Nobody’s home: the ecology of Terrence Malick

ABSTRACT

This article assesses Malick’s broadly ‘ecological’ claim against human intention and construction, including the auteur frame, which dictate narrative expectations and other aesthetics including the consequences of sound design and scoring in the films. It examines parataxis, lineation, and the de-anthropocentric impulse, at times in conversation with the animal figures in Malick’s films. It also articulates Malick’s custom of false focalization, mobilized in his later affluent ‘experience’ films toward an environmentalist claim: Malick’s vacant anthropic (nobody’s home). Finally, this essay engages briefly with the other pieces in the issue, which each build independent new theories of Malick’s syntax, genre work, and ecological arguments through attention to film form, philosophical interlocutors, and more.

KEYWORDS:

• Anthropocentrism
• sound
• poetics
• animals
• ecology
• Terrence Malick

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Rick Warner and James Cahill for important input at crucial stages. This work began long ago, more recently sustained by a Mellon Postdoctoral appointment at Rice University, where I presented portions of this work in progress to the seminars hosted by Cary Wolfe and Tim Morton, ‘After Biopolitics’ and also organized Malick screenings in collaboration with Charles Dove and Rice Cinema. My work was generously supported by the Rice Humanities Research Center in 2015-16 and a course release from Ashford University in 2018. Thanks to Dr. Rachel Taylor Geier for listening to me about Malick forever and explaining the music as many times as it takes.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.