The Old World and The New World

I was in the university library yesterday evening and bored of reading about monks (having overdosed on St Boniface in Fulda a couple of days earlier), so I sat down with my shiny new copy of Mark Sisson's The Primal Blueprint, in which he advocates a lifestyle founded on a version of the Paleo Diet. I've already been following the Paleo Diet for the past two or three months, with occasional lapses due to moving about and visiting Pizza Hut and suchlike. Sisson certainly knows what he's talking about. I always hated biology at school, but Sisson manages to make the biological basis of the Primal lifestyle both comprehensible and interesting. The main thing is to hunt and kill at least one animal every day - it could be a duck or a cat or an elk or anything else, as long as it can be eaten.

I also got Terrence Malick's 2005 The New World out from the library on DVD, starring Colin Farrell as Captain John Smith and Q'orianka Kilcher as Pocahontas. It is either a piece of sublime cinematic genius or lumbering and pretentious, I'm still deciding. Much of the film consists of long, slow shots of forests, shorelines and meadows, with ponderous internal monologue voiceovers which reveal the surprising truth that north America was settled not by pilgrims and pioneers, but tortured emos:

If only I could go down that river. To love her in the wild, forget the name of Smith. I should tell her. Tell her what? It was just a dream. I am now awake.

Or:

Who are you whom I so faintly hear? Who urge me ever on? What voice is this that speaks within me... guides me towards the best?

Or:

There is only this - all else is unreal.

Or my personal favourite:

You flow through me, like a river.

A line worthy of an Avatard. The New World reminded me a lot of another of Malick's films, The Thin Red Line, which is one of my favourite war movies but similarly strays rather too often into portentous philosophising (the film's opening line, I think, is a dreamy voiceover which asks, What is life...?) and idealisation of the old Western trope of the noble savage living in harmony with nature.

There's also the question of Colin Farrell, whom I do like as an actor, but I'm not sure why he sticks with his Irish brogue in this film when he's supposed to be playing an Englishman. The gaggle of Jamestown urchins also provide a couple of the best moments in the film with their Ken Loach-esque realism, but again, I'm not sure why these diminutive English colonists sound like they were picked up from some Dublin backstreet. Maybe it's because Irish accents sound more Olde Worlde to cinema audiences.

Malick's version of the John Smith/Pocahontas romance aims to be a more a historically accurate retelling of the story, except for the fact that the romance never actually happened; the real Pocahontas was only 10 when she saved John Smith (she's portrayed as 14 or 15 in the film), and the idea that they were romantically involved is a later fiction. The Pocahontas story has always bothered me anyway. There's something weirdly paternalistic and prurient about it which, ironically, is an effective metaphor for the philosophy of colonialism as a whole.

Never mind, New World (aged 15), the Old World (aged 30) is here to look after you

Still, this version is much less offensive and more inventive than Disney's. Although that may not be saying much.