Term Paper Draft Iv

Kyle Mountcastle 1 O’Connor 28 April 2018

Malick the Kind Maverick: A Look At the Creative Life of Terrence Malick Imagine a Pacific island rife with green tropical trees. Interspersed in these trees is a village of local islanders. Among the islanders is an American soldier gone AWOL. On the island, he is safe and away from the bitter realities of the Japanese and Americans fighting in the Pacific. His demeanor seems freewheeling and lazy. Now, picture an American ship pulling into shore. The soldier’s fantasy world has come to an end as he is pulled back into active duty. Upon returning to the island much later, the villagers do not welcome him. Innocence has been lost. This scene may be from a typical Hollywood screenplay, filled with action and drama. However, the screenplay in question is filled with odd details about voice-overs and images picturing an idyllic American couple back on the mainland. Furthermore, there is not such a clear enemy at a certain point in the screenplay. What is this screenplay? It has become anything but typical. In Hollywood, the tug-of-war between commerce and art remains as prevalent as ever. The three-act and linear narrative structure still is the primary template for most Hollywood productions. Storytelling feels stale to some film buffs. Few directors can claim to deviate from conventional storytelling ideology and have palpable mainstream success. Perhaps the most visible director of this kind is Terrence Malick. I will explore Malick’s works as a disjunctive voice amidst conventional narrative ideologues, as well as exhibit Malick’s works as “visual poems.” Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, a​ nd ​The Tree of Life ​will be my primary sources for examination. I will also try to find clues for Malick’s creative process and decisions for these

works, as well as how that fits into Malick’s voice. Lastly, I will give my own views on the quality of Malick’s work in lieu of his reputation with critics. First, we will look at how Malick challenges conventional us-versus-them narrative structures. A ​ ccording to Holger Pötzsch, ​The Thin Red Line​ is a powerful example of liminality in American films. In Pötzsch’s essay “Challenging the Border as Barrier: Liminality in Terrence Malick’s ​The Thin Red Line​” Potzsch begins with describing conventional “us versus them” narrative plots such as Ridley Scott’s ​Aliens​ (Potzsch 69-71). In these films, there is always a glorification of the protagonist and a demonization of the antagonists. In ​The Thin Red Line,​ liminality means that both the American Military and the Japanese Military on Guadalcanal are not presented in a clear us-versus-them narrative, but rather as two factions with suffering human beings on both sides (Potzsch 67). Furthermore, Potzsch establishes that ​The Thin Red Line’​ s central theme is borders, or territorial and cultural divisions between the Americans and 1

the Japanese : Even though spectators might of course identify with invisible enemies, the movie universe so far only consists of the soldier-self encountering a faceless and merciless threat. After the capture of the stronghold, however, all this suddenly changes…. Malick’s movie opens up a ​liminal space of victory/defeat​. This shared space, enabling the full presence of both self and other, implies a break with the representational conventions of many war and action movies. The formerly invisible and contained, or caricatured, enemy asserts itself massively in the conceptual and concrete universe of soldier-self and spectator.

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Potzsch, Holger. Journal of Borderlands Studies | 25.1 – 2010. Pages 74-75. 2010.

Potzsch says that representational conventions are broken without clearly defining them. To clarify, he is still talking about the us-versus-them narrative convention common in most Hollywood films. With the Japanese screaming for the mercy of the Americans, liminality cannot help but become apparent, as shown in this excerpt from the film’s script: Filthy and emaciated, he has a bad case of dysentery and is continually indicating to his guards, through a system of signs and pantomime, that he has to relieve himself. He has already messed his pants a couple of times apparently, and all in all, he is a pretty sorry spectacle.

COL. TALL What happened here?

Tall has turned away in disgust from the living prisoner to look at the two whose heads Queen knocked together. They lie side by side, unconscious. Except for the blood running from their noses, they show no signs of injury or wounds. Gaff merely raises his eyebrows, as though he didn’t know either. But Tall can read well enough what has happened, even if he cannot understand the method. They should have been bayoneted, or shot. He doesn’t like this sort of thing, but one has to make allowances for men in the heat of combat.

COL. TALL Some sort of explosive concussion? No fragment wounds. (Gaff does not answer) Well, a dead brown brother is one brown brother less, isn't it? Take good care of the others, men! G-2 will want them. There should be someone around before long.

THORNE

Aye, aye, sir, yeah. We'll take care of him.

One of the PRISONER'S GUARDS reaches out with his rifle muzzle and pokes him, tipping him over backward into his own mess. The men around all laugh, and the prisoner scrambles tohis feet. He appears to expect this kind of treatment and looks as if he were only 2

putting in time, waiting for them to shoot him.

This contradicts many other American films, such as ​Saving Private Ryan​. In ​Saving Private Ryan,​ the Nazis are clear demons of war. To many, they cannot be portrayed any other way, but Malick’s portrayal of the Japanese offers in ​The Thin Red Line ​appropriately makes up for the lack of multi-perspective portrayals of war in Hollywood. To portray the Nazis in a liminal fashion with an American audience likely would be far too controversial. Regardless of this, many American filmmakers could learn from Malick about how to present supposed antagonists in their movies. In​ Days of Heaven​, for example, while there is a conflict between Gere’s character and the wealthy farmland owner for Abby’s affection, the love triangle does not serve as a central theme of the movie. For ​Days of Heaven,​ romantic conflict is used as an existentialist tool for disenfranchising cultural mythologies about the American West, as portrayed in the Western genre. According to Joan McGettigan, in her book ​The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America, Second Edition,​ ​Days of Heaven​ categorizes the Western mythos as “unsustainable:”

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​The Thin Red Line.​ Dir. Terrence Malick. Fox 2000 Pictures. 1998.

The comradeship which sustains the Westerners in films such as ​My Darling Clementine f​ ails to develop in ​Days of Heaven​, and the satisfaction of revenge we so often feel in the western’s third act is rendered meaningless. The familiar, vast landscape, the source of so many western characters’ hopes and dreams is shown to be just that – a dream, a kind of heavenly apparition shared by the characters and the viewers, amorphous and unsustainable. Malick does not so much disprove the myth of the West as demonstrate our need for it and reinforce our desire for it; viewers leave the film understanding why our culture developed the western.

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Here, Joan McGettigan refers to the need for idealism as a means of improving the future. Without a story to tell about the West’s past, viewers are left without a significant part of the American identity. The Wild West, though heavily romanticized, serves as a means to learn from the class injustices of the late 19​th​ and early 20​th​ centuries, especially towards blue-collar labor. For instance, in the scene from the film below, we see a gentle, sensual metaphor of the West transform into brutish reality through the style of lovemaking:

The shoe gleams in the moonlight. Coyotes yelp from the hilltops. A scarecrow spreads its arms against the sky. The waving fields of wheat have given way to vast reaches of cleanly shaven stubble, stained with purple morning glories. Odd, large stakes are planted among them.

165 NEW ANGLE - DAY FOR NIGHT

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Patterson, Hannah. ​The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America​. Wallflower, 2003. Print.

BILL You want me to spin you around? She nods okay. He takes her by the hands and spins her around the way he used to--until they go reeling off, too dizzy to stand. 166 EXT. RIVER BANK - DAY FOR NIGHT They lie by the river looking at the great dome of stars. Bill wants to believe things are the same between them as before. So does Abby--but she knows better. BILL Suppose we woke up tomorrow and it was a thousand years ago. I mean, with all we know? Electricity, the telephone, radio, that kind of stuff. They'd never figure out how we came up with it all. Maybe they'd kill us. She looks at him, and they laugh. This line may be an allusion towards technological progress that is not checked. Early in the 20​th century, as the Industrial Revolution peaked in the United States, technology advanced past the rate of ethical responses to it, which means that children worked in dangerous factories. Bill goes on to subversively assert his dominance:

BILL You sleepy? ABBY This is the first time we slept together in a while, Bill. BILL You like it?

ABBY Of course. BILL Kiss me, then. Here, Bill has become jealous of Abby’s inklings towards the rich farmer. He seems to regret expressing the idea to make a fake marriage in order to inherit the dying farmer’s fortune. This failed plan almost seems to parallel with the failed dreams of a wild, free-spirited Wild West.

ABBY

It's so sweet to be able to kiss you when I want to.

167 NEW ANGLE

Before the marriage his lovemaking was gentle and soft. Now it has a brutal air, as 4

though he were asserting his right to her for the last time .

Here, any dreams of Western Wilderness are taken away by the dubious historical realities of the Western United States. Glamourous lawlessness and freedom is taken aback by not-so-glamourous Reconstruction-Era injustices toward former slave states. Line 167’s description of lovemaking turning into dominance reflects this binary of idealism and realism. This outlandish take on the Western genre seems like career suicide to other directors, but not Malick. Malick spends gratuitous amounts of time and money in post-production to make his

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Malick, Days of Heaven (1978). Paramount Pictures

shots into a cohesive visual poem. For ​Days of Heaven​, the meaning behind that particular poem may be “The Wild West wasn’t all idyllic, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t imagine it so.” How does Malick make such an impression upon his viewers? A look into his background may reveal some clues. Terrence Malick was born in Ottawa, Illinois on November 30​th​, 1943. He spent much of his childhood and adolescence at St Stephen's Episcopal School in Austin, Texas. After graduating in 1961, he went to Harvard University to earn a Philosophy Degree with highest 5

honors by 1965 He then continued his studies as a Rhodes Scholar at Magdalen College in Oxford, but left without completing his studies. This departure was supposedly due to disagreements about his master’s thesis with his thesis advisor (cite). After a brief time teaching and writing for the ​New Yorker,​ Malick entered the newly established American Film Institute in 1969. Near the end of his time at AFI, he began working on ​Badlands c​ irca 1971. ​Badlands, according to one source, was the “directorial debut that most filmmakers can only dream of

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Against his massive success with ​Badlands,​ Malick’s private life was in turmoil. His younger brother committed suicide in the early 1970s after breaking his hands to stop his musical studies under Andres Segovia (Solomons). In addition to private tragedies, Malick was establishing his long-held reputation as an eccentric recluse, not to mention his increasing frustration with Hollywood’s business ideology and politics of “filling butts in seats.” By the time Johnny Travolta was denied the primary role for ​Days of Heaven​ (Richard Gere took the role 5

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Kendall, Stuart. ​Terrence Malick: Film and Philosophy.​ Bloomsbury Academic, 2011. Print. Cinephilliabeyond.org. ​With ‘Badlands,’ Terrence Malick made a directorial debut most filmmakers can only dream of​. Unknown Unknown Unknown. Web. 29 April 2018.

instead), Malick had become weary of Hollywood. After the film’s release, he stepped away from Hollywood to travel the world. This respite did not atrophy Malick’s creative and poetic muscles, which needs much more elaboration. 7

One article from ​the Independent a​ sserts that this artistic obsession was a familial trait , which seems to correlate with Malick’s secrecy about his work: Michele Morette, his late ex-wife of 13 years, revealed that while they were together she wasn't allowed into his office, and that he would rather buy her a copy of a book than lend her his own. He also liked to leave his books and cassettes face-down, so people 8

couldn't see what he was reading or listening to . Given Malick’s mythic reputation, it seems easy to dismiss him as a snobbish recluse. However, I do not think he can be passed off this way. According to a Hollywood Reporter interview with Franz Rogowski, it seems Malick is much more gentle with actors than a snob would be: "Terry does 30-minute takes. I'm really interested to see what Radegund will turn out to be. Because he doesn't do scenes, he just creates a space where things can happen and turns on the camera. You're in a prison. You see a sunbeam coming in the window. You play with the light. And for no reason, you start to cry. If nothing happens, Terry comes in and whispers something in your ear. With the camera running the whole time. The difference is Haneke takes a week to edit, Terry takes up to four years. But both are great. And both are extreme. And that's what interests me."

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The Independent. Web. May 23 2011. Accessed April 7 2018. See 1.

Here, Malick’s whispering “something in your ear” suggests a much calmer filmmaker, albeit a bit time-consuming with post-production. Upon reflecting my research and viewing of Malick’s work, I have come to several conclusions: First, Malick is never an easy director to digest. Second, in spite of the dense difficulty of his work and the critical hype stemming from that, I believe there is artistic value in Malick’s work if one puts enough mental effort into understanding his films. Patrick Smith, writing for ​the Telegraph,​ appears to agree with me: Ending his 20-year sabbatical, Malick produced this near-three-hour essay on nature's colossal indifference to humanity, as seen through the prism of the American assault on Guadalcanal in 1942. It's adapted from James Jones's novel, and is sad, soulful and full of eye-catching vistas and languid shots of the wind blowing through the lush hillsides. It's 9

also really rather good . Smith ultimately sets up his article in a way smiliar to the famous “What I Think I Do” meme, which always attempts to simplify complicated perceptions of occupations, such as being in a rock band. This method of explanation suggests Malick’s work can be understood and not merely dismissed as intellectual dross. Lastly, the mental effort required to understand his films depends on the films. Due to Malick’s background in Heidegger and other existentialist studies, his approach to filmmaking strives to provoke introspection for the viewer at all costs. For me, I do have some experience in existentialism, but others may not be so fortunate to have taken any philosophy classes at the collegiate level. Because of the academic nature of his

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Roxborough, Scott. Franz Rogowski on Michael Haneke, Terrence Malick and Being Germany's Next Big Thing. 30 March 2018. Accessed 29 April 2018. Web.

background, watching his films pracitcally demands a basic understanding of existentialist philosophy. Due to the masturbatory intellectual tendencies of many professional and amateur film critics, Malick often is portrayed as a director of much the same sort of personality. However, due to his reclusive reputation, I do not think there is sufficient evidence for an inflated ego. If anything, the critics feel the need to fill in the gaps about Malick the person with their own idyllic ambitions. As an educated layperson who does not identify with the elite class of critics, I think this is completely unnecessary. To paint Malick as a snooty and wealthy contrarian to the mainsteam world of film is more of a romanticization for critics to relish in. I have always been suspicous of most instances of romanticization (especially movie portrayals of the American military, i.e. ​American Sniper​), and I think many critics need to change their inclinations to romanticized intellectualism. In the end, I think Malick is simply a private person that only tries to make films for his personal expression of his introspection about life. For earlier works, such as ​Badlands​ and ​Days of Heaven,​ less effort is needed to appreciate the films. For later films, such as ​The Tree of Life​, the demands are much greater. Whereas the former films follow a more linear plot, the latter exhibit far longer sequences of the cosmos, surreal sequences of a submerged house with a child swimming out the doors, and a much murkier sense of time. Imagine receiving the letter reporting the news of your brother drowning in a pool. Your entire life is disrupted and changed forever. Interspersed with faint memories of the deceased brother are scenes of a dying herbivore dinosaur at the mercy of one carnivourous onlooker, space nebulae corroding and emerging out of nothing, surreal scenes of you crossing through a desert chasm in a business suit, and opera music to accompany all of these sequences. Such

sequences make for a strange film, but that is essentially what ​The Tree of Life ​is. According to S. Brent Plate, Malick is extrapolating his philosophy toward the universe with the death of the protagonist’s younger brother as a springboard for this extrapolation: In Malick’s rendering, history unfolds from birth to the present and beyond. The origins of the universe are imagined through evolutionary schemas that nonetheless do not discount the possibilities of a Creator God in action. At the same time, though many have done so, the film does not necessitate a theological interpretation either. Here, Plate means that while Malick intends to express his philosophy towards the world, he does not intend to proselytize it to his audience. This is more evidence to show that Malick is not a snob. Furthermore, Malick is trying to make his complex understanding of the world around him simpler to his audiences by giving a basic setting of an idyllic 1950s American family in Texas in turmoil after one of its youth is lost. This is further explained by Plate here: Cosmic beginnings coalesce in the microcosm of Waco, Texas, circa 1950s, eventually moving on into some other realm of an afterlife (looking a lot like Utah). The film delights in visual connections between the macro- and microcosmos: far off gassy clouds of nebulae look like the gassy clouds of DDT sprayed for mosquito control in Waco (Figure 4a and b); an asteroid strikes the earth, beginning the mass extinction of the dinosaurs, while the young Jack O’Brien throws a rock through a window, beginning the extinction of his childhood innocence; Jack emerges dreamlike from an underwater house as a 10

cosmic metaphor for birth, and later another dies by drowning in a pool .

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Visualizing the Cosmos: Terrence Malick’s ​The Tree of Life​ and Other Visions of Life in the Universe

Here, the description of Jack O’Brien’s family is easy to understand. Also, Plate seems to implicitly argue that Malick is trying to connect his daunting philosophy background to something his audience can relate to, which is death presented in stark and stoic ways. The loss of a child, it seems, is an ideal platform for stoicism to take place in Plate’s mind. Furthermore, The Tree of Life’​ s script suggests Malick’s own stoic tendencies: Why does the world lie broken and in heaps? Where did it all go wrong? Our hero is left, if not quite where he was before, nevertheless in doubt and misgiving. He trusted nature to 11

answer his questions. It answers some but raises others in turn.

Here, Malick implicates the contradictions that Jack O’Brien (the protagonist) experiences between his father’s teachings and his mother’s teachings. These contradictory teachings that O’Brien experiences as a child only continue to confuse him as a middle-aged man working in a high-rise business. As the movie progresses, Malick’s conclusions seem to point to Heideggerian ideas imposed on the world around us, which can be simplified with a quote from a letter Heidegger wrote himself: Thinking is not merely l’engagement dans l’action [engagement in the action] for and by beings, in the sense of the actuality of the present situation. Thinking is l’engagement by and for the truth of Being. The history of Being is never past but stands ever before; it sustains 12

and defines every condition et situation humaine.

Here, Heidegger means that “right thinking” is not enough to sustain humanity. Contrary to Plato’s stance that thinking is enough for humanity, Heidegger asserts that there is always a context within any thought. This context informs not only the thought, but the actions humans 11

Malick, Terrence. The Tree of Life. Cottonwood Pictures. Film. 2011.

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make, which is intertwined with the thought, and ultimately interdependent with it. Malick’s unfinished master’s thesis deals with Heidegger specifically, so his influence permeates throughout Malick’s work. At the end of much analysis and exploration, I believe several descriptions of Malick remain clear. First, Malick will never make a film that follows us-versus-them ideologies that most Hollywood filmmakers swear by. Analyzing ​The Thin Red Line​ for liminality has uncovered much about nature’s detachment from the American and Japanese armies. Mother Nature is never going to express patriotism for either side, no matter how much either side suffers for their wartime goals. ​Days of Heaven​ only masquerades as a conventional movie, and it clearly offers provocations about revising popular mythologies about the American West with the romantic conflict only existing as a springboard for such revisions. ​The Tree of Life​ completely abandons any inclination for conventional plotting by juxtaposing computer-generated images of dinousaurs along a river, children swimming out of submerged homes, and a loose thread of Jack O’Brien’s memories of his brother as the only sequence connecting all the other sequences. Second, Malick is not a snob, but rather an extremely private person who dabbled into the film world on a whim, and that whim coincidentally gave him a larger-than-life reputation as a recluse. This can be supported by an interview quotation below: I was not a good teacher; I didn’t have the sort of edge one should have on the students, so I decided to do something else. I’d always liked movies in a kind of naive way. They seemed no less improbable a career than anything else. I came to Los Angeles in the fall of 1969 to study at AFI. At the end of my second year in Los Angeles, I began work on Badlands. My influences were books like The Hardy Boys, Swiss Family Robinson, Tom

Sawyer, Huck Finn—all involving an innocent in a drama over his or her head. I wanted 13

the picture to be set up like a fairy tale, outside time, like Treasure Island . This quote explains Malick’s pre-filmmaking situation as a financially safe, but boring position. For Malick to enter his filmmaking career in such a manner that is naïve to the business practices of selling movie scripts suggests to me Malick’s humility and playfulness. This humility and playfulness shines in spite of Malick’s academic rigor. Because of these traits, Malick cannot be romanticized as a jerk. He also exhibits strong creative choices in the face of Hollywood politics, such as with ​Days of Heaven. ​The honest ideas about the Wild West manifest through the film’s treatment of the romantic conflict as only a parallel to the West’s beautiful, but exploited landscape. With ​The Thin Red Line, ​Malick breaks away from typical plot structures to evoke transcendence of cultural boundaries in the viewer. With ​The Tree of Life​, we see how family tragedies can evoke the cosmic scope of Planet Earth in an attitude akin to Eckhart Tolle. These works exhibit the brilliant, but sadly misunderstood artist. All in all, Malick deserves the title of “Kind Maverick” due to his kind treatment of talent he hires for his ambitous films. He is never who critics or amateur pundits think he is.

Works Cited Braungardt, Jurgen. "Heidegger Made Simple." 6 June 2016. ​Philisophical Explorations.​ Blogpost. 28 April 2018.

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With ‘Badlands,’ Terrence Malick made a directorial debut most filmmakers can only dream of. Cinephilliabeyond.org. Author unknown. Date unknown. Accessed 29 April 2018.

Cinephilliabeyond.org. ​With ‘Badlands,’ Terrence Malick made a directorial debut most filmmakers can only dream of.​ Unknown Unknown Unknown. Web. 29 April 2018. Days of Heaven.​ By Malick. Dir. Malick. Paramount Pictures. Paramount , 1978. Film. Kendall, Stuart. ​Terrence Malick: Film and Philosophy​. Bloomsbury Academic, 2011. Print. Moving Pictures: In Search of Terrence Malick.​ BBC 2. n.d. Web. 5 April 2018. . Patterson, Hannah. ​The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America​. Wallflower, 2003. Web. Plate, Brent S. ​Visualizing the Cosmos: Terrence Malick's Tree of Life and Other Visions of the Universe​. May 2012. Web. Potzsch, Holger. "Challenging the Border as Barrier: Liminality in Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line." Journal of Borderlands Studies​ (2010): 74-75. Web Document. Roxbourough, Scott. "Franz Rogowski on Michael Haneke, Terrence Malick and Being Germany's Next Big Thing." ​The Hollywood Reporter​ 30 March 2018. Web. Solomons, Jason. "Terrence Malick: The return of cinema's invisible man." ​The Atlantic​ 2 July 2011. Article. The Independent. ​The secret life of Terrence Malick.​ 23 May 2011. Web. The Thin Red Line.​ Dir. Terrence Malick. Fox 2000 Pictures. 1998. The Tree of Life.​ Dir. Terrence Malick. Cottonwood Pictures. 2011. Film.