Writing Biography (1)

Uncovering a Hidden Life

Early last year, Pat McGilligan suggested I write a biography. It was something I had never considered. My academic work had left me wary of concentrating so much time and effort on someone else’s life and work. I’d written my PhD on Percy Shelley, one of the less funny of the Romantic poets. After four years I was sick of the little shit. He’d written some good poetry but he was a sanctimonious oik with a knack of driving the women he liberated to despair and/or suicide. He wrote some great poetry, but it was also convoluted and at times barely understandable, even as it called for a popular revolution. Postmodernists loved it. Enough said.

But McGilligan was offering me something that I longed for: a book deal. And he was giving me a lot of encouragement. So I suggested Terrence Malick. He was the perfect subject for me. I knew his work; not many people had written on him from a biographical point of view and he hadn’t made too many films. I wouldn’t be bogged down in too much material. A pity the fool that writes on Michael Curtiz for instance. I also liked the fact that there was a Quixotic feel to the endeavour. After all, Malick was infamous for being a recluse. He hadn’t given an interview for over forty years and had it in his contract that he wouldn’t allow photographs of himself to be published. Writing his biography would be the equivalent of writing about JG Salinger or Thomas Pynchon. As John F Kennedy might say we do it because it’s haa-ard.

One idea would be to make the search for Malick a part of the actual story. This is such a brilliant no journalist has ever had it. Scratch that. This is the kind of journalistic equivalent of a writer struggling to write a novel writing about a writer struggling to write a novel. It’s a brilliant idea for all of twenty seconds but then the readers is left to gape at the narcissism of the writer and end up none the wiser. So I ditched that idea. I’d have an honest crack at getting him and if I couldn’t I’d write the unauthorised biography, which most biographies are anyway. Plus this freed me up to write what I wanted without having to worry about egos and what not.

This was a good feeling, because my attitude towards Malick was not straightforward. I first met Terrence Malick late one night. The day after my nineteenth birthday, I was watching Moviedrome, a BBC TV series, screening cult movies to British audiences. A late-night pleasure, for many of my generation it was a formative part of our film education. I watched on a portable TV propped on a chair by my bed. The presenter – Repo Man (1984) film director Alex Cox – introduced Badlands (1973) as part of a double-bill with The Prowler (1951). He had this to say: ‘One of the great unanswered questions about Badlands is ‘Whatever happened to the director?’ Cox described Terrence Malick’s career, his first two films: Badlands and Days of Heaven (1978), before going on: ‘Since then Malick has disappeared, leading to unkind gossip that he has drifted into a maelstrom of drugs or alcohol - or worse, gone back to teaching philosophy. I don’t think any of these stories is true. The fact is the film business attracts the worst sort of people, particularly at the money end, and some individuals are just too sensitive, or sensible, to put up with the sort of sociopaths you have to associate with if you want to direct films. My suspicion is that Malick is neither a freebaser nor a lunatic, but rather a decent sort of chap who decided that making movies was just a big headache he didn’t need. Good for him. Too bad for the rest of us.’

I’m not sure this was the first time I saw the film – I think it had been screened before. But it was the first time I thought about the director. In the mid-nineties, I saw Days of Heaven as part of a film season dedicated to cinematography and was equally impressed. I spent years looking for the music used in both films. (This was before the internet made such queries last seconds.)  When, in 1998, The Thin Red Line came out I went to the Odeon cinema on London Road in Liverpool to watch the film. I remember being knocked out by how strange it was and yet how brutal. I found it intensely moving. It looked like nothing else, except Days of Heavens and Badlands. Coincidentally, as I walked out of the cinema, I recognized a voice in front of me of someone walking in front of me: Alex Cox. He was complaining that Sean Penn’s haircut was totally wrong for the period, an unforgiveable anachronism. I wanted to tap him on the should and remind him of how he had put helicopters and computers in his excellent biopic Walker, which was set in the 1850s. Today I hear his comments about haircuts as criticism, but perhaps Cox had been marvelling at the choice. I guess we’ll never know. (Actually we will know because I emailed Cox as I was writing and asked. He couldn’t remember: ‘What was my reaction to The Thin Red Line at the Odeon London Road? I imagine it was Rottenesque.’ I reminded him, including my Walker (1987) rebuttal; and he replied: ‘Excellent point. I had a thing about haircuts back then.’)

The Thin Red Line baffled many. Jonathan Romney’s review in The Guardian gave the film five question marks instead of five stars, a response that struck me as totally appropriate. Many is the film I’ve reviewed where I wished I could supplement the stars for question marks, or asterisks or exclamation marks or poo emojis.

I was still at Liverpool at the time of the film’s release and had begun writing book reviews for a nascent site called Film-Philosophy.com. I continued to do so after moving to Italy, where I had taken a position as a literature professor at a small university. One of the books I reviewed was Hannah Patterson’s anthology The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America.[1] My review was entitled ‘Please Make More Films’.[2] With only three films in the space of thirty years, there was a realistic chance that by 2022 we might get another two at most.

Since then Malick has released eight films as director, with another film in post-production. Just to be clear, I’m not claiming any credit for this new surge of productivity. And sometimes I haven’t greeted every new release with the excitement that preceded The Thin Red Line. In fact, at some points, I felt something like dread. There have been films that I’ve loved and films that I’ve grown to love. And films that I liked. And that I felt myself straining to like. I’m not a good disciple and some of my resistance began to take on the tenor of betrayal. Why is this guy who I so admired doing this?

It’s an odd question. It reminds me of how James Joyce’s later experimental work was greeted. His brother Stanislau said something about binning everything if he could get one more story from Dubliners. Joyce though had done Dubliners; he didn’t want or need to do it any longer. Likewise, Malick was never going to make Badlands again. Tony Scott and Quentin Tarantino would try with True Romance (1993), but Malick couldn’t and wouldn’t. Few assert as extreme a judgement as David Thomson in his Biographical Dictionary of Film that: ‘Malick’s decline is one of the most alarming tales in the death of film’, but that arc would make for a much more interesting narrative, than someone who was consistently great - or for that matter consistently terrible. Inconsistency was interesting. My ambivalence piqued my interest. There was something to work out here. Something to worry at.

And then again, maybe I would get to talk to the man himself.

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[1] Hannah Patterson (ed.)  The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America, Columbia University Press, 2003.

[2] John Bleasdale, ‘Please Make More Films: On The Cinema of Terrence Malick’, Film-Philosophy, vol. 9 no. 33, June 2005 <http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol9-2005/n33bleasdale>.