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Terrence Malick as pro-life filmmaker

Terrence Malick as pro-life filmmaker

Last updated on: March 21, 2016 at 5:40 am by Gene Veith

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Terrence Malick as pro-life filmmaker 2016-03-20T17:24:52-04:00 Gene Veith

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One of today’s most acclaimed, sophisticated, and artistic filmmakers is Terrence Malick, a practicing Roman Catholic Christian. Critics complain about not being able to understand his latest film, Knight of Cups. But William Randolph Brafford explains that the movie is all about “the culture of life”; specifically, openness to having children.

From Terrence Malick’s Openness to Life | William Randolph Brafford | First Things:

Knight of Cups opens with text from The Pilgrim’s Progress and scenes of its main character wandering in a desert. What follows will concern a pilgrimage. Like John Bunyan’s Christian, the main character of this film, who I’ll call the Knight, passes through a strange and dangerous landscape, meeting friends and guides as well as enemies and tempters. His journey takes him through the Los Angeles of the entertainment industry, with its lights, drinks, drugs, parties, and palm trees. The Knight’s brother and father visit him at intervals throughout the film. Other characters are present only in episodes. There are six women who appear in various relationships to the Knight: a young actress, a mournful ex-wife, a serene model, a lively stripper, a married woman, and an angelic blonde.

What might be called a symbolic geography is laid out through certain images that recur in patterns. Whenever the Knight has been jolted out of his complacency, perhaps by an earthquake or by the end of a relationship, we see him wandering in the desert. When the Knight is falling in love, or opening himself to love, he goes to the ocean. So we have a desert, and an ocean, and between them, The City, where the Knight experiences ambition, confusion, fear, and desire. The deeper the Knight’s love for a woman, the closer they get to the water. The Knight stands at the shore with his ex-wife but does not step into the surf, just as he couldn’t fully step into their marriage. The Knight and the stripper-temptress, who entrances him without reaching his soul, just stay on the boardwalk and shop for sunglasses.

What is this love that the ocean represents? It is a love that calls us out of ourselves. To fall in love is to have the soul awakened. Yet the Knight has rejected this love, and lives his life in alienation. The sign of his fear of love is a refusal to have children. “Are you sorry we didn’t have babies?” the ex-wife asks, early in the film. Later, the Knight walks into a restaurant and notices someone watching a sonogram video on a laptop. Just after that, the Knight’s mother makes a brief appearance, standing peacefully in the surf, she murmurs in voiceover “I hope you have children.” These are not just the words of a mother eager for grandchildren. She wants her son to know what it’s like to love as a parent does. In such moments, the film expresses its deep conviction: love between a man and a woman is not fully itself until it is open to family life.

As the film approaches its climax, this theme becomes dominant. In a segment with the Tarot-card title “Death,” the Knight begins a new love affair, this time with a married woman. She tells the Knight that she doesn’t feel guilty about breaking her vows, for her vows only come from the love behind them. Has the Knight finally found what he has been searching for? When the pair goes to the ocean, they dive into the breaking waves. They walk out along a pier, and the Knight leaps from a ledge into the water, uninhibited and seemingly free. They yearn to be married: when the woman walks by a shop, she gazes longingly at a wedding dress. But heartbreak comes for them at a beach house, where the woman reveals that she had become pregnant without knowing if the father was her husband or the Knight. It’s implied that she aborted the child. “I forget about it for a few minutes, and then I remember,” she says, weeping. The relationship ends. There is a shot of the empty pier on the empty beach, and the Knight’s whispered words: “Forgive me.”

Sometime after this, as the Knight reconciles with his father, we hear a voice reciting Psalm 51, which is associated in Scripture with King David after his time with Bathsheba: “have mercy on me, according to your unfailing love.” With this repentance, the Knight has passed his final trial. To this point in the film, the beaches have all been empty, or nearly so, but now there’s a long shot of an oceanside full of families, children, light, and laughter. The final title card of the film is “Freedom.”Knight of Cups ends with rising music and scenes of the Knight with a graceful, angelic woman and a crawling baby in a garden. This woman, unlike the others, is seen only fleetingly, but we do hear her praying Psalm 139 (“the darkness is not dark to you”). How did the Knight meet this woman? What is their life together like? We don’t know — but then again, Bunyan didn’t give us much detail about life inside the Celestial City.

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