ABSTRACT
Addressing Malick’s films in chronological order, this chapter notes the prominent presence of voice-over narrations in Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978) and shows how the narrations in those two early films differ—in affect as well as effect, in actual sound as well as in verbal content—from the soliloquies in the later films. In addition, the chapter compares the relative ‘clarity’ of the soliloquies in Thin Red Line (1998) and The New World (2005) with the rich ‘ambiguity’ of the soliloquies in The Tree of Life (2011), To the Wonder (2012), Knight of Cups (2015), and Song to Song (2017).
