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  • “Melt Earth to Sea”: The New World of Terrence Malick
  • Martin Donougho

“Melt earth to sea” is a striking turn of phrase from Ben Jonson’s Oberon.1 Terry Malick’s The New World (2005) has the poet declaim his verses during the audience granted Princess Pocahontas at the court of King James (apparently she did attend a performance of a Jonson masque). The phrase makes a nice fit with Malick’s overall cinematic concerns, which continually show blending and division of the elements—not just earth and sea but also rivers and sky (and, I’ll add, gods and humans). I propose an extended parallel between these concerns and Heidegger’s ideas on “world” and “world-disclosure.” That is not to advocate a reductive, allegorical “decoding” of the film, still less an “illustration” via the cinematic medium of the finer points of Heidegger’s thinking. My essay should be considered an exploration or experiment, juxtaposing the multiple implications, first, of Heidegger’s “world”—whether cosmological or social—and then of Malick’s films.2

Few would dispute that these films cast a potent (if elusive) spell upon the viewer. The New World is no exception. It opens with gliding shots of reflections in water and moments later inverts this view by diving below to display human swimmers on the surface, as if to imitate the fish beneath them. Meanwhile we hear in voice-over a prayer to Mother-Sky [End Page 359] and on the soundtrack the prelude to Wagner’s Rheingold—which is to say (symbolically), the original unity from which all distinction flows. With Wagner of course we are in for twenty hours of music, all deriving from the opening E-flat major triad—an effect Malick imitates not simply in quoting the section entire (although his film is not as extended as the opera, we might be relieved to find) but also by repeating it twice, in the middle and at the end of the film.3 This saturated complex of meanings—visual and aural as much as narrative or thematic—epitomizes his filmic practice. It is for some people a reason to admire Malick and for others a sign of pretension or just long-windedness. Even for admirers like me it is hard to say what exactly is going on. In what follows I attempt to articulate some ideas on that score, advancing a philosophical interpretation of The New World, from a particular “Heideggerian” angle. I do so in the belief that it is prima facie warranted—given Malick’s own early interest in Heidegger’s thought—and further that it does some justice to the formal, narrative, and thematic richness of our film experience.

1

As is well known, Malick studied with Stanley Cavell at Harvard and then as a Rhodes scholar attended Oxford briefly, later traveling to meet Heidegger in his Black Forest retreat while engaged in translating The Essence of Reasons (Vom Wesen des Grundes), a work written in 1928 just after Being and Time. Malick returned to teach philosophy at MIT for a year and then left to write journalism and study film in Los Angeles. He has said (in interview) that “I don’t feel one can film philosophy.”4 In any event, we should avoid treating film reductively, à la “The Matrix” and Philosophy or other attempts to detect philosophemes (often the most obvious!) in particular films. Yet here I would agree with Stephen Mulhall’s view in his On Film—citing Cavell above all—that we can think of certain films as practicing philosophy in their own right even when they do not advance arguments or contain concepts.5 Malick’s films attempt that, I argue: not by abstract allegory, or by thematic symbolism, but by showing in the medium of film what it is like to dwell in the world, in the modern world, and specifically in this country (call it “America”). I would single out the concern with the notion of “world” as central to Malick’s cinematic practice: how “we” think about the world, or simply take it for granted for that matter. This aspect has [End Page 360] been little studied in relation to Malick...

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