Terrence Malick has been making movies since 1973, beginning with Badlands. I don't remember hearing of the filmmaker or that first film until Thanksgiving 1978, when I saw his second effort, Days of Heaven. Soon after that I saw Badlands, and on the basis of those two, I was hooked for life. Their similarities, especially the way voice-over was employed, intrigued me. I learned that Malick was an alumnus of my high school alma mater, St. Stephen's Episcopal School in Austin, Texas. He graduated in 1961, I in 1970. I met Terry at a school reunion, I think in 1979.
Through the 1980s we would meet sporadically for lunch. Whole Foods and Luby's Cafeteria were his go-to eateries. I was struck by the way Terry and many of the workers in those buffet lines were on a first-name basis with each other. I was writing screenplays part-time. He humbly called himself my Dutch uncle, giving me the advice I solicited, all the while admonishing me not to take it too seriously. Chiefly he would draw me out, asking about the stages my kids were going through, urging me to write based on first-hand experience.
During the 1986-87 school year I took three courses at the Seminary of the Southwest, Austin's Episcopal theology school. I was steered toward a local priest to be my spiritual director as I pondered pursuing the priesthood myself. I remember telling Terry at that time that he had been my spiritual director over the previous few years. He demurred, flattering me by saying that, on the contrary, I had been his.
Terry is a famously private person. Being both famous and private is a tough combination to pull off, especially in our celebrity-hungry society and in the entertainment business that caters to it. I honor the balance Terry has struck.
And so there are only two chief instances of what could be considered "insider information" that I want to share. Two directors Terry encouraged me early on to familiarize myself with were Jean Renoir and Eric Rohmer. It was his wife Ecky who told me that Thomas a Kempis' The Imitation of Christ influenced Terry's "nature and grace" theme in The Tree of Life. Beyond those two examples, I have tried to respect and value Terry's privacy by sticking to facts that are publicly known and focusing on the movies themselves.
Terry sojourned from St. Stephen's to Harvard, where his teachers there included philosopher Stanley Cavell. Terry went on to study at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, translating Martin Heidegger's The Essence of Reasons for publication, and briefly teaching philosophy at MIT. Turning to filmmaking, he was part of the first cohort of students at the American Film Institute.
His eight dramatic films to date are:
BADLANDS (1973) -- Based loosely on a murder spree through the Midwest in the late 1950s, Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek play young lovers enamored of each other and of actor James Dean's iconic public persona. Spacek's romanticized thoughts in voice-over are oddly askew with the violence perpetrated by her beau.
DAYS OF HEAVEN (1978) -- During The Great War, the wheat fields of the Texas Panhandle are the setting for a love triangle, and nefarious plans gone awry. Again, a youthful female narrator reflects on the events in ways that are both wise beyond her years and wonderfully naïve.
THE THIN RED LINE (1998) -- Malick's WWII epic is based on a James Jones novel about the Battle of Guadalcanal. The sprawling cast features Jim Caveziel, Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, and Elias Koteas. Natural beauty wars with human destructive power. The voice-over becomes more directly philosophical than before.
THE NEW WORLD (2005) -- A take on the U.S. founding myth of Pocahontas (Q’orianka Kilcher) and John Smith (Colin Farrell), this film becomes another love triangle of sorts, with Smith followed in Pocahontas' affections by John Rolfe (Christian Bale), who marries her. It is a reflection on love in its different forms, and the meeting of worlds, with Europe serving as a new world for the Native Americans just as surely as America is new to the Europeans.
THE TREE OF LIFE (2011) -- Arguably Malick's masterpiece to date, the story moves in time and place from 1950s Waco, Texas, to decades later in Houston, and all the way back to the Big Bang. Like Augustine's Confessions juxtaposed with The City of God, it examines side by side the life of one individual and his family and the history of the universe and life on earth. The story spurs us to ask, "Are grace and nature to be reconciled in human life?"
TO THE WONDER (2012) -- A man of few words, played by Ben Affleck, falls for a lovely Parisienne (Olga Kurylenko), bringing her along with her young daughter home to Oklahoma, where they struggle to make sense of their life together. She returns to France. He begins a relationship with an old acquaintance. Then his French love returns without her daughter and the original pair try again to make their relationship work. Javier Bardem plays the local priest, going through his own dark night of the soul and echoing the ideas of Søren Kierkegaard on the nature of love and marriage.
KNIGHT OF CUPS (2015) -- Interweaving Plato, the Tarot deck, a gnostic tale of loss of self, and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, this story finds Christian Bale playing a screenwriter in serial relationships with numerous women. It picks up the examination of love from The New World and To the Wonder, setting the question of the relation of love to self-knowledge in the dizzyingly glitzy contexts of Los Angeles and Las Vegas.
SONG TO SONG (2017) -- Austin's contemporary outdoor music festival scene is the setting for this further study of artistic creativity and excess. 19th century French poet Arthur Rimbaud serves as mentor in bohemian license as Rooney Mara and Ryan Gosling, the film's central couple dance between self-discovery and nihilistic self-destruction. Again, what is love, and can it aid in righting a life out of balance?
Looking at the films themselves, the uniqueness of Terry's body of work to date lies in its dialogic nature, its distinctly Socratic quality, in which viewers are invited into significant, rich, deep conversation, the only requirement of them that we come up with our own answers. It helps to know that, as you watch Terry's movies, you are entering with him into engagement with the vexing and exhilarating existential questions humans have always faced. Academic philosophers find much in these films to discuss and celebrate. (If you’re inspired to follow up on this thought, one would do well to start with Stanley Cavell's Introduction to The World Viewed, Simon Critchley's essay "Calm -- On Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line," and especially Terrence Malick: Filmmaker and Philosopher, by Robert Sinnerbrink.) Terry's works are an extension of the legacy of idea-laden films of the sort created not only by Renoir and Rohmer, but Bergman, Fellini, Truffaut, Godard, Tarkovsky, Kieslowski, Kurosawa, and Wenders, as well. For filmmakers and cineastes, they are part of movie history's treasure trove.
Be that as it may, Terry Malick's movies seem to go underappreciated on a popular level or, perhaps better put, greatly appreciated by a much smaller audience than they deserve. For me, the key to engaging with Terry's films is to begin with his background in philosophy and to grasp that his approach to "the love of wisdom" ("philo-sophia") has much to do with the Socratic approach of asking and refining questions, resting lightly with answers received, and remaining open, on the quest. (Part of his "Dutch uncle" counsel to me three decades ago was to repeat the old saw that if you want to convey a message, send a telegram. When he saw that my didactic tendencies went undeterred and undiminished despite his best efforts, one of his final encouragements as my informal spiritual director was for me to jump at the chance to teach Senior Theology at our high school alma mater. I have been happily ensconced doing just that ever since.)
Things that stand out about these movies from the outset are creative use of voice-over (one hesitates to call it narration), exquisite cinematography coupled with fascinated, even rapt, attention to natural beauty, and rich use of music. Regarding the voice-over, Malick's experimentation began with a single, callow, female perspective in the first two films, expanded to multiple GI voices in the WWII movie, then settled on using three diverse points of view represented in each of the next three productions. I contend that, in this creative evolution, Terry has honed cinematic expressions of inwardness in ways parallel to Shakespeare's discoveries as a playwright and Henry James' development of the portrayal of interior monologue in prose fiction.
Days of Heaven's Oscar for Best Cinematography was won by Nestor Almendros on the basis of extensive use of natural lighting, making the most of what has come to be called "magic hour," and sustained focus on buffaloes and birds, wind-swept wheat, and expansive skies. The lush, green jungle enveloping the GIs on Guadalcanal in The Thin Red Line was as much a character as they were. The action sequences were choreographed and captured on film in a way that viscerally put us there as viewers. John Smith's point-of-view during his surreal early experiences in the Powhatan village in The New World likewise enable us to empathize, to see things through his eyes. Terry's partnership with cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki in his more recent films has involved increased use of hand-held, moving camera, and greater freedom to experiment in the editing room with techniques like the jump-cut. Characteristic of all Terry's films is a Taoist determination to observe with us the play of sunlight, the plumage of birds, water rushing over rocks, grass bending to invisible forces, and trees reaching toward glory.
Musically, Badlands captured my imagination with two pieces of pop culture wonderfully employed: "Love is Strange" over Holly dancing in curlers on the dirt near her tree house home; and "A Blossom Fell," as she and Kit dance with each other in the headlights near the end of their journey. James Taylor's guitar in Badlands carries over into Leo Kottke's immortal train music in Days of Heaven. Ennio Morricone's wistful symphonic score for Days of Heaven when the trio of interlopers is living the high life on the farm gives way to strident and stressful orchestration when the wheat harvest goes up in flames. The low rumble of the soundtrack at the beginning of The Thin Red Line as a gigantic crocodile disappears beneath dark waters perfectly sets up the film's focus on the "war in the heart of nature." Composition and love of music become explicit themes in The Tree of Life as the father, Mr. O'Brien, extols the work ethic and perfectionism of Toscanini and goes on to mourn the death of his own early musical ambition. In Knight of Cups, recurrent uses of Ralph Vaughan Williams' "Thomas Tallis Theme," Wojciech Kilar's "Exodus," "Solvieg's Song," by Edvard Grieg, and Hanan Towshend's original pieces for the film, weave a dreamlike spell perfectly adapted to the themes and scenes of the movie. Song to Song is all about music (and love…and mercy).
Most of my thoughts about Terry's films have come after seeing them initially on a large screen, then multiple times on DVD. If at all possible, I recommend seeing these movies first in a theater. At home, heed the recommendation of the producers and turn the volume loud. See each film at least twice. The first time, let the story wash over you, carry you along as you simply go with it, experience it. The second or third time, watch it on dvd with subtitles on. (I was delighted to find the lyrics to choral music translated on the Badlands DVD, especially in the house afire scene.) I also recommend seeing the films in the chronological order of their making. This makes clearer the development of both recurring themes and motifs, on the one hand, and stylistic elements like the use of that ruminative voice-over, on the other. Enter into the Socratic spirit, raising questions along with Terry. Enter into the journey ("to the wonder"!), as well. Be patient. Try not to be frustrated with Terry's questions. They are meant to encourage us to take our inquiry deeper, to find our own answers, to stay on the trail. Terry doesn't seem to consider himself in a privileged position with the desired answers. As his friend and erstwhile teacher Stanley Cavell has put it: "One is responsible for finding the journey's end in every step of the road, in one's own gait." (This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures after Emerson after Wittgenstein, p. 17.) These movies seem to adhere to that perspective. Remember that the films can be seen as invitations to a Socratic dialogue.
Finally, I am acutely aware that, while Terry's chief academic concentration (before filmmaking) was in philosophy, my own has been in theology. Paul Tillich would say that both fields deal with the ultimate concerns we have as humans. A chief difference would be that, where philosophers approach matters of ultimate concern via discursive, logically argued essay, theology examines myth, ultimate concern embedded in story. It strikes me that Terry's films have remained quite philosophically rooted, yet grown more explicitly theological over time. Perhaps the philosophical and the theological can be subsumed together under the heading "wonder." Ecky Malick returned to St. Stephen's in January 2016 to regale my senior students, sixty-some 17-, 18-, and 19-year-olds, with stories of her own high school days there, film shoots with Terry, and famous people humanized through friendship. What stood out to all was the question Terry asked her. They had known each other in high school, then gone their separate ways. When they got together again, both in their forties, Terry brought her up short with the query, out of the blue, "What do you wonder?" Ecky conveyed the way that simple question opened her vision not only to her husband-to-be's uniqueness and depth of thought but also to her own journey of self-understanding. The students afterwards remarked on numerous directions that question steered their own self-examinations. May continued enjoyment of Terry Malick's movies do the same for us all.
Jim Crosby serves as Lay Chaplain and teaches Theology to high school seniors at St. Stephen's Episcopal School, Austin, Texas. An Episcopal Third Order Franciscan, he started Nonviolent Austin, an affiliate of Campaign Nonviolence, a year ago.
Stay tuned to The Porch for Jim's reflections on The Tree of Life in preparation for the December 13th release of Malick's latest, A Hidden Life, the story of conscientious objector and martyr to the Nazis, Blessed Franz Jägerstätter.
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