"Ritual", the Missing Link of Terrence Malick's Cinema

Looking at Distant Seas

Amir Siadat

After making love with Holly in the wood and before returning to town, Kit picks up a piece of rock as a souvenir. Later, when his path goes on as an aimless journey through twisting roads and constantly running away from the law, he buries some of his and Holly's photos and belongings in the desert: Maybe in the next thousand years someone will dig here and find these. In the final chase and escape, when he finds himself almost at the end of the rope and on the verge of being caught, he stops moving, gets out of the car, piles a handful of rubble on top of each other, and then surrenders to the police without any resistance. Did he want to make a memorial of the moment he was arrested with that stone, which looks like a small ziggurat? What is the meaning of the memories and signs that Kit leaves behind? It seems that he has never experienced stability and safety and he is not going to. His whole life can be summed up in the word “repetition”. He is constantly passing and if he settles somewhere, it is temporary. He is always condemned to retrace the previous path for another temporary settlement. So maybe the memories he leaves are an attempt to give credit to a meaningless world and a ritual exit from the cycle of dying minutes. It is as if he wants to mummify the seconds and make eternal moments out of them. He wants to - symbolically - stop the spinning wheel from rotating and dig a tunnel from passing time to a ritual, eternal and immortal time.

Ritual is the missing link of Terrence Malick's cinema. He talks of the fate of man in a non-ritual and disenchanted world. The ritual world that Kit is looking for in Badlands is the same attraction that made John Smith in The New World and the weary soldiers in The Thin Red Line be fascinated by the consoling pulse of the lives of the native Indians and the Melanesian primitive people. On the other hand, the non-ritual world is the one that the British settlers created after invading the untouched land of the Indians. It is the same military ship that comes along with the horror of war and drives the Melanesian natives away from the coast; It is the same world that according to Jack (Sean Penn) in The Tree of Life has fallen into the hands of the inferior; The cold world of skyscrapers and depressing buildings.

Malick's cinema is the eloquent language of confusion. His characters are wandering. The lack of belonging and settlement can be seen from the external aspect of their lives (Kit and Holly's temporary homes in Badlands, Bill and Abby's homelessness - or the final image of Linda and her friend walking away along the train tracks towards an unknown destination - in Days of Heaven, the shaky and uncertain situation of soldiers in The Thin Red Line, the imprisonment and permanent strangeness of Pocahontas and Smith in The New World) to a kind of lack of stability in their minds and psyches can be recognized (the pinnacle of which is Jack in The Tree of Life). This disorientation in Badlands on the path of its contemporary outlaw cinema (from Bonnie and Clyde to Taxi Driver) has a clear relationship with the disintegration of the ideology that supported America in the war and the transformation of all social and political structures related to it - above all the culture of patriarchy (violation of the law and the fall of the elders from their high position) gradually tends to a kind of existentialist concern and apprehension, and the further we go, the more internal it becomes.

Badlands is obviously loaded with prominent themes of the late 1960s and early 1970s and talk about the distrust of the new generation in traditional values and about the weakening of the family foundation and the breaking of the family law; After that, Malick never respond so directly to the political-cultural conditions of his time. Just as Kit, bored with the modern urban life, goes through the nature and builds his house on top of the tree, Malick did not want the world he depicted in Badlands and looked for what he lost in the nature. He also felt alienated by this non-ritual world and had a tendency to return and kept going back: To the past, to the "heaven" before the First World War, to the days of American occupation and the "new world" that was gradually taking shape in the 17th century, and even to the moment of creation in The Tree of Life. Behind these returns lies a romantic and poetic effort to find the spirituality associated with nature.

In Days of Heaven, the scenes are mostly exterior and the frames are full of details of life in nature: endless wheat fields and meadows, the sky that sometimes takes up more than half of the frame with flowing and colorful clouds and people, horses and shepherds together. From Days of Heaven onwards, the presence of documentary images and imagery becomes one of the main identifiers of Malick's works. sometimes imaginative and sometimes documentary-like images of nature, which most of the times are outside the continuous flow and the main body of the story, but as if they have gained an importance equal to the main situations of the story to highlight the contrast between the finite human drama and the ongoing drama in nature: grasshoppers that chew wheat stalks, a crocodile that slowly sinks into the cesspool, a ray of light on the leaves of the forest trees, the wind that blows in the reeds, the clouds that separate from each other, fish in the clear water of the river, the reflection of the sky in the water.

In The Thin Red Line nature is piled of corpses, in The New World the pristine habitat of the natives has fallen into the hands of the conquerors who want to harmonize it with the relations of modern life, and in The Tree of Life we are facing a super-modern world that is disconnected from nature. Malick thinks about the time when man lived in the heart of the nature and he was not cut off from it. He wants to be related to the beginning, to the birthplace (Texas), to nature, to the mother, to childhood and infancy, to the womb, to the waters of the womb, to the beginning waters or the myth of creation. The image of a person immersed in water, as a sign of salvation, is one of his constant motifs: Melanesian children are immersed in water and their mothers bathe them in the river; Native Indians, some in the deep water, some sitting on the banks of the river, seem like a piece of nature. In The Tree of Life, the swimming child rises from the depths of a room full of water and the doors are opened in front of him so that his umbilical cord is cut when he leaves the mother's womb. The death and salvation of the soldiers of The Thin Red Line and Pocahontas of The New World means returning to the paradise of clear waters and green and fertile forests of the Melanesian islands and the habitat of the native Indians; Returning to the old hometown and perhaps to the uniformity and integrity of primitive life; to the days when classification, division of duties and personalization had not yet been formed. What is ritual but ignoring human distinction and individuality and making it possible to gather together in a unified whole and a single spirit?

In Malick's existentialism, what makes people feel alienated and lonely is the passion and ecstasy that Nietzsche calls "Dionysian"; Dionysus, the god of celebration and wine, who against the system of ascetic ethics and rejecting nature in Christian, spoke of earthly pleasures and saluted to life. That is why in The New World, Wagner's opera peaks in the scene of Pocahontas' happy return to the village. Nietzsche believed that Dionysus, after a long absence from the Western civilization, has appeared again in the guise of Wagner; An absence which is the result of the excessive reliance of Plato-like attitude on Apollonian wisdom (as another strain of Greek culture) and neglect of the joy and narcissism hidden in natural desires. Western metaphysics is based on two worlds, real (authentic) and apparent, so that the soul - at the expense of the body - is elevated, and with the removal of instincts and motivations from the Platonic city-state, life becomes a victim of truth-seeking. The continuation of such a view reaches the pious and ascetic teachings of Christianity, so that the body is considered as something ignoble and is reduced to a mere means to reach the aim of existence (negation of earthly life and transcendence to the eternal abode). The metaphysical worldview (from the time of Socrates and Plato to the nineteenth century) whether in the form of moral systems or medieval discipline or in the guise of philosophy, has always been concerned with an abstract truth and something beyond sensory perceptions. It seems that Malick has always narrated human wanderings that are stuck in the realm of metaphysical thought and are far away from nature. As evidenced by his camera, the passion for liberation should be sought not in the cloudiness of the sky, but in the views of the wide meadows, in the endless expanse of the fertile plains, and in the dancing on the fertile earth with bare feet.

If the ritual of Dionysus was focused on the death and life of the plant god and was connected to the earth and femininity, the wisdom of Apollon was born of the city-state and the cognate of rationality and philosophy. The former one was based on instinct and unconsciousness, and the latter was based on wisdom and conscious intelligence. Jung called the unconscious feminine and considered the conscious, which operated on the basis of logic and wisdom, masculine. Therefore, perhaps the passivity of women and the drying up of the sources of female creativity in Malick's cinema tells of the story of the Suppression of Dionysian forces in a patriarchal culture. Maybe this passion is the romantic photos that a soldier looks for in the battle of war: the hands of a woman who can be loved; A woman swaying joyfully and her faded and abundant reflection in the mirror come to life and die in front of our eyes. Pocahontas, who at first among her fellow tribesmen and in the heart of primitive life, is so creative and active and talks to the sky, water and earth as if nature is under her command, by going to the group of conquering immigrants, gradually is emptied of creativity and with turning into a dependent function, takes a step toward the slope of death. Throughout this cinema, human is a being separated from nature, whose Oedipal journey and behavior remains unfulfilled. From this point of view, The Tree of Life, is Malick's frank criticism of the metaphysical worldview.

“Do you see this line? Don't cross it!” The father stands in front of the children with a strong stature and strict rules, and in their eyes, he is an enviable and also frightening figure of limits and boundaries, order and authority, and the mother is the opposite point of him, flexible, lively and still a child. If the father wakes up his children to go to church with military seriousness and with a harsh and repulsive behavior, the mother puts ice in Jack's shirt to wake him up, and this is the beginning of laughter and joy. The father's flight was made possible by the industry (airplane), while the existence of the mother's wings made it possible to fly like birds. Coexistence with butterflies and fish, playing with dogs, dancing bubbles in the air, crawling into the embrace of a tree, and graceful rotations in the hands of the mother, ties plant and animal life to Jack's childhood to give the word “mother” a two-way function and dissolve the assurance and calmness of her face in the simple and welcoming image of mother nature. That’s why in the absence of the father, the brothers happily release their hidden energy and giggle freely while playing with mother. The ascetic ethics of paternalism is gathered together in the existence of the father; the mother surrenders to this moral system. After the death of his son, they advise her that "[God] himself gives and he himself takes back" and she has no choice but to submit to what she does not understand; Just as Job never understands why he has to endure all that pain and suffering. In the following, the name of God is interwoven in the figure of a father who is the lawmaker but does not adhere to any law, and disobeying his orders has dire consequences. Over the lunch time he has ordered silence, but he continues to talk until one of the children says what he should not: "Shut up." In this way, the table of food, the point of collision and intersection of religious masks (all demonstrations and rituals of thanksgiving directed to the sky) and human and instinctive needs (nutrition) becomes a dramatic place that clearly reflects the dual plan of The Tree of Life. After the tension that occurs between him and the boys, the father expresses one of the long-standing illusions of the paternalistic society in a conversation with the mother: You have raised my children against me.

According to the old traditions, the patriarchal society from the distant past also kept their children away from the influence of the mother and left them in the hands of nannies due to such fear. Perhaps the myth of the conspiracy of Rhea and his son Zeus to overcome Cronus (Rhea's wife), which in the end leads to lining up all the children of Cronus in front of him, is telling the same ancient horror. During the era of patriarchy, this myth was overturned to narrate the alignment of children against the mother, followed by the rule of the father (for example, the killing of Tiamat/first mother by her children and the kingship of Marduk). Because of this old fear, women have been kept away from social and political activities, and they have been asked to be dependent and surrendered (occurrence of this argument in the kitchen added to the irony of this scene). The film mixes religious elements and Oedipal elements in the way of a humanistic interpretation of the God/Father issue and turns the human fear of punishment into fear of the son of his father. Jack's conscience, which is offended and restless because of the desire to kill his father, becomes more or less equated with the eternal guilt that Christianity has placed on man's shoulders: “God, help me not to disrespect my father” (and further with the intensification of this desire: “God, kill him”). Days of Heaven also begins with the original sin: after killing his superior in the factory, Bill runs away to take refuge in the boundless plains of Texas, but even there sin cannot be separated from him and Abby, and at the same time, as the illicit relationship between the two is revealed to the landowner (Abby's wife), the wheat field is attacked by locusts and fire (like the outbreak of the plague in the city of Thebes in the tragedy of Oedipus, which is a reaction to a deadly sin). Kit's wandering in Badlands and stepping into desert of meaningless seems to be the result of Holly's father's murder: the father's dead body is in the house, and the house is on fire, and the church music of Carl Orff seems to sing a lament for the Christian values that burn and turn into dust with the father. The father in The Tree of Life is the church organist and church music often accompany him. Isn't he the embodiment or human representative of the transcendental matter located beyond the natural world for which man sacrifices his strongest desires, namely, his nature and instinct? - The same matter that Nietzsche thought had lost its previous power in Western culture and announced its death.

The silence of the supernatural forces fills the void between the characters of The Tree of Life and the sky, and the images, in contrast to the speech of the book of Job and the pleading whispers of the characters, lead to the theory of evolution and Darwin. The film looks through eternal abstract images, mixing colors, molten materials, and the formation of life from microscopic organisms to fish, birds, and dinosaurs, and a large part of it takes place on the level of the concept of creation. The tendency to replace the narrator's words with prayers and whispers and creating a break in the chain of fictional events can also be traced in Malick's previous works. The monologues give a nostalgic effect to every frame of Malick, in such a way that even his most passionate and lively images take on the tone of sorrow. We know that what we see is something that has passed, related to the past, due to the whispering narration of the narrators. This point turns the happiest moments into the saddest because a good memory means losing a good moment at best! People are unhappy that they remember the joys that have gone away. According to Horace nothing is more bitter than the joys of the past. There was a happiness once that no longer exists and - as a result - the desire to repeat it remains. Malick's whispering and fragmented narrations in combination with his restless camera turns every frame into a fading bliss image, and his interruption constantly postpones the continuity to leave a feeling of lack of duration, deficiency and discontinuity and tell the tale of "discontinuity". The predominance of the imagery - which, in line with the obvious tendency of Malick's cinema to "return" and according to the teachings of psychologists, can be called the desire to return to the pre-symbolic stage in childhood (the negation of language and the desire to replace the image) - in The Tree of Life is subject to thematic expansion and the scientific approach of the film; An approach that with relying on the three names that brought modern man back to nature (Darwin, Nietzsche and Freud) shakes the foundations of Christian arguments. The unexpected pause on the images of the formation of life and harmonizing them with the unanswerable prayers of human, except that it does not carry or receive transcendental meanings, has given nature a terrifying force in which every kind of human will is lost and the echo of every cry goes silent.

At the end of the inner journey of The Tree of Life, Jack smiles at the irony hidden in life, at the neurotic consequences of separation from nature and metaphysical worldview, and forgives the father's violence (comparable to, and of course opposite to, Tarkovsky's Revelations of Solaris; When Kris on his return, kneels in front of his father) and achieves something that is apparently insignificant in the scale of anxieties and wanderings he went through: to love. But is this insignificant? And have the men of politics and history, those who have made much greater promises, brought more happiness and welfare to humanity?