Terrence Malick - Music Composed and Conducted by Ennio Morricone
Saying a prayer in the field of wheat.
And I remembered, oh my goodness, that’s what I saw under the Big Dipper tonight. I saw that either side of one’s Truth possess conspiracies about the other. They think We spout conspiracies into the wind, and they are appalled at our lack of truth, morality, sense, propriety. Remembered while watching the Prayer in the Wheat Scene.
The Combine Scene
Loud machines
Churning through wheat.
Should make you the richest man in the Panhandle.
Richard Gere in the Chicago steel mills, pouring fuel into the roaring fire, he gives the foreman the eye. The foreman does not like the laborer’s eye. They fight. Gere character walks away. Head out to the plains, to Texas, looking for work. He’s got his girl. They find work, $3 a day, harvesting wheat. Gere gets in a fight with a fellow worker who challenged him, said something about the girl he just looked at. The justified anger established, the shitty conditions. Imagine having to accept the conditions of employment and the pay. This is key.
Rich man has his eye on his girl. He offers her a job. She wants to stay. The tension is palpable. Two men and a woman. How will this play. How much anger will there be? The land owner and the foreman, the big house on the Texas hillock, surrounded by wheat. Yes, they pray at harvest. And yes, the work is grueling.
Beauty in shots, in golden wheat and rolling hills, in the machinery, in vistas. The poetry of the land and of labor. Land and labor, bodies and power, relationships disrupted. Lives disrupted. Work for nothing. Mean people. Haystacks. Serfs. This is Russia and the czars. Land, property, ownership, production, bodies, and profit. The harvest is profitable. Should make you the richest man in the Panhandle. But it is wheat. It is food. Wheat is survival, not money. And this the finest example of alienation. Here lives the very definition of alienation. The Owner of the Means of Production is the Owner of the Means of Survival. He’s got his accountant tabulating the haul by acre. This is money not food. Profit alienataes man from himself; the workers harvest but it is not their harvest. It is the Owner’s harvest. They are dispensable, and dispensed with. Herein lies class struggle. Herein lies war forever. And the wheat flows in the wind on the prairie. There is beauty in the wind and the grain; beauty in seed; beauty in food. There is nothing else but food and survival.
And what of conditions that make you angry, but in which you can do nothing. And that you cannot escape? Know this.
The train dropped them off at the three large grain elevators.
The train picked them up in front of the three large grain elevators.
And they stayed behind.
Tapdance Harmonica
And so he gave up his girl? Sure, ask that as a question. Now answer it. Yes. He gave up his girl, she married the rich guy, he has to observe, and be a normal guy, a friend. They’re one wonderful family out there on the Plains.
“The rich got it all figured out,” said the narrator, the sister, the little girl.
So, if you ask, What kind of fucked up shit is this?” you would be correct to wonder. But answer it again: He gave her up to escape that shit life. That’s the set up anyway. Thinking, what, they’ll escape it one day. He did not stand up to the man. Or, standing up to the man doesn’t work. And so you bend over and give up your woman too? What is the line? In this story, what is the line? Observe and find out.
Then she runs off with him in the morning. They play and drink stolen wine.
Where you been? I’ve been looking all over for you?”
I couldn’t sleep. I went out for a walk.”
“You should have woke me up?”
The ranch foreman says “I don’t think they’re honest people. In fact, I think they’re a bunch of con artists.”
“You’re talking about my wife.’ You know, maybe you’d better off taking care of the north till spring.”
The shot of the germinating seed, growing through the dirt toward the sun, reaching and stretching for light, pushing and wiggling through the dirt, time lapse. Quickly, takes you to a new level.
The Locust Horde is Red Alert
And then there is Fire.
The fire rages, loudly, hot, across the prairie, the wheat on fire and a strong wind. Threatens everything, including the house. Fire started because Rancher charged Richard Gere with his lantern.
The shots of the locusts were awesome.
The film finished after pestilence and fire, murder and a manhunt, large horses and dogs, men with guns on large horses. They caught him along the river bank; they shot him in the water. He floated away. A police officer hauled in the lifeless body.