Malick the Philosopher

Terrence Malick and the Examined Life
by martin woessner
university of pennsylvania, 416 pages, $65

In his book God, Philosophy, Universities, Alasdair MacIntyre argues that “neither the university nor philosophy is any longer seen as engaging the questions” of “plain persons.” These questions include: “What is our place in the order of things? Of what powers in the natural and social world do we need to take account? How should we respond to the facts of suffering and death? What is our relationship to the dead? What is it to live a human life well? What is it to live it badly?”

MacIntyre’s critique of the university provides a fitting gloss on the frustrations experienced by Terrence Malick during his time studying philosophy as a Harvard undergraduate in the early 1960s. Malick, director of films such as Badlands (1973), The Thin Red Line (1998), and Tree of Life (2011),found professional philosophy alienating. He later wrote that, with the exception of one teacher's influence, his studies failed to help him “understand himself or his place in the cosmos.”

The questions MacIntyre poses—about suffering and death, our relation to the natural world and to the universal—are precisely those that have informed Malick’s filmmaking. The intersection of philosophy and film in the life, thought, and art of Malick is the subject of a new book, Terrence Malick and the Examined Life, by Martin Woessner, who argues that what Malick could not get out of academic philosophy “he has been seeking in motion pictures ever since.” Woessner’s book is unusual, not only in its reliance upon newly available archival material—particularly from the American Film Institute—but also in its locating of Malick’s project within the philosophical culture of Harvard and Oxford. At the latter, Malick did research on an ill-fated and never approved dissertation proposal on Heidegger, Kierkegaard, and Wittgenstein. Woessner’s opening chapter is titled “From Philosophy to Film”; the concluding chapter, “From Film to Philosophy,” records that Malick has recently held seminars on Plato’s Phaedrus, Epictetus’s Enchiridion, and the Gospel of Mark, as well as on Fellini and Kurosawa films—all under the theme of “redemption.”

The great exception among Malick’s Harvard teachers was Stanley Cavell, who taught a course on “the self-interpretation of man in Western thought” and who would soon publish a book titled The World Viewed (1971), which takes film seriously as a guide to the big philosophical questions. What resonated with Malick was Cavell’s distaste for professional philosophy, especially its analytic form, and a preference for questions about how to live. Literature and the arts, perhaps especially film, thus became a fit subject of philosophical inquiry, a means of mediating between high and low culture—and, in Malick’s case, between secular and sacred.

Malick was not of course averse to philosophy itself. Martin Heidegger, to whom he was personally introduced by Hannah Arendt, became his focus. He published a translation of Heidegger’s The Essence of Reasons in 1969 and embraced Heidegger’s turn away from the rationalistic, utilitarian bent of Western philosophy, particularly modern Western philosophy. Heidegger wanted to overcome the gulf—which can be traced back at least to Descartes—between the mind and the world. In his later works, he attempted to move entirely beyond traditional philosophical argument. Philosophy became for him a kind of meditative poetry in which, in a quasi-mystical manner, thinking becomes thanking, a stance of gratitude toward what is manifest in and through poetic language.

Now, if analytic philosophy is often dry and technical, continental philosophy is too often burdened by arcane language and a penchant for the abstruse and obscure. Heidegger would not seem to be the ideal philosopher for someone working in the popular genre of film—one who has directed such actors as Brad Pitt, Sean Penn, and George Clooney. Indeed, Malick’s films, one of which was described by the critic Stanley Kauffman as “emptily portentous” and “mopily terse,” seem to work hard to exclude a popular audience. Woessner himself says that Malick is averse to “dialogue, narrative, or plot,” even to “theatricality” itself.I think Woessner goes too far here. As his interpretations of Malick’s films often indicate, the director has crafted a distinctively cinematic grammar.

Like many academic Christians, I first came to the serious engagement of Malick upon the release of Tree of Life, which I reviewed for First Things. Among the many remarkable elements of that film, two things in particular struck me. The first was the unusual use of voiceover. Giving viewers access to the interior thoughts of characters, the voiceover in Malick’s films communicates their interior prayers—the questions, doubts, hopes, and desires they express to God. Silent prayers are a common enough phenomenon for plain persons in everyday life, yet they almost never surface in voiceovers in movies. The voiceover in Malick’s films is frequently in the interrogative mood: Characters pose questions to others, to nature, and to God. Most of the time it is clear which character is speaking, but sometimes it is difficult to tell. The speaker, it seems, could be anyone, perhaps even the viewer.

I was struck, too, by Malick’s frequent recourse to strong vertical camera angles: The perspective starts low and rises up through trees, ascending toward the sky and sun. The persistent suggestion throughout his oeuvre seems to be that in addition to considering the horizontal flow of the action, we need to attend to a vertical dimension, that of the whole cosmos and perhaps of its divine source.

Like great books, great films repay repeat visits. That’s not just because of the depth of their stories, but because they teach us how to view them. As Woessner shows, Malick follows filmmakers from Bergman to Hitchcock in prompting his audience to reflect on the conditions of the making and viewing of images. In Badlands, in which the characters seem all surface, Sissy Spacek’s character’s use of a stereopticon, a kind of primitive slide projector, inspires her to ask questions about her future life and what matters. She confronts her mortality as a “little girl destined to die,” and wonders who she might have been if she had never become entwined with the murderous Kit. These images stir a haunting, days-long dread.

Religious themes come to the fore in Malick’s later films, from Tree of Life through To the Wonder (2012) and A Hidden Life (2019). But Woessner shows that Malick has been preoccupied with theology throughout his career. Early on, he considered making film versions of richly theological books like A Canticle for Leibowitz and Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. During the filming of Badlands, Malick recommended to Martin Sheen, who plays the serial killer protagonist, that he read Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. Sheen has said that the book prompted his return to the Catholic faith. More recently, after watching Martin Scorsese’s film version of Shusaku Endo’s Silence, Malick wrote to the director to ask, “What does Jesus demand of us?”

One of the most compelling elements in Woessner’s interpretation of Malick has to do with the influence of Kierkegaard, an influence possibly eclipsing that of Heidegger. Perhaps the most surprising question in the list that MacIntyre adduces as central to a liberal education concerns what we owe to the dead. That question, and related ones concerning what we owe to the dying, surface regularly in Malick’s films. They are also the subject of a remarkable reflection by Kierkegaard. In Works of Love, Kierkegaard praises the recollection of the dead. By practicing the “most unselfish, the freest, and the most faithful” acts of love toward those whom we no longer see and from whom we expect no return, we learn to “love the living” whom we do see “unselfishly, freely, and faithfully.” Kierkegaard’s way of remembering death is more concrete and more life-giving than Heidegger’s abstract “being toward death.”

In one of the most intense combat scenes in The Thin Red Line, a film about a clash in the Guadalcanal Campaign in the Second World War, a soldier risks his life to go across the battlefield to a lethally injured comrade. He knows that he cannot save him, but he provides him with pain medication and comforts him. He imperils his life to care for a dying fellow soldier.

Heidegger’s “being toward death” tends toward the isolation of the lone individual. In Kierkegaard’s telling, by contrast, though the “hidden life speaks to single individuals in their innermost being,” it is precisely in that individuality that they discover an “unfathomable connectedness with all existence”: In their core, “God is a gushing spring.”

Both Hidden Life and Tree of Life, as Woessner notes, depict the way in which “one solitary life is connected to all of existence.” Malick regularly turns viewers’ attention to the whole, the encompassing natural cosmos. One of the peculiar features of Tree of Life is its inclusion of a lengthy cosmic creation sequence, from the Big Bang through the formation of planets and the evolutionary development of life on Earth. Hidden Life, a film about the martyrdom of Franz Jägerstätter by the Nazis, sets the action in the mountainous region of Sankt Radegund, Jägerstätter’s hometown. The technique of inserting shots of the natural world into the human action is drawn from celebrated European filmmakers such as Jean Renoir, who used it to shock characters into being—as Woessner puts it—“struck by something outside their reach.” In this way Malick presents a “world of proliferating mystery” and sees film as a vehicle for the “redemption of physical reality.”

Tree of Life is about remembering the dead. It is also about lamenting loss and questioning God. Its epigraph is from Job: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth . . . when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for Joy?” Here again, Woessner underscores Kierkegaardian themes. Kierkegaard sees Job as a model of someone “unsatisfied with explanation second hand” and unwilling to accept “formulaic talk of providence.” It is often noted that God does not provide Job with a justification; what is missed is a point on which Kierkegaard seizes. God actually speaks to Job. As Kierkegaard puts it, Job’s lament “prompts a response from God more glorious than the gossip of men about God.” Many of Malick’s characters aspire to be Job, that is, they raise questions, doubts, accusations, pleas to God in the hope that he might respond.

In a telling line from Tree of Life, a young boy asks his mother to tell him a story from before he can remember. Tree of Life attempts to tell the earliest story of all, the story from before any human being can remember, the story of the creation of the universe. So, Woessner suggests, the response to God’s question to Job is that in a sense we actually were there at the creation of the universe, since the human world is part of the grand narrative of creation. Through its lengthy creation sequence that eventually settles down to tell a human story in a small town in Texas (Waco, of all places), the film suggests that we were there at the beginning both in the sense that the process of creation seems to lead to us and in the sense that the stuff of the universe constitutes at least part of the stuff that makes us human. Here another theme from Kierkegaard, that of repetition, emerges. But this is repetition on a grand scale.

Woessner’s informed and lucid book demonstrates the deep and ongoing influence of Kierkegaard and Heidegger. While reading it, I could not help thinking of a line in the book Cosmos, written by a philosopher unknown to Malick, the Thomist Charles de Koninck: “We will only be able to understand ourselves when we understand the universe. Our present is filled with the past.”

Thomas Hibbs is the J. Newton Rayzor Sr. Professor of Philosophy and Dean Emeritus at Baylor University.

Image by Terrence Malick. Image cropped.