Yet it is not surprising that poets should continue to turn to Heidegger for inspiration and guidance… The poet, he writes, "uses the word - not, however, like ordinary speakers and writers who have to use them up, but rather in such a way that the word only now becomes and remains truly a word." (Adam Kirsch, “Taste of Silence”)


If Heidegger is right when he claims that whenever art actually happens "history either begins or starts over again," then The New World is about thresholds and beginnings – a series of natural passages lined with images of discovery. So many of this generation of pop culture claim The Matrix as a breakthrough film/philosophy moment. This was such a sad moment for American cultural dialogue, under the impression that The Matrix had achieved something profound. It is the case that Malick has done what The Matrix appeared to do, granting us access to a startling thought world of sustained philosophical reflection in The New World, which writes itself, realizes itself, and annotates itself as a narration of love, being, and the possibility of the “real” to use a Matrix-sullied Baudrillard buzzword. It is about a then undiscovered America, the story shaken loose from all the faux-antique woodcut images that begin the film. And it is also about the great myth of America, one that dismantles and reshapes the stories of people that come into contact with it. But beyond that The New World as a title captures Malick’s mood in every corner of the film, turned towards decisions and thoughts that either open or close us to possibility in an ideal sense – the "New World" being a space of disclosure in which the viewer, along with Malick, erects poetic reconstructions of his title. The New World is constantly referring to itself, trying to name what it is all about, cycling exact copies of themes through different characters in different settings. And these themes, far from being abstract qualities or ideas, are specific evocations of spirituality bound to their natural presentations. It is no coincidence that as a title, Badlands points us towards the barren canyons of their destination, or that Days of Heaven starts to come to an end when the fields are destroyed.


Likewise, the New World is not just a pretty background, but the rich foreground out of which its characters and arcs emerge before any thoughts emerge from them. These beautiful, primordial images of sea, land, wind in the grass – even (if not especially) the parallel grace of Malick’s unadorned England, a cacophony of bells, stone, and quiet geometric gardens – these are the places in which we begin to think about the film and its implications. It is difficult to disentangle these natural images from their Thoreau and Emerson undertones, but we must. The New World is not a utopia in a Romantic sense. John Smith’s voiceover digressions about starting over, losing his name and taking up with Pocahontas in this wilderness, really are digressions. And eventually his character becomes lost in them, mistakenly attributing utopia (a nowhere) to what really is an undiscovered Somewhere (better understood as a “heterotopia” in Vattimo’s sense - Malick simply shifts all those notions of "place" linked to Thoreau and recasts them in true Heideggerian fashion as ways to think about... being). The New World as a vast untamed space forces self-discovery upon visitors, making them consider the newness and transition offered by everything Malick represents as unsettled America. When the initial settlers erect the walls and gates of Jamestown, their course is set resolutely against what Smith discovers during his time among the "naturals." Over time their crops fail to take seed, they attack their own leaders, and they starve in the winter. Even John Smith unravels in the New World, his encounter with newness transposed with his love for Pocahontas. He is a perfect image of someone confusing an experience of transcendence with particular people rather than the places or spaces that are the literal ground of their experience. Eventually struck with this cognitive dissonance, confusion sets in. To use Heidegger's term, he couldn't effectively "dwell" in the New World. This is the sad fate of John Smith, doomed to traveling through a land he has lost contact with, probing Northern Coasts for new passages. As he realizes later, he sailed passed his Indies.


In contrast, Pocahontas is the supreme Malick figure, one that both embodies and endures the transition of his ideal, the New World. In her movement from Smith to Wolfe, Virginia to England, she is an elocution of his entire career in a consistent stream of images. Bouncing like a deer in the tall grass, naming ears, eyes, and noses, enduring the shame and shock of self-realization unto the point of Christian baptism, crossing the sea and emerging in a forest of stone and bells and the clatter of carriages – running her fingers along the hedges of her New World – reveling in the resolution of her long journey and birthing a child as a monument to her hard won insight. The flicker of the "Natural" face-painted blue and sitting, then dashing through the open door into an English garden in the last sequence of images (one which can be mentally recited as a liturgy of the New World) is Malick’s blessing on her evolution. A primitive shout of her past, it reverberates through the garden, through her love for John Wolfe, back across the sea through a storm of music, and stills in drifts of grass and water in the locus of Malick’s originating idea. In this astonishing finale she pretty much becomes Malick’s version of Kubrick’s Starchild – as Kirsch notes above via Heidegger she is like a word that by artful use "only now becomes and remains truly a word."


And yet balancing out the Smith/Pocahontas, Wolfe/Rebecca spaces in the film are foreboding prophecies of the demise of the literal New World that has given the ideal one shape. The thunder of the ships coming to relieve the first round of soldiers at Jamestown, the exile and anglicizing of Pocahontas, and the terrible scene at the end in which she is gawked at by royalty like one of many exotic creatures brought back from Virginia for their pleasure all point to a very Heideggerian critique of American as an "unworld." This "unworld" strips the New World of tradition and resources under the hypnosis of a mercantile logic, becoming America by undoing a previously existing state of affairs. There is an ambiguity to the scenes of Opechancanough in the English gardens at the end. He seems alternately transfixed and horrified by the regularity of these trees and shrubs, disconnected from this manicured earth even though it is real earth, just like in Virginia. This is criticism by Gestalt, as there could be no representation of Jamestown and the New World without an eventual recognition of what is also lost through Malick's ideal of discovery. And from this perspective, the jarring edit of the "Natural" in the concluding sequence (it isn't Opechancanough, but a companion on his journey we see two other times in England at the edges of frames) - sitting and then streaking through the door - looks much different, a last glimpse of the disappearing New World. It is a perfectly equivocal image.


It is interesting to think about the progression from Holly in Badlands - to Abby in Days of Heaven - to Pocahontas/Rebecca in The New World. It is almost as if we can see one consciousness maturing in three different storylines, Pocahontas being the apex of women in a Malick context. There is a little of Holly’s naiveté and Abby’s love story in Pocahontas. And like Campion’s ode to the mystery of women, The Piano, Malick ends The New World with an incredible feminine gesture, a recitation of memory and motherhood. But unlike Malick’s previous female characters, and very unlike the way Ada just barely escapes Campion’s film, Pocahontas is so aware and connected to what has happened in her decision to be Wolfe’s wife and to occupy her New World. Where other directors, Campion and Breillat for example, regress in their presentation of the female gender in order to make their points (they become successively weaker, lacing control, become more objectified), Malick's feminism directs us towards more powerful conceptions of gender roles as his work goes on. There is also a progression in Malick voiceover from Holly to Linda to Pocahontas. The New World narration can be considered clichéd and overwrought, overly concerned with itself. But this would be mistaken, as it would neglect its original narrative time. It is edenic, foundational, the first American love story. If it didn't sound clichéd, it would not have sounded appropriate. By the end of the film he has earned the right for Pocahontas to say something like "Mother, now I know where you live" and expect us to appreciate it. There is a lot of Resnais in how well these characters think through their own imagery.


I can’t help but over-think the film in the same way I do other favorites like The Mirror or 2001. When Wolfe and Rebecca, renamed, made their way across the sea I sank into memories of my wife. I thought of the oceans of spiritual and geographical transition that we have endured together in frightful leaps. I considered our marriage as a New World, realizing that it is us passing through the vast space of our relationship that has rooted me thoughtfully in the world. After all the philosophy, this is Malick’s last word - one that triangulates love, transition, and self-reflection. The final sequence of the film is far from an elegy, being instead a celebration of the successful evocation of Malick’s complicated sentiment in the character arc of Pocahontas, she is dancing in the garden and anointing herself, her son is flickering through the garden, we cross the ocean to Virginia and watch the water dancing in the wilderness.