Kaitlin Lake

Kaitlin Lake is a Ph.D. candidate in the Art History Department at The University of Sydney, Australia, where she also teaches undergraduate students in the unit “Introduction to Film Studies.” She is currently writing a thesis titled “Cinematic Aposiopesis: The Affect of Indeterminacy and Unresolved Endings in Films About Missing Persons,” which calls on the rhetorical device of the aposiopesis, as well as existentialism and phenomenology, to interrogate a selection of films that reject the natural compulsion to resolve. Kaitlin completed her undergraduate studies in Film and English at the University of Sydney, graduating with First Class Honours. Kaitlin is interested in the intersection of cinema and literature, narrative theory, and creating a dialogue between film studies and philosophy to illuminate each discipline further.

“The greatest poem”?: embodying the dream of America in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life

The importance of the affective character that unites Walt Whitman’s poetry and Terrence Malick’s cinema is obscured by a critical and scholarly focus on the pair’s thematic and philosophical reciprocity. Although the shared philosophy is significant, examining the affective reciprocity is a vital expansion of existing considerations of the relationship between Whitman’s poetry and Malick’s filmmaking, and one that extends to their respective constructions of American nationhood. One would be hard-pressed to find a piece of scholarly writing, or a popular review on Malick’s cinema, which does not reference Whitman. [3] Despite the continual comparison, there has not been any comprehensive academic study that examines the relationship in closer detail, and works that do tend to concentrate on shared philosophies or themes. Ron Mottram likens Malick’s filmmaking with Whitman’s poetry by virtue of his ability to ask “difficult questions” and  restore “the beauty and power of the image as a carrier of meaning” in a cinematic age in which “the image is often sacrificed to a shallow conceptualism.” [4] Lloyd Michaels uses the term “Whitmanesque” in his descriptions of Malick’s films, describing the “Whitmanesque workers swimming and bathing” in Days of Heaven (1978). [5] Morrison and Schur also speak to the “Whitmanesque” stylings of The Thin Red Line (1998) due to Malick’s “inconsolable lyricism: sudden cuts to the unbearable beauty of a breathtaking, twilit sky… protean inserts of a fissured leaf with blinding light streaming through the holes.” [6] The pair also argue that “Days of Heaven characterizes itself squarely in relation to its ‘classic’ antecedents” [7] as the “narrative content of the film encompasses a virtual catalogue of classic American literature.” [8] In this article, I contend that Malick’s representation of America is haunted by the specter of Whitman’s own construction of American foundational mythologies. 

Popular journalism has further planted the idea of a Whitman/Malick parallel into the minds of cinemagoers. Critic Niles Schwartz’s review upon The Tree of Life’s release was titled “Terrence Malick’s Song of Himself,” and Whitman’s name reappears in many of the early reviews which immediately followed the film’s release. [9] Like Mottram, “New York Times” film critic Manohla Dargis’ comparison identifies Whitman and Malick’s shared philosophical exploration. She claims that The Tree of Life exults “in a cosmic oneness with the world,” arguing for an intertextual connection between poet and filmmaker: akin to Whitman’s “Song of Myself,”  Malick’s film “is more circular in form than linear.” [10] This repetitious comparison speaks to a particular experience the critic or cinemagoer might have when watching a Malick film, feeling a thematic reciprocity between the filmmaker and Whitman’s poetry. However, this affinity can also be located in the respective texts’ undeniably affecting features: the precognitive, sensorial, embodied, and emotional experiences they both create. Thus, this study employs a methodology of affect, heightening the claims of existing works that demonstrate a Whitman/Malick parallel, specifically concerning their representations of America. 

The coupling of the two quotes which prelude this paper example the stylistic reciprocities identified in comparative studies of Whitman and Malick. The preface of The Tree of Life’s original screenplay is an uncanny parallel of the inclusive lexicon that flows throughout Whitman’s catalog, blurring the boundaries of “I” and “you.”  Both speakers forge an equivalence between speaker and responder, attempting to transcend the nominal self by insisting upon their own likeness with their reader. In doing so, they also speak to one another in their metatextual dialogues. Malick’s instruction to “understand this story as your own” validates the individual’s personal and precognitive experience of cinema. This reverence for feeling over understanding mirrors Whitman’s dismissal of attempts to intellectualize his writing: “Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?” (SOM 2, 4, 3). [11] Together, they champion a preconscious, embodied experience of art in which the text’s force upon the individual body is valued, and they employ affected registers of sensory experience to appeal to the bodies of their audience.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology is fundamental to interpreting a relationship between the poetry of Whitman and the cinematic form of Malick. Merleau-Ponty’s position is that all experience – intellectual, philosophical, and emotional – originates in the body. [12] Our experience and understanding of the world is bound to our existence as sensorial beings. The body as the catalyst for thought revises the Cartesian dualistic concept: instead of thinking and therefore being (cogito ergo sum), I exist because I experience the world with and through my body’s senses. 

The coalescence of the bodily state with emotional experience recurs throughout Whitman’s poetic oeuvre: in line 23 of SOM, Whitman speaks to “My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood and air through my lungs.” [13] Here, we note the use of rhyme, rare for the poet well known for his frequent forsaking of conventional poetic techniques. [14] The rhymed coupling of ‘inspiration’ and ‘respiration’ equates the forces of the creative process and bodily experience, and as Daniela Babilon explains, for Whitman’s “lyrical I, creative inspiration is a process fundamentally inspired by an affective bodily state,”⁠ and through rhyming Whitman ties the corporeal with the creative. [15] For Whitman, it is the body from which and through which writer and reader communicate, the embodied sensations preceding and generating creative thought. Whitman himself seemed to fashion his own rejection of Descartes’s existentialism in SOM with “I have said that the soul is not more than the body, / And  I have said that the body is not more than the soul” (48.1-2). [16]

Through bodily and emotional engagement with the screen, the viewer of The Tree of Life begins to act out Whitman’s interpersonal, embodied intimacy. The “unseen hand” of Whitman’s “twenty-ninth bather” (SOM 11, 10-14) passes over the bodies of the twenty-eight men. In merely observing the bathers from her “fine house by the rise of the bank,” the invisible twenty-ninth bather can nonetheless “splash in the water” despite “still in [her] room” (SOM, 11,4-9). [17] As cinemagoers, we take on the role of the twenty-ninth bather – our haptic eyes and our own “unseen hand” engage with the onscreen textures. Throughout The Tree of Life, close-up shots of hands reoccur, with the repeated touch of the human hand upon objects in the profilmic space (see Figure 1). Elena del Río describes the transmission of onscreen image to embodied affect as a phenomenon whereby “body and image no longer function as discrete units, but as surfaces in contact, engaged in constant activity of reciprocal re-alignment and inflection.” [18] Thus, with the recurrent motif of hands, we feel the onscreen world and are anchored by the haptic capabilities of our body in the film’s atmosphere of intimacy. Malick’s touching of flesh echoes Peter Coviello’s description of Whitman’s “unwavering belief in the capacity for strangers to recognize, to desire, and to be intimate with one another.” [19] A central theme of Whitman’s poems was “adhesiveness” (camaraderie, or homosocial friendship which privately “caused people of the same sex to be drawn to each other and love each other”) and “amativeness” (man-woman love). [20] For Whitman, the solely male bonds of adhesiveness were “more transcendental than marital love.” [21] Armengol-Carrera draws attention to Whitman’s imagining of the adhesive bonds the poet imagined forming with a host of unknown men in “This Moment Yearning and Thoughtful” from the Calamus cluster, first published in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass. Here, Armengol-Carrera explains that Whitman “looks forward to meeting and knowing men from other cultures and nationalities, who might become his friends and lovers… friendships between men thus seem to cross and undermine traditional racial, cultural, and national boundaries.” [22] Whitman imagines becoming “attached” to them, forging a physical and emotional intimacy with unknown men. [23] Whitman also asks if it is possible to be intimate with a person one has never met in his “Song of the Open Road”: 

Here is adhesiveness, it is not previously fashioned, it is apropos; 

Do you know what it is, as you pass, to be loved by strangers? 

Do you know the talk of those turning eye-balls? 

(6,8,1-3) [24]

Does Whitman’s illusory intimacy with imagined figures also generate questions of the cinemagoing experience, where we undoubtedly feel an emotional and physical intimacy with a film’s characters, despite their fictional nature? 

Explorations of physical bonds in Whitman and Malick are not limited to their depictions of human contact; embodied language is also paramount to their depictions of the natural world, specifically the American landscape. The tactile, material properties of Malick’s natural universe is emphasized by his characters’ contact with the elements, the organ of the skin and the fingertips physically interacting with nature (see Figure 2). The natural world of the pair’s respective poetry and cinema is experienced through the capacity to perceive nature’s forces in an embodied way. 

In The Tree of Life, the film’s characters persistently interact with the natural world, generating for the audience a blurring of sensorial boundaries as the properties of the spectator’s seeing eye and feeling skin encroach upon the peripheries of the other’s territory. The titular foliage of the pair’s works (Leaves of Grass, The Tree of Life) is not linked merely in their similar wording: the foliage exists precognitively in the embodied affect their tactile descriptions engender. The pastoral imagery of Whitman’s grass has repeatedly manifested in studies of Malick’s cinema on account of the filmmaker’s reverence for similar imagery. Sweeping, wide-angle, and aerial shots of bodies in wild grass occur not only in The Tree of Life but throughout Badlands (1973), Days of Heaven (1978), The Thin Red Line (1998), The New World (2005), To the Wonder (2012) and A Hidden Life (2019). 

Located in the memories of The Tree of Life’s Jack (Sean Penn), Malick’s suburban America establishes an intense longing for a bygone age, as the film’s nostalgic qualities arise out of an emotionally affected bodily state. Lauren Berlant speaks to an affective longing for “that moral-intimate-economic thing called “the good life,” an American Dream based on a materialist “pedagogy of desire.” [25] However, Jack’s longing for youth, is one of “cruel optimism,” a phenomenon in which “something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.” [26] For Berlant, 

the affective structure of an optimistic attachment involves a sustaining inclination to return to the scene of fantasy that enables you to expect that this time, nearness to this thing will help you or a world to become different in just the right way. [27]

Berlant speaks to the affective qualities of an excitement located in the prospective “change that’s gonna come.” [28] For Whitman, this change constituted a departure from the ideals of the Old World and the creation of a sovereign state devoid of monarchy and hierarchy. With its prophetic tone, Whitman’s poetry laid the foundations for America’s self-identification as a nation that would embody these democratic ideals. For Malick, however, this promise was never fulfilled – the “change” never arrives in The Tree of Life’s America. The film’s affected register creates a “feeling” of (white-middle class) American suburbia, but shatters its own illusion, ultimately revealing an intense longing for an egalitarian future that never came to pass. [29]

The concentration on Whitman’s visualization of a democratic nation has been revered, his critique of the British motherland’s intervention with the American nation styling him an “anti-imperialist” who has attained a “mythic status among Marxist literary critics.” [30] However, Dahl observes that these reductive readings of his works have taken a troubling precedence over the ‘colonial dimensions’ of his poetry and prose writings. [31] Turning to “Poets to Come,” the often neglected 1860 version reveals a poet whose visions of America were deeply tied with notions of the physical movement of colonial expansion. This stanza followed the fourth line of the poem in its original form –

Indeed, if it were not for you, what would I be?

What is the little I have done, except to arouse you?

I depend on being realized, long hence, where the broad fat prairies spread, 

and thence to Oregon and California inclusive, 

I expect that the Texan and the Arizonian, ages hence, will understand me,

I expect that the future Carolinian and Georgian will understand me and love me,

I expect that Kanadians, a hundred, and perhaps many hundred years from now, 

in winter, in the splendor of the snow and woods, or on the icy lakes, will take me with them, and permanently enjoy themselves with me.

–   originally followed line 4 of “Poets to Come” as published in the 1860 edition. [32]

Whitman’s anticipatory language of expectation – “I expect that the future Carolinian and Georgian will understand me and love me” – is indicative not only of a hopeful democrat but also imbued with a flavor of imperialist rhetoric. However, what is more pertinent to this affective study is the very fact that Whitman’s poetic America was often born out of purely imaginative faculties. A lifelong resident of the Eastern Seaboard, Whitman never actually traveled farther than his trip in 1879 to Colorado, and before writing his principal poems, had never ventured beyond Mississippi. [33] This biographical information is imperative to appreciating Whitman’s purely “imaginative encounters with the Western landscape.” [34]

The concept of the imagination is a central theme in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, the imagination emanating from what he calls the “virtual body” (le corps virtual), which impregnates the body consciousness with renewed means of world experience, freed from the boundaries of the objective body’s edges, or context-specific being. [35] For Merleau-Ponty, the imagination is “far from being merely an escape from reality” as it is for Sartre. [36] Instead, the imagination constitutes a fundamental state of being in the world, adding “an essential creative dimension of human existence.” [37] As James Steeves notes, “Merleau-Ponty shows us how the ambiguous structure of human existence consists of the intertwining of perception and imagination in the form of ‘a woven fabric.’” [38] It is with, and through, his virtual body that Whitman interacts with America. It is also, therefore, through the body that Whitman inspired the fundamental myths and symbols of Americana – his promise of an Edenic Utopia in the west – the forbearer of an American Dream.

Whitman’s Edenic vision, unencumbered by the feudal limitations of the Old World, eventually marked the American literary landscape. According to Henry Nash Smith, Whitman’s prophetic West “gave final imaginative expression to the theme of manifest destiny.” [39] The philosophies of America’s  “Manifest Destiny,” a term coined in 1845 by John L. O’Sullivan (editor of the United States Magazine and Democratic Review), “preached a particular form of Christian nationalism that centered on the expansionist fever occurring during the 1830s and 1840s” in defense of the United States’ annexation of the Republic of Texas. [40] John D. Wilsey explains that  the concept is helpful in locating “how Americans have self-identified in… since their origin as a collection of colonial, and later independent, polities.” [41] During (and prior to) this period, there was a fervent belief that “God had bestowed upon [the American people] a mission to spread their supreme civilization, in particular, freedom, whether in religion, commerce, or race.” [42] John Quincy Adams wrote in 1811 that 

The whole continent of North America appears to be destined by Divine Providence to be peopled by one nation, speaking one language, professing one general system of religious and political principles, and accustomed to one general tenor of social usages and customs. For the common happiness of them all, for their peace and prosperity, I believe it is indispensable that they should be associated in one federal Union. [43]

The irony of a democracy completely founded on the subjugation of (non-white) peoples flows throughout Whitman’s poetry, but is often concealed by the poet’s sympathetic treatment of Black and Native Americans. In “Apostroph,” Whitman’s egalitarian vision – “O I believe there is nothing real but America and freedom! / O to sternly reject all except Democracy!” (17-18) – is inextricably bound by a profoundly colonial and ethnocentric thought process. “O to promulgate our own! O to build that which builds for mankind!” (20) cries Whitman, continuing his “journey through all The States” (43) and “touching whatever is between them” (132). [44] Whitman’s embodied language (shouting and touching) amplifies the poem’s democratic ideals, although the colonial dimensions perhaps render this as merely performative. Whitman’s propagation of America’s divine providence is communicated in sensorial and emotional ways, thus uniting his worldview with the bodies (and thus the collective psyche) of his contemporary Americans. This culminates in Whitman’s description of the continent as “MY LAND” (203). Note the capitalization of these words, which speaks again to the reverence Whitman gives to the vocal performance of his poetry, inflected by the emotions of the expressive voice.

Benedict Anderson has demonstrated the importance of national literature in constructing nationhood and the ensuing identity of national subjects. [45] Anderson stresses the role of print in laying the basis for a national self-awareness, arguing that the printing press generated the radical transformation of societies in that it afforded to people “an awareness of the hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people in their particular language-field… that only those hundreds of thousands, or millions, so belonged.” [46] Speaking to the role of the writer in nation-building, Whitman wrote that

By great bards only can series of peoples and States be fused into the compact 

organism of one nation.   

To hold men together by paper and seal, or by compulsion, is no account,

That only holds men together which is living principles, as the hold of the limbs 

of the body, or the fibres of plants.    

Of all races and eras, These States, with veins full of poetical stuff, most need 

poets, and are to have the greatest, and use them the greatest. 

Their Presidents shall not be their common referee so much as their poets shall.

(“Chants Democratic and Native American” no. 1, 20-22). [47]

Evidently, many more millions belonged to the English language outside of America, but Whitman appreciated the unlimited possibilities of using the English language within a New World. Renewing the English language could create an entirely new sense of identity for American society, one of interconnectedness, expressed not only in the argument of his content, but also its corporeal language: “hold men together,” “limbs of the body,” “veins full of poetical stuff.”

Whitman’s Notebooks contain an entry in which the poet envisions a piece which “familiarly addresses those who will, in future ages understand me, (Because I write with reference to being far better understood then than I can possibly be now).” [48] It is fair to read this entry as the conceptual genesis of “Poets to Come,” the creation of a metatextual relationship motivating the piece. Most considerations of “Poets to Come” have concentrated on the apostrophic conversation with “the readerly ‘you’” – the poem’s democratic language of inclusivity facilitated by a much-used tool from Whitman’s technical arsenal. [49] Culler explains that Whitman’s “apostrophe is a device which the poetic voice uses to establish with an object a relationship which helps to constitute him… to strike up a harmonious relationship,” mirroring affective considerations of relations between subject and object. [50] Whitman’s corporeally affected apostrophe engenders a connection with the poet, his contemporaries, and Americans of the future, transported through time by virtue of their phenomenal bodies, manifesting a transtemporal “familiarity between poet and audience.” [51]

Whitman’s affective transmission of his United States manifested in the collective consciousness of the American people a prophetic idea of the nation’s democratic ideals. Yet, in The Tree of Life, we are presented with the disfigurement of Whitman’s imagined American democracy. The recurrent motifs of children at play, dead children, and lost childhood, coupled with religious allusions, manifest a figurative lament for the loss of American ideals, thus exposing Whitman’s prophecy as a fallacy, his specter haunting the collective consciousness of the nation. 

M. Gail Hamner argues that The Tree of Life is an exercise in affect, and that Malick’s creation of a disillusioned nostalgia for childhood occurs not narratively but affectively. She argues that “Malick presents less a story… than an affective presentation…” [52] Hamner argues that the film “leans heavily on the textured embodiment of nostalgia,” and bolsters the idea that Malick’s exploration of America occurs affectively, appealing to the body of both his characters and his audience. [53] The pastoral landscapes of Malick’s cinema speak to Whitman’s vision of Virgin America, as his textured, sprawling lands became a space through which the new American body could traverse. After the film’s prefatory glowing light fades, an adolescent girl peers through the open window of a farmhouse, observing the expansive “leaves of grass” that dominate the frame (see Figure 4). 

The girl is shrouded in darkness, the freedom of the pastures swathed in light. The contrast between light and dark equivalences romantic notions of Virgin America as a replenishing beacon, incompatible with the ideals of Old-World Europe. Outside, the pasture stretches to the horizon, cows graze unencumbered, and the girl is joined by her father, an Adam standing in his American Eden. Choral music fades in, manifesting a dreamlike atmosphere as it leaks into the ensuing sequence. Swinging on a rope swing, Mrs. O’Brien (Jessica Chastain) is surrounded by her brood, smoothly transitioning from Prairie Madonna to Rockwellian housewife as we are invited into her domestic space where the family says grace before they dine.

Yet this sequence turns away from a peaceful, pastoral aesthetic when it is rapidly interrupted by a future event in which Mrs. O’Brien is informed of her son’s death (Jack’s younger brother) in an unspecified war. Malick’s representation of war functions as a destabilizing force which undermines the jingoistic hallucinations manifested in Whitman’s earlier writing. The descriptions of war in the Drum-Taps collection are palpably accompanied by visions of nation-building, with the Civil War imperative to a democratic development of the United States, ultimately based off of the Unionist pride of the Northern states: 

Lightly strike on the stretch’d tympanum, pride and joy in my city,

How she led the rest to arms, how she gave the cue,  

How at once with lithe limbs unwaiting a moment she sprang,  

(O superb! O Manhattan, my own, my peerless!          

O strongest you in the hour of danger, in crisis! O truer than steel!)  

How you sprang! how you threw off the costumes of peace with indifferent 

hand;   

How your soft opera-music changed, and the drum and fife were heard in their stead; 

How you led to the war, (that shall serve for our prelude, songs of soldiers,)

How Manhattan drum-taps led

– (“First O Songs for a Prelude,” 2-10). [54]

Here, Whitman’s patriotic war is intensely aural. The “stretch’d tympanum” of the first line is synonymic, with the tympanum being a handheld drum and the membrane of the ear. The aural qualities immediately imbue the reader/listener’s body with the sound of the titular “drum-taps” of war as the drumming eventually drowns out the “soft opera-music” of the seventh line. Where Whitman speaks to the “songs of soldiers,” The Tree of Life’s aural treatment of war is silent. The artifice of cinematic sound cannot do the horrors of war justice. 

In The Tree of Life, Malick adamantly refuses to afford the Vietnam war any visual (or even verbal) place within the beauty of his film; despite the war driving the characters’ disillusionment with America, it is never mentioned or depicted. Just as Jack’s affected body as he wanders through the desert needs no spoken explanation, Mrs. O’Brien’s grief at the loss of her son comes entirely from the body. Following the delivery of the notorious, yellow Western Union telegram to Mrs. O’Brien, the subtle choral music which initially opened the sequence fades. The audience need not be told that her son has been killed; the fact is presented out of the mother’s affected bodily state. It is pure precognition.  The camera reveals her grief in close-up. It zooms out, taking on a high-angle shot to mirror the defeat of maternal love, thwarted by a greater force. Mrs. O’Brien reaches for a chair to steady herself, but her body gives way to the emotional blow and she collapses. The scene abruptly ends with the slight hint of an anguished scream, but the sound is unfulfilled as the scene cuts to a close-up of Mr. O’Brien (Brad Pitt). He receives a telephone call informing him of their son’s death, but the roar of a nearby plane completely obscures the voices of the conversation. There are no words that could adequately describe the tragedy. Mr. O’Brien’s body divulges his private grief, facilitated by the diegetic sound and the flow of the camerawork. A smoldering sun dips beneath the horizon, accompanied by the toll of a bell (does it sound the death-knell of American democracy?) As Hamner argues, the sense of loss in The Tree of Life “is affective, not narrative: viewers experience a fluid and ambiguous sense of connection and loss rather than a narrative immersion in a past decade.”  [55]

The gruesome onslaught in The Thin Red Line at least reveals the survivalist motivations of the soldiers who fearfully advance on their enemies, terrified of the carnage to come. Warfare, for Malick, is inherently an experience of the body. Michaels explains that the poetics that violence generates in the film respond “to the unanswerable questions of all men under stress in the universal language of music and images.” [56] Conversely, The Tree of Life’s failure of direct acknowledgment (in that no battle is shown, and the death of the O’Brien son is only implied) is a testimony to war’s purposeless nature, a sentiment that the Vietnam War represented for Americans more than any war before it.  

Comparisons between Whitman and Malick’s works have been made in relation to the latter’s 1998 film The Thin Red Line, with Lloyd Michaels asserting that 

So much of The Thin Red Line conveys Whitman’s sense of the dreamlike quality of war (through muffled sound, slow motion, strange landscapes, and the juxtaposition of the incongruous images and polyphonic voices)” [57]

The Thin Red Line can be affectively paralleled with Whitman’s work by virtue of the extensive and contemplative voice-over monologues which complement Malick’s visuals. In one scene, an unidentified speaker ponders that “maybe all man got one big soul that everyone’s a part of,” invoking the inclusivity which saturates Whitman’s oeuvre. Michaels goes so far as to claim that “The Thin Red Line cannot be readily categorized as an antiwar film… it is simply too beautiful.” [58] Michaels argues that the film “like Walt Whitman’s poignant Civil War poems… aspires to, if not redemption, reconciliation,” reminding us of lines from Whitman’s “Reconciliation”: 

Word over all, beautiful as the sky, 

Beautiful that war and all its deeds or carnage must be in time utterly lost, 

That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again, and 

ever again, this soil’d world (1-3). [59]

However, the Thin Red Line does significantly revise Whitman’s Civil War poems in two central ways. Firstly, Malick “interrupt[s] any genre-based expectations about narrative” by refusing to portray the soldiering experience as patriotically motivated, and with this, refuses to present war as a conduit for camaraderie. [60] As Tatiana Prorokova observes, Private Witt does maintain an “allegiance to his company” but “it is not mediated by political, national, and military institutions…. He does love his comrades, but that love has little to do with their common institutional bond.” [61] It is more “adhesive” in that it stems from the privacy of emotion, and thus The Thin Red Line rejects the underlying themes that inundate traditional war literature and cinema.

Of course, Whitman’s poetry did in part critique the atrocities of war, as in the second section of “The Wound Dresser” from Drum-Taps:

Where they lie on the ground after the battle brought in,

Where their priceless blood reddens the grass, the ground,

Or to the rows of the hospital tent, or under the roof’d hospital,

To the long rows of cots up and down each side I return,

To each and all one after another I draw near, not one do I miss,

An attendant follows holding a tray, he carries a refuse pail,

Soon to be fill’d with clotted rags and blood, emptied, and fill’d again.

(2, 2, 2-8) [62]

Peter Coviello acknowledges the paradoxical representations of war in Whitman’s Memoranda (1875), where the poet’s “once exuberant faith in the limitless civic and national capacities of writing” is inconsistent with his concurrent lament for “the thousands of soldiers whose graves are marked… ‘unknown.’ [63] Here, one cannot ignore the “queer resonances of Whitman’s hospital life,” where homosocial bonds and homosexual physicality ultimately impregnates Whitman’s critique of war with corporeal visions of sex. [64] Thus, there exists a perennial return to the notion that destruction is ultimately a conduit for creation. 

This seemingly paradoxical creation-in-destruction ideology is apparent in the interstellar sequence of The Tree of Life (00:19:15 – 00:24:14), which unexpectedly penetrates the domestic space of the film’s central narrative. Malick’s creation-of-the-universe sequence reveals the explosive dawning of the cosmos, steeped in eruptions of red, white, and blue light. Coupled with this allegorical dawning of the United States are the whispers of Mrs. O’Brien: “Lord. Where were you?” Unlike the divine providence Whitman espouses, envisioning a supportive God who shepherds his flock to the West, Malick’s representation of the domestic fallout brought about by the losses of the Vietnam War questions the providence of a nation supposedly “destined” to spread its democracy throughout the world. The grief of Mrs. O’Brien reveals the capacity of the Vietnam War to shatter the images of American democracy and its symbols, as “The American military’s involvement in Vietnam” according to Kapell, “would seem to perpetually scar America’s frontier mythology.” [65] Mr. O’Brien’s mother (Fiona Shaw) comforts her grieving daughter-in-law following her child’s death, “you have your memories of him,” simultaneously comforting a disillusioned America whose national creation myths were torn asunder by their failures in Vietnam. Malick’s representation of The Vietnam War (or lack thereof?) impacts his familial narrative and parallels the sentiments of H. Bruce Franklin:

Within the dominant American culture, “Vietnam” is no longer a nation, a people, or even a war.

“Vietnam” is something terrible that happened to us, something that divided, wounded, and victimized America. [66]

The ghost of the dead R.L., who penetrates his family members’ consciousness in flashbacks, wounds their affected bodily state through acts of remembering. With the flashback, and the experience of memory, the body performs a “temporal manoeuvre” [67] – the flashback is an experience that occurs in the present and masquerades as a memory; it is not an historical experience but an embodied one. Adult Jack is plagued by flashbacks to his suburban childhood, comparing the simplicity of the era of his childhood with the social and economic climate of his present. Undoubtedly, his recollection of childhood innocence is an erroneous projection upon his own personal history by virtue of his adult realization that “the world’s gone to the dogs…People are greedy, keep getting worse.” Jack’s whispered voice-over echoes Berlant’s idea of “cruel optimism.” Jack’s return to the past becomes the obstacle inhibiting his own happiness. Jack’s “fantasy of happiness and control…” (the America espoused by the optimistic Whitman) “remains longed for, but painfully out of reach.” [68]

Jack’s discontent with an American democracy that failed his dead brother places him on the periphery of a society he despises. His world is tinted blue, devoid of natural elements, hard and cold to the touch. We are not told of Jack’s discontent; we feel it. Jack’s physical isolation mirrors an American literary tradition that reads the Old Testament’s Job as “an individual, isolated or alienated to some extent from the ‘crowd,’ intellectually, spiritually, or literally.” [69] The Book of Job is an exercise in theodical thinking, which endeavors to “explain the justice of God, especially why a good and all-powerful God would allow evil to exist.” [70] As Norman W. Jones simplifies: “why do bad things happen to good people?” [71]

Opening The Tree of Life, Jack’s voice narrates the words which appear on screen,

Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?… 

When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of 

God shouted for joy? 

                Job, 38:4,7 

Whitman permeated his democracy with the very essence of God, observing God “each hour of the twenty-four” and finding “letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is signed by God’s name” (SOM, 1855, 48,18). Harold Bloom suggests that “Walt Whitman was the crucial celebrant of… the American Religion… that marked the beginning of the end of European Protestantism in America.” [72] For Whitman, America and God were synonymous. Whitman’s “new American bible” [73] engendered a fervent faith in the American nation, founding a cult of Americana to which the nation subscribes, “if you are American,” as Bloom posits, “then Walt Whitman is your imaginative father and mother, even if… you have never composed a line of verse.” [74] Jack’s whispered recitation of the Book of Job is not only a questioning of a Christian God who punishes unjustly, but also of Whitman’s erroneous deification of American democracy, a questioning of the “imaginative father and mother.” The disruption of American mythology by the Vietnam war spawns revelations of Whitman’s merely imagined democracy, facilitated by the senses of his phenomenal body, influencing Malick’s pessimism.

Solidifying the pessimistic worldview of Malick’s America, The Tree of Life’s interstellar sequence crescendos in its imagining of the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, which eradicated species in mass numbers, including land-dwelling dinosaurs, whose deaths prefigure the possibility of the gargantuan American nation’s final collapse – a downfall that Whitman’s poetry does not foretell. Every sequence in The Tree of Life is infected by Malick’s prophecy of certain end, a disillusionment whose only remedy is an afterlife devoid of the concept of nationhood. When Mrs. O’Brien narrates – “How did I lose you?” – we yearn not only for the touch of her killed son but for the loss of an imaginary nation whose fallacy has been exposed; Turner suggested that “Western democracy has been from the time of its birth idealistic.” [75] Whitman’s affected entanglement of the bodies of the American people, poet, and reader, has embedded such idealism into the very fabric of American culture by virtue of its status as what Emerson described as “the most extraordinary piece of wit & wisdom that America has yet contributed.” [76] The year 1855, according to Genoways, did not merely mark the publication of Leaves of Grass; it “was also the moment of [America’s] own immaculate conception, when a poet imagined us into being.” [77] Ultimately, Whitman’s poetry conceives an ideal America rather than describing the America which historically existed in his epoch. While Malick in part visually reflects Whitman’s imagined utopia, The Tree of Life shatters this constructed image, illuminating the complex etymology of the word “utopia” – the Greek word “utopia” may have its roots in “ou-topos, meaning ‘no-place,’ and eu-topos, which can be translated as ‘good place.’” [78] Utopia is thus an impossible perfection.

The influence of Whitman’s specter upon the American cultural landscape is fundamentally encapsulated in an exchange between Mr. O’Brien and the adolescent Jack (Hunter McCracken) as they tend to their patchy lawn:

FATHER: Why’s this bare here?

JACK: The grass won’t grow under the tree.

FATHER: It does at Kimball’s.

JACK: They have a gardener.

FATHER: They have money. Of course, he inherited it.

A camera slowly follows Mr. O’Brien as he walks with Jack across the lawn, pointing out its inadequacies (see Figure 5).

The persistent visual and narrative return to grass throughout The Tree of Life develops a conversation between director and poet, with Malick responding to the egalitarian worldview in section six of SOM, in which the speaker informs a child that the grass is

…a uniform hieroglyphic,

And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,

Growing among black folks as among white,

Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I

receive them the same. 

(6,4) [79]

The differing quality of the Kimballs’ and O’Brien’s lawns is revealed haptically: soft, lush grass is contrasted with barren patches of dirt. This not only serves a narrative function within The Tree of Life (revealing paternal deficiencies, shattering filial piety) but solidifies the discordance between the egalitarian America espoused by Whitman, where grass grows equally, and the realities of capitalist society. Images of 1950s suburbia run rampant throughout the film, constituting the majority of screen time. Melanie Smicek argues that suburbia is “a cultural, ideological space incorporating Americans’ hopes for an economically safe and prosperous family life.” [80] Because television was “inseparable from the model of the suburban single-home in the 1950s” suburbia subsists as its own mysterious simulation – a “copy without an original.” [81] For Baudrillard, America’s suburban spaces are “models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal,” [82] ultimately revealing the precarious nature of what Kenneth Jackson designates the “fullest, most unadulterated embodiment” of American culture. [83] In The Tree of Life, the romanticized domestic spaces of suburbia only exist to shatter themselves, revealing America’s false idols. The “film’s ripe nostalgia,” with its “richly textured presentation of the late 1950s,” does not venerate the past, explains Hamner, “but slams viewers into a shared and visceral awareness of finitude.” [84] For Hamner, “viewers become absorbed in a felt resonance with memories of what a 1950s childhood was like…” [85] Ultimately, it could be said that the “memories” of America that Jack (and the audience) creates and longs for are mere simulacra. Whitman’s declaration in the preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass that “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem” [86] is revealed through Malick’s affecting film to be an erroneous and imagined fantasy. Berlant argues that  “fantasy is the means by which people hoard idealizing theories and tableaux about how they and the world “add up to something.”” [87] Whitman’s espousal of American equality fails to come to fruition in The Tree of Life, and Berlant asks: “What happens when those fantasies start to fray – depression, dissociation, pragmatism, cynicism, optimism, activism, or an incoherent mash? [88] In The Tree of Life, what happens via prioritizing affected mood over narrative structure is a rejection of the idea that America is “the greatest poem.” The collage of Malick’s images do not ask us to think, and “it is easier to acknowledge how it makes viewers feel.” [89] Just as Whitman’s embodied and inclusive lexicon speaks to Berlant’s “affective components of [American] citizenship,” Jack’s lament in The Tree of Life is also an embodied mourning for national myths. [90] Each artist inflects their works with affective qualities in their representation of the United States. The bodily states of creator, character, and audience coalesce and continually transform, speaking to the state of the nation as a dialogue between past and present, multifaceted, and ever-changing.  

Endnotes

1. The Tree of Life, dir. Terrence Malick, 2011; Terrence Malick, The Tree of Life: A Screenplay by Terrence Malick (Writers Guild of America, 2007): i.
2. Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” Leaves of Grass, ed. Sculley Bradley & Harold W. Blodgett (New York: Norton, 1973), 28.
3. The following book-length publications example some of the references to Whitman in the analyses of Malick’s themes and visuals: The collected essays in Hannah Patterson’s  The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America (London: Wallflower, 2003) explicitly make the link between American poetry and Malick’s filmmaking in its title, but also references Whitman’s poetry specifically numerous times (5, 13, 141). Notions of a Whitman/Malick parallel also appears in a host of shorter pieces, including the following journal articles: Marc Cerisuelo makes the claim in multiple publications. In “Terrence Malick: Different Colors Made of Tears, or Terrence Malick’s Blue Note,” Positif  540 (Feb 2006), he argues that the transcendentalism of Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman is “at the heart of the filmmaker’s inspiration” (17); the link is also noted in his collaboration with Pierre Eisenreich, as they describe “a certain referential network”” in “The Tree of Life: Rendre le Mystère Explicite,” Positif 605/606 (Jul/Aug 2011), 121; in “Poetry of Political Waterways”, Positif 509/510 (Jul/Aug 2003), Eisenreich calls on the Whitman/Malick parallel in his exploration of the landscape in the Western film genre (27-9); Bernard Nave argues in “The Tree of Life”, Jeune Cinéma 338/339 (Summer, 2011) that “we must look to Walt Whitman to find such a poetic world capable of to embrace in the same movement the cosmic and the intimate” (17). 
4. Ron Mottram, “All Things Shining”, The Cinema of Terrence Malick: poetic visions of America, ed. Hannah Patterson (2003), 13-14, 47.
5. Lloyd Michaels, Terrence Malick (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 47.
6. James Morrison and Thomas Schur, The Films of Terrence Malick (Santa Barbara: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2003), 25.
7. Ibid., 43.
8. Ibid., 33.
9. Niles Schwartz “Terrence Malick’s Song of Himself”, The Point, September 19, 2011, https://thepointmag.com/2011/criticism/terrence-malicks-song-of-himself; John Patterson, “Is Terrence Malick assuming Stanley Kubrick’s Mantle?”, The Guardian, July 2, 2011,  https://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/jul/02/terrence-malick-tree-of-life; Sam Adams, “Terrence Malick’s Voyage(s) of Time”, Slate, September 15, 2016, https://slate.com/culture/2016/09/terrence-malicks-voyage-of-time-illustrates-exactly-why-hes-become-so-polarizing.html; G. Roger Denson, “Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life Plays Garden of Eden to the Family of Man,” HuffPost, December 6, 2017, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/terrence-malicks-tree-of-_b_868895.
10. Manohla Dargis, “Malick’s Film Adds Dose of Sincerity to the Festivities,” The New York Times, May 16, 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/17/movies/terrence-malick-asks-big-questions-in-the-tree-of-life.html.
11. Whitman, “Song of Myself,” 30.
12. Merleau-Ponty’s central thesis concerns the “primacy” of perception.” For Merleau-Ponty, all consciousness emanates from a subject’s precognitive, bodily experience. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith, (London: Routledge, 1962).
13. Whitman, “Song of Myself,” 29.
14. Darío Villanueva, Images of the City: Poetry and Film, From Whitman to Lorca, trans. Gabriel S. Baum (New York: CUNY Graduate Center, 2008), 2.
15. Daniela Babilon, The Power of Smell in American Literature Odor, Affect, and Social Inequality (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2017), 102.
16. Whitman, “Song of Myself,” 86.
17. Ibid., 68-9.
18. Elena del Río, “Body as Foundation of the Screen: Allegories of Technology in Atom Egoyan’s Speaking Parts,” Camera Obscura 37/38 (Summer 1996): 101.
19. Peter Coviello, Intimacy in America : Dreams of Affiliation in Antebellum Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 127.
20. David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 61, 82.
21. Joseph M. Armengol-Carrera, “Of Friendship: Revisiting Friendships between Men in American Literature,” Journal of Men’s Studies 17, no. 3 (June 2010), 52.
22. Ibid., 206. 
23. Whitman “This Moment Yearning and Thoughtful,” Leaves of Grass, 128.
24. Ibid., 249.
25. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 2, 30.  
26. Ibid., 1.
27. Ibid., 2.
28. Ibid.
29. Gail Hamner, “Filming Reconciliation: Affect and Nostalgia in The Tree of Life,” The Journal of Religion and Film 18, no. 1 (2014), 5.
30. Adam Dahl, Empire of the People: Settler Colonialism and the Foundations of Modern Democratic Thought, (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2018), 142.
31. Ibid.
32. Sam Abrams, The Neglected Walt Whitman, (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993), 103.
33. Henry Nash Smith, “Walt Whitman and Manifest Destiny,” Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 44; Linda Furgerson Selzer, “Walt Whitman, Clarence Major, and Changing Thresholds of American Wonder,” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 29, 4 (May 2012), 159.
34. Selzer, 159. Emphasis added.
35. James Steeves, “The Virtual Body: Merleau-Ponty’s Early Philosophy of Imagination,” Philosophy Today 45, no. 4 (Winter, 2001), 376.
36. Ibid., 378.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid.
39. Smith, 44.
40. John D. Wilsey, “‘Our Country Is Destined to be the Great Nation of Futurity’: John L. O’Sullivan’s Manifest Destiny and Christian Nationalism 1837-1846,” Religions 8, no. 4 (April 2017), para. 1.
41. Ibid.
42. Darren Dobson, “Manifest Destiny and the Environmental Impacts of Westward Expansion,” Flinders Journal of History and Politics 29 (2013), 43.
43. Matthew Baigell, “Territory, Race, Religion: Images of Manifest Destiny”, Smithsonian Studies in American Art 4, no. 3/4 (Summer-Autumn, 1990), 12.
44. Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price, “Chants Democratic and Native American – Apostroph,” The Walt Whitman Archive, 17 March 2019, https://whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1860/clusters/3.
45. Jason Xidias, An Analysis of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, (New York: Routledge, 2017), 11.
46. Benedict Anderson, “The Origins of National Consciousness,” in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, (London: Verso, 2006), 37-46.
47. Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price, “Chants Democratic and Native American,” The Walt Whitman Archive, 17 March, 2019, https://whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1860/clusters/3.
48. Maire Mullins, “Prophetic Voice and Sacramental Insight in Walt Whitman’s ‘Messenger Leaves’ Poems,” Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature, 68, no. 4 (Fall 2016), 255. 
49. Kathryn Brigger Kruger, “American ‘Apostroph’: Walt Whitman’s Apostrophic O,” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 34, no. 1 (Summer 2016): 36.
50. Jonathan Culler, “Apostrophe,” Diacritics 7, no. 4 (Winter, 1977), 63.
51. Nathanson, in Kathryn Brigger Kruger, 35.
52. Hamner, 2.
53. Ibid., 3.
54. Whitman, “First O Songs for a Prelude,” Leaves of Grass, 279-80.
55. Hamner, 9.
56. Michaels, 76.
57. Ibid.
58. Ibid., 65.
59. Ibid.
60. Robert Pippin, “Vernacular Metaphysics: On Terrence Malick’s ‘The Thin Red Line’,” Critical Inquiry 39, no. 2 (January 2013), 255.
61. Ibid, 256.
62. Whitman, “The Wound Dresser,” Leaves of Grass, 310.
63. Peter Coviello, “Whitman’s Children,” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 128, no. 1 (2013), 74.
64. Ibid.
65. Matthew Wilhelm Kapell, Exploring the Next Frontier: Vietnam, NASA, Star Trek and Utopia in 1960s and 1970s American Myth and History (New York: Routledge, 2016), 3.
66. Kapell, 84.
67. Chris Healy, “Dead Man: Film, Colonialism and Memory,” in Memory, History Nation: Contested Pasts, in ed. Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone, (London: Routledge, 2017), 225.
68. Hamner, 18.
69. Kristina Louise Marie Knobelsdorff, “Re-readings of the Book of Job in American Life and Letters: Debate and Dissent within Bounds,” (PhD diss., University of Connecticut, 2005), 9-10.
70. Norman W. Jones, The Bible and Literature, (New York: Routledge, 2015), 80.
71. Ibid.
72. Harold Bloom, “Whitman’s America,” The Wall Street Journal (New York), July 29, 2005,  https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB112260447471999630.
73. Jones, 121.
74. Bloom, “Whitman’s America.”
75. Turner, in George Rogers Taylor, The Turner Thesis: Concerning the Role of the Frontier in American History, 3rd edition, (Lexington: DC Heath & Co, 1972), 45.
76. Emerson, in Harold Bloom, “Introduction and Celebration,” Leaves of Grass: 1855, viii-ix.
77. Ted Genoways, “Inventing Walt Whitman,” Virginia Quarterly Review: A National Journal of Literature and Discussion 81, no. 2 (2005), 3.
78. Melanie Simicek, American Dreams, Suburban Nightmares: Suburbia as a Narrative Space between Utopia and Dystopia in Contemporary American Cinema, (Hamburg: Anchor Academic Publishing, 2014), 11.
79. Whitman, “Song of Myself,” Leaves of Grass, 34.
80. Ibid, 1.
81. Ibid.
82. Ibid., 16.
83.  Ibid., 1.
84. Ibid., 5-6.
85. Hamner, 8.
86. Whitman, “Preface,” Leaves of Grass. In American Bard: The Original Preface to Leaves of Grass, ed. William Everson (New York: The Viking Press, 1982), 9.
87. Berlant, 2.
88. Ibid.
89. Hamner, 13.
90. Berlant, 3.