It’s always been interesting to me how big stars line up to work with Terrence Malick. The reclusive filmmaker, one of my favorites, is known to wield a heavy scissor in the editing room, and he’s trimmed quite a few names from his films. In looking up further info about “Knight Of Cups”, I was startled by the cast list, since there were a lot of familiar faces I didn’t spot at all. I recommend you look up that group of actors, it’s an awfully strange collection of people. And of course some of them aren’t actually in the movie proper.
“Knight Of Cups” is ostensibly about a screenwriter, Christian Bale. What happens to him during the movie, informed by tarot cards as per the title’s suggestion, is up for interpretation. Consider it “ennui”. He certainly takes many lovers – Natalie Portman, Cate Blanchett and Freida Pinto are amongst the women he seduces in this movie, which is kind of what I imagine a talented screenwriter would do if he looked like Christian Bale.
There is family drama regarding a dead brother. Malick tends to bring out the woo-woo in many actors, so it’s interesting to see the late Brian Dennehy as Bale’s father. Towering over Bale and casting a shadow over the entire movie, Dennehy brings a blue collar crustiness to his role that grounds what is an experience that otherwise levitates to a certain rhythm. A-Listers have typically been used by Malick as window dressing, so it’s pretty exciting to see a blue collar character actor like Dennehy break through all the artsiness.
Malick is an acquired taste, and after the relatively mainstream success of Oscar-nominated “Tree Of Life”, even the critics have started to abandon him. He’s also grown less interested in narrative and logic – portions of “Knight Of Cups” are successful when you feel them. You’re not sure what happened between two characters, but you can tell, from camera angles and furtive glances, that there is some heartache and/or regret building a chasm that separates them.
I had missed Malick’s style. During the end of the pandemic, when cable was running out of movies to show, FX began airing “A Hidden Life”, Malick’s moody tale of a conscientious objector in Germany during the Holocaust. A steady diet of generic blockbuster crap made Malick’s work look almost alien by comparison, and I was taken with the pure visuals of the film. I overheard a simpleton slag the film off without knowing anything about it, and it almost led to a fight. It’s funny how prison makes you realize exactly what you find worth fighting for. You eventually realize you fight over pretty stupid stuff.
One of the reasons I think Malick lost people over the last few years was that, starting with “To The Wonder” (starring the very un-Malickian leading man Ben Affleck), he began to tell stories beyond a working class existence. Visual poetry is easier to see and more universally accepted when you’re dealing with poverty-level conditions (like Malick’s “Badlands” and “Days Of Heaven”) or more structured environments (the war formations of “The Thin Red Line”). “To The Wonder” met with resistance in exploring the discomfort in pristine-seeming suburbia. And then “Knight Of Cups” arrived, with Malick’s roving camera capturing the exploits of rich people in their extravagant apartments and at their swanky parties.
Malick’s eye for detail met up against a more challenging subject in capitalism, to be sure. The filmmaker certainly isn’t judgmental about what he sees, which can confuse viewers of “Knight Of Cups” who wonder, how should I feel about this problem-free lifestyle, the booze and drugs and gorgeous bedmates? It’s a more mature observation than one most filmmakers would make – American films tend to fetishize either lower class lifestyle or, more often, well-financed living. Malick knows better than to sermonize against a wealthy lifestyle. It’s up to you to gather what is occurring in these gaudy upscale worlds.
Capitalism, however, is undoubtedly at the heart of the criminal justice system. Most don’t truly understand the difference between federal and state charges, why the feds would get involved instead of state authorities. The difference is usually based in one key ingredient to every federal charge – “interstate commerce”. State laws govern all types of criminal malfeasance, but federal charges are all about interstate commerce.
What the means is, if you crossed over state lines to commit a crime, or the crime itself was carried out over state lines, then it is federal jurisdiction. So if I sell you an eight ball on a street corner in Detroit, the local police would be interested. But if there was proof that eight ball traveled from Detroit to Illinois, and you’re responsible, then it’s a federal crime. Because most drugs travel a considerable distance, that places drugs squarely in the crosshairs of the feds. “Interstate commerce” also takes into account computer activities, which includes many fraud charges, and most, if not all, of the sex charges in the low-security realm of the feds.
The next question would have to be, how do they enforce those laws? And that’s when you reach the federal sentencing guidelines for all manners of crimes. When the question of how severe one charge is compared to another, the amount of financial gain is given disproportionate weight. Everything else is also reduced to numbers. Those of you familiar with the sentencing disparity between crack cocaine and powder cocaine are familiar with this – an over-reliance on math instead of basic awareness. Most Americans aren’t knowledgeable about drugs. They’re also unfamiliar with structural racism, so they wouldn’t realize just how many more minorities are jailed, for longer sentences, compared to whites because crack cocaine is commonly used by Black users, and the less-policed powder cocaine has a much higher percentage of white customers. The further you go down the drug sentencing guidelines, the more you realize certain drugs are randomly compared to others, guidelines that are the results of overzealous prosecutors and politicians who otherwise know nothing about the drugs in question.
Sex and financial crimes are counted in the same ways. It becomes about “stacking”, which is a casual term that nonetheless pops up in a lot of legal analysis, as if charging criminals was like building a burger. Sex crimes involving the vulnerable don’t take into account whatever damage is done to the victim, but instead how “much” the perpetrator has collected – federal sex crimes are usually about content and not conduct, so a lot of it deals with pornography, which boils down to counting images. Financial crimes are much easier to understand, because of course this whole system is based on commerce. Are officials more concerned about victims? Or are they more interested in counting? Are they more interested in money that hasn’t been taxed?
Numbers are what keep so many Americans imprisoned. Because what is the prison industrial system if it’s not an economy? Recidivism is what provides the lifeblood for these institutions, which employ many people at various levels. I overheard one guard, at one point, bemoaning that WalMart wouldn’t take him back as an employee during that season, which is why he had to return to working as a guard. These are jobs, and these jobs provide considerable benefits. And so many people involved use this system of subjugation and degradation to put food on their families’ tables.
Of course, that’s just one part of a larger puzzle. Most prison commissary food, overpriced and undersized, comes from a company called Keefe’s, which is run by H.I.G Capital. This is the same H.I.G. Capital that is in bed with various lawmakers in Washington, a real marriage of convenience. It’s all one big capitalist disaster, and in the end those that pay the biggest prices are the loved ones of the incarcerated. People don’t discuss how expensive it is to know someone in prison, but it’s something I’ll discuss at a later time.