Entranced by the Spectacle of Truth: Wonder and Ascent in Plato and Terrence Malick's Knight of Cups and To the Wonder

Plato's account of philosophical transcendence links together wonder, spectacle, ascent, and love. A preoccupation with transcendence and its corollary Platonic themes is replicated in the cinematic work of writer / director Terrence Malick, who reinterprets them in terms of Kierkegaardian existential quest. Malick's films Knight of Cups (2014) and To the Wonder (2012) illustrate failed moves of ascent toward transcendence, but they also shed light on successful ascent. A persisting problem in interpretation of Plato is the nature of ascent and transcendence, particularly with respect to the question of how ascent relates to concrete reality. Some commentators read Platonic ascent in dualistic terms, as abandonment of concrete immanence; by contrast, a more holistic view asserts that to love the Good is to orient oneself toward concrete individual things in the light of the ideal. Malick offers a cinematic argument for holistic transcendence, depicting ascent as a conversion insight that the ideal is present in the concrete and provides grounding and intelligibility for the concrete. To make the movement of ascent is to grasp the dialectical or synthetic relationship between the transcendent and the immanent, and to affirm both the transcendent source and the imperfect beauty it grounds.