Towards a Phenomenology of Praxis: The Entropy of Existence in the Films of Terrence Malick

Kamran Bashir

“All ends in peace, as music does. The last chord melts into ordinary production sound. Time has reappeared; resumed its sway.

And still the vision is not the journey. The real journey has yet to begin.

Will he give himself to this new life? Does he dare?”
—The Tree of Life, Terrence Malick

“The death of childhood is the beginning of poetry.”
—Andrei Tarkovsky

“But poetry, as the authentic gauging of the dimension of dwelling, is the primal form of building. Poetry first of all admits man’s dwelling into its very nature, its presencing being. Poetry is the original admission of dwelling.”
—Martin Heidegger, “Poetically Man Dwells”

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]f a translation of the movement of memory, time or identity in a film or a literary piece, as it progresses through the flow of narrative time, is attempted—what would its disposition be like? What would the translation of the language and motion of memory in a film like The Tree of Life (2011) appear through words? This would result in a painting that resists dramatic coherence, coalescing into a vast montage of words that would resist to tell just any story through a linear method. In such an occurrence, the language of such imagery producing the action of words and memories should ultimately feel too aware of itself—because by the act of natural will it would demand attention, given the enormous involuntary thought and motion of memory. Such an entropy would feel burdensome to interpret.

Is there any language for such a translation in making sense of the lost time? Would the words ever suffice? And if so, what language and words would suffice? What vertigo should then befall the language of prose that it should produce an exact and evasive cinematic movement of memory? These are the questions that directly or indirectly follow from the philosophical discourse on our being, time and existence in a world where we are bound to varying relationships.

The Tree of Life

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]errence Malick’s style is not aimlessly digressive. Truth is struck with repetition. Malick’s films are stuck in memory. The Tree of Life flows with the pressure of memories. The body of the film stretches with one memory leading to another. The present is postponed indefinitely. Malick’s engagement with the energy of the cosmos is a Heideggerian warning against all catastrophe of the soul—a slow lament of surrender against all that stands in the way of its due return to a terrifying darkness. Malick’s films function as prayers and meditations on the dark poles of existence. In this regard, Lee Braver writes the following about Malick’s films:

Terrence Malick’s cinema circles around crises and torment—probing those in pain, those who have lost what is precious and become strangers to themselves—but he seems less interested in his characters’ pain than in their thoughts about it, their painful attempts to understand their pain, precisely where Nietzsche says our focus should be (Braver).

Malick’s films, known for their meditative and visual poetic qualities, plunge into the thematic interrogation of memory, childhood, adulthood, motherhood, fatherhood, trauma, history, identity and the entire entropy of existence. All these are achieved by employing complex narrative structures, evocative imagery, use of wide-angle shots, random motion of characters and contemplative voiceovers. Malick attempts to follow the imprints and traces of life as it is lived and memory as it evolves. Therefore, this is a parallel chase with the elusive nature of reality. Slowness is the fundamental threshold set in several of Malick’s films like A Hidden Life (2019), Knight of Cups (2015), The Tree of Life (2011), etc. Malick perceives the entropy of living and loss as an event. Memory, history, trauma and identity appear as a collective wound, rather than a personal affliction, especially in his The Tree of Life. This collective wound is situated blatantly in the beginning through the lines in the preface of the screenplay of The Tree of Life:

The ‘I’ who speaks in this story is not the author. Rather, he hopes that you might see yourself in this ‘I’ and understand this story as your own (Malick 2).

Work such as The Tree of Life (2011), Knight of Cups (2015), and A Hidden Life (2019) engage deeply with existential and phenomenological questions. Malick draws from philosophy, art, history to envision and sculpt a cinematic exploration of the entropy of existence while at the same time engaging with the larger cosmic phenomenological questions of being. Malick’s films have taken an enormous influence from Heidegger’s ideas. Malick even translated Heidegger’s The Essence of Reasons.^[1] As Rene Magritte’s The Lovers explores the enigma of intimacy, Malick visually interprets this in The Tree of Life, reinforcing the theme of unknowable human connection.

It is a remarkable insertion. It conveys the difficulty of the mysterious dimension of truly knowing a person, self or the big Other. In doing so, it raises relevant questions, such as: what does it mean to truly live by grace or by the way of nature? What are the standards? What are the rules? What is the guidebook? Where do all the rules come from? Where does radical autonomy take birth from?

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Stills from The Tree of Life (2011)

At a certain moment in The Tree of Life, Jack is shown resenting his father blatantly in front of his mother, when he states, “She only loves me.” While it may seem unnecessary and a cliche to splash an oedipal aura into the scene, it could also infer a probing into the deepest confines of the human psyche. For Jack, the only resting place is his mother. He is comforted by ‘grace’. Yet, at a later point in the film, he tells his father that he is more like him than her. This internal conflict of being torn between belief and distrust pervades the various frontiers of the film. In the Knight of Cups, Rick and his brother have a troubled relationship with their father. They are seen shouting at him and he is seen doing the same. In Knight of Cups, Rick’s father asserts the following in the beginning of the film:

“My son...
you are just like I am.
Can’t figure your life out?
Can’t put the pieces together?
Just like me.
A pilgrim on this earth.
A stranger.
Fragments...
pieces...
of a man” (Malick).

Such a monologue appears as a voiceover. A similar voice appears in The Tree of Life but this time the son, Jack, speaks to his father, admitting that in character he resembles his father more than his mother. Rick is constantly shown tussling between the mode of life he wanted to experience and the way of life that is religiously indoctrinated in him. Rick and his brother are constantly seen resenting their father. In the Tower scene, their father even speaks of everything he could ever do:

“I gave my life up for you kids. It wasn’t a noble sacrifice. It was what we were supposed to do. It was the way I was raised” (Malick).

While Jack, in The Tree of Life, hates to see his father kissing waitresses’ hands and teasing them, it is Rick in Knight of Cups as the son who is addressed by a fatherly voice that tells him:

“My son.
The light's gone out of your eyes.
Womanizer” (Malick).

He too has finally become like his father. Malick’s later films like the Knight of Cups seem to build upon the unsaid, unexplored or explored contours of an old or a new life. Malick looks at the past through characters who would pass, what seem like the major frontiers of things past. He makes them look within memory for the same thing from different places, ages, and the different people they become as they wear life at every different frontier. He makes them look at everything; every object, every feeling, every word, every sign and symbol—all together into an infinite splash. Perhaps the reason why there seems a repetition of fragmentation from every possible point in memory is conveyed by a voiceover of a scene in The Tower part, as it most certainly is Rick’s father who speaks the following:

“You think when you reach a certain age things will start making sense. Then you find out you’re just as lost as you were before. I suppose that’s what damnation is. The pieces of your life never to come together. Just splashed out there” (Malick).

The end result in The Tree of Life is the loss of equilibrium as a vision described thus:

“All dies, even death itself. Time comes to a close, and all is as it was in the beginning.

Shall the creation leave off here? Has death no purpose, great as life’s?” (Malick, 126).

Such a vision is brought about by the aid of memory, while passing through a seemingly final antechamber of life to another; doors flung open, skies spread blues, the world is a stretched bay and they meet everything they have ever lost. What after that? The final eternal vision of life could only be a projection or a resolution from a collective draft of memory. The most interesting scene in the film is Jack’s first arousal; how he almost drowns in guilt, begins to detest himself and practically everything around him. He cannot think of anything but get rid of that white female skirt. He runs miles and finally passes that skirt into the flow of the river.

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Stills from The Tree of Life (2011)

The Tree of Life is a story of grief as a form of prayer and the response to it is the remarkable history of the stillness, motion, creation and recreation, rebirth and renewal of life in the cosmos. It is remarkable how Malick refuses to bring about an exegesis of birth, life, death, living, loss, grief, love, memory, childhood, resilience, the existence of God, reality, dreams, etc., through the use of a short-spanned linear discourse. Malick simply does not watch but allows us to feel the slowness by making us look at objects, the cosmic energy, the shadows of Jack, R.L. and Steve playing in the front yard, the scent of patriarchy, and R.L’s guitar or his way of living gracefully.

Memory is involved in a spiritual and phenomenological investigation in The Tree of Life (2011). The Tree of Life occupies the silence of memories, almost all of Malick’s films do. The spoken language of voiceovers is the narrative flowing in memory. It is brief and profound. It is always up against oblivion and decay. It is remembrance. There are multiple narrative voices that together converge into a collective montage of memory. The narrative of The Tree of Life commences with a cosmic light and the movement of grown-up Jack’s memory. This is the bigger frame from which it flows, “Brother. Mother. It was they who led me to your door.” Thereafter, the narrative paces up, flooding into scenes of Mrs. O’Brien’s childhood. The girl looking outside the window is little Mrs. O’Brien. This is a significant technique used by Malick in the film at several points; bringing the trajectory of the character into motion, making the character speak and flow alongside their memory; to practically take the vantage of being a memory. The narrative shifts to Mrs. O’Brien’s years as a mother, which represent Jack, R.L. and Steve’s childhood.

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Stills from The Tree of Life (2011)

There are instantaneous shifts into characters’ epochs of adulthood, which more or less reflect the fleeting nature of existence. The movement of memory becomes so intense at times that it halts the present motion of life. The present is postponed, while it is only the flow of memory that directs the present. If Rick were to recall this life over the next ten years, there are high chances that his memory could be amplified.

Trauma is shaped by uneasy living, that is, the loss of a perspective. A radical incoherence takes birth. This is quite evident through Jack’s adult life. He stumbles on the pounding weight of memory in the office, elevators, and long pathways. His frustration grows panicked. He cannot take a meaningful step and instead drowns in the nostalgia and haze of his past. Jack reveals that his brother Rick died at age nineteen, and this loss fuels the ongoing struggle within the voices of memory. All the voices of memory are in a constant struggle with their respective becoming. Memory is portrayed as simultaneously burdensome, comforting, and essential home. When Jack feels he is bumping into walls, he cannot think of anything but his childhood with his brother, Rick.

A similar motion takes up in Malick’s A Hidden Life (2019). Malick almost penetrates, invades and attempts to seize the privacy and flashy nature of the memory in his subjects; situating them as struggling to find a shelter in the rhizome. All the physical movement thus is an attempt to move on. Malick hints at his characters as humble and capable of redemption in the face of a growing metropolitan world where one tends to fall into oblivion. Meanwhile, remembrance is involuntary. It shapes itself as trauma. Jack experiences existential despair because of the trauma of his brother’s death. This anguish and immobile entropy are juxtaposed with graceful images. Jack can only think of this life of recollection; the life of memory which is elusive. This is not something he does willingly. There is almost an involuntary stumbling on the haze of the past. This is how memory functions. This nature of memory is corroborated in Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn:

“Memories lie slumbering within us for months and years, quietly proliferating, until they are woken by some trifle and in some strange way blind us to life” (Sebald).

Memory in Malick’s films is layered and fragmented, reflecting an interplay of the individual and collective, shaped by both trauma and time. Through Jack’s recollections of childhood, the structure aligns with Paul Ricoeur’s idea of “narrative identity”, where individuals construct their identity through storytelling or to be precise memory-making. Malick’s films often juxtapose the personal and the cosmic, presenting memory as something deeply subjective, nonlinear and fragmented. In The Tree of Life, memory functions as a spiritual archive. Jack O’Brien’s memories unfold as impressionistic montages in which the most mundane memories coexist with existential reflections.

This structure aligns with Susan Sontag’s conception of images as repositories of memory, which she explores in On Photography when she writes, “To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.” This idea is mirrored in Malick’s visual style, where flashes evoke an almost sacred appropriation of time. In the grand scheme, Malick’s method attempts to meditate on the characters adrift in the landscape of metropolitan and historical detritus, the radical loss of coherence in the world and ultimately the existential disarray they embody.

Malick’s films depict a story while stressing at the same time on the grand motion of the cosmos. At one point in the documentary Voyage of Time, a voiceover states, “Every atom, every particle, blazing.”

In that instant within the documentary, the world should have stopped because of the suffering, pain, chaos and incoherence. It does not. Malick explores this radical incoherence in several of his films. And he even offers a resolution through moving images like in Knight of Cups:

“You see the palm trees, they tell you anything is possible. You can be anything. Do anything. Start over” (Malick).

This attitude of Malick to a phenomenological praxis in film appears in line with Iqbal’s Saqi-Nama:

فریب نظر ہے سکون و ثبات
تڑپتا ہے ہر ذرۂ کائنات

ٹھہرتا نہیں کاروان وجود
کہ ہر لحظ ہے تازہ شان وجود

سمجھتا ہے تو راز ہے زندگی
فقط ذوق پرواز ہے زندگی

بہت اس نے دیکھے ہیں پست و بلند
سفر اس کو منزل سے بڑھ کر پسند

“Stability is an illusion of eyes,
For every atom in the world pulsates with change.

The caravan of life does not halt anywhere,
For every moment life renews itself.

Do you think life is a great mystery?
No, it is only a desire to soar aloft.

It has seen many ups and downs,
But likes to travel rather than to reach the goal.”^[2]

These lines reflect a dynamic ontology that aligns with Malick’s own cinematic theology: that life is not a fixed state but a continuous process of becoming. In Iqbal’s view, as in Malick’s, to live authentically is to accept the transience and motion as the only constants. This philosophical kinship suggests that Malick’s films, despite being situated in a Western context, resonate with global metaphysical tradition, including those from the Islamic East.  Malick, however, does not forget to envision a reconciliation in the screenplay of The Tree of Life:

“Creation is eternal birth. A beginning without end. It happens in every instant of time. The same power which burns in the stars burns equally in us. Our being is a miracle, equal with the creation of the universe, and like the universe, each day is created anew” (Malick).

Knausgaard builds up a similar meditation on the entropy of existence in his volume of books entitled My Struggle, especially with the first volume, where he writes the following at the end:

“For humans are merely one form among many, which the world produces over and over again, not only in everything that lives but also in everything that does not live, drawn in sand, stone, and water. And death, which I have always regarded as the greatest dimension of life, dark, compelling, was no more than a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that slips off a clothes hanger and falls to the floor” (Knausgaard).

Knight of Cups

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]errence Malick’s Knight of Cups explores existential themes that resonate deeply with Martin Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology, particularly as outlined in Being and Time. Heidegger introduces the notion of Dasein, the being that is aware of and questions its own existence. According to Heidegger, Dasein is “thrown” (Geworfenheit) into a world not of its own making, already entangled in relationships, roles, and cultural norms (Heidegger 1962). This thrownness is a condition that Malick’s protagonist embodies—a man cast into the chaotic urban sprawl of Los Angeles, burdened by memory and haunted by a disconnection from authentic selfhood.

Heidegger also emphasizes the concept of  “existentiality” or “transcendence”, referring to Dasein’s ability to project itself into future possibilities and construct a meaningful existence. Malick’s camera visually traces this search as Rick wanders through fragmented scenes, interacting with lovers, family, and strangers, often without dialogue—his internal voice is the only guide. Yet this movement toward potentiality is consistently undermined by what Heidegger calls “fallenness” (Verfallen): a state where Dasein becomes immersed in the distractions of everyday life, losing its grasp on authentic being (Heidegger 1962). Malick captures this fallenness in recurring shots of lavish Hollywood parties, commercialized landscapes, and Rick’s apparent detachment from intimacy and purpose. Knight of Cups becomes more than a character study—it is a phenomenological meditation on being. Rick is a modern Dasein, simultaneously seeking and avoiding truth, submerged in the noise of life but still haunted by the call of authenticity. Malick transforms Heidegger’s theoretical abstraction into a living cinematic language, one that shows the spiritual cost of forgetting one’s potential for transcendence.

There is an unbearable and brutal movement of memory in Knight of Cups. It almost feels like a vision, an internal awakening, a movement of the mind, a simulation projected onto the present by this living mind stuck in memory. This is the substance that makes up the bulk of the film, as is indicated in its script. Through the boulevards of LA, this voiceover appears at an instant:

“This was a vision, nice and clear as a mountain stream.

The mind revealing itself to itself” (Knight of Cups).

These lines are also a reference to David Lynch’s Twin Peaks episode “May The Giant Be With You”. At a restaurant, the Major recounts a dream he had about his son, Bobby.

“This was a vision, nice and clear as a mountain stream. The mind revealing itself to itself.” There is thus, evidently, constant warning and self-assurance of what seem like the simpler reality of life:

“You are in exile…stranger in a strange land. A Pilgrim. A Knight. Find your way…from darkness to light…”

“So much I was given. So much I left behind. Remember. The Pearl.”

“I have spent thirty years. Not living life. But ruining it. For myself. And others. I cannot remember… A man I wanted to be” (Malick).  

“No one cares about reality anymore.”

“Whispering. Each man. Each woman. A guide. A god.”

Malick seems to ask, ‘in such a crisis how are we supposed to live?’ There are modes of life presented to us. There is then a mode of life which is brought to us by the subtle talk between Rick and the pole dancer. The pole dancer is the high priestess. This conversation exposes how Rick is coping up with his trauma and loss:

“You have a darkness on you. A little shadow. You live in a little fantasy world, don’t you? Don’t you?”…

“You can be whoever you want to be. You can be an asshole. You can be a saint, you can be a god” (Malick).

This leads back to the question of the dichotomy of living through the way of grace or nature. This leads back to The Tree of Life. There is one more instance in the high priestess part of the Knight of Cups that evokes the idea of transcendental idealism:

“We are like clouds. Coming and going. There is no such thing as forever” (Malick).

This also finally leads back to these words spoken by a lady in The Tree of Life while comforting Mrs. O’Brien after R.L’s death:

“Life goes on. people pass along. nothing stays the same. the lord gives and the lord takes away. that's the way he is...!” (Malick).

Malick’s meditation on the entropy of existence is thus one of the phenomenology of loss, love, trauma, grief and the ever-changing poetic history of memory. His characters occupy this status of becoming a multitude of people simultaneously. They are filmmakers, lovers, husbands, fathers, brothers, and strangers walking in the streets. They cannot function properly. Their relationships are shattered. The past shapes their becoming. That is why, Malick’s films from 2011 to 2017 feel like a single movie playing on loop. In Knight of Cups, the tussle between an artist’s inner life and a public life is quite prominent. One lady comes, another goes, another comes, another goes. In Knight of Cups, there is a radical meditation on love. Rick cannot function normally. At a certain point in the film, when his brother joins him, Rick mediates, “Show me what it is like to live a normal life.”

There is a core poetic identity innate to all of us. Modern totalitarian and capitalist systems aim to slowly rob us of that self. While it needs labour to cultivate that identity, we usually tend to gratify the lazy part of our brain. Therefore, the slow demise of the progress of soul, the slow demise of Earth, the slow demise of the World and Man.

Malick gives everything a poetic identity, in crisis, in joy, in pastures, in metropolis, and at times he shows his characters being ripped off this identity, they struggle hard to maintain their identity. The most serious things are attempted to be said in a poetic form. Wittgenstein believed that the most serious things can be said in the form of jokes but we cannot deny a deep philosophical poetic identity of man. The reasons for human actions are various and why do people act in a certain way. Why does Meursault live with a certain indifference against an indifferent world? Where does he find grace? How does he retain his individuality where his actions have consequences but he perceives them as beyond good and bad! If to a person everything is beyond good and bad, what does it mean for him to do a good thing or a bad thing? If the 'World' is really indifferent, why should he care about its dwelling place 'Earth'?

Rick’s memory attempts to flow in a poetic vision; one that is blocked by the wounded script of his life, one that Heidegger describes for a man who is not claiming control of language:

If need be, we can imagine that poets do on occasion dwell poetically. But how is "man"—and this means every man and all the time—supposed to dwell poetically? Does not all dwelling remain incompatible with the poetic? Our dwelling is harassed by the housing shortage. Even if that were not so, our dwelling today is harassed by work, made insecure by the hunt for gain and success, bewitched by the entertainment and recreation industry. But when there is still room left in today's dwelling for the poetic, and time is still set aside, what comes to pass is at best a preoccupation with aestheticizing, whether in writing or on the air. Poetry is either rejected as a frivolous mooning and vaporizing into the unknown, and a flight into dreamland, or is counted as a part of literature. And the validity of literature is assessed by the latest prevailing standard. The prevailing standard, in turn, is made and controlled by the organs for making public civilized opinions (Heidegger).

There is a constant show of lifts, flights and stairs reflecting a soul’s journey to higher levels of mystification. There is a vision coming from the characters’ dreams:

“I had a dream.
Don't stare at me like this.
I met a woman from another world.
I was taken up above the earth.
I shook with fear. Wonder” (Malick).

Slowly, after this scene, references to Buddhism and even the objects of ecstasy build up. There are scenes which cover the statue of Buddha in a Buddhist-styled house and a young woman meditating there. Looking at Buddhism seems only an observant practice in the film.

As such, Malick’s Knight of Cups also channels themes found in psychoanalytic and Buddhist discourses, which Slavoj Žižek compellingly bridges in his philosophical work. Žižek, drawing from Lacanian psychoanalysis, asserts that the notion of a unified, stable self is a fantasy—a fetishized illusion constructed through misrecognition. Instead of a coherent ego, what exists is a void at the center of subjectivity. Similarly, in Buddhist thought, the “self” is seen not as a fixed essence but as an illusion to be transcended. Enlightenment involves the recognition that identity is fluid, fleeting, and fundamentally empty (Žižek 2012).

In Knight of Cups, Rick embodies this psychic instability. His identity is fractured across time, space, and memory. The film’s non-linear structure mimics what Žižek calls the “flow of thoughts without a thinker” (Žižek 2012). Rick does not act so much as he drifts. His voice overs do not resolve into coherent reflection but instead trace a dissociative interiority, filled with regret, longing, and metaphysical bewilderment.

Žižek argues that psychoanalysis and Buddhism both lead to a confrontation with the void, the Real, where the fantasy of selfhood collapses. Malick dramatizes this through visual fragmentation: Rick’s image dissolves into shadows, mirrors, glass panes, and desert landscapes. His body is often shown from behind or in partial view, evoking a lack rather than a presence. These visual metaphors reinforce Žižek’s claim that the “Self” is nothing but resistance and repetition—there is no authentic core waiting to be uncovered (Žižek 2012). Rick’s journey is not toward the discovery of a lost identity but toward the acceptance of its absence. The pearl he seeks, a recurring metaphor in the film, is not a hidden truth to be retrieved, but a symbol of this very lack. His exile is spiritual, not geographical. He is, as Žižek might say, learning how to go to pieces without falling apart.

There is a depiction of wild energy. Yet, there is a soft reckoning and meditation over everything rough that follows. Rick wants to live but ambition and fear stand in his way. Nancy’s voice in the Knight of Cups speaks of this tension:

“I don't wanna accuse you, but you turned more unkind toward me. Almost cruel.”

“Just don't threaten me with leaving, okay? Just do what you want to do! … Just go!”

“You wanted me to help you through the dangers of a young man’s life. Ambition. Fear. I think you were afraid of going astray. I could not help you stay on the right path. Your head was turned in the wrong direction. You never really wanted to be inside our marriage. Nor outside it, either. You were sincere in the promise you made. Still… they didn't come from your heart” (Malick).

Rick mumbles in low voices:

“Stay. I want you. Hold you. Have you. Mine.”

“You gave me peace. You gave me what the world cannot give. Mercy. Love. Joy. All else is cloud. Mist. Be with me. Always.”

While Nancy is seen walking after her and speaking:

“You’re still the love of my life. Should I tell you that?” (Malick).

Rick only looks up high to the motion of flight taking up to a higher dimension. He wants to soar like a bird. Beach and the sea are a constant presence in Knight of Cups and The Tree of Life. The beach could reflect the big bay as Borges hints in his “The Dead Man.” The woman, the saddle and the big bay; this is something that a man aspires to have in his kingdom. This is something he largely lives up to, resulting in this inability and anxiety to drown in the worldly practice of love. Rick’s experience with women and love almost reeks of embodying The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:

“I grow old ... I grow old ...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown” (Eliot).

Malick appears to warn Rick, at every passing frontier, be it the Hollywood parties or through the pole dancer in the high priestess part. In a Hollywood party, a man is tied to a rope and a woman drags him by that rope. People shower flowers upon the scene. People laugh, clap and enjoy. Amid this mayhem, a voiceover speaks:

“Get up…Get up…Find it” (Malick).

This seems like a warning and a wake-up call for the Prince and Rick, to come out of his drowsiness and start the search for Pearl again. Rick is, however, aware of his drowning from the beginning:

“All those years… living the life of someone… I didn't even know” (Malick).

Even in the mayhem of parties, his voice speaks:

“I wonder where I was in all that time. A sleepwalker. In love with the world, in love with love. The world is a swamp. You have to fly over it. Fly” (Malick).

In the party scene, Malick's use of the song "Dilbar Dilbara" (“Beloved, oh beloved”) from the Pakistani film Uff Yeh Biwiyan (1977) directed by S. Suleman is simultaneously an interesting, peculiar and mysterious reference. But it seems to infuse cultural depth into the narrative. By utilising a song from a Pakistani film in the backdrop of a scene, Malick might be attempting to bridge cultural differences, providing a locus for internationalism. Nahid

Akhtar somewhere in the song sings:

“Pyaar sei hai yai dunya haseen
Pyaar nahi toe kuch bhi nahi…
Hungama kiye jaa, gaate jaa
Masti mai yunhi lehraayai jaa…


“Love makes this world beautiful,
Without love, there is nothing at all.
Keep creating a stir, keep singing,
Keep swaying in joy like this" (Suleman).

In the context of Hollywood party culture in Knight of Cups (2015), these lines can be seen as the veneer of love and beauty. The first couplet ("Love makes this world beautiful") can symbolize the superficial but glamorous world of Hollywood, where love and relationships are the very essence of life, but in reality, everything is superficial and empty. The protagonist, Rick, is searching for meaning but is stuck in a world that is not emotionally deep. It can also symbolize hedonism and escapism. The second couplet ("Keep creating a stir, keep singing") can symbolize the decadent, frantic energy of the party—where people are caught up in excess, hedonism, and fleeting pleasures. The Hollywood lifestyle, full of distractions, reflects this constant partying, but behind the facade, it can be nothing but a way of escaping inner emptiness. In total, these lines are consistent with the themes of existential searching, material excess, and the tension between surface-level beauty and deeper, spiritual longing that define Knight of Cups.

Rick cannot truly experience love in its fullest and truest form. There is one woman who after  sharing a certain intimacy with him states:

“We are not leading the lives that we are meant. We’re meant for something else” (Malick).

It is interesting that before sharing an intimacy with Rick, she tells him:

“Come and do what you like” (Malick).

When Rick attempts to experience it, there are barriers of doors and glasses. There is another woman who speaks:

“What do you want from me?”

“There’s something else we need to get to. I know it” (Malick).

There is a magical moment in The Tower part. It arrives in the form of a sigh:

“Oh, life” (Malick).

There are many such visual and voiceover moments that feel like the substance of the film is breathing. One such visual mood is created through the depiction of the shadows of real objects questioning the very nature of reality and our existence in this shrinking sphere.

There are voiceover narrations that drive the film to higher dimensions while it seems to suffer from utter fragmentation:

“Treat this world as it deserves. There are no principles…just circumstances.”
“Nobody’s home” (Malick).

In the beginning, the earthquake scene feels nothing like that has ever been done in a film with such themes and setting. The film returns to that apartment in the Tower part where Rick is robbed. Every item in Malick’s films has a message to convey—the entropy of existence—with respect to the thing nearest in life.

What does the Pearl finally suggest in the film? What is it that is leading Rick astray? What is it that puts him in delirium? Why are the worldly pulls distracting him from his main goal? Why cannot he remind himself of the archaic memory of Adam’s fall? Why cannot he figure out that our wings are still there in that far terrifying darkness? Why should he live like that? It leads me back to Knausgaard who writes in his My Struggle:

“Why should you live in a world without feeling its weight?” (Knausgaard).

Malick has developed a signature shot wherein he follows his characters from their back trying to reach their inner state. His characters move with a certain slowness and random motion in contrasting landscapes. Sometimes their motion is in a metropolis, at times in deserts reflecting on the phenomenology of loss and the way forward, “Save what you can of your life. Don't lose it all just because you've lost a part.” Such characters’ movement is juxtaposed with flashes from memory. They cannot speak. They are no longer the same person they used to be a moment past. Their memories speak. Their ever-pervading silence speaks. All these characters may seem to have given up and be in despair. But, all in all, they form homes in multitudes. Their living takes up different moods. It transcends the normative landscape of life. This signature shot is prevalent in Knight of Cups and A Hidden Life.

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Stills from A Hidden Life (2019)

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Stills from The Tree of Life (2011)

There are certain works that actually pinch an artist to create an internationalism in their work. In that sense, these three works by Terrence Malick are rare, mainly because they do not exist in stasis. Malick’s films do not exist as static pieces of art. They are in a constant flux where movement and variation converge to present such works in a certain process of ‘becoming’. There is no language that can praise, explain or define Malick’s work. Perhaps the reason why Malick chose filmmaking as a pragmatic practice of exercising the poetry of dialectical materialism, philosophy and history over ending up as an academic philosopher is elaborated best in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein when he states “What cannot be said must be shown.”[3] Malick’s work, and in particular films such as The Tree of Life, Knight of Cups, and A Hidden Life also reflect Wittgenstein’s words about how the “unutterable” manifests within what has been “uttered” when he states, “If only you do not try to utter what is unutterable then nothing gets lost. But the unutterable will be—unutterably—contained in what has been uttered.”[4] Malick is a master of making present that which is otherwise perceived as absent, and perhaps this is yet another reason why his cinema is profoundly parallel to our experience of life or the closest approximation to life itself.

End Notes

^[1] Baskin, Jon. "The Perspective of Terrence Malick." The Point Magazine, 4 Oct. 2019, thepointmag.com/criticism/the-perspective-of-terrence-malick/.

^[2] Translation source: "(Bal-e-Jibril-142) Saqi Nama (ساقی نامہ) Sakinama." Allama Iqbal Poetry کلام علامہ محمد اقبال, iqbalurdu.blogspot.com/2011/04/bal-e-jibril-142-saqi-nama.html?m=1.

[3] The first part, “What cannot be said must be shown,” is a paraphrase of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, particularly Proposition 4.1212 and 7: 4.1212: “What can be shown, cannot be said.” (Was sich zeigen läßt, kann nicht gesagt werden.)

7: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” (Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.)

[4] The second part, “If only you do not try to utter what is unutterable…,” appears in Philosophical Investigations, 6.522:

“There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical.” (Es gibt allerdings Unaussprechliches. Dies zeigt sich, es ist das Mystische.)

This expresses Wittgenstein’s shift from the Tractatus’ rigid logical structure to the more nuanced, use-based philosophy of language in Philosophical Investigations. The idea that “the unutterable will be contained in what has been uttered” suggests that meaning is often embedded in language’s use rather than in explicit statements. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein emphasizes the limits of language and argues that while some things (logical facts) can be expressed in language, other things (like ethics, aesthetics, and the mystical) cannot be articulated in propositions but only revealed or shown.

Works Cited

Braver, Lee. “The Alien God Behind the Camera: A Gnostic Viewing of Terrence Malick’s Cinema, Especially Knight of Cups.” Life Above the Clouds: Philosophy in the Films of Terrence Malick, edited by Stephen M. DeLay, e-book ed., State University of New York Press, 2023.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, e-book ed., Harper & Row, 1962.

— “Poetically Dwells Man.” Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hofstadter, e-book ed., Harper & Row, 1971.

Knausgaard, Karl Ove. My Struggle: Book 1. Translated by Don Bartlett, e-book ed., Archipelago Books, 2012.

— My Struggle: Book 2. Translated by Don Bartlett, e-book ed., Archipelago Books, 2012.

Malick, Terrence, director. A Hidden Life. Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2019.

— Knight of Cups. Broad Green Pictures, 2015

— The Tree of Life. Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2011.

— The Tree of Life. Screenplay, Writers Guild of America, 2007

— Voyage of Time: The IMAX Experience. IMAX Entertainment, 2016.

Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative. Vol. 1, translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, e-book ed., University of Chicago Press, 1984.

Sebald, W. G. The Rings of Saturn. Translated by Michael Hulse, e-book ed., New Directions, 1998.

Sontag, Susan. On Photography. E-book ed., Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. E-book ed., Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1922.

Žižek, Slavoj. Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. E-book ed., Verso, 2012.