Song to Song to Song to Song to Song to
On the main man Malick
Terrence Malick makes it very easy to make fun of him. There’s no ironic detachment in his many, many shots of characters dancing through nature while they narrate about love and/or loss. Malick simply showcases the world as he sees it, or at least his vision of the world documented as best he can. His method of filmmaking is unlike any filmmaker working today: He takes a loose outline and has his actors improvise several films worth of material before carving a meaning out of the mess in the editing. He’s a cinematic sculptor in this sense; the sculptor chisels away at rock until only the statue is left, and Malick chisels away at film until only Feeling is left. That’s why his films don’t flow like traditional cinema. They’re composed of fragments where just for a moment, whatever feeling Malick wanted to express was revealed in its purest form. Of course these moments can’t last forever, but what Malick does is take these moments and create a stream of simple, undiluted emotion that can be returned to time and time again. Within the walls of Malick’s films, the finite becomes infinite.
The plot of Song to Song is negligible: We follow a trio of characters in the Austin music scene: BV (Ryan Gosling), Faye (Rooney Mara) and Cook (Michael Fassbender) as they fall in and out of love with each other and people that happen to pass through their lives. The film has a back-and-forth structure between the ecstasy of finding a brand new connection with someone, only to be followed by the realization that this new world is a reiteration of old mistakes, followed again by another connection, another chance to build something new and leave the past behind. Malick takes a structure that could become monotonous and infuses it with his cinema of fragments to make every switch from joy to sorrow revelatory. Whatever point the characters are at on their emotional journeys to nowhere, Malick seems as convinced of the permanent nature of his characters’ feelings as they themselves are.
When BV and Faye first fall in love, the edit is composed of euphoric moments firing one after the other, their love surrounding them wherever they go. But when their baggage gets in the way and causes their relationship to implode, the misery that follows is just as real and inescapable as everything that came before. The past does not negate the present does not negate the future. There’s a “scene” where BV and Cook fight over Cook ripping him off. They jump locations from a squash court to a music festival to a rooftop party, and yet the conversation remains intact, because wherever they go, the feeling is the same. The physical setting is just a vehicle for the internal to be made external. The film ends happily, sure, but that happiness is a point on a wheel that can turn to despair in a moment. Then again, the wheel can turn back just as quickly.
The paradox of Malick’s career is that he uses material tools to chase something immaterial. Perhaps that’s the goal of all filmmakers, but Malick’s films are unbound to anything that might hold him back from his pursuit of seeing something that is completely and utterly itself, whether that’s a bird flying through the sky or Michael Fassbender doing a weird little jig in the middle of an argument. All Malick is is what he’s going after.