Terrence Malick

Filmmaker and Philosopher

Robert Sinnerbrink

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350063655
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Many critics have approached Terrence Malick's work from a philosophical perspective, arguing that his films express philosophy through cinema. With their remarkable images of nature, poetic voiceovers, and meditative reflections, Malick's cinema certainly invites philosophical engagement. In Terrence Malick: Filmmaker and Philosopher, Robert Sinnerbrink takes a different approach, exploring Malick's work as a case of cinematic ethics: films that evoke varieties of ethical experience, encompassing existential, metaphysical, and religious perspectives. Malick's films are not reducible to a particular moral position or philosophical doctrine; rather, they solicit ethically significant forms of experience, encompassing anxiety and doubt, wonder and awe, to questioning and acknowledgment, through aesthetic engagement and poetic reflection. Drawing on a range of thinkers and approaches from Heidegger and Cavell, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, to phenomenology and moral psychology Sinnerbrink explores how Malick's films respond to the problem of nihilism the loss of conviction or belief in prevailing forms of value and meaning and the possibility of ethical transformation through cinema: from self-transformation in our relations with others to cultural transformation via our attitudes towards towards nature and the world. Sinnerbrink shows how Malick's later films, from The Tree of Life to Voyage of Time, provide unique opportunities to explore cinematic ethics in relation to the crisis of belief, the phenomenology of love, and film's potential to invite moral transformation.

1

Approaching Cinematic Ethics: Badlands and Days of Heaven

It is not uncommon for great art to be ignored or misunderstood when it first appears in the world. This has proved true for Malick’s work as an artist. Hailed as an American classic today, Malick’s first feature, Badlands (1973), was praised by many critics (its premiere at the New York Film Festival was favourably received), but it also met with mixed reviews, including negative ones, upon its commercial release. Pauline Kael, for example, declared it a self-conscious art movie that hints at things unspoken but we cannot really say what they are.

The film is a succession of art touches. Malick is a gifted student, and ‘Badlands’ is an art thing, all right, but I didn’t admire it, I didn’t enjoy it, and I don’t like it. (Kael 1977)

Kael’s complaint concerns what she takes to be the film’s ‘negative’ critique of mass culture and its deadening effects on youth, a rather literal and reductive interpretation of the film that misses what makes it aesthetically distinctive and ethically significant. Days of Heaven (1978), his next feature, received praises for its beautiful cinematography (by Nestor Almendros, along with Haskell Wexler) and poetic presentation of landscape, but it was also criticized for being not only too ‘pretty’ but too emotionally distant to be a successful narrative film. Kael, again, dismissed the film as empty, lacking in character depth or narrative focus, remarking that, like a Christmas tree, ‘you can hang all your dumb metaphors on it’ (1982: 137). Kael’s complaint echoes a long line of Malick critique that commenced with Badlands and Days of Heaven and continues – in increasingly harsh tones – to the present day: namely, that Malick films strip back narrative content, character presentation and plot development far too much, replacing these standard elements of narrative film with an emphasis on cinematic mood, poetic atmospherics or metaphysical themes. Although critics readily acknowledge the beauty of Malick’s imagery, the success of his works as narrative films often remains in doubt.

One could respond to this charge in a number of ways. One could argue that, rather than fault Malick for not making conventional movies, we should praise him as a filmmaker exploring, indeed extending, the possibilities of narrative cinema, while working within, yet transforming, conventional genres. Or one could argue that Malick’s films are essentially poetico-philosophical meditations and are thus best treated as non-conventional forms of narrative cinema with a distinctively existential slant. Or one could adopt a more radically aestheticist stance, arguing that Malick’s films are first and foremost exercises in cinematic poetics, exploring the possibilities of cinematic style within highly abstracted narrative formats, and so should not be viewed as either conventional dramas or as philosophical narratives but rather as bold experiments in cinematic form.

Although there is truth in all three perspectives, I shall focus in what follows on Malick’s films as cases of cinematic ethics, exploring and evoking ethical experience by distinctive aesthetic means. Indeed, even his early works, not generally regarded as ‘philosophical’, offer complex forms of ethical experience. Their fascinating combination of impressionistic character portrayal, minimal plot development and poetic disclosure of nature offers compelling ways of evoking varieties of ethical experience expressed in mythic and poetic form. Malick’s first two films, moreover, also show a surprisingly consistent concern with moral questions concerning existential choice, the nature of love and the meaning of violence. They explore mythological, cultural, moral-religious and philosophical themes that will recur in Malick’s oeuvre. With their lyrical voiceovers, mythical overtones and poetic moods, they offer striking cases of how cinema can explore ethical experience through aesthetic means.

‘I got some stuff to say’ (Badlands)

Consider Malick’s directorial debut, which I saw as a student and have revisited many times over the years. I remember it being discussed in a university film class, which was supposed to explore the idea of aesthetic experience. My teacher, a well-known Australian cultural theorist, was trying to persuade his sceptical charges that beauty and aesthetic pleasure were not merely cultural constructs, addictive opiates peddled by a hegemonic ruling class. He cited Badlands and Ozu as cases of pure aesthetic pleasure, a counter-example to the postmodernist, ‘cultural studies’ scepticism towards art and beauty that was prevalent in the 1990s. My peers appeared unmoved by the Badlands clip he showed, but the scenes I saw were stunning; the movie has resonated with me ever since, along with a desire to communicate something of this experience.

The film is loosely based on the case of 20-year-old Charles Starkweather and 14-year-old Caril Ann Fugate – recast in the film as 25-year-old Kit Carruthers (Martin Sheen) and 15-year-old Holly Sargis (Sissy Spacek) – a young couple who go on a killing spree through the American Midwest during 1958–59. A number of generic features might strike the viewer on a first viewing. On the one hand, this is a ‘true crime’ story, combining elements of the Bonnie and Clyde/lovers-on-the-lam narrative. It is also an impressionistic road movie set in a very distinctive historical and geographical setting (the South Dakota town of Fort Dupree in 1958, following the fugitive couple all the way to the ‘Badlands of North Dakota’, as Holly tells us). On the other hand, it retains a personal, subjective quality, emphasized in Holly’s naive, incongruous voiceover. This is combined with a mythic ‘fairy tale’ atmosphere that removes the story from its historical-factual setting and opens up a fantasy world in which psychological and social realism gives way to poetic reflection and mythic resonance. At the same time, the film comments on its cinematic references (Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde), literary influences (Treasure Island, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn),¹ and on myths of American freedom and cultural history (Holly’s immersion in teen romance stories, her naive speech and mundane reflections reflecting a 1950s Southern upbringing, Kit’s idolization of James Dean, the ‘gun crazy’ theme marking their story and so on). Finally, it is Malick’s arresting images of nature, place and landscape, evoking a densely textured world imbued with a mythic sense of unreality, which made this film so original and impressive. This unique combination of history and myth, romantic naivety and cinematic self-reflection, made Badlands a landmark in contemporary American cinema (see Campbell 2007; Patterson 2007).

It is clear, nonetheless, that Badlands is not often regarded as a philosophical, let alone ‘Heideggerian’, film in the ways that Malick’s later efforts (after The Thin Red Line) would be.² At the same time, it is difficult to ignore the obvious moral question at the film’s heart: What prompts an ordinary young romantic couple to go on a remorseless killing spree? What does this story of casual killing in the pursuit of freedom on the road encapsulate about late 1950s American culture? Although it does not offer any direct answers, Badlands addresses the mythic themes of freedom, authenticity, the pursuit of happiness and self-assertion through violence, which together define the mythology of American individualism and its role in American cultural-historical self-understanding. Badlands is, in this respect, an historical film with a strong focus on cultural mythology, as mediated via cinema and popular culture; moreover it is a film that reflects on its own status and condition as a cinematic work dealing precisely with such themes. Kit both resembles and emulates James Dean, as remarked by Holly in voiceover and by one of the state police who captures him. Holly’s father (played by Warren Oates) is a commercial sign writer and is shown painting signs, painting a billboard in the isolated plains during one of the film’s standout sequences and looking through his stereopticon viewfinder, which Holly also ruminates upon, wondering about her contingent existence in the world. Practices of image-making, perceiving images and projecting self-images abound in the movie, which retains a subtly self-reflexive character despite its obviously impressionistic tone and poetic atmosphere.

The film echoes scenes and motifs from Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde but presented in a deadpan manner, staging while deflating the romantic myth of the fugitive couple, whose killing is bound up with their outsider status and ‘forbidden’ romance (Michaels 2009; Orr 2007). Although this theme is also foregrounded in Bonnie and Clyde, Badlands renders it in a far more deflationary manner. Holly remains passive and undemonstrative throughout the story; Kit’s expressions of desire and affection are clichéd, flat and rudimentary.³ Neither Kit nor Holly appears to have any emotional maturity or psychological insight into their predicament. Indeed, Kit may be emotionally disturbed, as Holly remarks; after Kit shoots his friend Cato (Ramon Bieri) in the stomach and deposits his body in a storage shed, we see Kit pacing up and down in front of the shed, violently flailing his arms and remonstrating with himself. Both characters are lacking in affect and emotional involvement, in critical self-reflection or moral conscience; they seem to be in a state of depression or despair, yet unable to communicate a condition that remains opaque even to themselves. Kit and Holly both appear to be drifting through life in search of meaning or purpose, finding it in a personal mythology of love and violence – characters that we might describe as in states of existential despair.⁴ Although Badlands evokes some of the cinematic and cultural myths of outsider romantic couples, expressing their passion through violence, their fate as doomed to die through their self-chosen confrontation with society, it refuses to celebrate or romanticize this myth. Instead, the film deflates or ironizes it, offering an existential fable rather than a romantic critique. In place of aesthetic fascination with the outsider couple, we are offered an emotionally distanced, mood-evoking, cinematic meditation on the nature of this myth promulgated via Hollywood.

Badlands, moreover, reflects upon its own complicity in such cinematic mythmaking. Malick himself appears in an intriguing scene, playing an architect carrying blueprints, who has come to visit the rich man’s house, where Kit and Holly are holding the occupants captive. He passes on a written message to Kit, who promptly throws it away (a wry joke on authorial intent and the search for ‘meaning’ in film). Kit then steals the rich man’s hat and jacket, clearly imitating the Malick/architect figure as they flee in the rich man’s Cadillac. In this respect, Badlands would qualify as a case of what Stephen Mulhall has called ‘film in the condition of philosophy’: films that reflect upon their conditions of possibility or that draw attention to – hence reflect upon – their own status as cinematic works presenting ideas via the medium of cinema itself (2008: 6–8). This concern with reflexively marking the status of the medium, while rendering cinematic mythmaking in aesthetically rich form, will continue to be a distinctive feature of Malick’s oeuvre. None of these features are presented in an historical realist mode or as a modernist form of self-reflexivity but rather in a subjective, impressionistic, mythopoetic manner that Malick will develop further.

The opening sequence of Badlands includes many elements of what has since become recognizable as Malick’s signature style. The opening shot depicts Holly on her bed playing with her beloved dog as the camera slowly moves from left to right around her, revealing her room, and accompanied by George Aliceson Tipton’s melancholy score. Her voiceover, an artless, naive, deadpan narration, has been aptly described as vernacular poetry.

My mother died of pneumonia when I was just a kid. My father had kept their wedding cake in the freezer for ten whole years. After the funeral he gave it to the yardman. He tried to act cheerful but he could never be consoled by the little stranger he found in his house. Then, one day, hoping to begin a new life away from the scene of all his memories, he moved us from Texas to Fort Dupree, South Dakota.

During Holly’s voiceover, the film cuts to two wide street shots of Fort Dupree, in early morning stillness, an anonymous, sleepy, small town with little to distinguish it. A garbage truck rolls into view, and we are introduced to Kit, sporting a James Dean haircut, white T-shirt, jeans and boots and leaping off the truck. He is shown peering at a dead dog, asking his colleague (Cato) whether he’d eat the dog for a dollar. Kit’s indifferent curiosity towards the dead dog contrasts sharply with Holly’s playful embrace of her beloved pet. He will be shown engaging with several other dogs (throwing an apple to one during his garbage round), later stepping on a dead steer, again with indifferent curiosity, while working at the cattle feedlot, whereas Holly’s dog will be shot and dumped in the river by her father as punishment for seeing Kit. As for Holly, the one thing she mentions with regret, narrating her experiences with Kit from the perspective of the future, is that she threw out her sick catfish, which made her feel bad. The characters’ curious proximity with animals and simultaneous indifference towards nature, contrasting with the sublimity of the landscapes they journey through, sets up a visual and narrative tension marking the entire film.⁵

After breaking off during the middle of his garbage round, Kit leaves Cato and wanders off aimlessly towards town, balancing an old mop on one hand and kicking cans around, before coming across Holly, practising her baton-twirling routine in the yard before her house. A mid-shot of Kit, as he spots Holly, shows him glancing furtively around to see if anyone is looking, then heading towards her to engage in conversation. As he approaches the house, the title ‘Badlands’ is superimposed over a long shot of the twirling Holly to the left of screen, with Kit wandering towards her from screen right, against the solidity of the family home in the background. All the key elements of the film are condensed in this shot, accompanied by Carl Orff and Gunild Keetman’s ‘Gassenhauer’ (Street Song), a whimsical tune, arranged for children, that serves as a leitmotif for the film (it is adapted further in George Aliceson Lipton’s score, which includes a piece mistakenly attributed to Orff).

These two characters, stripped back to the barest, minimal features, given little if any backstory, whose inner lives are left opaque, are presented in a lucid, non-judgemental light. Their actions and responses are depicted with an expressive clarity but without revealing their inner psychology, familial history or social background. As will become more pronounced in Malick’s later films, they are presented more as mythical or allegorical figures than as psychologically developed, concretely individuated characters. Their stories take on the quality of myth, presenting the physical landscape and character’s environment as expressive of their states of mind, while concealing their inner feelings or psychological responses. The central question posed by this mythic tale – Why do Kit and Holly go on their murderous crime spree? –remains unanswered throughout the film. Holly’s voiceover, which combines naive artlessness and moments of lyrical poignancy with callous indifference and vacuous cliché, obscures rather than reveals the meaning of their violent adventure. Her romantic fantasies and adolescent naivety never fully grasp the measure and meaning of her own experiences. Kit’s dialogue remains stilted and hackneyed, a combination of movie clichés, James Dean posturing and small-town truisms worthy of an ‘Eisenhower conservative’, to use Malick’s phrase describing Kit’s personality and outlook.⁶

The way the film presents Holly’s father’s killing (played by Warren Oates) is a case in point. In one of the most commented on scenes in the film, Kit drives out to a desolate sunlit plain in order to talk to Holly’s father, who clearly disapproves of Holly’s meetings with Kit. In a stunning sequence of long shots, showing the lurid farm advertisement billboard incongruously placed in an desolate empty plain, blasted with harsh sunlight, Kit asks permission, as it were, to see the man’s daughter but is brusquely rebuffed. The film lingers on the father’s attempts to ignore Kit’s presence, refusing to look at him and focusing intently on the billboard patches he is painting. The billboard itself, a local advertisement featuring a garish, homely farm scene, has a missing panel through which we can see a patch of bright blue sky. The father finally turns to Kit and warns him to stay away from his daughter, a warning that Kit politely refuses, setting up the expectation of some kind of conflict. Kit leaves, only to learn that he has been fired from the garbage route, which releases him from his remaining tenuous links with the social community.

He returns to Holly’s family home (a gun stuffed down the back of his jeans) apparently intending to take Holly away with him and prepared to use the gun if confronted. Kit’s unnerving combination of folksy politeness and callous indifference is amply on display in this sequence, which shows the father confronting Kit, standing atop the staircase, noticing his gun and warning that he will have to call the police. The father turns and heads off-screen, pursued by Kit, who shouts and fires two shots into his back from close range. Cut to a shot revealing the father lying inertly on the ground, shocked and silent, attended by a mutedly distressed Holly, silent witness to the shooting, too stunned to comfort him.

Kit’s reaction is extraordinary: a combination of indifference and irritation that the dying father presents an inconvenience, vaguely defending his action because of the threat to call the cops and half-heartedly apologizing to Holly for the unfortunate turn of events. In one of the few scenes where Holly responds through action, she slaps Kit, but remains silent, a strange pantomime of romantic tiff and immature playacting. Despite her pretence of anger, she soon meekly falls into line, follows Kit’s instructions to help move her dying father to the cellar, before they resolve to burn down the house. This sequence that follows, commenced by Kit angrily dousing the piano and furniture with kerosene, turns powerfully poetic as the flames take hold, consuming Holly’s ‘childish things’, her domestic space of family and memory, in a ritualistic destruction of the past through fire. The beautiful but terrifying conflagration, consuming toys, objects, furniture and the building, accompanied by Orff, takes on a sombre and funereal quality. We are witnessing an esoteric rite, a symbolic death and rebirth of Kit and Holly as placed outside the law, existing in their own private mythic world, a child’s fairytale version of existential freedom and flight into the wilderness.

They flee the burning house, now on the verge of collapse, rescuing some obscure domestic items (like a lamp). Kit leaves a surreal calling card, his fake suicide message recorded on a vinyl record recording (a popular means of recording testimonials to which Kit will have recourse again later in the film, at the height of their killing spree). The idea of recording himself, of leaving a message to posterity, of communicating something of import to the world (‘I’ve got some things to say’) is a recurring motif in the film. In the end, Kit communicates not through words but acts of violence – and a concern with images (above all, his own self-image).

Kit mediates his relations...