Five days later, I was back at the Cineplex, confident that The New World would soon disappear from the big screen forever (though some cineastes cut Malick some slack for his evident seriousness and ambition, most film-goers had roundly pronounced the film an exercise in tedium). What was it that made me return so soon, I wondered, to a film that had only transported me at moments ? Partly, perhaps, 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; though Malick’s films could not be more independent-minded, they never step back from their epic scale. Where the typical independent film-maker crafts exquisite, tiny New Yorker short stories on celluloid, Malick throws up Melvillean dramas of darkness and light in eternal battle. His films represent not so much different perspectives on the world we know as a whole new way of seeing and thinking, which 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. I went, a few weeks after revisiting The New World, to see Sigur Ros, the Icelandic post-rock band, play in Osaka. All 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 four figures 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 ever more 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 is what Malick says, over and over again, and unashamedly in his films, feral and vicious and just occasionally unfallen; we are like ellipses in a sentence that some larger force, beyond our ken, is completing. People in his films–this is evident in almost every scene of The New World–are indistinguishable from the creatures, the elements all around them: figures moving around in grass taller than themselves, silent outlines seen semaphoring in the distance, scarecrows in a landscape that pulses like a living web all around them, with “existence’s alert awareness of itself,” in the words of a German philosopher who just happens to be called Heidegger.
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. Not so much for moral reasons as through that larger logic that people call Providence or God or Genesis, at least.
“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 prefallen courtship in the film (Pocahontas’s name never used in 150 minutes) 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 who monitor his landscapes, agents of a larger order we are too bestial to apprehend. The shock of a Malick movie is that frame after frame will show no action or external event, but birds in the sky, implacable above us, fish in the water, the movement of wind across a field. As soon as his people try to civilize themselves–a 14 year-old waif enters a dancing-school in Days of Heaven, Pocahontas is made to put on finery by the English settlers in Virginia–they are gone forever, like dogs who put on three-piece suits and sit on chairs before candelight for dinner. Our true way is vagrant, among the dirty-chinned, snarling, scabrous creaures who drawl and mumble through his films (or, in this case, among the “naturals,” as he carefully calls the natives, who still exist in a latticework of trees and light).