucked from TV commercials and promoted as the last word
in waspish glamour, Hedren functioned in The Birds (1963) and
Mamie (1964) as a pure construct, down to the single quotes of her
name—Hitchcock's autotelic invention, without prior associations in
viewers' minds of the type usually prerequisite to stardom, thus en-
abling Hedren to become a sort of simulation, a virtual palimpsest,
rife with associations of previous stars: Grace Kelly, Kim Novak, and
Vera Miles all rolled into one. That Hedren's ready-made stardom was
not really fulfilled beyond her collaborations with Hitchcock—though
later rewarded in a fascinating way through the career of her daughter,
Melanie Griffith—only ratifies her status as a type of film star on the
cusp between the decline of the studio system and the rise of the New
Hollywood.
Two of Malick's films have featured patent "discoveries"—Linda
Manz as the little sister, Linda, in Days of Heaven and Caviezel in The
Thin Red Line. {Days of Heaven was also the debut film of Brooke
Adams and Sam Shepard, but they don't function in the movies simi-
larly to Manz and Caviezel, who inhabit special places in their respec-
tive films.) Both Manz and Caviezel contribute a sense of presence that
crucially defines the film's sensibility. With her clipped, hoarse voice,
and her gaunt face, looking at once childlike and weathered, waspish
and wizened, Manz embodies the union of innocence and worldliness
that infuses the spirit of Days of Heaven. Stories of her discovery on
the streets of Chicago point back to practically obsolete traditions of
Hollywood talent hunting, and promote a sense of the role as an ex-
tension of her identity, or her identity as an extension of the role, down
to the same name shared by character and actor. So complete was this
sense of identification that Manz made only a few films subsequently,
cast in at least one of them—Harmony Korine's Gummo (1997)—in
tribute to her appearance in Days of Heaven. Caviezel's career after
The Thin Red Line has pursued a more conventional stardom than his
austere, claustral presence in that film, carnal yet unearthly, seemed
to prefigure. Like Manz, Caviezel in The Thin Red Line represents a
notion of performance as a manifestation of the natural, giving prior-
ity to the cogency and weight of bodily presence over the professional
protocols of theatrical expertise or experience. On the evidence of the
films, what seems to have been of key importance in the casting of
these actors is their having been, formerly, unknown.
A Sense of Things 87
W I T H INTEREST
I wasn't trying to get across any messages with the film. It's not just to
tell a story You hope—though you really don't set out to do this—but
you hope that the picture will give the person looking at it a sense of
things. A feel for the way the world goes. I come away from a movie I
like with a sense of things. It's as though everything just falls into place
for a little while. It isn't as if you've been told anything you didn't al-
ready know. (Linden 1975)
perhaps letting him rhyme the landscapes of his native Texas with
those of Vegas's postmodern backdrops.
A project for which Malick wrote a treatment about Jerry Lee Lewis
reached the screen with a different script in 1989 as Great Balls of Fire,
directed by former avant-gardist {David Holzman'sDiary [ 1967]) and
t e m p o r a r y H o l l y w o o d insider Jim McBride. By m o s t accounts,
Malick's script was "darker" (Gillis 1995, 61), and it is easy to imag-
ine this chronicle of a hell-raiser's downfall as a telling companion piece
to Badlands. A project announced in 1992, a reportedly "loose" stage
adaptation (Lopate 1999) of Kenji Mizoguchi's 1958 masterpiece
Sansho the Bailiff to be directed by Andrzej Wajda, developed over a
period of at least two years: A report on its progress as of 1994 (Shteir
1 9 9 4 , 8 4 - 8 6 ) gives some indication that the enterprise was belea-
guered, and despite the extent of its development, it never came to
pass.
Unless, that is, one learns to regard preparation, conception, and
development as themselves a coming to pass, a form of fruition. Like
Welles's career, Malick's teaches the value of process over product.
During his fifty-year career, Welles's silences w^ere sometimes enforced,
his projects actively discouraged, yet he completed exactly the same
number of films, a lucky thirteen, as Stanley Kubrick, the type of the
contemporary auteur with complete autonomy. Despite the exquisite
textures of Malick's finished films, in one way or another all three relate
ambivalently to the idea of completion. The polished surfaces do not
conceal the willfully unresolved tensions of plot, theme, style, and each
film pronounces some sense, to greater or lesser degrees, of open-
endedness. Scanning the chronology of Malick's projects, one is struck
by range and consistency, a recurrent interest in particular settings or
iconographies, a drive toward the familiar, evident in (among other
things) the relation to sources, or in the prominence of adaptations
of various types. O n e is equally impressed, at the same time, by a
quality of adaptability, a willingness to rove afield.
As of this writing (fall 2 0 0 2 ) , Malick's current project is reported
to be a script of "The English Speaker," an adaptation of the "Anna
O . " case study from Breuer and Freud's Studies in Hysteria. The rela-
tive difference of this project from the context of Malick's work to
date is not undermined by a premonition that this meditation on the
founder of the "talking cure" in psychoanalysis could very well recur
to Malick's interest in the psychology or philosophy of language as
human action. Both the difference and the recurrence are important,
A Sense of Things 93
overtake the usual, the customary, and the regular. Where philosophi-
cal tradition, as well as c o m m o n usage, tended to view transcendence
as a special, largely inaccessible condition in which the subject rises
above the quotidian in a timeless instant of surpassing purity,
Heidegger redefines it as a common experience, present in the every-
day. It can signify a trajectory from essence to quotidian as fully as it
can signify the reverse movement. If, as Heidegger contends, "tran-
scendence means surpassing" in some literal way, then to walk past a
table means to transcend it. It becomes another of those "always-al-
ready" phenomena Heidegger is famous for insisting upon. With ev-
ery move we make, or every minute that passes, we could see ourselves
in a state of transcendence, because we are always surpassing something,
or something is surpassing us.
Similar senses of transcendence come to light in Malick's films. It
is not that Malick's work evinces any particular or defining interest in
the everyday (as Cassavetes's films do, for instance), only that he con-
stantly reminds us of the charge that infuses everything around us,
from the cosmic to the abject. H e does not do so, however, by striv-
ing to bring these things "to life"—as does, say, Joris Ivens in some
of his earliest lyric films, like The Bridge (1928) or Rain (1929), wiiere
the elements of everyday life seem animated by inner rhythms of their
own. More often than not, in Malick's films, objects appear inert, and
transcendence resides in a mute, reciprocal encounter between preg-
nable humanity and inanimate nature. The haunting recurrent shot
of a scarecrow in a field in Days of Heaven is an apt example. The image
has about it something of the grotesque or the uncanny. An absurd
effigy—an insensate imitation of human being—the scarecrow hangs
against an open sky vibrant with dusky light. It could be a puppet,
fashioned as a model by a god who did not hold humans in high re-
gard. Yet it endures, shot by shot, holding its place amid the beauties
of the world as if it would be one of them. With each shot its famil-
iarity confers a greater dignity, even in its grotesquerie, as we remem-
ber it is not the product of indifferent gods after all, but a thing made
by people who are no longer there. Something of the same kind could
be said of the closely related image of the stone dwarf we glimpse near
the end of the same film, in a series of shots that eloquently articu-
late a sense of the transcendent in the everyday. Amid the surround-
ings of the farmhouse, when no one seems at home, we glimpse the
dwarf, an empty gazebo, a whirring mill-fan, a potted plant in a shad-
owed corner. Some of these things we've seen before, in contexts that
A Sense of Things 101
gave them life and purpose, so that what is striking about them now,
even in the memory of having seen them before, is how bereft they
look—how abandoned or, we might even say, surpassed. For especially
in this film, where plans and schemes come to naught, where when-
ever people resolve to act they find themselves only acted upon, tran-
scendence seems present everywhere, yet available n o w h e r e . It is
indeed a Heideggerian sense of things. The apparent and uncharac-
teristic optimism of Heidegger's naming transcendence as a dimen-
sion of daily life may be belied by a tragic implication—that, for this
very reason, we can never really know it.
H O L L Y W O O D RENAISSANCE—WAX A N D W A N E
York Film Festival, a venue that had been so crucial in the presenta-
tion of Malick's previous film.7 Instead, in honor of its high-tech pedi-
gree, the film was given specialized "road show" exhibition in selected
venues. For these showings, it was blowm up to 70 m m and shown
with six-track stereo sound, with programs distributed at screenings
and reserved tickets often sold in advance. This mode of exhibition
was a short-lived sidelight of the boom in high-concept filmmaking
of the late '70s, and such other distinctive films as Cimino's The Deer
Hunter (1977) received a similar treatment in their initial runs. It is
significant that such efforts to validate the new films looked back to
the age of the show palace, or to the "legitimate" theater. At this criti-
cal turning point, the new mavericks were trying to recapture the aura
of an earlier age of movies; the consolidation of new technologies pro-
duced new nostalgias. N o wonder it didn't last.
V E R S I O N S OF MALE BEAUTY
of the head, a slight bounce when he stands. His body almost always
works in miniature. The gestures are rhythmic, closed off, and indica-
tive of fashion modeling more than of itinerant labor. When he walks,
for instance, there is a stylish delay before each step—a small twist and
thrust of his hips. In the only moment his body appears liberated from
108 The Films of Terrence Malick
Fig. 12. Versions of male beauty: Jim Caviezel in The Thin Red
Line. Courtesy of Photofest.
BRAVING T H E ELEMENTS
Elemental imagery infuses Malick's work: earth, air, fire, water. The
meanings of these images are too various to lend themselves to easy
classification, but some associations recur. Earth signifies commun-
ion—the concord of the workers at the harvest in Days of Heaven, or
Linda's fantasy of her future in the same film: "I could be a m u d
doctor . . . Talk to the trees. In dreams they'd talk back to m e . " A r
signifies transcendence, the "aerial aspirations" that the characters in-
cline toward, and that Malick's wide shots of open sky yearn to prom-
ise. 8 Fire means redemption, of sorts. Principle of a Yeatsian "terrible
beauty," the fire that consumes Holly's house in Badlands or the fire
that follows upon the plague of locusts in Days of Heaven brings a
catharsis that promises a new liberty, a release (fig. 13). But the prom-
ise is short-lived: redemption inflicts evasion, transcendence entails
failure, c o m m u n i o n implies catachresis. For many artists, a turn to
elemental imagery marks a return to fundamental things, a stripping
away of inessentials. For Malick, the essential is as much part of a com-
plex as any other idea. Stripping away only reveals further notions for
contemplation, and Malick's images, in one of their dimensions, are
nodes of thought.
Water may be the most suggestive element in this pattern, for
Malick associates it repeatedly with d e a t h , especially with the
martyred deaths of vulnerable or helpless parties. The shooting of
Holly's dog in Badlands, the killing of Bill in Days of Heaven, and
the death of Witt in The Thin Red Line describe an arc of related
imagery across the three films. Where typical taxonomies of symbol
emphasize the life-giving properties and sustaining associations of
112 The Films of Terrence Malick
Fig. 13. Earth, air, water—fire: The plague of locusts in Days of Heaven.
Courtesy of Photofest.
The Thin Red Line, and after the death of Witt, it seems mournful,
even though it signifies unceasing life in the light of mortality. Water
gives life, maybe, but these stunted arboreal clumps that grow out
of the water—just what kind of life is this?
The scene of Bill's death culminates invocations of the themes of
Stephen Crane throughout Days of Heaven. The film's nature imag-
ery, despite its evident beauty, still reflects, at times, a Crane-like im-
peachment of nature's indifference. After the killing of the farmer,
when Abby, Bill, and Linda take flight, Linda speaks of what she sees
on land from the boat they're traveling on: "You could see people on
the shore . . . Maybe they were calling for help, or dumpin' somebody
or somethin'." The lines bring to mind Crane's story "The Open
Boat" (1898), where the ocean figures as a symbol of cosmic indif-
ference. The men stranded in the boat can see people on the shore,
but amid their trial by water, they cannot decode the signals the people
transmit to them from land. Only when the water yields them up, and
they return to solid ground, do they feel that "they could then be
interpreters"—to quote the startling last line of this tale that had not,
until this point, seemed to be about interpretation. In Days of Heaven,
Bill, pursued by the law, heads for the lake, but as he wades through
the water, he turns back to land, where he sees a well-dressed man
watching him run. The man gives no sign of interest; his gaze is im-
passive. But Bill, as desperate as Crane's castaways, must think he sees
a gesture of solace from that quarter, for he begins to run toward the
man, with a savage gratitude as if he expected to be saved. He is not
spared; and in the moment he is shot, we cut for an instant to a van-
tage point under the water, as Bill falls toward the camera. It is an
extraordinary shot: mercurial, brutal, and sad. The immediacy of it is
appalling. Falling toward us, Bill's body breaks through the water's
surface, causing wild, convulsive, beautiful undulations. In the next
instant, this sudden turbulence is past. We see, in a long shot, that
the water has regained its calm, and it bears Bill's corpse along on its
slow, perpetual current. On the shore, Linda does a quick little jig of
grief before reverting to a benumbed attitude that mimics the sea's
complacence.
Witt's death in The Thin Red Line transpires in a scene modeled on
the one from Days of Heaven. In both cases, the plot establishes some
exculpatory circumstance—Bill has killed a man, Witt is at war and
might kill his own murderers—just to make the point that every death
is an injustice. Surrounded by enemy soldiers, Witt waits, watches. A
long moment passes before he begins to raise his rifle, and is gunned
T
NOTES
In Production:
On the Work of Style
Despite the authority of the rhetoric, it does seem that the reconstruc-
tion of style must always be, at best, "hypothetical" for Bordwell. Yet,
if this effort is always inadequate—since we can never get back, as the
deconstructionists reminded us, to the "scene of writing"—it is par-
ticularly deficient in film criticism because of two key aspects that dif-
ferentiate film style from that in o t h e r arts. First, technological
mediation is a determining constituent upon a film's composition, not
an incidental factor in its dissemination—as it could be said to be, for
instance, in literature. And second, in the industrial model of film
In Production 117
a mistake, pure and simple, and almost every movie has them. They
are more significant than misprints in a book precisely because they
signify the ineluctable materiality of a film's production, as it intrudes
into the finished product. That filmmakers are expected to erase such
intrusions from their work is something like a corollary to the idea
that literary texts exist ideally, somehow, apart from their printed
manifestations in any given instance. In the case of an artist like Malick,
the significance of these issues is amplified. As evidenced by an exami-
nation of Malick's working methods, his films are products of a very
distinctive approach to filmmaking that makes the development from
script to film central to the process by virtue of an emphasis on chance
and improvisation in production and postproduction. This chapter,
while far from realizing a material theory of style, demonstrates how
Malick's style emerges as an evolving process of labor in the produc-
tion of his work.
This conception of style as process seems always to be held in rela-
tively low esteem, despite its wide acceptance as an inevitable feature
of production. The critical reception of certain films by otherwise
admired directors as disparate as Jean Renoir, Orson Welles, John
Cassavetes, and Mike Leigh has often been provoked in differing ways
by biases against overtly improvisational methods in filmmaking. Even
where one might expect sympathy, one often finds hostility to such
approaches. Peter Biskind, who has at times in the distant past ex-
pressed some support for the development of film art, joins forces with
the m o n e y m e n in his estimation of Malick's procedures. In Easy
Riders, Raging Bulls, Biskind says of the editing phase in the produc-
tion of Days of Heaven, "Malick was famously indecisive. O r just
meticulous, depending on who's footing the bill" (Biskind 1998, 298).
A similarly philistine reaction arises from, of all quarters, an interview
with Steven Soderbergh, an independent American filmmaker one
would have supposed to be receptive to Malick's methods—assuming
those methods were known or understood. Soderbergh's comments,
though, suggest that they are not: "There was a lot of dialogue in the
script [of Days of Heaven], but when they got on the set Terrence
Malick would go, ' D o n ' t say anything.' When you look at the film
you realize that he ended up having to write all that voice-over in post-
production because nobody said anything, so nobody knew what was
going on! . . . Sometimes it's better not to know too m u c h " (Hillier
2 0 0 1 , 268). Soderbergh's anecdotal report suggests that his respect
for the film is lessened by these alleged exigencies of p r o d u c t i o n ,
In Production 119
though he does not pause to ask why, with all that available dialogue—
of unimpeachable quality, as dialogue, as it happens—Malick suppos-
edly told the actors not to speak it.
Badlands, in its way Malick's most assured film, is the least illus-
trative of what otherwise appear to be the director's characteristic
methods. By contrast to the extreme differences between script and
film of Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line, there is almost no dif-
ference between extant scripts of Badlands znd the finished film. Those
involved with the production, in discussing the making of the film,
speak of a zealous quest for verisimilitude that was, they claim, cru-
cial to the shoot. In a star biography of Martin Sheen, for instance,
Sheen recounts an anecdote about getting on his hands and knees to
remove beer can pop-tops from the ground before shooting a scene
at a gas station, because these would have been anachronistic if caught
on film (Riley and Schumacher 1989, 19). In an interview for her own
star bio, Sissy Spacek speaks of being encouraged to do "painstaking
research" (Emerson and Pfaff 1988, 36) of the period for her part,
b u t also of being coached in " M e t h o d " styles of improvisation in
building her character. These accounts suggest a meticulous fidelity
to a preexistent concept in the making of the film, while also prefig-
uring a m o r e free-form improvisation that comes to the fore in
Malick's subsequent films.
Nestor Almendros's detailed professional autobiography, Man with
a Camera (1984), is an invaluable source of information on the pro-
duction ofDays of Heaven. According to Almendros, the film was shot
in Canada over a period of seventy-three days, in the fall of 1976.
Almendros himself was the chief cinematographer for the greater part
of this period, but when he had to leave to shoot Francois Truffaut's
The Man Who Loved Women (1977), Haskell Wexler replaced him for
the final two weeks of shooting. Wexler shot the final sequences of
the film set in the city after Bill's death, as well as sundry pickups and
the exterior sequence in snow. The latter fact is especially striking,
because though this sequence has the feeling in the film of having been
a happy accident, Almendros confirms that it was planned—a point
that a reading of the shooting script seconds—and, indeed, that the
crew worried an "Indian Summer" in A b e r t a that fall would hold off
snow and make filming of the scene impossible.
Nevertheless, by Almendros's report, much that happened on the
set of Days of'Heaven was, if not accidental, improvisatory and experi-
mental. The unifying theme of A m e n d r o s ' s commentary is his focus
120 The Films of Terrence Malick
[T]he crew (which I did not choose) was made up of old-guard, typi-
cally Hollywood professionals. They were accustomed to a glossy style
of photography . . . They felt frustrated because I gave them so little
work. The normal practice in Hollywood is for the gaffer and grip to
prepare the lighting beforehand, so I found arc lights set up for every
scene. Day after day I would have to ask them to turn off everything
they had prepared for me. I realized that this annoyed them; some of
them began saying openly that we didn't know what we were doing,
that we weren't "professional." (Almendros 1984, 170)
The light really was very beautiful, but we had little time to film scenes
of long duration. All day we would work to get the actors and the cam-
era ready; as soon as the sun had set we had to shoot quickly, not losing
122 The Films of Terrence Malick
a moment. For those few moments the light is truly magical, because
no one knows where it is coming from . . . Malick's intuition and daring
probably made these scenes the most interesting ones visually in the film.
And it takes daring to convince the Hollywood old guard that the shoot-
ing day should last twenty minutes. (Amendros 1984, 182)
take place at different locations in the film, or that lines are transposed
among scenes and even among characters. Discussing the film's mak-
ing, Brooke Adams (who plays Abby) testifies to having shot much
more footage than appeared in the final cut: "I kept asking myself,
'What happened to that scene? How could he have cut it there?'"
(Buckley 1978). The script she auditioned with, Adams says, was very
literary, in the manner of Thomas Hardy, and her interview implies
that this script was largely adhered to during shooting, which suggests
that much of the compression took place in the editing phase of pro-
duction. Nick Nolte echoes the witness of many of Malick's actors,
however, when he speaks of various forms of improvisation on the set
of The Thin Red Line. He says that Malick would shoot multiple takes
with variations on the action, sometimes improvising, sometimes ob-
serving silence, sometimes reciting lines shouted by the director from
behind the camera.2 This account squares with Adams's description
of being filmed in shooting Days of Heaven, with Malick shouting
apparently random and clearly unscripted directions at her as the
camera ran.
What we have been calling improvisation could also be termed,
more simply, revision. A study of a third-draft script for The Thin Red
Line, bearing dates spanning from June to October 1997 (thus very
close to the time of shooting), shows that the development of that
project was indeed a painstaking process of rethinking and reviewing.
This script contains differently colored pages to denote earlier versions,
suggesting the existence offive prior drafts, and it marks major changes
with an asterisk. On the first page appears a report on revisions from
the previous version, mainly noting that about half a dozen charac-
ters from the earlier draft have been combined with other characters
in this one. Clearly, a primary issue in the construction of the script
is the collation of its many characters—more than thirty, with at least
six quite fully developed. The condensation of characters continued
after this draft in production. In the script, there are two officers, Stein
and Staros, and it is Stein who has a conflict with Colonel Tall when
he resists Tail's command to order his men to advance into battle. In
the film, Stein disappears, and the conflict is transposed to Staros.
Otherwise, the intricate relationship between the script and the film
is difficult to unravel. Scenes that are crossed out in this version of
the script appear in the finished film, while other scenes that have been
added to this draft, obviously to clarify plot points or flesh out char-
acters, do not. What seems clear is that, as with Days of Heaven, Malick
In Production 129
grounded in the script. The interaction with the crocodile that begins
and ends the film on an enigmatic, allegorical note occurs in the script
as a brief and literal scene. O n occasion in the script, Malick notes
background nature imagery of the type that is brought into the fore-
ground in the film. The second scene in the script, for instance, is said
to end with a peripheral close-up of a crab. Moments of visionary in-
tensity in the film—Bell's memories of his wife or Witt's radiant vision
of his Kentucky home—appear in the script in more grounded form,
as dreams, for instance. U n m o o r e d in the film from their direct
psychological motivations, these scenes cast a dreamy light upon the
film as a whole. Even the voice-overs, absent from the script, have clear
sources there, as in a dialogue in a trench between Bell and Fife (a
main character of the script whose role is much diminished in the film),
where they discuss the meaning of life and war.
A crucial source of information on Malick's working methods on
The Thin Red Line is an extended interview with the film's cinema-
tographer, John Toll. Toll's remarks are especially interesting in com-
parison to A l m e n d r o s ' s c o m m e n t a r y on the s h o o t i n g of Days of
Heaven. While Almendros testifies to Malick's depth of photographic
knowledge, for instance, Toll suggests that Malick's twenty-year ab-
sence from filmmaking left gaps in his knowledge of new technolo-
gies (Pizzello 1999, 45). However, Toll suggests he picked up on these
developments "quickly and intuitively," and indeed, like Days of
Heaven, The Thin Red Line is marked by a notably high-tech relation
to the cinematic apparatus. Two technologies Toll discusses at length,
in the midst of an account remarkably detailed in technical terms, are
the Steadicam and the A<:ela crane, both instrumental in achieving the
sweeping quality of the combat scenes. "Magic h o u r " shooting, Toll
says, was kept to a minimum: "We shot relentlessly every day, in ev-
ery conceivable lighting condition, from seven in the morning until
it got dark at 6 P.M. Yes, there are magic-hour shots in the film, but
only because we had to keep shooting until it got dark" (Pizzello
1999, 56). This account contrasts with Almendros's description of
painstaking setups for brief periods of shooting on the set of Days of
Heaven.
Of two key instances of preparation for production that Toll re-
counts, one coincides with A m e n d r o s ' s narrative. According to Toll,
he and Malick used an anthology of paintings for inspiration in con-
ceiving the film's compositions—Images of War: The Artist's Vision of
World War II (McCormick and Perry 1992). Taken together with
In Production 131
NOTES
A Paramount Production
Directed by: Vernon Zimmerman
Produced by: Vernon Zimmerman and Tony Bill
Screenplay by: Terry Malick
Associate Producer: John Prizer
Editor: Danford B. Greene
Music: Tom T. Hall
Costumes: Richard Bruno
Assistant Directors: Fred Brost and Russell Vreeland
Production Manager: Jack Bohrer
Cast
Cast
BADLANDS (1974)
A Pressman/Williams Presentation
A Jill Jakes Production
A Warner Brothers Release
Written, Produced, and Directed by: Terrence Malick
Executive Producer: Edward R. Pressman
Photography: Brian Probyn, Tak Fujimoto, Steven Larner
Editor: Robert Estrin
Associate Editor: William Weber
138 Filmography
Cast
Wranglers:
John Scott
Isabella Miller
Reg Glass
Bob Wilson
Joe Dodds
Dixie Gray
Assistant Propmaster: Barry Merrells
Production Secretaries: Michelle Shapiro, Marilyn Tasso
Time-Lapse Photography: Ken Middleham
Special Audio Assistants: Allan Byers, Robert Burton, Al Splet
Research:
Irene Malick
Susan Vermazen
Rosalia Purdum
Peter Neufield
Nathalie Seaver
Harmonica: Rick Smith
Stunt Flying: Erin Talbott, Joe Watts
"Enderlin," written and performed by: Leo Kottke
"Swamp Dance," words, music, and performance by: Doug Kershaw
"Carnival of the Animals—The Aquarium," by: Camille Saint-Saens,
performed by: the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra
Cast
Cast
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152 Bibliography
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Index