Philament SENSE & SENSATION – August 2009 Narrative Vistas: Subversive Voice‐over in Terrence Malick James McLeod Introduction The complexity of Terrence Malick’s filmic language makes his films worthy of close, sustained academic analysis with respect to the vagaries of their voice‐overs, to augment the growing body of work dedicated to his visual style, work which often alludes to the voice in passing, but less often as a central focus. Crofts’ illuminating study of Malick’s Days of Heaven observes the critical privileging of the visual track 1 and Malick’s tendency to “defamiliarise and disturb” 2 the relationship between sound and image. James Monaco articulates this troubled relationship as “an electric current between the positive pole of the voice‐over narration and the negative pole of the images on the screen” 3 . I analyse the same relationship, but where Crofts foregrounds Malick’s “intention to supplement and trouble the traditional hierarchisation of synchronised dialogue” 4 through the use of asynchronous voice‐over, I examine Malick’s voice‐over narration against the cinematic traditions, not of dialogue, but of narration. Thus where Crofts argues for Malick’s reorganisation of the soundscape away from a “vococentrist,” 5 hierarchical privileging of the synchronous voice by the viewer, I start from the conventional bestowal of uncanny narrative authority 6 upon the offscreen ‘storyteller’. As Sarah Kozloff articulates, “We put our faith in the voice not as created, but as creator,” 7 and this imbues the narrator with deific conjuring power. The unseen voice therefore becomes, in Doane’s terms, the voice of the (personified) film: even when asynchronous or ‘wild’ sound is utilised, the phantasmatic body’s attribute of unity is not lost. It is simply displaced – the body in 56