Expelled to paradise. Terrence Malick's last man

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In his major book Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche warned his contemporaries: "Alas! The time is coming when man will no more shoot the arrow of his longing out over mankind, and the string of his bow will have forgotten how to twang!...Behold! I shall show you the Last Man." Martin Škabraha´s new book on Terrence Malick draws inspiration from this metaphor, and, against the dominant critical approach to Malick in terms of spiritual cinema, reads his work as a reflection of American capitalism. Škabraha links historical materialism with anthropologist Stephen Gudeman´s notion of market logic “cascading” destructively into the realm of mutuality. This concept provides an original interpretive key to Malick´s films, which portray the gradual loss of human capacity to bring a new beginning to the old world.