It’s just hard to talk about Terrence Malick. Strangely, nearly every time Malick comes up, even between two people who are great fans, the subject seems to disperse prematurely, but winds itself up as if you’d been talking for hours. I’m pretty sure other people will recognize this pattern – the peculiar Malick exhaustion. It’s not a dearth of things to talk about, or a weariness concerning the topic; it’s just that a film like Badlands or The Thin Red Line has a ‘wholeness’, smooth walls, that makes it unadaptable to any familiar line of thought; there’s just no place to dovetail any ideas into it. It’s open, owns up to itself, but it’s still insular, silent. Malick is slow, deliberate, and fantastical (in that strange “grown-up” way that to a kid just seems weird, like The Return of the Pink Panther) – and so are his films. His is a peculiar, backwards romanticism, only recognizable as such for its keen awareness of American fantasy, that one-sided scrapbook that’s equal parts fairytale, Ford, and Hearst. It takes a stubborn and restless mind to mine this ground of popular mythology – it’s so self-contained, and full of faces and cut-corner rhymes whose permanence is measured in half-decades. Only a few people have really penetrated this sublimated America – Malick, Nicholas Ray, Bruce Springsteen, among others. Springsteen’s “Badlands” and “Nebraska” both pay tribute to Malick, the first channeling the same viral strain of Midwest alienation and the fire lit under the heels of kids that try to bust out of it; the second relating the story of Kit and Holly, using instead the narration of the young killer himself. (Nebraska, the album, is all about depositions.) Springsteen and Malick, it seems, have the same way of divining stories from the inscrutable, huge and quiet American ethers; the only things worth telling can be found in newspapers, and the books in any house. (With the exception of The Thin Red Line, the stories have nearly been told before, played out in headlines or history books or popular literature.) America, like no other country, has an interregnum of disposable history that hangs between the coasts; it’s as if every story ever told got thrown up into a huge cloud that hangs right over our heads – this is no national mythology, it’s almost a physical phenomenon. There’s little “real history” to knock these things out of place; our history is stretched so thin over the fact of our explosive expansion that it literally disappears in places. Excluding land purchases, the sincerely formative events number in the dozens; other countries have hundreds, over centuries. Lacking the resource of history, and being driven to compete culturally with the ‘old world’, which has it in spades, we’ve taken away the restrictions on what counts as “history” to grow our stores, the unprecedented result being that anything – anything – can be canonized, if it’s only remembered. Malick draws from this history, utilizing forgotten radio transmissions, buried headlines, and the investigative bent of a former journalist, tempered by a gentler, parallel stream of inquiry to tell his stories. A few misconceptions about Malick draw on the fact that his films contain little in the way of explication; it’s either inferred that he’s willfully obscuring the histories or motivations of his characters, or that he intends to generalize them by withholding these specifics. Neither of these are patently true; however, we certainly can’t reject these propositions outright. Malick is exactly the sort of filmmaker who evades this kind of characterization, which makes postulations like these hard to stick, but also hard to refute. But the proposition that finds the least resistance is that popular ephemera fills in these gaps, and that’s exactly how Malick intended it. Badlands draws on Huck Finn, The Swiss Family Robinson, Rebel Without a Cause – all familiar touchstones. Badlands leaves exactly as much space as to be filled by these and other popular mythologies. Some have commented on the “emptiness” of Malick’s films; it’s hard to tell whether they mean an absence of ideology, the expansive camerawork that favors unspoiled vistas, or a feeling, harder to pin down, that a film like Days of Heaven estranges itself from the ideas one would expect to be at its core – it’s no Grapes of Wrath. Any of these explanations would do, but most often “emptiness” seems to be an accusation, as if the film was no more than a message film that forgot its message. While I’m inclined to say that this is the whinge of an oversteeped intellect, there are reasons for this reaction. Perhaps some infer that he distills the emotional and ideological conflicts of his torn characters into the extended arcs through nature that fill his films; the disparity between these two things must be maddening, and might account for the exasperation some feel in response to Malick. Some feel that he must, like John Ford or Werner Herzog, use natural settings to reflect the protagonist’s state of mind, but he’s rather like Tarkovsky, letting the lens drink in the natural surroundings, but forging no particular connection between the placid scenes and the machinations of his characters. The ruminative voice-overs of The Thin Red Line and A New World may be too numbingly metaphysical for some to take, but I have the feeling that greater precision of inquiry would only wick away the marrow of the film to build, perhaps compelling, but pointlessly competing structures outside its walls. Another issue is the relative semiotic bareness of Malick’s films. Moviegoers have been weaned on bargain-basement symbolism, and those who prefer a more advanced variety can find it easily. We’ve been taught that surfaces are deceiving; filmmakers have taken advantage of the richness of the medium to bury meanings and maxims between layers of action and speech. So when a filmmaker like Malick, or Robert Bresson, or John Cassavetes comes along, we are disappointed when our attempted excavations reveal little, or nothing at all. Having been rewarded for guessing a talking raven to be Karl Marx, we are naturally frustrated when our analysis doesn’t pay out. With a plenum of critical tools at hand, we are stymied by things that come in one piece. This perverse reaction should tell us something: enjoying cinema shouldn’t be work. If you can’t simply enjoy a spectacle on the screen without the added pleasure of smirking at some implicit dichotomy or retrofitting it with some painfully stretched symbolism, then you should be forced to watch Chaplin films until you break down. You can’t pick any locks with Malick, and giving a movie like Badlands the fine-touch hacksaw treatment (which usually involves the death-by-tickling tactic of pitting Deleuze or Foucault against a film one can't penetrate in an orthodox fashion) is just pointless. Invoking critical theory is like a white flag. One hedges his bets by treading into critical theory or metalinguistics; he’s hoping that no one understands his point so that it can’t be attacked with some simpler reading of the film in question. A reviewer who invokes Wittgenstein to hold Malick responsible for one thing or another is obviously missing the point in a spectacular way. But I don't want this to fall apart into complaints about critical nozzle-sitting; this article is in progress, and it'll probably include something about A New World in a few days, since I've just seen it recently. I saw it on opening night - so many kids; the most incredible and exhilarating thing is how many bus-riders got suckered into seeing a Terrence Malick film! Laughs of exasperation popping off all over the place at the two-hour mark, one high school girl, combing her bangs in a mirror, said, "That was the worst movie I've ever seen." And one honor roll tank top right behind me: "She's his India!" More to come soon. -Theresa Smith
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1/30 posted by: George I took my mother to see “The New World,” as it has become something of a bonding experience for me to figure out, among this wacky slate of movies I’m constantly watching, what she might like. Though I don’t say as much, I think I am repaying her for the movies we both loved that she took me to as a kid, most memorably the “Police Academy” and “Lethal Weapon” series. “The New World” turned out to be a good call, as we were both astonished and overwhelmed by the Terrence Malick version of the Jamestown legend. This also marks the first time I cried in the theatre since, I believe, “The Royal Tenenbaums.” I later thought to myself what a waste it is to cry in the theatre with my mother, as I should probably save the waterworks for a dating scenario where such an overt display of sensitivity can get me some kind of useful credit. Then I realized that I have never cried on a date, so I really have no idea if that sort of ploy really works at all. Does it, women? Furthermore, I recognized that there are only a handful of actual dates I‘ve ever participated in. I missed the boat on that courtship ritual (and others).
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