Terrence Malick's The New World

photo: Lake Nipissing summer 2005

Five hundred years on and still it brings me to the verge of tears when I imagine or I am shown a depiction of what we've lost, of what our ancestors crushed. There are those that would find it trite, overly sentimental, pining for a lost paradise that never was a paradise, they would scoff, ridicule, mock, taunt but what should that matter to me? Why should it be of my concern, their reaction to these same images, these same facts and this same legacy and their reaction to my own? Why, if they cannot comprehend my sorrow, or think it ill advised, repulsive, not pragmatic or just generally contradictory to their own sense of the "way the world works", should I attempt to retreat, retract, rephrase or rethink what I feel to be true and right? I have "rethought" much, and in the end there is nothing I can change, nothing I should change, of how I react to these things, how the shortsightedness of our ancestors' actions have lead to so little, are leading us to a dead-end. In short, why should the emotional reaction and response to these facts by others that do not share my wish that things could have been different become somehow my responsibility to explain or challenge or acknowledge? It is a way in which we can get derailed from thinking along the good path. They should look at themselves and question their own reactions and not demand that I do so. They do not know me. They do not know how I arrived at my own conclusions and way of seeing. I believe in many cases the antagonists of the world know that this works, that attacking those who do not agree with harsh words will often cause them to react and defend and be on the defensive and spend energy simply on reiterating opinions to those who do not listen and do not care when that same energy could be used elsewhere to better ends.

History teaches us nothing not because it cannot but because, for the moment, we have little more than the word history, as well as a misunderstanding of how to study it and to what ends. We also lack the ability to comprehend how it is still with us. We are and have been repeating what was left behind in Europe; we are becoming what our ancestors, in part, believed they were fleeing. We are mutilating even the very sins of our fathers and mothers. And we are doing it at a time in the phase of human techno-cultural means that will see us enslaved in ways that could render us incapable of survival without them. Today, if I did not have at least the change in my pocket, with the skills I possess I would be dead in less than a month.

I walked home on the same earth depicted in the film, with those same horrifying trees lined out in rows as they were in horrific England. I walked across places where forests had stood for millennia, where hunters hunted and people worshipped and made love and fought and died and wondered at their existence. Now there is a grid of streets bearing the names of saints and politicians and long dead public figures whose stories no longer mean anything to us and perhaps should not. There is no New World, only a corpse dressed up in European garb.

The editing was a dance and a dream, obeying no rules of classic continuity. I watched thin strong leaves augment the light of the sun and pages turned with the wind of a breath. Some will no doubt find it hard to endure, as did the giggling girls a few seats over from mine, but I believe this form was conducive to the theme, the collision of one way of seeing with another and the tantalizing disorientation that can ensue. It also works to keep it ethereal, somewhat impossible to possess, to own, to claim to know. It is about loss after all, an immense loss that we cannot truly comprehend and shrink from attempting. It was less about the facts (though they were there) than it was about the human reaction to the world and an homage to this moment when the opportunity to come to know and be in the world was there before Western man. A moment that was so quickly lost and may never be repeated. I want to see it again and again, and at least once more on the big screen, for there are still questions, not questions of plot or story but rather questions of meaning, of how to take in the work as a whole and how it should inform and alter one's life. There is no one making films like this man anymore.



PS: sorry Blog Monkey, I just decided on the spur of the moment on the way home from work to go see it, but I'll see it again with you, honest I will!