Terrence Malick and the Making of America

Now that Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life––––a film that earned both heckling and the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year––––is almost out of theaters and more firmly a part of the controversial auteur’s canon, I feel prompted to reexamine Malick’s career and his ideas about American life.

For many, Malick’s reputation as a difficult recluse with a meandering eye for nature and a sense of pomposity speaks louder than the content of his work. That his output consists of five films released since 1973, detractors suggest, adds a deceptive weight to his artistic import: critics and high-minded audiences are self-congratulatory and like to pair their viewing experiences with urgency––––the idea that they are privy to a rare and anticipated event. Thus, they enforce outside significance upon Malick’s work. Moreover, naysayers claim, his bloated running-times, use of overbearing classical music, and blatant Judeo-Christian themes grandly conceal the lack of depth in his ideas. His fans, on the other hand, stress that Malick’s films have invented a new language for cinema. The most sensible place to be, given these extremes, is in the middle.

Perhaps his most heralded film is Days of Heaven, a depression-era story that marked the true birth of his unique cinematic approach. While its twilit cinematography and rich, thoughtful pacing should still impress, I’ve always considered Days of Heaven an unwieldy mesh of two different films––––one intimate, the other operatic, both imperfect––––created, Frankenstein-like, in Malick’s editing room. His debut feature, Badlands, is an entirely unpretentious affair, and while it doesn’t represent the zenith of his style, I’d argue that it’s still his best work. Inspired by the story of 1950s outlaw Charles Starkweather, Malick follows young Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek as they escape South Dakota for a cross-country drive. He kills and steals; she both fears and idolizes him. It is the first of five films that would outline Malick’s career-long thesis: that the unchained human ego (usually masculine) is the primary destructive force in a natural world that urges balance, oneness, and humility. This recurring theme is found in every work of his, from the military’s ruinous warfare in the Guadalcanal jungle in The Thin Red Line to Brad Pitt’s abusive “Be-your-own-man” paterfamilias in The Tree of Life.

Malick is a bold surveyor of human behavior but not a great director of actors, and Badlands also strikes me as the last film of his in which the emotional investigation of his characters would be dependent on a story’s narrative arc. This is not to say that he hasn’t directed great performances since then. Q’orianka Kilcher’s Pocahontas (The New World) and Jessica Chastain’s unnamed mother (The Tree of Life) are luminous, magnificent renderings of complete people. More often than not, Malick’s searching lens captures off-the-cuff moments of incredible beauty, empathy, and awkward truth. The Tree of Life, in this respect, is his finest exhibition of stillness in motion. From out of nowhere, a butterfly lands on a woman’s arm; a boy trips as he chases his brother through a field; an infant ascends a staircase for the first time and, watching him, we fear he will fall. Like all of cinema’s most valuable directors, Malick offers us new ways of looking at the familiar––––the inherent unpredictability of living, breathing things. He looks for what makes us the same. It is the ego, he claims, that divides us.

And the ego, according to Malick’s filmography, is what built America. Spacek fears and adores Sheen’s selfish Badlands murderer in the same way that America itself has mythologized its violent past. Cowboys & Indians was once a politically correct children’s game. From The Public Enemy (1931) to Public Enemies (2009), the gangster film has never lost its appeal. Portrayals of villains like Hannibal Lecter, Anton Chigurh, and the Joker have won Oscars for their explorations of evil unbound. We are fascinated by our own darkest possibilities, our capacity to overpower the world around us until we can gain from its destruction.

Why should this be the trend? In The New World, Malick went back to the founding of Jamestown and the annihilation of the surrounding native life as the birth of American exceptionalism. He may be right––––after all, Jamestown marked the permanent settlement of an entirely “new” continent by an already-civilized society. The Jamestown settlers were in an unprecedented position. They weren’t there to bring back slave labor or natural resources for England’s consumption. They were there to stay. And so, determined to establish a colony, they perceived the “newness” of the continent and understood that they were meant to make the American nation from scratch. All history would start with them. Call it America’s first ego trip: in order to better ourselves, they resolved, we must destroy what came before. Tellingly, Sheen’s first murder in Badlands is of Spacek’s rigid father.

What, then, does The Tree of Life, brandishing highbrow awards and prefigured importance, add to Malick’s overall conception of American life? The answer can be found, once again, in between the extremes, where the grandiosity of Malick’s ideas meets his observational intimacy. What little story The Tree of Life offers, in the traditional sense, goes like this: one of three brothers in a mid-century Texas family is somehow killed at the age of nineteen. Many years later, one of the surviving brothers (a somber Sean Penn) reflects on his loss of innocence via his upbringing, his relationship with his dead brother, and the tension between his stern father and graceful mother. The film is structured largely as a series of dialogue-light montages that are either awe-inducing or preposterously silly, depending on the audience member’s taste. One such sequence is a visualization of the origins of the universe and life on earth. Another sequence details the birth and infancy of the three children of this Texas family (set to Holst’s Hymn to Dionysus, it is, in my opinion, Malick’s finest work). Creation, Malick suggests, is a long and still emerging process, at once beautiful and frightening. We may not know where it’s going, but we should never take it for granted, because the future can be erased as easily as one of three Texas brothers dies at the cusp of adulthood and leaves his family in shambles. If Badlands and The New World examined how America’s past has shaped its present, then The Tree of Life is a warning about the future, a simple message wrapped in the complex metaphors of art: deny existence its meaning and substance, and you may lose it.