The Feminine in Terrence Malick's Films

Unearthing the Feminine Undercurrent in Terrence Malick’s Cinematic Badlands

[Written in the spring of 2011]

Despite being award-winning, Terrence Malick’s fifth film, The Tree of Life, divided critics and audiences like one of those Magic Eye pictures that were popular in the 1990s. Those who groused there wasn’t a worthwhile picture to be seen in the shimmering mess on the screen weren’t that different, however, from those who claimed they could see one, since even the latter group missed an important interpretation of the film that can easily be found from its surface all the way down to its deepest nooks and crannies. Perhaps this was due to the fact that (as with film reviewers in general)[1] its apologists were overwhelmingly male: they focused on its safely given starting points–such as the search for spiritual answers (many compared it to “a prayer”) and Malick’s kinship with the American Transcendentalist canon[2]–rather than the less mainstream, but no less obvious, idea that in The Tree of Life, as in Malick’s four earlier films, viewers are urged to embark on a journey of personal growth from a traditionally masculine worldview to a traditionally feminine one, or at least toward a balance that grants more power to the latter.

Terrence Malick has never exactly spoken of this interpretation, but then again he’s known for giving Thomas Pynchon a run for his money when it comes to keeping mum on everything. In fact, he’s only spoken publicly about his filmmaking twice, both times in 1975, after his debut, Badlands, came out.[3] In one of those interviews, however, speaking of Sissy Spacek’s character, he casually tosses out something that can be seen as a kind of Rosetta Stone for understanding the link between Badlands and his disparate, future films: “Holly is in a way the more important character; at least you get a glimpse of what she’s like. And I liked women characters better than men; they’re more open to things around them, more demonstrative.”[4] This isn’t a lot to work with, but over the years a few related things that he’s said to cast and crew members have trickled out to the public. To make sense of them, though, it’s necessary to look at the ways his films themselves tell us to favor a traditionally feminine take on things over a masculine one.

First, to clarify what I mean by that dichotomy, I turn to a philosopher–not one of the bigwigs usually brought up in reference to Malick (i.e., Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Kiergegaard, whose different concepts of “world” he proposed writing about for his unaccepted Oxford Rhodes Scholarship Doctoral thesis[5] and the first of whom he translated into English).[6] No, I’m turning to a living feminist scholar, Susan Bordo, specifically to her 1986 essay “The Cartesian Masculinization of Thought,” which posits that René Descartes’s Meditations was the hinge upon which a door to the past and its brand of epistemology, which she characterizes as feminine, swung shut, leaving us in the No Exit-type room that is modern scientific thinking, which she characterizes as masculine. Bordo isn’t the first to describe this watershed period in these terms (Francis Bacon dubbed the seventeenth century “a truly masculine birth of time”)[7], but she uses them to elaborate on the old holistic vs. discrete chestnut in a way that, interestingly, portrays the latter way of thinking as always looking over its shoulder at the former, as if insecure in its supposedly dominant position:

It is crucial to note that it is the lack of differentiation between subject and object, between self and world, that is construed here as the epistemological threat. The medieval sense of relatedness to the world had not depended on such “objectivity” but on continuity between the human and physical realms, on the interpenetrations, through meanings and associations, of self and world.[8]

Bordo emphasizes this neurotic corollary to the detached masculine cognitive style frequently:

[During] periods in which long-established images of symbiosis and cosmic unity break down (as they did during the period of the scientific revolution), may we not expect an increase in self-consciousness and anxiety over the distance between self and world–a constant concern, to paraphrase [Margaret] Mahler, over the whereabouts of the world? All these, as I have suggested, are central motifs in the Meditations.[9]

Neither the self nor objects are stable, and the lack of stability in the object world is, indeed, experienced as concern over the whereabouts of the world.[10]

These are also central motifs in the films of Terrence Malick.

In 1973’s Badlands, Holly laments in a voiceover, “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.” In 1998’s The Thin Red Line, Sergeant Welsh says, “In this world, a man himself is nothin’. And there ain’t no world but this one” and Private Witt counters, “You’re wrong there, Top. I seen another world. Sometimes I think it was just my imagination.” Later in that film, Private Train says in a voiceover, “Walked into a Golden Age…Stood on the shores of a new world.” In 2005’s The New World (a telling title, since, following the tradition of the myth it revives, most other directors probably would have named it Pocahontas), Pocahontas, meeting an elder from her tribe in England, says, “Uncle, I have made a great many mistakes. Life has brought me to this strange new world.” In 2011’s The Tree of Life, Mrs. O’Brien says in a voiceover, “There are two paths through life: the way of nature and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you’ll follow.” Add that to her husband’s stern advice to their sons (“It takes fierce will to get ahead in this world”), and you get the sense that there is an implicit second world that Malick is trying to get us to think about. Since he put a lot of thought into the concept of “world” as a philosophy graduate student, it seems reasonable that all the talk (and that one title) about “the world” and “another world” in his films isn’t about places, but about worldviews, one and then another that shimmers within the first. One of the ways Malick pivots between the two on screen–which Bordo also employs numerous times, in her essay, as a tool for differentiating between masculine and feminine epistemologies–is through the contemplation of objects, via his characters and his camerawork.

Malick breaks out of the gate with a shotgun blast of this in Badlands: from the things Kit picks up or remarks on on his garbage route in the first scene (a dead collie, some old shoes, someone’s letter and bills, a broom, a can); to the little hot air balloon he sends up with a vow of his and Holly’s love, along with, as she puts it, “some of our little tokens and things;” to the scenes Holly contemplates in her dad’s stereopticon; to the objects she and Kit pick up or remark on in, first, his friend Cato’s shack, then in the rich man’s house they take over for an afternoon; to the inverse of the balloon scene, the part where Holly tells us, “Before we left, he shot a football that he considered excess baggage. Afterwards, he took and buried some of our things in a bucket. He said that nobody else would know where we put ‘em…And we’d come back someday, maybe, and they’d still be sittin’ here, just the same, but we’d be different. And if we never go back, well, somebody might dig ‘em up 1,000 years from now, and wouldn’t they wonder;” to the penultimate scene outside the airport hanger, where Kit gives away things from his pockets to the fawning lawmen; to everything in between.

For his follow-up, 1978’s Days of Heaven, Malick began to shift away from showing characters contemplating tangible things (though there are a few such scenes: montages of items in the Farmer’s mansion and of things in the yard around it; Linda, the farmhand Bill’s little sister, looking at pictures of wild animals in a book; Linda standing in the charred ruins of the wheat field and pointlessly pulling one piece of junk, then another off a burnt farm machine). Instead, he began to focus on people treating other people as objects, as when Linda, in a voiceover, describes the Farmer falling in love with the farmhand Abby thus, “This farmer, he didn’t know when he first saw her…Or what it was about her that caught his eye.” Ten minutes later, with the screen image reduced to a circle, we see him spying on Abby with a telescope. After he marries her, the Farmer confesses to Abby the object-like quality that first drew him to her, “You know what I thought when I first saw you? I thought, ‘If only I could touch her, then everything’d be alright.’”

This shift increases with The Thin Red Line, which, of course, also has plenty of static shots of things (mostly plants and animals), as well as shots of soldiers contemplating things (Witt pouring water onto a plant leaf and watching the drops roll off; another private, on his stomach in a battle, touching a leaf which, in a surprising instance of tropism, curls). War, though, is the ultimate example of what can happen when we objectify a group of people, so it’s no surprise that, early on, even a high ranking officer, General Quintard, thinks in a voiceover, “There’s always somebody watching you. Like a hawk.” Soon we see a soldier and a Guadalcanal aborigine eyeing each other, as they pass on a trail. Private Dale–epitomizing Susan Bordo’s masculine worldview to such an extent that he literally itemizes others–sorts through his collection of teeth pulled from Japanese soldiers, while threatening a living one, and, later, throws them down in guilt and disgust.

With The New World, Malick comes on almost as heavy as in Badlands, splitting evenly, this time, between people contemplating objects (mostly the Native Americans examining British goods, such as mirrors and cannons) and people contemplating other people as if they are objects (the Natives and British examining each other). After some Natives check out John Smith’s compass, he even says to them, “We have…Articles that might interest you.”

Finally, in The Tree of Life, Terrence Malick, for the most part, rises above his two well-worn paths of object contemplation–things and people–to tackle the issue from the more abstract macro/micro level, via the juxtaposition of cosmological dynamics and those within a single human family. Thus, we see both a small space object (a meteor) hitting a larger one (the earth) and the impact on a child’s development (Jack, the older son) of his father’s having taught him and his brothers masculine behaviors such as how to hit another person; and we see both a large space object (the sun) reaching out and embracing a smaller one (the earth), until they seem to be single thing, and moments of familial bliss that make us forget for a moment how selfish individuals can get. In her essay, Susan Bordo writes: “[The] transition from Middle Ages to Renaissance can be looked on as a kind of protracted birth–from which the human being emerges as a decisively separate entity, no longer continuous with the universe with which it had once shared a soul […]”[11] In light of Bordo’s argument, it’s no surprise that, after his “birth of the universe” sequence, Terrence Malick immediately shows us the birth of Jack, the character whose soul, or at least peace of mind, is the crux of the film. Nor is it any surprise that the first parent we (and, diegetically, the baby) see after this birth is the father.

The beating heart of all of Malick’s films is the constant gummy struggle individuals go through to reconcile the masculine and feminine worldviews within themselves. Considering he studied philosophy in the mid- to late-60s (and briefly taught it at MIT)[12], it seems reasonable to assume that his aesthetic choices have been at least a little influenced by Postmodern theory, in vogue back then, with its emphasis on noting or creating interplay between what is inside and outside a frame of some kind. With this in mind, the Hero’s Journey that Joseph Campbell contends is central to most narratives could, in the case of Malick’s films, be seen as one that we, the viewers, go on, with him and his films as our Obi-Wan Kenobi-like “Supernatural Aid” (step 3 of 17; step 16, interestingly, is “Master of Two Worlds”). Our destination becomes clear when we consider what Campbell has to say on the monomyth subgenre fairy tales: “Very often they’re about a little girl who does not want to grow up to be a woman. […] All of these dragon killings and threshold crossings have to do with getting past being stuck."[13] We are meant to grow toward the philosophical worldview traditionally symbolized by women, and the blatant clues Malick drops like clockwork that point to this are his barely pubescent–which is to say, fairy tale aged–protagonists.

Ostensibly, older male characters propel the action in his films, but scratch the surface and you’ll see that Malick considers young women more important. In Badlands and Days of Heaven, barely pubescent girls (Holly, Linda) not only narrate the films, but also become the upbeat focus of their endings (Holly inform us she went on to have a normal life, that she even married the son of her defense lawyer–unlike Caril Ann Fugate, her real life counterpart, who went to prison for 17 years[14]–and Linda is shown escaping from boarding school to walk along a railroad track with a friend). It’s also telling that, in Days of Heaven, Malick gives the farmhand Bill a little sister, when that character could just have easily been a little brother. The Thin Red Line, with its dearth of women, is the exception that proves the rule: Private Witt is the stand-in for the usual barely pubescent girl character, as if, with his third film, Malick were trying to get us to realize that the point is not that literal female tweens are important to his oeuvre, but that what they represent is. The type of philosophical things Witt spouts, in his thoughts and to Sergeant Welsh, line up with Bordo’s idea of the feminine, as does his gentle, connective presence in the company. Plus–like Holly, Linda, and fairy tale characters balking at the threshold of becoming women–Malick doesn’t portray him as a sexual person, as, for example, doing what so many soldiers do when they’re AWOL. Witt’s attitude toward the female Pacific Islanders, in the beginning and during flashbacks, is one of beatific appreciation, which is to say it’s no different than his attitude toward the men and children in that setting, or, for that matter, toward anyone, friend or foe, in the war setting. This is also the case with Malick’s portrayal of Pocahontas, in The New World. According to the somewhat contradictory writings of the real John Smith, the age of the (never named, though easily identified) character the 14 year old actress Q’orianka Kilcher portrays ranges from about 11, when they first meet, to about 21, when she dies on the coast of England, en route back to Jamestown with her husband John Rolphe and their son, with a large majority of her screen time focusing on the earlier end of that spectrum.[15] Also, Malick goes no further, in terms of Pocahontas and Smith’s romance, than a lot of scenes showing them nuzzling and declaring their love for each other, essentially what a preteen girl might imagine happens when two soul mates meet (nothing more was permissible anyway, because of Kilcher’s age); her relationship with Rophe is depicted in an even more chaste fashion, even though she had a child with him. By this film, Malick was well set in his multi-character voiceover template, but, even though Pocahontas’s perspective is just one of several in that sense, she dominates the plot in that she’s shown first, her story continues even when John Smith disappears for a long period, and, even after her death, Malick shows a quick montage of her, in all her vivaciousness, before ending with a montage of running water.

Running water is the final, frequent clue to Terrence Malick’s sympathy for the feminine worldview, and it also helps foreground the seemingly-absent barely pubescent girl aspect of The Tree of Life. Jack, as a grown man, has followed his father’s path to such an extent that he’s shown not connecting with–not even facing!–his wife or girlfriend, and his profession, as either an architect or engineer, involves the very masculine pursuit of imposing rigid, cut-and-dried lines over the world. Through reflecting on his brother’s death, he reconnects with the feminine way of seeing things his mother introduced him to as a child. Many critics derided the last third of the film, when the adult Jack reunites with living and dead family and friends in a mysterious, watery desert, and even many of its apologists assumed this showed us the afterlife–but that’s clearly not true. Prior to this, as if to pound home the idea of a fairy tale-like journey, Malick shows a barely pubescent girl, from the back, push open a pair of thick wooden doors; soon after this, following a woman we assume to be his mother, the adult Jack hesitates at the edge of a make-shift doorway in the desert, then stumbles through. It’s telling that, before his mother is shown with his father and others he knows in this setting, Malick shows her there surrounded by dancing girls and women we’ve never seen before: this place isn’t about Jack reuniting with specific people he’s know, Heaven-style, but about his reuniting with the feminine in general and, by extension, the connectivity–with others, things, the concentric circles of the world–that is characteristic of it. The most climatic visual of Jack’s epiphany, though, is when he drops to his knees in the water rolling over this metaphoric place.

Water in motion is a key symbol of an aspect of the Tao that is very relevant here. As Benjamin Hoff, the popular layperson’s guide to the topic, writes:

Unlike the [patriarchal, hierarchical] Confusianists, Taoists saw the power of Heaven as both masculine and feminine, as symbolized by the Taoist T’ai Chi–the circle divided by a curved line into light and dark, or male and female, halves. Heavenly power in the natural world, however–what Lao-tse called “The Mother of Ten Thousand Things”–has always been seen by Taoists as mostly feminine in its actions. It is gentle, like flowing water.[16]

Unsurprisingly, flowing water is so ubiquitous in Terrence Malick’s films it’s almost a stock character. Many pivotal scenes involve characters touching or immersed in water (Bill and Abby hatching their plan to trick the farmer, while standing in a river; Bill’s death in a river; Private Bell rinsing his wife in the bath and later seeing her in the surf, saying “Come out. Come out to where I am;” Witt in 75% of his scenes; John Smith getting knocked unconscious by a Native, while standing in a river; etc). In The Tree of Life, Malick even almost exactly repeats a water-centric scene from The New World that really can hardly be improved on: Jack, as a toddler, reaches up to help as his father tilts a watering can’s contents toward a newly planted sapling, his mother behind him holding his baby brother; Rolphe and Pocahontas’s young son reaching his hands up to the stream of water Rolphe is pouring from a watering jug over a garden row, as Pocahontas, bent over, guides the child from behind and says, in a voiceover, “Mother…your love is before my eye. Teach me your path.” That takes us back to the Tao, which, in Chinese, literally means the “(right) way”.[17]

Terrence Malick is on record as having the Tao and its symbols on his mind when he makes films. Dan Glass, The Tree of Life’s senior visual-effects supervisor, told an interviewer, “[Malick] wanted to avoid defining the imagery ahead of time and often used the word ‘Tao’ to convey an organic search for unpredictable images.”[18] Malick told Hans Zimmer, The Thin Red Line’s composer, to make the music “flow like a river.”[19] Vltava, the piece of music Malick chose for the happy family section of The Tree of Life (and for most of the film’s trailer), was originally written by Bedrich Smetana to celebrate the Czechoslovakian river with that name. [20] Christian Bale, when interviewed about playing Rolphe in The New World, said, “Everything with Terry just seems to slide–like sliding into warm water. He doesn’t make big exclamations. It just kind of happens,” and, “Terry […] is a very maternal man […]”[21] This brings us to Jack’s voiceover in The Tree of Life: “Father, mother, always you wrestle inside me…Always you will.”

Malick’s films enact this struggle, like the sinuous line in the Yin-Yang symbol, to the extent that, even when the feminine is seemingly literally dead and buried, as its symbol Witt is in The Thin Red Line, he immediately reassures us that the masculine needs what it’s repressed, as in this speech by Captain Bosche: “We are a family. I’m the father. I guess that makes Sergeant Welsh here the mother. And whether you guys like it or not, that makes you all the children in this family. Now, a family can only have one head, and that is the father. Father’s the head, mother runs it. That’s the way it’s gonna work here.” Throughout his oeuvre, Malick tells us the feminine and masculine should co-exist, but, because of the predominance of Captain Bosches in the world, we should actively foster more of the former’s long-neglected ideology. That is the tree we need to climb in life: the hard, vertical route to a view of how all things are one, not an accumulation of sundry unconnected objects that are there to be grabbed by the most aggressive hand.

Perhaps the male-centric field of film reviewers will finally see this when Malick releases his sixth film. Its poster shows a golden field, with Ben Affleck’s and Rachel McAdams’s nuzzling heads off to the side like an afterthought. Tall waving grass, of course, is Malick’s frequent stand-in for flowing water.

End Notes

1.      Of the 40 starred critics whose reviews are cited on Rotten Tomatoes (as of June 2011), 33 are male, 6 are female, and the gender of one was unclear.

2. http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/jul/10/tree-of-life-terrence-malick-review ; http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2011/05/a_prayer_beneath_the_tree_of_l.html;  http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2011/05/30/110530crci_cinema_lane?currentPage=2; http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/05/27/movies/the-tree-of-life-from-terrence-malick-review.html ; http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2011/05/terrence-malick-tree-of-life.html

3. Lloyd Michaels, Terrence Malick, University of Illinois Press, 2009, p. 101

4. Terrence Malick, interviewed by Beverly Walker in Sight and Sound, Spring 1975, pp. 82-83
5. Thomas Deane Tucker and Stuart Kendall, Terrence Malick: Film and Philosophy, The Continuum International Publishing Group, 2011, p. 80
6. Morrison and Schur, p. 1
7. Francis Bacon, The Philosophy of Francis Bacon, ed. B. Farrington, Liverpool University Press, 1970, p. 130
8. Susan Bordo, “The Cartesian Masculinization of Thought,” Signs, Vol. 11, No. 3, The University of Chicago Press, Spring, 1986, p. 449
9. Ibid, p. 445
10. Ibid, p. 446
11. Bordo, p. 448
12. Lloyd Michaels, Terrence Malick, University of Illinois Press, 2009, p. 14
13. Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, Anchor Books, 1988, p. 168
14. R. Barri Flowers and H. Loraine Flowers, Murders in the United States: Crimes, Killers, and Victims of the Twentieth Century, McFarland, 2005, p. 176
15. www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Pocahontas_d_1617 , accessed June 17, 2011
16. Benjamin Hoff, The Te of Piglet, Dutton, 1992, pp. 41-42

17. New Oxford American Dictionary, edited by Angus Stevenson and Christine A. Lindberg, Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 1774

18. Benjamin B, “Big Bang Theory,” American Cinematographer, August, 2011, p. 34

19. Hans Zimmer, interviewed for the Criterion edition of The Thin Red Line
20. www.cheltenhamsymphonyorchestra.info/pronotes.htm, accessed June 17, 2011

21. movies.about.com/od/thenewworld/a/nwworldcb122505.htm, accessed June 17, 2011

[1] Of the 40 starred critics whose reviews are cited on Rotten Tomatoes, 33 are male, 6 are female, and the gender of one was unclear.

[2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/jul/10/tree-of-life-terrence-malick-review ; http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2011/05/a_prayer_beneath_the_tree_of_l.html;  http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2011/05/30/110530crci_cinema_lane?currentPage=2; http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/05/27/movies/the-tree-of-life-from-terrence-malick-review.html ; http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2011/05/terrence-malick-tree-of-life.html

[3] Lloyd Michaels, Terrence Malick, University of Illinois Press, 2009, p. 101

[4] Terrence Malick, interviewed by Beverly Walker in Sight and Sound, Spring 1975, pp. 82-83

[5] Thomas Deane Tucker and Stuart Kendall, Terrence Malick: Film and Philosophy, The Continuum International Publishing Group, 2011, p. 80

[6] Morrison and Schur, p. 1

[7] Francis Bacon, The Philosophy of Francis Bacon, ed. B. Farrington, Liverpool University Press, 1970, p. 130

[8] Susan Bordo, “The Cartesian Masculinization of Thought,” Signs, Vol. 11, No. 3, The University of Chicago Press, Spring, 1986, p. 449

[9] Ibid, p. 445

[10] Ibid, p. 446

[11] Bordo, p. 448

[12] Lloyd Michaels, Terrence Malick, University of Illinois Press, 2009, p. 14

[13] Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, Anchor Books, 1988, p. 168

[14] R. Barri Flowers and H. Loraine Flowers, Murders in the United States: Crimes, Killers, and Victims of the Twentieth Century, McFarland, 2005, p. 176

[15] www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Pocahontas_d_1617 , accessed June 17, 2011

[16] Benjamin Hoff, The Te of Piglet, Dutton, 1992, pp. 41-42

[17] New Oxford American Dictionary, edited by Angus Stevenson and Christine A. Lindberg, Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 1774

[18] Benjamin B, “Big Bang Theory,” American Cinematographer, August, 2011, p. 34

[19] Hans Zimmer, interviewed for the Criterion edition of The Thin Red Line

[20] www.cheltenhamsymphonyorchestra.info/pronotes.htm, accessed June 17, 2011

[21] movies.about.com/od/thenewworld/a/nwworldcb122505.htm, accessed June 17, 2011