Abstract
This chapter is a deep exploration of present unseeing in Malick’s Days of Heaven—a film about a failure to listen. The film applies Peirce’s and Deleuze’s semiotics to audible relations: firstness (hearing), secondness (listening), and thirdness (nomos). The film’s release corresponds with the emergence of mixing as an art form, which is a means of establishing relational modes of hearing and listening. It anticipates the film’s twin conflicts through the ambience of the locusts and the characters’ lack of audible openness. Both elements become knowable only in sight and by then it is too late. Without hearing, listening does not occur; without listening, secondness never gains its thirdness (nomos). Plato’s Myth of Er, Aristotle’s Poetics, Nietzsche’s readings of Heraclitus, and major Deleuzean concepts are all addressed in the context of the film.
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Notes
- 1.
Advocating for a conception that rings as Deleuzean and Spinozan, Simon Critchley writes that there is nothing “enchanting” to Malick’s nature , rather that nature has its beings, which “continue on regardless of our strivings” (2005, p. 146).
- 2.
Lifting from both Greek and Latin to mean “the completed form” or “the perfect image.”
- 3.
For ease of readership I will maintain the use of “differentiation” rather than Deleuze’s “differenciation,” the latter of which would be more appropriate in this case. On the distinction of the two terms, see Deleuze (1994).
- 4.
“Nature’s imperfection is that it has no history in any other sense, and its perfection is that it has the intimation of a history (namely, it has come to be, which is the past; and that it is, the present). But it is the perfection of the eternal not to have a history, to be the only thing that is and yet absolutely without a history” (Kierkegaard, 2009, p. 143).
- 5.
Could we not say the same about God and the Devil? The hearing of either comes from within the everyday of the indiscernible.
- 6.
“Christianity has never assented to giving each particular individual the privilege of starting from the beginning in an external sense. Each individual begins in an historical nexus, and the consequences of nature still hold true. The difference, however, consists in that Christianity teaches him to lift himself above this ‘more,’ and it judges him who does not do so as being unwilling” (Kierkegaard, 1980, p. 73).
- 7.
“Masking” is a sound-engineering term for one sound that covers another, which is normally unwanted.
- 8.
All three terms are attributed here to Aristotle’s Poetics (2005).
- 9.
Aristotle is responding to the Pythagorean music of the spheres in de Caelo, that its sound would not be audible since it has always been with us. See Allen (1991).
- 10.
“The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something—because it is always before one’s eyes.) …we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful ” (Wittgenstein, 2009, s129, p. 56).
- 11.
“For the Greeks, φύσις takes in the entire realm of the world in the sense of what’s out there—the totality of stars, earth, plants, animals, humans, and gods ” (Heidegger, 1969, p. 1).
- 12.
See Deleuze (1990a), “Spinoza Against Descartes.”
- 13.
See again, Heraclitus , Fragment 2. (McKirahan, 2010).
References
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Batcho, J. (2018). Days of Heaven and Hell. In: Terrence Malick’s Unseeing Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76421-4_4
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