How Terence Malick juxtaposed the 2 symbolic worlds in his film The New World

In this post I want to specifically discuss the dynamic I found in Terrence Malick's 2005 movie The New World.

It's about the 2 worlds I keep discussing here on this blog—that of strictly ordered conscious awareness with all its logic and language, and that of the free and poetic unconscious, transcendent and natural. He juxtaposes these 2 worlds constantly, the world of civilization and structure represented by the English, and the innocent childlike world of nature by the natives. This juxtaposition, these opposed symbolic elements, take many different forms in the film, some visual and some auditory or conceptual.

In many ways the natives are associated with animals throughout (connects up with this post, the world of objects, animals & nature from the very beginning of this blog). They move at times like birds—quick jerky head movements, strutting like peacocks—at times like deer (in fact the voiceover at one point directly says they're approaching like timid deer), and when they attack they move like wolves or bears. Their vocalizations are based on those of various animals and they swim naked like fish.

By contrast the English try in every way to insulate themselves from nature. Their fort is built from dead trees, a spiked wall to keep nature out to what extent possible. Inside the ground is hardpack dirt rather than the lush green forest that surrounds it, and their houses and buildings are rectangular boxes (shapes not found in nature)—dark and cloying. They cover themselves in heavy steel armor and layers of clothing and they use a complex structured language to communicate. The natives do have language, but it's used infrequently.

And the natives dance. Most of their movements are graceful and dancelike. I've seen angry diatribes in the comment section @ Amazon and elsewhere that this is not authentic—Indians don't dance around all the time. Ironically enough, those comments are by people trapped entirely in the literal and aggressive left brain, who fail or refuse to see the juxtaposition this post is about. They refuse to allow the director any poetic license—they want pure left-brain history and data without any artistry involved.

John Smith lives with the natives for a time and gradually sheds his civilized garb and language and ways—becomes increasingly like them, in tune with nature. He moves toward transcendence from the trap of the purely literal and structured. Meanwhile he's teaching Pocahontas his language, which is sure to contaminate her purity. By the end of the movie she's living in England, dressing, walking and talking like the English do.

It's she who utters the line that became the title of the movie, when she calls England the new world. For her of course, civilization (consciousness) is a new world. But in a deeper sense, civilization and consciousness are themselves new arrivals in the long-existing natural world of pure poetry and transcendence.

The most interesting thing I noticed though is the way these elements—the conscious and unconscious worlds—are juxtaposed. The hard part is to fit them together in a way that allows them to harmonize or at least not clash as they usually do. And Malick came up with a brilliant method.

It's the string and pebble approach I discussed briefly in the previous post—a game children play where they tie a pebble to the end of a string and spin it over their heads, gradually paying out more and more string. The string is the structure, the central anchor point trying to pull the pebble back. It's tradition, the restrictions placed on pure untrammeled imagination. And the pebble, pulling out away from the center point, is the poetry—the pure dreamlike wash of visual and auditory beauty that takes over in the natural world. The pebble provides the outward centrifugal pull, a movement away from the restrictive structuring of filmic style and story. Both are necessary to maintain the tension—without the string the pebble would just fall, and without the pull of the pebble the string couldn't reach nearly as far.

These are the 2 worlds in opposition against each other. It's a tug-of-war between them. Sometimes one gains traction and nearly takes over the filmic technique, sometimes it goes the other way. Traditional narrative form is used when we're in the world of the English settlement, it's all dialogue and very ordinary filming techniques. But when the camera floats out into the free natural world all that evaporates. Instead you get long dreamlike passages of pure cinematic poetry. He pays out more string at times, lets all narrative form dissolve from the movie, and at times he reels it in tight, restricts his techniques down to the familiar narrative ones codified by the Classical Hollywood studio system. It's this interplay between the pebble and the string that's so fascinating—the successive tightening and releasing of formality.