Linda: Just for Comic Relief

[It is useless to read the following before my review of The Tree of Life, The Imaginary Family of Terrence Malick.]

I found a little more time before making that announced pause. My last post was very gloomy. We need a comic relief around here. Linda is good for that. If you think that you have read strange things about Malick and his tastes in this blog...

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“It was all very queer. But queerer things were yet to come.”
(Sunset Boulvevard)


You know, Malick is not always a demented nihilist with a camera, a crazy psychopath. Sometimes he is just plain stupid. I wrote somewhere that Days of Heaven was Malick’s most obvious film. This is true in what concerns to the general idea. His allusions to Psycho and Sunset Boulevard are very transparent. Once you get these you are in position to start understanding the little jokes, like that shot inspired in Pasolini. But what about Linda?

In Badlands Malick was just Kit. He assumed the character of James Dean and started his killing spree. All very simple. In Days of Heaven Malick divided himself in two, Bill and Linda. This solution announces the future explosion of his one big self in The Thin Red Line. But it was something different too, as he assumed a feminine character. Linda is not Holly, there is no erotic relation with her. She is Malick, the director.
One thing I tell you, not in a million years I would have gotten the joke with Linda if I had thought – as it would be natural with Norman Baites around – that Malick associated her with some sinister cinematic myth/character. It was just by chance that I found out about Linda. As I noticed that she made a little bit of tap-dancing with a black worker, all the suddenly I became very angry with Terry: Hey, that’s not fair! That’s cheating! Linda hasn’t curled hair! You haven’t been true! I want my money back!

From Rebel Without a Cause (Kit) to… the Littlest Rebel (Linda). If Malick is not plain stupid...

The black worker is Bill Robinson, the famous tap dancer who did several films with curly Shirley. Below, The Little Colonel

That school for girls with Victorian atmosphere from where she escapes in the end is another attribute (The Little Princess and that sort of “masterpieces”).

Linda seems to have learned to de-feather a chicken and to cook in Miss Minchin’s School.

You think that this isn’t enough? Well, maybe it isn’t but I confess that the moment that I read this in the script (Linda was Ursula in the script)

“Abby is dressing in the cool woven shade of the woods when Ursula, her face caked with a mask of river mud, jumps from the bushes with a shriek, scaring the wits out of her sister.”

all my doubts about Linda were finished.

Two details of Littlest Rebel with Shirley in blackface (sorry about the colorized version but you were certainly not expecting me to buy a dvd of this “wonderful film”).

And that’s just great because with the obvious exceptions I doubt that I have the necessary patience to see all Shirley Temple’s films. If this subject interests you, go ahead, but my love for science is probably not great enough to submit myself  to such a torture. I just ask myself if Malick’s cinema, accumulating grotesque caricatures from its beggining (it all starts with the 40 years old family man version of James Dean/Sargis and that bum Plato/Cato to end in RL, the American middle class sweet Tadzio) is not more indebted with the tradition of Baby Burlesks than with the “noble” one of The Seven Year Itch. (By the way, it seems that Shirley’s first daughter is called Linda. Was that why Malick kept the actress’ name?)

From the title sequence: Lewis Hine, Paris Gamin (detail), c. 1918. That title sequence seems to be even more complex than I imagined... It most be full of crazy allusions, Curly Top appears there as Hine’s gamin. (That’s still cheating with Linda, Malick.)

 

It seems to be a good idea not to neglect the photos in Malick’s films... like this one, of the Farmer’s mother. Know her? “Ah, great old lady.” (Frenzy)

Malick couldn’t film it, but I can’t help to think that in his imagination he/Linda/Shirley sings Polly Wolly Doodle to Norman Baites. I honestly would like to see that. Wouldn’t you? Just imagine such a scene. Hitchcock must be rolling in his grave.

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And maybe not that stupid…

“Try to keep an open mind. Try to understand the viewpoints of others.” (Badlands) I have decided to add a few lines to this post exactly because of its first image, Bill playing with Linda as if she were a puppet, a doll, a toy, anyway.

As a matter of fact, Linda/Shirley was a very famous toy. I have to read that new biography, maybe Malick had a Shirley doll. Just kidding.

I think that they didn’t produce these until the '80s ... but Malick made one for him in the '70s, remember?

I said that Malick was like a boy playing with his toys, remember? That was the point stressed in my second post. Did you love to play for hours and hours with your dolls, soldiers, little cars, dinosaurs (even if the game was not Vertigo), whatever? Did you like to imagine battles, crazy stories with them, to build scenarios, imaginary territories to stage your plays? Those really interested in Waco’s wacko: consider to go deep into the world of children’s games. Everything is a toy for sweet little Terry’s pleasure. First of all his celluloid friends. He, a very enterprising child, makes toy versions of them, so he can invent crazy stories in which he takes part, fantasy adventures in which he can submerge, forgetting everything he hates, everything he condemns forever, that unreal real world outside the movie theater. Malick was “just” someone who understood that an actor is as manipulatable as plastic, wood, paper or porcelain. And that one does not need to change the medium. You can produce a cinematic toy of a cinematic character.

Not a Shirley Temple doll, not a Great Depression film, not even an American one, but what matters is the girl’s look.

Bill’s doll is Shirley Temple, the most popular child star of all time. From 1934 on, hers was the most coveted of all the dolls. It sold millions of copies along with Curly Top’s underwear, coats, hats, shoes, books, hair ribbons, soap, dresses, toys, cereal bowls... It became the most desired Great Depression girl’s toy. Our friend certainly knew this. It might be a clue to understand his strange, apparently rather ridiculous choice. (I don’t have to bring here the reasons of Shirley’s popularity in those dramatic years, have I? By the way, notice the presence of the theme of dreams in her films, for example in The Little Princess.)

Know this?

Shirley’s was certainly the most famous ever, but these kind of dolls weren’t new, of course. Charlie Chaplin dolls, for example, were produced since 1915, one year after the first celebrity movies-themed doll making its appearance. A fiction hero from somewhere over the rainbow avaiable in your hands. Probably a serious enquire would start at least with the history of paper dolls. You know, those with which you can make little theaters, like Alexander’s. All the famous film characters and stars had a paper doll version.

Playground of dreams. “To dream is not another way of experiencing another world, it is for the dreaming subject the radical way of experiencing its own world.” (Foucault)

I ask myself if this is not Bergman’s house. It was always a conflicted place, wasn’t it? What you say, Monika and Harry adopted Fanny and Alexander? I think there is a bit of Summer with Monika in Badlands, maybe Kit shaving in the tree house is an allusion to it (and those glass objects at the window could be an allusion to the scene where Harry breaks one in the film). As for Fanny and Alexander, if you know it (I have only seen the theatrical version), you will certainly understand why Alex (Fanny is in there, but this image didn’t catch her) would fit in Waco. Crazy idea to consider in the future.

Thinking about her.

But the doll with which Malick tried to play the most in his last game was from a different nature. It was something like “presence” in the strong sense. That doll which scared us and Alexander to death and granted Bergman one of the most powerful moments of his cinema. You know, big daddy.

Bye for now. 

Tabu

[It is useless to read the following before my review of The Tree of Life, The Imaginary Family of Terrence Malick.]

I will have to make another vacation from the blog. I was working on plenty to post – fetishism, Linda, The Thin Red Line – but it is postponed by now. I have been promising my thoughts on Malick’s Guadalcanal for a long time and I felt it was fair to tell you something on the subject before saying goodbye for a few months. What follows is the continuation of Künstlerroman, Roman à Clef, Muses and Personifications: Some Thoughts and Nous voici encore seuls.

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Difficult, delicate post to write. There is something necessary to do what Malick has done of which you can hardly have theoretical knowledge. That is what we call – with all fatal controversies – psychopathy. Let’s keep it simple: have you ever come across someone totally lacking of empathy, unable to feel remorse or guilt? If you possess only second hand experience of this human reality – scientific studies, all sort of film and romance clichés – it will be hard to imagine Malick’s kind of person. For a psychopath any of us is either: a source of amusement or gratification; something in their way. Responsibility to the other = 0. Any possible attempts to relate only led to a worsening of their inability to do so. “They want you dead. Or in their lie.” (The Thin Red Line) In the inside they are not only dead for humanity: they don’t “feel the lack.” If you know what such a person is you will understand that “He died when he was 19.”

I suspect that those German notes are a little joke with Lang. Like I have written, the clown is probably an allusion to Spies (below) and, after all, this is the experiment of the thousand faces’ cinematic man, Dr. Malick, der Spieler. Not that it is important, even RL asked O’Brien how he used them. Just a little joke. What is important is the allusion to the game/gambling itself: “Countess: I fear that there is nothing in the world to interest me for long. Everything that can be seen from a car, from an opera box, or from a window is partly disgusting, partly uninteresting, always boring! Mabuse: You are right, Countess – nothing in the world is interesting for long – except for one thing – Playing with people and their destinies.” (Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler)

So, I am not thinking in the “artist psychopath”, someone at the margins of society or someone at war with social rules by the means of his craft for the sake of establishing something else by more or less revolutionary – even violent – means, the type suggested in Monteiro’s final quotation in Nous voici encore seuls. I am certainly not thinking in someone desiring any kind of social reform. I am speaking of those to whom it simply does not matter anymore if the world could be better or worse, more like this or more like that – those to whom the world is entirely dead.
Malick created his own image for this alienated state of being: the world is like a “faraway planet” (Holly’s words). This doesn’t deserve the expense of much philosophy. I can’t help remembering one of Monteiro’s blasphemous jokes, the words of his madman friend who thought himself as Christ after the Ascension: “When I rose to the heavens, I told every mortal: fuck each other now, because you won’t be fucking me anymore.”

It is wrong – even dangerous, i.e., capable of inspiring all kind of ideological opportunisms – to enter Malick’s labyrinth of allusions without this notion made clear: his experiment is not the (self-proclaimed) logic conclusion of some philosophy, some nihilistic conception of life. It will not become obvious why Malick did what he did by reading all Bataille or seeing Hitchcock’s films 50 times, although both things are highly recommended in order to do so. What is at stake is the appropriation from an absolute maniac of whatever he finds to feed the fire of his own Apocalypse.
You should read with care those interviews given by Malick to Sight and Sound and Positif. He really must have fun playing with words. Take this bit:

“He [Kit] thinks of himself as a successor to James Dean – a Rebel without a Cause – when in reality he’s more like an Eisenhower conservative. ‘Consider the minority opinion’, he says into the rich man’s tape recorder, 'but try to get along with the majority opinion once it's accepted.' He doesn’t really believe any of this, but he envies the people who do, who can. He wants to be like them, like the rich man he locks in the closet, the only man he doesn’t kill, the only man he sympathizes with, and the one least in need of sympathy. It’s not infrequently the people at the bottom who most vigorously defend the very rules that put and keep them there.”

More like an “Eisenhower conservative” exactly because he is indifferent to the world except as source of fun through his films, as Good that makes Evil possible, his “great evil” possible, as the very rules that put and keep him there, which make him special, before his eyes, first of all. He can’t make his a civilized game, like the rich man’s (Hitchcock). Why he sympathizes with Mr. Scarborough we can imagine, but they are on different sides of the thin red line, the line between “sanity” and “madness” (that’s its meaning in Jones and that’s its meaning in Malick, along with the idea of line of no return, the line separating him from The New World), which, somehow, Vertigo’s bells establish.

It is like if Malick’s river was the maniac version of several streams of the history of art from the Renaissance on, like he would like to drag the entire Western culture to his vertiginous pit of eternal damnation. Fortunately, that is not possible. Holly will end marrying somebody else and there will be (there is, I can tell you) plenty of poetry after The Tree of Life. But Malick certainly made the best possible attempt he could. The chimneys are a symbol of his “final solution”. For Malick this is really the end of the river. I have told you once that you should keep your ears alert during his films. Tell me, what you hear in this exact moment (final shots of the factory)?

Can’t you guess? What is that Buddha burning in The Thin Red Line? Some spiritual-philosophical comment? One of the main confrontations in this film opposes Gordon Tall to Staros. (If you have read this blog carefully, you should be ashamed not to identify Staros. I will tell you later, but my hints are: he’s a synthesis of two characters played by the same actor in films of the same “father”; we have talked about his father around here more than once; the actor in question plays a Greek in one film and someone dies in his arms by the end of the movie; he is a lawyer and an army officer in the other film; most of his characteristics come from this last.) Staros is the good guy. And what about Tall?

“Look at this jungle. Look at those vines, the way they twine around the trees, swallowing everything. Nature’s cruel, Staros.”

That Malick’s Nature is cruel we know, but if I told you that this was an allusion too?

“Even the jungle wanted him dead, and that’s who he really took his orders from anyway.” (Apocalypse Now)

Remember Tall saying to a soldier “Get that blouse on, soldier. It’s not a goddamn bathing beach” ? Just another joke: it was not surfing time. Have you understood what the noise of O’brien’s ventilation fan is? It is “the end.” Welsh tells Witt:

“You’re running into a burning house, where nobody can be saved.”

That house is The Tree of Life. Apocalypse now. Final solution. The end.

This to say that Fire, the god of the volcano, is who Malick really takes his orders from anyway.

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I have mentioned le divin marquis one or two times around here, haven’t I? Barthes’ considerations about his work can give you an idea of what Malick’s Nature does with – let’s use this word to simplify – style. It is well known, but the best is to quote:

“Sade makes extensive use of what might be called metonymic violence: he juxtaposes in the same syntagm heterogeneous fragments belonging to spheres of language normally kept apart through socio-moral taboo. Thus the Church, "fine" style, and pornography: "Yes, yes, Monseigneur," La Lacroix says to the aged Archbishop of Lyons, he of the fortifying chocolate, "and Your Eminence can plainly see that by exposing to him only the part he desires. I am offering for his libertine homage the prettiest virgin ass hole to be kissed that there is." What are here being overtuned are obiviously, in a very classical way, the social fetishes, kings, ministers, eccleastics, etc, but so too the language, the tradtional classes of writing: criminal contamination touches every style of the discourse: narrative, lyrical, moral, maxim, mythological topos. We begin to recognize that the transgressions of language possess an offensive power as strong as the moral transgressions, and that the poetry which is itself the language of the transgressions of language, is thereby always contestatory.” (Sade, Fourier, Loyola)

Malick works on a different scale of Good and Evil. His artistic “crimes” are much more complicate – transgressions of language become also moral because of the “Vertigo Project” – than the Marquis’, but Barthes’ formulation might still help you to understand his work. Through Grace, from Badlands to The Tree of Life there are continuities but there are also many differences, aren’t there? Not rarely those who praise Badlands dislike – or like less – what Malick did afterwards, especially from The Thin Red Line on and vice-versa. That’s why “every style of the discourse” is in bold. O’Brien said something funny to Jack in the draft script: “Every time I see a young guy walk by with a shirt and tie, looking sharp, that’s my kid I’m looking at.” Don’t be so proud to think that there is really a difference between those looking sharp and the others. There are baits for almost every kind. It is difficult to find someone who dislikes all Malick’s films, isn’t it? Happy few.

Malick’s tree of crime is a kind of rapping rage of everything that those living in that “faraway planet” care for, build their identity on, searche the sense of their lifes in. As savadge as he can imagine it: he did “pour son plaisir et selon sa volonté tout le mal qu’il pouvait.” (Bataille [int.], Le procès de Gilles de Rais) Everything consumed by fire. Even everything that in our minds is far from being associated with the world of “Good”. That final fusion of  Riefenstahl and Bataille – “I give him to you” – shows you just the kind of joker he is. His poetry is not “contestatory”. It is apocalyptical.

I took a while to understand what that feather was. Smith decides to leave after this scene, it had to signify something. It became clear what the feather was when I realized that Malick was on his way to “life’s golden tree” and that he was playing with Murnau’s girl: Faust’s contract (although Murnau’s film doesn’t follow Goethe’s version most of time). By the way, did you noticed the joke with Flaherty? I am not 100% sure, but it seems to me that when he leaves Reri he ends meeting Nanook... Those were definetly not Malick’s Indies.

The truth is that the experiment was only worth if it lead beyond all the “red lines.” A taboo is only a taboo if breaking it condemns who does so to be destroyed. Any doubts about Malick’s mental condition are dissipated by his identification with Kurtz – and his ritual sacrifice.

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I hope you understand that underlining Malick’s extreme psychopathy is not to refuse the possibility of any historical-philosophical discussion of his experiment. It is just the way of not loosing dangerously the perspective of things. The moment you get that he is a psychopath, go ahead: Sade, Nietzsche, Bataille (what would he say about such an experiment?), or whatever you want (not necessarily included in Malick’s self-comments, that should be judged, anyway).
I confess that one thing among others interests me: where exacly Malick puts God in this game.

John of God: What attracts me is entering into the vice and diving headlong into it, to the end. Pay to see, as they say in poker. What does one need to pay to see everything?

Omar Rashid: Only God can see everything.
John of God: It’s the fundamental principle of tragedy.
Omar Rashid: He who plays against God is condemned to lose without redemption.
John of God: Nothing ventured, nothing gained…
(God’s Wedding)

This game is about to “pay to see” and it seems to be, to a great extent, a game with God. To go jusqu’au bout, jusqu’au bout of one’s destructive and self-destructive violence. Jusqu’au bout de l’horrer. The horror, the horror.

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For one time, I will end with a poetic comment. It is also an homage to Monteiro, who must forgive me to have brought him to this sordid discussion in order to illuminate the aberrant fantasies of Terrence Malick.

“It is over, Diotima! our men plundered, murdered, indiscriminately, even our brothers were killed, the innocent Greek in Misitra, or they wander helplessly about, their deathly faces calling Heaven and Earth to wreak vengeance against the Barbarians, whose leader I was.
Now indeed I can go forth and preach my good cause. Oh now indeed all hearts will fly to me!
How cleverly I went about it. How well I knew my men. Yes! it was indeed a remarkable undertaking, to establish my Elysium with a pack of thieves!
No! by sacred Nemesis! I have got what I deserved, and I will bear it too, bear it until the pain destroys my last consciousness.
Do you think I am raving? I have an honorable wound, which one of my faithful followers gave me while I was trying to avert the horror. If I were raving, I would tear off the bandage from it, and then my blood would run where it should – into this sorrowing soil.
This sorrowing soil! whose nakedness I sought to clothe with sacred groves! this sacred soil which I sought to adorn with all the flowers of Greek life!
Oh, it would have been beautiful, my Diotima!
Do you tell me I have lost my faith! Dear girl! the evil is too great. Bands of madmen are bursting in every side; rapacity rages like the plague in Morea, and he who does not also take the sword is hunted down and slain, and the maniacs say they are fighting for our freedom.
Others of these wild men are paid by the Sultan and do the same things.
I have just heard that our dishonored army is now scattered. The cowards encountered a troop of Albanians near Tripolossa, only half as many as themselves. But since there was nothing to plunder, the wretches all ran away. Only the Russians who risked this campaign with us, forty brave men, put up a resistance, and they all found death.
So now I am alone with my Alabanda, as before. Ever since he saw me fall and bleed in Misitra, that true-hearted friend has forgot everything else – his hopes, his longing for victory, his despair. He who is in fury came down upon the plunderers like an avenging god, he led me out of the fight so gently, and his tears wet my clothes. He stayed with me, too, in the hut where I have lain since then, and only now am I glad that he did so. For had he gone on, he would now be lying in the dust before Tripolissa.
What is to follow I know not. Fate casts me back adrift in uncertainty, and I have deserved it; my own feeling of shame banishes me from you, and who knows for how long?
Ah! I promised you a new Greece, and instead you receive only an elegy. Be your own consolation.”
 
(Hyperion oder Der Eremit in Griechenland)

Mutter Nacht

[It is useless to read the following before my review of The Tree of Life, The Imaginary Family of Terrence Malick.]

 

This post was to be called Angels are not cruel enough to hide until I noticed that Ashley was cruel enough to. So, radical solution: all references to Ashley were extracted from the blog.

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Even if his intentions might seem far from serious, this artist brought psychoanalysis to the field. I have decided to force myself to write on the subject one or two light posts.
At least as a possibility to be explored, psychoanalysis is hanging over this blog from its very beginning, from the first post’s title. To those acquainted with Freud and his followers this title might have brought to mind more than imago and fiction: family romances. But that is not today’s theme and probably never will be. It is not compelling to drive this blog into speculations about Malick’s relation with his parents or about his childhood. It is obscene, out of scene, in all Malick’s films (studying with care The Thin Red Line made me understand to what point that is true) and it will be kept that way, without prejudice of some future considerations about his psychopathy. If you remember, just one time it was necessary to go into Malick’s (true) family, in order to clarify that “He died when he was 19.”

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Mother…  “Long have I loved you and for my own delight would call you mother” is very different from Long have I loved you with delight, like my mother (sorry, Hölderlin). The idea of getting into this kind of stuff à propos de Malick came from the vague recollection of an article about Sternberg’s (let’s forget that Hollywoodian “von”) cinema. I had forgotten its title – Masochism and the Perverse Pleasures of the Cinema – and was wrong about the author’s identity – Gaylyn Studlar. The 1985 article, quite famous, was developed in a 1988 book, which I haven’t read. Briefly, masochism, departing from Deleuze’s theory, was equated with Sternberg’s work and the movie spectator (‘s pleasures) with the passive child before the mother. Why the article came to my mind? Because Malick’s spectators assume the position of the child desiring to be controlled within the dynamics of the fantasy, to enjoy the pleasures of submission with no great consequence. The child who doesn’t want to grow, who refuses to answer the question: where was I when Malick laid the foundations of the Earth and made the morning stars sang together before my eyes? The child who does not put the question of the Father, whose ghost is O’Brien.
And Malick?

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The director’s look toward us – O’Brien’s, the architect’s – is structurally criminal, sadistic. There is not a trace of masochism, only pure unrestricted debauchery. There is a single non-metaphorical image of the film spectator in his work, Linda (and the rest) looking at the arrival at the promised land in The Immigrant. This is certainly a self-portrait of this sadistic Malick arriving at his heterotopia. (After reading the script and looking to Linda’s scenes carefully, I believe today that the relation with Chaplin is probably intended with Abby [Paulette Goddard played an Abby] and Bill and not primarily with the girl; that is why she is The Kid). With her eyes wide open, seemingly excited, Linda speaks about the devil who is “just sitting there laughing”, about how he is “glad when people does bad”. Well, the only bad thing that we could have done was to trust him, sitting “all tied up” in the movie theater with our good (and more than natural) ideas about him. We were just too distracted to notice how Kit played with the mop. It all belonged to an order of things too heterotopic to come to our minds, or not to be repressed by our minds. And so Malick knew that we would probably end falling in love with Madeleine/Mother/Cinema. That moment the movie theater became his “snake house,” where the snakes eat “your eyes out” and go “down your throat and eat all your systems out”.
“I think the devil was on the farm.”

I ask myself what this devilish kitsch creature is to Malick. And if it is the devil himself? Dieterle’s, I mean... Or is it one of the seven dwarfs?

This is Malick as “Nature”, pure delight in mastery, ordering things, godlike dominion and destruction. O’Brien holding Mother Cinema in his arms. To what extent Malick’s work is Sadian (and not only sadistic) would be an interesting question to put futurely. For now, let us see Malick as our brother... spectator.

Father

Son

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Leise zieht durch mein Gemüt

liebliches Geläute.

Klinge, kleines Frühlingslied,

kling hinaus ins Weite.

Kling hinaus bis an das Haus,

wo die Blumen sprießen.

Wenn du eine Rose schaust,

sag, ich laß sie grüßen.

Although much more important, Malick, the father, should not make us forget Malick, the son, Steve. Among other things, Steve permits to add an extra degree of complexity to the image of his relation with cinema, to portrait himself, his cinematic “one big self”, in certain modes of spectatorship (including towards his own work) not included in Waco’s almighty father. To make his vertiginous experiment more vertiginous.

In that first night, mother’s night, Mrs. Cinema tells us about how she went for a ride in a plane once. This story, like I have said, is nothing but Badlands, the story of how Kit/Malick knew Holly, Father met Mother. Steve, the little snake, is listening, of course. This metaphorical bedtime story made me remind of one of Malick’s beloved scarlet empress’ films, Blonde Venus, in which Helen/Dietrich and Ned/Herbert Marshall tell (and act) for their son Johnny the “Germany story”, the story of how they met. If there is a film in which Studlar’s ideas find easy illustration is Blonde Venus. This love story between mother and son actually ends with a (Johnny’s) point-of-view shot of the music-box’s artificial heaven while Mother sings us Heine’s poem. I ask myself if it is an image capable of expressing Malick’s “heaven”: to go asleep from a condemned world in Mother’s arms.

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Dreyer’s Day of Wrath. Anne offers Martin water from the spring: “More?” Martin answers: “Water? No.” “ Of what then?” She offers him her lips: “Drink!”

We. We together. One being. Flow together like water, till I can’t tell you from me. I drink you. Now. Now.

(The Thin Red Line)

The decisive moment comes to my mind: the architect driven towards the woman’s belly. It is not only vampirization which is at stake. He is entering her, disappearing in her, fusing with her, being absorbed into Mother Cinema. Is not such an involution – such an invagination – the perfect metaphor of Malick’s experiment? To disappear in the celluloid, to melt in the River of Life with the object of his desire, to consume himself in evil? Mother… Remember Mephistopheles’ words?

I am a portion of that part which once was everything,
a part of darkness which gave birth to Light,
that haughty Light which now disputes the rand and ancient sway of Mother Night
(Faust)

The critical legacy of Jean-Louis Baudry’s The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in Cinema (1975) testifies how popular is the image of corporeal absorption crafted by Malick in the desert’s door scene. His article presented cinema as “a representation of the maternal womb, of the matrix into which we are supposed to wish to return.” Departing from Bertram Lewin’s “dream screen”, Baudry saw what he called the “dream effect” of cinema as “the submersion of the subject in his representations.” Illibatezza by Rosselini for Ro.Go.Pa.G.