Seite - 200 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Band 05/02

Terrence Malick”, Peter Leithart describes Malick’s palette as polyphonic, fol- lowing Dostoyevsky and Bakhtin (as well as in conversation with Alter and Au- erbach) – that is, nature provides its own symbolic system, the trees and grass, birds, animals, water and light, Homer and Genesis. In The Thin Red Line most explicitly, grass becomes a kind of character: “All flesh is grass, but flesh at war is the grassiest of grass, mown down at a moment’s notice by a strafing of ma- chine gun fire. Grass is not only a sign of the vulnerability and brevity of human life but of its glory” (53). Leithart uncovers this palette in each of Malick’s films, displaying a visual equivalent to dialogism where the nihilist anthropology (i.e. the state of nature) is put on par with a theist one (i.e. the way of grace) with- out proving, but rather being reticent to prove, either one over the other. More than in The Thin Red Line, these options are starker through Anna’s voice and Fr. Quintana’s in To the Wonder, where the latter is exemplified in St. Patrick’s Lorica. If “Malick’s world is the world of Job, where suffering takes place before a beautiful but implacable heaven” (57), is this really reticence, then? In “Who Has Eyes to See, Let Him See: Terrence Malick as Natural Theologi- an”, David Calhoun compares filmmakers who are anti-theology (such as Stan- ley Kubrick, Brian De Palma, Ridley Scott, Lars von Trier, or Woody Allen) to Malick’s natural theology. “Where natural theology uses observation of nature and rational inference to make a case for the reality of the supernatural, con- temporary naturalist films employ imaginatively constructed naturalist explana- tory accounts of the natural world to question, discount, or even reject theism” (67–68). As Leithart did with Dostoyevsky’s dialogism, Calhoun does with Tolk- ien’s fairy stories and their power to enchant. Malick’s way of telling is more of a fairy story than a traditional religious or “providential” film such as The Ten Commandments (Cecil B. DeMille, US 1956), It’s a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, US 1946), or Heaven Is For Real (Randall Wallace, US 2013). Calhoun contrasts the polysemic character2 of Malick’s films with what Leithart would call dialogism. Both David Davies and Calhoun are interested in the problem of interpretation and while Davies supports a Merleau-Pontian reading of Malick,3 Calhoun appears to be holding a Kierkegaardian view (90). This book as a whole is thus challenging the anti-theology interpretations of Malick’s films such as the Heideggerian or Nietzschean interpretation.4 This Kierkegaardian interpre- tation is also seen in Christopher Barnett’s, Paul Martens’s, and Paul Camacho’s contributions to this volume. As in Tolkien’s fairy stories or Stanley Cavell’s writ- ings on film, “Malick replicates the fundamental human representation of the world as involving a wonder for being” (91). 2 Davies 2009a. 3 Davies 2009b. 4 See Batcho 2018 for a Deleuzian interpretation, which would also be anti-theology. 200 | Michael Funk Deckard and Cassie Overcash www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/2, 198–203