A Speck in the Universe: On Voyage of Time

Abstract

A Speck in the Universe:On Voyage of Time Maud Casey (bio) A few years back, I went to a dentist who played the Discovery Channel constantly, on enormous plasma TVs, throughout the office. It drove the staff crazy. When I asked the woman working the front desk how often the TVs were on, she leveled her gaze at me. "All. Day. Long." It was the dentist's attempt at kindness, she said. For the patients. TVs were mounted above every dental chair so you could watch as the chair started its dread recline. Since I needed twelve dental crowns, I saw a lot of Discovery Channel that year. As demolition began, a cheetah would bound across a vast savanna and tear a gazelle to pieces; a school of fish swam and scattered, swam and scattered in an ocean that went on forever. Somewhere in that watery abyss, a whale keened. It kind of worked. Not kindness so much as existential distraction. When I say Terrence Malick's Voyage of Time: The imax Experience is like sitting in a dentist's chair having twelve crowns put in while watching the Discovery Channel—only with next-generation Laser projection, a twelve-channel sound system, and a Brad Pitt voice-over narration—I don't mean it only in a bad way. What Malick calls his "scientific chronology of the Earth," for which he consulted natural historians and nasa advisers, was forty years in the making. Pressing his considerable brain against the universe across millennia and Earth-ages—stars collapse, volcanoes erupt, life migrates from the sea to land, dinosaurs! (he loves him a CGI dinosaur), humans clamber out of the muck—he's after the galactic view. Astrophysics and evolutionary biology with a Mahler soundtrack. Not existential distraction so much as a (strenuous) effort at existential engagement. My child, what do you see? Pitt asks as the universe is born. "His writing style is horrendous," the girl child in front of me and my friend says to her mother when we shuffle out of the theater at the end of the movie, down jackets swishing against each other in the chill. My friend's jacket, the brightest, sweetest blue, is how I keep track of him in the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum's Lockheed Martin Theater crowd. On our way to dinner, we discuss the movie's many problems, including its horrendous writing style. We discuss Malick's training as a philosopher. How much is made, and rightly so, of his interest in philosophy and its role in his films. How my heart shuts down when I read treatises on the Heideggerian themes in Malick's movies. (Maybe it's the use of the word themes, which, like the word symbols, makes me as grouchy [End Page 75] as Flannery O'Connor.) How these treatises discuss the way Malick cinematizes Heidegger's being of beings and the presence of beings. How the smug certainty of Pitt's voice slams the door on the searching humility Malick achieves in so many of his movies. That wide-open wonder—Perspective! Scale!—can be as bright and sweetly blue as my friend's jacket bobbing beside me as we walk. But the slamming-shut door of Pitt's voice, even over the course of an abbreviated forty-five minutes, starts to sound like tooth demolition. Maybe, my friend and I wonder, we should have seen the longer version with the Cate Blanchett voice-over. Everything is better with Cate Blanchett. Maybe we should have seen it stoned? From out of nothing, the beginning. When did dust become life? Death, when did it first appear? From out of nothing: YOU. What binds us together? Makes us one? Love.Is love too not a work of nature? Words are a problem sometimes (I declare with words, from my life of words). Hurting not helping, as a friend of mine used to say, a variety of shorthand with her husband, to whom she is still married. Your words are hurting not helping, Malick. Yet I want so much to stay married to you. Look. Listen. What is it? This miracle. This gift.Infinite like you, child...