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.

Poetry does not fly above and surmount the earth in order to escape it and hover over it. Poetry is what first brings man onto the earth, making him belong to it, and thus brings him into dwelling. (Heidegger, “Poetically Man Dwells”)


"To dwell is to garden." (Heidegger, “The Origin of the work of Art”)


And ye shall teach them your children, speaking of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. And thou shalt write them upon the door posts of thine house, and upon thy gates: That your days may be multiplied, and the days of your children, in the land which the LORD sware unto your fathers to give them, as the days of heaven upon the earth. (Deuteronomy 11:19-21)


Most of what could be said about Badlands can be said of Days of Heaven. In many ways the film takes Kit and Holly from Malick’s previous film and reconfigures them for this new space in Bill and Abby, bracketed by references to silent cinema forms and allusions to the Bible. And behind all this is the legend of Malick himself, so exhausted by the production of Days of Heaven he simply disappeared from view, letting these two films speak for themselves over the next twenty years. As it moves a step closer to pure formality than the bare poetry of Badlands, I find it difficult to talk about, more accessible to language I share with others when walking through museums and talking about the paintings that we see.


I am enamored of awkwardly long shots of natural or industrial scenes. The opening to Herzog’s Heart of Glass, much of Roeg’s Walkabout, the middle bits of Ballard’s underappreciated Black Stallion, and P.T. Anderson’s recent derrick shots of There Will Be Blood are handy examples. But Malick’s lengthy shots of the fields, the life cycle of wheat and its harvest have probably set the standard for such cinematography. Giant agricultural machines hum along the furrows of crops, workers brushing behind through the golden stalks. Their scythes flick in sweeps across the fields. Large hoops of wheels rattle past, trains clatter, lines of men and women crest dry hills and sit to rest. Thankfully, much of the film’s dialogue was scrapped for Linda’s halting voiceover, granting us more time to wander with Malick through echoes of Wyeth, Hopper, George Bellows, and perhaps further on after Benton and Wood is the later Van Gogh (of which Heidegger speaks in a hauntingly Malick way, see my Badlands review).


At the center of the story is an image of Ruth (Abby) and Boaz (The Farmer) which is eventually ruined by the envy of Bill, Abby’s lover and partner in crime. And against this current of Ruth’s story is an allusion to Abraham and Sarah. Bill and Abby have fled Chicago with his young sister after he accidentally murders his boss, and decide to tell everyone they are brother and sister to just make things easier. In the Genesis 20 story this references, Abraham likewise claims that beautiful Sarah is his sister, lest the Philistines kill him and take her for themselves. While the grace of the Ruth allusions unfold, the truth of the Abraham allusion dawns on The Farmer, eventually pitting him against Bill and shattering the perfect balance of the film’s many references. After all this is said and done, I have a hard time understanding what is referred to by "Days of Heaven" if it isn’t simply everything Abby and The Farmer could have achieved were it not for the con that began their relationship.


The poetry of the film lies in the ambivalence of the land to the maneuverings of Abby and Bill. But eventually the land responds to their skullduggery with another biblical allusion, that of swarming locusts, a catastrophe further unleashed when The Farmer accidentally sets the crops on fire in his anger at Bill. The land burns through an incredible set of nocturnal edits, taking what the locusts had left. And the land, the foundational Malick poetry that has given their story context, has vanished – along with it the possibility of dwelling, which is the goal of all poetry. There is an incredible sadness to The Farmer’s death, one that is bound up in the intensity of the film’s crafted beauty. It is so intent on directing us towards the logic of Malick’s poetry, towards the possibility of “dwelling” and catching a glimpse of true “days of heaven,” that when Bill kills The Farmer he ends every idea that the film imagined. This sadness may be exemplified in Malick’s biography, who simply drifted away for decades after editing Days of Heaven for two years. I can imagine him sitting there bewildered that Bill would be so foolish, watching hours of such perfectly natural footage vanish in a hectic gun battle.

The world was like a faraway planet, to which I could never return ... I thought what a fine place it was, full of things that people can look into and enjoy.


(Holly, Badlands)


Loosely based on the true events of 1950’s spree killer Charles Starkweather (of whom Bruce Springsteen sang: “They wanted to know why I did what I did/Well sir I guess there's just a meanness in this world), Badlands follows James Dean obsessed Kit and his under-aged girlfriend from murder to murder until Kit stops the Cadillac and turns himself in. Very unlike either Straw Dogs or A Clockwork Orange, seminal violent films released two years before Badlands, Malick is not interested in the psychology of his characters. Unlike Peckinpah, he doesn’t see a need to make us complicit in the act of violence, or like Kubrick, aware of its ecstatic properties. Rather, each violent movement of the film is posed as a poetic moment in Heidegger’s sense of the term, an eruption of the possibility of transcendence in a world that has lost its potential for meaning and direction.


And this is not to say that Malick understands violence as poetry or transcendence. That is, unfortunately, fair to say of Peckinpah. But that Malick has taken the Starkweather myth and understood it in Heidegger’s terms. Having extensively studied, taught, and translated Heidegger, a recognition of his influence seems to unfold Malick’s films, which are cast at a poetic distance and uninterested in modern questions of psychology, motivation, and causality. Badlands lacks any interpretive framework. We wait for it to appear in Holly’s naïve voiceover, but it never does. We are poised for the gavel of moralism to fall when Kit gives himself up, but we find that all the police are enchanted by the murderous myth he has enacted. They are attracted to the pure freedom he embodies in the same way James Dean remains an icon of cool indifference. (As Malick said to Sheen during production: "Think of the gun in your hand as a magic wand.") Malick fails to mark different spaces of the film with any indication of his own personality, and in this way the film quietly grows under the logic of its tangential connection to Starkweather.


And this is all an intentional practice of Heidegger’s dictum on art: "Color shines and wants only to shine. When we analyze it in rational terms by measuring its wavelengths, it is gone." Likewise, Malick’s genius lies in his ability to limit access to Kit and Holly. Any attempt to think of either as monstrous or evil causes each character, as poetic figures rather than moral figures, to evaporate. And this in no way absolves Kit and Holly from their crimes. It actually puts any moral reflection on their story on better footing, freeing it from immediate directorial commentary or audience response, and attaching it to the deeper questions of meaning and existence in which Malick is interested.


The central image of the film is that of Kit and Holly jetting across the flat plains to Montana in a stolen Cadillac. Its total incongruence best expresses Malick’s interest in holding us at arm’s length, forcing us to read his poem stanza by stanza. It may be during this sequence that we see some of Malick’s thought unconsciously slipping through, the camera often drifting off to the right or left on the empty earth they are crossing. But if anything, these seeming indiscretions are part of his attempt to demonstrate how connected Kit and Holly are to their barren world. Throughout there are overtones of Swiss Family Robinson, Tom Sawyer, and Huckleberry Finn. But these literary echoes only more closely link the two lovers immediately to nature rather than circumstance - anticipating the possibility of any analysis, they emerge from it before any thoughts emerge from them. This sense of “nature” and “earth” is well-captured in Adam Kirsch’s brilliant essay on Heidegger and Poetry, “Taste of Silence”:

To understand exactly what Heidegger means by this numinous formula, it's necessary to sketch his complex argument. To answer the abstract question "What is art?" Heidegger begins by setting the reader before a particular artwork—a Van Gogh painting of a pair of shoes. When you wear shoes, he points out, you seldom think about them. Shoes, like all kinds of tools and equipment, are at their best when they are most reliable, that is, when they perform their function silently and unobtrusively. In fact, you only begin to pay attention to your shoes when they stop working properly—when they pinch your foot or when the sole comes off. And most of the objects that surround us share this quality of being instruments, things that we use and ignore.


Looking at Van Gogh's painting of a pair of shoes, Heidegger suggests, something different happens. For the first time, we become aware of the two dimensions or axes in which a pair of shoes exists. On the one hand, we are struck by their physical reality: their weight and texture and color, all the qualities we tend to overlook when we wear them. At the same time, the painting allows us to imagine the life in which these shoes belong—the life of a peasant woman, Heidegger imagines, with her "toilsome tread." Crucially, these two aspects of the shoes—what they are and what they do—are inextricable in the painting. "In the stiffly rugged heaviness of the shoes," Heidegger writes, "there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the far-spreading and ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. On the leather lie the dampness and richness of the soil. Under the soles slides the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls."


In this way, he suggests, the Van Gogh painting demonstrates the double purpose of art. Art confronts us with "the earth"—the sensuous reality of the non-human, which we tend to forget or ignore when we are engaged in practical tasks. At the same time, art sets the earth into "the world"—the historical human context in which we work, suffer, and hope.

Malick brings us into contact with the “shoeness” of Kit and Holly. Having ceased to work properly, we become aware of their condition in the world, and the direction their story takes as a consequence. And at the same time, Badlands roots the characters in an actual context from which we can sense despair and its eventual counterpart. Kit is far too engaged in his own myth to ever need anything like hope, and Holly too swept away by the pace of their self-narrating to have discovered a story in which hope is possible. But this really doesn’t matter, as Badlands is more about the possibility of its viewers living in worlds from which the potential for self-discovery has been stripped. It is by no means a hopeless film.

I think most critics have simply rejected Youth Without Youth as a film that was too ambitious to support its own ideas. But I wonder if the opposite is actually true. The film is entranced by these ideas about language, memory, and history connected to the well known philosophy of myth developed by Mircea Eliade, who wrote the story on which the film is based. I think the flaw of the film is that Coppola hedged his bets by trying to make the film more watchable as a story rather than letting it tread its own course through the implicit mystery of the storyline. I can easily see this film having achieved the spirituality of Tarkovsky’s The Mirror, a film with which it has some narrative and thematic affinities. But whereas Tarkovsky’s film gives itself over to the abstract rhythms of remembered history, Coppola’s tries to make a story out of themes and images that aren’t very story-like.


The film opens with an elderly Dominic Matei in the late 1930’s realizing he will never finish his lifelong research regarding the origins of human language and cognition. Thinking about this failure, and the loss of his fiancee decades beforehand, Dominic plots a suicide attempt that is thwarted by a bolt of lightning. He survives extra-crispy, his doctor surprised to discover that the lightning bolt has restored youth to his body and mind. No longer 70, he emerges from the hospital a spry 30. This miracle attracts the attention of the Nazis who are eager to reverse engineer Dominic’s secret. He evades the Nazis through a cloak and dagger routine (complete with femme fatale, forged documents, and Matt Damon cameo) until the end of the war during which he discovers he need only pass his hand over a book to completely learn its contents. Such a talent makes his attempt to rediscover the origins of human language and cognition much more efficient. The film then leaps to 1955 in which through a series of misfortunes he discovers the spitting image of his lost love (now Veronica) in cave after having been … struck by lighting and granted a strange talent of her own. Dominic eventually discovers that her talent, which ages her when used, can grant him firsthand access to the first human language. Eureka. And then in a move that ultimately wrecks the film, it turns into a love story.


Though sluggish at points, the film keeps one interested in the potential of its ideas. Eliade described contemporary participation in myth/religion as an attempt at “eternal return.” Through religious behavior we attempt to return to the narrative time of our mythologies. And ultimately, this idea is at the center of Youth Without Youth; Dominic working through the mystery of language until he can achieve an experience of its first expression. The study of language, being his mythology, draws him more and more deeply into its range of mystical possibilities. This is pictured in the film as his sudden rebirth, the electricity that crackles as his hands leech knowledge from books, or the luminous blue glow that appears at significant moments. Eliade also spoke in great detail about the differences between sacred and profane space, and the thresholds that serve as place markers between the two. These thresholds, like church doors or treasured memories, are also indications of our attempts to abandon the here and now (profane time) for the narrative time of our mythologies (sacred time). The Eucharist, for example, is thought of by Christians to be either an act of memory that returns us momentarily to the death of Christ or the actual substantiation of Christ in our present time. Either way, it is an attempt to inhabit “sacred time.”


Youth Without Youth is a love story that treats language as a sacred space, its origin being a sacred time sought by Dominic. His great misfortune is that the very means of his experience of this sacred time conflicts with his love for Veronica, who represents a competing sacred space. His desire for her, which has skipped through many decades, eventually outstrips his desire to discover the origins of language. This would make the film a fairly basic story about intellect versus passion, developed through the wry exchange between Eliade’s ideas. But if this is the case, Coppola’s story telling gets in the way of both the intellect and passion that could have produced a set of memorable images and meditations on love and language.

(This was to be my annual contribution to Metaphilm, but since it was posted here first in seed form last week it was not accepted.)


I have had a hard time putting my finger on the basic common denominator of Van Sant's Death Trilogy (Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days), but the last shot of Elephant clinches it for me. Van Sant referred to the film as a “thought machine,” in distinction to the then recent Bowling for Columbine, that would provide a way for viewers to reach their own conclusions about the causes of the Columbine massacre. In this respect, the film has been criticized for its attempt to displace instant moral response with the Bressonian pose of the two shooters - the initial Larry Clark-lite scenes of the two shooters a reprehensible narrative failure. I tend to agree with such criticisms, off-put that Van Sant would treat the Columbine massacre as a formal exercise. But such criticisms also fail to place key shots of Elephant in the broader context of the Death Trilogy, three films intent on exploring spaces related to death, real deaths, and their echoes in cultural memory. This context somewhat blunts otherwise legitimate criticisms of Elephant.


Much of the film in narrative time charts the last few minutes of the school before the shooting begins. Like Van Sant's last four films, the backbone of Elephant is the series of tracking shots of these high school students and teachers that intend to open up a background, to grant the viewer the sort of deep-focus access championed by Bazin, Toland, Kracauer, or any other verité aesthetic. There seems to be a lot of space for play in these films, at least a sense of detachment that permits us time to connect social and ideological dots not explicitly drawn or even shared by Van Sant. This sensibility is only enhanced by the title, that being the thing in the dark room of which we are all touching a different piece (cribbed from a 1989 film about similar killings in Northern Ireland). But I am beginning to think this is all a McGuffin. Van Sant is aware of the expectation related to his resolute use of these long tracking shots, often in close focus on a moving subject. They are passages in time, a filmed equivalent of reflection, movements through a space that comes to life in the screening process. (Bringing to mind Bresson’s classic statement: “My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected on to a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.”)


But Van Sant's passages in time involve characters that we know beforehand are on their way to death. In all three films we have the reverse of the determinism employed by Bresson in A Man Escaped. In the very title of the film we are told what is going to happen to the subject of his long tracking shots. The purpose of the film is not to discover whether a man becomes free or not, but to actually participate wholly in his efforts to obtain his predetermined freedom. Bresson just thumbs his nose at any cheap thrills provided by a less certain escape. Likewise, the course of Van Sant's tracking shots are predetermined. They are not open, they are movements through a space that has certainly contributed to the death of the film's characters but no longer has any influence over them. If Bresson thought his films “come to life again” through some of the same formal characteristics that Van Sant employs, but Van Sant’s films have a different teleology. His open spaces are all preludes to definitive, irrevocable endings. Though in other cases, such tracking shots open films up to us, as in the brilliant final sequence of Haneke's Code Unknown, Van Sant's tracking shots eventually shut the film down like a tetherball winding around its pole, a process set in motion right from the beginning. It would be a formal bait and switch if we didn’t know that Gerry dies, that all these kids at Columbine die, and that Kurt Cobain dies. In this way, Elephant is not just a distasteful formal exercise, but represents a genuine, awful, movement towards death.


This movement towards death is occurs in two ways.


1. The first is that these tracking shots are spatial movements linked to the physical movement of their subjects, and in each Death Trilogy film there is a continual movement towards physical death. This finality seems to conflict with the essence of the tracking shot, but that is Van Sant's tricky little McGuffin. Whereas at the end of 400 Blows the tracking shot concludes in a evocation of the life of its character beyond the film, Van Sant's shots end in death, leaving no other option for the film but the credits.


2.The second way this movement towards death occurs is that each film uses tracking shots to move their characters toward a mythological appropriation of their circumstances. In Gerry, the movement of dialogue farther and farther into the ridiculous idiom of its characters is a movement from the order of language to the chaos of their predicament. This movement towards abstraction is the purest sense of myth. In Last Days, the increase of Christological imagery pushes Blake towards his death, having passed through the Garden of pop culture hysteria, he lays down in a network of allusions. And then in Elephant the final tracking shot poses one of the shooters as a Nietschzean explorer, moving him through sharply configured space towards his final victims as he accumulates cultural associations. The noise of animals in a jungle in the background, the steady hold on his rifle in close focus, the military bent of his identity poses him as some sort of first person PC shooter on his way into Conrad's Heart of Darkness. It is in this final shot that we get a sense of the sense of mythical identity shared by the two shooters, one borne in gaming media culture and unconsciously linked to classic death fugues.


So in each case there is a literal movement towards death, as all these films are about the deaths of their subjects. And there is also a movement from reality to abstraction. This move towards the mythical countermands any verité conceptions that may have accrued by the film's end. In each case our prior conception of verité aspects of the tracking shot is subverted, denied, maybe even refuted. This use of such verité formulas in the virtual reconstruction of famous deaths is unsettling, as they unconsciously shift previous modernist conceptions of reality associated with cinema verité to emerging conceptions of reality and identity linked to those cultivated by journalism, gaming culture, and pop culture. All of this occurs in the spaces evoked by the Death Trilogy, the better context in which to watch Elephant.

Is 2001 Poetry?


The best extant commentary on 2001: A Space Odyssey from an intentionally theological perspective hails from the conclusion of C.S. Lewis’ essay “Is Theology Poetry” in the seldom read Weight of Glory collection. The essay is just a reprint of a lecture given at Oxford in 1944 (no doubt in a mahogany cased room with crumpled carpets smelling of rain and tea), a full 25 years before Kubrick’s 2001. I am not the biggest fan of Lewis’ science fiction literature, finding it somewhat too overt in its allegorical self-awareness to match the sheer readability of L’Engle, Chesterton, or other “Christian” sci-fi provocateurs, but apparently his grasp of how science fiction relates to theology (and specifically Lewis’ conception of theology as mythmaking) was well developed:

"Consider for a few moments the enormous aesthetic claim of its [Christian theology] chief contemporary rival - what we may loosely call the Scientific Outlook...Supposing this to be a myth, is it not one of the finest myths which human imagination has yet produced? The play is preceded by the most austere of all preludes: the infinite void, and matter restlessly moving to bring forth it knows not what. Then, by the millionth millionth chance - what tragic irony - the conditions at one point of space and time bubble up into that tiny fermentation which is the beginning of life. Everything seems to be against the infant hero of our drama - just as everything seems against the youngest son or ill-used stepdaughter at the opening of a fairy-tale. But life somehow wins through. With infinite suffering, against all but insuperable obstacles, it spreads, it breeds, it complicates itself: from the amoeba up to the plant, up to the reptile, up to the mammal. We glance briefly at the age of monsters. Dragons prowl the earth, devour one another and die. Then comes the theme of the younger son and the ugly duckling once more. As the weak, tiny spark of life began amidst the huge hostilities of the inanimate, so now again, amidst the beasts that are far larger and stronger than he, there comes forth a little naked, shivering, cowering creature, shuffling, not yet erect, promising nothing: the product of another millionth millionth chance. Yet somehow he thrives. He becomes the Cave Man with his club and his flints, muttering and growling over his enemies' bones, dragging his screaming mate by her hair (I could never quite make out why), tearing his children to pieces in fierce jealousy till one of them is old enough to tear him, cowering before the terrible gods whom he has created in his own image. But these are only growing pains. Wait till the next Act. There he is becoming true Man. He learns to master nature. Science comes and dissipates the superstitions of his infancy. More and more he becomes the controller of his own fate. Passing hastily over the present (for it is a mere nothing by the time-scale we are using), you follow him on into the future. See him in the last Act, though not the last scene, of this great mystery. A race of demigods now rule the planet - and perhaps more than the planet - for eugenics have made certain that only demigods will be born, and psycho-analysis that none of them shall lose or smirch his divinity, and communism that all which divinity requires shall be ready to their hands. Man has ascended his throne. Hence forward he has nothing to do but to practise virtue, to grow in wisdom, to be happy. And now, mark the final stroke of genius. If the myth stopped at that point, it might be a little pathetic (sic). It would lack the highest grandeur of which human imagination is capable. The last scene reverses all. We have the Twilight of the Gods. All this time, silently, unceasingly, out of all reach of human power, Nature, the old enemy, has been steadily gnawing away. The sun will cool - all suns will cool - the whole universe will run down. Life (every form of life) will be banished, without hope of return, from every inch of infinite space. All ends in nothingness, and "universal darkness covers all." The pattern of myth thus becomes one of the noblest we can conceive. It is the pattern of many Elizabethan tragedies, where the protagonist's career can be represented by a slowly ascending and then rapidly falling curve, with its highest point in Act IV. You see him climbing up and up, then blazing in his bright meridian, then finally overwhelmed in ruin.


Such a world-drama appeals to every part of us. The early struggles of the hero (a theme delightfully doubled, played first by life, and then by man) appeals to our generosity. His future exaltation gives scope to a reasonable optimism; for the tragic close is so very distant that you need not often think of it--we work with millions of years. And the tragic close it self just gives that irony, that grandeur, which calls forth our defiance, and without which all the rest might cloy. There is a beauty in this myth which well deserves better poetic handling than it has yet received: I hope some great genius will yet crystallise it before the incessant stream of philosophic change carries it all away. I am speaking, of course, of the beauty it has whether you believe it or not. There I can speak from experience: for I, who believe less than half of what it tells me about the past, and less than nothing of what it tells me about the future, am deeply moved when I contemplate it."

Kubrick's reliance on various images in Greek mythology implies that 2001, as the sort of odyssey described above, is a major artifact of Western rational spirituality. It is a perfect example of the storytelling that interests Lewis. The rest of the essay goes on to argue that while the “science” myth is beautiful when rendered similar to Kubrick’s later revelation, the myth offered by theology is arguably prettier. Sidestepping all the traditional science vs. theology questions, Lewis cuts to the quick of what would come to occupy the cultural critics of a few generations later, that being the question of how these different myths are represented and what makes them more or less effective. Though such thinking may not appeal to typical Christian thought at an ideological level, it certainly appeals to the continual need for Christian art and practice to meta-narrate - to re-describe, or even better put, to re-mythologize what Christian theology exposes. And this is where 2001 ultimately succeeds as well. It trades the technical distractions of all these apologetic questions of evolutionary thought for a focus on the literary/mythical history of its core ideology, it turns this history into a stream of fascinating science fictions that ultimately dissolve in a final moment of potent abstraction, and “I, who believe less than half of what it tells me about the past, and less than nothing of what it tells me about the future, am deeply moved when I contemplate it.”


The Passion of the Christ is a film that has been misunderstood as often as 2001, and I think Lewis helps us to understand why. The connection between these films is that they are very visually intensive exercises in the imagination of their respective ideologies. The difference, of course, is that one has a sense of historical reference and the other doesn’t. But the relative lack of dialogue and narration in both permit each to be experienced more as iconography than anything else. They are both myths in Lewis' sense of the term that push their respective traditions to their narrative and visual limits. 2001 certainly achieves an abstraction that The Passion of the Christ does not (as that would have been… really weird), but as the best representations of the opposition posed by Lewis in his essay between narrating the myth of science and the myth of theology, parallel reflection on these two films may generate a fruitful ecumenicity in thinking about myth, religion, and beauty in film. At the very least it still startles me that Lewis described my feelings about 2001 many years before it was produced, which may actually make “Is Theology Poetry” his best work of science fiction.

Moving away from the clinical distance that granted us a hands off approach to his recently finished Death Trilogy (Gerry, Elephant, Last Days), Van Sant literally takes a step closer to his worn themes of guilt, anxiety, and adolescent angst in Paranoid Park. At times dropping his 35mm camera for tight Super 8 shots of kids floating on skateboards around a downtown Portland skate park, Paranoid Park is a claustrophobic spin on coming of age in a day littered by South Park and Napoleon Dynamite references.


An adaptation of the Blake Nelson novel by the same name, the film centers on a skate park in downtown Portland. An historic haunt for homeless people, street kids, and assorted disaffected youth, Paranoid Park in Van Sant’s film is both a place of transience and a moment frozen in time, the last stand of adolescence exerting itself in the ballet of skaters paced by otherworldly Nina Rota soundtracks from Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits and Amarcord. The story follows Alex, who is being questioned in the murder of a railway guard close to the skate park. His response to the questioning suggests he was involved with the death as the film skips from past to present, doubles back to retrace its own steps, and swaps Alex’s stilted voiceover for slow motion pans across his daily routine. The film splinters as a painful memory unwilling to be recognized, and Alex moves numbly through Van Sant’s nonlinear structure until we encounter the railway guard’s graphically broken body, Beethoven’s 9th looming in the background.


No stranger to working with non-professionals, Van Sant cast the film through a MySpace call. Alex’s performance in particular is immediately awkward and naïve. But as the story unfolds and we hear Nina Rota, Elliot Smith, Billy Swann, Ethan Rose, and others in the background balancing out the clumsy dialogue, it is as if Van Sant is letting others speak for Alex, lending him a gravity he is incapable of achieving. And ultimately, this is what Paranoid Park is about. Alex struggles to find ways to articulate his sense of trauma, and finds nothing to turn to but the empty appeal of Paranoid Park. Some may find the film a repetitive exercise, as it covers much of the same ground as Elephant. But Van Sant’s careful posture in the film, weaving the mature soundtrack with an inarticulate first person, will appeal to those who have been in the past lulled by his hypnotic connections between pop culture and personal loss.

The Brave One is one of those films that by virtue of plot and shooting location have so many accidental connections to classic films or trends in criticism that comparisons just start piling on their reception. By now we are assured that it references Taxi Driver, is a feminist revenge fable, an artful exploitation flick, or a post-911 justice fantasy. When the dust settles, however, it is hard to distance the film from other classic revenge fantasies like Walking Tall, Death Wish, or Ms. 45, the latter film a benchmark in conscious exploitation.


Of course it is interesting to reflect on the idea that the Jodie Foster who once played an underaged hooker in Taxi Driver is now a popular editorial radio host a few blocks north. An odd bit of tradition history there. But once Foster gets the gun in her hand I am not sure this takes us anywhere further than a generic history repeating itself, this time the revenge fantasy divorced from the political and social logic ascribed to Travis Bickle. In this respect, The Brave One is precisely the sort of film we were warned against in A History of Violence, Foster’s outbursts of violence erotic flickers of power revealing themselves to the viewer as private moments of release. Perhaps a better context in which the film can be described is the still emerging “post-9/11 violence in New York” setting. This tradition probably reached an early apex at the end of Spike Lee’s 25th Hour, which closes on a brutal image of self-inflicted violence, if not self-hatred. But a large part of post-9/11 New York filmmaking involves the violence of natural disaster, in which the city is leveled by giant monsters, floods, aliens (The Day After Tomorrow, Cloverfield, War of the Worlds, I am Legend, etc…). Such films immediately link our residual awareness of 9/11 with reflections on life and death via Susan Sontag’s classic essay “Imagination of Disaster”:

“In the [sci-fi/apocalypse] films it is by means of images and sounds, not words that have to be translated by the imagination, that one can participate in the fantasy of living through one’s own death and more, the death of cities, the destruction of humanity itself.”

Here the destruction of New York becomes a way for its citizens to re-experience the awful imagination of their death and emerge from it unharmed. And such films would have us believe that we are all in some way citizens of post-9/11 New York. It seems in this case that The Brave One has far more in common with the new New York disaster film tradition than that of the 1970's revenge flick. Her character survives her initial trauma alone, survives the further disaster of revenge, and moves on with her life. The conclusion of Sontag’s essay on science fiction and disaster films perfectly describes Foster’s character arc:

“[W]e live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large ration by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters. For one job that fantasy can do is to lift us out of the unbearably humdrum and to distract us from terrors—real or anticipated—by an escape into exotic, dangerous situations which have last minute happy endings.”

There was an explosion of revenge cinema during and after the Vietnam War, the American conscience dealing with itself through Dirty Harry, Death Wish, and eventually Rambo. And at first glimpse The Brave One is well within this genre, part of a number of films that may be similarly related to our current war in Iraq (e.g., in the first Walking Tall the protagonist is a former professional wrestler, in the 2004 remake he is an Iraq veteran). But the difference between past revenge cinema and the recent post-9/11 films such as The Brave One is the way they access Sontag’s commentary on disaster and apocalypse. As revenge films, they are linked to the catastrophe of 9/11, an apocalypse of Sontagian proportions, and thus just as much about revenge as they are about the themes Sontag addresses in her essay. The central scene in 25th Hour takes place with its two main characters looking down at the World Trade Center footprint, placing the film in its shadow. Likewise, the difference between Taxi Driver and The Brave One are not the suggested feminist tones of the latter, but the different space in which it takes place. The side effect of this convergence between the revenge and disaster film in post-9/11 New York is that they are now open to Sontag’s ultimate critique of the sci-fi apocalypse, certainly true of The Brave One:

“What I am suggesting is that the imagery of disaster in science fiction is above all the emblem of an inadequate response.”

At least this is more true of The Brave One than it is a number of films Sontag levels with that criticism.