Around such a man, the Thomas Pynchon of the modern cinema, rumours inevitably cluster. He lived in Paris for many years, and studied Buddhism in the Himalayas, people say. He was all set to make a movie based on the Jerry Lee Lewis story, which is less surprising than it sounds if you recall that Lewis is said to be possessed and plays out the all-American tale of devils in the wilderness speaking through a graduate of the Southwestern Bible Institute and cousin of Jimmy Swaggart. He considered filming Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In an industry where the important thing is to keep your name and face in the news, Malick went twenty years between his majestic second film, Days of Heaven, in 1978, and his third, The Thin Red Line, a brooding meditation on the idea that “We’re dirt” and “We’re meat.” The actors who work with him are always asked to comment on the mystery surrounding him, and tend to use words like “very, very shy” and “a very gentle spirit.” Nick Nolte grumbled that all Malick was interested in was light—and indeed, unbeknownst to the studio, he filmed the whole of The Thin Red Line in “the magic hour” of dusk.
Malick does for the cinema what that other uprooted laureate of West Texas, Cormac McCarthy, does on the page. Both construct grand, flawlessly beautiful canvases on which scenes of the most fearful violence play out. Both plainly believe that God has given man a bounty, especially in the promised land of America, and yet men squander their blessings by going where they should not go. Humans are no more than disposable ants in their landscapes, pawns with which such abstract forces as nature and fate and time fiddle. In Malick’s most recent film, The New World, 2005, it is fair to say that nothing happens in its almost two and a half hours. Yet what the film underlines is that he is a plains mystic, much like McCarthy, who finds in the American grain the charred ashes of the paradise we’ve lost, and the haunted echoes of the possibility of recapturing it again.
Five days later, I was back at the Cineplex, confident that The New World would soon disappear from the big screen forever. What was it that made me return so soon, I wondered, to a film that had only transported me at moments Perhaps it was the very spaciousness of the canvas, the gravitas of its intention, the fact that its maker is so clearly working from vision more than mere observation. Where the typical contemporary filmmaker crafts exquisite New Yorker short stories on celluloid, Malick throws up dramas of darkness and light in an eternal battle worthy of Herman Melville. His films represent not so much different perspectives on the world we know as a whole new way of seeing and thinking that urges us to take things in more slowly and to put wonder before information and nothing before stillness.
But more than that, they speak a different kind of language. A few weeks after revisiting The New World, I went to see Sigur Rós, the Icelandic post-rock band, play in Osaka. Many of the band’s songs are in a made-up language called Hopelandic, and therefore bypass the realm of words and sense entirely, to speak to something deeper. From the first chords—the band’s four members silhouetted behind a gauzy white curtain, just shadows playing notes—I realized I was in a different, rarely visited part of myself. The mind was stilled and something else was awakened, in heart and even soul. Tears came as when we see a home we never quite knew we had. A lofty claim, perhaps, but one that began to explain to me what Malick is about and how he affects a few of us in ways we can barely articulate. He offers us a way out of the increasingly claustrophobic moment, and into something that feels less passing. Light and words and the natural world all point to a grander silence.
We are all a part of nature, Malick tells us over and over again, feral and vicious and just occasionally unfallen; we are like ellipses in a sentence that some larger force is completing. People in his films are indistinguishable from the creatures, the elements all around them: they are figures moving through grass taller than themselves, silent outlines seen semaphoring in the distance, scarecrows in a landscape that pulses like a living web all around them. We hunger for more, though; we connive, and hatch designs to increase our standing in the world. And as soon as we attempt to rise above our station, to disrupt the larger pattern, we are lost (or exiled from paradise) forever. Hubris, as the Greeks called it: an inability or refusal to live with what we’ve been given. We hunger for Eden, or a greater part of Eden, and so lose the Garden entirely.
” We rise, we rise,” the romanticized Indians in The New World say, but for them it is a rising into spirit, “towards the light,” as trees and saplings rise; it is a rising into the sky or heavens in which we lose ourselves in something greater. The words that Pocahontas teaches John Smith in their pre-fallen courtship in the film are for sky, for sun, for water, and then for something that he never even bothers to translate, though it could be wind—or movement or the spirit of the universe itself.
People rise to dissolve in Malick’s vision, but never to become greater humans; they are to all intents and purposes like the hawks or wolves that monitor his landscapes, agents of a larger order we are too bestial to apprehend. The shock of a Malick movie is that in frame after frame it will show no action or external event, but birds in the sky, implacable above us, fish in the water, or the movement of wind across a field. As soon as his people try to civilize themselves—a fourteen-year-old waif enters a dancing school in Days of Heaven, Pocahontas is made to put on finery by English settlers in Virginia—they are gone forever, like dogs who put on three-piece suits and sit on chairs before candlelight for dinner. Our true way is vagrant, among the dirty-chinned, snarling, scabrous creatures who drawl and mumble through his films, or, in the case of The New World, among the “naturals,” as he carefully calls the natives, who still exist in a latticework of trees and light.
Malick loves gates because he is fascinated by the places where worlds intersect, the parts where we can go into either a higher or lower realm. The most startling image in Days of Heaven is a shot of a black train under cloudless, newborn blue skies, puffing over a suspension bridge and carrying the main characters into a new world. Not much later, on rough, jolting carriages, the film’s three main characters are taken through an ancient-looking gate that might as well announce, “Abandon human life, all ye who enter here.” Even after they become part of the rolling plains of a farm out of time, trains, planes, and cars keep encroaching on their agrarian rites as if to yank them back into the industrial world, the world of linear time.
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