Two Letters about Two Viewings of To the Wonder Morgan Meis (bio) 1 Dear ______, Our shared enthusiasm for To the Wonder puts us at odds with most of the world. Certainly the critical consensus stands against it. Have you read some of those reviews? What is it that we see in this film that others don't? For me it all begins with the images of Mont St-Michel, that venerable Catholic pilgrimage site in Normandy. Malick's images of the place startle my memory. My first trip to Mont St-Michel happened when I was eleven years old. I wasn't raised in the Church, but I believe that in some sense what happened to me when I was eleven ended up bearing fruit twenty-five or so years later. My Catholic baptism in Sri Lanka took place when I was nearly forty. This process connecting time and spiritual conversion is something I think Malick captures well in To the Wonder. On one hand, you can look at the experiences in your life in a pretty flat way. I could just list different things that happened to me. "August 13, 1983: saw an amazing medieval fortress and church on an island off the coast of Normandy. Ate trout on the bone for the first time ever. Slept well." This would be an accurate portrayal of what actually happened. And it would also miss everything that is of any importance. Because what happened to me at Mont St-Michel, and what happened to me that entire summer I spent with my aunt in Paris and traveling around Europe, was that I was continually shocked and astounded by experiencing the world in new and surprising and destabilizing ways. I was opened up. My heart softened. I'm not sure exactly why it happened for me that summer, probably, a number of forces and accidents in my life all came together at once, the way those things happen. I was a pretty cynical eleven-year-old kid. But wandering around Europe with my aunt knocked that out of me, for a time. Later, of course, it came back, the coldness, the hardness. And then I had to fight it off again. All of life, in a sense, has been like that for me. Learning various ways to protect myself from the empty deadness and disappointment of the world … and then realizing that it is the self-protection, the putting-on-armor, that contributes to that very sense of deadness. In fact, when I'm opened up, when I'm snapped in two and knocked on my ass by the otherwise insignificant beauty of the world, that's when life seems more like a mystical hovering than like a flat and dead list of events and … I don't know, mute causality. [End Page 56] I see Malick's films over the last few years as an attempt to put that specific way of being-in-the-world, the Mont St-Michel way of being-in-the-world, into a film. Whether this is successful or not is another question. But I will say it is an incredibly bold and moving thing to try to do. Crazy perhaps. Parts of Tree of Life probably fail exactly because they try too hard in this area. And many of the scenes in most of his recent movies, with all the fucking muslin floating in the breeze and people wandering around meaningfully on the beach … they probably aren't the right images for the feeling he's trying to get. Maybe he already got it back in Days of Heaven with some of those late evening shots, the magic hour out in the fields. Maybe everything else is just piling on. But I think he wants to try, at least. (Is there anything more to life—or to art?) I think he wants to remind me, on film, what it felt like to be eleven years old and wandering around at the top of Mont St-Michel, utterly astounded and utterly convinced, finally, that something in my heart has been right all along. That life is not simply a cruel trick, and that throwing...