Historical Realism and Imperialist Nostalgia in Terrence Malick’s The New World

MONIKA SIEBERT University of Richmond Historical Realism and Imperialist Nostalgia in Terrence Malick’s The New World THE PROMOTIONAL MATERIALS FOR TERRENCE MALICK’S THENEWWORLD (2005) devote considerable time to detailing the extraordinary effort of the production crew to recreate Werowocomoco, the capital of the Powhatan’s paramount chiefdom, and Fort James, the first surviving English settlement in Virginia, in the period from 1607 to 1617. The hour-long documentary on “The Making of The New World.” accompanying the DVD release of the film, for example, chronicles the shared work of a research team of historians, archeologists, linguists, anthropologists, and members of Virginia tribes to represent as faithfully as possible Powhatan and English agriculture, architecture, language, and material culture. The viewers of the featurette learn that the filming takes place only ten miles from the original location of the settlement and that Werowocomoco and Fort James are reconstructed with exclusively local materials, such as heirloom Indian corn and tobacco plants for the gardens, thousands of shell beads for Powhatan’s mantle, and wild turkey feathers and deer racks provided by Robert Green, the chief of the Patawomeck tribe, to adorn Powhatan’s house. As Dr. William Kelso, director of archeology for the Association for the PreservationofVirginiaAntiquitiesandchiefarcheologistattheoriginal Jamestown settlement site, attests on camera, “the set is a time capsule; it fully captures the feeling of what it was like to live in Fort James.” Choreographers and martial arts experts teach actors the fundamentals of seventeenth-century body language and dialect trainers help Q’orianka Kilcher, the actress portraying Pocahontas, pronounce both Algonquian language and Algonquian-accented seventeenth-century English. The producers repeat frequently that the film’s director “likes the things real,” that they too are committed to “solid reality,” all the way down to filming without artificial lighting or computer generated special effects. And above all, that in a marked departure from the historical representations of American Indians on film, the crew is dedicated to depicting the Algonquian people of early Virginia, rather 140 Monika Siebert than generic Indians. Stephen R. Adkins and Robert Green, the chiefs of the Chickahominy and Patawomeck tribes, appear in the documentary, describing their initial wariness of yet another project reinventing their old world anew and cautiously expressing “high hopes” for the film’s potential to evoke among its viewers the long overdue recognition of the people who greeted the settlers of Jamestown. And yet, the filmmakers’ dedication to the faithful recreation of early seventeenth-century Tsenacomoco/Virginia1 and all its inhabitants, showcased in “The Making of The New World,” does not translate into an equally accurate account of the British colonial project in North America, let alone its long lasting effects, in the feature film itself. Instead, The New World offers yet another reprise of the largely fictionalized story of Jamestown settlement with its attendant romance of John Smith and Pocahontas.2 While the film includes episodes needed to offer a historically accurate account of the early colonization of Tsenacomoco—not least in depictions of the beginnings of the Virginia tobacco industry and consequent displacement of the Powhatan or in frequent juxtapositions between Captain Smith and Captain Newport’s lofty political ideals and the far baser actions of the colonists— ultimately, its emphasis falls elsewhere. Though it starts off as a historical drama, The New World transforms quickly into a romance. The film’s commitment to historical realism implied in the authenticity of the reconstructed material environment is, in the end, overshadowed by its unrelenting interest in a love story of a special kind: not a story of John Smith’s infatuation with Pocahontas, but of his falling for America as a new beginning, for America as an opportunity for idealist Englishmen, disgruntled by the enclosure movement, to construct a social utopia.3 The New World parts company with historical facts 1 Tsenacomoco is the name the Powhatan used to refer to their country. 2 The accounts, whether scholarly or fictional, of the alleged Smith-Pocahontas romance are legion. Along with the numerous debunkings of this romance, they could constitute a sizable literary tradition. We now even have books on the books about Smith and Pocahontas, studies attempting to account for the development of...