Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon;
The World was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:
They hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.
John Milton, Paradise Lost
For this essay, I regard the 172-minute Extended Cut of Terrence Malick’s The New World as the definitive version. Some of the moments in the film that I reference are only found in that cut.
1
As both a critic and a poet, I cringe every time I hear some film reviewer call Terrence Malick a “poetic” filmmaker. In contemporary film criticism, to call a movie poetic means next to nothing—some pretty photography, beautiful landscapes, natural lighting, elliptical editing, ambiguous storytelling, a meditative mood, etc. Malick’s films certainly do have these things, but if that were the full extent of his achievements as a filmmaker, there would be no reason to call him a poet of cinema.
Poetry is not simply beautified language. Aristotle’s old definition of poetry is still one of my favorites, and remains the one I find the most useful. To paraphrase the Poetics, poetry (poiesis) is mimesis (imitation, representation). Poetry is more than emotional self-expression and unusual words. Poetry is imitation of action through the artistic representation of human deeds, thoughts, and emotions via language, rhythm, and harmony. And the poet does not represent merely what has happened, as the historian purports to do. Rather, the poet artistically represents the kinds of things that could happen or should happen, according to human probability or moral necessity. Poetry is more philosophic than history, because it seeks the universal (the human) in the particular (the factual). Poetry is more than mere lyricism and verse.
Malick is truly a poetic filmmaker in this deeper, Aristotelian sense. And his 2005 film The New World is an excellent example of this. Indeed, The New World has long been one of my two favorites of Malick’s films, because, in it, he is closer to this truer sense of poetry, though many critics would consider it one of his least poetic movies, when they mean poetry in that shallower way. In The New World (as well as in his previous film, The Thin Red Line, my other favorite), Malick focuses on grand, American subjects and humanistic themes, and he makes all his typical, elliptical filmmaking techniques—his calm, sensuous, imagistic cinematics, where the images, music, and even voice-over are more important than the dialogue, etc.—work in the service of a coherent narrative and rich characterizations.
In The New World, Malick does not simply use the story of the founding of Jamestown and the romances of Pocahontas as an excuse to present his audience with lyrical images, as some of his films tend to do, for better and worse. Rather, he uses the images, the music, the plot, the characters, and the language—all together—to remake history, myth, and erotic experience in a poetic-philosophical form. Here, he is a true poet—he makes a familiar legend of America’s founding wild and new again, so that we, his audience, are forced to re-examine it, both critically and empathetically.
Through the allegorical, symbolic, and sometimes metaphorical romances of Pocahontas, Malick transforms the historical particulars of America’s founding into a mythic and philosophical drama about worlds, Eros, freedom, responsibility, and grace, revealing universal patterns within historical accidents and sufferings.
2
As with most great myths, the legend of Pocahontas is historically dubious, as far as facts are concerned. The historical Pocahontas was likely only eleven when the English first established Jamestown in 1607, and there is no historical basis for the romance of Captain John Smith and the Powhatan Pocahontas, which occupies the first half of Malick’s story. Historians even dispute Smith’s famous account of Pocahontas rescuing him from Powhatan execution, since Smith may not have first told the story until it appeared in his 1624 book, The Generall Historie of Virginia.
The historian cannot excuse such inventions. Yet Malick is a poet, and he takes the poetic liberties with history that are his right as a poet to take, in order to see beyond facts to the truth. He is not dealing solely with the factual, historical Pocahontas, John Smith, and John Rolfe—instead, he is weaving a story that deals with the myth, with the second life legendary figures can lead in poetry. Malick accepts the story as it has been passed down to us, in order to consider what Americans have wanted, and have needed, from it. He considers innocence, beauty, Eros, sexuality, dreams of escaping from the Old World into the New World, and the desire of the human soul to transcend history.
Even the titular phrase itself, “The New World,” contains within it or implies both the dreams and the tragedies those dreams might produce. The Europeans called the Americas “new,” but the Americas were ancient to the people already living there. In fact, the virgin land Smith believes he has discovered in Virginia is colored fantastically, in his mind, by what he imagined it would be, before he arrived.
We, as Americans, do not truly have our own foundational epic poem. The King James Bible has long served this function for us, with its tale of Creation, the Fall of Man, wanderings through many wildernesses, and, finally, the great redemption, through Christ’s love for us. The New World is, in many ways, symbolic of this, especially of Genesis and the Fall. In Malick’s story, he shows us Eden; the necessary loss of Eden; the redemption, through love; and asks whether Eros can survive the loss of Eden by being reordered through higher kinds of love. The New World, therefore, is a cinematic poem of America’s founding—it poetically transforms history into myth, and then subjects that myth to moral judgment—that necessarily comes after the Holy Bible.
We come now, as well, to the philosophical weight of Malick’s title. Before becoming a filmmaker, Malick studied philosophy, first at Harvard under the post-analytic philosopher Stanley Cavell, then at Oxford, where he began to write his thesis on the concept of “world” in Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein, with reference also to Emerson and Thoreau. However, Malick’s advisors at Oxford favored more purely analytical philosophy, and derided Malick’s thesis as a project in continental phenomenology. So Malick left Oxford to teach philosophy at MIT, and to publish the first complete English translation of Heidegger’s The Essence of Reasons, with commentary, prompted by meetings he had with Heidegger (to whom he was introduced by Hannah Arendt) in the Black Forest five years before. It was only after this that Malick attended the American Film Institute, in its inaugural class, thanks to his teacher Cavell’s work on aesthetics and ontology in film.
In Malick’s 1969 introduction and critical notes to his translation of The Essence of Reasons, Malick emphasizes that the concept of Welt/“World” in Heidegger (alongside Kierkegaard’s “sphere of existence” and Wittgenstein’s “form of life”) is not merely the sum total of all existing objects, but is that thing in terms of which those objects first become meaningful—where those objects acquire meaning and purpose and have some standard against which to be measured—a total web of significance and relational context. It is hard, then, for me not to see Malick’s film The New World as an illustration of these concepts: two peoples meet there; they have discovered the same waters and lands; they discover each other’s bodies; they labor together; they love and they hate one another; and they realize that they can place radically different significances on these shared objects, they measure them differently. The land and the peoples are ancient, but when they come together, there are multiple new “worlds.”
3
The New World begins with an epigraph from John Smith’s 1616 book, A Description of New England: “How much they err, that think every one which has been at Virginia understands or knows what Virginia is.” This is immediately followed by a voice-over prologue from the character of Pocahontas: “Come, spirit, help us sing the story of our land. You are our mother, we your field of corn. We rise from out of the soul of you.” Then we hear the sound of water against a shoreline, the songs of the birds on the shore, and the subtle splashing of skilled swimmers in the water.
The first images Malick shows us are the James River; the river reflecting the sky; Powhatan people, on the rocks, seen through the ripples of water; and the beautiful bodies of young men and women swimming in the river. Accompanying these images, we hear the opening notes of Wagner’s Das Rheingold, coming up from underneath the sounds of the river, and swelling. We as the audience cannot help but think, then, of Wagner’s Das Rheingold as the first music drama of Wagner’s epic Ring cycle, and of its story—of creation, out of chaos, and of destruction, into chaos; of nature in a sublime, primordial state, and of the foreshadowing of the fated loss of that state. Then English ships appear on the horizon, and the two groups of people stare out across the expanse at one another—the English with hope in their eyes, the natives with curiosity in theirs.
Malick lets us linger and luxuriate in the state where the perceptions of these two peoples are forming, not yet hardened. Yet these two peoples’ worlds are already colliding—and no one can see without interpreting what he is seeing.
The English land, and they immediately get to work bending their surroundings to their will. “We have been blessed,” their president, Captain Newport, tells them. “We have escaped the Old World and its dottage,” and, “We are the pioneers of the world.” They survey the land and build fortifications, and they explore and record their findings. They divide the labor and issue commands. Jamestown is quickly established, and the gentle curves of nature are filled with the rigid lines of buildings and walls. The men fell trees for lumber, plant wheat and barley and hunt for provisions, make boats for navigating the rivers, and raise churches and crosses. They claim the territory all around as their property. They transform everything, as much as they can, for their own purposes.
It is tempting, as modern viewers, to watch these events onscreen and to pass moral judgment on them as proof of European, colonial corruption. However, none of these transformations, in the story thus far, are proof of European spoilage of American natural innocence. After all, the Powhatan men and women also build houses, cultivate crops, govern one another, practice religion, and transform the land, to suit their purposes. Their society is not, in this regard, more representative of Nature, as opposed, say, to some kind of artificial European Culture. Both peoples inhabit their own worlds.
Captain Smith is tempted by as simple an account as the modern viewer is tempted. When he comes to live among the Powhatan, he believes he has discovered a group of people who live more in harmony with Nature than the English do. He believes that if he could live like they do, he could cast off the responsibilities that the English have thrust upon him against his will and be part, as he says, “of a true commonwealth, where self-reliance is a virtue, and there are no land lords to interfere.” He believes he could have a fresh beginning and live there without possessiveness and rivalry, without guile and trickery, without envy and greed—as he thinks they live (though the plot shows us this is not quite true).
It is through his story’s plot that Malick shows us Smith’s supposed New World was very old before he arrived. He shows us that Smith imposes his proto-Romantic, utopian ideas and cultural relativism—which Malick’s Smith has learned largely from such European texts as Barlowe’s “The First Voyage” and Montaigne’s “Of Cannibals”; Smith’s voice-overs even quote these essays—upon the Powhatan, and, eventually, upon Pocahontas. Smith discovers America in a wild age, but it is at least partly an age that European writers had already imagined for him.
This is something Malick’s Smith realizes too late. When, toward the end of the film, Pocahontas asks an older Smith if he found the utopian islands for which he was always searching, he can only sadly say—when he thinks of the future he could have had with her, had he been less restless—“I may have sailed past them.”
4
And so we return to the specifically Christian character of Malick’s artistic spirituality. Malick’s Virginia is gorgeous, but, for the Christian, beauty in nature is not innocent, not totally well, not wholly free of the possibility of the Fall.
The Fall, in this story, however, does not come about simply because the English colonize America. Christians—from the tradition of Catholic theology (such as I am, such as Malick seems to be, and which the English who settled Jamestown were)—believe that human beings inherit a condition of sinfulness from the disobedience of Adam and Eve against God in the Garden of Eden, which brought sin and death into the world. Such Christians believe that all people are born with a corrupted nature, and separated from God, because of the choices of Adam and Eve. This corruption is cleansed only through God’s grace. Fallenness appears, necessarily then, wherever there are people—sin and corruption are possible anywhere. Malick’s philosophic concerns have both a religious and a moral dimension.
Malick’s formal filmic style makes the viewer experience the problems of his story. His cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki’s freely moving, wide-angle camera shows us the attempt by humans to overcome their surroundings, but the intrusions of nature into the frame never allow man to master his surroundings unchallenged. Even as the camera follows the characters in the story’s plot, other natural elements constantly distract the eye.
In his commentary on Heidegger’s The Essence of Reasons, Malick discusses how Heidegger, in his many baffling asides, is not trying to provide conventional proofs of his arguments about the “world” but is instead trying to give his most careful readers an indication of where they might look in order to better understand their world, or other worlds. A wayward hand, children at the edge of a group of adults, a skein of geese, an ear of corn, water rippling through reeds, flooded trees, an empty bird’s nest, a patch of sky through the top of a smoke bay, a wooden cross—Malick’s camera works to the same effect, and it lingers, waiting to see if the answers to the story’s questions will become clearer, or if perhaps further complications will arise.
This is at least part of what it means to call Malick poetic.
5
Like the wondering, wandering eye of Malick’s camera, the language of the film also acts as a kind of anthology, bringing into the story an unusually extensive range of literary and historical sources, which Malick incorporates into his dialogue and voice-over.
In The New World, Malick includes quotes from literary sources such as Sappho’s Fragment 31, Virgil’s Aeneid, Montaigne’s “Of Cannibals,” Thomas Campion’s “What is a Day?,” Rousseau’s The Social Contract, The Brothers Grimm’s “The Frog-King,” Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Herman Melville’s White-Jacket, Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, Walt Whitman’s “One Hour to Madness and Joy,” Hart Crane’s The Bridge, and Vachel Lindsay’s “Our Mother Pocahontas,” and he quotes historical documents too, such as colonial promotional literature and various surviving Jamestown records and letters. For instance, Pocahontas’s invocation that opens the film comes from the Lindsay poem, one of her erotic reveries comes from the Sappho fragment, and Smith’s first description of Pocahontas comes from the Grimm fairytale.
Malick simultaneously does poetic, philosophic, and critical work in this way. Rolfe says of Pocahontas, “She weaves all things together,” and so does Malick. He brings poetry, history, and mythology from two millennia of Western civilization together, to help us understand what myths mean, the cumulative effects they have on us once they reach us, and the ways that poetry and myth combine in the poetic imagination. “There is no new thing under the sun,” says the Preacher of Ecclesiastes. What is new are our encounters with these inherited things. And we are not alone; the very language we use to speak, and to think, comes laden with longstanding traditions.
Eros, however, has the ability to make inherited things feel new again. Smith and Pocahontas begin to know each other through gestures and naming, as they come to learn each other and learn each other’s languages. They explore each other, imitate each other, and learn each other’s words for their bodies and the world around them. As Longinus says in On the Sublime of the particular Sappho fragment Pocahontas quotes, “Are you not amazed how at one instant she summons, as though they were all alien from herself and dispersed, soul, body, ears, tongue, eyes, color?” Love allows us to see the ordinary with new magic—beauty disturbs. For Smith, this is true as well. Pocahontas does not merely enter his world as something new; she changes the way he sees the world. She reveals the world to him, erotically.
But revelation can be a dangerous thing. Smith has a deep restlessness in him, a wanderlust, a sense of possibility that he believes the English (whom he lives among, sometimes as a prisoner, but to whom he feels superior) have closed off from him. He comes to love Pocahontas—genuinely, deeply—but this love also allows him to see the possibilities within himself, and he becomes bolder, and more deeply ambitious. She is an allegory for America—Smith eroticizes both her and the continent—and Smith both loves her and sees in her his escape. He cannot help but conflate his erotic desires with his restless desires for adventure and freedom. Even when he is pining for her during the year he is president of Jamestown, it is largely one with his desire to escape Jamestown and his position on the council there. And so Smith leaves Pocahontas.
Wagner’s Das Rheingold, used prominently throughout the film, musically illustrates the drama. Just as Wagner’s Alberich succumbs to the temptations of hatred, gold, and the desire for glory or power, especially with the renunciation of love—so, eventually, do Smith and many (though not all) of the English. The German myth helps us see the power of the American legend. Malick’s film, bringing all of these worlds together, shapes the myth, aestheticizes history, and makes both the seductions and the transcendence of beauty newly visible to us.
6
At this point, I think of Augustine. The Augustinian problem of love and of Eros (as he discusses in The City of God) is not a problem, simply, of restraint versus passion. Rather, it is a problem of whether Eros is properly ordered. The passion of Eros is not enough if it remains disordered; if it does, it can only end in chaos. Yet if Eros is properly ordered—if finite human good is directed toward something infinite, and educated toward something absolute—it will flow from disorder to order. For Augustine, if the Eros of human desire and the Agape of divine love can be ordered together, they will become Caritas—Christian love, charity.
Of course, Augustine learned this partly from Plato’s Symposium, where Socrates explains Eros as a condition in a finite being who lacks the Good but sees it, observes its beauty, and desires it. If the lover is properly educated and can properly order their Eros, they can ascend, with their desire, from attraction to individual beautiful bodies toward beautiful souls, practices, knowledge, and ultimately to the true Beauty and Good. In Socrates’ teaching, Eros is a daimōn, an intermediary between the gods and the mortals, and though it may begin with romance and sexual desire, it has its ultimate and truest end as the fundamental power of philosophical ascent and transcendence—if it is properly ordered.
Smith’s Eros is disordered—by his conflicting desires, by his various ambitions, and by his naïveté and the passivity it sometimes mires him in, despite his soldierly knowledge of the facts of the world. Though he loves Pocahontas genuinely, he tries to make her carry the weight of his own fantasies about escaping history. She reveals the world to him through their love for each other, but he sees in this revelation a chance at freedom, which, because of his restlessness, includes freedom from responsibility, including responsibility to her.
The more properly ordered John Rolfe, then, only enters Malick’s story after the original dreams have ended—Smith’s dream of living wild with Pocahontas and the Powhatans, Pocahontas’s dream of living a life of love with Smith, and Captain Newport’s dream of living peacefully and harmoniously at Jamestown. To drive this home, the scene that transitions into the story of Rolfe’s courtship of Pocahontas is the burning of several Native American villages by the new, militaristic settlers who are more hateful toward the tribes than Smith and Newport are (Newport and Smith call the natives “naturals,” while the crueler English call them “savages.”)
While Smith and Pocahontas met “in a dream,” as Smith calls it (outside history, in circumstances they naively believed to be utopian), Rolfe and Pocahontas meet in something closer to reality. The weight of history is heavy on Pocahontas now—her beloved Smith is gone, she is exiled from her tribe for helping the English, and she is slowly transforming herself into an Englishwoman in order to survive her new circumstances. The weight of responsibility is heavy on Rolfe—his wife and daughter died on the journey to Jamestown, he is facing a life as an important farmer at Jamestown without a partner, and he longs to have a family again. He sees Pocahontas—mourning the beloved man she thinks dead, moving aimlessly from one task to another, deprived of her former Powhatan identity, now practicing two religions—and he feels that he understands her suffering, and that she can understand his. He hopes that, together, they might be able to build a life and find love again, as partners, and as a family.
Rolfe and Pocahontas, now named Rebecca, marry. He loves her; she only admires him (“he is like a tree,” she muses). Their marriage in the present coexists with both partners’ memories of past love, past passion—through marriage, their Eros is changed, tamed. But love, admiration, necessity, and responsibility come together, making something like charity. They have a son, and they create a new world together.
7
The new world of Rolfe and Rebecca’s marriage is created through commitment, especially Rolfe’s commitment to care for Rebecca, and her commitment to be his partner and to be faithful to him. Where Smith found freedom in the preservation of endless new possibilities, Rolfe is only free to love Rebecca by closing off possibilities. And he hopes that she will come to love him, to feel the same way toward him; slowly she does. Grace, then, begins to enter the story through the romance of Rolfe and Rebecca.
When they travel to England, at the king and queen’s request to see the Christianized Powhatan princess, England initially seems a dark contrast to the natural beauty of Virginia. The country’s clipped hedges, cramped streets, formal clothing, and pompous ceremony seem suffocating. There is great loss. But Rebecca is still beautiful amidst it all. The light of grace redeems what it touches. When Rebecca plays with her husband and son in the carefully manicured English gardens, she is delighted, and everyone around her is delighted too. Grace is not dependent on an irrecoverable state of innocence.
Milton is a good guide for us here. When Adam and Eve lose their innocence, and God expels them from the garden, they have a life filled with corruption and great suffering ahead of them. But what is left for them is grace—in their love for each other, their love of their children, and the salvation Christ will ultimately bring. The garden is behind them, but the whole world, though fallen, is ahead of them—they will have overwhelming sorrow and responsibility to bear, but they will also have the freedom “to choose their place of rest, and Providence their guide. . . hand in hand, with wandering steps.” The unmerited favor and mercy of God are necessary, because the innocence at the beginning of creation is gone.
When Rebecca is dying in England, her final message for her son is this: “’Tis enough that you, our child, should live.” Rolfe did not solve the problem of desire for Rebecca, just as she did not solve the problem of freedom for Smith, and just as no character could solve the problem of the English desire for possession of the New World. Jamestown will not be torn down. The Powhatan will not, as they say, drive the English back to the sea. The land has seduced the English too thoroughly. The excesses of Smith’s passions and restlessness will not allow him happiness, and he will drive deeper into the wild. Rebecca cannot return to the Pocahontas she was before she loved Smith, became a captive at Jamestown, converted to Christianity, married Rolfe, bore a son, and visited England. History happens—no one can ignore this—but grace redeems history. Rebecca did come to love Rolfe, and her son is one of Malick’s evidences that Rolfe and Rebecca were able to overcome their suffering together, at least momentarily, or at least that they, through their love, created a being beyond their suffering and who survives them.
The history of the settling of Jamestown, and the various characters of that story, is a history of sorrow. It is easy to get lost in the particulars, the facts, of this history Poetry, however, has the ability to let the light of grace shine through the story. Poetry, especially when it is good, sees the universal in the particulars, the truest patterns, and better understands the moral questions they pose and the answers they suggest, as well as their philosophical and spiritual aspects.
By the final scene of The New World, Malick’s poetry, philosophy, Christianity, and Eros have converged without becoming interchangeable—a convergence of worlds. He brings history and myth together, and—via a moving series of beautiful images and sounds—he tests them, and he makes them new again to us, his audience. He reveals their power, and their meaning.
Malick understands the Romantic fantasy of an everlasting Eden. He, too, is seduced by the simplicity of this idea. But he seeks poetic truth, he seeks reality, and he comes to understand (aided by his philosophical training and Christian faith) that the collision of worlds is unavoidable, and that new beginnings free of the consequences of sin and free of responsibility are a fantasy, but also that there is a possible reordering of desire through the creation of new worlds, and through grace.
These are the kinds of things that make Terrence Malick a truly poetic filmmaker. It is more than shallow lyricism, more than certain moods and beautifications. He practices poiesis—he makes; he brings into being. He illuminates and corrects. He makes familiar language strange again. He shows us complex new worlds.
In the final movement of the film, human action gradually gives way to water, to leaves, to wind, to light. Wagner’s opening notes return, through repetition transformed. Wagner cannot return us to Eden, to innocence. Neither can Malick, neither can any nation, any lover, or any poem. What remains is a fallen world, still full of grace, still deserving of love.
Good poetry declares the universal truths within the sordid particular facts. Good poetry reveals the realities—the truth—of the world. Good poetry allows us to see the world we already inhabit with new eyes.