聖杯騎士｜Knight of Cups：Fragmentation Reassembly
Interpreting the incoherent frames
Preface
I finally got some time to write down some words for Knight of Cups, since all this hustle and bustle workflow of life began, I even dreamt about fixing bugs last night. How miserable.
Back to work, the fractions of the film still meandering through thoughts of mine. What kind of structure could I build on the frames interspersed between the protagonist’s main journey and contingency, the main sequence we need for comprehending his main quest. Let’s start with — — the quest.
The Quest
First, we need to talk about fragments of life. We used to live in sequence, think in a sequential way that sorts out our life occasions with more sense. The sequence has its own perquisites — — there is a meaning. Rick (I love Christian Bale), the protagonist, comes up with the story of his father sending him out West in search of a treasure and was served by drink that made him forget his quest. The ‘quest’, which is what made him the ‘knight’, indicates there is a role for him. Yet, the more profound longing for meaning, any kind of meaning, to give some sense of structure to his fragmented life, and avoid what he sees as damnation — the pieces of his life, never come together, the more he finds he’s in a single-role play. The play is infinite in the world he has augmented, but the control of his own sequence is finite. This recalls me of the photographer in Blow-Up, the innocent man who wants to feel his controllability to reality, albeit reluctantly, he lastly ‘drops’ his camera first to engage the gap between identification and reality. Accordingly, the ‘knight’ seems to place his existential burden on women, making them his source for existential closure to the point of fetishising them, which of course dooms his relations to failure as they are finite to reality, and can never live up to what he want them to be. It’s a shame if we stop here. The quest has not been impeached by this film. Conversely, it buzzes towards the ambiguity of the quest — — the pearl.
The Pearl
Previously, we’ve discussed how the quest is a wishful illusion by ‘the knight’. He somehow can tell the fragments — — pieces of a man is an inevitable feeling which may come closer to reality. Uniquely, he does not stop parsing what to do with his occasionality, which brings him to the attempt of taking a leap of his faith. The leap connecting to the infinite by relating oneself absolutely to a transcendent source transforms love for other people into a love for the eternal being that shines through them. Thereupon, Rick craves not trying to achieve infinite things, not acting based on logical reasons. These nonlogical reasons for not searching for infinite emphasize the importance of a subjective worldview rather than an objective one, and inversely, an objective view towards oneself, rather than a subjective one. This is the time Rick ‘translated’ himself from ‘Knight of Cups’ to ‘Knight of Faith’, by relating oneself to a higher source of infinite. The faith, however, is a mostly hypothetical being for in reality to be free from despair, which means that this moment of faith must be made continually on the strength of an absurd, a repetition that is almost impossible to uphold continuously. Henceforth, we see Rick scaling the mountains towards the light, we see clouds move into the view obscuring the light, and pushing it back to the horizon, we see the film concluding with the image of yet another journey towards the elusive sunset, accompanied by the single word — — Begin.
The light in the eyes of others.
The pearl.
Coarse Texture
In this case, the pursuit of this film seems to fade into the myth of heroic masculine purpose, which makes it a vulgar clickbait. Despite this coarse texture, ‘You need a style first, and then choose your cars’. We may discuss this ambiguity a bit further in my next article (if there is one).
At the end of the day, meet Terrence Malick, Knight of Cups.
