{"id":242,"date":"2021-08-25T15:32:47","date_gmt":"2021-08-25T19:32:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/?p=242"},"modified":"2021-09-01T10:07:07","modified_gmt":"2021-09-01T14:07:07","slug":"kaitlin-lake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/2021\/08\/25\/kaitlin-lake\/","title":{"rendered":"Kaitlin Lake"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kaitlin Lake<\/strong> 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 \u201cIntroduction to Film Studies.\u201d She is currently writing a thesis titled \u201cCinematic Aposiopesis: The Affect of Indeterminacy and Unresolved Endings in Films About Missing Persons,\u201d 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.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cThe greatest poem\u201d?:\u00a0embodying the dream of America in Walt Whitman\u2019s Leaves of Grass<\/i> and Terrence Malick\u2019s The Tree of Life<\/i><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
The \u201cI\u201d who speaks in this story is\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

not the author. Rather, he hopes that\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

you might see yourself in this \u201cI\u201d and<\/span><\/p>\n

understand this story as your own.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    \n
  • From \u201cPreface\u201d to the first draft\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

    \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0screenplay for <\/span>The Tree of Life <\/span><\/i>[1]<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/td>\n

I celebrate myself,\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And what I assume you shall assume,<\/span><\/p>\n

For every atom belonging to me as good\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0belongs to you.<\/span><\/p>\n

    \n
  • From \u201cSong of Myself\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

    \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0in <\/span>Leaves of Grass\u00a0<\/span><\/i>[2]<\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

    The importance of the affective character that unites Walt Whitman\u2019s poetry and Terrence Malick\u2019s cinema is obscured by a critical and scholarly focus on the pair\u2019s 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\u2019s poetry and Malick\u2019s 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\u2019s cinema, which does not reference Whitman.<\/span> [3] Despite the continual comparison, there has not been any comprehensive <\/span>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\u2019s filmmaking with Whitman\u2019s poetry by virtue of his ability to ask \u201cdifficult questions\u201d and\u00a0 restore \u201cthe beauty and power of the image as a carrier of meaning\u201d in a cinematic age in which \u201cthe image is often sacrificed to a shallow conceptualism.\u201d<\/span> [4] Lloyd Michaels uses the term \u201cWhitmanesque\u201d in his descriptions of Malick\u2019s films, describing the \u201cWhitmanesque workers swimming and bathing\u201d in <\/span>Days of Heaven<\/span><\/i> (1978).<\/span> [5] Morrison and Schur also speak to the \u201cWhitmanesque\u201d stylings of <\/span>The Thin Red Line<\/span><\/i> (1998) due to Malick\u2019s \u201cinconsolable lyricism: sudden cuts to the unbearable beauty of a breathtaking, twilit sky\u2026 protean inserts of a fissured leaf with blinding light streaming through the holes.\u201d<\/span> [6] The pair also argue that \u201c<\/span>Days of Heaven<\/span><\/i> characterizes itself squarely in relation to its \u2018classic\u2019 antecedents\u201d [7]<\/span> as the \u201cnarrative content of the film encompasses a virtual catalogue of classic American literature.\u201d [8]<\/span> In this article, I contend that Malick\u2019s representation of America is haunted by the specter of Whitman\u2019s own construction of American foundational mythologies.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    Popular journalism has further planted the idea of a Whitman\/Malick parallel into the minds of cinemagoers. Critic Niles Schwartz\u2019s review upon <\/span>The Tree of Life<\/span><\/i>\u2019s release was titled \u201cTerrence Malick\u2019s Song of Himself,\u201d and Whitman\u2019s name reappears in many of the early reviews which immediately followed the film\u2019s release.<\/span> [9] Like Mottram, \u201cNew York <\/span>Times\u201d film critic Manohla Dargis\u2019 comparison identifies Whitman and Malick\u2019s shared philosophical exploration. She claims that <\/span>The Tree of Life<\/span><\/i> exults \u201cin a cosmic oneness with the world,\u201d arguing for an intertextual connection between poet and filmmaker: akin to Whitman\u2019s \u201cSong of Myself,\u201d\u00a0 Malick\u2019s film \u201cis more circular in form than linear.\u201d<\/span> [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\u2019s poetry. However, this affinity can also be located in the respective texts\u2019 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    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<\/i>\u2019s original screenplay is an uncanny parallel of the inclusive lexicon that flows throughout Whitman\u2019s catalog, blurring the boundaries of \u201cI\u201d and \u201cyou.\u201d\u00a0 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\u2019s instruction to \u201cunderstand this story as your own\u201d validates the individual\u2019s personal and precognitive experience of cinema. This reverence for feeling over understanding mirrors Whitman\u2019s dismissal of attempts to intellectualize his writing: \u201cHave you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?\u201d (SOM <\/i>2, <\/span>4, 3).<\/span> [11] Together, they champion a preconscious, embodied experience of art in which the text\u2019s force upon the individual body is valued, and they employ affected registers of sensory experience to appeal to the bodies of their audience.<\/span><\/p>\n

    Maurice Merleau-Ponty\u2019s phenomenology is fundamental to interpreting a relationship between the poetry of Whitman and the cinematic form of Malick. Merleau-Ponty\u2019s position is that all experience \u2013 intellectual, philosophical, and emotional \u2013 originates in the body.<\/span> [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 (<\/span>cogito ergo sum<\/span><\/i>), I exist <\/span>because<\/span><\/i> I experience the world with and through my body\u2019s senses.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    The coalescence of the bodily state with emotional experience recurs throughout Whitman\u2019s poetic oeuvre<\/i>: in line 23 of SOM<\/i>, Whitman speaks to \u201cMy respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood and air through my lungs.\u201d [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 \u2018inspiration\u2019 and \u2018respiration\u2019 equates the forces of the creative process and bodily experience, and as Daniela Babilon explains, for Whitman\u2019s \u201clyrical I, creative inspiration is a process fundamentally inspired by an affective bodily state,\u201d\u2060 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 <\/span>to fashion his own rejection of Descartes\u2019s existentialism in <\/span>SOM<\/span><\/i> with \u201cI have said that the soul is not more than the body, \/ And\u00a0 I have said that the body is not more than the soul\u201d (48.1-2). [16]<\/span><\/p>\n

    \"\"
    Figure 1: close-ups of hands, touching and being touched, appear throughout The Tree of Life.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

    Through bodily and emotional engagement with the screen, the viewer of <\/span>The Tree of Life<\/span><\/i> begins to act out Whitman\u2019s interpersonal, embodied intimacy. The \u201cunseen hand\u201d of Whitman\u2019s \u201ctwenty-ninth bather\u201d (<\/span>SOM<\/span><\/i> 11, 10-14) passes over the bodies of the twenty-eight men. In merely observing the bathers from her \u201cfine house by the rise of the bank,\u201d the invisible twenty-ninth bather can nonetheless \u201csplash in the water\u201d despite \u201cstill in [her] room\u201d (<\/span>SOM<\/span><\/i>, 11,4-9). [17]<\/span> As cinemagoers, we take on the role of the twenty-ninth bather \u2013 our haptic eyes and our own \u201cunseen hand\u201d engage with the onscreen textures. Throughout <\/span>The Tree of Life<\/span><\/i>, 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 R\u00edo describes the transmission of onscreen image to embodied affect as a phenomenon whereby \u201cbody and image no longer function as discrete units, but as surfaces in contact, engaged in constant activity of reciprocal <\/span>re-alignment and inflection.\u201d<\/span> [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\u2019s atmosphere of intimacy. Malick\u2019s touching of flesh echoes Peter Coviello\u2019s description of Whitman\u2019s \u201cunwavering belief in the capacity for strangers to recognize, to desire, and to be <\/span>intimate<\/span><\/i> with one another.\u201d<\/span> [19] A central theme of Whitman\u2019s poems was \u201cadhesiveness\u201d (camaraderie, or homosocial friendship which privately \u201ccaused people of the same sex to be drawn to each other and love each other\u201d) and \u201camativeness\u201d (man-woman love).<\/span> [20] For Whitman, the solely male bonds of adhesiveness were \u201cmore transcendental than marital love.\u201d<\/span> [21] Armengol-Carrera draws attention to Whitman\u2019s imagining of the adhesive bonds the poet imagined forming with a host of unknown men in \u201cThis Moment Yearning and Thoughtful\u201d from the <\/span>Calamus<\/span><\/i> cluster, first published in the 1860 edition of <\/span>Leaves of Grass<\/span><\/i>. Here, Armengol-Carrera explains that Whitman \u201clooks forward to meeting and knowing men from other cultures and nationalities, who might become his friends and lovers\u2026 friendships between men thus seem to cross and undermine traditional racial, cultural, and national boundaries.\u201d<\/span> [22] Whitman imagines becoming \u201cattached\u201d to them, forging a physical and emotional intimacy with unknown men.<\/span> [23] Whitman also asks if it is possible to be intimate with a person one has never met in his \u201cSong of the Open Road\u201d:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    Here is adhesiveness, it is not previously fashioned, it is apropos;\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    Do you know what it is, as you pass, to be loved by strangers?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    Do you know the talk of those turning eye-balls?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    (6,8,1-3) [24]<\/span><\/p>\n

    Does Whitman\u2019s illusory intimacy with imagined figures also generate questions of the cinemagoing experience, where we undoubtedly feel an emotional and physical intimacy with a film\u2019s characters, despite their fictional nature?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    \"\"
    Figure 2: tactile engagements with the natural world in The Tree of Life.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

    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\u2019s natural universe is emphasized by his characters\u2019 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\u2019s respective poetry and cinema is experienced through the capacity to perceive nature\u2019s forces in an embodied way.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    In <\/span>The Tree of Life<\/span><\/i>, the film\u2019s characters persistently interact with the natural world, generating for the audience a blurring of sensorial boundaries as the properties of the spectator\u2019s seeing eye and feeling skin encroach upon the peripheries of the other\u2019s territory. The titular foliage of the pair\u2019s works (Leaves of Grass<\/i>, The Tree of Life<\/i>) 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\u2019s grass has repeatedly manifested in studies of Malick\u2019s cinema on account of the filmmaker\u2019s reverence for similar imagery. Sweeping, wide-angle, and aerial shots of bodies in wild grass occur not only in The Tree of Life <\/i>but throughout Badlands <\/i>(1973), Days of Heaven<\/i> (1978), The Thin Red Line <\/i>(1998), The New World <\/i>(2005), To the Wonder <\/i>(2012) and A Hidden Life <\/i>(2019).\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

    \"\"
    Figure 3 (clockwise from left): To the Wonder, A Hidden Life, Badlands, The New World, Days of Heaven,\u00a0and\u00a0The Thin Red Line<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

    Located in the memories of <\/span>The Tree of Life<\/span><\/i>\u2019s Jack (Sean Penn), Malick\u2019s suburban America establishes an intense longing for a bygone age, as the film\u2019s nostalgic qualities arise out of an emotionally affected bodily state. Lauren Berlant speaks to an affective longing for \u201cthat moral-intimate-economic thing called \u201cthe good life,\u201d an American Dream based on a <\/span><\/strong>materialist \u201cpedagogy of desire.\u201d<\/span> [25] However, Jack\u2019s longing for youth, is one of \u201ccruel optimism,\u201d a phenomenon in which \u201csomething you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.\u201d [26] <\/span>For Berlant,\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    the <\/span>affective<\/span><\/i> 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]<\/span>
    \n<\/span><\/p>\n

    Berlant speaks to the affective qualities of an excitement located in the prospective \u201cchange that\u2019s gonna come.\u201d<\/span> [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\u2019s poetry laid the foundations for America\u2019s self-identification as a nation that would embody these democratic ideals. For Malick, however, this promise was never fulfilled \u2013 the \u201cchange\u201d never arrives in <\/span>The Tree of Life<\/span><\/i>\u2019s America. <\/span>The film\u2019s affected register creates a \u201cfeeling\u201d 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]<\/span><\/p>\n

    The concentration on Whitman\u2019s visualization of a democratic nation has been revered, his critique of the British motherland\u2019s intervention with the American nation styling him an \u201canti-imperialist\u201d who has attained a \u201cmythic status among Marxist literary critics.\u201d<\/span> [30] However, Dahl observes that these reductive readings of his works have taken a troubling precedence over the \u2018colonial dimensions\u2019 of his poetry and prose writings.<\/span> [31] Turning to <\/span>\u201cPoets to Come,\u201d 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 \u2013<\/span><\/p>\n

    Indeed, if it were not for you, what would I be?<\/span><\/p>\n

    What is the little I have done, except to arouse you?<\/span><\/p>\n

    I depend on being realized, long hence, where the broad fat prairies spread,\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    and thence to Oregon and California inclusive,\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    I expect that the Texan and the Arizonian, ages hence, will understand me,<\/span><\/p>\n

    I expect that the future Carolinian and Georgian will understand me and love me,<\/span><\/p>\n

    I expect that Kanadians, a hundred, and perhaps many hundred years from now,\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    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.<\/span><\/p>\n

    – \u00a0 originally followed line 4 of \u201cPoets to Come\u201d as published in the 1860 edition. [32]<\/span><\/p>\n

    Whitman\u2019s anticipatory language of expectation \u2013 \u201cI <\/span>expect<\/span><\/i> that the future Carolinian and Georgian will understand me and love me\u201d \u2013 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\u2019s poetic America was often born out of <\/span>purely imaginative faculties<\/span><\/i>. 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.<\/span> [33] This biographical information is imperative to appreciating Whitman\u2019s purely \u201c<\/span>imaginative <\/span><\/i>encounters with the Western landscape.\u201d<\/span> [34]<\/span><\/p>\n

    The concept of the imagination is a central theme in Merleau-Ponty\u2019s phenomenology, the imagination emanating from what he calls the \u201cvirtual body\u201d (<\/span>le corps virtual<\/span><\/i>), which impregnates the body consciousness with renewed means of world experience, freed from the <\/span>boundaries of the objective body\u2019s edges, or context-specific being.<\/span> [35] For Merleau-Ponty, the imagination is \u201cfar from being merely an escape from reality\u201d as it is for Sartre.<\/span> [36] Instead, the imagination constitutes a fundamental state of being in the world, adding \u201can essential creative dimension of human existence.\u201d<\/span> [37] As James Steeves notes, \u201cMerleau-Ponty shows us how the ambiguous structure of human existence consists of the intertwining of perception and imagination in the form of \u2018a woven fabric.\u2019\u201d<\/span> [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 \u2013 his promise of an Edenic Utopia in the west \u2013 the forbearer of an American Dream.<\/span><\/p>\n

    Whitman\u2019s Edenic vision, unencumbered by the feudal limitations of the Old World, eventually marked the American literary landscape. According to Henry Nash Smith, Whitman\u2019s prophetic West \u201cgave final imaginative expression to the theme of manifest destiny.\u201d<\/span> [39] The philosophies of America\u2019s\u00a0 \u201c<\/span>Manifest Destiny,\u201d a term coined in 1845 by John L. O\u2019Sullivan (editor of the <\/span>United States Magazine and Democratic Review<\/span><\/i>), \u201cpreached <\/span>a particular form of Christian nationalism that centered on the expansionist fever occurring during the 1830s and 1840s\u201d in defense of the United States\u2019 annexation of the Republic of Texas. [40]<\/span> John D. Wilsey explains that <\/span>\u00a0the concept is helpful in locating \u201chow <\/span>Americans have self-identified in\u2026 since their origin as a collection of colonial, and later independent, polities.\u201d<\/span> [41] During (and prior to) this period, there was a fervent belief that <\/span>\u201cGod had bestowed upon [the American people] a mission to spread their supreme civilization, in <\/span>particular, freedom, whether in religion, commerce, or race.\u201d<\/span> [42] John Quincy Adams wrote in 1811 that\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    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]<\/span><\/p>\n

    The irony of a democracy completely founded on the subjugation of (non-white) peoples flows throughout Whitman\u2019s poetry, but is often concealed by the poet\u2019s sympathetic treatment of Black and Native Americans. In \u201cApostroph,\u201d Whitman\u2019s egalitarian vision \u2013 \u201cO I believe there is nothing real but America and freedom! \/ O to sternly reject all except Democracy!\u201d (17-18) \u2013 is inextricably bound by a profoundly colonial and ethnocentric thought process. \u201cO to promulgate our own! O to build that which builds for mankind!\u201d (20) cries Whitman, continuing his \u201cjourney through all The States\u201d (43) and \u201ctouching whatever is between them\u201d (132).<\/span> [44] Whitman\u2019s embodied language (shouting and touching) amplifies the poem\u2019s democratic ideals, although the colonial dimensions perhaps render this as merely performative. Whitman\u2019s propagation of America\u2019s 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\u2019s description of the continent as \u201cMY LAND\u201d (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.<\/span><\/p>\n

    Benedict Anderson has demonstrated the importance of national literature in constructing nationhood and the ensuing identity of national subjects.<\/span> [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 \u201can awareness of the hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people in their particular language-field\u2026 that only those hundreds of thousands, or millions, so belonged.\u201d<\/span> [46] Speaking to the role of the writer in nation-building, Whitman wrote that<\/span><\/p>\n

    By great bards only can series of peoples and States be fused into the compact\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    organism of one nation.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    To hold men together by paper and seal, or by compulsion, is no account,<\/span><\/p>\n

    That only holds men together which is living principles, as the hold of the limbs\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    of the body, or the fibres of plants.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    Of all races and eras, These States, with veins full of poetical stuff, most need\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    poets, and are to have the greatest, and use them the greatest.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    Their Presidents shall not be their common referee so much as their poets shall.<\/span><\/p>\n

    (\u201cChants Democratic and Native American\u201d no. 1, 20-22). [47]<\/span><\/p>\n

    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: \u201chold men together,\u201d \u201climbs of the body,\u201d \u201cveins full of poetical stuff.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

    Whitman\u2019s Notebooks contain an entry in which the poet envisions a piece which \u201cfamiliarly 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).\u201d<\/span> [48] It is fair to read this entry as the conceptual genesis of \u201cPoets to Come,\u201d the creation of a metatextual relationship motivating the piece. Most considerations of \u201cPoets to Come\u201d have concentrated on the apostrophic conversation with \u201cthe readerly \u2018you\u2019\u201d \u2013 the poem\u2019s democratic language of inclusivity facilitated by a much-used tool from Whitman\u2019s technical arsenal.<\/span> [49] Culler explains that Whitman\u2019s \u201capostrophe is a device which the poetic voice uses to establish with an object a relationship which helps to constitute him\u2026 to strike up a harmonious relationship,\u201d mirroring affective considerations of relations between subject and object.<\/span> [50] Whitman\u2019s 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 \u201cfamiliarity between poet and audience.\u201d [51]<\/span><\/p>\n

    Whitman\u2019s affective transmission of his United States manifested in the collective consciousness of the American people a prophetic idea of the nation\u2019s democratic ideals. Yet, in <\/span>The Tree of Life,<\/span><\/i> we are presented with the disfigurement of Whitman\u2019s <\/span>imagined<\/span><\/i> 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\u2019s prophecy as a fallacy, his specter haunting the collective consciousness of the nation.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    M. Gail Hamner argues that <\/span>The Tree of Life<\/span><\/i> is an exercise in affect, and that Malick\u2019s creation of a disillusioned nostalgia for childhood occurs not narratively but affectively. She <\/span>argues that \u201cMalick presents less a <\/span>story<\/span><\/i>\u2026<\/span> than an <\/span>affective presentation<\/span><\/i>\u2026\u201d [52]<\/span> Hamner argues that the film \u201cleans heavily on the textured embodiment of nostalgia,\u201d and bolsters the idea that Malick\u2019s exploration of America occurs affectively, appealing to the body of both his characters and his audience.<\/span> [53] The pastoral landscapes of Malick\u2019s cinema speak to Whitman\u2019s vision of Virgin America, as his textured, sprawling lands became a space through which the new American body could traverse. After the film\u2019s prefatory glowing light fades, an adolescent girl peers through the open window of a farmhouse, observing the expansive \u201cleaves of grass\u201d that dominate the frame (see Figure 4).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    \"\"
    Figure 4: The Tree of Life’s intertextual “leaves of grass”<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

    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 <\/span>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\u2019Brien (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.<\/span><\/p>\n

    Yet this sequence turns away from a peaceful, pastoral aesthetic when it is rapidly interrupted by a future event in which Mrs. O\u2019Brien is informed of her son\u2019s death (Jack\u2019s younger brother) in an unspecified war. Malick\u2019s representation of war functions as a destabilizing force which undermines the jingoistic hallucinations manifested in Whitman\u2019s earlier writing. The descriptions of war in the <\/span>Drum-Taps<\/span><\/i> 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:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    Lightly strike on the stretch\u2019d tympanum, pride and joy in my city,<\/span><\/p>\n

    How she led the rest to arms, how she gave the cue,<\/span> \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    How at once with lithe limbs unwaiting a moment she sprang,<\/span> \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    (O superb! O Manhattan, my own, my peerless!<\/span> \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    O strongest you in the hour of danger, in crisis! O truer than steel!)<\/span> \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    How you sprang! how you threw off the costumes of peace with indifferent\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    hand;<\/span> \u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    How your soft opera-music changed, and the drum and fife were heard in their stead;\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    How you led to the war, (that shall serve for our prelude, songs of soldiers,)<\/span><\/p>\n

    How Manhattan drum-taps led <\/span><\/p>\n

    – (\u201cFirst O Songs for a Prelude,\u201d 2-10). [54]<\/span><\/p>\n

    Here, Whitman\u2019s patriotic war is intensely aural. The \u201cstretch\u2019d tympanum\u201d 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\u2019s body with the sound of the titular \u201cdrum-taps\u201d of war as the drumming eventually drowns out the \u201csoft opera-music\u201d of the seventh line. Where Whitman speaks to the \u201csongs of soldiers,\u201d <\/span>The Tree of Life<\/span><\/i>\u2019s aural treatment of war is silent. The artifice of cinematic sound cannot do the horrors of war justice.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    In <\/span>The Tree of Life,<\/span><\/i> 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\u2019 disillusionment with America, it is never mentioned or depicted. Just as Jack\u2019s affected body as he wanders through the desert needs no spoken explanation, Mrs. O\u2019Brien\u2019s 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\u2019Brien, 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\u2019s affected bodily state. It is pure precognition.\u00a0 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\u2019Brien 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\u2019Brien (Brad Pitt). He receives a telephone call informing him of their son\u2019s 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\u2019Brien\u2019s 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 <\/span>The Tree of Life<\/span><\/i> \u201cis affective, not narrative: viewers experience a fluid and ambiguous sense of connection and loss rather than a narrative immersion in a past decade.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0 [55]<\/span><\/p>\n

    The gruesome onslaught in <\/span>The Thin Red Line<\/span><\/i> 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 \u201cto the unanswerable questions of all men under stress in the universal language of music and images.\u201d<\/span> [56] Conversely, <\/span>The Tree of Life<\/span><\/i>\u2019s failure of direct acknowledgment (in that no battle is shown, and the death of the O\u2019Brien son is only implied) is a testimony to war\u2019s purposeless nature, a sentiment that the Vietnam War represented for Americans more than any war before it.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    Comparisons between Whitman and Malick\u2019s works have been made in relation to the latter\u2019s 1998 film <\/span>The Thin Red Line<\/span><\/i>, with Lloyd Michaels asserting that\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    So much of <\/span>The Thin Red Line<\/span><\/i> conveys Whitman\u2019s sense of the dreamlike quality of war (through muffled sound, slow motion, strange landscapes, and the juxtaposition of the incongruous images and polyphonic voices)\u201d [57]<\/span><\/p>\n

    The Thin Red Line<\/span><\/i> can be affectively paralleled with Whitman\u2019s work by virtue of the extensive and contemplative voice-over monologues which complement Malick\u2019s visuals. In one scene, an unidentified speaker ponders that \u201cmaybe all man got one big soul that everyone\u2019s a part of,\u201d invoking the inclusivity which saturates Whitman\u2019s <\/span>oeuvre<\/span><\/i>. Michaels goes so far as to claim that \u201c<\/span>The Thin Red Line<\/span><\/i> cannot be readily categorized as an antiwar film\u2026 it is simply too beautiful.\u201d<\/span> [58] Michaels argues that the film \u201clike Walt Whitman\u2019s poignant Civil War poems\u2026 aspires to, if not redemption, reconciliation,\u201d reminding us of lines from Whitman\u2019s \u201cReconciliation\u201d:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    Word over all, beautiful as the sky,\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    Beautiful that war and all its deeds or carnage must be in time utterly lost,\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again, and\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    ever again, this soil\u2019d world (1-3). [59]<\/span><\/p>\n

    However, the<\/span> Thin Red Line does<\/span><\/i> significantly revise Whitman\u2019s Civil War poems in two central ways. Firstly, Malick \u201cinterrupt[s] <\/span>any genre-based expectations about narrative\u201d by refusing to portray the soldiering experience as patriotically motivated, and with this, refuses to present war as a conduit for camaraderie.<\/span> [60] As Tatiana Prorokova observes, Private Witt does maintain an \u201callegiance to his company\u201d but \u201cit is not mediated by political, national, and military institutions\u2026. He <\/span>does<\/span><\/i>\u00a0love his comrades, but that love has little to do with their common institutional bond.<\/span>\u201d<\/span> [61] It is more \u201cadhesive\u201d in that it stems from the privacy of emotion, and thus <\/span>The Thin Red Lin<\/span><\/i>e rejects the underlying themes that<\/span> inundate traditional war literature and cinema.<\/span><\/p>\n

    Of course, Whitman\u2019s poetry did in part critique the atrocities of war, as in the second <\/span>section of \u201cThe Wound Dresser\u201d from <\/span>Drum-Taps<\/span><\/i>:<\/span><\/p>\n

    Where they lie on the ground after the battle brought in,<\/span><\/p>\n

    Where their priceless blood reddens the grass, the ground,<\/span><\/p>\n

    Or to the rows of the hospital tent, or under the roof\u2019d hospital,<\/span><\/p>\n

    To the long rows of cots up and down each side I return,<\/span><\/p>\n

    To each and all one after another I draw near, not one do I miss,<\/span><\/p>\n

    An attendant follows holding a tray, he carries a refuse pail,<\/span><\/p>\n

    Soon to be fill\u2019d with clotted rags and blood, emptied, and fill\u2019d again.<\/span><\/p>\n

    (2, 2, 2-8) [62]<\/span><\/p>\n

    Peter Coviello acknowledges the paradoxical representations of war in Whitman\u2019s <\/span>Memoranda <\/span><\/i>(1875), where the poet\u2019s \u201conce exuberant faith in the limitless civic and national capacities of writing\u201d is inconsistent with his concurrent lament for \u201cthe thousands of soldiers <\/span>whose graves are marked\u2026 \u2018unknown.\u2019<\/span> [63] Here, one cannot ignore the \u201cqueer resonances of Whitman\u2019s hospital life,\u201d where homosocial bonds and homosexual physicality ultimately impregnates Whitman\u2019s critique of war with corporeal visions of sex.<\/span> [64] Thus, there exists a perennial return to the notion that destruction is ultimately a conduit for creation.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    This seemingly paradoxical creation-in-destruction ideology is apparent in the interstellar sequence of <\/span>The Tree of Life <\/span><\/i>(00:19:15 – 00:24:14), which unexpectedly penetrates the domestic space of the film\u2019s central narrative. Malick\u2019s 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\u2019Brien: \u201cLord. Where were you?\u201d Unlike the divine providence Whitman espouses, envisioning a supportive God who shepherds his flock to the West, Malick\u2019s representation of the domestic fallout brought about by the losses of the Vietnam War questions the providence of a nation supposedly \u201cdestined\u201d to spread its democracy throughout the world. The grief of Mrs. O\u2019Brien reveals the capacity of the Vietnam War to shatter the images of American democracy and its symbols, as \u201cThe American military\u2019s involvement in Vietnam\u201d according to Kapell, \u201cwould seem to perpetually scar America\u2019s frontier mythology.\u201d<\/span> [65] Mr. O\u2019Brien\u2019s mother (Fiona Shaw) comforts her grieving daughter-in-law following her child\u2019s death, \u201cyou have your memories of him,\u201d simultaneously comforting a disillusioned America whose national creation myths were torn asunder by their failures in Vietnam. Malick\u2019s representation of The Vietnam War (or lack thereof?) impacts his familial narrative and parallels the sentiments of H. Bruce Franklin:<\/span><\/p>\n

    Within the dominant American culture, \u201cVietnam\u201d is no longer a nation, a people, or even a war. <\/span><\/p>\n

    \u201cVietnam\u201d is something terrible that happened to us, something that divided, wounded, and victimized America. [66]<\/span><\/p>\n

    The ghost of the dead R.L., who penetrates his family members\u2019 consciousness in flashbacks, wounds their affected bodily state through acts of remembering. With the flashback, and the experience of memory, the body performs a \u201ctemporal manoeuvre\u201d<\/span> [67] \u2013 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 \u201cthe world\u2019s gone to the dogs\u2026People are greedy, keep getting worse.\u201d Jack\u2019s whispered voice-over echoes Berlant\u2019s idea of \u201ccruel optimism.\u201d Jack\u2019s return to the past becomes the obstacle inhibiting his own happiness. Jack\u2019s \u201cfantasy of happiness and control\u2026\u201d (the America espoused by the optimistic Whitman) \u201cremains longed for, but painfully out of reach.\u201d<\/span> [68]<\/span><\/p>\n

    Jack\u2019s 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\u2019s discontent; we <\/span>feel<\/span><\/i> it. Jack\u2019s physical isolation mirrors an American literary tradition that reads the Old Testament\u2019s Job as \u201can individual, isolated or alienated to some extent from the \u2018crowd,\u2019 intellectually, spiritually, or literally.\u201d<\/span> [69] The Book of Job is an exercise in theodical thinking, which endeavors to<\/span> \u201cexplain t<\/span>he justice of God, especially why a good and all-powerful God would allow evil to exist.\u201d<\/span> [70] As Norman W. Jones simplifies: \u201cwhy do bad things happen to good people?\u201d<\/span> [71]<\/span><\/p>\n

    Opening <\/span>The Tree of Life<\/span><\/i>, Jack\u2019s voice narrates the words which appear on screen,<\/span><\/p>\n

    Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?…\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    God shouted for joy?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    \u00a0<\/span> \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Job, 38:4,7\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    Whitman permeated his democracy with the very essence of God, observing God \u201ceach hour of the twenty-four\u201d and finding \u201cletters from God dropt in the street, and every one is signed by God\u2019s name\u201d (<\/span>SOM<\/span><\/i>, 1855, 48,18). Harold Bloom suggests that \u201cWalt Whitman was the crucial celebrant of\u2026 the American Religion\u2026 that marked the beginning of the end of European Protestantism in America.\u201d<\/span> [72] For Whitman, America and God were synonymous. Whitman\u2019s \u201cnew American bible\u201d<\/span> [73] engendered a fervent faith in the American nation, founding a cult of Americana to which the nation subscribes,<\/span> \u201cif you are American,\u201d as Bloom posits, \u201cthen Walt Whitman is your imaginative father and mother, even if\u2026 you have never composed a line of verse.\u201d<\/span> [74] Jack\u2019s whispered recitation of the Book of Job is not only a questioning of a Christian God who punishes unjustly, but also of Whitman\u2019s erroneous deification of American democracy, a questioning of the \u201cimaginative father and mother.\u201d The disruption of American mythology by the Vietnam war spawns revelations of Whitman\u2019s merely <\/span>imagined<\/span><\/i> democracy, facilitated by the senses of his phenomenal body, influencing Malick\u2019s pessimism.<\/span><\/p>\n

    Solidifying the pessimistic worldview of Malick\u2019s America, <\/span>The Tree of Life<\/span><\/i>\u2019s interstellar sequence crescendos in its imagining of the Cretaceous\u2013Paleogene extinction event, which eradicated species in mass numbers, including land-dwelling dinosaurs, whose deaths prefigure the possibility of the gargantuan American nation\u2019s final collapse \u2013 a downfall that Whitman\u2019s poetry does not foretell. Every sequence in <\/span>The Tree of Life<\/span><\/i> is infected by Malick\u2019s prophecy of certain end, a disillusionment whose only remedy is an afterlife <\/span>devoid<\/span><\/i> of the concept of nationhood. When Mrs. O\u2019Brien narrates \u2013 \u201cHow did I lose you?\u201d \u2013 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 \u201cWestern democracy has been from the time of its birth idealistic.\u201d<\/span> [75] Whitman\u2019s 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 \u201cthe most extraordinary piece of wit & wisdom that America has yet contributed.\u201d<\/span> [76] The year 1855, according to Genoways, did not merely mark the publication of <\/span>Leaves of Grass<\/span><\/i>; it \u201cwas also the moment of [America\u2019s] own immaculate conception, when a poet imagined us into being.\u201d<\/span> [77] Ultimately, Whitman\u2019s poetry conceives an ideal America rather than describing the America which historically existed in his epoch. While Malick in part visually reflects Whitman\u2019s imagined utopia, <\/span>The Tree of Life<\/span><\/i> shatters this constructed image, illuminating the complex etymology of the word \u201cutopia\u201d \u2013 the Greek word \u201cutopia\u201d may have its roots in \u201c<\/span>ou<\/span><\/i>-topos, meaning \u2018no-place,\u2019 and <\/span>eu<\/span><\/i>-topos, which can be translated as \u2018good place.\u2019\u201d [78]<\/span> Utopia is thus an <\/span>impossible perfection<\/span><\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n

    The influence of Whitman\u2019s specter upon the American cultural landscape is fundamentally encapsulated in an exchange between Mr. O\u2019Brien and the adolescent Jack (Hunter McCracken) as they tend to their patchy lawn:<\/span><\/p>\n

    FATHER: Why\u2019s this bare here?<\/span><\/p>\n

    JACK: The grass won\u2019t grow under the tree.<\/span><\/p>\n

    FATHER: It does at Kimball\u2019s.<\/span><\/p>\n

    JACK: They have a gardener.<\/span><\/p>\n

    FATHER: They have money. Of course, he inherited it.<\/span><\/p>\n

    A camera slowly follows Mr. O\u2019Brien as he walks with Jack across the lawn, pointing out its inadequacies (see Figure 5). <\/span><\/p>\n

    \"\"
    Figure 5: Patchy grass in The Tree of Life’s suburbia shatters national myths of equality<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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

    \u2026a uniform hieroglyphic,<\/span><\/p>\n

    And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,<\/span><\/p>\n

    Growing among black folks as among white,<\/span><\/p>\n

    Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I<\/span><\/p>\n

    receive them the same.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    (6,4) [79]<\/span><\/p>\n

    The differing quality of the Kimballs\u2019 and O\u2019Brien\u2019s lawns is revealed haptically: soft, lush grass is contrasted with barren patches of dirt. This not only serves a narrative function within <\/span>The Tree of Life<\/span><\/i> (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 \u201ca cultural, ideological space incorporating Americans\u2019 hopes for an economically safe and prosperous family life.\u201d<\/span> [80] Because television was \u201cinseparable from the model of the suburban single-home in the 1950s\u201d suburbia subsists as its own mysterious simulation \u2013 a \u201ccopy without an original.\u201d<\/span> [81] For Baudrillard, America\u2019s suburban spaces are \u201cmodels of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal,\u201d<\/span> [82] ultimately revealing the precarious nature of what Kenneth Jackson designates the \u201cfullest, most unadulterated embodiment\u201d of American culture.<\/span> [83] In <\/span>The Tree of Life<\/span><\/i>, the romanticized domestic spaces of suburbia only exist to shatter themselves, revealing America\u2019s false idols. The \u201cfilm\u2019s ripe nostalgia,\u201d with its \u201crichly textured presentation of the late 1950s,\u201d does not venerate the past, explains Hamner, \u201cbut slams viewers into a shared and visceral awareness of finitude.\u201d<\/span> [84] For Hamner, \u201cviewers become absorbed in a <\/span>felt resonance<\/span><\/i> with memories of what a 1950s childhood <\/span>was like<\/span><\/i>\u2026\u201d<\/span> [85] Ultimately, it could be said that the \u201cmemories\u201d of America that Jack (and the audience) creates and longs for are mere simulacra. Whitman\u2019s declaration in the preface to the 1855 <\/span>edition of <\/span>Leaves of Grass<\/span><\/i> that \u201cThe United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem\u201d<\/span> [86] is revealed through Malick\u2019s affecting film to be an erroneous and imagined fantasy. Berlant argues that\u00a0 \u201cfantasy is the means by which people hoard idealizing theories and tableaux about how they and the world \u201cadd up to something.\u201d\u201d<\/span> [87] Whitman\u2019s espousal of American equality fails to come to fruition in <\/span>The Tree of Life<\/span><\/i>, and Berlant asks: \u201cWhat happens when those fantasies start to fray \u2013 depression, dissociation, pragmatism, cynicism, optimism, activism, or an incoherent mash?<\/span> [88] In <\/span>The Tree of Life<\/span><\/i>, what happens<\/span> via prioritizing affected mood over narrative structure is a rejection of the idea that America is \u201cthe greatest poem.\u201d The collage of Malick\u2019s images do not ask us to think, and \u201cit is easier to acknowledge how it makes viewers feel.\u201d<\/span> [89] Just as Whitman\u2019s embodied and inclusive lexicon speaks to Berlant\u2019s \u201caffective components of [American] citizenship,\u201d Jack\u2019s lament in <\/span>The Tree of Life<\/span><\/i> is also an embodied mourning for national myths.<\/span> [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.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    Endnotes<\/strong><\/p>\n

      \n
    1. The Tree of Life<\/span><\/i>, dir. Terrence Malick, 2011; Terrence Malick, <\/span>The Tree of Life: A Screenplay by Terrence Malick<\/span><\/i> (Writers Guild of America, 2007): i.<\/span><\/span><\/li>\n
    2. Walt Whitman, \u201cSong of Myself,\u201d <\/span>Leaves of Grass<\/span><\/i>, ed.<\/span> Sculley Bradley & Harold W. Blodgett (New York: Norton, 1973), <\/span>28.<\/span><\/li>\n
    3. The following book-length publications example some of the references to Whitman in the analyses of Malick\u2019s themes and visuals: The collected essays in Hannah Patterson\u2019s\u00a0 The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America<\/span><\/i> (London: Wallflower, 2003) explicitly make the link between American poetry and Malick\u2019s filmmaking in its title, but also references Whitman\u2019s 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. <\/span>In \u201cTerrence Malick: Different Colors Made of Tears, or Terrence Malick\u2019s Blue Note,\u201d <\/span>Positif <\/span><\/i>\u00a0540 (Feb 2006), he argues that the transcendentalism of Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman is \u201cat the heart of the filmmaker\u2019s inspiration\u201d (17); the link is also noted in his collaboration with Pierre Eisenreich, as they describe \u201ca certain referential network\u201d\u201d in \u201c<\/span>The Tree of Life<\/span><\/i>: Rendre le Myst\u00e8re Explicite,\u201d <\/span>Positif<\/span><\/i> 605\/606 (Jul\/Aug 2011), 121; in \u201cPoetry of Political Waterways\u201d, <\/span>Positif <\/span><\/i>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 \u201cThe Tree <\/span><\/span>of Life\u201d, Jeune Cin\u00e9ma<\/span><\/i> 338\/339 (Summer, 2011) that \u201cwe must look to Walt Whitman to find such a poetic world capable of to embrace in the same movement the cosmic and the intimate\u201d (17).\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n
    4. Ron Mottram, \u201cAll Things Shining\u201d, <\/span>The Cinema of Terrence Malick: poetic visions of America, <\/span><\/i>ed. Hannah Patterson (2003), 13-14, 47.<\/span><\/li>\n
    5. Lloyd Michaels, Terrence Malick (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 47.<\/span><\/li>\n
    6. James Morrison and Thomas Schur, <\/span>The Films of Terrence Malick <\/span><\/i>(Santa Barbara: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2003), 25.<\/span><\/li>\n
    7. Ibid., 43.<\/li>\n
    8. Ibid., 33.<\/li>\n
    9. Niles Schwartz \u201cTerrence Malick\u2019s Song of Himself\u201d, The Point, September 19, 2011, https:\/\/thepointmag.com\/2011\/criticism\/terrence-malicks-song-of-himself; John Patterson, \u201cIs Terrence Malick assuming Stanley Kubrick\u2019s Mantle?\u201d, <\/span>The Guardian<\/span><\/i>, July 2, 2011,\u00a0 https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/film\/2011\/jul\/02\/terrence-malick-tree-of-life; Sam Adams, \u201cTerrence Malick\u2019s Voyage(s) of Time<\/i>\u201d, Slate<\/i>, 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, \u201cTerrence Malick\u2019s The Tree of Life<\/i> Plays Garden of Eden to the Family of Man,\u201d HuffPost<\/i>, December 6, 2017, https:\/\/www.huffpost.com\/entry\/terrence-malicks-tree-of-_b_868895.<\/span><\/li>\n
    10. Manohla Dargis, \u201cMalick\u2019s Film Adds Dose of Sincerity to the Festivities,\u201d <\/span>The New York Times<\/span><\/i>, May 16, 2011, https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2011\/05\/17\/movies\/terrence-malick-asks-big-questions-in-the-tree-of-life.html. <\/span><\/li>\n
    11. Whitman, \u201cSong of Myself,\u201d 30. <\/span><\/li>\n
    12. Merleau-Ponty\u2019s central thesis concerns the \u201cprimacy\u201d of perception.\u201d For Merleau-Ponty, all consciousness emanates from a subject\u2019s precognitive, bodily experience. Maurice Merleau-Ponty<\/span>, The Phenomenology of Perception<\/span><\/i>, trans. Colin Smith, (London: Routledge, 1962).<\/span><\/li>\n
    13. Whitman, \u201cSong of Myself,\u201d 29.<\/span><\/li>\n
    14. Dar\u00edo Villanueva, <\/span>Images of the City: Poetry and Film, From Whitman to Lorca<\/span><\/i>, trans. Gabriel S. Baum (New York: CUNY Graduate Center, 2008), 2.<\/span><\/li>\n
    15. Daniela Babilon, <\/span>The Power of Smell in American Literature Odor, Affect, and Social Inequality<\/span><\/i> (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2017), 102.<\/span><\/li>\n
    16. Whitman, \u201cSong of Myself,\u201d 86. <\/span><\/li>\n
    17. Ibid., 68-9.<\/li>\n
    18. Elena del R\u00edo, \u201cBody as Foundation of the Screen: Allegories of Technology in Atom Egoyan\u2019s<\/span> Speaking Parts<\/span><\/i>,\u201d <\/span>Camera Obscura<\/span><\/i> 37\/38 (Summer 1996): 101.<\/span><\/li>\n
    19. Peter Coviello, <\/span>Intimacy in America : Dreams of Affiliation in Antebellum Literature<\/span><\/i> (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 127.<\/span><\/li>\n
    20. David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 61, 82. <\/span><\/li>\n
    21. Joseph M. Armengol-Carrera, \u201cOf Friendship: Revisiting Friendships between Men in American Literature,\u201d <\/span>Journal of Men’s Studies<\/span><\/i> 17, no. 3 (June 2010), 52.<\/span><\/li>\n
    22. Ibid., 206.\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n
    23. Whitman \u201cThis Moment Yearning and Thoughtful,\u201d <\/span>Leaves of Grass<\/span><\/i>, 128.<\/span><\/li>\n
    24. Ibid., 249.<\/span><\/li>\n
    25. Lauren Berlant, <\/span>Cruel Optimism<\/span><\/i>, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 2, 30.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n
    26. Ibid., 1.<\/span><\/li>\n
    27. Ibid., 2.<\/span><\/li>\n
    28. Ibid.<\/li>\n
    29. Gail Hamner, <\/span>\u201c<\/span>Filming Reconciliation: Affect and Nostalgia in The Tree of Life,\u201d <\/span>The Journal of Religion and Film<\/span><\/i> 18, no. 1 (2014), 5.<\/span><\/li>\n
    30. Adam Dahl, Empire of the People: Settler Colonialism and the Foundations of Modern Democratic Thought, (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2018), 142.<\/span><\/li>\n
    31. Ibid.<\/li>\n
    32. Sam Abrams, <\/span>The Neglected Walt Whitman<\/span><\/i>, (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993), 103. <\/span><\/li>\n
    33. Henry Nash Smith, \u201cWalt Whitman and Manifest Destiny,\u201d Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 44; Linda Furgerson Selzer, \u201cWalt Whitman, Clarence Major, and Changing Thresholds of American Wonder,\u201d Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 29, 4 (May 2012), 159.<\/span><\/li>\n
    34. Selzer, 159. Emphasis added.<\/span><\/li>\n
    35. James Steeves, \u201cThe Virtual Body: Merleau-Ponty\u2019s Early Philosophy of Imagination,\u201d <\/span>Philosophy Today<\/span><\/i> 45, no. 4 (Winter, 2001), 376.<\/span><\/li>\n
    36. Ibid., 378.<\/span><\/li>\n
    37. Ibid.<\/li>\n
    38. Ibid.<\/li>\n
    39. Smith, 44.<\/span><\/li>\n
    40. John D. Wilsey, \u201c\u2018Our Country Is Destined to be the Great Nation of Futurity\u2019: John L. O\u2019Sullivan\u2019s Manifest Destiny and Christian Nationalism 1837-1846,\u201d <\/span>Religions<\/span><\/i> 8, no. 4 (April 2017), para. 1.<\/span><\/li>\n
    41. Ibid.<\/li>\n
    42. Darren Dobson, \u201cManifest Destiny and the Environmental Impacts of Westward Expansion,\u201d <\/span>Flinders Journal of History and Politics<\/span><\/i> 29 (2013), 43.<\/span><\/li>\n
    43. Matthew Baigell, \u201cTerritory, Race, Religion: Images of Manifest Destiny\u201d, <\/span>Smithsonian Studies in American Art<\/span><\/i> 4, no. 3\/4 (Summer-Autumn, 1990), 12.<\/span><\/li>\n
    44. Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price, \u201cChants Democratic and Native American \u2013 Apostroph,\u201d The Walt Whitman Archive, 17 March 2019, https:\/\/whitmanarchive.org\/published\/LG\/1860\/clusters\/3. <\/span><\/li>\n
    45. Jason Xidias, <\/span>An Analysis of Benedict Anderson\u2019s Imagined Communities<\/span><\/i>, (New York: Routledge, 2017), 11.<\/span><\/li>\n
    46. Benedict Anderson, \u201cThe Origins of National Consciousness,\u201d in <\/span>Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism<\/span><\/i>, (London: Verso, 2006), 37-46. <\/span><\/li>\n
    47. Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price, \u201cChants Democratic and Native American,\u201d The Walt Whitman Archive, 17 March, 2019, https:\/\/whitmanarchive.org\/published\/LG\/1860\/clusters\/3.<\/span><\/li>\n
    48. Maire Mullins, \u201cProphetic Voice and Sacramental Insight in Walt Whitman’s \u2018Messenger Leaves\u2019 Poems,\u201d <\/span>Renascence<\/span><\/i>: <\/span>Essays on Values in Literature<\/span><\/i>,<\/span> 68, no. 4 (Fall 2016), 255.\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n
    49. Kathryn Brigger Kruger, \u201cAmerican \u2018Apostroph\u2019: Walt Whitman\u2019s Apostrophic O,\u201d <\/span>Walt Whitman Quarterly Review<\/span><\/i> 34, no. 1 (Summer 2016): 36.<\/span><\/li>\n
    50. Jonathan Culler, \u201cApostrophe,\u201d <\/span>Diacritics<\/span><\/i> 7, no. 4 (Winter, 1977), 63.<\/span><\/li>\n
    51. Nathanson, in Kathryn Brigger Kruger, 35.<\/span><\/li>\n
    52. Hamner, 2.<\/span><\/li>\n
    53. Ibid., 3.<\/li>\n
    54. Whitman, \u201cFirst O Songs for a Prelude,\u201d <\/span>Leaves of Grass<\/span><\/i>, 279-80.<\/span><\/li>\n
    55. Hamner, 9.<\/span><\/li>\n
    56. Michaels, 76.<\/span><\/li>\n
    57. Ibid.<\/li>\n
    58. Ibid., 65.<\/span><\/li>\n
    59. Ibid.<\/span><\/li>\n
    60. Robert Pippin, \u201cVernacular Metaphysics: On Terrence Malick’s \u2018The Thin Red Line\u2019,\u201d <\/span>Critical Inquiry<\/span><\/i> 39, no. 2 (January 2013), 255. <\/span><\/li>\n
    61. Ibid, 256.<\/span><\/li>\n
    62. Whitman, \u201cThe Wound Dresser,\u201d <\/span>Leaves of Grass<\/span><\/i>, 310.<\/span><\/li>\n
    63. Peter Coviello, \u201cWhitman’s Children,\u201d <\/span>Publications of the Modern Language Association of America<\/span><\/i> 128, no. 1 (2013), 74.<\/span><\/li>\n
    64. Ibid.<\/li>\n
    65. Matthew Wilhelm Kapell, <\/span>Exploring the Next Frontier: Vietnam, NASA, Star Trek and Utopia in 1960s and 1970s American Myth and History <\/span><\/i>(New York: Routledge, 2016), 3.<\/span><\/li>\n
    66. Kapell, 84.<\/span><\/li>\n
    67. Chris Healy, \u201c<\/span>Dead Man<\/span><\/i>: Film, Colonialism and Memory,\u201d in <\/span>Memory, History Nation: Contested Pasts<\/span><\/i>, in ed. Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone, (London: Routledge, 2017), 225.<\/span><\/li>\n
    68. Hamner, 18.<\/span><\/li>\n
    69. Kristina Louise Marie Knobelsdorff, \u201cRe-readings of the Book of Job in American Life and Letters: Debate and Dissent within Bounds,\u201d (PhD diss., University of Connecticut, 2005), 9-10.<\/span><\/li>\n
    70. Norman W. Jones, <\/span>The Bible and Literature<\/span><\/i>, (New York: Routledge, 2015), 80.<\/span><\/li>\n
    71. Ibid.<\/li>\n
    72. Harold Bloom, \u201cWhitman\u2019s America,\u201d <\/span>The Wall Street Journal<\/span><\/i> (New York), July 29, 2005,\u00a0 https:\/\/www.wsj.com\/articles\/SB112260447471999630.<\/span><\/li>\n
    73. Jones, 121.<\/span><\/li>\n
    74. Bloom, \u201cWhitman\u2019s America.\u201d<\/span><\/li>\n
    75. Turner, in George Rogers Taylor, <\/span>The Turner Thesis: Concerning the Role of the Frontier in American History<\/span><\/i>, 3rd edition, (Lexington: DC Heath & Co, 1972), 45.<\/span><\/li>\n
    76. Emerson, in Harold Bloom, \u201cIntroduction and Celebration,\u201d <\/span>Leaves of Grass: 1855<\/span><\/i>, viii-ix.<\/span><\/li>\n
    77. Ted Genoways, \u201cInventing Walt Whitman,\u201d <\/span>Virginia Quarterly Review: A National Journal of Literature and Discussion<\/span><\/i> 81, no. 2 (2005), 3.<\/span><\/li>\n
    78. Melanie Simicek, <\/span>American Dreams, Suburban Nightmares: Suburbia as a Narrative Space between Utopia and Dystopia in Contemporary American Cinema<\/span><\/i>, (Hamburg: Anchor Academic Publishing, 2014), 11.<\/span><\/li>\n
    79. Whitman, \u201cSong of Myself,\u201d <\/span>Leaves of Grass<\/span><\/i>, 34. <\/span><\/li>\n
    80. Ibid, 1.<\/span><\/li>\n
    81. Ibid.<\/li>\n
    82. Ibid., 16.<\/span><\/li>\n
    83. \u00a0Ibid., 1.<\/span><\/li>\n
    84. Ibid., 5-6.<\/span><\/li>\n
    85. Hamner, 8.<\/span><\/li>\n
    86. Whitman, \u201cPreface,\u201d <\/span>Leaves of Grass<\/span><\/i>. In <\/span>American Bard: The Original Preface to Leaves of Grass<\/span><\/i>, ed. William Everson (New York: The Viking Press, 1982), 9.<\/span><\/li>\n
    87. Berlant, 2.<\/span><\/li>\n
    88. Ibid.<\/li>\n
    89. Hamner, 13.<\/span><\/li>\n
    90. Berlant, 3.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      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 \u201cIntroduction to Film Studies.\u201d She is currently writing a thesis titled \u201cCinematic Aposiopesis: The Affect of Indeterminacy and Unresolved Endings in Films About Missing Persons,\u201d which calls on the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19530,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19530"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=242"}],"version-history":[{"count":27,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":343,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242\/revisions\/343"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}