Malick, in other words, is a director who established himself during the transition from Old Hollywood to New Hollywood, where experimenting became the norm, and it is while experimenting at the American Film Institute (AFI) and the Center for Advanced Film Studies that he was able to accomplish his goals: to have nomadic characters find meaning while on their existential travels, whatever that meaning may look like, and even if there is no meaning at all; and producing film-philosophy considered works of art rather than mere mind candy for the masses.
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Terrence Malick is an academic; a student of continental philosophy; a film director whose muses are Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, and Husserl; a dabbler in “stranscendentalism and theology”; and a devourer of popular “novels, poems, and plays” (12). As a filmmaker, he has to navigate money-grubbing producers and the perils of bureaucracy; however, he intentionally pushes away what would be considered business as usual to ensure that one’s “examined life” is represented on-screen. This aspect of Malick’s canon is the primary focus of Martin Woessner’s Terrence Malick and the Examined Life. Malick, in other words, is a director who established himself during the transition from Old Hollywood to New Hollywood, where experimenting became the norm, and it is while experimenting at the American Film Institute (AFI) and the Center for Advanced Film Studies that he was able to accomplish his goals: to have nomadic characters find meaning while on their existential travels, whatever that meaning may look like, and even if there is no meaning at all; and producing film-philosophy considered works of art rather than mere mind candy for the masses.
Woessner makes it known early that he is going to emphasize Malick’s protagonists, who are representations of the director and his quest for meaning. Woessner thus presents each chapter as a progression on Malick’s journey toward enlightenment, analyzing each of the films, from Badlands (1973) to A Hidden Life (2019), as if they are steps toward an understanding of the world, a world that may or may not exist. And what better way to show how those travels begin than with a road movie, a quintessential genre during the 1960s and early 1970s. Badlands, like most road pictures, is about “cars and cruising, outlaws and open roads” and is a “perfect allegory for [the filmmaker’s] artistic struggles,” in that “it prioritized conflict and liberation” (28). Starring Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek, the film is about vagrant murderers Kit and Holly, a couple who have no real motive to kill other than to justify their own existences. The film is also self-reflexive in that it is a movie about movies, and how audiences relate to movies, similar to that of the Western, another genre Malick seemed to revere, according to Woessner, because of the “alienated protagonists struggling to survive in increasingly modern, even more regimented surroundings” (39). Malick appreciated and emulated the cowboy figure or outlaw in that he was a violent threat to the status quo and had to be punished for his rabble-rousing ways. In fact, his first film, Lanton Mills: The Cincinnatus of Texas (1969), which he made while at the AFI, was a tried-and-true Western with a modern spin; however, ironically, it has since been vaulted by the institute and can no longer be seen by the general public. Woessner speaks to how Malick’s work is a philosophical commentary on such things as auteurism, film violence, the need for celebrity, self-mythologizing and the creation of persona, depictions of anxiety, and audience spectatorship that derives from New Hollywood allusions and a reverence for existentialism, which places to the fore human nature, free will, and the ways we exist in the natural and metaphysical world.
Unlike Badlands, Days of Heaven (1978), according to Woessner, is “a very human tale” (77) about a metaphysical and idyllic farming world, where one’s livelihood could change in seconds, whether naturally or not. Unlike other bombastic films that delve into prairie life, Days of Heaven is more of “anti-epic” (79) due to its “hushed tones and meditative stillness” (80). The film is naturalistic, quiet, “inquisitive” (79), poetic, and filled with a sense of wonder and anxiety (81). Days of Heaven is not typical genre filmmaking: it is a biblical, philosophical, metaphysical Western containing raging infernos and destructive locusts along with Heidegger’s Daesin, the metaphysical concept that human existence and the world survive as one Being. It is in these moments in Terrence Malick and the Examined Life that readers start to see Malick’s brilliance as an auteur and a film-philosopher. Woessner makes the likes of Heidegger and Stanley Cavell (among multiple others) accessible to a general public not familiar with their oftentimes confusing postmodernist language.
Another way Woessner makes Malick’s films understandable is his use of a linear, sporadic timeline that spans multiple decades. At the beginning of his career, Malick was notorious for not putting out films for years at a time (a tradition he has since abandoned). Twenty years after Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line (1998) opened to critical acclaim and soon after became a revered addition to the director’s oeuvre. A loose adaptation of James Jones’s 1962 novel, the film “exposes just how unreal dramatized depictions of combat death and military violence usually are when they are compared to the real thing” (114). According to Woessner, the film “shows that the supposedly heroic nature of war is always and everywhere overshadowed by the brutal realities of modern, industrialized violence” (116), and that death, being ever-connected to the horrors of war, is “omnipresent,” “anonymous, empty, and meaningless” (117), because of how pervasive it is. There is no distinction between the weapon and the person who uses it. The weapon becomes an extension of who they are, which makes The Thin Red Line more contemporary, relevant, and introspective than many of its predecessors; and distinctions between servicemen are only made with personal, contemplative voice-over narrations, even though many of the actors in the film are famous and recognizable. The weapons used also cut through the beauty of the landscape, a common trope in Malick’s canon. Scenes emphasize “tropical waters, jungle canopies, and native villages” rather than the “skirmishes and battles” that ripped through Guadalcanal (128), because Malick is more interested in the natural world and the souls of these men than in war and soldiers (130).
The same can be said about Jamestown and those who inhabit it in The New World (2005). Jamestown, Captain John Smith, and Pocahontas have become mythic, according to Woessner, even if historical and real; and, Jamestown itself has been depicted in a variety of ways for generations, most especially as the embodiment of “the burgeoning national ethos of the United States” (149) rather than the horrific disaster it was. The author displays considerable knowledge of the histories (both historic and constructed) of the New World. His research materials are impeccable and his use of sources effortless. Woessner is an interdisciplinarian with 20 years of knowledge in film-philosophy and history; his prose is polished, passionate, and maturely constructed. The same can be said about his close readings of Malick’s historical/mythological films and characters, which are expertly connected to the philosophical concepts the author alludes to throughout the book. Captain John Smith and Pocahontas are romanticized, and yet Malick recognizes that the “colonial enterprise” is “brutal, dismal, [and] demeaning,” and disturbs “the natural order” of what was once an Eden-like paradise (172). In essence, Malick recognizes that movies are a combination of both worlds, the world in the film and the world of the film (177), and movies are “worldly artforms” (179) that depict how the natural world, which includes human beings, can survive when the unnatural world, which includes human beings, is determined to destroy the natural world.
Woessner recognizes that the films represent a very subjective and personal journey for Malick. This leads to a brilliant discussion of The Tree of Life (2011), To the Wonder (2013), Knight of Cups (2016), and Malick’s documentary, Voyage of Time (2016), films that “represent a unique kind of autobiographical cinema” (185). Woessner’s final chapters are about Malick himself and how all of these films were about topics that “preoccupied Malick in all the various stages of his life: when he was a budding filmmaker in Hollywood, when he studied philosophy at Oxford and Harvard, when he was a boarding-school student at St. Stephen’s Episcopal, but also when he was just a curious kid in suburban Oklahoma” (186-187). These four films, spanning five years, are, according to Woessner, about self-reflection; his journey from doubt to faith; mortality (life and death as tied to each other); his connection with the cosmos and the Creation (cosmic consciousness); his relationship with the Bible and philosophical teachings; his relationship with nature and how the camera sees the natural world; his love of cinematic masters like Renoir, Bresson, and Fellini; gender dynamics; etc. Ultimately, these films (especially The Tree of Life) are a way to show how Malick’s “life – his experiences and his memories – fit into the ongoing story of creation” (219). What Woessner does in these final chapters is unpack why Malick’s films can be so maddening at times, in that they are more about him and his characters and less about his audience. Malick lets us in to see his worldview and his search for meaning through his lens; however, who is he compared to those who watch his films? In other words, what makes Malick so special? Yes, he is a masterful director with a wide-ranging understanding of philosophy and filmic/world history; and he seemingly is like the rest of humanity in that he is still searching for what it all means. However, Woessner should have devoted more time to giving his readers a sense of why they should follow Malick’s thought processes about the world around him. Woessner appreciates his work. The question is: Why should we?
The last chapters of Terrence Malick and the Examined Life speak to Song to Song (2017) and A Hidden Life, one of which is considered one of his worst films, the other one of his best. Woessner states, “Like all directors, Malick has made some curious choices over the years. Some of his cinematic experiments have worked, others have not. But each has been, in its own unique way, necessary” (269). Again, it is hard not to agree that Malick is an auteur who loves the subject matters he delves into, but how does Woessner define “necessary”? Malick’s films may be a cinematic pilgrimage through his mind, his thoughts, his perceptions, but are his viewers in dialogue with him or is he in his own world? Ultimately, these questions do not get answered, because Woessner does not seem to mind tagging along with Malick and “listening” to his filmic pontifications. He reveres this director who gives his audiences “plenty of material for a long, hopefully edifying, conversation” (320) about how film and philosophy can come together to create a sense of wonder for anyone willing to examine themselves and their relationship to what is truly a beautiful world.
