Interview: Charles Taylor

Philosophy Now, July/Aug 2011

http://www.philosophynow.org/issue74/Charles_Taylor

Charles Taylor is one of the world’s leading living philosophers. Chris Bloor talks to him about philosophy and society.

Charles Taylor’s intellectual journey took him from studying at McGill University in Montreal to Balliol College Oxford, then back to McGill. There he has taught philosophy and politics while writing a series of influential articles on concepts of freedom and the nature of explanation in the social sciences. His books include works on Hegel, as well as Sources of the Self: The Making Of The Modern Identity. His most recent book, A Secular Age, was published in 2007. In 2007 he was also awarded the Templeton Prize for his life’s work, which comes with an award of $1.5 million; and this year he was awarded the Kyoto Prize, which includes an award of 50 million yen ($500,000).

Chris Bloor: Professor Taylor, were you surprised to win the Kyoto Prize?

Charles Taylor: Yes, I was indeed, because it’s a very rare honour. I didn’t expect it at all. I understand it more now that I’ve gone there and talked to the judges. They’re not only looking for people who have done something important intellectually, but they look very much at your attitude – whether your motivation is to help mankind and so on. And the application to the political world of the idea of helping humanity was very important in my motivation.

Before that you won the Templeton Prize?

That’s right. That was even more surprising in a sense, because in previous years they were giving it to natural scientists who were interested in a link with spirituality, and not at all to … whatever I am! I guess I’m somewhere in-between a social scientist and a humanities person.

What are you going to spend the money on?

A lot of what I do in philosophy, in my work in general, comes out of networks. Certain people I work with need to meet together, and we can’t simply wait until we all get invited to go to a symposium in London or wherever. It’s very helpful to be able to move around, and to move other people around, and to bring them together in small groups, be it in New York or Chicago or Europe, or even Delhi, which is one of the places we’ve been meeting. That’s essential for everybody in this type of work, unless you’re a total hermit and get it all out of your own head, which I could never possibly do. I need to work like that. I’m doing things across disciplinary boundaries, and I probably make lots of mistakes when I cross these boundaries and poach in historians’ territory or political scientists’ territory or sociologists’ territory. You make less terrible mistakes if you’re working with sympathetic social scientists, historians, and so on.

You found the analytic philosophy at Balliol College dry and uninvolving. Do you have any advice to students who might find philosophy off-putting or not what they expected?

Really, it’s a DIY situation – do it yourself! That’s not necessarily impossible – I don’t mean do it yourself alone. I suppose I can best put this autobiographically. When I felt like that in Oxford, I found some like-minded graduate students, and we very quickly discovered some interesting authors – in our case Merleau-Ponty – so we read them together. This is what you sometimes just have to do, if it isn’t on offer in the course you’re doing. And on the web it’s even easier to get hold of interesting stuff and discuss it than it was for us back in the 50s.

The flip side of that is that some students, particularly in multi-disciplinary courses, find philosophy fascinating but overwhelming. They embark on required texts such as Heidegger’s Being and Time or something by Foucault, but they can’t understand them, there’s something missing which they expect to be there. What would you advise such students?

Well, yeah, that’s a very difficult thing, because you are quite right, sometimes, as with the work of Foucault, it can take a really big investment of time, particularly if it’s just you and the text and you’re reading it for the tenth time, asking ‘What’s going on?’ But there are some good commentaries out there. Hubert Dreyfus has written a commentary on Division One of Being and Time that I think really bridges the gap between Heidegger and anybody with a certain knowledge of philosophy in the English-speaking world. But it is certainly true that for both Heidegger and Foucault you definitely have to retool your mind (laughs). You don’t get it right away, because they’re not writing in terms immediately connected to the terms you’ve been used to.

Do you think there’s a problem in trying to fit such characteristic and difficult thinkers into a typical university syllabus?

At any given moment, in any given situation where people are discussing things, there are assumptions so deep they’re not even seen as assumptions, because they look so obvious – they look like ‘two and two make four’. The great example that I’ve been battling with throughout my life is the whole epistemological tradition from Descartes. Descartes says in one of the letters that we get all our ideas from the impact of the outside world causing representations in our minds. When he was saying that, he was saying ‘two and two make four’ – an obvious thing – yet it’s actually quite wrong in many ways (laughs). But people don’t see that: they get so into this ‘obvious’ way of thinking that it just never occurs to them it might be wrong.
When you get somebody thinking beyond the obvious, at first you’re baffled by what they’re saying – they seem to be speaking nonsense: ‘two and two is five’! ‘Retooling your mind’ means being able to haul the absolutely unquestioned frameworks up and looking at them, and seeing that it ain’t necessarily so; or maybe it is so in a way in the end, but you have to argue for it in light of other possibilities. That’s a very big change. And before the penny drops, you can be completely baffled by a text where somebody’s challenging your basic assumptions. It looks like somebody’s just denying obvious facts about the world or the mind.

In you work you’ve often been trying to correct a kind of failure of self-understanding of our culture. For example, you called Sources of The Self ‘an essay in retrieval’. In some sense we’re missing what it is to have arrived at this point in our history, so your work is an attempt to explain Western culture in the early 21st century to itself.

I think that’s right. I try to do that by delving back into history. If you’ve lived through a transformation you understand something of how you got to where you now are. But further generations may lose sight of history, and they take the mental landscape they’re in as being totally natural. They therefore miss something about the nature of that landscape, about the nature of their reference points of identity. They take them not as adopted possible reference points, but as the obvious ones you can’t avoid. So they’re living their identity, but in a way which hides very important dimensions and features of it. So it is a matter of retrieval – retrieving the trajectory that brought you to where you are. I think that should be a very important part of philosophical work.

How might that be accomplished?

Well, I think that there are certain moments in university history where this kind of retrieval was maximally facilitated. At the time of Max Weber – maybe we nostalgically magnify that – and even slightly later, you found that philosophy students in Germany, were given an incredibly broad course in Greek philosophy and the history of philosophy, and Kant and German idealism; but they also read Weber, Durkheim, Troeltsch, and Dilthey. So they had a broad understanding of how the questions then being debated had got to that stage.

That was one of the things that struck me when I managed to see the tail end of it – because I think it’s dying out, even in Germany. When I visited Habermas, he was handing on that kind of education to his students, even though he didn’t necessarily agree with a lot of the stuff that he was conveying to them. That’s what got me riled up when I went to Oxford – they were so narrow, those people: they weren’t even reading one tenth of the tradition that had got them to where they were.

I wanted to ask you about Sources of the Self. This year is the twentieth anniversary of its initial publication.

That’s right – already! That’s so fast, it just seems like yesterday!

That was the first book where I systematically presented what I wanted to say. Before, I wrote books on Hegel, and a lot of articles on aspects of social science. I was very much wanting not just to argue against certain positions in social science, psychology and so forth, but to understand why people were defending those positions which I thought were false and very implausible. But in order to see why, you have to see the development of the modern conception of the self. So that was the first attempt I made to open up that area – not simply arguing against certain errors, but trying to explain how the situation could arise in which those errors would be plausible to people. I still feel that was a real turning point in my work, because from then on I could expand and work on that field of problems – how we got to the point where the things we’re arguing about are ‘x and y’ as opposed to ‘y and z’ or ‘z and q’ – why the obvious alternatives seem to be these and not something else. And that’s a real effort of retrieval, trying to see how we got here, and trying to understand it differently.

You make many powerful assertions about modern identity drawn not only from philosophy but from the history of religion, and literature and art and so on. It is difficult for someone who does not have that breadth of knowledge to assess your claims adequately.

Yes. So great (laughs) – so people might go and read something! It connects up with what I was saying about my ideal picture of the German university circa 1920: that we really should have that kind of breadth in our education system for the history of humanities, social science, and so on. So I’m not displeased by that kind of reaction. If people really want to know if an idea is right, then they’ll go and read something, and it will make them capable of forming their own view about how we got to where we are.

The book contains a soundbite that sums up your criticism of the shallower aspects of our culture: ‘Nothing would count as a fulfilment in a world in which literally nothing is important but self-fulfilment’.

Well, ‘what makes things important in the end’ can’t simply turn on fulfilling or satisfying the self. That puts you in a kind of regress: ‘Okay! But what is it that is going to give me self-fulfilment?’ You have in the end to point to some purpose in something beyond you, such as in the way things are, or the way the universe is, or the way human beings are, or the direction of human history. The things that people find deep, deep self-fulfilment in all have that feature. One person says “I want to work with Médecins Sans Frontieres in the Congo” and another person says “I want to write the Great Canadian novel.” It should be obvious that all these forms of very deep satisfaction refer to something that reaches beyond you. So it’s a soundbite, but it has an important truth.

I was thinking about your recent book A Secular Age this morning and a bus passed by with an atheist (or more correctly, agnostic) slogan “There’s probably no God: now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”

I heard about that! It’s hilariously funny. It’s very odd, isn’t it? I’m trying to figure out why this is happening in our time. This new phenomena is puzzling – atheists that want to spread the ‘gospel’, and are sometimes very angry. I think it may be rather like the response of certain bishops to Darwin in the 19th century. The bishops had a sense that the world was going in a certain direction – more and more conversion, and so on – and then they find they’re suddenly upset in their expectation and they get very rattled and very angry. Similarly, we’re seeing this now among the secularising intelligentsia – liberals who felt that the world was going in a certain direction, that it was all going according to plan – and then when it seems not to be, they get rattled. So you get these rather pathetic phenomena. Putting things on buses as though that’s going to make people somehow change their view about God, the universe, the meaning of life and so on. A bus slogan! It’s not likely to trigger something very fundamental in anybody.

It seems symptomatic of when you say that modern people are stuck between two polarised positions – as you put it, Strong Atheism on the one hand, and on the other, Strong Religiosity. But this leaves the average person wavering between the two, not particularly drawn to one pole or the other, but kind of messing around in the middle.

That’s right. And it can lead just to perplexity, or it can lead to bricolage – putting together your own position. In A Secular Age I mention lots of people who obviously do so. Victor Hugo is a very good nineteenth century French? example of people who put together a middle position, and I think it’s a very, very widespread phenomenon today – including the cases where it’s de facto bricolage, but it doesn’t appear that they’ve put it together themselves. Then there are the cases where people are self-consciously putting it together. That’s what people often mean when they say, “I’m spiritual, but not religious. ‘Not religious’ means I don’t belong to any tradition with a pre-existing formula that I would have to sign up to; but I’m ‘spiritual’ in that I’m exploring this whole area.”

This scene of such a tremendous number of different positions – spiritual, anti-spiritual and what have you – being held simultaneously in the same society – is undoubtedly unprecedented in history, I think, and the number of positions are multiplying. There are positions which were just not thought of a hundred years ago at all. That passage about the two extremes people are reacting to was my attempt to look at some of the underlying dynamic.

You make the point in your work that liberal democracy is confused when it holds itself up as neutral. You say, in fact ‘liberal democracy’ is itself a value, which sometimes comes into conflict with other values, as it should, and we should recognise that this is inevitable.

Yes. I think that there’s no such thing as total neutrality, particularly in terms of what the good life is. For instance, the notion of participating, of being a citizen, taking part in determining the future of yourself and your society – I think this is not an ‘optional virtue’, as it were (laughs): it’s very close to the health and lifeblood of liberal, democratic society. We should be upfront about that.

You’ve suggested that when considering the claims of different cultural perspectives, it’s valuable to adopt a ‘language of perspicuous contrast’ – striving for a form of discourse which highlights the differences between those cultures rather than attempting to gloss over or reconcile them.

I think that’s what we have to aim at if we want to get these differences out into a sphere where there can be a rational and calm discussion of how to live together with tension between different groups. It’s only by coming to such a language that we can have a discussion that doesn’t degenerate into a kind of stigmatising of the other. It’s not just important in the classroom or the anthropology monograph, it’s tremendously important in our public debate. We need it very badly in our diverse societies. I’m very pleased about what happened in a public consultation in Quebec over religious extremism. People started off saying very xenophobic-sounding things, but then others, particularly Muslims, came along and said “this is just wrong.” The debate evolved to a non-caricature way of presenting the differences. I think that’s what we always have to try to do.

In an interview with Bryan Magee in 1978 you said a lesson from Marx is that “at the very moment when men have developed immense potential to control their lives and to make of themselves whatever they want, this power is, as it were, wrenched from their hands by their own internal divisions.” Similarly, in Ethics of Authenticity, you wrote of ‘La Lotta Continua’ – ‘the continuing struggle’ – a phrase you borrow from the Italian Red Brigade. Is your message here that a degree of conflict and upheaval is inevitable in Western society?

I hope we don’t have to get used to this level of disarray in our economy! But yes, in a general sense there are no final, determining solutions. There are deep dilemmas, and we’re being pulled in different directions, and we’re going to have to find the least destructive way of putting things together. I think that’s true also of the current dilemma, of on the one hand needing markets and a certain degree of free agency in them, and on the other hand, the need to head off the terrible consequences that markets can bring about if left unfettered. The resolution’s going to be difficult.

The same thing is true of the two tendencies I call the ‘technologist’ and the ‘expressivist’. I think most of us have both tendencies, but there are obviously people who are more into one or other, and they square off against each other. We’re never going to reach a final and definitive solution. That’s what I mean by La Lotta Continua. There’s always going to be the problem of putting perspectives together. There will always be people pushing terribly hard in one direction and not paying attention to other requirements. We are always going to need to knit together a solution that will last for a while between opposing tendencies.

So is the hope that we can strive towards some higher level in which the fundamental conflicts of culture are resolved a pipe dream?

Yeah. That’s a pipe dream. It’s a beautiful dream, but it’s not something we can possibly hope for. It’s a pipe dream in the kind of sense that Marxism in its original form contained. This means that Marxism’s a tremendously interesting philosophy to read, because it holds out an important definition of the main cultural contradiction – as opposed to its error of thinking that we can resolve it. It’s just as bad not even to see the contradiction – to have this bland neo-liberal view that there are no major cultural contradictions at all, and things will all go swimmingly, that we’ll all just globalise. This is the absolute nadir of blindness. Those neo-liberals have to be put to read Marx – and if they totally convert to Marxism, then maybe they’ll have to be corrected by a dose of reality!

Chris Bloor studied under Charles Taylor and now philosophizes in London.

Sentimentality or Honesty? On Charles Taylor

Mark Oppenheimer | August 10, 2011

The Nation

 

The philosopher Charles Taylor is a sadly endangered type: the philosopher-statesman. Born in Montreal in 1931, Taylor studied at McGill and Oxford, where he was a pupil of Isaiah Berlin and G.E.M. Anscombe. In 1961 he returned to his hometown to teach at McGill, and during the next decade he lost four races for the House of Commons, most notably in 1965 to future Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. By the end of the decade, Taylor was sufficiently well-known as a politico that even his writing two successive books on Hegel could not tarnish his public reputation. Taylor later taught at Oxford, then McGill again, and more recently at Northwestern. Over the years his interests have shifted from analytic philosophy to the concrete political realm; he has made major contributions to the fields of human rights, multiculturalism and communitarianism.
Taylor is particularly animated by the problem of Québécois nationalism, which concerns—and perhaps has determined—two of his chief sympathies: liberal democracy and multiculturalism, not just within societies but among them. Those sympathies conflict, of course. On the one hand, Taylor knows that liberal democracies are supposed to treat all people equally; on the other hand, he is sympathetic to his concitoyens’ desire for a French Quebec, an assertion of ethnic chauvinism that mandates legal privileges for one ethnic group and disabilities for another, such as the law prohibiting commercial signs in English.

As Taylor sees it, Quebec is not merely his worry but all of ours. For what he is asking—along with contemporaries like K. Anthony Appiah, Seyla Benhabib and Amy Gutmann—is how the Western liberal can reconcile a preference for liberal democracy with the illiberalism necessary for cultural preservation or self-preservation, which many accept as understandable goals. To those who feel that this tension is not easily resolved, the Jewish character of Israel, say, is not just a case of ethnic chauvinism—it is also the embodiment of a people’s aspirations to endure and thrive. At the same time, the believer in cultural preservation will be sympathetic to the Palestinian people—not just as individuals seeking justice but as a community with collective aspirations that could not be fulfilled by citizenship in some other Arab country.
The tension between liberal democracy and certain kinds of preference—whether the preference is construed as ethnic, religious, national or all three—at times feels unbearable for the Western liberal. Americans, as it happens, are particularly ill suited to dealing with the claims of religious and ethnic pride. We get to eat our cake in a country that is basically nice to us all, Scientologist and Sikh alike. The United States, for all its paroxysms of xenophobia, is unusual for being a country where ethnic chauvinism has basically no popular support or institutional sanction. (Representative Peter King’s recent hearings on American Muslim support for terrorism are a shameful exception.) Here, even outright bigots tend not to think anymore that their bigotry should be written into the law. With two possible exceptions—affirmative action and the case of self-governing Indian reservations—America pretty uniformly sides with liberal democracy, one adult/one vote, hedged by colorblind constitutional rights. Yet this is decidedly not the case for many other countries, even our closest cousins: Britain contends with Scottish nationalism and, of course, the once-violent conflict in Ireland; while Canada has, in addition to its native peoples, the far more politically charged issue of Québécois nationalism.

* * *

Taylor is a more relevant statesman as a philosopher, with his electioneering days behind him, than he was as a politician in the 1960s. He has also become a very famous philosopher since then. In 1989 he published Sources of the Self, a voluminous philosophical and historical treatise on the evolution of identity in the West. In that book, Taylor argues that the modern human derives identity from “first, modern inwardness, the sense of ourselves as beings with inner depths…second, the affirmation of ordinary life which develops from the early modern period; third, the expressivist notion of nature as an inner moral source.” In 2007 he published A Secular Age, in which he tries to explain our “move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others.” It is a book so big that a reviewer could mention its heft (“weighing in at 1.3 kilos,” said the Guardian’s critic), a book that you may not have read but sense you ought to reckon with, the Infinite Jest of historical philosophy. Robert Bellah, the great sociologist, called A Secular Age “one of the most important books written” in his lifetime, which is the kind of hyperbole that at least keeps you from selling it to the used bookstore. That year, Taylor won the Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries About Spiritual Realities, a lucrative honor previously bestowed on the august, like physicist Freeman Dyson, as well as the not, like Campus Crusade for Christ founder Bill Bright.

Sources of the Self and The Secular Age bracketed shorter books, including Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition” (1992), in which Taylor attempts, rather inconclusively, to make sense of the Quebec problem. In 2008 he co-wrote a 300-page government report affirming Quebec’s French identity but suggesting ways to make it more accommodating to minorities. Earlier this year he published Dilemmas and Connections, an essay collection, not as boring as its meaningless title suggests, that updates points made in A Secular Age. Not long before, a conference on Taylor had yielded Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, a collection of twelve responses to A Secular Age from leading scholars in different fields, like Bellah and the theologian John Milbank.

Read one at a time, Taylor’s books can be illuminating and actually quite gripping. The Ethics of Authenticity, also from 1992, is a spirited defense of the West’s much-derided emphasis on fulfillment, or self-actualization, or what Taylor calls “authenticity” (this short book can function as Cliffs Notes for Sources of the Self). Yet his books can also be scattered, repetitive and windy, like the disparate essays in Dilemmas and Connections. Sometimes, Taylor is the kind of writer so fearful of simplifying a complex truth, or flattening out nuances, that he runs out of space (or courage or stamina) just when he seems about to say what he is trying to say.

For example, in the essay “Democratic Exclusion (and Its Remedies?),” in the new collection, Taylor writes that “a full understanding of the dilemma of democratic exclusion shows that there is no alternative” to what he calls “sharing identity space.” Sounds promising. But a few sentences later, as it occurs to you to ask what “sharing identity space” means, he writes:

What this means in practice is beyond the ambit of this essay. Solutions have to be tailored to particular situations. But some of the political mechanisms of this sharing are already well-known, for example, various brands of federalism, as well as the design of forms of special status for minority societies, such as we see today in Scotland and Catalonia, for instance. But many other modalities remain to be devised for the still more diverse democratic societies of the twenty-first century.

Here, as in numerous other passages in his work, Taylor is a master of the philosopher’s tease. After all the foreplay—the meaty problem (democratic exclusion), the examples both famous and less so (Scotland and Catalonia), the careful array of possible solutions—the climax is postponed. It is “beyond the ambit of this essay,” except we know that achieving it will involve “other modalities.” Cold shower, please.

* * *

Still, when you take the recent books by and about Taylor together—as only a professional philosopher or a book reviewer would do—you see they offer an intelligible vision of how to think about the modern world. Because Taylor writes so much, any synopsis of his views is necessarily a travesty. I am about to attempt one, and it will leave out a lot; from this new collection alone, I am scanting his essays on Iris Murdoch and Paul Celan, which means I seriously underplay Taylor’s interest in art and literature. And I surely misrepresent him, for nowhere does he state the propositions I am about to ascribe to him; this is my gloss, and I don’t expect he would use language like mine.

Nevertheless, let’s consider five propositions I believe characterize Taylor’s recent work. The first is “Once enchanted, we are now disenchanted.” Up until about the year 1500, Taylor believes, people in Christendom were enchanted, had “porous selves” open to metaphysical notions, theophanies, divine guidance, etc. Since that time, we have become disenchanted: whereas once most people had no choice but to believe, belief is now an option. Today, even if we choose to believe in something unseen, belief is necessarily of a different character than it was in an enchanted age, when belief simply was.

The second proposition is “Our response should not be nostalgia for the old, more unified, more religious Christendom.” Taylor is a Roman Catholic, and as with his response to disenchantment, he stakes out a position on nostalgia at odds with some prominent Catholic philosophers, like his contemporary Alasdair MacIntyre and his old teacher G.E.M. Anscombe. For them, modernity—disenchanted, secular, materialistic—is in its essence regrettable. For Taylor, modernity does not have to be a bad thing.
Like many religious philosophers, Taylor sees the foregrounding of earthly life, as opposed to eternal life, as one aspect of modernity. This worries him, because seeing one’s bodily survival and flourishing as the ultimate goal of existence tends toward selfishness. In “A Catholic Modernity?,” my favorite essay in Dilemmas and Connections, Taylor discusses possible alternatives to the culture of earthly life. One alternative comes from Nietzsche, who “rebelled against the idea that our highest goal is to preserve and increase life, to prevent suffering…. Life itself can push to cruelty, to domination, to exclusion, and, indeed, does so in its moments of most exuberant affirmation.” Another alternative comes from Christianity, which, especially in Catholicism, can give license to asceticism, monasticism and other denials of aspects of life.
But Taylor is no Nietzschean, and he does not want to romanticize what we might call Extreme Catholicism. Not only is that premodern Catholicism unrecoverable, Taylor says; it had to expire in order for us to become a more charitable, humane species. Taylor argues that with the Protestant Reformation came an “affirmation of ordinary life” (the term is discussed at length in Sources of the Self) that refocused religious devotion on the daily acts and works of ordinary people while elevating the sufferings of those ordinary people to a matter of divine concern.

In the Catholic world, it was too easy to feel that none of us mattered—all that did matter was present in the church, or the Mass, or heaven. But once it became clear that God was present when you read the Bible, it also became clear that the affairs of those Bible readers mattered to God. Taylor seems to say that Protestantism rescued Catholicism. Modernity gives us horrors, but also graces such as we never knew: “The age of Hiroshima and Auschwitz has also produced Amnesty International and Médecins sans Frontières.” Taylor says that Christianity “needed this breach with the culture of Christendom…for the impulse of solidarity to transcend the frontier of Christendom itself.” Pan-human solidarity, so much a part of our humanity now, is too valuable to lose. So the work at hand is to live with modernity: it’s worth it.
Here’s the third proposition: “If we’re going to live with modernity, we should start by trying to understand its many forms—chief among them, in the contemporary West, the cult of authenticity.” Rather than being good Christians (or, for that matter, good utilitarians or good Kantians), we now seek to be authentic, true to ourselves. I just want to be me. Like the worship of life, the worship of one’s authentic self, or true nature—a worship heightened in the Romantic movement—can result in narcissism, not to mention absurdity. We now say things that would have made no sense in the year 1500, things like, “I would marry her, but I’m not sure settling down is who I am.” Obviously, there is a problem here, one Taylor recognizes. But he insists that this need not be a bad striving. It could even be fruitful, if only modern man and woman figure out how to make it so.

Proposition four: “That is the task at hand: how to live a life that is personally authentic—a goal the medieval church would not have understood, much less approved of—while giving that life meaning, spirituality, fullness.” In other words, how can we keep our modern humanity without losing what is best from the more enchanted past?

It is on this question that the personal Taylor and the political Taylor converge, in ways that can be quite satisfying. It might seem that the Taylor who writes about the modern personality (Sources of the Self, The Ethics of Authenticity) and the Taylor who writes about the modern state (parts of A Secular Age and Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition”) are working on two different projects. I don’t think that is so. Although I could not find a place where Taylor connects the two urges, it seems to me that “authenticity,” a word he uses only for the personal project, is actually the word he wants for the political project too.

Philosophers like Rousseau tend to see political community as the natural enemy of personal authenticity; the state is what represses our true selves. (I have to thank my friend Matthew Simpson, the philosopher and Rousseau scholar, for clarifying this point.) But as I read Taylor, he seems to say that just as any given woman in Quebec wants to be true to herself, the Québécois want to be true to their culture. It is the same problem on two different levels. It is the Romantic urge personally and politically, and in both cases it seems to appear, historically speaking, just on either side of the year 1800. The political urge makes no sense without the personal one. Taylor recognizes this equivalence implicitly, and his work argues for it, but he never quite formulates the extent to which, for him, the personal is political.

Here’s proposition five: “To the extent that we can succeed in being authentic, as people and as cultures—succeed in creating political forms or governments that allow people and groups to flourish that way—we will have a greater fullness than what people had in the old age of enchantment.” In fact, Taylor believes, we may be able to have a fullness unimaginable in days of old. In a sense, we will have solved the problem implied in proposition one, the problem of disenchantment. We will have shown disenchantment to be a blessing.

* * *

These propositions raise a big question: What will that “greater fullness” look like? What does a world adapted to modernity—charitable and altruistic, in which people may seek out their authentic selves but in a way that leaves them spiritually full and oriented toward a horizon other than the preservation of physical life—actually look like?

It’s a fair question, and as far as I can tell Taylor sends us to a cold shower once again. His reluctance to offer specific suggestions for how states should organize themselves may be a failure of nerve. It could also be that his particular take on communitarianism naturally implies that every community will organize itself a bit differently, making up its own rules, suited to the needs of its constituent groups. Perhaps there is no single set of rules that will work for both Canada and Israel (Taylor is strangely silent on Israel, which would seem to be—after his beloved Quebec—the most important cautionary tale in the limits of balancing democracy and ethnic identity). And so, as Taylor the erstwhile Wittgenstein scholar might say, whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

That reticence can make Taylor seem an even grander statesman: after all, as President Obama showed during the Egyptian crisis, for politicians especially, discretion is the better part of valor. Philosophers are paid to have opinions, whereas politicians often succeed to the extent that they never commit themselves exclusively to any one opinion.

But after reading Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, the new essay collection about Taylor (with a title so bad he could have chosen it), I think Taylor’s discretion is something other than statesmanlike. Two essays in particular argue for a kind of sentimentality in Taylor, as if he believes—even when writing about the most consequential matters of world governance—that the play of ideas is more important than the logical conclusions. These two essays are by historians, not philosophers. The first is by Jon Butler, a scholar of American and transatlantic religion (and once my teacher); the second is by Jonathan Sheehan, who studies early modern Europe and the Reformation.

In “Disquieted History in A Secular Age,” Butler argues that Taylor is simply a bad historian: “This is not history for historians, meaning history meant to uncover the past for its own sake…. Rather, it is history for argument about modernity, the cause of the modern condition, and its possible cure. It is a history of lament and failure intended to propel readers toward a history of meaning and fulfillment.” Taylor is also so narrowly focused on the Western and wealthy world that his claims about secularization—hardly a pressing problem in Africa, Latin America or the Arab countries—can seem a bit absurd. Some might wonder, Butler writes, “if Taylor has been observing modern world politics since 1990.” But where Taylor goes most blindly astray is with his suggestion that 1500 marked some sort of turning point between enchantment and disenchantment. Taylor speaks of the Reformation as if it is one big homogeneous thing. There is little consideration of the differences among Lutheran, Calvinist and Anabaptist movements; and there is almost no consideration of how ordinary people—so important to Taylor, given his emphasis on the new attention paid to quotidian life—lived their religions.

Or did not. What Taylor cannot accept is how many ordinary people lived with very little religion at all, neither as believers nor as active skeptics. Some were unbelievers—apostates, heretics—while many were simple disbelievers, the religiously indifferent. In 1584 a third of Antwerp adults failed to claim any religion. This diversity is now an article of faith among social historians, but not among philosophers interested in the lettered elite. “Medieval Christians (and non-Christians and partial Christians),” Butler writes, “were almost devastatingly accustomed to huge doubts about faith. They lived through them and, perhaps more to the point, died through them. How many lives were consumed by the Albigensian crusade to rid Languedoc of the Cathar heresy in the early thirteenth century? Medieval Christians knew that faith was not axiomatic, if only because so many needed to be killed to make it so.” Butler charges Taylor with bad faith, of writing a tendentious prequel to the age he wants us to imagine.

In his more generous essay, “When Was Disenchantment? History and the Secular Age,” Sheehan takes Taylor even less seriously as a historian—one gets the sense he is patting the old man on the head. But Sheehan thinks the quality of Taylor’s history does not much matter. For Taylor is not, Sheehan believes, writing history of the kind history professors write and teach. Rather, Taylor is unabashedly writing himself a kind of usable past, not for historians but for philosophers who need a narrative to help them think. “Before, the self was ‘porous,’” Sheehan writes, summing up Taylor:

Now it is buffered. Before, religion was incarnated in bodily practices. Now it has been removed from the corporeal, the ritual, and the practical. And so on. This is, as Butler points out, a kind of subtle romanticism. It is also, as Simon During [another contributor to this volume] has noted, a version of conjectural history, a history built around a mobile, at times heuristic distinction between yesterday and today.

“Conjectural history” is a more polite way of saying “mythology.” Sheehan compares Taylor’s practice with Rousseau’s in Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, in which the author cautions that his inquiries “ought not to be taken for historical truths.” Sheehan writes that the Discourse “is filled with factual claims about early man. But these facts do philosophical rather than historical work.” Taylor’s story should be read the same way, Sheehan counsels, in which case “our opening question—when was reform?—does not matter.” It is as ridiculous to interrogate Taylor’s historical accuracy as it is to interrogate Rousseau’s, Hobbes’s or Machiavelli’s. The history serves the ideas, and the ideas are what count.

* * *

I think Sheehan is right about one way to read Taylor’s book. A Secular Age could have a lot to say philosophically; come closing time, Taylor is not clocking hours as a historian. But I am wary of Sheehan’s attempt to exculpate Taylor because I think it patronizes him and makes unwarranted assumptions about his “Christian” motivations.

One reason Taylor is so popular among liberals is that he embodies what seem to them several key contradictions: he is an Anglo in Quebec who has made his peace with the French, and he is a Catholic who has made his peace with modernity. Butler and Sheehan, I think, want to glean from Taylor’s work a Christian partisanship. “This is just how apologetics work,” Sheehan writes late in his essay. “The historical and descriptive undergoes constant transmutation into the normative and prescriptive.” Taylor’s Christianity, Sheehan argues, gets to possess the past, “as the original author of the secular age,” and the future, “as the resource available for the overcoming of the secular age, a Christianity-to-come. As such, Christianity is both the history and the future of the West…. It dwells in the sphere of reason yet promises incarnated passion.”
This charge—that Taylor is basically selling us Christianity under the guise of philosophy under the guise of history—is not entirely new. The late philosopher Bernard Williams wrote something similar in 1990, in his review of Sources of the Self; he seemed to believe that Taylor’s history was more Catholic than he realized, that Taylor had a kind of false pluralist consciousness. But Taylor never pushes his Christianity, and if he sometimes does an imperfect job of cloaking his Catholicism in pluralism, that is less contemptible than it is human. Besides, many Christians would find his kind of vague spirituality incompatible with orthodox faith.
The “fullness,” to use his word, that Taylor wants for secular selves is obviously a concept determined by the Christian heritage. But looking forward, it may lead people to some spirituality-lite, as propagated by Oprah or the yoga instructor at the mall. That is surely not what Taylor wants, but given his reluctance to offer a more specific road map, there is no reason to think we won’t end up there. On this reading, calling Taylor a Christian apologist may be giving him too much credit; he is never so clear or specific. But Taylor has spent decades trying to figure out how people with different cultural assumptions can speak to one another. He has also tried to tell us how we got to be ourselves. I do not think he has solved these questions, and as far as he’s got, he could have done it in half as many pages. But I do not think he is a coy dissembler. A list of his virtues includes intelligence, industry and, I would say, honesty. Perhaps that is why he is so fine a philosopher-statesman, and so poor a politician.

How to make the best of the long malaise

By Joseph Stiglitz

FT, 9 August 2011

The only good thing about the continuing barrage of bad economic news is that it could have been worse: all three rating agencies could have downgraded the US, stock markets could have fallen further and the US could have defaulted on its debt. The general view is now that in this, the next round of the Great Recession, there is a high risk of things getting worse, with no effective instruments at governments’ disposal. The first point is correct but the second is not quite right.

Throughout the crisis – and before it – Keynesian economists provided a coherent interpretation of events. Pre-crisis, America, and to a large extent the world economy, was sustained by a bubble. The breaking of the bubble has left a legacy of excess leverage and real estate. Consumption will therefore remain weak and austerity on both sides of the Atlantic now ensures the state will not fill the void. Given this, it is not surprising that companies are unwilling to invest – even those that can get access to capital.
 

Of course, those worried about the shortage of policy instruments are partially correct. Bad monetary policy got us into this mess but it cannot get us out. Even if the inflation hawks at the Federal Reserve can be subdued, a third bout of quantitative easing will be even less effective than QE2. Even that probably did more to contribute to bubbles in emerging markets, while not leading to much additional lending or investment at home.
The Fed’s announcement that it will keep the target federal funds rate near zero for the next two years does convey its sense of despair about the economy’s plight. But, even if it succeeds in stopping, at least temporarily, the slide in equity prices, it will not provide the basis of recovery: it is not high interest rates that have been keeping the economy down. Corporations are awash with cash, but the banks have not been lending to the small and medium-sized enterprises that are, in any economy, the source of job creation. The Fed and Treasury have failed miserably in getting this lending restarted – this would do more to rekindle growth than extending low interest rates though 2015!

But the real answer, at least for countries such as the US that can borrow at low rates, is simple: use the money to make high-return investments. This will both promote growth and generate tax revenues, lowering debt to gross domestic product ratios in the medium term and increasing debt sustainability. Even given the same budget situation, restructuring spending and taxes towards growth – by lowering payroll taxes, increasing taxes on the rich, as well as lowering taxes for corporations that invest and raising them on those that do not – can improve debt sustainability.

The politics, however, are elsewhere. Markets know that the mix of low tax and debt fetishism sweeping the North Atlantic means that there are no instruments at hand: monetary policy won’t work, fiscal policy is constrained, growth will slow and the improvement in deficits (brought by austerity) will be disappointing.
But markets have a political agenda too, clearly evident in S&P’s downgrade. No economist would look just at the debt side of a balance sheet, yet that is what S&P focuses on. Even more telling is the fact that the US pays its debts in dollars, and it controls the printing presses. There is thus no chance of a default – apart from the kind of political charade we saw last week.

Markets are often wrong but the rating firms’ record does not inspire confidence – certainly not to justify replacing the aggregate views of millions with judgments of a few “technicians” working in a firm whose governance and incentives are problematic. Europe’s leaders were right in their recent meeting to call for less reliance on these ratings.

Europe and America now face extraordinarily difficult politics. It is hard to know which is worse: America’s gridlock, or Europe’s broken political structure. Europe’s leaders have taken decisive action but events move faster than their processes of ratification and implementation. Europe’s debt-to-GDP ratio is also lower than in the US; if it had an adequate common fiscal framework, it would be in a better position than America, too.
Europe’s other problem is too many think fiscal stringency is now the answer. Yet Ireland and Spain had a surplus and low debt-to-GDP ratios before the crisis. More austerity will only ensure that Europe grows more slowly and its fiscal problems will mount. Only latterly have Europe’s leaders finally recognised that Greece and the other crisis-plagued countries needed growth – and that austerity would also never bring that growth.
All of this makes it more likely that the North Atlantic will enter a double dip, but there is also nothing magic about the number zero. The critical growth rate is that which stops the jobs deficit growing larger. Problematically, America and Europe’s current growth rate of about one per cent is less than half of the amount required to do this.

When the recession began there were many wise words about having learnt the lessons of both the Great Depression and Japan’s long malaise. Now we know we didn’t learn a thing. Our stimulus was too weak, too short and not well designed. The banks weren’t forced to return to lending. Our leaders tried papering over the economy’s weaknesses – perhaps out of fear that if we were honest about them, already fragile confidence would erode. But that was a gamble we have now lost. Now the scale of the problem is apparent, a new confidence has emerged: confidence that matters will get worse, whatever action we take. A long malaise now seems like the optimistic scenario.

The writer is a recipient of the 2001 Nobel Prize in economics and professor at Columbia University
 

The Runaway Genius

The herculean struggle to get Terrence Malick's first movie in two decades–a film version of James Jones's war epic The Thin Red Line–to the screen was complicated not only by its elusive director’s reticence but also by the two producers who believe they made it all happen.

By Peter Biskind

Vanity Fair, August 1999

When The Thin Red Line, a tale of World War II, unleashes its artillery—including an all-star cast of Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, John Travolta, Woody Harrelson, John Cusack, Bill Pullman, Gary Oldman, George Clooney, and others—in December, expect a 21-gun salute to a hero who seems certain to remain an unseen soldier. The project marks the return, after exactly two decades, of the mysterious director Terrence Malick, whose Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978) are classics. Malick, who declined to speak for this article, has established himself as a sort of cinematic Salinger, as silent as Garbo, as evasive as the Fugitive. A fleeting presence, like the rare birds he loves to watch, Malick is the kind of seductive talent sought after as much for his elusiveness as for his eye. He has always been an enigma, one of modern Hollywood’s genuine myths. Nobody knows why, at the height of his powers, after those two unforgettable films, he walked away from directing. And nobody knows why he came back. But one thing is definite: offscreen a battle rages about who deserves the credit for bringing Malick home.

Bobby Geisler first met Malick in 1978 when he approached the filmmaker to direct a movie version of David Rabe’s play In the Boom Boom Room. Geisler—short and cheerful with long, thinning locks and an accent that softly suggests the South—was a novice producer who had been deeply impressed by Badlands, which starred then unknowns Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek in a story loosely based on the bloody career of spree killer Charles Starkweather and his girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate. With its stunning mix of psycho and pastoral, Badlands inspired subsequent lovers-on-the-lam films, culminating in Oliver Stone’s notorious homage, Natural Born Killers, in 1994. Badlands made its debut at the New York Film Festival in 1973, overshadowing even Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets.
 
Malick turned down the Rabe project. Still, he and Geisler had hit it off and began meeting at Los Angeles restaurants little frequented by celebrities, such as the Hamburger Hamlet on Sunset and Doheny, where they sat in back batting around ideas. Malick, about 35 then, was bearish and bearded. He had the beef-eating habits of a boy raised in Texas and Oklahoma; as he talked he wolfed down hamburgers, two at a time. Malick invariably wore jeans and a seersucker sport coat a little too small for him. It gave him a slightly Chaplinesque air. Geisler kidded him that it looked like the seersucker jacket that Kit Carruthers—Sheen’s Starkweather surrogate—stole from a rich man’s house in Badlands.

For 18 months or so, well into 1979, Geisler and Malick worked on a project based on the life of Joseph Merrick, the 19th-century British sideshow celebrity who suffered from a rare, debilitat-ing disease. One day Geisler was stunned to receive an invitation to a screening of Days of Heaven,Malick’s new picture. The director had never mentioned it.
Featuring Richard Gere in his first big role, along with Sam Shepard and Brooke Adams, Days of Heaven was a brutal shoot, complicated by conflict between the director and its temperamental male lead, as well as by savage battles between Malick and the producers, Bert and Harold Schneider. Linda Palevsky, then married to Malick’s friend and patron, computer millionaire Max Palevsky, recalls, “Terry’s quite mad, and he had this notion of wanting to make the perfect movie. He used to describe the kind of purity he wanted—he would say things like ‘You have a drop of water on a pond, that moment of perfection.’ That’s the kind of quality he expected from the work he did, and if he couldn’t do that, then there was no point making a movie. You’d say to Terry, ‘You really ought to go into therapy,’ and he’d say, ‘If I go to therapy, I’ll lose my creative [juice].’”

The picture languished in the editing room for nearly two years, partly because Malick wouldn’t or couldn’t make decisions. Says Paul Ryan, who shot second unit on the film, “Terry’s not one to draw things to a close.” Confounding the doubters, Days of Heaven emerged as a testimony to Malick’s artistic persistence, a dark jewel of a film, acclaimed for its stunning imagery, even by critics who found its meager narrative elliptical. The movie was nominated for four Oscars (winning the best-cinematography award) and impressed Charles Bluhdorn, the colorful head of Paramount’s parent company, Gulf & Western, who fell in love with Malick’s melancholy tone and dreamy landscapes. Bluhdorn gave him a production deal. Still, Malick seemed to feel he had failed at what he had set out to do.

Geisler’s Merrick project never wound up on Malick’s Paramount agenda. When director David Lynch announced his Merrick project, The Elephant Man, Malick and Geisler shelved theirs—and quickly lost touch. Still, Malick had made a lasting impression on the producer. “I thought Terry was a genius, an artist, and I was completely mesmerized by him,” Geisler says. “I felt better when I was with him, and more than anything I wanted to learn from him, swore that I would produce a play or a movie of Terry’s if it was the last thing that I did.”

Exhausted and bruised by Days of Heaven,Malick spent considerable time with his girlfriend, Michie Gleason, in Paris. While she directed a film called Broken English, he labored in their Rue Jacob apartment on his new script, tentatively entitled Q. Its prologue, which dramatized the origins of life, became increasingly elaborate and would ultimately take over the rest of the story.

Malick shuttled between Paris and Los Angeles, where he hired a small crew, including cameraman Ryan and special-effects consultant Richard Taylor, who worked intensely for a year or so to realize Malick’s vision. “He wanted to do something different, get images nobody had ever seen before,” recalls Ryan. In one version, the story began with a sleeping god, underwater, dreaming of the origins of the universe, starting with the big bang and moving forward, as fluorescent fish swam into the deity’s nostrils and out again.
“Terry was one of the coolest guys I ever worked with,” says Taylor. “He had a passion for trying to do things from the heart. The amount of work we produced was phenomenal.” Malick dispatched cameramen all over the world—to the Great Barrier Reef to shoot micro jellyfish, to Mount Etna to shoot volcanic action, to Antarctica to shoot ice shelves breaking off. “He was writing pages of poetry, with no dialogue, glorious visual descriptions,” Ryan continues. “Every few months, Paramount would say, ‘What are you doing?’ He’d give them 30 pages that would keep them happy for a while. But eventually they said, ‘Send us a script that starts with page one and at the end says, “The End.” We don’t care what it is, but do something.’ Terry’s somebody who always functioned very well from the underground position. Suddenly, everybody was looking at him.… He did not work well under those conditions. He didn’t want to be on the spot.”

Taylor adds: “Then one Monday, Terry never showed up. He didn’t call anybody, we couldn’t find him—we got worried that maybe something had happened to him. Finally, after about two weeks, we got a phone call. He was in Paris, and he said, ‘I’m not sure if I’m going to make this picture. Maybe you should just pack all that stuff up.’ He just stopped. It was disappointing. I had never put my heart into a project as much as I did that one.”

Malick’s relationship with Gleason ended, leaving him as bitter and disillusioned personally as he had become professionally. Still, he liked Paris and was spending more time there. Every now and then he called friends. On one occasion he exclaimed to Ryan, “I have a great idea. We’re gonna give cameras to people who are just coming out of insane asylums, and let them film. You think that’s nuts, but it’s not. I’m deadly serious about this.”

One day in 1980 or 1981, Malick’s landlord introduced him to Michèle, a tall, thirtysomething blonde Parisienne who lived in the same building. She had a young daughter, Alexandra. Michèle had never met anyone like Malick. “He takes you places where you never go with regular people,” she says. “He’s interested in everything from ants and plants and flowers and grass to philosophy. And it’s not superficial. He reads all the time and remembers everything. He’s got this incredible charm … something interior.”
Malick, friends surmised, was trying to fashion a normal life far from Hollywood. Michèle had become part of that. She thought of herself as average, unglamorous. She cooked and did dishes while Malick played father to Alex. Occasionally, they attended Mass. Always preoccupied with faith and religion, Malick knows the Bible well.

In a year or two, the trio moved to Austin, Texas, where Terry had attended prep school, St. Stephen’s Episcopal, in Westlake Hills. He had been a star football player and outstanding student. His parents, whom he and Michèle visited often, lived by then in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. Terry’s father, Emil, was an oil geologist of Lebanese extraction (“Malick” means “king” in Arabic) who worked for Phillips Petroleum. His mother, Irene, is Irish and grew up on a farm in the Chicago area.

The Malicks were a family of secrets, marked by tragedy. Terry was the oldest of three boys. Chris, the middle son, had been involved in a terrible automobile accident in which his wife was killed. Chris was badly burned.

Larry, the youngest, went to Spain to study with the guitar virtuoso Segovia. Terry discovered in the summer of 1968 that Larry had broken his own hands, seemingly despondent over his lack of progress. Emil, concerned, went to Spain and returned with Larry’s body; it appeared the young man had committed suicide. Like most relatives of those who take their own lives, Terry must have borne a heavy burden of irrational guilt. According to Michèle, the subject of Larry was never mentioned.

Malick was worshiped by his family. He was devoted to his mother. (For years he wouldn’t allow her to read the script of The Thin Red Line because of the profanity.) But he had terrible fights with his father, often over trivial issues. Even at the age of 50, according to Michèle, he still argued with Emil over whether he should wear a tie to church. Another bone of contention was family photographs. Malick’s father loved to take pictures, but it made Terry uncomfortable. (Malick’s contract with Twentieth Century Fox prevents his likeness from being used to promote The Thin Red Line.)

Michèle did her best to adapt to Austin. Malick took her on bird-watching expeditions to Big Bend National Park in south Texas. But she was out of her element. Although Terry, who spoke softly and slowly, tried to avoid confrontations, he shared his father’s temper. According to Michèle, Terry loved to debate abstract intellectual issues but had very rigid ideas about how domestic life ought to be lived. He did not brook contradiction.

The first real fight he and Michèle had was over buying a television, which she thought Alex, who was 11 or so by then, needed to help acclimate her to a foreign country. Malick, who has the habit of casting his likes, dislikes, and personal eccentricities as matters of principle, argued that TV was trash, that it would ruin the child. (When traveling, Malick often had the TV removed from his hotel rooms, and when that wasn’t possible, covered it.) Michèle wouldn’t relent—and there was a blow-up. At difficult times like these, Malick would often just leave, for hours, days, or weeks. She never knew where he went, and it made her crazy.
Malick had other eccentricities. He was compulsively neat and possessive about his things. Michèle says she was not allowed to cross the threshold of his office. If she wanted to read one of his books, he preferred to buy another copy rather than lend his own. It was difficult for her to figure out what he was reading, anyway: he always placed books cover down. When he listened to music, he used a Walkman and rarely left cassettes faceup.
 
Malick didn’t discuss his film work with Michèle, telling her, “I want my personal life to be completely separate from the movies.” Although once in a while she read his scripts, mostly he wouldn’t tell her what he was working on, and she was not supposed to ask. Occasionally, Malick went to Los Angeles, and every so often he took Michèle along. She met a few of his friends. Malick and Michèle had married in 1985, but no one in L.A. had known of the wedding, or even of their relationship. She felt she had ceased to exist.

Alex had become sassy and rebellious. But Malick was very strict. Not only was there no TV, there was no candy, no telephone. The stricter he became, the more the teenager acted out. Michèle was not strong enough to protect her. One day, Terry and Michèle found Alex gone. She had apparently gotten her father to send her a ticket to France. She was only 15 at the time.

Malick’s production deal with Paramount had ended in 1983 after the sudden death of Charles Bluhdorn. He supported himself by writing the occasional script. He did something for Louis Malle and also completed a rewrite of a Robert Dillon script called Countryman for producers Edward Lewis and Robert Cortes in 1984. “I couldn’t communicate with him directly,” recalls Cortes. “I would make a phone call to a certain number, leave a message, and then his brother would call me back.” Once, Malick and Cortes actually met face-to-face at Universal executive Ned Tanen’s home in Santa Monica Canyon. After the meeting, Cortes offered to give him a lift. “He was very cryptic about where to drop him off,” Cortes continues. “I let him out at the corner of Wilshire and Seventh or somewhere. He waited for me to drive away, and then he just walked off.”

Mike Medavoy, who then headed production at Orion Pictures and who had been Malick’s agent, hired the director to write a script for Great Balls of Fire! Malick also did a rewrite of a script based on Walker Percy’s novel The Moviegoer. In 1986, Rob Cohen, then head of Taft-Barish Productions, hired him to adapt Larry McMurtry’s The Desert Rose for Barry Levinson to direct. “Malick was someone who was listening to a high whine in his head,” recalls Cohen. “He was very tense and fragile, the least likely person to be a director. I once had to have a meeting with him in Westwood. He was getting up every five minutes and hiding behind pillars; he kept thinking he saw somebody he knew. He would call me, and I’d hear trucks rolling by on the highway, and I’d say, ‘Where are you?’ and he’d answer, ‘I’m walking to Oklahoma!’ ‘What do you mean, you’re walking to Oklahoma? From Texas?’ ‘Yeah, I’m looking at birds.’”

By the time Geisler reconnected with Malick in 1988, the producer was teamed up with another Texan, John Roberdeau, who had grown up in Austin. Roberdeau was also a Malick devotee, who had committed Days of Heaven to memory—every shot, every cut, every scrap of dialogue. Geisler and Roberdeau have a mixed reputation in the film and theater community. They are praised by many for their taste and generosity to artists, but disliked by others for their tireless self-promotion and record of running up bad debts. At the time they met Malick, they had produced several plays—including a Broadway production of Eugene O’Neill’s five-hour drama, Strange Interlude, on Broadway with Glenda Jackson. But, after a decade in the business, they had completed only one movie, Streamers (in 1983). Robert Altman, the film’s cantankerous director, had grown so frustrated with the pair’s interference that the relationship completely broke down.

Geisler and Roberdeau approached Malick about writing and directing a picture based on D. M. Thomas’s novel The White Hotel, a vividly erotic story of the Freudian analysis of a woman who dies in a concentration camp. In a characteristic display of largesse, they offered him $2 million, which they didn’t yet have. Malick declined, but went on to concede that it might be time he went back to movies. Geisler recalls Malick’s saying that if the two producers would be patient they could walk down that path together. Malick told them he would be willing to write an adaptation of Molière’s Tartuffe—a classic farce—or James Jones’s World War II saga The Thin Red Line, a sequel of sorts to From Here to Eternity. Geisler and Roberdeau sensibly chose the latter and paid Malick $250,000 to write a script.

Malick sent Geisler and Roberdeau a first draft in late May of 1989. The producers flew to Paris and met up with the director and his wife on the Pont Saint-Louis, a bridge which connects the precincts of Notre Dame to the Île Saint-Louis. In a gesture both thoughtful and seductive, they gave the Malicks a silver flask from Tiffany on which was inscribed a sergeant’s chevron and one of their favorite lines from the Jones novel: “Billions of hard, bright stars shone with relentless glitter across the tropic night sky.” They had dinner at the Brasserie de l’Île Saint-Louis, where Jones, who had died in 1977, and his wife, Gloria, had often lunched. The foursome walked up the Quai d’Orléans to No. 10, where Jones had lived, and Malick bowed before the former home of the master.

At Le Jardin des Plantes and other sites around Paris they settled in to discuss the script. Geisler had prepared 400 notes, and he believes his seriousness impressed Malick. “Had we not delivered 400 notes,” Geisler maintains, “had we just said, ‘Thanks for the screenplay, we’ll be in touch later,’ he would not have directed it. It was because we were in this dialogue that he did.

“The notion that we discussed endlessly,” Geisler continues, “was that Malick’s Guadalcanal would be a Paradise Lost, an Eden, raped by the green poison, as Terry used to call it, of war. Much of the violence was to be portrayed indirectly. A soldier is shot, but rather than showing a Spielbergian bloody face we see a tree explode, the shredded vegetation, and a gorgeous bird with a broken wing flying out of the tree.”

Malick had agonized about every deviation from Jones’s novel, no matter how trivial. He asked Gloria Jones’s permission for the smallest changes. Eventually she told him, “Terry, you have my husband’s voice, you’re writing in his musical key; now what you must do is improvise. Play riffs on this.”

Malick ultimately fashioned a remarkable script, infused with his own sensibility. But he had made some questionable choices. He retained several of Jones’s more conventional situations, but dropped some interesting elements, including the suggestion of a homoerotic undertow among some of the characters. Later, he changed Stein, a Jewish captain, to Staros, an officer of Greek extraction, thereby gutting Jones’s indictment of anti-Semitism in the military, which the novelist had observed close-up in his own company.
On the final night of the producers’ visit, over dinner at the Café de Flore, in a dramatic appeal he had rehearsed ahead of time, Geisler beseeched Malick to direct the script himself, and assured him that he and his partner would wait forever if necessary. According to Geisler, Malick agreed.

But the director left open numerous doors through which he might make a hasty exit. Always cautious, he wasn’t about to enter into any ironclad commitments. The producers realized that although they had hooked their fish, it was far from reeled in. “It was important that we find a way to remain in continual touch with Terry,” Geisler says, candid about his efforts to cement the relationship. “The best way to do that was to commission him to develop another project.” In late 1989, although Malick had never before written a play and was not much interested in the stage, he suggested adapting the story which had been the basis for the great Kenji Mizoguchi film Sansho¯ the Bailiff for the theater. Geisler and Roberdeau agreed to pay him $200,000, plus a $50,000 bonus, which Malick would collect the night the play opened on Broadway.
The producers plunged into the research, supplying Malick with anything and everything he needed. And often, expensively, going him one better. No script existed for the Mizoguchi film, so they had it transcribed and translated by both a Japanese linguist who spoke English and an American who spoke Japanese.
(Debates over particularly enigmatic areas of the text were also incorporated.) The producers excavated 10th-century literature written in ancient Japanese—travel sketches and diaries. They taped Japanese children who were the same age as the children in the script, speaking Malick’s lines, so he could hear what they sounded like.
The three men became what the producers considered to be close friends. Geisler corresponded with Emil Malick, sending him newspaper clippings on subjects of interest to him, and even two city guides to Washington, D.C., on the eve of a visit. When Roberdeau’s brother was diagnosed with leukemia, Malick offered to donate his bone marrow. Even though the producers had other projects—they had enlisted the now deceased Dennis Potter to write The White Hotel—Malick was the focus. Claims Geisler, “We behaved like family toward each other. We liked each other, I thought, loved each other. He was the center and circumference of our lives.”

Occasionally, the trio converged on Los Angeles. At the Beverly Hills Hotel, Malick asked them to request one of the first-floor rooms in the back, with the patios. Rather than use the valet, he parked on Crescent Drive, adjacent to the hotel, and instead of walking through the lobby, he crossed the grounds and entered from the rear, hopping over the little patio fence, rapping on the plate-glass door for admittance. Says Roberdeau, “It was as if he was Greta Garbo or something.”

The producers’ friends told them that they were crazy, that Malick would never finish a project. But, says Geisler, “I thought we were working with a guy who was one of the few true artists of the 20th century. It wasn’t an easy day’s work, but it was a great day’s work. Terry was the Holy Grail. He was thought to be unfindable, unapproachable, unconvincible. Others had failed; we would be successful. We realized how much that might mean to our careers.”

Malick, still not entirely won over, had plenty of caveats. For a long time he would not allow the producers to keep a sample of his handwriting. They say original copies of documents bearing his penmanship were to be returned to him with no copies made. Handwritten notes were to be destroyed. It reminded Roberdeau of Badlands, in which Sheen’s character would never sign his name the same way twice out of fear of forgery.
Geisler and Roberdeau practiced what they called “method producing,” which consisted of elaborate (and expensive) trips, flying to San Francisco to see the Kodo Drummers, visiting an Asian collection at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and then heading on to Grafton, Vermont, for a Sansho¯ the Bailiff editing session while they ate cheese soup and watched the leaves turn. They booked Malick into the best hotels, reserved tables at the finest restaurants. Sometimes he took such first-class service for granted, but occasionally he balked, tried to plan his own trips, or rejected a car. They sent it anyway.

One day in the fall of 1990, Malick told the producers he had long been working on a script called The English-Speaker, based upon Dr. Josef Breuer’s well-known 19th-century case study of Anna O., a hysteric. In Malick’s silent world of secrets, this script was especially personal, private. He would allow no one but Geisler to read it. Of the project, the producer says, “It’s as if he had ripped open his heart and bled his true feelings onto the page.” It is indeed a remarkable script, The Exorcist as written by Dostoyevsky. So when Malick said, “Let’s do this,” Geisler and Roberdeau, drunk on his prose poetry, agreed, paying him $400,000.

Late in the summer of 1990, Malick had turned in the first draft of Sansh¯o the Bailiff. The producers knew it wasn’t quite there yet, but in early 1991 they sent it out to directors Peter Brook, Peter Stein, and Ingmar Bergman. Each turned it down. Undeterred, the producers conceived the ambitious notion of staging the play as a workshop and inviting the participation of the world’s masters of set design, sound, lighting, and choreography. But they still needed a director.

In August 1992, Geisler and Roberdeau, along with the Malicks—who by that time were estranged and living separately—met up at the music festival in Salzburg. They were impressed by the great Andrzej Wajda’s staging of the Polish classic Wesele and were famil-iar with Wajda’s celebrat-ed trilogy—A Generation, Kanal, and Ashes and Diamonds—a masterpiece of world cinema.

Wajda had never heard of Malick, but flew to New York in October to screen Badlands and Days of Heaven at the Tribeca Film Center. Afterward, at a nearby restaurant, he agreed to direct Sansh¯o the Bailiff. The tables were covered with butcher paper, and Wajda drew a picture with crayons. He inscribed it, “For Terry from Andrzej Wajda.” Geisler was so excited, he called Malick in Austin, saying: “Next stop, Warsaw!”

On a cold and wintry December evening of the same year, the Malicks and the producers converged on Wajda’s family home in Warsaw. Faded photographs of ancestors and war heroes illuminated by flickering candles in sconces peered down at them from the green enameled walls as they shared a traditional dinner with Wajda and his wife, actress Krystyna Zachwatowicz, two enormous dogs, and various friends and relatives who dropped by.

Malick, who detests beets and fish with bones—or even the appearance of bones—seemed ill at ease as the guests hungrily attacked the three beet dishes (pickled and roasted beets, as well as borscht), four varieties of herring, along with kasha, duck, and 10 or so other delicacies. The meal was washed down with generous quantities of Polish vodka, which Malick drank sparingly.

Wajda felt that the play required substantial revision. He expected Malick to roll up his shirtsleeves and do more, do better. Sitting by the roaring fire after the sumptuous meal, Wajda turned to Malick and said, “Terry, what you need to do to Sansh¯o the Bailiff is make it more like Shakespeare.”

Recalls Geisler, “That was the beginning of the end.”

The workshop was budgeted at $600,000. As the first day approached, the producers’ long-suffering backers abruptly pulled out. Still, the show went on. True to their word, Geisler and Roberdeau did manage to gather some remarkable international talents, including lighting designer Jennifer Tipton, sound designer Hans Peter Kuhn, and a collection of fine Asian-American actors. But the six-week workshop, held at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (bam) in November of 1993, was a bust.

The relationship between Malick and Wajda quickly deteriorated. A few days into the workshop, Michèle arrived from Paris to see her husband. To her, it seemed that Wajda was threatened by Malick’s presence. Malick thought Wajda didn’t understand his play; he was frustrated by how little the director was bringing to it. He was angered by what he regarded as Wajda’s condescending attitude—“You, boy, go do your rewrites.”

Wajda spoke English to Geisler and Roberdeau, but never a word to Malick, with whom he conversed through translators. He was annoyed that Malick had not done the work he wanted. Malick insisted on doing it his way, but he wasn’t the director. Says Kuhn, “Terry didn’t know anything about theater, and he was not interested in learning. He was very stubborn.”

On the last day, just after Michèle returned to Paris, Malick asked the producers for a limo. Geisler and Roberdeau were puzzled; he had never asked for a car and chauffeur before. They were flabbergasted when they saw it was for Ecky Wallace, an Austin woman who was an old friend of Malick’s from St. Stephen’s. Later, she became Malick’s girlfriend.

The workshop cost $800,000, alienated Malick, and left the producers devastated, although it was a disaster of their own making. The play just wasn’t ready. Geisler and Roberdeau were besieged by angry creditors—bam, caterers, travel agents, publicists, restaurants. The partners were dead broke. They sold their furniture to meet their payroll; Roberdeau sold CDs and books so they could eat. One creditor managed to have Geisler arrested. He was led from his town house in handcuffs, marched down West Ninth Street in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, and thrown in jail overnight for grand larceny, a charge that was later dismissed. (In April 1996, Geisler and Roberdeau were evicted from the home they shared.)

Says Roberdeau, “It was ridiculous. We were sitting on all these assets that we had sunk our money, blood, and time into. It was time to put Terry on notice.” In December, they began to press Terry about which of the two movie projects would go first, The English-Speaker or The Thin Red Line. Geisler, who was closer to Malick, played the good cop, Roberdeau the bad. The latter angrily told the director, “Don’t pretend you’re not a participant in all of this.” But, says Geisler, Malick blithely refused “to take any responsibility whatsoever. Our problems were our problems. He had forewarned us in the beginning that his timetable would be his timetable, and if we were still standing by the time that he got around to directing one or both of the movies, that would be great.”

In January 1995, the producers sent Malick a note, begging him to allow them to approach Mike Medavoy, who was in the process of setting up his own company, Phoenix Pictures, to finance The English-Speaker and/or The Thin Red Line. They say Malick never answered. Geisler and Roberdeau borrowed money for tickets and flew to Los Angeles, arriving in a teeming rainstorm. Fallen trees blocked the narrow roads that thread the canyons of Beverly Hills. Later the two men came to feel that they had ignored a portent of biblical proportions. But Medavoy agreed to give them $100,000 to secure the project for his company; he said he would back The Thin Red Line with the other two men serving as producers.

But Sansho¯ the Bailiff had badly damaged the relationship between Malick and the producers. Geisler and Roberdeau, terrified, made herculean efforts to mend fences. By the following year, Malick’s wounds had apparently begun to heal, and the three men again professed affection for one another. Geisler and Roberdeau say that Malick asked them to hire him to adapt A Tale of Two Cities for the stage.

The producers spoke between themselves about how to keep the pressure on, how to steer Malick away from theater and toward starting The Thin Red Line. At the time, the feeling was that since the film’s message was that war dehumanized the G.I.’s and made them anonymous, stars would not be used in the picture. The producers sent their two assistants on weekend trips to the Midwest to scout fresh faces, corn-fed boys at spelling bees and debating contests. It was expensive, but it was a way of moving Malick forward.
March of 1995 brought a reading of The Thin Red Line at Medavoy’s home. The Malick magic worked its spell. The reading included Martin Sheen delivering the screen directions, Kevin Costner, Will Patton, Dermot Mulroney, Peter Berg, and Lukas Haas.

Malick was nervous. His face was flushed. He had prepared some remarks, but when he stood up his mind went blank. He was deeply embarrassed and looked as if he just wanted to survive to the end. Observes Roberdeau, “He was in his element, but he was painfully aware that everybody was looking at him as the master. This was a kind of coming-out.” The fact that Malick turned up at all was a symbolic gesture that somehow made The Thin Red Line official. But there was still a long road ahead.

In June, a five-day workshop was scheduled, also at Medavoy’s. A few weeks before it was due to begin, Malick said he couldn’t sleep at night; he was worried that Geisler and Roberdeau might produce Sansh¯o the Bailiff before he finished it, directed by someone else. They say he demanded that his producers relinquish all rights to the play to him. Geisler says, “Terry would have drawn a line in the sand, and The Thin Red Line wouldn’t be happening today.” By this time, they had invested nearly $1 million and a decade’s effort in The Thin Red Line. They agreed to his terms.

Plans for the film workshop proceeded. One day Brad Pitt dropped by. Malick met Johnny Depp at the Book Soup Bistro, on Sunset. Recalls Geisler, “Depp basically said to Malick, ‘Let’s sign this napkin; you tell me where to show up, when, what to play.’ After Depp and Pitt provided the affirmation Terry needed, it was easier to get him to meet with other actors.” But there was a downside to stars; Geisler told the suddenly starstruck director, “You’re going to compromise the movie.” Finally Malick gave in. According to a source, Malick said, “The audience will know that Pitt’s going to wake up after his death scene and collect his $1 million.”

But word had gotten out that Costner, Pitt, and Depp were up for roles in The Thin Red Line, and a feeding frenzy began among male actors. Geisler and Roberdeau were even getting calls from actresses. “There are no actresses in it,” Roberdeau told one agent. “There’s only a photograph of a woman in one scene.” Without missing a beat, the agent said, “She’ll play that! She’ll be the photograph.”

Pre-production moved slowly, with Malick displaying his characteristic reluctance to make decisions. Says a source, “It was hard for him to say something definite. He would couch [his ambivalence] in a way that was very compelling on the surface, all about being delicate, and he speaks so idiomatically that sometimes you get caught up in the beauty of what he’s saying, but fundamentally it was hard to get him to commit to things.” He met with scores of actors, told each of them, “There is no one whom I admire more.”

Around the beginning of 1996, Malick phoned Michèle in Paris and told her he wanted a divorce. It did not come as a complete surprise. There had been problems since her days in Austin. But she claims when she had asked Malick if things had changed between them, he had always said, “No, no, no.”

Malick was inching toward production, but there were still unresolved issues. As soon as Medavoy got involved, Geisler says, a turf war broke out. It was one that, without Malick’s support, Geisler and Roberdeau would inevitably lose. Medavoy says he welcomed the participation of Geisler and Roberdeau. “I did everything to keep them on,” he says. “I took them out to lunch. I said, ‘Here’s your chance to really learn how to make a movie.’”

But Geisler and Roberdeau had no experience with a project of this scale. Medavoy hired his friend, veteran producer George Stevens Jr., whom Malick had known and liked since the late 60s. (Stevens had invested in Badlands.) He was to supervise the production, which would largely take place in Queensland, Australia, and cost about $55 million.
 

Medavoy asked Geisler and Roberdeau to share their producers’ credit with Stevens. They refused.

In the fall of 1996, according to Geisler, Malick called him and said that he was once again having trouble sleeping. Now he was worried about The English-Speaker. He feared that, since his exclusive five-year directing option had lapsed at the end of 1995, the producers might turn it over to another director.
“I thought he wanted me to say a few words of love and reassurance,” recalls Geisler. But he says Malick made it clear that he would not proceed with The Thin Red Line unless the producers extended his right to direct The English-Speaker in perpetuity. The producers refused.

“Terry said that if we ultimately produced one of the three projects with him, we should feel ourselves lucky,” Geisler remembers, summing up an exchange with Malick. “I said, ‘You’re scaring me now, because you’re making me feel as if you have no intention ever of developing Sansh¯o or directing The English-Speaker, which was not the spirit in which these other projects were commissioned.’”

Medavoy agreed with them, told Malick that if he felt so strongly about The English-Speaker he should buy the script back or enter into a partnership with the producers. But Malick was adamant, denied he had any ulterior motives, and held out a carrot. Again, according to Geisler, he said, “We’ll clean our wound to the bone, proceed together on The Thin Red Line without doubt or suspicion. We will now be speaking pilot to pilot. I don’t want to jump out and see that you’re still on the plane. We’ll be able to jump out of the plane together.” Roberdeau broke in, saying, “I feel like I’ve already jumped out of the plane. I’m on the ground with my legs broken.”

Geisler consoled himself with fantasies about the glorious day when The Thin Red Line would finally open, “A Terrence Malick picture, produced by Robert Geisler and John Roberdeau.” He explains: “During those years of stress, selling furniture and books and CDs, I got through it because I said, ‘Bring Malick back and, oh, what a day it will be. What a reward we’ll have. We’ll stand shoulder to shoulder, speak pilot to pilot.’”
Principal photography was to begin on June 23, 1997. Phoenix had a deal with Sony, which was slated to co-finance the picture. Geisler and Roberdeau learned from a story in Variety that Sony president John Calley had pulled his company out of the film. They say they faxed the article to Malick in Australia, where he was scouting locations. He flew to Los Angeles immediately and pressed Medavoy, who admitted he didn’t have the financing. Geisler and Roberdeau claim that Malick was furious with his old friend, and asked them if, contractually, he could take the film away from Medavoy.

Medavoy responds, “I don’t know if that’s true or not, because Terry never mentioned it to me. I had told Terry that we ran the risk of not doing it at Sony, and since he was in Australia and unavailable, I waited until he got back to tell him that it wasn’t going to be Sony, but that we would find another distributor.”
In any event, Malick, Medavoy, and Stevens (sans Geisler and Roberdeau) were obliged to pitch the project, something Malick had hoped to avoid. Fox 2000 president Laura Ziskin agreed to pick up the film, but required the presence of some stars. They would play supporting roles while lower-wattage actors, such as Elias Koteas, Adrien Brody, and Jim Caviezel, took on the main parts. The last stone had been cleared from the path.
“In May of 1997, we were working our hearts out in New York, and I saw that people were beginning to move to Australia,” says Geisler. “We called Phoenix. Under no circumstances were we to be in Australia, ever! I called Terry and said, ‘What we just heard doesn’t square with either our recent situation, in which you seemed to rely upon me, if not hourly, at least every other day, nor our relationship over the last 10 or 20 years.’ We just wanted the pleasure of seeing him say ‘Action!’ for the first time in 20 years, feeling we had earned that, and he would not be there were it not for John and me.

“Basically he said I should be grateful to him for directing this movie. It was not what he expected to direct, he didn’t want to, he was doing it only for me. I said, ‘Terry, this is going to sound melodramatic and biblical, but let me put it to you like this: I feel like Moses. I led this fucking movie through the desert, and now the fun starts, everybody else is walking into the promised land.’ He said, ‘Bobby, there is no one for whom I have more admiration than you. No one speaks the truth to me like you do, Bobby.’” Essentially, says Geisler, Malick blamed it on Medavoy.

Geisler continues, “To be really theatrical about it, this sums up my whole life with Terry Malick.” He takes out a small manila envelope and turns it upside down, spilling a handful of brightly colored pills, like M&Ms, onto the table. He slowly counts out 17, some of which are vitamins. “Several years ago, I didn’t take anything,” he says. “My face has started falling off. High blood pressure, diabetes, I got fat, I drink too much. I’m never going to get over this. We were co-dependent. I don’t like to think this about myself, but we were members of a cult.” Adds Roberdeau, “We were the high priests of it. I’m the cardinal of Bobby’s Malick cult.”

Disputes between directors and producers are, as is well known, common in the film business. But what happened next was a little strange. Several journalists visited the set, among them Josh Young from Entertainment Weekly. Shortly thereafter, Young received a copy of a peculiar statement from the set on The Thin Red Line stationery, and a later letter, unsigned. The statement said, in part: “Bobby Geisler and John Roberdeau are imposters and confidence men who have no connection with Mr. Malick and who have had only a distant one in the past. Journalists should beware of letting these tricksters promote their own careers by using Mr. Malick’s name … ” The letter attacks them for crediting themselves “as the reason [Malick] has returned to filmmaking,” and credits Ecky Wallace instead.

It seems extremely unlikely that Malick would have lent himself to so bizarre an exercise as this one. But regardless of who wrote the statement, it reflects the sentiments of the people around Malick. Says Medavoy, “The [producers] were really resourceful in getting to Terry and putting the impetus into it, but I don’t think they convinced him to make the movie, maybe Ecky did. I don’t know. But one thing’s for sure: he came to it himself, and it wasn’t about money, it was about passion.”

Says Clayton Townsend, Oliver Stone’s producer, who worked on pre-production, “Geisler and Roberdeau are two guys who live in their own world. They’re very pretentious fellows and take great pride in their paper presentations. They just had a knack for putting on a lot of people along the way. I tried to stay clear of them.”

Adds one source, “There are a lot of people Geisler and Roberdeau owed money to. The fact is, they might have had the police after them if this picture hadn’t been set up. They are the great spenders of the Western world. They didn’t have enough money to pay for the office help, but you ask them to go out and get you a list of actors and they Federal Express you a book full of pictures in a $200 binder. The two guys are trying to get their careers started on Terry. They wore out their welcome.”

Adds another source, “It wasn’t that they were banned from the set. They hadn’t been involved for a year prior to the shooting, except in their own minds. They’re people Terry got involved with and wishes he hadn’t. Terry said that not only did they not bring him back, their being around was discouraging him from coming back.”

The source adds that Geisler and Roberdeau were working at cross-purposes with Phoenix. For example, he claims that the production was waiting for the delivery of uniforms, which never came. When the supplier was called, he said he had been fired by Roberdeau. (Geisler denies this.) Another source says that Geisler and Roberdeau were asked to give Adrien Brody, an actor they had recommended, a tape of Il Posto, a film that Malick wanted him to see. Instead they arranged a screening and dinner at the Royalton Hotel in New York for a dozen people. Malick was reportedly furious that they had “improved” on his instruction.

Adrien Brody plays Fife, a major character in the novel—Jones modeled him after himself. Now his scenes have been reduced, and the film, not unlike Oliver Stone’s 1986 Platoon, turns on the conflict between idealism and cynicism as embodied in the clash between two characters—Welsh, who is played by Sean Penn, and Witt, who is played by Jim Caviezel. (Caviezel and Elias Koteas, who plays Staros, are the two actors whose performances are generating advance praise.)

Although people around Malick now say that it was, among other things, Geisler and Roberdeau’s problems with creditors that estranged the director, their phone logs reveal that he was calling them frequently, often two or three times a day, as much as a year after The New York Observer went public with their financial woes, right up to the start of production.

The producers think Malick got rid of them because of their close relationship with Michèle. Says Geisler, “We and Michèle got divorced around the same time. We got the call and Michèle got the call. A chapter was closed and a chapter was opened.” Geisler and Roberdeau are contractually allowed to thank four people in the credits. Michèle Malick was one of the people they selected. According to Geisler, when Terry heard about all of this, he threatened to take his name off the picture.

Concludes Geisler, “Terry’s writing is obsessed with mercy and sacrifice and love and courage and comradeship, but that just doesn’t square with who he is: utterly unmerciful. But great artists are not necessarily always nice people.”

The fact is, we’ll probably never know the entire truth about this relationship. But one thing is clear: Malick and the producers, who did manage to retain their screen credit, were made for each other. His genius sparked their ambition; their ambition cleared his path back to filmmaking. Geisler and Roberdeau ensnared Malick in a web of love that he may have come to experience as obligation, and he broke loose. They tried to seduce him, become the circumference of his life, but he seduced them and became the center of theirs. As playwright Charles Mee Jr., who wrote four drafts of The White Hotel, puts it, “When Bobby and John first encounter an artist, they are so appreciative, they are so generous, but there comes a time when they would like some consideration in return, and if they don’t get it, they feel dissed. There comes a test of love—that most people fail.”

The fact is, the director has returned and, despite his long absence, brought The Thin Red Line in on time and on budget. The much discussed result is a “meditation on men and war,” as Laura Ziskin calls it, as far from Saving Private Ryan, the year’s other big war movie, as you can get. “The technical virtuosity of Saving Private Ryan is stunning,” she continues. “The artistic virtuosity of The Thin Red Line is equally stunning. There’s a kind of hypnotic quality to Malick’s movies, and this one is just mesmerizing.”

Europe should not control the IMF

By Martin Wolf
Financial Times, 24 May 2011

The king is dead; long live the queen. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the French erstwhile managing director of the International Monetary Fund, had not even resigned before Europeans started to coalesce around Christine Lagarde, the French finance minister, as his successor. Gone are past promises of an open selection. The Europeans insist on the principle that what we have we hold. The ancien régime survives.

Mme Lagarde is a perfectly respectable candidate. She is French, almost a requirement, it often seems, for the European head of an international institution. She is a woman, surely an advantage, not least when her predecessor is facing charges of attempted rape. She was chairman of Baker & McKenzie, a famous US law firm and she speaks English fluently. She is an extremely likeable and impressive person. But she is not a perfect candidate: her economics are limited. If she were to become head of the organisation she would have to rely on the advice of those around her. If she were to get the job, it would be essential for whoever replaces John Lipsky, the American first deputy managing director, who is due to depart in August, to be a first-rate economist.

I write as if she is going to get the job. I am quite sure she is. As of today, the European Union still has 32 per cent of the votes (see chart) and the US another 16.7 per cent. If the latter supports them, as I suspect it will, the Europeans will have no difficulty in obtaining additional votes from countries dependent upon them. Why might the US support the Europeans once again? One reason is that the US has not yet given up on the old bargain, which gives it a permanent lock on the presidency of the World Bank. Indeed, the Americans will probably tell themselves that the chances of getting any money from Congress for World Bank programmes (above all, its concessional lending arm, the International Development Association) if the Bank’s head is not an American is close to zero.

To be fair to the Europeans, the emergence of the IMF during the course of the current crisis as what is, in effect, a European monetary fund gives an understandable urgency to their desire for control over an institution that has played a vital catalytic role in the response to the crises not just in Europe’s western and eastern periphery, but inside the eurozone itself. As of April 2011, 79.5 per cent of IMF credit outstanding was to European countries, 52.9 per cent in the east and 26.6 per cent in the west of the continent (see chart).


The response of Europe’s critics is one of vociferous condemnation: did any one, they ask, think that the head of the IMF needed to be an Asian to deal with the Asian crisis of the late 1990s or a Latin American to deal with the crises in that continent in the 1980s or 1990s? Of course not. So why should a European be needed to clean up the mess the Europeans have now made of their affairs? The claim traditionally made by advanced countries is that their nationals should run international organisations, because they are relatively competent. Today’s European disarray is, the critics note, a disproof of this proposition.

The Europeans’ argument is, in my view, stronger than these critics will admit. The eurozone is a very special (and, in my view, quite dangerous) construction. When the IMF lends to Greece, Ireland or Portugal, it is directly affecting the monetary and financial stability of all other members of the eurozone. It is almost as if it were rescuing, say, California from a looming default. It is, I think, understandable that leaders of powerful countries, such as Germany or France, want to feel complete trust in the management of an institution that is performing such a vital function for themselves. Indeed, it was for this reason that I initially thought the IMF should not have been involved inside the eurozone at all: it would ultimately subvert the IMF’s own independence.

While I find this European argument has some force, it does not have enough force. The counter-argument is that it is in the Europeans’ interest to receive unbiased and independent advice from the IMF. That, Mr Strauss-Kahn could not give. Mme Lagarde will not be independent either. But someone is going to have to make Europeans recognise that debt restructuring will almost certainly be needed and that, given this, it would be better to fix financial systems directly, rather than indirectly via lending to quite possibly insolvent governments.

On balance, then, I do not think the case for a European head of the IMF is made overwhelming by the current crisis. Then one has to recognise the enormous advantages in terms of the global legitimacy and effectiveness, not just of the IMF, but of the multilateral institutional order, of making a transition to open global selection of the IMF’s new head. It has to be recognised that the place of the old advanced countries and of Europe, in particular, in the world economy is declining rapidly. According to the IMF’s own statistics, the share of the EU in global output, at purchasing power parity, will shrink from 25 per cent in 2000 to 18 per cent in 2015 – an astonishingly rapid rate of decline (see chart). The EU remains over-represented in the IMF: even after all the reweighting, the voting share of the Netherlands will be 1.76 per cent, against 2.62 per cent for India.

The best course, I believe, would be to commission a high-level search committee. Candidates should also set out their prospectus for the future of the IMF: there are many big issues ahead, including global monetary reform. They should then be chosen by the members on merit.

The criteria used should, however, be far more than technocratic. An understanding of economics is indeed important. So, too, is proven political ability, toughness and experience as a successful high-level policymaker. The person chosen should be willing to take the risks of leading. In that respect, Mr Strauss-Kahn excelled. I would not myself exclude a European, as some I respect would. But the time has come for the incumbent powers to recognise that they cannot continue to dominate the global scene. If they persist in running these institutions, the rising powers will, inevitably, turn away from them altogether, to create replacements they can control. This would Balkanise management of the global economy, to no one’s true long-term advantage.
Regimes that do not bow to the winds of change get blown away. The Europeans need to recognise that truth in time. They will not do so. But it will prove a big mistake.