Pico Iyer Journeys

Terrence Malick's Brave New Worlds

If this all sounds a little programmatic, in The New World it unfortunately is, the Indians all shown in a Green World from the Golden Age (waiting for Gawain, perhaps), while the English who invade them are found in a dun-colored hell, a purgatory of rapine and mutiny and barely human scheming. As ever in Malick, the architecture of this eschatology is as precise as in Northrop Frye: when the English quarrel over dates, we realize that is it Time itself that is their undoing. They are denizens of the world of the clock, as the Indians are denizens of a different kind of calendar (you could call it Eternity). At one point the natives take John Smith and turn him into a kind of pagan Jesus, laureled in leaves and surrounded by incantations, spread out as if crucified in a bed of human arms. But in time it is the British who conquer the Indians, and draw them down into the world of Time (of loss, of mortality, of the trappings of so-called “civilization”).

Malick loves gates because he is fascinated by the places where worlds intersect, the parts where we can go either into a higher realm or a lower. The most startling image in Days of Heaven, early on, is a sudden shot of a black train, under cloudless, newborn blue skies, puffing over a suspension bridge and carrying the main characters into a new (old) world. Not much later, on rough, jolting carriages, the main three figures are taken through an ancient-looking gate that might as well announce, “Abandon human life, all ye who enter here.” Even after they are part of the rolling plains of a farm out of time, trains, planes, cars keep encroaching on their agrarian rites as if to yank them back into the industrial world, the world of linear time.

Malick is, in other words, a descendant of Emerson and Thoreau, and their liberating sense of American possibility; the New World is the aboriginal place, this Midwesterner returned from Oxford and Paris is here to tell us, where, ideally, we can recover a sense of a glory we need not tamper with. You do not have to know that he studied the Transcendentalists under Stanley Cavell (professor of both Thoreau and film) at Harvard to see that his subject, among other things, is the Oversoul, and how the fields of America, the great tabula rasa at the heart of the New World, are how we step back into a previous world of myth. The New World is, in fact, quite similar to Pocahontas, a virginal creature wooed and then corrupted by visitors from exhausted Europe (though, crucially, she never loses entirely her sense of where she came from).

Malick’s latest movie suffers from the absence of the wry, vivid, scuffling narrative of the 14 year-old Linda Manz in Days of Heaven, which gave it the salt and tang of Huck Finished Forever, and, most important, grounded the film’s otherworldly flights; the mystic, more than anyone, needs irreverence and salt to keep him honest. The New World also lacks something of the randomness–the wandering dialogues, the hobo dances–of that earlier film, which nonetheless compressed the entire Biblical story of Abraham and Sarah and the Pharoah into ninety minutes of American Greek drama. But Malick is still gazing on sybilline old languages (it was Hebrew in Days of Heaven, it is Greek in Oxford’s Bodleian Library here), still leading us into ceremonies and archetypal rites that bring us into the world of the “dread Day of Judgment.” His groundlings are residents of an Underworld, one feels, even as the England that Poachontas is taken to becomes a Spencerian garden of tamed nature and ordered hedges that contrasts, almost too tidily, with her natural home.

An artist is distinguished from a mere film-maker by the fact that he sees no reason to change his vision to suit the needs of producers or audience, and only seeks to develop it, perhaps even to deepen it. Thus James Horner’s score for The New World might almost be an out-take from Ennio Moricone’s haunting, unworldly piano melodies in Days of Heaven; Q’Orianka Kilcher, the striking 14 year-old part-Peruvian nymph who makes her debut in The New World, has exactly the black eyes and antique black hair of Brooke Adams in Days of Heaven. As in the film of 28 years ago, we see flames as agents of retribution, a passage across water that marks a kind of death, a set of old prints over the opening credits as if to remind us of what we’ve lost and where we long to go back again.

Words become just sounds, often, scraps, incantation. Music (Mozart and Horner’s own score) becomes a way of summoning up some logic or pattern that exists above us, a sense of swelling–in a climactic scene of death, and in a moment of self-discovery in love–that suggests a release into what is beyond us. Cinema, like prayer or ritual dance, we see, is one of the only ways we can get at what we cannot say or understand. There is less concreteness in The New World than in the earlier pictures, less of an immediate sense of the “bone-yard” that Linda Manz describes along the edges of rivers and forests in Days of Heaven, the “floating graveyard” that might be Ahab’s ship in The Thin Red Line. There is less mobility in Malick’s portait of America as the spiritual home of new horizons, the return to a green world of cycles and abundance. The camera roams and glides down ariver, as before, a low-riding crocodile, but there’s something of an inertness to what it sees, less of a sense of the life that’s on the bank, than earlier; The New World can feel more like a mapping of Heaven than a journey there.

Yet what Malick does superbly in his latest work is offer us a vision of Apocalypse Now at home; he bodies forth and enters the naturals so intensely that we see how they can link us to the world of opossum and coyote, and even bring us back to a network we’ve fallen out of. Their prancing, cuckooing figures, weird with animal sounds, totemic masks, chanting rituals, promise to colonize us with innocence; their bodies dart and swarm through the trees, looming up out of the undergrowth or appearing around rocks as if to take us to the primal order that Marlon Brando thinks he’s found at the end of Francis Ford Coppola’s epic movie. We feel on the pulse, each time we cross the frontier between native world and colonized, the difference, the distance between living in a world of presences and living in a world of death.

The mystic’s gamble is a ruthless one: in return for letting him carry us out of the everyday human scheme of things, he will show us the web that lies above and behind us, he silently promises, the ocean into which we dissolve as drops. We live on two levels at once, the Dalai Lama says in his latest book, about science, The Universe in a Single Atom, and the mystic’s aim is to take us out of “conventional reality,” all event and personality and the chatter of the monkey mind, into the silence and space, the hidden plotting of “ultimate reality.”

It sounds pretentious to invoke such terms, perhaps–and those who trace Malick back to Heidegger are never shy of pretension–but he almost asks us to take him on such terms by living in the neighborhood of pretension, in the world known as aspiration. His post-human movies offer us none of the consolations of daily life, none of the solace even of morality; they bring us simply, as in Dante or Melville, to the landscape of the soul.

“Who are you ? Who are you ?” each of the three lovers in The New World asks, in voice-over, and the voices that keep overlapping on the soundtrack begin to suggest the voices in our heads, as we play out, each one of us, the almost daily struggle between the angels and the beasts in us. “What do you dream of ?” Pocahonas’s new English husband asks her, as if concerned only with essentials. “I like grass,” she says, much as Linda Manz had done in Days of Heaven and, if those not won over to the Malick universe will say she’s stoned, those who sign on for his adventure will see it as the right–the natural–answer. As in Sigur Ros again, the sense of voices all around, not always meaning something, takes us into the realm of dream.

Beauty will lift the soul into the heavens: that is the impenitent, almost sacrilegious promise of a Terrence Malick film. Many, many movies these days are beautiful–more and more–but in no other that I’ve seen (though Anthony Minghella’s English Patient and Martin Scorsese’s Kundun come close) is beauty used as an actual promise, a force, almost a main character, the way it might have been used in the works of Mozart or a Renaissance artist. Few other films dare to try to invoke a presence of the divine so strong that beauty seems almost its instrument. Malick’s aim is to take us back to the time when man and what’s beyond man had a contract–the world of Mozart or the Renaissance painter–and he humbles me, shakes my heart with his cathedrals of light through the trees. Then he makes my tears real and deep with the philosophical weight that lies behind his images, the insistent questions about how we get back to ‘those other shores, the blue hills.”

He cracks me open, in fact, in ways that make all the other films of the day, attentive and intelligent and rewarding, seem very small indeed. Instead of characters he gives us fire, water, soil and sky, and instead of dialogue he gives us a perpetual dusk, grunts scrounging to the sound of Faure’s Requiem in Paradisum.  It is as if in film–just the play of light, a scan across a lake, a wolf suddenly appearing at the crest of a moonlit hill–he finds an ancestral form that rhymes with the very promise that first brought pilgrims to America. He’s the best hope we’ve got, I find myself believing, because hope, the best in us, is what keeps doggingand haunting those savages, in the light.

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