“Our Lord Jesus Christ went up into a little castle and was
received by a virgin who was a wife.”
“Now, then, play close attention to this word: it was
necessary that it be a virgin by whom Jesus was received. “Virgin” designates a
human being who is devoid of all foreign images, and who is as void as he was
when he was not yet…
…If a human were to remain a virgin forever, he would never
bear fruit. If he is to become fruitful, he must necessarily be a wife. “Wife,”
here, is the noblest name that can be given to the mind, and it is indeed more
noble than “virgin.” That man should receive God in himself is good, and by
this reception he is a virgin. But that God should become fruitful in him is
better; for the fruitfulness of a gift is the only gratitude for the gift. The
spirit is wife when in gratitude it gives birth and bears Jesus back into God’s
fatherly heart.”
Meister Eckhart, Sermon Jesus
Entered. Transl. by Reiner Schurmann from Wandering Joy
I wanted to begin this review with those words
because of a conversation I had days before watching Terrence Malick’s TO THE
WONDER. I was with a friend, whom you know as roomasick, browsing information
about the film when we stumbled upon an interview with Ben Affleck where he
speaks about working with Malick and about his style of directing. In it,
Affleck jokes that since he was aware Malick has a Doctorate in Philosophy and
translated works by Heidegger, a good way to get into his mind was to read
those translations. Obviously that did not work for him and did not even give
him inkling into what the film was about or how he was to react to Malick’s
direction. While the remarks from the interview about the preparation verge on some sort of self-serving absurdity (should we even ask, when directed to perform, for the director to give us a map of his thought process, a diary of his inhibitions and beliefs? To draw for us a belief system? In other words,should we ask from the creator of a situation to justify all aspects of it?),
said remarks stayed with me. My thoughts went into tangents when confronted
with other Malick films such as THE NEW WORLD or THE TREE OF LIFE. Granted, if
a director has thought, read and translated thinkers who devoted their mind’s
life to ask ultimate philosophical questions (questions about the nature and
origin of being, not of the why of things, but of the how is it that things
are), then wouldn’t the same person work through those questions in another
medium of his choosing? Yes, as obnoxious as this could sound, Malick’s films
are not only of grand themes (be it WWII, the destined clash of two cultures,
or even a ‘cultural’ history of the cosmos) but also about the workings of
phenomena, really they are about the origin of all being, in different
disguises.
And so it is
with TO THE WONDER that when I saw it, the film seemed to me a radical
departure from his previous work and a clear attempt by the director to flesh
out a philosophy of what it means to lead a good life. TO THE WONDER was, to
me, an actual attempt at delivering a system of thought through images and
emotive evocations. It is his most engaging film, in the sense that it engages
our very present and the very systematic undercurrents in our civilization to
ask political and religious questions.
Reiner
Schurmann, in his book Broken Hegemonies, defines what I believe Malick
is using film for, to think: “ To think is to linger on the conditions of what
one is living: to linger on the site we inhabit.” And indeed, in TO THE WONDER
there is nothing more but the depiction of the site the characters inhabit, and
of their reflecting, their lingering on the conditions of what has happened, or
what does not happen, to them.