The New World of the Other
Posted: January 3rd, 2006 | Filed under: The room flickers blue and white |
I’m mostly procrastinating again. But here’s as good a place as any to record some thoughts on finally seeing Malick’s The New World. I need to see it again to really get it all, and I’ll probably wait for the DVD since it’s supposed to be longer anyway.
It’s an immensely challenging movie, given the subject matter - the question in my mind is whether it’s difficult for Malick for the same reasons that it is for me. What, if anything, does a romantic love story have to do with one of the many first encounters that ended in North American genocide? Is Malick taking on this conventional story to ask these questions? Disney’s Pocahontas(we never even hear this name in Malick’s film) is only the most recent incident of the gentle violence of the traditional story. To valorize and fictionalize this figure is to bring her out of “the other” and create sympathy where we should be asking forgiveness instead. I suspect/hope that Malick is interrogating the story as he tells it, like Kazantzakis did with the gospel story. There is some evidence that he is - I point for example to the score. The music at times distances us from the scene, pulls us back into non-diegetic space where we look on this story like a familiar text.
The most obvious relationship of the love story to the first contact story is one of new beginnings. Romantic love imagines a new self, new start, new beginnings - everything is promised to be alive and routine, due to the transcendence of the self into the other. Likewise with Smith’s experience of the New World, where a short life with the Indians (”the naturals”) reveals utopia to be within reach.
The film’s story after Smith is sent back to Jamestown reads as a version of the Biblical Fall. He can’t go back, but keeps thinking back to those hours in the woods, exploring every sense along with his equally aware and enlivened love, Pocahontas.
We never hear her Indian name, at least not spoken by an Englishman.
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