Few filmmakers have inspired as much philosophical and theological commentary as Terrence Malick. He was, for a short time, a professional philosopher, but even if that fact were unknown, his films would still quite obviously provide a wealth of images, events, and experiences that invite philosophical or theological reflection. I have read most of these philosophical and theological treatments of Malick’s work, and they tend to have two things in common. First, they typically exhibit a deep knowledge of and enthusiasm for his work; but second—and here we run into problems—they tend to treat the films as a repository of helpful philosophical or theological illustrations. That is, Malick’s films are treated as an ancillary collection of material that allows professors of theology or philosophy to make arguments they could have made without reference to Malick’s films. All the movie stuff just makes those points more vivid.
Because this tendency has been unfortunately widespread, I am greatly delighted by the publication of Martin Woessner’s new book, Terrence Malick and the Examined Life. Woessner is, in my experience anyway, the first academic writing about Malick to take fully seriously the possibility that Malick’s films are themselves philosophical projects—unique philosophical projects whose value cannot be replicated by the conventional discourse of academic philosophy or theology and cannot fully be translated into any terms other than their own. As he writes in his introduction, “It is my contention that Malick’s films represent a continuous philosophical project in their own right, one that draws upon preexisting philosophical discourses and traditions yet also calls them into question and even, in some instances, transcends them. They remind us that philosophy can be not just an academic subject but also a way of life.” The rest of the book amply bears out this contention.
A summary account for those who do not know Malick’s work: Terrence Malick was born in Illinois in 1943 and raised largely in Texas before going on to Harvard University to study philosophy, primarily with Stanley Cavell—Cavell being, interestingly enough, the first academic philosopher to write in a philosophically serious way about film. (His 1981 book, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage, remains a classic, and one unlike any other book.) After translating Martin Heidegger’s The Essence of Reasons into English and teaching briefly at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Malick decided the academic life was not for him and began to work in journalism—unsigned reflections in The New Yorker on the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were written by Malick—but finding journalism no better suited to his habits of mind and work than academia, he decided, almost on a whim, to try film school. He later said that it had not seemed more unlikely than any other option.
So in 1969 he joined the first class of students at the brand-new American Film Institute Conservatory, where his classmates included Paul Schrader and David Lynch. His first film, Badlands, made on something less than a shoestring budget, appeared in 1973 and was quickly acknowledged as a small masterpiece. After making a second picture, the contemplative and radiant Days of Heaven, in 1978, he did not direct another film until his magnificent depiction of the invasion of Guadalcanal, The Thin Red Line—based on James Jones’s novel of the same title, though transfiguring the story in remarkable ways—appeared in 1998. (This was the same year, oddly enough, that Saving Private Ryan, a radically different kind of World War II movie, appeared.) Since then, he has worked regularly and, after the autobiographical The Tree of Life in 2011, entered into a period of experimentation that lasted for three films. Though this phase of his career displays technical exploration, it also manifests a thematic continuity with The Tree of Life: It is seriously biblical and Christian. Malick’s work had always been spiritual, but that spirituality has become increasingly focused on the Christian message, something that may be seen clearly in his 2019 film, A Hidden Life, about the Roman Catholic martyr to Nazism Franz Jägerstätter, and presumably will be seen more clearly still in The Way of the Wind, a work, currently in postproduction, that tells the life of Jesus, primarily as seen through the eyes of the apostle Peter.
Woessner’s treatment of this extraordinary career follows a relatively conventional structure. After an extremely enlightening introduction, he turns to a chapter on Badlands and then proceeds chronologically through Malick’s work, though one chapter covers three films and another covers two; then comes an illuminating conclusion. Woessner has done his research thoroughly, demonstrating not only an intimate knowledge of every film but also a detailed understanding of how they were made. He has investigated archives; he has discovered drafts of screenplays and compared the development of those screenplays through a series of revisions; he knows how Malick films have been received—which is to say, sometimes with adulation, sometimes with revulsion, sometimes with confusion.
It’s a remarkable account of both the creation and the reception of a body of artistic work, and for anyone who simply wants an overview of Malick’s career, this is the most accurate and vividly written one I have come across. It is well worth reading, even if you have no interest in the philosophical questions that Woessner raises. But it is Woessner’s treatment of the philosophical character of the work that makes this book so important.
I must admit that as I first picked up the book and saw that Woessner had written extensively about Heidegger, particularly in his 2011 book, Heidegger in America, I was concerned. All too often, philosophical scholarship on Malick begins by noting his translation of The Essence of Reasons and then proceeds on the assumption that his movies illustrate—the curse of “illustration” again—Heideggerian concepts and themes. But I soon saw that Woessner is perfectly aware of this danger, and indeed warns the reader against a Heideggerian-literalist interpretation of Malick’s movies: “The assumption that Heidegger’s influence is somehow behind everything he has written and directed is both too neat and too easy.” Moreover, Heidegger’s thought changed greatly over the decades, which, Woessner shrewdly notes, raises the question of just which Heidegger Malick is supposed to be channeling.
And, after all, what would it mean for a film, or a body of cinematic work, to be “Heideggerian”? There is an important sense in which any art that draws directly on Heidegger’s terminology and conceptual frameworks would be un-Heideggerian: As Woessner points out in relation to one of Heidegger’s key concepts, Welt (world), “Heidegger’s concept of world really did suggest a radical reconsideration of…philosophical practice.” Thus, any artwork that merely redeployed Heidegger’s own reconsideration would be missing the point, and would not exhibit a rethinking of philosophical practice, and (worse) would remain unaccountable to the mysteries of the World and of Being. A truly Heideggerian cinema would work in ways unimagined by Heidegger. And, says Woessner, “if anything defines [Malick’s] cinema it is a restless searching for new perspectives, new insights, new meanings.” Woessner doesn’t hesitate to invoke Heidegger when he thinks it appropriate, but he always treats Malick’s movies as distinct philosophical projects with their own energies, their own imperatives, their own cinematic grammars.
All that said, I will now risk my own use of Heidegger. One of that thinker’s most famous concepts is Geworfenheit (“thrownness”), the disorienting experience of being cast into a world and having to navigate it as best one can. Woessner invokes this notion, especially in relation to The New World (2005), which makes perfect sense, since to be among the first Europeans to visit the North American continent, or the first Native American to visit London, is to be “thrown” with a vengeance. Yet all Malick’s films seek to portray—not to describe but to portray—this condition, which combines wonderment, bewilderment, and alienation. A teenage girl on a road trip with her boyfriend, who has just murdered her father; a group of young men dumped from a transport ship onto a wild Pacific island occupied by Japanese soldiers; a Hollywood screenwriter whose life suddenly becomes incomprehensible to him; a farmer whose refusal to vow fealty to Adolf Hitler lands him in prison—these and many others are thrown, and by being thrown, are tested. How, the world asks them, will you respond to the challenge I offer you?
When asked which of Malick’s films is the best, I vacillate; I give different answers in different moods. But when asked which film someone curious about Malick should see first, I unhesitatingly reply: The Thin Red Line. It has, I think, the perfect balance of the accessible and the demanding. The movie is very much an ensemble piece, and does not have a protagonist as such, but it tends to center on one Private Witt, played by Jim Caviezel. (In the original screenplay, Witt was a relatively minor figure, but during the course of filming Malick came to believe that Witt’s spiritual and moral journey was the key to the movie, and altered his script and, later, his editing, accordingly.) At one point deep into the story, when the soldiers of C Company have driven Japanese soldiers from their camp, we see Witt stop in his tracks and stare at something. After a beat, we discover what he is staring at: a dead Japanese man whose whole body, except for his face, is covered by dirt and rocks. The eyes of the corpse stare upward, and Witt hears the dead man speak to him:
Are you righteous? Kind? Does your confidence lie in this? Are you loved by all? Know that I was, too. Do you imagine your suffering will be any less because you loved goodness…truth?
And below the murmur of these words, we hear music: a fragment of Charles Ives’s great orchestral piece The Unanswered Question.
The unanswered question—or questions in this case, though they add up to a single challenge to Witt’s life: How will he respond to the suffering that is advancing upon him? Will he be cowardly or brave, cruel or kind? Will he see human beings as Others alien to him, or, as another soldier muses, all part of “one big soul”? As Woessner demonstrates in his chapter on the film, many elements of The Thin Red Line suggest a debt to the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ives’s fellow New Englander, especially the concept of the “Over-soul.” But a viewer of the film need know nothing of Emerson or Ives or American Transcendentalism more generally to know that one is being faced with a challenge to one’s very being. Witt and all the other soldiers we see have been cast into a complex and confusing world, one in which the horrors of war are constantly juxtaposed to astonishing beauty. Philosophy as an academic discipline can describe; philosophy as a mode of literature (e.g., in Emerson or William James) can dramatize; but perhaps the unique capability of what Woessner calls “film-philosophy” is to throw us into the very environment in which decision is demanded.
You can get quite a lot from Saving Private Ryan, but you can’t get that.
In this book, Woessner quotes almost everything valuable that Malick has said about his films, but he missed (I think) one key interview. At the Rome Film Festival in 2007, Malick spoke of his abiding affection for the early films of Federico Fellini, which he had seen as a teenager. He recalled “coming out into the light and making vows to be a better son or brother, or work harder.” He noted that just watching such films “strengthened you.”
For Malick, the essential work that a movie achieves does not happen in the theater as we watch; it begins when we leave the theater and return to our social and personal worlds. This is the point that Woessner understands profoundly, and this is why his book continually returns to the questions implied by its title: those that arise when one examines one’s life. Malick’s movies, like most of the best movies, are inducements to self-examination; they depict that experience in wonderfully and agonizingly detailed ways, and they passionately encourage us to the same kinds of reflection that the characters undergo.
Woessner writes that “Malick’s turn away from professionalized philosophical work may have been the very thing that allowed him to become a true philosopher, not just some ‘professor of philosophy.’” And: “For as long as philosophy was associated with the question of how to live, it began with and returned to personal experience.” Terrence Malick and the Examined Life is an academic’s book that freely acknowledges the limitations of academic books; but when we academics point to those who do what we can’t do, we begin to transcend our professional limitations. As for Malick’s movies, they indeed return us to personal experience, or strive to do so, but not for the sake of nostalgia or easy comfort or emotional self-indulgence. If we let them, they can strengthen us.
But the viewer should be warned: The self-examination prompted by Malick’s films might lead to a place beyond philosophy. At the outset of Knight of Cups (2015), the movie about the existentially disoriented screenwriter, it is suggested to us that his story is a version of what John Bunyan called “The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come.” But—and this is why the quest to know oneself is so scary—we can’t know our destination when we set out. As the final word of that film, a most Malickian word, teaches us, all we can do is: Begin.