The Tree of Life Essay

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L I G H T YEARSTERRENCE MALICK RETURNS TC THE

LANDSCAPE CF HIS CH ILDHC CD AND SEES ALL THEWAY TC ETERNITY IN HIS IMMENSE NEW FILMBY KENT JON ES

" A LL TH A T IS IS LIGHT." FOR REA S O N S TH A T S H O U LD BE O BV I O U S TO A N Y O N E WH O H A Sseen even one of his films, Stan Brakhage returned often to this quotation from JohannesScotus Eriugena, the 9th-century Neoplatonist. Brakhage found Eriugena's maxim inEzra Pound's Cantos, in the first Pisan Canto (LXXIV) as "all things that are are lights,"and in LXXXVII, the third poem in the "Rock-Drill" section, in which Eriugena's origi-nal "O mn ia qua e sunt, lumina su nt" is given an even blunter tran slation: "All things arelights." Pound was looking for directives, observations, and formulations whose powerlay in their simplicity, direct ema nations from the " rad iant wo rld . . . of moving energies."Two centuries after his death, Eriugena was judged a heretic because of his equationsof God with creation and humanity with divinity. To Eriugena, God is not an omnipotentFather, but an unknowable, uncategorizable, and transcendent "non-being" that mysteri-ously arrives at a process of "self-creation"in a word, illumination. Every being andthing is a "theophany," a divine manifestation, "all things low lamps shedding diffusedivinity" as Hugh Kenner put it. Evil is not known by God because, properly speaking,God cannot "know" anything. It is strictly a human affair, the result of beings blinded totheir essentially divine nature by fantasies rooted in and empowered by tbe contingenciesof life in the material w orld. Me taphorically speaking, these are the people who have eatenfrom the Tree of Knowledge; as opposed to those who live "a blessed life" of "eternal


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peace in contemplation of the truth, whichis properly called deification." In Christo-pher Bamford's wo rds, "this is the full real-ization of the Word-born fruit of theIncarnation, the Word himself." Which isto say, Jesus, who, as Eriugena remindedus , is "the fruit of the Tree of Life."I am not suggesting that the work of a9th-century Irish dialectician offers askeleton key to Terrence Malick's newfilm. However, it seems obvious that Mal-ick is unfashionably conversant withearly philosophers hke Eriugena, Gros-seteste, St. Augustine, and St. Paul, whowrote to the Ephesians that "whatsoeverdoth make manifest is light." His intenseinterest in originsof violence, of the uni-verse itselfhas made his last three filmsanomalous in modern film culture. It isalso what has made him such a reveredfigure to some, such a suspect one to oth-ers. Speculations about the origins of lifeon earth and correctives to the course ofhuman history are, at the moment, auto-matically tagged as "grandiose," hold-overs from a pre-Marxian age when theconcerns of great men were fixed on theIdeal and the Ultimate as opposed to theContingent and the Here and Nowinthis sense. Pound's life story has become acautionary tale. How we got here, how itis that this world once was not and willone day no longer bethese questions arenow reckoned so immense as to beunseemly, asked only by religious fanaticsor essentialist philosophy professors whobelieve that we are nothing more thanshadows on the wall of Plato's cave.

IDETECT A STRAIN OF EMBARRASSMENTin some of the more ho stile reactions toThe Tree of Life. Structurally speaking ,Malick's film is a transformative visionthat happens in the blink of an eye to a

middle-aged man named Jack, played bySean Penn. Its syntax is set to the rh ythm ofunceasing revelation and unified by a grandconsistency of forms (across the span ofthe film, we are prompted to recognize thesame spindly tentacles in a ball of primalenergy, in a waving undersea plant, in adinosaur's tale, in the branches of treesblowing in the wind, in human hands andfingers) and pathways (ascents, via glasselevators and up flights of stairs, toward

discovery, reckoning, t r anscendence) .Temporal continuity is shattered an d th e"protagonist" is virtually everyone w hosteps before the camera. In other words ,Malick really is making an attempt or toput it in punitive blogspeak, "presum-ing"to tell the story of us all.At th e moment, indeterminacy is all therage. Films in which something might ormight not have happened, in which imma-nence or transcendence are hinted at orglimpsed within a rush of contingencies butnever fully defined, are routinely valorized.THE TREE OF L/FE IS NOTA FROZEN VISUALIZATIONOF APRE-DIGESTEDIDEAOR BELIEF, BUT A OUESTSET IN DYNAMIC MOTIONBY A RESTLESS AESTHETICINTELLIGENCE.

This trust in suspension, which is obvi-ously derived from a well-founded suspi-cion of belief-based controls, results in acountervailing distrust of art that erects itsspiritual parameters as nakedly as Malickdoes here. Keep it in a suspended state orkeep it modestotherwise, we have aproblem. Thus the inevitable complainttha t The Tree of Life is a pretty goodmovie about a family in the Fifties madetop-heavy with dinosaurs; or, in RichardSchickel's case, a piece of claptrap thathardly merits your consideration.

On a far more serious and subtle level,J. Hoberman included a thought-provokingpan in his Cannes coverage, in which hedescribed the film as "emotionally remo te,"and made an interesting reference to whathe experienced as Malick's misplaced"cosmic" notion of the family. I thinkthis is to see The Tree of Life from thewrong end of the telescope. To claim thatMalick conceived a film about a familyhis familyand then pitched the actionat a cosmic level seems to me an inversionof his process and a denial of what makesit so emotionally and spiritually potent.As has been noted, this is the first timeMalick has filmed modernity, which hevisualizes as a grid of harsh angles,straight lines, glass boxes, and vertical

conveyances, as if humanity no longtrusted itself and felt compelled to restrits own movements (thematically speing, it's a continuation of that first shoing appearance of the fully construcfort in The New World). The evasive bolanguage between Jack and his wichoreographed within and perhabrought into being by the pathways their own glass box; the learned im persality of the workplace, where emotiodilemmas are confessed in terse whispethe self-limiting geometries of modurban planning: by Malick's lights, theyall manifestations of the same error, nrotic fixations resulting from a misplacemphasis on the transitory, too munourishment f rom the wrong tree . TTree of Life has been referred to as"religious film," which I take to meanChristian film, but that implies an adhence to religious doctrine that just isthere. One could say that it exists acrossroad between Eriugena's vision life on earth, specifically the part that h im pos thumously condemned asheretical pantheist , and pre-or thodBuddhismthis is not a work fixatedthe afterlife, but, hke The Thin Red Land The New World, on the "glory"this life. But Malick is an artist, not a tologian or a philosopher, and certainot a proselytizer. To speak only in sterms is to deny the film its immediand urgency. The Tree of Life is nofrozen visualization of a pre-digested ior belief, hut a quest set in dynammo tion by a restless aesthetic intelligen

On one level, the film is an actrecovery spurred by prolonged mournfor a younger brother (we don't witnhis death at 19, but we find ourselsearching for its early causes). Jacksummoned by an unnamed and unspresence ("How did you come to methat thrusts him into an imaginationour collective beginningthe formatof the planet, the emergence of prehtoric life, the ice age, and Jack's biwhich stands for the dawn of all humlife. I presume that the serious groanat the Cannes press screening besomewhere dur ing th is pass iona tcrafted interval, whose abstract contiity does bear a marked resemblance


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2001's Stargate sequence. I found it noless awe-inspiring.

IT IS FAIRLY COMMON, AND JUST, TObring up Emerson in discussions ofMalick's last three films. Hobermanand the Wonderfully Witty AnthonyLane referred to him in their reviews; I

invoked him when I wrote ahout The NewWorld. Once again, reading Emerson doesno t explain the films, but there seems littledoubt that he's been foundational for Mal-ick. One could claim a relationship betweenthe Emerson of "Circles" and thefilm'sfiuidshifts of scale: "T he eye is the first circle, thehorizon that it forms is the second; andthroughout nature this primary figure isendlessly repeated." This might just serveas an apt summation of the film's signatureaction of dilation and contraction, opti-cally, formally, and thematically. But it wa s"History" that came to mind after my firstviewing. "If the whole of history is in oneman, it is all to be explained from individ-ual experience. There is a relation betweenthe hours of our life and the centuries oftime. As the air I hreathe is drawn fromthe great repositories of nature, as the lighton my book is yielded by a star a hundredmillions of miles distant, as the poise ofmy body depends on the equilibrium ofcentrifugal and centripetal forces, so thehours should be instructed by the ages,and the ages explained by the hours. Ofthe universal mind each individual man isone more incarnat ion."

When I was young, everything seemedto happen under the aspect of eternity. Thescuttling of ants over the asphalt tran-spired in epochs, and the leaves that fellfrom the trees and the crocuses thatpushed through the snow were signs of allthe endings and beginnings since the dawnof time, brought to life for us in our booksabout dinosaurs and readings from Gene-sis in church. We were enormous and wewere infinitesimal, we were isolated andwe were connected to every stone andpathway, and to each other. How far awaywas the sun? How many seconds had Ibeen alive? How heavy a burden would Icarry for stealing a dollar from a girl'spurse? We felt history before we knew it,and we each gradually discovered ourshame, our self-consciousness, our pride.

and our defenses. I've never seen a film thatha s entered this territory and stayed sosteadfastly devoted to charting its topog-raphy. The creation movement, far froman appendage, is a crucial aspect of thattopography, or perhaps the celestial domethat covers it . The young Jack (HunterMcCracken) standing in his best suit,watching his father (Brad Pitt) play theorgan: the father making a show ofdemonstrating the value of practice an dhard work but in actual fact trying to elicitsilent admiration from his son; the son, allTHE MOVIE DOES NOTCO M E AT US IN ISOLATEDSHOTS BUT IN BURSTS OFATTENTIVELY CO VEREDEM OTIO N AN D ENERGY, AN DONE RECALLS INSTANTSTHAT FEEL LIKE THEY'VEBEEN SEIZED FROM ONE'SO W N M E M O R Y

eyes and ears an d restless limbs, trying to sti-fie his energies and summon up what heimagines to be the correct posture of admi-ration and respectful silence, an d betrayinggenuine awe as his father makes his waythrough the grand intricacies of Bach's "Toc-cata and Fugue ." It's only one in a bounty ofmoments that are hair-raisingly sharp onmultiple levels (mood, posture, power hal-ance, the relationship between people andenvironment), covered by a hypersensitive,mobile camera eye that wants to be every-where at once, placed within a progressionthat is not narrative b ut developmental (cog-nitively, emotionally, spiritually), and shad-owed hy the immensity of the universe,which endows each moment with an imme-diacy that stays true to the terrifyingahsolutes of childhood in an earlier era.Whether or not The Tree of Life will meanas much to someone who did not grow upas a male in a postwar American Christianhousehold is, I suppose, open for debate. ButI can't imagine a more vivid evocation.

In The New World, the actors were obvi-ously asked to be "genuine," and Malickwou nd u p with a modey collection of behav-iors ("My character^ he's a fuckin' osprey,"Colin Farrell told Christopher Plummer.

"That's how he sees me"). In The Tree Life, they are asked to do something spcific, and their director's preferred methfor achieving his ends, as always, is infinpatience, giving them time to find thown just relationship to an emotion interaction. Moviegoers have grown usto dinner-table explosions from domineing fathers enabled by quiescent mothebut the emotional dynamics of this filmouthurst are extremely subtle. Pitt's fathis a rarity in movies, a Southern aesthepatriarch with a touch of Van Clibuabout him, whose fragile sense of selfdependent on the constant love arespect of his family at all times. "Awhat were you up to today, my fine feaered friend?" he asks the largely silmiddle son (Tye Sheridan) between stecorrect ions and sarcast ic taunts . Timprobability of this stab at urbane reptee, meant to diffuse the air of emotiooppression, is perhaps most insulting all. From over in the corner, the fragyoungest son (Laramie Eppler) speaspontaneously in a soft voice: "Be quiePitt's amazement at his sons' disarmhonesty is one of the film's refrains, and ''What did you say?" is less a matter anger than stunned hurt. When the fathunleashes his fury, it's not about destrtion but containmen t, pushing the boy ia room, blotting out the rejection, then ting down to finish his meal in shame.

Hoberman takes issue with the passin which Jack and his brothers encountecollection of misshapen outsiders, crippand convicts during a visit to town, aLane sees a militant chasteness in episode where Jack steals a piece of lingefrom a comely neighbor's bedroom and thlets it flow down the river before he canfound out. I don't understand these coplaints. This is a film of first encounters areaction formations in the passage frinnocence to experience. "Can it happenanybody}" asks the young Jack in hehreaking voiceover as he and his brothwatch handcuffed men being herded intpolice van. "Nobody ever talks about It's not the film that's classifying alcoholcriminals, and the disabled under "abnmal," but the wide-open mind of a mcentury child. As for Lane's "observati(fishing expedition is more like it), I'm g


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that he had such an uncomplicated boy-hood. What makes the episode sopotent isthe violent shifting of psychic gears from thecompulsion to test boundaries, promptinganother walk up another flight of stairs andthe eureka moment of finding the forbiddenobject in the top dresser drawer, to abjectterror under the all-seeing eye of Godadesperate run to the riverbank, stuffing theslip under a log and then sending it floatingdown the river, then the slow walk homean d theguilty approach to a mother whomust know. How could sheo?

BOMBASTIC? GRANDIOSE? WHENthe film isworking at its peaklevel, which is about 90 per-cent of the time, it is both anecstatic inventory of wondersan d a symphony of unending transforma-

tion, inwhich the short-circuiting of controltriggers surrender, curiosity blooms intodestruction, andmovinglycruelty givesway to grace. The movie does not come atus in isolated shots but in bursts of atten-tively covered emotion and energy, and onerecalls instants that feel like they've beenseized from one's own memory: a play-ground scene that expands to a shapely andexcitingly colored Brueghel-esque vision;ferocious boys hurtling their way throughtall grasses on their bikes; a first tremblingforay into flirtation, a play of glances andaversions; the house and the yard as theheart of the world, and the street as theboundary of beyond. For obvious reasons,Kubrick's name has been invoked in morethan a few reviews, but if there's anotherartist shadowing The Tree of Life, it'sMahler, theopening passage of whose 1stSymphony is heard during the creationmovement and under the frenzied discoveryof a drowned boy atapublic pool ("You leta boy die," whispers Jack in voiceover."Why should I be good?"). Both artistswork to create a final form that sits on theedge of chaos, so abundant and varied inscintillations and spiraling pathways that itfeels vast in the memory. The occasionalrepetition of certain motifs seems less like afailing than necessary overspill.

Throughout TheTree of Life, Malickincorporates otherworldly visions, many ofwhich (a house underwater, the motherhovering in midair under the tree in the

yard, or encased in a glass coffin in thewoods like Snow White) aremoving poeticamplifications or crystallizations. He alsoreturns regularly to themiddle-aged Jackwalking through acracked desert landscapeat the end of time. The fulfillment of hisvision is ameeting with his younger self andhis family as they were during his boyhood,surrounded by angels and other familiesreconciled with their own loved ones, cul-minating in the mother commending herlost son to eternity. Thematically speaking,it makes perfect sense, but incomparison tothe super-specificity of what we've justexperienced, theactions of thedazed indi-viduals are disappointingly vaguewealready know this imagery from CloseEncounters or the now forgotten Frenchfilm Les Revenants. It's fining but not alto-gether satisfactory: like theclosing passageof In the Mood for Love, another memoryfilm, it works, but that's about all. I thinkthat at some point, the pull of recreation ledMalick a little bit astray from his originalconception. The peaceful acceptance of a

terrible loss isovershadowed by the realiza-tion that the ways of grace (the mother) andnature (the father), evoked in the film's firstvoiceover, are not opposed but dialecticallyconjoined. Somewhere along the line, Ithink that this became a movie abou t a m anseeing his father in full, and forgiving himwithout sentimentalizing him. That is itssecret center. If the final passage is slightlydisappointing, try to recall how manymovies you've seen that are large enough tohave a secret center.

The Tree ofLife doesn't move forwardbut p ulses, like a massive organism , and itsbeginning and end point are the same: aball of primal energy in the blackness,ready to generate more theophanies. UnlikeBrakhage, Malick is not venturing into theuniverse hidden within thefolds of percep-tion. But like Vermeer, Turner, and Godard,both are revelators, reminding us, frame byframe, that all that is is light. DThanks to Dermot Moran and MarkMcElhatten.

CH RIS M ARKER'S homage toANDREI TARKOVSKY* * *A MA STERPIECE!Th e be st single piece ofTarkovsky criticism Iknow of, clarifying theoverall coherence of hisoeuvre while leavingall themysteries of

his films in tact."Jonathan Rosenbaum,Chicago Reader

" The most sustainedand heartfelt tributeone filmmaker haspaid another."-/. Hoberman,

Village Voice

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