To the Wonder

I really enjoyed the editing style used in To the Wonder. It was my first Malick experience. Unlike the editing practice of Intensified Continuity emerging in cinema (Transformers, etc.) in which a short ASL drains the picture of richness, Malick's editing allows for an abundance of ideas and juxtapositions. Malick sequences shots under a narration in combination that you never thought would be syntadgmatically meaningful. Malick does not relate time in a conventional cinematic manner. I can't tell if it augments or diminishes the "standard" amount of time for a scene. For me, the film presented a plentiful variety of shots that each contained a weighty gravity of information. This, in one sense, emphasized a "nowness" like Dorsky, making it difficult to have an accumulated sense of time, since the totality of each shots is only a disparate collection of very brief moments. The syntactical negative space between these shots is unknown. However, the shots are often unconnected and from a variety of locations and time periods. The combinations of these shots form a synecdochical whole that is temporally cast. The negative space between, especially, allows for temporal fathoms, as the viewer constructs indefinitely vast narrative bridges to combine the disparate shots. Malick allows his viewers to practice their emotional intuition. He rarely provides a complete picture, often beginning a seen that seems already midway to fruition. The film has a documentary feel in this regard - the camera happening to be there to capture spontaneous events as opposed to rehearsed and premeditated scenes. Malick grants profundity to the quotidian and subtle. Anything that he shoots seems to serve as a strong symbol or important syntactical element. 

In terms of my experience watching To The Wonder, it was very painful! I suffered a great deal, it was hard to watch the characters struggle. This was especially difficult for me because I (you'd never guess) love to talk and express myself. I would be very fearful of being misrepresented in a situation. it's very challenging to watch a situation crumble due to communication issues. Just as the characters cannot find each other, we cannot find them. These films are the most brutal for me. Any violent film is escapist in the sense that I would not kill another human so to watch a murder in film is disaffecting and distancing, easy to watch. This film shows real pain, real regret. It shows situations I'm afraid of, nightmares that I've seen and fear I'll see again.

I would argue that this film reflects the essential style of Transcendental Cinema. Though not every charactr Transcends - in fact, no character ever reaches full bliss. It does, however, discuss despair, stasis, and how people respond to the conflicts of life. Ben Afleck's character (Neil) reflects the disparity of the transcendental style. Schrader describes disparity as a "growing crack in the dull surface of everyday reality." In his case, Neil's existential schism forms a gash dividing his security regarding the endurance of his new family unity. Neil exhibits the symptoms of despair as outlined by Schrader. He persistently "negate[s] his emotions", and overall an inaccessible, stolid character. Though dialogically he is all but impenetrable, his solitary behavior, especially his job , suggest deeper aspects of his character. It is a valid effort to anything done by Neil in the film to be psychologically divulgent - or, moreover, that the transcendental style allows for fluid irrationality and emotional reality. Neil's occupation as an environmental inspector, for example, situates him within literal chasms in the earth. He is knee-deep in the muck and industrial carnage of violated nature, enunciates the Schrader's second level of despair that "all is not right with the banal world." Contrasted against the mud-play scene in Normandy at the film's beginning, the scenes of Neil rummaging through ruined fracking sites evoke a deep sense of terrestrial irresponsibility, a demystification of the natural. Malick's transcendental style allows for multitudinous dimensionality of any image. Neil's occupation, for example, invokes not only a literalization of his marital discord, but speaks to a larger discourse regarding differences between the American and European imaginaries and realities. When Marina and Tatiana move to America, it is framed as more spacious, freer, fantastical. The opening American shots feature carefree dancing through field acres, Walmart: the consumer good wonder emporium, high school football. However, as time elapses, America proves to be less-wild, less-mystical, more-constraining. On this macro level of film analysis, To the Wonder is very much in-keeping with the directorial themes and motifs of Malick's earlier works as analyzed in "All Things Shining" and "Poetic Visions in America." In "Poetic Visions in America," Patterson outlines a paradox often stressed by Malick in his films of “the impossibility of fulfilling myths that assert mobility and settlement, freedom and restraint, individualism and conformity.” In "All Things Shining," Mottram describes Malick's first three films as discourses on "the violence of natural in our world and in ourselves," "the bareness of contemporary American life," and "nature and the meaning of war." It was interesting to watch this film, as it lies subsequent to these analyses yet reflects the Malick themes highlighted in his earlier work. Neil and Marina's love is a war - the exodus of Europeans to America and the mounting cultural tension between the two now - American torpor, environmental exhaustion, bloated penitentiaries, high consumerism. When Marina and Neil go to a Sonic drive-thru and he smashes his car's side mirror upon learning of her affair, it is archetypal and transhistorical in so many ways. It's composition speaks to, almost the culture of imperialism and violence in America. The drive-thru speaks to the American malaise of mass consumerism, of business conglomerates that reinforce banality, of capitalism and its unrelenting competitiveness, how it will insert neon into a desert stolen from American Indians and underpay employees to service customer cars so they don't have to even enter the restaurant. Neil is unwilling to enter the mystical realm of romantic feelings, he is lethargic. As him and Marina go to a lethargic eatery, as Neil is forced to confront a mature situation regarding infidelity, his aggression becomes volatile. He does not confront her sexual identity, the crucial issues in their relationship - at a time of conflict, his lethargy proves to be a guise to cover his aggression. This notion of violence guised by lethargy should not be extricated from the more abstract notions of a larger American banality of violence addressed in Malick's oeuvre.

In many ways, Marina presents a transcendence of despair. Though the film never really indicates what specifically Neil is avoiding, it presents plenty of stress that Marina must overcome. Marina is a single mother who must take a huge chance beginning a new life with a emotionally uncertain partner. She must travel to a new country that turns out to reflect a radical cultural alterity to everything she knew. She is torn bureaucratically from her homeland and her new home. She must suffer the strife of her daughter, as she has a hard time making friends and feels unsure of Neil as a new father figure. Yet despite all this, she dances. Marina freezes the conflicts, and, in melancholic grace, embraces the universality of nature and love , unabashedly expressing herself and remaining open to the splendors of love despite fear. She is not a giddy character by any means, but she does something which Neil doesn't: she manages to stay warm and live atop a frozen stasis, at some points ambivalent and at others independent from her surroundings. Neil, on the other hand, forces stasis within himself, and does not transcend. At the film's conclusion, Marina tells Neil that she will keep his last name. She very much indicates an ability to feel an ease with the tumult of the past - to not drop the pain, as it is her, and she can accept it and move beyond it.