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  • On Parakeets, in The New World
  • Skip Horack (bio)

Terrence Malick's fourth feature film, The New World, reimagines the founding American legend of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith. The premise is that the pair were equals in love, a daring conceit with its own complicated questions aimed backwards at the history of North America. These and other decisions made the film divisive; The New World is a film whose qualities cannot be discerned clearly from its approval score (55 percent) at review-aggregation websites such as Rotten Tomatoes. Personally, I agree with critic John Patterson's observation that the movie "doesn't have fans: it has disciples and partisans and fanatics." I am one of those devotees.

To become serious about The New World means sharing its concerns not only about the history of colonialism but also about the larger story of humankind's tendency to abuse the earth itself. Scott Tobias, film editor of The A.V. Club, wrote: "To Malick, the planet's most basic elements—those that sustain life and survive death—are not to be ignored, because they dwarf all other concerns. Where other films show humans paddling furiously upstream, Malick's show the river, too."

A few years after the release of The New World I began working on a novel, similar to that film in ways not so apparent to me at the time, about an indigenous pygmy tribesman who is stolen from Central Africa and sold into slavery—and who then, following his New World escape, finds himself wandering the early nineteenth-century wilderness of Spanish Florida. And likewise, at least aspirationally, one of the things I enjoyed most about writing this novel was the opportunity it afforded me to work from the perspective of an individual born into a culture that, then and now, lived in closer contact with the natural world than perhaps any other—and to show him moving through landscapes and environs that no longer exist in all of their previous glory. Ultimately, this was an opportunity for me to breathe life back into so much that has already been lost.

Which brings me to the parakeets. In 1918 the last known Carolina parakeet—a beautiful species that once ranged from New York to Florida to Colorado in vast, shimmering flocks of greens and yellows and reds—died in captivity in the Cincinnati Zoo. And halfway through my novel is my attempt to resurrect, through the eyes of my protagonist as he walks through a brier thicket, that bygone creature on the page. The only chance, sadly, that I would ever have to "see" a Carolina parakeet for myself.

But, as it turns out, that wasn't exactly true. Because in poring over the internet, researching and digesting observations and accounts of Carolina [End Page 49] parakeets penned by long-dead explorers, settlers, naturalists, and the like, I came across a bit of information, and seven seconds of film, that until then had somehow escaped my attention.

According to the New York Times, in the two-and-a-half-hour entirety of The New World there is only a single computer-generated effect—to my knowledge, the first foray into CGI of Malick's career. Captain Smith and Pocahontas alone together in the forest, a tamed pair of Carolina parakeets perched on her lithe arm. And not just the visual of those two parakeets—a digital recreation that was reportedly accomplished using a John James Audubon watercolor as a reference—but also the extinct bird's vocalizations … because, as noted in a press release issued by the Macaulay Library at the Cornell University Lab of Ornithology:

Curator of Audio Greg Budney took on the challenge of finding a Carolina parakeet stand-in. Although no recordings of the parrot exist, based on body size and beak shape, Greg determined that the song of the Aratinga mitrata or mitred parakeet would be a good approximation.

   In the end, the Library provided cues for more than seventy-five species of birds, frogs, insects, and mammals that were appropriate for the time and place of the story, adding a rich layer of auditory detail to the sound...

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