Abstract
While the previous chapter was an overview of Malick’s temporal shift, this chapter explores his post-Days of Heaven films in depth from the standpoint of unseeing. Shifting states of listening resonate an ethics of openness in The Thin Red Line, The New World, and The Tree of Life. A more hopeful chapter than the audible failures of Chap. 4, listening becomes a re-engagement with lost time through acts of recollecting and imagining. Malick presents a listening that resonates hearing and moves toward new durations: listening-for, listening-to, listening beyond, and answering the call of new thinking. Moving through deep unseeing expressions in Malick’s work, it brings Kierkegaard, Deleuze, and Heidegger together to unfold themes of love, family, redemption, and the desire to reconnect and ultimately reform a lost unity.
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Notes
- 1.
See Chap. 3.
- 2.
Point of audition; see again Chap. 2.
- 3.
Deleuze points out that this is common in war films, the “interminable waiting and its permeations of atmosphere on the one hand and on the other its brutal explosions and its acting-out” (Deleuze, 1986, p. 160).
- 4.
See section 40 of Heidegger (2010).
- 5.
See Heidegger (1966).
- 6.
We may remember again that “repetition” for Deleuze and Kierkegaard are not the same, but neither are they entirely at odds.
- 7.
The circuit is found most prominently in his second cinema book (Deleuze, 1989) but is found as well in other texts. His brief essay “The Actual and the Virtual” (Deleuze, 2002) is an unusually direct definition of the connection of the two and how circuits function in their operation. (See also Eliot Ross Albert’s footnote on this text.)
- 8.
These two may occur in the same moment, typically marked by the arrival of some unseen entity. Examples are the jungle sounds that fade prior to the appearance of the tiger in Apocalypse Now (Coppola, 1979), the crickets that fade prior to the arrival of the UFO in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Spielberg, 1977), and the cicadas that cease twice prior to the reveal of Frank (Henry Fonda) in Once Upon a Time in the West (Leone, 1968).
- 9.
“And now the moment. Such a moment is unique. It is, of course, brief and temporal, as moments are, ephemeral, as moments are, passed, as moments are, in the next moment, and yet it is decisive, and yet it is filled with eternity. Such a moment must have a special name. Let us call it: the fullness of time” (Kierkegaard, 1980, p. 90).
- 10.
“While thinking I am not where I actually am; I am surrounded not by sense objects but by images that are invisible to everybody else. It is as though I had withdrawn into some never-never land, the land of invisibles, of which I would know nothing had I not this faculty of remembering and imagining ” (Arendt, 1978, p. 85).
- 11.
Both Deleuze and Kierkegaard are countering Hegel’s generality, mediation, representation. “When we say, on the contrary, that movement is repetition and that this is our true theatre, we are not speaking of the effort of the actor who ‘repeats’ because he has not yet learned the part. We have in mind the theatrical space, the emptiness of that space, and the manner in which it is filled and determined by the signs and masks through which the actor plays a role which plays other roles; we think of how repetition is woven from one distinctive point to another, including the differences within itself” (Deleuze, 1994, p. 10).
- 12.
In A Thousand Plateaus, they write that Kierkegaard’s infinite plane “must become a pure plane of immanence that continually and immediately imparts, reimparts, and regathers the finite…”(Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 282) . This unmediated movement becomes the limit of the relation, “the presence of one haecceity in another, the prehension of one by the other or the passage from one to the other: Look only at the movements.”
- 13.
In Deleuze’s Bergsonism, there are several differences in kind (matter/memory, perception/recollection, etc.). But when recollection becomes actualized, differences in kind become “obliterated,” leading to differences in degree between recollection-images and perception-images. See Deleuze (1988).
- 14.
For another take on this scene, see Sinnerbrink (2011): “The music fades and finally stops as he is led into the grey, muddy, dispiriting fort, the Wagnerian Prelude replaced by the sound of barking dogs and whistling wind” (p. 185). Sinnerbrink’s emphasis is on Wagner’s music as transcendent and symbolic (audioviewer), whereas mine is on the immanently audible (character).
- 15.
- 16.
“Two Edifying Discourses in Various Spirits.” See Kierkegaard (1946).
- 17.
For Deleuze, intensity is the movement that differentiates—singular, vertical, interpretive, spiritual. “One is extensive, the other intensive. One is ordinary, the other distinctive and singular. One is horizontal, the other vertical. One is developed and explicated, the other enveloped and in need of interpretation” (1994, p. 23). He continues in this manner, putting intensity in the activity of change, mutation, newness, in contrast to extension which is terrestrial and comparatively lacking in newness.
- 18.
There are more than four, as audibility and its time-images are indeterminate. But for the purposes of description we will limit ourselves to four.
- 19.
It is not yet clear who is hearing or thinking. It is another example of Malick’s Woolf -like floating subjectivity.
- 20.
Das Man comes from Heidegger , but it is surely influenced by his readings of Kierkegaard. “There is a restless activity which excludes a man from the world of the spirit, setting him in a class with the brutes, whose instincts impel them always to be on the move” (Kierkegaard, 1946, p. 24; Either/Or).
- 21.
Heidegger, 2010, p. 141 (see also footnote on that page).
- 22.
See as well, Ronell (1989).
- 23.
- 24.
This is something Malick himself recognized. See his written introduction to his translation of Essence of Reasons (See Heidegger, 1969a). The distance that is near is found throughout Heidegger’s writings, but see in particular his Letter on Humanism (Heidegger, 1993): “he at first fails to recognize the nearest and attaches himself to the next nearest. He even thinks that this is the nearest. But nearer than the nearest and at the same time for ordinary thinking farther than the farthest is nearness itself: the truth of Being” (p. 235). Heidegger writes that this nearness comes through the “essence” of language as the house of being, whereas I am writing of another kind of being.
- 25.
“The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears its truth .” (Bachelard, 1960, p. 59).
- 26.
See Kierkegaard (2009b).
- 27.
For Heidegger , destiny is coupled with freedom, the abyss of Dasein , which provides it a “‘potentiality for being,’ with possibilities which gape open before its finite choice, i.e., in its destiny” (1969a, p. 129).
- 28.
Both Jung and Freud applied Ubertragung as what became known in classic psychotherapy as “transference,” a projection of troubling aspects of identity onto another. Here I mean instead an affirming, transformative aspect.
- 29.
This is a diversion as well from Heidegger’s animus (1968), which is more aligned with the Latin use as soul and yet for him is the striving along and attuning to what is.
- 30.
Revisiting a theme from A Thousand Plateaus, they write : “Kierkegaard’s ‘knight of the faith,’ he who makes the leap, or Pascal’s gambler, he who throws the dice, are men of a transcendence or a faith. But they constantly recharge immanence : they are philosophers or, rather, intercessors , conceptual personae who stand in for these two philosophers and who are concerned no longer with the transcendent existence of God but only with the infinite immanent possibilities brought by the one who believes that God exists” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1991, p. 74) .
- 31.
See James (2002).
- 32.
See again, Melberg (1990) for more on this audible aspect of Kierkegaard: “What is remarkable is that the young man describes his expected experiences in auditive terms: ideas are about to ‘spume,’ thoughts to ‘arise noisily’; and he also expects a ‘stillness like the deep silence of the South Sea’ [186/221]. Noise as well as silence indicate that the young man’s expectations of the sublime point to the nonverbal or to pure sound (that is, language without purpose or meaning). Or to deep silence. The desire of this text for a privileged now can be realized only beyond a language of meaning” (p. 77).
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Batcho, J. (2018). Listening to the Logos. In: Terrence Malick’s Unseeing Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76421-4_6
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