Digital Static: Returning To The Wonder

          To the Wonder, Terrence Malick’s sixth feature film, is both a reflective look back and a daring leap forward for the director. It very much extends the qualities that have come to define Malick’s work—a didactic editing style based around natural elements, an emphasis on movement and gestures to convey emotions, and a solemn, poetic voiceover. However, while some have seen the film as a minor b-side to The Tree of Life, it is very much a break, a reorganization of principles more than anything else. While his Texan set childhood nostalgia piece searched and celebrated a forgotten Promised Land of Americana, To The Wonder is emotionally bare and claustrophobic film, at times a psychological horror flick. The gestures of Malick’s previous films are repeated but they are closed in, made meaningless as the modern and suburban ennui overtake his protagonist, Marina. I find it to be an devastating work.

            I have already written at length on the film, but I returned to it again, and have even more to say about what I believe will be seen as a transitional piece in Malick’s filmography. I first want to address comments made by my friend Jason Bellamy on my original piece. Jason writes:

I'm especially skeptical of almost all criticism that tries to tie a director's work to his (or her) personal life. Doing so suggests that the narrative we know about the director's life is accurate (as if public figures unselfishly expose their true selves to us), that they don't have secrets, and that they're as two-dimensional as the narratives about them tend to be…I'm even more skeptical about attempts to tie autobiographical motivations to the work of Malick, a director everyone agrees we know very little about.…this review, while possibly accurate, has an uncomfortable number of "clearly" and "certainly" readings within it, as it relates to Malick's motivation. (Most notably: Aren't you going pretty far out on the limb to say that Malick is "clearly in a crisis"?)…Put another way, much of your analysis that this film is a masterpiece seems to hang on the belief that it's vividly revelatory about Malick. But what if it isn't?

As always, I appreciate Jason’s comments, and if you haven’t, you should read his own piece on the film. Having Jason’s comments in mind, I did try and separate myself from the “Authorial Intent Fallacy” while viewing the film a second time. But what I cannot separate myself from is certainly Malick’s other films, and how much this work stands in contrast to his other work. Many critics who have come out negatively against the film have stated that the gestures and twirls feel vague and without emotion—I would say its more the opposite. They no longer carry the magic once felt before, and that’s the central dichotomy at play. In Jason’s review, he writes, “I suspect that many of us who have Malick's movies printed on our heart will find it difficult to watch Kurylenko's Marina raising her hands to salute a storm without thinking about Q'orianka Kilcher's Pocahontas doing the same in The New World…What once felt specific, organic and true now feels random and offhand, which threatens to retroactively suffocate the charms of To the Wonder's predecessors.” I would instead argue is that Malick is searching for meaning to that gesture in this (very) new world, but unable to find the same resonance, and then must deal with the emotional consequences of it.

In Defense of Oblivion

      Why defend Oblivion? Oblivion doesn’t need any sort of defense—it’s a big, very loud sci-fi flick that has made more than enough money already and can only be shameless Hollywood product that meant to indulge what little of your brain it can why throwing as much trash onto the screen possible. Right? Big products like this with big studios and big stars only care about grabbing paychecks and moving onto the next shameless project. Studios can’t care about craft.

            That’s a lot of the rhetoric I’ve seen thrown around Oblivion, a film that I feel the need to defend, not just as something that I found quite entertaining, but also something that I think perceptions of what it aspires to be often cloud the judgment of viewers. Oblivion is far from perfect—it actually has numerous issues that keep it from being anything truly worth upholding as a major work—but the reason it needs defense is that once one draws a party line, one begins to see everything in the film as a problem. One begins to point the moments of interest and simply call them bad instead of thinking through them. Yes, Oblivion has good things and bad things—but it also has interesting things worth discussing, and to discuss their meaning, their narrative function, and, yes, their artistry is what I find why I need to defend Oblivion—not for the sake of giving the film more of an audience, but to hope that every film can get a proper due, no matter who or what is behind it.

Terrence Malick's To The Wonder

This past

Is now here: the painter's

Reflected face, in which we linger, receiving

Dreams and inspirations on an unassigned

Frequency...

-John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, 1975

Update: I wrote a second piece on the film here.
   
         Terrence Malick has always made movies through himself—his view of the world, and how his eyes connect to the experiences he sees and grapples with. There have been countless attempts to describe his perspective: the connections between man and nature, life and death, the one and the many. “All things shining” to use that final, elliptical line in The Thin Red Line. It almost feels like there is no point in attempting to articulate Malick anymore: even the closest descriptions often still fail to capture the opulence of his filmmaking. But the one person who hasn’t questioned or described Malick’s filmmaking and philosophy is Malick himself.

            The often described as reclusive director—a statement that fails to see that his “non-statements” are just as telling as those whose blabber appears on talk shows and Twitter—has made a new film, coming to theaters under two years after his massive project, The Tree of Life. But To The Wonder, a title filled with both richness and hidden meanings, is not an extension of that 2011 tone poem of childhood nostalgia and cosmic grandeur, but instead almost its polar opposite.

            Malick has often placed himself at the centers of his narrative: the one who speaks for him: Holly, Linda, Witt, Jack, often speak for him. His films, thus, have been more or less about him enforcing his philosophical perspective onto the worlds of his characters. The tension released by this—often by imposing his style onto classic American genres like lovers on the run, WW2 combat picture, and childhood melodrama—has always released by Malick’s side “winning.” We give into his view than the one we’re used to.

            It is essential then, that Malick’s own figure in To The Wonder is passive, lumbering, somewhat adrift—a heavy figure nailed Neil, played by Ben Affleck. His muse, Marina, is the floating, beautiful, and always reaching for the sky Olga Kurylenko. She’s the main figure in the film—and certainly the Malickian figure. But she is not Malick.