Theology and the Films of Terrence Malick

Christopher B. Barnett, Clark J. Elliston, Christopher B. Barnett, Clark J. Elliston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138821699
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317588276
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Terrence Malick is one of the most important and controversial filmmakers of the last few decades. Yet his renown does not stem from box office receipts, but rather from his inimitable cinematic vision that mixes luminous shots of nature, dreamlike voiceovers, and plots centered on enduring existential questions. Although scholars have thoroughly examined Malick's background in philosophy, they have been slower to respond to his theological concerns.

This volume is the first to focus on the ways in which Malick integrates theological inquiries and motifs into his films. The book begins with an exploration of Malick's career as a filmmaker and shows how his Heideggerian interests relate to theology. Further essays from established and up-and-coming scholars analyze seven of Malick's most prominent films – Badlands (1973), Days of Heaven (1978), The Thin Red Line (1998), The New World (2005), The Tree of Life (2011), To the Wonder (2012), and Knight of Cups (2015) – to show how his cinematic techniques point toward and overlap with principles of Christian theology. A thorough study of an iconic filmmaker, this book is an essential resource for students and scholars in the emerging field of religion and film.

Part One

An Introduction to Terrence Malick—Scholar, Filmmaker

1 An Improbable Career

The Films of Terrence Malick

James Kendrick

In July 1958, French critic and filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard wrote in the film journal Cahiers du cinéma:

There are five or six films in cinematic history one would like to review with these words alone: “This is the most beautiful film!” For there is no higher praise. Films like Murnau/Flaherty’s Taboo, Rossellini’s A Voyage to Italy, and Claude Renoir’s The Golden Coach require no lengthy discourses. Like starfish opening and closing, they know how to open, then conceal the secrets of a world they alone possess and at the same time fascinatingly reflect. Theirs is the only truth. It is deeply embedded in them, even though it is constantly exposed to the world on the silver screen.¹

The subject of Godard’s essay was the great Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, who at the time had already directed nineteen films, but his words would just as well apply to the films of Terrence Malick. Malick’s body of work—which at this point includes seven narrative feature films with several more currently in production—demands multiple viewings, and while Godard might argue that his films, such as Taboo, A Voyage to Italy, and The Golden Coach, speak for themselves and therefore “[require] no lengthy discourses,” the many secrets in Malick’s films compel our attention and desire for contemplation, even if any attempts at analysis can only hope, at best, to shed a fraction of light into their mysteries.

This essay will explore Malick’s improbable cinematic career and the interlocking aesthetic qualities and recurring themes that define him as an artist—particularly his rejection of conventional Hollywood narrative, the formal beauty of his imagery, and his use of subjective voice-over narration—as well as his unique positioning as a challenging, idiosyncratic auteur whose films have nevertheless been consistently afforded the resources of major Hollywood studios, which typically shy away from investing significantly in such projects. Central to Malick’s cinema is the fact that their unique mix of qualities accentuates their intertwined spiritual and psychological dimensions: the unconventional narrative structures eschew simple cause-and-effect logic in favor of a metaphysical focus on interconnectedness, especially between humanity and the natural world. In addition, the films’ ethereal lighting makes the physical transcendent and the use of voice-over narration both draws the viewer into an unseen world within his characters and allows Malick to pose challenging philosophical and theological questions generally ignored in mainstream Hollywood cinema.

An Improbable Career

Malick has remained an inscrutable figure throughout his career, defined primarily by the absence of his voice outside of its embodiment in his films. One of the most revered of the young directors who made their name in the 1970s as part of the so-called New Hollywood (a group that also includes Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and Steven Spielberg), Malick has remained recalcitrant in his artistic independence, defining his cinema against mainstream Hollywood conventions while creating an almost impenetrable mystique as a reclusive genius via his decades-long absence from interview chairs and red carpet premieres. For those of us outside his close circle of confidants and friends, Malick the artist and his films are virtually one and the same because they are all we have. Interestingly, the inseparability of Malick the artist and his films is belied by the fact that cinema was neither his first love nor his initially intended profession. As he told Beverly Walker in 1975, after discovering that he was not a good teacher, “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.”² According to director/producer Rob Cohen, who hired Malick in the mid-1980s to adapt Larry McMurtry’s novel The Desert Rose, “He was very tense and fragile, the least likely person to be a director.”³

Particularly at a time when we have become fully accustomed to media saturation, the cult of celebrity, twenty-four-hour news, and massive digital networks of instantly accessible information, the improbable and mystifying nature of Malick the artist who refuses to step under the magnifying glass is all the more compelling, imbuing his films with an additional layer of extra-diegetic allure. The numbers are telling: in a filmmaking career that now spans forty years and counting, he has written and directed only seven films—Badlands (1973), Days of Heaven (1978), The Thin Red Line (1998), The New World (2005), The Tree of Life (2011), To the Wonder (2012), and Knight of Cups (2015)—and during that time he has consented to only a handful of interviews, the two most significant of which were both published in 1975, one in the French journal Positif⁴ and one in the British film journal Sight & Sound.⁵ His last “proper” interview was given to French journalist Yvonne Baby in 1979 for an article published in Le Monde.⁶

Malick’s general silence on his works was intensified by the two-decade gap between Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line, during which time he all but vanished from the public eye. Each passing year increased his aura and drew stronger and stronger comparisons to authors J. D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon and chess master Bobby Fischer, all geniuses who shunned the spectacle of public celebrity, choosing instead to lead intensely private lives and refusing to play by the rules set by others. Malick has never attended one of the premieres of his films, and even though he was nominated for Oscars for both The Thin Red Line (in 1999) and The Tree of Life (in 2012), he declined to be present at either ceremony. He has refused to participate in any of the supplementary materials included in DVD and Blu-ray releases of his films, despite Badlands, Days of Heaven, and The Thin Red Line being distributed by the prestigious Criterion Collection. Pictures of him are so scarce that, when Italian filmmakers Luciano Barcaroli, Carlo Hintermann, Gerardo Panichi, and Daniele Villa made the documentary Rosy-Fingered Dawn: A Film on Terrence Malick (2002), they were not able to secure a single image of him.

Information about Malick’s early life is limited, with much of it deriving from the two interviews he gave in 1975, the similarities of which led Lloyd Michaels to opine, “[it is] as if the circumspect director had rehearsed the commentary he wished to be disseminated about his life and first film.”⁷ Malick was born in either Waco, Texas, or Ottawa, Illinois.⁸ He is the son of an oil company executive, although he spent some of his childhood growing up in Austin, Texas, and Oklahoma. An excellent student with a clearly brilliant mind, he attended Harvard from 1961 to 1966, where he studied under the philosopher and film theorist Stanley Cavell (who directed his senior honors thesis, The Concept of Horizon in Husserl and Heidegger) and graduated Phi Beta Kappa. Malick was later named a Rhodes Scholar and received a fellowship to attend Magdalen College at the University of Oxford. However, during his time there he displayed early signs of his idiosyncratic temperament, and he left without a degree after his senior tutor, the philosopher Gilbert Ryle, rejected his proposal to write a dissertation on the concept of world in Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein.⁹

After leaving Oxford, he bounced around a number of jobs, most of which would inform his later films: working wheat harvests in both the United States and Canada (Days of Heaven), working in oil fields and driving a cement mixer in a railyard (Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Tree of Life), and eventually working as a freelance journalist who contributed to Life, Newsweek, and the New Yorker. During his four months working at the New Yorker, he was sent to Bolivia to cover the trial of Régis Debray, the French intellectual who fought alongside Marxist revolutionary Che Guevera. He followed his stint in journalism with a one-year lectureship in philosophy at MIT, which, along with the 1969 publication of his translation of Martin Heidegger’s The Essence of Reasons for Northwestern University Press, effectively ended his academic life.

In the fall of 1969, he enrolled in the two-year Master of Film Arts program at the American Film Institute’s newly created conservatory in Los Angeles, which encouraged a “film as art” approach to filmmaking (Paul Schrader and David Lynch were fellow new students). Having never made a film before, Malick considered his experience at AFI “very helpful” and called it “a marvelous place.”¹⁰ For his thesis film, he collaborated with actors Harry Dean Stanton and Warren Oates to make Lanton Mills, an absurdist seventeen-minute short film about a pair of cowboys who set off to rob a bank and inexplicably stumble into modern-day Los Angeles. Malick admitted at the time that he didn’t know what he was doing and was unsatisfied with the finished product,¹¹ although he donated a copy of it to the AFI with the stipulation that only AFI scholars could view the film at the institute library in Los Angeles. Theresa Schwartzman, one of the few people who has actually seen the film and written about it at any length, describes it as quite unlike the serene, philosophical cinema typically associated with Malick. Rather, it is an “endearing” comedy, “marked by a goofy, sprawling, messy humor that puts it squarely in the comedy genre, and much of its comedy resides in Malick’s own touching performance as a slow-witted cowboy buffoon.”¹² While studying at the AFI, Malick also secured numerous screenplay rewrite jobs through agent Michael Medavoy for studio films as varied as Drive, He Said (1971), Dirty Harry (1971), Pocket Money (1972), and Deadhead Miles (1972), which helped pave the way for his first feature film, Badlands.

Badlands (1973)

Malick began work on Badlands near the end of his second year at the AFI. While working on the screenplay, he took the daring and, at the time, novel approach of bypassing the major studios and independent distributors for funding and self-financed the film by securing the involvement of multiple investors. (He raised half of the film’s $300,000 budget, while executive producer Edward R. Pressman secured the other half.) The resulting film, despite falling squarely into the general category of the romantic-young-killers-on-the-run genre that had exploded in the wake of Arthur Penn’s counterculture hit Bonnie and Clyde (1967), is decidedly unconventional: a broad exercise in demythologizing the heady romance of criminality.

Although loosely based on the two-month, cross-state killing spree of teenagers Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate in 1958, Badlands minimizes the inherent sensationalism of its material with a deliberately slow pace, almost to the point of being plodding, and Malick constantly undercuts the potential thrill of on-screen violence by rendering it awkward, vicious, and ugly in its juxtaposition with tranquility. The protagonist, Kit (Martin Sheen), is a handsome drifter with no particular place to go and nothing to do. Described numerous times as being a dead ringer for James Dean, he is a mixture of charming boyishness and coldhearted killer. He begins a courtship with fifteen-year-old Holly (Sissy Spacek), a somewhat gawky, underdeveloped girl with freckles and bright eyes. She shows more curiosity than intelligence, which is evidenced in her banal, almost embarrassingly honest voice-over narration (at one point, she admits she loves Kit because he likes her even though she isn’t pretty, and she isn’t popular). Holly’s narration also carries with it an unsettling charge given that it is spoken in the past tense, yet reflects no real emotional involvement or sense of trauma from the violence with which she was involved.

Kit and Holly run away together after Kit shoots and kills her father (Warren Oates), who doesn’t approve of their relationship. The singularly unromantic nature of the killing confirms the film’s approach to bloodshed: When Kit suddenly pulls a pistol on Holly’s father, you get the feeling that he’s bluffing, and it seems as though he’s never handled a gun before. Nevertheless, he shoots him in cold blood, and by the time the film winds its way to its rather unexpected and anticlimactic conclusion, he will have done the same thing to more than a half dozen other people across two states—all with the same deadpan, uncaring sense of necessity.

Badlands was met with broad critical success, and it was chosen as the closing-night film for the 1973 New York Film Festival—a significant honor for a first-time filmmaker.

Days of Heaven (1978)

Malick took four years to complete his second film, Days of Heaven, which was financed and distributed by Paramount Pictures. The story takes place just before World War I and focuses on two central characters, Bill (Richard Gere) and Abby (Brooke Adams), who must flee Chicago because Bill has accidentally killed his foreman at a steel mill. Along with Bill’s preteen sister, Linda (Linda Manz), they escape by train to the Texas Panhandle. Pretending to be brother and sister, rather than lovers, Bill and Abby join other itinerate workers harvesting wheat on a massive farm owned by a wealthy, but lonely young farmer (Sam Shepard). The Farmer’s life is epitomized by his Gothic-style house, which is large and beautiful but completely isolated on the top of a hill, more sad than powerful. The Farmer falls in love with Abby and asks her to stay. Bill, having overheard a conversation suggesting that the Farmer has only a year left to live (his exact illness is left vague), encourages Abby to marry him, knowing that it will provide a short-term safe haven and, when the Farmer eventually dies, long-term financial stability.

Thus Malick establishes a love triangle in which Abby is torn between the two men, each of whom represents a different element of masculine attractiveness. Whereas Bill is free and wild and not entirely in control of his emotions, the Farmer is wealthy and accomplished, but also shy and somewhat sickly. His love for Abby is a kind of puppy love, and the manner in which she and Bill exploit it is unnerving, although strangely understandable. If the romantic triangle in Days of Heaven seems somewhat slight, it is be...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Part One An Introduction to Terrence Malick—Scholar, Filmmaker
• Part Two Terrence Malick as Theological Auteur
• Part Three The Films of Terrence Malick: Theological Readings
• Notes on Contributors
• Index of Bible References
• Index of Names and Subjects