The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world. St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere, and its circumference nowhere. We are all our lifetime reading the copious sense of this first of forms... Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.
—Emerson, “Circles”
I
If there is a sense that Terrence Malick has never filmed anything but quest-narratives—expulsions from Paradise and wanderings in search of a Promised Land—that’s largely because, not to put too fine a point on it, this is the structuring myth of the majority of Western literature in its Classical and Christian heritage. The third essay of Northrop Frye’s landmark Anatomy of Criticism is an encyclopedic, tour-de-force account of these archetypes, which he organizes into four narrative elements or mythoi, each corresponding to a season—comedy (spring), romance (summer), tragedy (autumn), and irony and satire (winter)—and each of which can further be seen as aspects of “a central unifying quest-myth.” It is easily observed that The Tree of Life (2011) works as a retelling of the Book of Job, or that Knight of Cups (2015) draws from John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. But since commentaries so often merely note such parallels before ascending into ecstatic rapture or metaphysical speculation, an approach that engages with Malick’s use of such mythoi is far from exhausted. Employing an analogy to painting, Frye suggests that it is often useful to “stand back” from a poem to see its organization. And given the nebulous, mystifying language so often used to describe, especially, Malick’s recent work, we might well do the same with his filmography, attempting to clarify the attractions of his polarizing late period. If Malick is, as has often been said, one of cinema’s great poets, it may be useful to develop a concerted account of his poetics.
Those suspicious of critical systematization may find assurance in Frye’s statement that his book is “not designed to suggest a new program for critics, but a new perspective on their existing programs.” It is an approach characteristic of his practice as a whole. In A Natural Perspective, his account of Shakespearean comedy and romance, Frye’s evident taste for system-building, far from being confining, is often freeing. His project is not so much prescriptive as it is perspectival; the work of drawing distinctions, so central to his methods, is meant to refine old observations and release new ones. So in the spirit of that book, which starts by acknowledging that Shakespearean comedy presents a complex challenge to both theory and experience, then deliberately begins with the “large simplifying device” of the dichotomy, playfully stating that all literary critics are either Iliad critics or Odyssey critics—that is, “interest in literature tends to center either in the area of tragedy, realism, and irony, or in the area of comedy and romance”—we might well start with the polarities so often identified with Malick’s oeuvre: those of city and country.
In the cinema, this dichotomy is often discussed in relation to F.W. Murnau, particularly Sunrise (1927) and City Girl (1930), though it of course extends far beyond, the city and country (or garden) both being human forms of the natural world, each with their respective lineages of artistic imagery. At its apocalyptic and demonic extremes, the city can show up as the temple of Jerusalem in the Bible or the City of Destruction in The Pilgrim’s Progress, while the country/garden can emerge as the green worlds of Shakespeare’s forest comedies or the wilderness of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. But in more intermediate forms, the images of city and garden depend upon their specific (cosmological) place in what Frye identifies as the two main narrative movements: “a cyclical movement within the order of nature,” and a dialectical movement from that order into a higher world of total order, which he terms “apocalyptic” (in the sense of revelation or vision). The natural cycle encompasses movements within the world of romance (the top half) and within the world of experience (the lower half), while the dialectical aspect designates tragic (“downward”) and comic (“upward”) movements. It is from these four types of mythical movement (“within romance, within experience, down, and up”) that Frye identifies the generic plots or mythoi of spring (comedy), summer (romance), autumn (tragedy), and winter (irony and satire). Each of these in turn blend with their adjacent elements: romance overlaps with comedy on one end and tragedy on the other, and so on.
The aforementioned Murnau films should provide a sense of how images of city and country show up in different contexts. However, as Frye specifically designates the four mythoi as “pregeneric” conceptions, it will not do to take a deterministic approach in relating them to cinematic genres. Still, we should distinguish some localized affinities. For instance, in considering the seven films Stanley Cavell studies in Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage, which he sees as inheritors of Shakespearean comedy, we might look at how they figure specific relations to the realms of city and country. And one might note how, say, Bringing Up Baby (1938) and The Lady Eve (1941) move from urban environs to pastoral worlds of contemplation (often in Connecticut).
To offer another example: It seems clear, considering Robert Warshow’s 1948 essay “The Gangster as Tragic Hero,” that the gangster film and its world of ritual bondage and futile, constrained, often city-bound action tends to be localized in the mythos of irony—as, in general, is film noir, hence the significance of the femme fatale figure within it. Such claims, though, evidently cannot proceed too far with respect to the western. This partly has to do with the genre’s affinities with the quest form, but mainly with how effectively its iconography (descended from the pastoral) has been taken across an imposing range of narrative mythoi. One need only trace the lineage of the so-called noir western (or western noir) to get a feel for the genre’s scope and sweep.
II
In this archetypal schema, Badlands (1973), though it opens in the dead-end suburbs of South Dakota, belongs to the realm of ironic myth, which is most easily understood as a parody of romance: “the application of romantic mythical forms to a more realistic content which fits them in unexpected ways.” Each of its narrative contours traces the outline of a romantic archetype. Sissy Spacek’s Holly and Martin Sheen’s Kit are essentially parodies of the romantic heroine and her mysterious father figure, as in Shakespeare’s The Tempest: the former’s (virginal) inexperience can be traced to her father’s tyranny, while the latter’s garbage-man job links him to the lineage of slave/servant figures from Greek comedy to Prospero’s slave Caliban. Kit’s distorted reflection of James Dean functions similarly, as does the way he takes the place of Holly’s father, killing him early on, and later lifting a panama hat just like his, thereby completing the sordid substitution. Likewise, the pair’s retreat into the forest, instead of engendering intimacy and harmony, becomes an engine for narcissism and paranoia—and even nature takes on, in Holly’s description, the cold, alienating hardness of “a big marble hall.” The exhilaration of Badlands is that while its iridescent imagery is sensuous and multivalent, its control of tone is frighteningly complete, and goes beyond what the story’s tragic element alone can draw out. In his debut, Malick proves an uncanny inheritor of the ironic mythos, pushing past a tragic vision of personal evil, to a view closer to Holly’s remembrance of something Kit once told her: “He said that if the Devil came at me, I could shoot him with a gun.”
If Days of Heaven (1978) can be said to build on Badlands, it’s in the way it goes from an ironic movement to a full mythical cycle. Accordingly, it begins at the end of a previous one: the imagery of Bill (Richard Gere) in the hellish furnaces of a Chicago steel mill, which gives way to an open-air train departure set to Linda Manz’s narration of the Last Judgment as told to her by a man named Ding Dong. From this ironic overture, the film sets up a comic engine, where the drive, as in classical comedy, is the creation of a new society out of an old one: Under the cover of a brother-sister relationship, Abby (Brooke Adams) and Bill attempt to take over the domain of Sam Shepard’s unnamed sovereign. But as Shepard’s farmer continues to defy death, so he threatens the comic resolution. He stretches the period of confused identity—an integral element of comedy—to its limit and unwittingly pulls the central couple apart. Abby tumbles forward into romance (“She loved the farmer,” says Linda with disarming forthrightness), while Bill falls back into irony. But just before the point of collapse, literal clowns arrive and offer a reprieve: A flying circus swoops in, not just postponing the unmasking, but also taking Bill along when it departs.
His departure allows Days of Heaven to move, for a time, into high romance, and when he returns it is as a threat to the tenuous structure. Abby’s marriage has moved to centre, but it cannot hold. Espying Abby and Bill together, The Farmer drives the film into tragic catastrophe, giving rise to some of the most astonishing infernal imagery in the American cinema. From this scorched-earth climax, where Bill again kills a man amid a fiery furnace, Manz’s unforgettable line (“There was never a perfect person around”), accompanied by the rush of sky and sun-dappled river, brings us full circle. The film’s last few minutes comprise a précis of a picaresque satire—a signal form of the ironic mythos—taking us, with Bill’s death, to the end of the cycle.
All that said, this account of Days of Heaven should be somewhat unsatisfactory—the film is more than its structure. But what the schematism of the above is meant to show is that no level of structural integrity can determine just how something will be taken. The uncanniness of viewing Days of Heaven is that it seems almost impossible to know a priori what sort of place or function any given moment is to have, as though nothing short of seeing the image in the moment would be sufficient. It is something of this quality that leads Adrian Martin, in his valuable essay on Days of Heaven, to call Malick “a true poet of the ephemeral,” observing that, “Nothing is ever insisted upon or lingered on in his films; that is why they reveal subtly different arrangements of event, mood, and meaning each time we see them.”
This aspect of Malick’s cinema is also why it’s rather misdirected to read Days of Heaven as pointing us back to the moment of creation (and thus a creator), or as suggesting that its days of heaven are something once given to us that we had squandered, despoiled. Rather, it presents a vision of creation as human re-creation quite apart from pre-existing providence, calling not for a restoration of the past, but perpetual recreation in a new context. The sense of loss one feels throughout the film is not a matter of a lost place and time, but of perspective, of a way of being where we felt not the distinction between creation and recreation—where, as Wallace Stevens puts it in his poem “The Motive for Metaphor,” “you yourself were never quite yourself / And did not want nor have to be.” Perhaps in response to those who would charge Malick with self-seriousness, one might be tempted to seize on moments of levity and humour in his films—and not without reason. Arguably the most remarkable aspect of Manz’s voiceover, however, which is rightly credited with “opening up” Days of Heaven, is that it evokes what Freud calls “the mood of childhood, when we were ignorant of the comic, when we were incapable of jokes and when we had no need of humour to make us feel happy in our life.” It is this that seems lost by the end, as Manz stares out across a railroad track, perhaps thinking for the first time, that there are no days of heaven but those that humans create.
If Days of Heaven transforms its cyclical structure through crucial shifts in vantage, The Thin Red Line (1998) takes this strategy even further. The film traces two full cycles (call them Old and New), with Nick Nolte’s Lt. Col. Tall and Jim Caviezel’s Private Witt defining, respectively, its poles of irony and romance. The first cycle covers Witt’s escape and paradisiacal time among the Melanesian natives, the platoon’s wandering, and the assault on the guarded hill during which Tall gains prominence; the second encompasses the battalion’s week-long leave, a second period of wandering, Witt’s Christlike sacrifice, and the entrance of a new captain. Still, the triumph of The Thin Red Line is not its structure, but its dispersal of perspective across a deep cast, as if perpetually redrawing its cyclical movements from an alternate horizon. The film cuts across a range of experience that will not fit any dichotomy: the indignity of Woody Harrelson’s death; the chaos of the initial hill attack and the frightening efficiency of the seven-man mission; John Cusack’s staredown with Nolte; the desolation of both the Japanese and American soldiers during the extended battle. Such scenes may be identified in any number of war films, but what sets The Thin Red Line apart is its unsettled point of view and judicious sense of proportion. Adrien Brody may still lament his reduced screen presence, but his sacrifice provides The Thin Red Line with its most unique qualities: a quest without a centre, a war film swallowed up in glassy seas and seas of grass.
Befitting its title, The New World (2005) returns Malick to a more archetypal quest-romance form. A hyaline-clear image of water gives way to the sight of an approaching British ship, signalling the arrival of the hero and the beginning of a new cycle. The chains on John Smith (Colin Farrell), vestiges of a far-off land, remind us of an ironic movement that no doubt preceded this one, but with the departure of Captain Newport (Christopher Plummer), he swiftly emerges in this new, relatively untouched environment as the romantic hero. His journey upriver brings him in contact with the Powhatan, though following the threat of execution and the intervention of Pocahontas (Q’orianka Kilcher), he enters into a tentative relationship with “the Naturals” that neither blocks nor advances his quest. In romance, Frye tells us, characters “who elude the moral antithesis of heroism and villainy generally are or suggest spirits of nature,” and Pocahontas remains, for a time, in this role. Not yet a heroine of the quest, she provides a focus for the romantic mood, and her blossoming relationship with Smith imparts to him a “mysterious rapport with nature that so often marks the central figure of romance.” But once she gives Smith the grain that allows the Jamestown settlement to take root, she aligns herself with the heroic quest and is exiled from her tribe. Tragedy ensues, battles are waged, and we enter a period of irony where no heroism is possible. With the return of the British ship, news of Smith’s social ascendance, and his subsequent departure for England, his cycle is ended.
Much has been written on Malick’s experiments with sound, image, dialogue, and narration, to say nothing of his philosophical inheritance, but perhaps not enough on how his concrete, childlike sense of story makes these formal innovations possible. In the specific case of The New World, he employs the logic of a seafaring adventure, which shows up in both its action (an exciting swamp skirmish, hairsbreadth escapes from death, drastic reversals of fortune) and characterization, which works with both shadowy romantic archetypes (Farrell’s rather laconic John Smith) and stock roles (David Thewlis’s greedy impostor). If I have emphasized the more conventionalized patterns that structure The New World at the expense of Malick’s daring weaves of image and sound, it is to suggest that a too-narrow focus on his “visionary” aspects risks obscuring the ways by which he elicits a more fundamental engagement. We risk denying absorption in the story being told.
Indeed, we may fail to recognize that The New World is in essential terms a comedy. Following John Smith’s departure, and his decision to leave word that he perished at sea, the narrative centre decisively shifts to Pocahontas, who enters a period of desolation. Her subsequent marriage to John Rolfe, the birth of their child, their life together on a Jamestown tobacco farm: these suggest a spring of renewal, a new social vision that is so often the comic drive. But a cut to Smith, having sailed past his Indies, cloaked on the frigid shores of England, reminds us that we are in fact still in winter. And if her marriage is to be fulfilled—if spring is to come, if the past is to open up into the future—this relationship must be resolved. A summons from the royal court bears the couple across the Atlantic, and after being presented there, Pocahontas reencounters John Smith at Rolfe’s London estate. The enclosed garden where this meeting takes place becomes, for her, a point of epiphany, and Smith departs thereafter. She returns to Rolfe, and in one of the tenderest gestures of Malick’s oeuvre, takes his arm, telling him, “You are the man I thought you were and more.” In so doing, she effects a remarriage. She ratifies their union as true.
That this extraordinarily moving passage is not so much festive as pensive places the film in the overlapping late phases of comedy and romance where, Frye writes, the mode is “a contemplative withdrawal from or sequel to action rather than a youthful preparation from it.” Indeed, for its reflective mood and cyclical movements between two kingdoms (the mythical sea-coast of Virginia, the shores of England), The New World may bring to mind one of Shakespeare’s late romances, The Winter’s Tale, a play roughly contemporaneous with Pocahontas’s historical Whitehall visit. (For his “sea” romances, such as Pericles and The Tempest, Shakespeare has also been known to draw from accounts of the era’s seafaring exploration.) The subtitle of Shakespeare’s main source for the The Winter’s Tale, Greene’s Pandosto, is “The Triumph of Time,” a phrase that beautifully encapsulates how the play goes from a tragic to a comic movement, from a “winter’s tale” to a spring of renewal, spanned by an 18-year breach. Recalling this, we may think of how The New World likewise moves from catastrophe to reintegration, and how time shifts our perspective on its persons and events: John Smith no longer looks to us the romantic hero; Chief Powhatan’s violent rejection of Smith resonates, in the end, as proper; and the presence of his brother Opechancanough (Wes Studi) during Pocahontas and Rolfe’s passage to England may even be taken as tacit approval, a kind of mediated reconciliation between father and daughter.
Not coincidentally, The Winter’s Tale is also the play that Cavell sees as a precursor of the films discussed in Pursuits of Happiness. Malick’s film is self-evidently not a remarriage comedy in the manner of, say, The Philadelphia Story (1940), but it presents, just as strikingly, how Cavell figures the relationship between the central couple and their society: that is, in the notion of consent made “express as opposed to tacit” in the reaffirmation of both marriage and a larger social contract. The risk of compromise is insistently present in both, as it is in any democracy, but the beauty of The New World’s remarriage conclusion is that Pocahontas offers her consent to Rolfe knowing full well that its object—their union, not to mention the society their union represents—is yet incomplete, still in part a vision. As Cavell writes, “this [notion of consent] creates a romance of America,” and needless to say, such images have always been abused, distorted. But as with Pocahontas’s subsequent death, what matters most is our perspective on things—not that we deny tragedies, but pass through them, and in doing so move from one form of life to another.
Like the miraculous transformations and metamorphoses in the finale of The Winter’s Tale, intimately associated with art and music, the challenge of The New World is that we do not turn it into an object of belief, historical or otherwise, but that we let it resound—simply, directly—as an imaginative vision that we are hastily led away to recreate. So the final chapter, titled “And Last,” closes with a story told from father to son, the beginnings of yet another seafaring voyage, and a radiant glimpse of a world dawning on the horizon of experience.
III
As The Tree of Life requires no introduction, it’s at this point worth restating two underlying hypotheses of this essay. The first is that even a cursory account of Malick’s films reveals strong, conventionalized structures that undergird his sensuous weaves of sound and image. The second is that, far from being determinant, these structures cannot fix just how any element of his films will be taken, a fact that Malick augments by effecting continual shifts in perspective (whether through whispered voiceover or narrative relays) and reversals of tone (quite literally in the case of Ennio Morricone’s score for Days of Heaven). If Malick can be considered a magician of mood, his cinematic prestidigitation seems to ask the viewer just what it is that “a natural perspective” consists of. In all these respects, The Tree of Life stands at the very centre of Malick’s cinema.
The view on the film that tends to dominate, though, is something like a retreat into hushed awe, as though the only proper response to its images was to be cowed into submission, crushed by its beauty, dwarfed in significance by the vastness of the cosmos. It makes us lachrymose. In so grandiosely pointing towards creation, The Tree of Life all but voices the series of rhetorical questions God puts to Job, part of which the film uses as its opening epigraph: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth… When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” (Job 38: 4,7). Job cannot answer, and likewise, we are silenced into submission.
That the film specifically invites such a response during its extended creation sequence is undeniable. But to construe the experience of the entire film in this way seems to me to vacate from it—or, to repeat a phrase used earlier, to turn it into an object of belief or worship. For one thing, the creation passage takes up roughly 20 minutes of a 139-minute film that notably abounds with images of human recreation. There is, for another, the recurring emphasis on cultivation, growth, and germination: the title, most clearly, but also the line drawn in front of a neighbour’s lawn, the planting of a tree (“You’ll be tall before that tree is grown”), and the numerous scenes of the O’Briens tending to their garden. Related to this are the myriad instances of art and human creativity: not just the brother’s painting and guitar-playing, and Mr. O’Brien’s abandoned musical career, but also the latter’s patents, which come with his tendency to view the world as a vast conspiracy against him. It is no minor point, either, that the clearest echo of the Book of Job epigraph, the second son’s bedtime request that his mother tell him and his brothers “a story from before we were born,” transforms God’s unanswerable rhetoric into an impetus of human creativity. As much as its dialectic of nature and grace, the film develops a tension between notions of divine creation and acts of human recreation.
As is often the case with Malick, The Tree of Life is unified without being uniform. And while more unsympathetic viewers tend to treat it as a ceaseless parade of majesty, repeat viewings make clear the impressive range and types of images on display. There is, foremost, the way episodes are organized around moments of crisis (the receipt of the telegram, the drowning of a child in summer) and conflict (the vacancy of Jack’s marriage, the dinner-table fights), and since the film immediately presents a dialectic, we may recall the methods of the so-called Soviet school. Eisenstein in particular offers an interesting point of reference: not just for his emphasis on the “pathetic,” which one could use to organize, especially, Jack’s Huck Finn adventures and his stirrings of lust in the episode where he steals a woman’s slip; but also for his use of theatrical setups, which show up for Malick in such sequences as Jack’s birth, with the impossibly white delivery room, and the scenes between Mr. and Mrs. O’Brien fighting through various rooms of their suburban home, where the dominant impression given by the camera and staging is of sets of objects (chairs, tables, dishes, doors) being reconfigured in a series of action-reaction rhythms.
The key difference, though, is that unlike Eisenstein, who conceived of man’s relationship to Nature “scientifically,” according to what he termed a great “organic spiral” organized by particular laws of growth and development, Malick does not figure his images according to such assumed stabilities. His view is more like Emerson’s: “Whilst the eternal generation of circles proceeds, the eternal generator abides. That central life is somewhat superior to creation, superior to knowledge and thought, and contains all its circles.” And so, instead of Eisenstein’s sundry caesura leaps, Malick’s images play directly with the flow of time, each cut seeming to generate new spiralling movements: the Tarkovskian time-pressure of Chastain floating before a tree; the crystalline image of her sleeping in a glass coffin amid a forest; a dazzling instance of a child and the Mirror Stage; and the close-up of a newborn sleeping on the grass, its sheer thereness seeming to bend the world around its presence.
It has frequently been observed that The Tree of Life is where Malick takes up the question of memory more insistently. And indeed, no less than Citizen Kane (1941), it is a plunge into the past—or, to use a later title of his, a voyage of time, going from creation to fall to exile to final restoration. Moment to moment, it is dizzying in its labyrinthine expanses (no less difficult to navigate for their visual openness), spiralling montage, and world-moving alternations of light and shadow. It even seems an investigation of a sort—perhaps the adult Jack’s attempt to find an answer to God’s queries in the Book of Job, or pinpoint the birth of his consciousness. But there is, crucially, no Rosebud here. As is his wont, Malick works more with moods than with objects, and there’s nothing quite as hard to retrieve as a feeling that you can neither name nor fully remember, and hence can’t even be sure that you ever really had.
But now we seem to have gone no further than the Book of Job, confronted with the limits of experience and knowledge, faced with questions we cannot answer. So maybe it’s worth asking a different one: Why retell the story?
In a brief, but rich set of 1980 lectures published under the title Creation and Recreation, Frye deals with just this question—not in relation to Malick of course, but with reference to John Milton and Paradise Lost, asking why “the instinct of so very great a poet [led] him in precisely the direction of retelling the story of creation in Genesis… expressly for the purpose of rationalizing it, or, as he says, to justify the ways of God to men?” Frye’s answer to the question, which takes up the last half of his final lecture, is enormously suggestive, functioning with the rest of the essay as no less than a treatise on the origin of the work of art. But what concerns us for the moment is what he and other of Milton’s critics have seen as the distinctive role of the reader in that poem. In his account of Paradise Lost, where “Eden as an external environment disappears, to reappear as the ‘paradise within thee, happier far’ … held out to Adam as a final hope,” Frye sees the creation myth “as a seed that comes to its own real fruition in a recreative effort in which Adam is involved.” In other words, he sees Milton’s theology as “moving in the modern direction of regarding the reader, simply as human being, as the real focus of his poem and the final aim of all his ‘justifying’ of the ways of God.”
The relevance of this detour to The Tree of Life is that as with any work of art, it is something to be read. The point is not to somehow decipher the film by fixing it into words, but to live its details, to avoid treating it as an object to be worshipped or acquired, as a thing completed. Cavell habitually calls his accounts of films readings, which is his way of conveying how any account of a film will have distinct emphases, stresses, omissions, interpolations, and so on—and which strikes me as the least misleading way of conveying how each viewer recreates the film, as it were, in their accounting of it. In any case, certainly some resistance to reading The Tree of Life in relation to the Book of Job has to do with the fact that it seems a bit too easy to read a film through its epigraph. But since that rather notorious biblical text (which Milton saw as the model for the “brief” epic) has itself given rise to a multitude of readings, it’s worth taking this a bit further.
The usual reading, as it had been taught to me anyway, was that in response to Job’s questions about human suffering in general, his own in particular, God in his infinite wisdom convicts Job of his ignorance by asking him a series of rhetorical questions that he cannot answer, thereby reminding him of his finitude. Needless to say, this has never been exactly satisfying. (Also, the fact that Satan, who starts the whole thing by wagering with God on Job’s life, doesn’t return at the end, tends to be glossed over.) But for no less obsessive a reader of the Bible than William Blake, the point of the parable is not that God is out to silence human questions, but that Job is being pushed away from a futile fixation on creation—which involves him in all forms of paranoia and terror—and encouraged to look forward. Whether or not one takes the creation story literally (as Milton did), or believes in a Second Coming, it is this shift in perspective that is significant. What we are told at the start of The Tree of Life is that the nuns taught “two ways through life,” not two answers to the question of first cause. The film’s very deliberate progression is therefore a call to throw our attention forward—or, to use now-familiar terms, to meet the ironies of human existence with the perspective of romance.
This can sound unbearably naïve. But the point is not to raise one (artistic) temperament over another—only to say that whether one identifies as, say, an Iliad critic or an Odyssey critic, absolutism in such matters will not go very far. Malick’s vision of a windswept hereafter can no doubt be read as the work of an incurable romantic—and, with its implicit belief in a Divine Comedy, a distinctly Christian one at that. But while the passage is not offered ironically, the resistance some (including myself) have felt towards it does not seem entirely unwarranted, or even unintended, either. Indeed, the experience of watching this otherworldly reunion at the “end of time” is not so different than the experience of reading that Job, after having lost everything he had, including seven sons and three daughters, is in the end restored by God, and given seven new sons and three new daughters, the latter of whom, we are told, are the fairest in all the land. This is technically a comic ending—but structure has its limits.
In The Tree of Life, this restoration is very clearly presented as a vision to the middle-aged Jack. Following the image of Chastain’s hands raised to the sky, we are given so many images of descent and retreat: a slow pan down to a field of a thousand sunflowers; the downwards rush of an elevator; the frame pulling back from a tree bounded by a canopy of glass and steel. Then, a shot of Penn stumbling into the light of mid-afternoon, waking up to a kind of self-recognition such as one finds in Shakespeare’s late romances, especially The Tempest. Although he is an architect, and thus associated with the arts, Jack is obviously no Prospero—with his filial and fraternal guilt, he is something more like Antonio or Sebastian—but as he looks skyward, renewal and reintegration take place all the same. And following his gaze, we see a matrix of skyscrapers, then a bridge (the Verrazzano-Narrows), these images—not allegorical, but metaphorical—crystallizing the force of The Tree of Life into an instant where divine creation and human recreation are completely identified. It is a moment wholly worthy of comparison with The Tempest, for it locates the positive action of The Tree of Life not in the past or future, but as Frye writes of Shakespeare’s great romance, in “an expanded present where, as Eliot says, the past and the future are gathered.
“This present is a resurrection which is not the reviving of a corpse, and a rebirth which is not an emerging of a new life from a dying older body to die in its turn. It is rather a transfiguration into a world we keep making even when we deny it, as though a coral insect were suddenly endowed with enough consciousness and vision to be able to see the island it has been helping to create.”
IV
What comes after this point of epiphany? This question may be taken as the subject of Malick’s next three films set in the contemporary world: To the Wonder (2012), Knight of Cups (2015), and Song to Song (2017). Unlike the films before them, though, they present no easily traceable narratives; their “expanded presents” comes with a sense of progression that is often difficult to account for. Malick’s poetics of ephemerality, as in Adrian Martin’s aforementioned observation, poses new problems. Not exactly an adherent of Aristotelian principles of catharsis to begin with, Malick has increasingly moved to the opposite pole of ecstasis or absorption, where emotions are unattached to objects, and are thus contained rather than purged. And if writing on these films has tended to invoke analogies to music, it is because principles of ecstasis tend to be most useful in considering lyrics.
Indeed, To the Wonder, as Josh Timmerman astutely points out, is most productively viewed as “a love song.” Its ancient source is the Song of Songs, and it manages to incorporate the literal exchange of verses between lovers, as well as the allegorical dimension of the Church as the bride of Christ: “The erotic interaction of the man and woman in the Song of Songs is re-played in the voices and physical movements of Kurylenko and Affleck… while the Song’s allegorical representation of Christ and his Church is embodied in Bardem’s priest.” Structurally, the film comprises three concentric circuits or couplings: at its centre, the failed relationship between between Neil (Ben Affleck) and Jane (Rachel McAdams); bounding this, the separation and reunion of Neil and Marina (Olga Kurylenko), constituting the main action; and at the periphery, Father Quintana (Javier Bardem) and his crisis of devotion to God.
Being in essential part a lyric, To the Wonder relies upon, and is in crucial ways about, the act of repetition. “Newborn, I open my eyes,” intones Marina at the beginning, echoing Revelation’s “Behold, I make all things new”—and from to a Sonic Drive-In to an Oklahoma supermarket to the spire of Mont Saint-Michel, Malick and Emmanuel Lubezki present us with images of uncommon splendour. Far from being some facile paean to seeing all the beauty in the world, however, the film’s continual sense of visual newness eventually feels more like an attack on such a sentiment. No less than The New World, To the Wonder is preoccupied with language and scenes of naming, thereby charting the distances and proximities between Old and New, Europe and America, abandonment and renewal. And it takes nothing away from Lubezki’s cinematography to say that the film’s visual force functions, in at least one way, to call and question what it is we call beautiful, and thus reveal how arbitrary our measures so often are.
The “concept of calling as questioning the given names of things and naming as a vocation” is what Cavell sees as essential to the work of Thoreau, a thinker whose writings echo throughout Malick’s work. (The director has also signed on to executive produce a forthcoming film based on Thoreau’s diaries.) In particular, Cavell reads Thoreau’s statement that “The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions” as “a mock summary of Kantian Idealism and its progeny, implying a quarrel about how to get our concepts (say of the understanding) pure.”
That is, you can get the world to call things houses that are prisons, or to call things necessary which are the merest luxuries, or to call things accidents (such as the deaths of a certain number of workers building the railroads) which are not accidents but inevitabilities of the way we live. When he asks, “Which is the real bed?” he is similarly mocking Plato’s picture according to which the real bed is not the one we actually sleep on, and at the same time mocking our inability to recognize that the one we actually sleep on may be an arbitrary measure of what we need a bed to be.
One need only track the various instances of what are called (or treated as) dwellings in each of Malick’s films to get a sense of this relation to Thoreau and Walden (both the place and the book). But the insistent matter of naming reaches a new intensity in the topsy-turvy world of To the Wonder, whose soul-sick seekers so often seem baffled into silence, unsure of how to figure their place in things, unable to express or name exactly what it is that their lives consist of. Timmerman sees Malick as “asking no smaller or less significant a question here than, what is the nature of love—what is the substance of it?” This is essentially right. But as we are dealing with naming (and thus with such things as “essence,” “nature,” and “substance”), I prefer to put it as Malick asking: What is it that we call marriage—what is marriage?
The question figures significantly in all of Malick’s films—even the male-dominated world of The Thin Red Line makes room for nostalgic recollections of romance and a request for divorce. But it reaches something of a climax in To the Wonder, which gives us two wedding ceremonies: the first between a young couple in a church, the second between Neil and Marina in a civil court, in the presence of lawyers, judges, barristers, and, most crucially, witnesses who are also prisoners. Like The New World, To the Wonder actualizes a tension of the comic mythos—that is, between the society emblematized or envisioned by the married couple, and its achievability in an eventual human community. Traditionally, comedy’s “answer” (as discussed in Frye’s early “The Argument of Comedy”), was to include as many types of characters—especially antagonist or parasite figures—into its festive marriage conclusion as possible. The civil wedding in To the Wonder asks if this call to witness is still something we can accept. If marriage is to be the emblem of a new social vision, it is here marked from the start with the taint of injustice.
The response of the couples of the remarriage comedies in Pursuits of Happiness—only one of which ends in a public, festive marriage ceremony—is their conception of privacy, of marriage behind closed doors. This is epitomized for Cavell in Leo McCarey’s The Awful Truth (1937) and its picture of marriage “as romance, as adventure—of the dailiness of life, its diurnal repetitiveness, as its own possibility of festivity.” And this image of marriage does seem something Neil and Marina try to live and enact. But the more insistent difficulty in To the Wonder is how to conceive of privacy in a world that seems all but absent of it, and where our increased capacity to witness (figured in at least one way through the iPhone footage with which the film opens) has in other respects turned us into prisoners; where our dwellings (or the very earth, as in Neil’s environmental inspector job) condemn us; and where the act of closing one’s doors and turning away from the public sphere can seem like so much neglect. As one sees throughout the Oklahoma-set passages with Bardem’s Father Quintana, the very task of witnessing is rife with confusion and contradiction.
Is there a way out of this? Perhaps things were simpler for Neil and Marina when they first ascended “to the wonder” in the abbey of Mont Saint-Michel. But then, the history of the place itself—a fortress, a prison, and much else besides—can hardly be considered simple. All the same, Mont Saint-Michel becomes the film’s signal image, and it looms over the couple across the runtime—perhaps a beacon of love, perhaps an idolatrous fixture of it. Just as the main action of Walden is Thoreau’s learning to leave the place, so the main action of To the Wonder is the couple’s search for perspective on this Walden of their own. As they attempt to free themselves from the nostalgia of recollection, the struggle is to open up the past into the future, to conceive of, to name a world better than the one offered to their eyes. In this film of rare aesthetic grandeur, the quality of one’s vision, of one’s looking, becomes an index of character.
Mont Saint-Michel hovers over To the Wonder one final time at the end, its spire stretching from sandy shore to shadowy sky, floating like some magician’s island about to sink back into the sea. But whether it stands, here, as a recollection of a world we no longer have access to, or as a crystalline seed that we can use to bring forth and recreate that lost world, is, finally, a question that we must answer for ourselves.
V
Where does that leave us? Alone on a stair, perhaps, as in Emerson’s famous image. There are steps below us, stretching into darkness; there are steps above us, ascending out of sight. Though having drunk too heavily the night before, still dizzy with sleep and surrounded by dazzlement, we seem to have forgotten which way is up. Tremors confuse things still further, and there is no one around to orient us. There are only the voices in our head.
Knight of Cups expressly begins with three: the voice of John Gielgud, as he recites the title page of Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress with the lilt of a sermon “delivered under the similitude of a dream”; then Christian Bale as Rick, accompanied by an outer-space view of the Aurora Borealis; and finally the voice of Brian Dennehy (whom we later learn is playing Rick’s father) recounting the story of a knight sent to Egypt on a quest to recover a precious pearl, only to have forgotten his quest and the king that sent him. As Rick wanders through the film, from the Greater Los Angeles area to the wilderness of Death Valley and the monuments of Las Vegas, he glides, ghostlike, a pale shadow of romantic archetypes—perhaps a Ulysses half-willingly trapped on Circe’s island, or perhaps a Hamlet not overly bothered by a familial drama of succession. Taken together with the film’s two dominant musical leitmotifs, Wojciech Kilar’s Exodus and Vaughan Williams’s Tallis Fantasia, the film’s processional form and strategies of repetition come into focus. As Pierre Berthomieu succinctly observes in Positif: “The former, a tragic Bolero, makes us feel the endlessness of this quest; while the latter grasps the majesty of its strong moments and fermata. Both pieces of music share an archaic model that is recurrent in Malick: ecstatic melody, modality, repetitive hymn, unison or polyphony.”
Though explicitly tagged as a quest, the film is just as much a city symphony—as impressive in breadth, scope, and ranging perception as The Man With a Movie Camera (1929) from nearly a century prior, a connection that finds direct confirmation in the soundtrack, which features tracks from Geir Jenssen’s 1996 score for Vertov’s film. In “‘The Man with the Movie Camera’: From Magician to Epistemologist,” Annette Michelson identifies Vertov’s achievement in his inventive uses of the tropes and techniques of reverse motion. The examples Michelson discusses from the film are numerous and inventive, including, neatly enough for our purposes, Vertov’s humorous interventions “between sequences showing marriage and divorce bureaus—as if to intimate that marriage is another process, and therefore, reversible.” For Michelson, Vertov is not just disclosing filmmaking techniques, but indeed “rendering causality visible,” systematically subverting the certitudes of illusion, and thereby “transforming The Man with the Movie Camera from a Magician into an Epistemologist.”
Reversibility, certitudes of illusion, movements and counter-movements: such matters are of utmost significance to the world of Knight of Cups, where there is no shortage of men with movie cameras; where, to use a phrase of Emerson’s, all things swim and glitter; and where progression is more a matter of perspective than actual movement. “Begin,” whispers a voice (Dennehy’s) throughout the film, and like its musical motifs, which never resolve, Knight of Cups is a quest whose onwardness can seem, in a word, illusory. But whereas Vertov’s epistemology, as in Michelson’s analysis, works with a dialectic of matter (i.e. with objective successions of objects), it is not possible to construe Malick’s methods in this way. The illusions, reversals, and counter-movements of Knight of Cups are just as concerned with moods as with objects—more so even. If Malick was once a magician of mood, he becomes here an epistemologist of it.
An “epistemology, or say the logic, of moods,” is exactly what Cavell sees as the subject of Emerson’s “Experience,” the essay’s argument about the nature of experience contained in the crucial remark: “The secret of the illusoriness [of life] is in the necessity of a succession of moods or objects. Gladly we would anchor, but the anchorage is quicksand. This onward trick of nature is too strong for us: Pero si muove.” It is this illusoriness that, likewise, strikes me as the very subject of Malick’s epistemology: And yet it moves.
As Emerson writes, “Our life is not so much threatened as our perception,” and indeed, Knight of Cups is, to use a favoured phrase of Brakhage, a veritable adventure in perception. Dense with textual allusions, musical motifs, and symbols archaic and modern, it displays a restless recourse to abstraction that is not a renunciation of incident. Employing a range of film and video formats, it covers a dizzying breadth of contrasts: GoPro footage of a Hollywood party; a black-and-white video installation covering the wall of a spacious loft; footage of a child frolicking on a beach, whose hyper-saturated colour palette inevitably recalls Godard. Indeed, there is a volume and density here comparable to the French filmmaker’s late (or anyway post–Éloge de l’amour) period. But if Godard’s methods, particularly in his film-essays, tend towards “a pedagogy of the image” (to use a phrase of Deleuze’s), when the function of reading a frame is made explicit, Knight of Cups creates a map of associations through intense, questioning repetitions. It asks, What is (what we call) illusion?, then offers a journey whose dazzlement lies in the seeming infinitude of ways that the question—that the word “illusion”—can be taken; in our discovery that around every circle, another can be drawn.
That we respond to the endlessness of nature with the onwardness of a quest may be taken as self-involvement or solipsism or worse. But as Cavell writes, expounding on Emerson’s essay: “The fact that we are taken over by this succession, this onwardness, means that you can think of it as at once a succession of moods (inner matters) and a succession of objects (outer matters). This very evanescence of the world proves its existence to me; it is what vanishes from me. I guess this is not realism exactly; but it is not solipsism either.”
A journey driven by the awareness that eye and horizon are not one, the knowledge of our essential separateness from nature, Knight of Cups is a quest that finds its motive in metaphor. If the film can be said to stake out a position (call it “The Argument of Romance”), it is that structure does not determine perspective, that the universe bends inexorably to the partiality of the quest. We readily accept the knowledge that there is no end in nature, and that every end is a beginning. But in doing so, we internalize something deeper: that the horizon cannot dictate just what the eye will see.
VI
Nor, unfortunately, does the artist create. That is an illusion of the non-creative, who still believe that all things are made somewhere and had a moment when they did not exist. But an artist, in seeing that things are and are not simultaneously, knows he can only set down the appearance of one or the other at a particular moment and from a particular angle from which, perhaps, it may be true, since we call him creative, no one else had thought to look.
—David Stacton, On A Balcony
One face, one voice, one habit, and two persons,
A natural perspective, that is and is not!
—Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Someday I may find something useful to say about Song to Song, but before moving on to A Hidden Life, I want to consider Kierkegaard’s 1843 book Repetition, a text of some significance to Frye, Cavell, and this essay as a whole. In that short book, the Danish philosopher puts forth the term “repetition” to designate a philosophy thrown to the future, both in contrast and as a complement to the Platonic view of all knowledge as a recollection of the past. “Recollection and repetition,” he writes (under the pseudonym Constantin Constantius), “are the same movement, except in opposite directions.”
Kierkegaard being Kierkegaard, he develops the concept in his unusual, highly original manner, asking, Is repetition possible? then relating various case studies connected to the question. Subtitled “A Venture in Experimental Psychology,” Repetition includes, among other things, the author’s thoughts on Berlin’s theatre scene, and his discussion of how, dissatisfied with the “perfection” of tragedy, comedy, and light comedy, he turns to farce, which is unable to assert a uniform mood on the audience because “its impact depends largely on self-activity and the viewer’s improvisation.” For the most part though, Repetition relates the case of a confidant referred to only as the Young Man, who finds himself unable to consummate his love for a young woman in marriage. In the author’s reading of the situation, this is because marriage would require the Young Man to engage in repetition—in this case, the devotedness and diurnal responsibilities of being a husband—whereas he is only capable of aesthetic, nostalgic recollection, which mires him in melancholy. Apart from the author’s account, we also get a series of pained letters from the Young Man, who increasingly identifies his situation with that of Job—that is, until he finally learns that the woman has married another man, freeing him from any obligation. Lest one miss the curious nature of the book, the author notes, towards the end, how it “may provide an ordinary reviewer the desired opportunity to elucidate in detail that it is not a comedy, tragedy, short story, epic, or epigram.”
In Creation and Recreation, Frye sees Kierkegaard as proposing a characteristic of Christian philosophy, relating repetition to the structure of the Bible and the promise of Revelation, which calls its readers to turn away from paranoiac fixation on creation, and towards a perpetual recreative effort directed at the future. In Pursuits of Happiness, specifically his essay on The Awful Truth, Cavell takes Repetition as a study on the possibility of marriage, which he links to his conception of the remarriage comedy as “the comedy of dailiness,” and “its correction not of error but of experience or of a perspective on experience,” where every moment is, to use the essay’s title, the same and different. With their distinct, but related emphases on perspective, both Frye’s and Cavell’s views are significant to how I’ve been looking at Malick’s cinema. But since this essay has also been dealing with such terms as “archetype” and “structure,” I’d like to consider Repetition as a study of genre.
Throughout this essay, the matter of genre has, thus far, been left largely implicit—no surprise as we started with “pregeneric” concepts of archetype. But the notion that structure does not determine perspective is one that’s come up a few times already. In his Foreword to Frye’s A Natural Perspective, Cavell puts this notion—which he sees as a central emphasis of Frye’s thought—this way:
There is no fixed structure that a given work obeys, that as it were determines its significance… on the contrary, the extent to which certain structures are determinative sets the drive of an argument, not necessarily conclusive, between a work and, say, its genre.
To call The New World a comedy because it culminates in a (re)marriage is to say something about its structure, its archetype, a kind of plot where certain things happen; to account for how the film determines the significance of that archetype, how it takes a perspective on (or argues for) it, is to account for its genre. Likewise, one can say that Repetition has the comic ending of a marriage, but after pointing this out, one still has to account for its perspective, so the question of genre is still in force. The advantage of having a structural or archetypal picture to work with, of course, is that it helps you determine your position. It helps clarify how the work sets the drive of its argument.
The picture of an “argument” between a work and its genre is an attractive and useful one. For one, it invokes how Cavell conceives of remarriage comedy not through top-down definitions, but through reciprocal, compensatory relationships between the genre and its members. For another, the notion of argument makes explicit how rhetoric is involved in the relationship between structure and genre. Hence the title of Frye’s aforementioned “The Argument of Comedy.” Hence also his decision to follow the third essay of Anatomy of Criticism, “Archetypal Criticism: Theory of Myths,” with “Rhetorical Criticism: Theory of Genres.” Kierkegaard called Repetition “experimental psychology.” Without denying him that, one can certainly say that it’s an experiment in prose and rhetoric—hence also an investigation of genre. Likewise, if Malick’s style, as I said earlier, can be seen as asking the viewer just what “a natural perspective” is (or is not), then his development may be traced by looking at how exactly he poses the question, by looking at his argument.
It is fatuous to observe that a director “asks more questions than they answer,” as though either a question or an answer could really account for the value one derives from a given work of art. Still, if we continue to think of artists and artworks as Saying Something, if we nonetheless persist on discussing individual works in relation to questions or themes (“What is marriage?”) or, broadly speaking, stylistic problems, it is in order to centre our readings of a work, to make explicit where we are construing its field of value. It is to clarify just how we are figuring its rhetorical force. And as Frye observes near the end of his “Theory of Genres”: “What distinguishes, not simply the epigram, but profundity itself from platitude is very frequently rhetorical wit.” Those unsympathetic to Malick tend to construe his thematic concerns as so many platitudes, which often says more about the writer’s rhetoric than the film in question. But if the difference between profundity and platitude has become more insistent in discussions of Malick’s recent work, it’s because this most taciturn of American directors seems to have intensified his investigations of rhetoric and genre.
But why put things in just this way? I will do no more than suggest an answer, but the suggestion will nonetheless go some distance from Malick.
In the conclusion to Anatomy, Frye asserts that in the work of breaking down barriers between critical approaches, he sees archetypal criticism as having “a central role.” As a critic especially attentive to geometric and graphical implications, Frye knows that in saying this, he is drawing a picture that places rhetorical criticism on the periphery. If archetypal criticism is at the centre, then rhetorical criticism “encircles” it. But since a picture must, after all, be seen, the question of perspective remains open. The structure having been laid out, it still remains to fix the eye—what Emerson calls the first circle. Again, the advantage of having a picture to work with is that it helps you determine your position.
The hypothesis, then, is this: The eye has gradually shifted its position away from the “inner” circle of archetype and myth to the “outer” circle of rhetoric and genre.
Some recent examples, chosen more or less at random, of films that seem to me indicative of this shift: the late films of Godard, especially Adieu au langage (2014); John Gianvito’s Her Socialist Smile (2020); the video art of Elizabeth Price, particularly The Woolworths Choir of 1979 (2012); and, more generally, the expanding wilderness of what is called the essay film (a term that, whatever the deficiencies of its application, gets at a certain rhetorical impulse). Lest this sound like a roll-call of experimental or avant-garde work, however, I’ll also mention the films of Hong Sang-soo from roughly Tale of Cinema (2005) onwards. (If that sounds too much like provocation, I’d just invite one to judge how differently The Lady Eve and Hong’s 2016 Yourself and Yours develop, not to say argue for, their doppelgänger-remarriage plots.)
Whatever the myriad differences between these works, they all seem to me rooted in—or responding to—the general situation of having no shared archetypes or myths to work from. How, in that case, should one go about the task of artistic creation or critical systematization? Is the latter still possible, or even desirable? The considerable conceptual accomplishments of Anatomy of Criticism, after all, remain centered on Western literature. And as Frye himself says at the end of the fourth essay, in a staggering remark that has often struck me as the climax of the entire work, “The notion of a conceptual rhetoric raises new problems, as it suggests that nothing built out of words can transcend the nature and conditions of words, and that the nature and conditions of ratio, so far as ratio is verbal, are contained by oratio.”
The notion of a conceptual rhetoric has obvious relevance far beyond criticism—in, for instance, religion and political ideology, both of which raise issues of professed belief and practical action that I don’t want to directly address. But I make the connection because it may be useful to have in the background while considering the less urgent-seeming problems of aesthetics and criticism, which are more readily (though still insufficiently) recognized as being bound up in all the problems of words. Amid the cacophonies of our present age, it should be unsurprising that both artists and critics alike are interested in investigating how meaning is constructed—how language, as a philosopher once put it, often seems to speak us rather than the other way around. I have focused on genre as a means of exploring such matters, but this is just one angle of approach; genre study has no special claim of truth over these questions. Then again, the fact that the study of genre apparently holds, for me, a certain rhetorical attractiveness cannot, in the end, be so easily dispensed with.
In any case, it is hopefully clear that some connection can be made between oratio, rhetoric, genre, and Kierkegaard’s methods of indirection in Repetition, the effort of which, despite all appearances, seems driven by a desire to speak—to not just be read, but understood. From the last section of Repetition: “Who in our day thinks of wasting any time on the curious idea that it is an art to be a good reader, not to mention spending the time to become that?” Kierkegaard’s question resonates clearly with the Christian vocation of reading the word of God (as we saw in Milton). But no matter one’s beliefs, the art of reading can be well understood as something worth cultivating. In “The American Scholar,” Emerson’s 1837 address to Thoreau’s graduating class—among other things a famed piece of oratory—he puts the matter unequivocally: “Undoubtedly there is a right way of reading, so it be sternly subordinated.” He discusses the matter throughout the speech, but the essential moral is contained his urgent, repeated call not for “mere thinkers,” but Man Thinking. This is a crucial distinction, one that, as I read it, is meant to push us away from the complacency of a name or title (e.g. “reader” or “thinker”), and towards action (reading and thinking as vocation, as a daily task of life); away from objects and personality, and towards process. Or, if I can put it this way, from noun to verb.
As for how all this relates to Malick, undeniably an American Scholar of a kind, I’d prefer to just proceed with some notes on A Hidden Life, a uniquely challenging film that seems to balance on the edge of meaning. Since its release, it has been taken, both positively and negatively, as a “break” with his recent work, and a “return” to the methods of his earlier films. Both views are in some respects true—though perhaps we can now just call it repetition in the Kierkegaardian sense. But it is time for the movie.
VII
The tyrant dies and his rule is over; the martyr dies, and his rule begins.
—Kierkegaard
—Terrence Malick, A Hidden Life (script dated July 06, 2016)
I know that the world I converse with in the city and in the farms, is not the world I think. I observe that difference and shall observe it. One day, I shall know the value and law of this discrepance.
—Emerson, “Experience”
A Hidden Life is, in the first place, Malick’s most sustained meditation on a marriage. “Remember the day we first met,” begins Fani Jägerstätter (Valerie Pachner), recounting to Franz (August Diehl) the details of their first meeting (“that motorcycle, my best dress…”), accompanied by a few key images that will recur near the end of the film. Although incontestably a tale of martyrdom, A Hidden Life is as much about Fani’s sacrifice as it is Franz’s. His refusal to take the Hitler oath lays a strain on them both, and insofar as the film can be said to operate according to dramatic terms, it is in relation to their marriage. An essentially epistolary work, it proceeds as an exchange of letters in the way that To the Wonder and Song to Song flow as exchanges of verses.
It is, secondly, a film that’s more about vision than faith—or faith insofar as it relates to one’s quality of vision, which as in To the Wonder, becomes an index of character. We find this not just in the opening propaganda footage, partially taken from Triumph of the Will (1935), or the scenes where Franz and his fellow conscripts watch footage of the war effort, but also in the work of the painter who knowingly depicts the “comfortable Christ” of the Church, rather than the true Christ whose life, says Franz, “is a demand,” as well as the Church itself, and its damning gulf between word (not to say Word) and deed.
It is, finally, a film that places an intense emphasis on silence. “Sprechen Verboten,” reads the writing on the wall in a prison courtyard: Speaking is forbidden. And throughout A Hidden Life, one becomes acutely aware of the pain, and the risks, of silence. In Franz’s select conversations with figures of authority, we feel, increasingly, not his uncertainty, but his fear of the false word—his refusal of any statement incommensurate to his act, or to the word of God, with which he identifies his action. In a world stamped by the Tower of Babel, silence is its own thing. But in the face of everything, and against all odds and appearances, Franz speaks.
Tragedy and irony can often be distinguished from comedy and romance in how the action relates to time, its workings leading to catastrophe in the former, renewal in the latter—time lost and time regained. In A Hidden Life, no such distinction can be made. Or, it destroys the grounds on which such a distinction can be made: time is regained in its being lost. The situation, human life faced with death, is tragic irony, but the film proceeds as if it were comedy and romance. It is true that Malick does not appreciably alter the film’s rhythms as it unfolds, but a response that takes this decision as slack indifference presupposes that there is just one way that this story can be told and taken—just one way that it should be seen and read. And A Hidden Life, from the first moment to the last, calls us to make another way. As Franz writes in a letter to Fani, “When you give up the idea of surviving at any price, a new light floods in. Once you were in a rush, always short on time; now you have all you need.” This is not realism exactly; but it is not solipsism either.
The climax of A Hidden Life is the final meeting between Franz and Fani in the presence of his lawyer (Alexander Fehling) and the local priest of St. Radegund (Tobias Moretti). The latter two attempt to convince Franz to sign a piece of paper and thereby swear an oath to Hitler, but his only question (“Do you understand?”), directed at Fani, is whether or not she will support his decision—no, join him in it. And she can, she does: “I love you. Whatever you do. Whatever comes. I’m with you. Always.” Man and wife reunited, reaffirmed, the scene is a renewal of vows—remarriage—repetition in the face of certain death. There is no question that her life will be all the more difficult without him. The awful truth is that he wouldn’t be the man she loved if he chose otherwise.
The remainder of A Hidden Life alternates between the couple and their starkly contrasting environs of farm and city. For Fani, the mountains of St. Radegund stretch out before her, a horizon of experience that she has a lifetime left to read. For Franz, housed in the shadowy cloisters of the Brandenburg-Görden Prison, his experience is a progressive narrowing of horizons, until only darkness remains—but that, too, must be read. Lest we forget this, Malick offers out of the blackness a closing epigraph from George Eliot’s Middlemarch:
... for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
It is as powerful and moving a use of onscreen text as I’ve encountered in the cinema, for whatever one’s professed beliefs, it makes manifest the fearsome power that our words, our silences, have to judge or redeem us, even beyond death. To condemn the tyrant and sanctify the martyr. It demonstrates the power of speech, which is also action, to transform and expand in ways that necessarily go beyond us. Maybe this places too heavy a burden on the reader, but was it ever otherwise?
Again, “The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world. St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere, and its circumference nowhere. We are all our lifetime reading the copious sense of this first of forms.”
We read. We are read. And in this double-action the eye, fixed by the finitude of human life, becomes a circle forever repeated, the same and different, extending into a quest without end.
The study of letters shall be no longer a name for pity, for doubt, and for sensual indulgence… A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.
—Emerson, “The American Scholar”
VIII
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Is God a verb? Pero si muove.