Song to Song

How can I say what I want to say about this film? I must find a format for characterizing the film. The easiest is incidentally comparing and contrasting it with Knight of Cups: Knight of Cups exists in my understanding, the way I understand it, and it is easiest to assimilate Song to Song into there through association with that film.

This may be an unfortunate state of affairs.

I still may experience Song to Song as its own film, but it only adds to my understanding insofar as it contrasts with how I understand the other film, or fortifies that understanding, and so all I have to say about it are these contrasts and to a lesser degree fortifications.

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Rooney Mara is the centerpiece of this film. Her involuntary self-destruction is a virus to those who bring her near; she interacts with every character, never to a net positive effect. Michael Fassbender is dangerous in another way -- he is greedy with power. Or is this essentially the same thing? He resembles the protagonist of the last movie in many superficial ways. Ryan Gosling is good. All of these demonstrate the desolating power of human attachment, which can turn stable lives violent, introduce enormous emotional baggage, create crushing winless battles, render a human being - organism with the greatest potentiality, similitude with God - helpless and agonized. The introduction of love has an unbelievably large influence on any course of human events. The pain which can be forsook by forsaking love is great; the life which is forsook by forsaking love is great.

The storyline in this film was more coherent, down-to-earth, slightly more accessible than the previous. The end was just and definite -- not morally ambiguous, ambivalent, indefinite, like the previous.

I like this movie. I am detracted by the musical element -- I am too familiar with the object, so it compromises the fantasy for me unless executed exquisitely. In this movie not enough attention was paid to the music, so it compromised the atmosphere for my experience.

I probably prefer Knight of Cups; I recall it being spacier, dreamier, with less trudging through the trenches of human emotion. One could not relate to any fleeting storyline so one was not weighed down by any storyline; one could float with the movie. Perhaps floating is my preferred mode of ambulation with Malick.

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Are these characters real? They are free, floating souls, without self-image, playful, juvenile -- they are winged souls who fly and space is free but empty. They are reflective, and sensory-obsessed. Tactile fixation is a crude way of labeling their physical, tangible longing for something in this life. They are singularly unbound -- the mean irony is that they're unleashed into emptiness, yet this is the condition of freedom. These characters seem not to exist outside Terrence Malick movies, and by the dozen within. Their abandon is enviable -- but whatever aids their perpetual searching is made useless when there is nothing to find. This is the mark of these movies: there is nothing to find for these who search most.

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Most striking line: "It was like a new paradise, forgiveness."

12/31