I didn’t know
about this book (Martin Woessner’s Terrence Malick and the Examined Life [2024])
until I randomly happened upon it at the library a couple of months ago. I
instinctively checked it out and have been gradually making my way through it during
free throw breaks during the NBA playoffs and other interstitial moments in my
life, until I finally sped through the last few chapters today because it’s due back
and I want it out of the way so I can focus on material more pertinent to my
current project. I have some thoughts about it and when I started typing them
out it got longer than a tweet, so I decided to write this little blog post,
which because written on a whim will be brief and non-exhaustive. Verdict: the book is O.K. It definitely has a decent amount to recommend to anyone interested in
Malick—heavy contextualization of the state of philosophy both in general in the mid-to-late 20th century and specifically at Harvard around Malick’s time
there in the 1960s, as well as detailed information about the AFI’s inaugural film
school and Malick’s activities there; a deeply researched accounting of Malick’s
wide and disparate influences both artistic and otherwise (I particularly found
insightful the pinpointing of Jean Renoir as a stylistic influence on Malick as
it pertains to his penchant for nature montage, including Renoir’s 1959 film Picnic
in the Grass, a rare and still-unseen-by-me-because-of-that-reason picture
that was the topic of discussion at a March 1970 Center for Advanced Film
Studies seminar that Malick introduced); as well as other miscellaneous trivia
/ interesting ephemera about Malick that I had never heard before or had
forgotten about, scattered throughout the book—but my main disappointment with
the book can be hinted at by a simple mathematical accounting of the book’s content
structure: full chapters on Badlands (47 pages), Days of Heaven (36
pages), The Thin Red Line (37 pages), The New World (37 pages), and
The Tree of Life (39 pages), but then only one combined chapter on To
the Wonder, Knight of Cups, and Voyage of Time (43 pages) and on Song
to Song and A Hidden Life (47 pages). Woessner’s enthusiasm progressively
starts to wane slightly as we hit To the Wonder and Knight of Cups and
then reaches an obvious low point with Song to Song, where he goes from mostly
hiding behind quotes from dissatisfied and confused critics to speaking
outright on his opinion of it being lesser Malick. He still continues to
provide interesting reference points and discussion of Malick’s evolution as a film-philosopher,
so they aren’t totally worthless, but I’d be lying if I didn’t start to get a
little worked-up during the Song to Song section in particular. He comes
back to life a bit in the A Hidden Life section, a predictable move, but
you can still sense that he’s uncomfortable to a certain degree with Malick’s
progressive turn away from what one would probably call philosophy towards what
one would probably call theology. His decision to do away with the common
grouping of the three contemporary-set films does, however, strike me as usefully
thought-provoking; he instead groups The Tree of Life, To the Wonder, and
Knight of Cups as part of what he calls the “confessional” trilogy—films
explicitly based on parts of Malick’s biography—and recategorizes Song to
Song next to A Hidden Life, two films that are more explicitly
Christian in their outlook. As noted before, Woessner can’t quite hide his
skepticism of the theological forwardness of these works, at least to the
degree that in his mind it overshadows the philosophical or, in the case of A
Hidden Life, the political; as a philosopher and academic, Woessner obviously
seems more comfortable with questions than answers, and is noticeably more
interested in the searching, wondering films of Malick’s pre-2012 career than
his more “didactic,” per him, recent works. But another thing his regrouping of
the 2010s films might hint at is an emphasis on Malick the thinker-philosopher
rather than Malick the poet-stylist. There is a heavy imbalance throughout the
book—I’d generously estimate it at 90/10—between discussion of ideas and
discussion of style. I recognize that this is his prerogative as a writer coming
from the academic field of philosophy, but I mention it because this seems to
be the case for almost every book that gets written on Malick these days (caveat:
I might be wrong, I haven’t read basically any of them, and it’s partly for
this reason), and because, to me, any true accounting of Malick as an artist
needs to grapple at-length with what he’s doing on the very specific level of
cinema as an art. Even though Woessner tries to go beyond the academicism of
other writings on Malick—the book jacket claims that it “suggests it is time for
philosophy to be viewed not merely as an academic subject, overseen by experts,
but also as a way of life, open to each and every moviegoer”—as an academic his
writing still inherently has an academicism to it that, while certainly
readable, can’t quite jump into the thick of life the way many of the texts and
films he references are able to. Nevertheless, to repeat the praise from the
beginning, there’s enough here to interest the average Malick fanatic to
warrant a look; apparently “newly available archival sources” were used by the
author, and the information and insight those sources provide is probably the
#1 reason why I’d tell someone to pick up the book if they were interested. Finally,
part of the reason I find myself with many of the criticisms mentioned here,
and that I’ve felt like taking the time to write them out, is that I’ve been
increasingly envisioning myself as a writer of books, and it’s something I hope
to make a vocation out of if the world will allow it. I’m in the trenches of
attempting it right now, and I hope I will have good news to share on that
front in the near future. But to return to Malick—after years of mostly refraining
from trying to write about his films, I think I’ve finally reached a point
where I’m looking forward to the day that I’ll be able to write my own book
about them. (Such a book would probably be too concerned with theology to
interest many cinephiles and too concerned with cinema to interest many
theologians, so who knows how in the world I’d get it published, but that’s a
future battle I’ll fight when I get there.) In the meantime, however, reading this
new Malick book has inspired me to once again go back and take a chronological
look at the films, and to take a very casual, preliminary stab at writing about
them. The results of that can be found on my Letterboxd, where as of this
writing I’ve scribbled notes about Badlands and Days of Heaven
so far.
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