Love sick: Malick's Kierkegaardian 'Weightless' trilogy

Malick's ‘weightless’ trilogy (To the Wonder [2012], Knight of Cups [2015] and Song to Song [2017]) explores the limits of different conceptions of love, from the romantic and ethical to the spiritual and religious. Focusing on To the Wonder, I argue that this exploration of subjective experiences of love is manifested through Malick's distinctive cinematic style, which aims to present the ‘weightless’ (groundless, shifting and distracted) subjectivity defining contemporary moral-cultural experience. Malick's trilogy thereby recapitulates both a Platonic and a Kierkegaardian existentialist movement of ascent, from aesthetic and ethical to religious experiences of love.