Given the chance to become a movie director in Hollywood or a professor of philosophy at Harvard, I imagine very few of us would choose the academic life. The money and fame of being a movie director are far more tantalizing than teaching Plato, Kant, or Simone de Beauvoir. Terrence Malick chose to become a movie director instead of a philosophy professor, but not for the reasons you might think. It was not money and fame that convinced him, but the inability of philosophy courses to help “him understand himself and his place in the order of the cosmos” as Martin Woessner explained in a recent book dedicated to the great filmmaker. Although he is not the only promising scholar to ditch his dissertation and a career in academia due to philosophy’s scientific turn in the 1960s, he is probably the only one whose “entire oeuvre,” as Woessner tells us, “constitutes a philosophy by other means and is worth taking seriously as such.”
Malick’s inability to pursue a career in academia reminds us—members and friends of the APA—that we must encourage and promote students who prefer wondering, and asking questions about everything and nothing, to completing narrow tasks. Malick’s films and Woessner study demonstrate it is possible (and sometimes necessary) to philosophize outside of the university’s rigid disciplinary boundaries when these questions emerge among our students. Malick’s career arguably shows us not only what has gone wrong with the teaching of philosophy today, but also how to fix it by returning it to the project of “examining our lives,” as Socrates suggested. Similarly to other key philosophers of the twentieth century, this career begins with Martin Heidegger.
When Woessner discovered—in his previous book—the filmmaker had not only written an “expert honors thesis” on Martin Heidegger under the supervision of Stanley Cavell at Harvard University, but also translated one of his books and met him in Germany, he knew this could serve to unlock the “magic” of the American filmmaker. But what does this book unlock precisely? Why have so many philosophers—Cavell, but also Leslie MacAvoy, and Robert Sinnerbrink, among others—believed that what Malick is doing with moving images, Heidegger was doing with philosophical prose?
Heidegger was not only another giant within German philosophical tradition. He also thought that philosophy had ended because philosophers only considered meaningful what could be conceptualized through logic and linguistics. Malick’s interest in the German thinker—who taught philosophers as different from each other as Herbert Marcuse, Hannah Arendt, and Hans-Georg Gadamer—lies in his critique of modernity, during which the “world” has become “enframed.” “The fundamental event of modernity,” Heidegger proclaimed, was “the conquest of the world as picture,” and it meant that now “man fights for the position in which he can be that being who gives every being the measure and draws up the guidelines.” The problem with these measurable guidelines is that they imply an external, objective distance between the world and human existence when, in fact, they are entwined in a way that escapes the strictures of logic and calculation. Against the analysis of grammar and objects—which was the predominant method among Malick’s mentors at Harvard and Oxford—Heidegger suggested contemplating and disclosing that which made them visible in the first place.
Although Malick was a protégé of Cavell—one of the few professors at Harvard willing to read authors whom the proponents of logical analysis openly dismissed—by the time he applied to film school, he was “at the end of my rope as an academic,” he later said. In Woessner’s words, Malick “had been indoctrinated into thinking that being sharp was the only thing that mattered in philosophy, that fuzzy, comforting thinking was something to be avoided at all costs.” This indoctrination was meant to reduce philosophers to mere “professors of philosophy” and philosophy itself to just another “technical discipline.” It avoided questions concerning the meaning of life and our place in the cosmos. The ongoing crisis of American philosophy—exemplified in Henry David Thoreau’s famous remark that instead of “philosophers,” there are nowadays “only professors of philosophy”—can be said to run parallel to Heidegger’s critique of modernity. Against the narrow problem-solving agenda of Anglo-American philosophy, Heidegger offered Malick a new kind of thinking, seeing, and listening that slipped the binds of narrow academic discourse.
Heidegger wanted to go beyond rational arguments and enter the world of meaning, emotions, and feelings, in which we exist as human beings rather than just rational animals. But how can we experience the world as a whole? Why is there something rather than nothing? Why is “wonder”—as Socrates reminds us in Plato’s Theaetetus—the “philosophical condition”? To respond to these questions, we must abandon the idea that the world is the sum of all things. Instead, we must interpret it existentially, in relation to human freedom, temporality, and Being.
The revelation of Being’s secret requires a new attitude, a new kind of thinking, a new language even, all of which is on display in Malick’s films. In The Thin Red Line (1998), for example, this language was pursued through improvisation, avoiding the frames that inevitably belong to any script. Indeed, Malick was even willing to sacrifice his own scripts. Actor Ben Chaplin recalls that when Malick “gets behind the camera on the hill, he doesn’t care about it anymore, he just tosses it away. It’s all about the moment. True film-making.” While Adrien Brody thought he was the protagonist of the film, he discovered at the premiere that he was just a cameo; Mickey Rourke and Bill Pullman never even made the final cut. If The Thin Red Line taught many of these actors that they were (to some degree at least) dispensable, it’s because they were part of something much more significant than just a film.
To prevent his film from feeling staged, rehearsed, and predictable, Malick shot much of the movie in a documentary style, “instructing his actors to act as if they were appearing in a silent movie.” According to Woessner, some of the film’s most remarkable images were captured by accident, looking outside the film’s martial storyline, away from all the combat. This is confirmed by Leslie Jones, one of the editors who worked on the film. Jones said that “Malick often preferred viewing the nature footage shot by his second unit camera crew and the so-called ‘anthropological unit’ over any of the material depicting the military sequences at the center of the film’s narrative.” But what was Malick seeking to achieve by so diligently avoiding staged or rehearsed scenes?
Malick’s disinterest in staged or rehearsed scenes is meant to draw us close to the “world” that made them all possible in the first place. As Heidegger explained, this world is “not the ‘totality of things’ but that in terms of which we understand them, that which gives them measure and purpose and validity in our schemes.” Malick is not interested in “another world” but in this “world”—but without the frames that “man as the measure of all things” imposed upon it. His consideration of the cosmic force animating all living things, together with many improvised scenes of the natural world, such as the blue butterfly floating through a firefight, is something that could not be arranged within the film’s martial storyline. Malick could only search for it once he started filming.
There are few “philosophers” asking big questions nowadays. Those who still do probably will agree that Malick’s films are not very different from the books of Hannah Arendt, Frantz Fanon, or Slavoj Žižek. Together with Malick, these thinkers invite us to explore the meaning of the world. They also warn us that the world is much more than we think it is. This is why they provide us with questions that amaze us, questions that cannot always be answered but must be asked nevertheless. Our vision is transformed, altered, and changed forever after reading such a book or watching such a film. I could not agree more with Woessner as he affirms that each of “…Malick’s films originates in wonder. Whether they address historical topics or contemporary ones, whether their perspectives are vastly cosmological or intensely autobiographical, Malick’s movies depict a searching that is unique in cinematic history.” I would say it’s unique in the history of philosophy, too.
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