New Review of Film and Television Studies

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The cinema of entanglement: how not to

contemplate Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder,
Voyage of Time, and Knight of Cups

Gabriella Blasi

To cite this article: Gabriella Blasi (2019) The cinema of entanglement: how not to contemplate
Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder, Voyage of Time, and Knight of Cups, New Review of Film and
Television Studies, 17:1, 20-37, DOI: 10.1080/17400309.2019.1563360

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Published online: 02 Jan 2019.

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NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION STUDIES
2019, VOL. 17, NO. 1, 20–37
https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2019.1563360

The cinema of entanglement: how not to

contemplate Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder,
Voyage of Time, and Knight of Cups
a,b
Gabriella Blasi
a
School of Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences, Griffith University, Nathan, Australia;
b
School of Communication and Creative Industries, The University of the Sunshine Coast,
Maroochydore, Australia

ABSTRACT
Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder (2012), Knight of Cups (2015), and Voyage of
Time: Life’s Journey (2016) share a consistent use of theological and metaphy-
sical references in voice-over narration. This paper frames the markedly spiri-
tual and religious connotations of these 2010s films as an expression of
a persistent teleological vision of time and history in contemporary settings.
It argues that such vision is highly complicated and subverted by the films’
innovative formal and aesthetic elements. The analysis foregrounds the rele-
vance of current scientific and philosophical notions of entanglement in
Malick’s films and offers an ecocritical interpretation and application of some
of the films’ formal and narrative complexities in contemporary settings.

KEYWORDS Terrence Malick; film-philosophy; ecocriticism; teleology; entanglement

The Latin contemplatio, like its Greek equivalent, primarily means looking at
things, either with the eyes or with the mind; in either case it can be
contrasted with doing things.

(The Concise Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church)

Introduction
A few issues back in this journal, Martin P. Rossouw reviewed Malick’s film-
philosophical canon, the work of a number of philosophers and film scholars
with an interest in Malick’s cinema.1 Rossouw’s (2017, 281, 282) ‘meta-analytic
stance’ locates common interpretive methods in the analysis of Malick’s style;
a style labelled in the literature as diversely as ‘“poetic”, “lyrical”, “romantic”,
“visionary”, “mythical”, and “metaphysical”’, while consistently characterised
as uniquely ‘contemplative’ and ‘transformational’. He states that Malick’s is:

CONTACT Gabriella Blasi g.blasi@griffith.edu.au

© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION STUDIES 21

[a] style that viewers experience as ‘contemplative’ . . . presents itself an attrac-

tive invitation for philosopher–theorists to explore the nature of thought in,
through or of film. Since philosophy involves acts of contemplation, the con-
nection between contemplative style and philosophy is, quite understandably,
one that is easily drawn (282–283).

This would explain contemporary philosophers’ attraction to Malick’s films.

What Rossouw takes issues with is that philosophical reflections, readings,
and descriptions of style and their effects are still ‘interpretations . . . of what
stylistic devices do . . . and invested, value-laden interpretations of that’
(293–294). Rossouw’s meta-analytic approach usefully reminds film-
philosophers of the importance of foregrounding methodological stand-
points in the framing and interpretation of cinematic styles. Yet, he notes,
‘to demand from film-philosophers to give greater empirical grounding to
the style-effect connections that they pose . . . would seem to violate the
spirit of the philosophical readings considered here’ (293).
For Rossouw, the value-laden interpretation of style-effects is informed
by philosophers’ personal and ethical dispositions over the world of Nature.
He concludes that Malick scholarship is divided into two broad philoso-
phical approaches to Nature, the subjective, self-reflective vision and the
immersive, non-subjective vision:

One is led by a motive of Subjectivity, emphasizing how his style embodies

and elicits reflective thinking . . . and the other by a motive of Nature, giving
priority to the world to which his style gives presence . . . The first stream has
an overall ethical orientation that affirms subjectivity. The second, quite the
opposite, hopes for a negation or loss of individual subjectivity. This means
that one approach will hold dear certain transformational values that the
other will not. Nature-led approaches are undoubtedly drawn to the value of
unity (with nature), as it typifies the ideal of a dispersed subject who escapes
itself through its connectedness to the world. Film philosophers dedicated to
a Subjectivity motive instead make appropriate the distinctness separation of
human experience, as it seeks meaning over against nature (294–295, italics
in the original).

Taking up Rossouw’s vision and implied provocation, I would suggest the

interpretive grounding he calls for should not be limited to ‘empirical’
premises, especially at a time when the human experiential sensorium is
a less-than-adequate tool to make sense of empirical data on the nature of
reality.2 In this view, I contend that contemporary research into quantum
entanglement may provide the theoretical and practical premise to articu-
late a vision of Nature in which neither subjective nor immersive philoso-
phical orientations are mutually exclusive. Current scientific investigations
into quantum entanglement provide a spooky3 and uncanny milieu in
which unity and disunity coexist, a milieu that eludes classical notions of
linear time and causality and in which entangled matter may actually ‘build
22 G. BLASI

up’ (Van Raamsdonk 2010) and precede spacetime phenomena. While

Malick is certainly not a scientist or mathematician (nor a metaphysician
or theologian for that matter), his work denotes a preoccupation with
current notions of spacetime spookiness.
A growing proportion of enthusiastic scholarly literature on Malick’s
films is in the domain of religious and theological discourses, with an
inverse proportion of dissatisfied film scholars almost personally offended
at Malick’s recent change of style, particularly in To the Wonder, Knight of
Cups and Song to Song. Malick’s work of the 2010s seems to polarise
reception between enthusiastic experts in religious and theological matters,
and disappointed and frustrated experts in film matters.4 These films appear
to tackle the complexities of a new relation between physics and poetics,
with an editing style that favours notions of non-causality and entangle-
ment between instances of non-linear, spacetime fragments and shots.
As a result, the story events depicted on the screen are not just repre-
sentations of events, that is, they are not – perhaps even less – an inter-
subjective vehicle of influence between films and spectators. With Malick,
the materiality of film experiences can be understood in terms of non-
causal relations between humans and the world at large:

The concept of entanglement differs from that of influence. The latter derives
from images of fluent and ‘local’ communicability that ancient astrology,
Aristotelian physics and classical mechanics all share in common; by contrast
the former is one of the basic concepts of quantum theory (Fenves 2016, 3).

So, what would the experience of entanglement with Malick films mean
in concrete terms? It would mean an expansion of the concept of
spectatorship. It would mean spectators have the opportunity to become
entangled with the events, characters and situations brought to view: the
exact opposite of film experiences as escapism and the exact opposite of
film experiences as catharsis. Hence, the immediate negative reaction that
critics and the general public experience when watching these films may
come from the sense of not wanting the ensuing work and responsibility
they entail.
In what follows, I argue that current religious-metaphysical interpreta-
tions of Malick’s recent films are based on classical notions of time and
space that are contradicted by the film’s stylistic and aesthetic elements. I
claim that the notion of entanglement5 is relevant for future film-philo-
sophical study and analysis of Malick’s innovative film-style, and propose
a material rather than metaphysical reading and interpretation of Malick’s
narrative and stylistic elements. The aesthetics of Malick’s recent work
complicates religious and theological closures and brings forth an uncom-
fortable reflection on the inadequacies of a teleological notion of time in
contemporary settings. More precisely, his work exposes the exhaustion of
 NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION STUDIES 23

both religious and capitalist views of progress in twenty-first-century

culture.

Setting the contemporary scene: Knight of Cups and To the

Wonder
Malick’s seventh feature film, released shortly after To the Wonder and
Voyage of Time and quickly followed by Song to Song in 2017, is perhaps
his most criticised to date. Set in contemporary Los Angeles, Knight of Cups
provides one of the most unflattering accounts of the city ever documented
in a narrative film. Poignantly, it is the story of Rick (Christian Bale),
a troubled Hollywood screenwriter who wanders from party to party, from
woman to woman, as he tries to figure out conflicting relationships with his
father (Brian Dennehy) and his brother (Wes Bentley) while healing from
a broken marriage with Nancy (Cate Blanchett). Nancy is older than Rick
and works as a physician treating the poor, sick, and neglected people of Los
Angeles. Voice-over narration suggests that she provided emotional and
economic support when Rick was younger: ‘you wanted me to help you
through the dangers of a young man’s life’. Nancy regrets them not having
children: ‘are you sorry that we didn’t have children together? I am. We got
started so late’. Later in the narrative, in a segment titled under the tarot card
‘death’, Rick has a relationship with Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), a married
woman who falls pregnant and does not know if the baby was conceived with
Rick or her husband. Her abortion – which she does not take lightly – is
suggested in a brief, surreal scene or fragment. This moment almost passes
away unnoticed in a sequence of other images washing away on the screen.
Indeed, the audience is submerged in a stream of images without narrative
purpose – a sense of extemporaneity or life-as-it-happens on screen.
Such precise configuration of non-meanings and extemporaneity are
achieved through the careful deployment of precise aesthetic techniques,
such as the use of anamorphic lenses, fluid steady-cam movements, and
discontinuous editing that favours temporal incongruities between shots.
There are instances in which the visual narrative reverses and subverts
linear cause-effect and eye-line matches, suggesting a disruption of viewers’
expected suturing into narrative progression, such as when Rick is seen
ascending a mountain in the desert and the following shot shows him
looking at it. Similarly, there are instances in which unsettling jump cuts
take us back in time, such as when the camera moves around Rick’s
apartment towards the window, and a rapid cut takes us back in, frustrating
what would have otherwise led to a sense of liberation and accomplishment,
as Rick says ‘begin’ in voice-over. Such precise contradictions of meaning
hinder narrative progression and effectively returns viewers to the halluci-
natory, dream-like, overwhelming, and obfuscating quality of Rick’s inner
24 G. BLASI

battle as he struggles to find his way in life and disentangle himself from his
father’s vision and history.6 Nevertheless, the stylistic features of Knight of
Cups do not allow time to think and do not appeal to the audience’s
emotions either. As a result, the film upset most contemporary critical
reviewers and audiences who tend to see and decode films as rational,
political critiques and/or in terms of emotional, empathic and neurological
connections with the characters and story worlds depicted on screen.
Malick’s work poses methodological questions for contemporary film scho-
lars. Confronted with the unknown and the unfamiliar, most critics and
audiences respond angrily, accusing Malick of senility, of having lost his art
and other rather shallow personal attacks.7
The narrative and aesthetic elements of Knight of Cups are carefully
crafted, eliciting specific effects on viewers, including discomfort and con-
fusion. Such stylistic features have gradually become Malick’s signature
style in his later films, reaching full maturity in the folded and parted
narratives of Song to Song,8 in which the images on screen repeatedly take
us back and forth in time with some uncanny déjà-vu and anticipations of
yet-to-happen events (like some of the experiences narrated by Patti Smith,
playing herself in the film). Reportedly, protagonists in these later films
were not given a script, allowing their characters freedom and space to
develop and explore gestures on set; gestures that were then manipulated
and actualised (or abandoned) in post-production. In Knight of Cups, there
are instances in which voices and lines of dialogue are barely audible or
completely muted, reinforcing the sense of alienation, frustration, and
incompleteness of the story as it unfolds. Nevertheless, while images convey
such an extraordinary picture of Rick’s crisis and daily alienation, the film
presents moments that reveal the level of intentional aesthetic detail in
producing such random and ‘casual’ life-as-it-happens effects.
One such moment occurs in a fleeting sequence in which Rick and his
brother meet their mother (Cherry Jones) in a restaurant. A visibly depressed
and tormented Rick enters the restaurant where he will have lunch with his
mother and brother. There are only a few patrons in the restaurant, most of
them are alone, except for a couple who strikes our and Rick’s attention. The
man has a laptop in front of him, and a woman is talking on her mobile phone.
On the laptop screen, a pregnancy ultrasound plays in loops: the baby’s head is
clearly visible as the man reaches for a drink of water. Despite the film’s flowing
and casual aesthetics, the moment is certainly not accidental. A low angle fast
tracking shot and rapid match cut seamlessly bring us closer to the table and
screen. As we see the foetus’ head moving intermittently, Rick’s reflection on
the monitor enters the picture from the left – evidently, the image has also
attracted his attention – as he stops behind the man to get a closer look at the
recorded ultrasound playing on the screen.
 NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION STUDIES 25

This cut arguably undermines the sensation of witnessing life-as-it-hap-

pens randomness. The moment is preceded and followed by the mother’s low
volume voice-overs telling Rick he used to hide from his father when he was
a child, and he always felt like a spy, followed by a clearer and louder line: ‘I
hope you have children. You are always wondering if they are cold, if they are
warm enough, instead of worrying about yourself’. While the mother’s line
gives voice to a general, popular sentiment on the benefit of having children,
the figural economy of the entire sequence exposes another side: babies as
desirable consumer goods and commodities that are good for us. Arguably,
the sequence undermines the conviction that having children counters self-
ishness. The couple’s gestures convey an alienated, mediated, and a self-
absorbed distance between them and the ultrasound image of their future
baby on a computer screen. The entire sequence is crowded with images of
children, starting with a child sleeping in a pram, to some unnamed friends
walking on the streets with their three small children. This segment follows
Rick’s encounter with Helen (Freida Pinto), an embodiment of connected-
ness with life and the only woman Rick does not bed. After a series of rather
abstract meditative practices with Helen, a fade to black followed by Rick on
the street in full daylight feels like waking up to reality: images of a homeless
woman resting her head on her knees, a wounded pelican limping away from
Rick and his brother’s gaze, and images of polluted water follow as the
father’s voice-over exhorts Rick to remember the ‘pearl’ and his purpose in
life.
Malick’s aesthetic and narrative elements contradict themselves. While
voice-overs constantly frame Rick’s story as that of a teleological journey
‘from darkness to light’ using Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, Plato’s
Phoedrus, and Rumi’s pearls, the images on screen tell another story:
a story that does not progress towards heaven, and of a soul incapable of
love, one that does not have wings. Malick’s imagery undermines any clear-
cut interpretations, particularly straightforward, religious, and metaphysical
readings. From the initial earthquake scene, Rick’s pilgrimage does not
progress towards resolution or a higher state of transcendence and is
constantly brought back to Earth. Similarly, the river (a recurrent figure
in Malick cinema) does not flow to the sea. Reduced to a paddle in the
desert, the dry river is the first image of the film and the road leading to it is
the last: where to from there? Indeed, Rick’s personal crisis and his profes-
sion as a screenwriter in contemporary Hollywood effectively allegorise the
crisis of teleological thinking embedded in classical storytelling.
The same discrepancy between narrative and formal elements and com-
plex configuration of meanings is embedded in the setting and narrative
elements of To the Wonder. The same yearning for religious or metaphy-
sical transcendence, escape from life’s suffering and pain, and the same
scrupulous frustration of any such attempt is the defining stylistic feature of
26 G. BLASI

Malick’s 2012 film. The story focuses on the love life and torments of an
environmental toxicologist Neil (Ben Affleck), a Roman Catholic Priest,
Father Quintana (Javier Bardem), and a French divorcee and parent of an
only child, Marina (Olga Kurylenko). At the beginning of their metaphoric
and literal love journey ‘à la merveille’, Marina and Neil steadily climb the
steps of Mont Saint Michel’s abbey. Despite this hopeful incipit, the fast
tides below and the increasingly discontinuous imagery of the film under-
mine and frustrate any such linear ascent and progression towards stability
and immutability from the outset. Such desire for stability in a world of
relentless change marks the imagery of the film from its inception and is the
thematic thread woven into Father Quintana’s touching prayers and invo-
cations. Father Quintana advocates ‘divine’ love: a love ‘that never changes’,
something ‘higher’ than romantic love because ‘emotions, they come and go
like clouds’.
The film follows Marina and Neil’s love story, from its beginning in Paris to
its demise in Bartlesville with several crises along the way, including betrayals
by both. When Marina and her daughter return to France for an expired visa,
Neil has a brief and intense relationship with Jane (Rachel McAdams),
a quintessentially American ranger who reads the bible and walks among
buffaloes. Upon Marina’s return to Bartlesville the couple marries with civil
and, later, Christian rites; however, the relationship ends after Marina’s
betrayal with a carpenter (Charles Baker) who forged a musical instrument
for the couple, a dulcimer she places on the windowsill. Catholic readings
suggest Marina and Neil’s moments of crisis, and subsequent betrayals are
a deeper response to their struggle to contemplate a higher love (Camacho
2017) and the impossibility of remarrying under Catholic dogma and rites
(Urda 2016). Nevertheless, Malick’s cinematic endeavour in To the Wonder
appears more complex and nuanced than a simple illustration of religious
persuasion. The argument that the film shows the consequences of Marina and
Neil’s lack of commitment to the sacrament of marriage and procreation in the
Catholic tradition and dogma reads as reactionary. Conversely, the reference to
possible pregnancies is a recurrent theme in later Malick – one often accom-
panied by a disturbing number of new estates and developments, new houses
and construction sites.
An important turning point in Marina and Neil’s love story occurs
when they are informed that Marina’s intrauterine contraceptive device
must be removed for some unspecified health problems. On the occasion,
the doctor asks the couple if they are considering having children. The
scene follows a Skype conversation between Marina and her daughter,
who evidently decided not to follow her mother back to Oklahoma and
moved in with her father and his new family. After this segment, we
witness Marina and Neil’s brief return to happiness, coinciding with the
blossoming of a new spring season in the newly constructed estate they
 NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION STUDIES 27

moved to when they arrived in the US. Images of the estate’s streets in
various seasons recur throughout the film, with children on bicycles,
manicured lawns, and the still, empty block of land next door waiting
for a new house and a new family to buy it.
One particular scene in this segment reveals Marina’s uneasiness in
progressing her relationship with Neil to the next, socially expected, step
in their narrative. The reveal occurs when some unspecified friends or
family members join for a barbecue with their six, or possibly seven,
children. We see Marina at the patriarchal dinner table silently gazing
and smiling at Neil as the father gives his thanks and blessings. The
sequence that follows parallels Marina’s moment of introspection with
a series of confronting images of the poor and suffering people Father
Quintana visits in his daily routine, ending with Marina in the church
confessing her sins to, and taking the Eucharist from, Father Quintana. In
the following sequence, Marina betrays Neil with the only other person she
has interacted with in Bartlesville: the carpenter who worked on their new
house’s windows. She says: ‘my God what a cruel war. I find two women in
me: one full of love for you; the other pulls me down, to the earth’. This
voice-over precedes the sequence in which Marina metaphorically follows
the pull to Earth and betrays Neil. Such a moment conveys Marina’s inner
split between a ‘high’ state of love and connectedness with God, and a ‘low’
state in which she feels, so the film tells us, this pulls to Earth.
In this simple, dualistic cosmogony associating Earth with death and
God with eternity and immutability, Marina finds herself caught in an
impossible battle. The desire for transcendence and the impossibility of
reaching such a state in temporal, finite life is a source of suffering and pain
for her. When Marina confesses her betrayal to Neil, the couple splits and
Neil is seen filing a divorce case and reaching out to Father Quintana in
search of spiritual comfort and answers. After this point, the visual narra-
tive of To the Wonder becomes increasingly fragmentary and clearly indi-
cates two separate but simultaneous paths or possibilities: one shows
fragments of Marina’s life in Oklahoma with a baby and with a child, and
the other shows Marina crossing paths with Jane and leaving Bartlesville.
This split mirrors the two women Marina mentioned earlier in voice-over
narration. According to this logic, Marina with the baby follows the push
towards transcendence and Marina leaving Bartlesville follows the push
down to Earth. The film ends on images of Neil with children and a new
family, and Marina walking through a bleak semi-rural countryside with
a dog. Malick leaves us with the Marina who followed the pull to Earth, the
one whose hands are covered in dirt, but not before a fade to black brings
us back to France for a moment.9
While Marina’s final images suggest complex configurations of meanings
and non-linear temporal relations in human history, the parallel between
28 G. BLASI

Father Quintana and Neil leaves audiences with a clear vision about their
deeper nexus beyond the screen – the one between religion and capitalism
in human history.10 Despite their obvious differences (one is a Catholic
priest and the other a scientist), Father Quintana and Neil’s gestures are
very similar: they are shown wandering from house to house, town to town,
talking to the same desperate and upset people. Father Quintana does his
best to comfort the sick and poor of our time in Bartlesville, and Neil
diligently performs his duty gaining first-hand accounts of the level of toxic
waste and pollution in densely populated, regional areas of Oklahoma,
which are highly exploited by the mining industries. Here, the parallel
between the literal and the metaphoric wastelands these characters inhabit
could not be more explicit: the association between Father Quintana and
Neil is deeply embedded in a shared, progressive and teleological notion of
time.11

The end of teleology in Voyage of Time: Life’s Journey

What is teleology and how does it relate to human notions of time? Using
a rather simplistic figure of speech, temporal teleology is the fundamental
notion that there is meaning at the end of the tunnel, in final causes. For
example, a teleological vision of the world is that human ‘original sin’ will be
redeemed at the end of time; the sinful body will be resurrected, transfigured,
and transformed into a higher state and returned to paradise. But teleological
visions of the world and life are not confined to religious and theological
discourses. Since Aristotle (1991), they pervade metaphysically notions of
final causation in general, including more modern versions and reinterpreta-
tions in the eighteenth century, such as the Romantic Bildung (Pfau 2007)
and Darwin’s theory of evolution (Lennox 1993). For Luhmann:
the teleological perspective is a way of defining and analyzing causal pro-
cesses by looking at the final state of these processes. The final state, outcome,
or effect of a process represents the focus of teleological thinking. By fixing
the outcomes (i.e. keeping them constant) teleological analysis establishes
equivalence classes for causal processes. (quoted in Toepfer 2011, 115)

Teleology is not confined to Aristotelian philosophy but is embedded in the

way contemporary humans interpret phenomena around them. As Ruse
(2016) observes:
Teleology. . .is trying to understand things in terms of the future, as when we
ask about the plates on the back of the dinosaur, stegosaurus, and suggest
that they might sometime be used to control the internal temperature of the
brute. (italics added)

Following this logic, enormous progress has been made in the scientific study
of biological organisms and ecosystems. Nevertheless, despite efforts to remove
 NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION STUDIES 29

notions of divine final causes from the biological sciences and scientific
thought generally, teleological thinking remains endemic to inductive and
deductive reasoning in biological research. Temporal teleology remains
a structural understanding of time as progressing along one or multiple lines,
or a succession of points along those lines; hence, the linear notion of time
upon which we all agree.12
Voyage of Time: Life’s Journey is a documentary film narrating the
evolution of life on Earth following the latest scientific theories in the fields
of evolutionary biology, palaeontology, and astrophysics. The scientific
accuracy of the documentary, which was supervised by a list of credited
science advisors, is then conveyed using state-of-the-art visual effects and
sound design supervised by Dan Glass and Joel Dougherty, respectively.
The rhetorical aspect of the documentary becomes apparent in the solemn
voice-over narration of Cate Blanchett,13 whose questionings offer
a theological and philosophical counterpoint to the scientific evolution of
life communicated in the visual narrative on screen. Contrary to the forty-
minute-long IMAX version narrated by Brad Pitt, which has a more
science-based educational purpose, the feature film version narrated by
Blanchett is a more philosophical and questioning work in which Malick
directly tackles one of the central themes of his oeuvre: nature and humans’
place in it: ‘What is this world? The stricken ox. The abandoned child. The
wound. The old woman. Might we be deceived? The soul. A wish. A dream.
And we know nothing. Blind. Oh Life. Hear my voice’.
Blanchett’s voice-over seemingly endorses a teleological vision of history:
a spiritual movement from original unity and immutability, to fragmentation
and distance, to final reconciliation. In this narrative, final causes and origin
coincide in an immutable, atemporal reality. The voice-over starts by saying:
‘Mother, you walked with me then. In the silence. Before there was a world.
Before night or day. Alone in the stillness. When Nothing was’. After a long
central segment detailing the advent of biological life on the planet, Blanchett’s
concluding remarks evoke concepts of Platonic memory: ‘The shadows flee the
show. Time goes back to her source. Mother, I take your hand I dream no
more. Joined with you. Leaf to branch, branch to tree. Love binds us together.
What lives in you can’t die. Oh Life. Oh Mother’. In this Manichean universe,
Nature – or biological life – is associated with death, restlessness, and dis-
satisfaction: ‘Mother, born now I am. Life, who are you? Life, restless, unsa-
tisfied . . . Nature, who am I to you? You defy yourself only to give birth to
yourself again’. Following this logic, historical, biological, and temporal life on
Earth is an interval, a digression on life’s teleological journey to reconciliation
with timeless, immutable ‘Spirit’ or ‘Mother’. Such a complexity is com-
pounded when the voice asks: ‘Who are you? Life Giver. Light bringer’.14
And when the voice parallels life to restlessness, dissatisfaction and dualism:
‘Mother. Born. Now. I am. Life. Restless. Unsatisfied. I thirst. Light. Dark’. In
30 G. BLASI

this universe, life gives without asking, creates itself in ever-changing shapes,
‘devours itself only to give birth to itself again’. By contrast, the ‘light of love’
awakens and is an endless source, endless river, shapeless as a cloud. Many
change and pass while the light of love endures and from her perspective, ‘all
things ascend and stone flows like mist’. Therefore, Mother is ‘beyond time,
beyond sorrow’, because ‘time ravages and devours all’.
In this series of invocations to ‘Mother’ (the source and origin of all, to
which all things return), the subject position and agency of the speaking
voice is not fixed or determined, as it bears testimony to Mother, life and
nothingness, yet is ‘full of trouble. A riddle to [her]self’. Certainly, both
time and Nature in Malick are never scientifically straightforward and are
very difficult to pin down in exact philosophical or theological terms.
Indeed, the film metaphorically speaks to all: readers of the bible will find
a state-of-the-art National Geographic rendition of Genesis; scientists will
find the most accurate and aesthetically pleasing simulations of scientific
data; and others are left wondering why Malick spends so much time
putting together such an accurate simulation of teleological time and the
type of (delusional) spiritual journey it ensues. Nevertheless, while
Blanchett’s voice-overs deserve close, dedicated textual analysis in their
own right, it is the accompanying aesthetic techniques in this longer version
of the documentary that are most striking.
In Voyage of Time: Life’s Journey, voice-over narration and visual ima-
gery tell different stories. The film opens and closes with images of blue sky
and invocation to Mother. It also opens and closes with mobile phone
camera quality images that interrupt the otherwise seamless 4K depictions
of life’s journey on the screen a number of times (mobile phone camera
images on 4K images appear as a digital translation of 16-mm grainy
images in a 75-mm film). This poor quality, shaky footage is interspersed
with an otherwise epic visual narrative on five occasions. These are images
of contemporary, twenty-first-century human life on Earth, belonging to all
cultures, creeds, and nationalities: sick, elderly people in the US; an Oxfam
refugee camp in Tanzania; Hindi communities and animal deities in India,
traditional dances in Russia and old women in France and Italy; schoolgirls
studying English in China; Hebrew wedding ceremonies and chants, Tai
Chi, Buddhist monks, and prayer wheels; and a buffalo slaughter ceremony
in Nepal. Similar contemporary footage from all corners of the world is
edited into a final montage following a vision of spacetime physics and
fractal-like simulation preceding Blanchett’s final voice-over: ‘Love binds us
together. What lives in you can’t die’.
Malick’s 4K state-of-the-art images narrate the teleological, progressive
story of the evolution of life on Earth from simple, unicellular life to complex
human beings in a succession of events on a timeline. Conversely, Malick’s
‘mobile-phone’ aesthetic techniques interrupt this teleology with incursions
 NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION STUDIES 31

of contemporary human life on the planet, effectively undermining the

chronological ordering and notion of gradual successions that so scrupu-
lously details the evolution of biological life on Earth. These are present-day,
ordinary stories of starvation, war, poverty and perplexing ‘spiritual’ striving
and practices from all continents. The story of contemporary human life on
the planet effectively counters the very notion of progress informing the rest
of the 4K simulations. At the same time, the final fractals on screen reveal
a notion of spacetime and reality not bound to classical physics, causation,
teleology and progress. These images reveal the possibility of a new relation
to reality in the presence of our human condition, a reality open to sudden
changes and not bound to tradition.
Malick’s documentary and narrative films of the 2010s display a consistent
configuration of aesthetic and stylistic elements showing the end of the line
in terms of progress and teleology. Malick’s contemporary settings are
a testimony to early twenty-first century’s dysfunctional relationship between
humans and their planet. These works show us the full picture of twenty-first
century’s exhaustion and alienation, in economic, capitalistic and religious
terms. In To the Wonder, we see densely populated and poor areas of
Oklahoma through Neil’s daily occupation as an environmental toxicologist
and Father Quintana’s visits to the poor and sick people of Bartlesville. While
Neil struggles to defend the interests of the unknown corporation he works
for, Father Quintana struggles through his Catholic routines, rites and
ministry. Both figures are the product of teleological, progressive logic and
both are shown as exhausted, tired and in crisis. Marina’s crisis, however,
takes another path in To the Wonder. The last image of Marina is a medium
close-up as she suddenly turns, illuminated by a flashlight at dusk. An
intercut of Mont Saint Michel in the distance follows in the similar evening
light. This final image of Marina leaves us in totally new, uncharted, and
unexplored territory in human history a territory not tied to teleology,
patriarchal tradition, and the religious ways of the past.
A similar configuration of meanings pervades Knight of Cups and its
figural economy. From the point of the initial powerful earthquake, the film
constantly pulls Rick down to Earth, frustrating any attempts to transfigure
or transcend physical reality. As a counterpoint to the rich Los Angeles of
celebrities, images of traffic, poverty, crowded beaches, and overpopulated
streets follow. We are left with the sound of traffic halfway through the final
credits, just before the film ends with Hanan Townshend’s alluring ‘Water
Theme’. Indeed, the theme of water recurs throughout the film,15 but water
has lost its lure and promise of redemption in Knight of Cups. Disturbingly,
images of water are either confined in aseptic, sparkling pools or shown to
be murky and polluted or dried up in rivers and fountains. The ways of the
past have run their course: eternity is a myth and the logic of economic,
capitalistic progress cannot progress any longer. The father says: ‘I’m proud
32 G. BLASI

of you, you’ve done better than me. This is the way it is supposed to be’.
Nevertheless, Rick’s crisis and the film’s aesthetics make us fully aware that
continuous progress and expansion of material prosperity are definitely not
‘the way it is supposed to be’.
Malick’s recent films do not entertain or persuade, nor do they invite
a contemplative, philosophical reflection on the nature of reality. As argued,
they give us a concrete, spatio-temporal ground to experience the exact
opposite of contemplation, and the exact opposite of vicarious experiences
of catharsis on screen. Malick’s films of the 2010s provide their audiences
and spectators with the opportunity to become entangled with their prota-
gonists’ journeys, crisis, and awareness. This way, they give us the oppor-
tunity to take Marina and Rick’s crisis and awareness into the concrete,
material realm of one’s own life, acts, and choices.

Conclusion
This paper proposes a distinctly historical, material interpretation of
Malick’s To the Wonder, Voyage of Time, and Knight of Cups. Traditional
religious, spiritual conceptions of the world are shown as part of the
problem Malick’s aesthetic argument on the inadequacies of present-day
humans’ relation to the planet, nature, and life bring to view. If competing
for life and looking for transcendence and spiritual answers has brought us
to overpopulation, mass displacement, mass starvation, mass massacres of
animals, widespread poverty, and mental illness in one of the richest
countries on Earth, perhaps present-day human relations to the planet,
resources, and nature need reframing not through contemplation but
through concrete acts and choices at an individual and political level.
After the extraordinary visualisations of contemporary notions of spacetime
physics, Malick’s documentary ends its evolutionary, teleological journey on
Malick’s hometown of Austin, Texas, on a little girl, listening, walking
through a suburban landscape and some new buildings. The story of that
girl, as the story of Marina walking away from the past and the story of Rick
in the desert, is yet to be told.

Notes
1. Rossouw (2017) reviews and reflects on the following works and film-
philosophers: Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit (2004), Clewis (2006), Coplan
(2008), Critcheley (2005), Davies (2008a, 2008b), Furstenau and MacAvoy
(2007), Kendall (2011), Lehtimäki (2012), Macdonald (2008), Martin
(2006), Neer (2011), Plantinga (2010), Pippin (2013), Rybin (2011, 2012),
Silberman (2007), Sinnerbrink (2006, 2011a, 2011b), Tucker (2011),
Virvidaki (2014); and Walden (2011). Rossouw identifies analysis of precise
stylistic devices in the literature (such as photography of landscape and
 NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION STUDIES 33

nature; first person voice-over monologue; juxtaposition of image and

sound; discontinuous editing; repetition of devices; music; camera move-
ment; and episodic, elliptical narrative) and analysis of stylistic effects (such
as elliptical, fragmented or impressionistic aesthetic qualities; experience of
incongruity or disorientation; questioning or interrogative modes of pre-
sentation; experience of awe, wonder and sublimity, expressions of perspec-
tives, point of view or ways of seeing). Taken together, they enlist and solicit
‘ethically significant effects on the viewer . . . [and] a contemplative mode of
self-transformation’ (284–285, emphasis in original).
2. As an example of such inadequacy, contemporary investigations into quan-
tum physics and astrophysics are based on computational mathematical
models as opposed to the analytic methods of applied mathematics.
3. Albert Einstein, in a letter to Max Born in 1947, referred to the notion of
entanglement in quantum physics as the theory that ‘cannot be reconciled
with the idea that physics should represent reality in time and space, free
from spooky actions at a distance’. See Siegfrid’s (2016) article detailing the
enduring relevance of quantum entanglement’s ‘spookiness’ in contemporary
research, especially the notion that quantum entanglement ‘builds up space-
time’ (Van Raamsdonk 2010). In his article, Van Raamsdonk ends his
scientific/mathematical calculations with the following evocative and philo-
sophically groundbreaking conclusion: ‘it is fascinating that the intrinsically
quantum phenomenon of entanglement appears to be crucial for the emer-
gence of classical spacetime geometry’ (2328).
4. As the most recent examples of this double strand in theology and film
studies, see the analysis of Malick’s films in Zocchi (2018) and McKim
(2018).
5. The notion of entanglement is gaining momentum in film studies. Creed
(2009) links it to the literary and cinematic uncanny in early cinema and
Walton (2016) to phenomenological interpretations of Baroque aesthetics in
particular films. See also Elsaesser's (2018) conception of the mind-game
films and Buckland’s (2009) conception of the ‘puzzle plot’ (also see note 10).
6. The mise-en scène associated with the father in Knight of Cups constantly
displays old furniture, industrial sites and abandoned and dusty offices and
workplaces belonging to late twentieth-century aesthetics.
7. As examples of mixed reactions and reviews, see Robey (2016) and Bradshaw
(2016). See also volume 39 issue 2 of New England Review (2018), edited by
J. M. Tyree.
8. In my extended work on Malick (forthcoming in the series Film Culture in
Transition, Amsterdam University Press), I contend that Song to Song breaks
exceptional new ground in film aesthetics and poetics. In particular, I suggest
further reflection on the philosophical value of Malick’s inclusion of images and
sounds of Saturn recorded and sent back to Earth from the Cassini space
Mission (2004–2017). Images of Saturn’s moons are disguised under incon-
gruent aesthetic styles, in an early-cinema style fragment and on a screen of
a ProTools equipped recording studio. ProTools is a professional Digital Audio
Workstation (DAW) made by AVID. (Thanks to Dr Lachlan Goold for giving
a proper name to the sound engineering equipment figuring in Song to Song).
9. Five prolonged cuts at the end of To the Wonder take us back to the Palace of
Versailles: the staircase and the fountain of Apollo in the gardens, the statues
and the open gate.
34 G. BLASI

10. Religious impetus and accumulation of material wealth share paradoxically

similar motives: both are preoccupied with assuring stability and certainty
(spiritual and material, respectively) in a world in which change and imper-
manence are inevitable. See Lehmann (2016).
11. When Father Quintana and Neil meet, there are two broken clocks carefully
displayed in the mise-en-scène. In the same extended work mentioned in the
previous note, I suggest further analysis of the significance of the recurrent
image of the clock in Malick films particularly the reference to a tradition in
Naturphilosophie.
12. Such a linear conception of time is embedded in notions of human narratives
and storytelling. Complex plots, multiple timelines and complex manipula-
tions of story-time are not uncommon in films. Certainly, the concept of
‘puzzle film’ (Buckland 2009) goes a long way in articulating a non-
Aristotelian order of events, or plots, in film poetics (Aristotle 1987). For
example, a puzzle film, for Buckland, is not defined by complex plots, but
conceptualised as a movement away from causal complexities in films: ‘how
do puzzle plots go beyond Aristotle’s definition of the complex plot? . . .
Puzzle films embrace non-linearity, time loops, and fragmented spatio-
temporal reality’. As Buckland further notes: ‘a puzzle plot is intricate in
the sense that the arrangement of events is not just complex, but complicated
and perplexing; the events are not simply interwoven, but entangled’.
13. There are two versions of Voyage of Time. A 45-min version narrated by Brad
Pitt Voyage of Time: The IMAX Experience, released in IMAX theatres in
2016, and a longer version (90 minutes) narrated by Cate Blanchett, pre-
sented at the Venice Film Festival in 2016 and distributed on DVD and
online by One Entertainment in 2017.
14. ‘Light bringer’ translates into Latin lux fero.
15. Hamner (2016) notes that water images pervade and ‘saturate the film’s
aesthetic canvas’, signifying its deeper religious-symbolic meaning and ‘dai-
monologic lure and promise of eternity’ (272).

Acknowledgments
My sincere thanks to Ted Geier for his patience, persistence, and thoughtful
insights on earlier versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID
Gabriella Blasi http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6267-1999

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