The Tree of Life.
Pretty much every socio-political indicator around us reaffirms that we are truly the products of the French Enlightenment, where rationality and reason dominate our thought processes over emotional responses. Seems like every decision made in the past century has been formulated through some level of metrics or statistical analysis, and every outcome has formed the foundation of decisions yet-to-be-made.
But as creatures of reason (Descartes proudly professing “I think, therefore I am!”), we’ve yet to acknowledge that what actually governs our ability to be rational is indeed our emotions. Our sense of moral right and wrong is determined by our instinct and our emotional response to others’ suffering or likewise their elation. We know what feels good and what feels bad, and the entire thing gets thrown into an empirical tizzy when we try to quantify what “feeling good” exactly means.
Major studio films have made “feel good” into a marvel of engineering, churning out a textual algorithm that feeds into our analyzed behavioral responses, giving us exactly what we want, which is to feel something that has been manufactured for us. This is the World of Film as per the Age of Enlightenment, and under its rule we have made the most startlingly vast and global achievements of art (Avatar! Pirates of the Caribbean! Shrek! The Real Housewives of Orange County!) in human history.
We think, therefore we are.
As my snark might lead on to, we can also argue that the Age of Enlightenment has created the ultimate destroyer of art, which is predictability. Those happiness, romance, and violence algorithms that permeate film and television screenplays - works that are commissioned to deliver, nay, force feed emotions that we’ve been taught to believe give us satisfaction, well those algorithms are in fact patterns of recognition. It feeds into our Enlightened predisposition to be creatures of habit. We go to the theater, eat popcorn, watch five CAA-repped superstar blockbuster trailers (carefully counterprogrammed with smaller, female-oriented romantic comedies / Victorian period pieces), watch our completely predictable sequel of The Hangover, surmise that we are satisfied and “happy,” and then call it a day. That’s the Age of Enlightenment for you.
I can rationalize then why almost a dozen people walked out of the theater only twenty-five minutes into Terrence Malick’s Palme D’Or winning film The Tree of Life. Our entertainment algorithms tell us a few things - that this film has Brad Pitt (a star! Angelina Jolie’s husband!) and Sean Penn (another star! Just shagged Scarlett Johansson!) and therefore it will deliver quality adult entertainment. The Hollywood algorithm also instructs us to completely negate who the director is, or look into their previous body of work, because when you have Brad and Sean, who needs a director?
Twelve people walked out during Tree of Life and countless more were frequently checking their cellphones in the dark to see when it would be over. The girl sitting next to me, released from cinematic bondage by the appearance of the end credits, turned to her boyfriend and lovingly said “I hate you.”
Apparently lost in all this is one of the most beautiful, startlingly original, and fiercely realized films of the past four decades. It is not a perfect movie by any means - the final act is overtly laden with clunky symbols and the film is overlong by a good twenty minutes - but it is that rare new form of filmmaking that challenges rational thought. It however does not obliterate rationality in favor of emotion - it is not abstract nor avant-garde, rather it tempers the cauldron of emotion with the calming order of reason.
The story itself is quite simple - a family deals with a strict and cold patriarch (Brad Pitt, jutting his jaw out Aldo Raine-style to indicate he is playing a Southerner) who seeks to control his environment by draconian rule, thereby introducing order and normalcy. The mother (a luminous Jessica Chastain) is the embodiment of nature suppressed - a boiling undercurrent of free spirit that lives within her bosom and burns on in the eyes of her eldest son. The father and son battle for ideological supremacy, each reaching a compromise that is catalyzed by the death of a beloved sibling.
It’s a heartwarming, brilliantly acted family drama that revels in the details of innocence being trampled upon by rationalized expectation, which ultimately manifests itself as a fear of the unknown future ahead. While this is all fairly straightforward, director Malick, who in his legendary filmography has never once constrained himself to mainstream patterns of expectation, takes a bold and inspired U-turn with his narrative. Lodged firmly in the film is the visual history of the Universe, told without the aid of the human voice, at great length of time. In these chapters we see the creation of the Universe, Solar System and planets, the origins of biological life, bacteria, trees and dinosaurs. We witness cycles of incineration and rebirth as the Earth rips itself apart and molds herself into what we now know her to be. On the surface, this epic story of creation is a random inclusion, but the immediate hard juxtaposition of it against the story of a family struggling with nature and control immediately (and clearly) defines the director’s intent. When we look into the eyes of children, we see galaxies at work, we see the divine creation, we see but an extension of the long chain of progress that we call life.
It is a form that is pure, justified emotion. It is also rational in its delineation and placement within a grander order, one which we can likely never understand. And it is this challenge to our Enlightenment which advances us above the Enlightenment, that to not know everything is to truly understand our existence. Once we embrace the irrational, justified through our emotion and given context by our rationality, only then are we able to embrace the beauty of our lives, and only then are we truly free to love unconditionally.
With Tree of Life, Terrence Malick has taken on a subject - the enormity of life and existence - that in my opinion only one other filmmaker has ever successfully captured. That was Stanley Kubrick with 2001: A Space Odyssey. Both films embraced the calculated nature and purpose of randomness - perhaps fractal - and placed them firmly within the context of our understood human existence. Both filmmakers use hardened machines that ultimately achieve awareness through the prospect of failure and death - Kubrick’s machine is obvious in HAL 9000, but Malick’s is more nuanced, in the form of the father (his father), a cold, mechanical man that becomes aware of his own emotional purpose.
I was captivated by The Tree of Life as a bold experiment, a challenge to rationality, as a beautiful tone poem, as an ode to the big bang that is found in the love of a family. Most will praise the film for its technical brilliance, it’s Days of Heaven-esque basking in the magic hour, it’s astounding nature photography. Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki gives us his finest camera work and one of the most visually stunning films in recent memory, following in the footsteps of previous Malick collaborators Tak Fujimoto, Néstor Almendros, Haskell Wexler and John Toll.
But most importantly Tree of Life is a much-needed battering ram to our cold, tired expectations. It does to us what nature does to its protagonists in the film, which is to remind us that we are indeed soft machines that feel, we are the modern Prometheus, an amalgamation of chemistry and incalculable, inexplicable life energy. Our desires to explain ourselves should never arrest, but when placed in the greater context of creation, we submit to a higher understanding. Whether that higher understanding is God is as ambiguous as the images of spectral vapor that bookends Tree of Life. It’s open to both our emotional and rational interpretation, and will only reach any kind of meaning when we exercise each without prejudice. A truly magnificent and fascinating film, and a reaffirmation of Terrence Malick as one of the great thinkers of our time.
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mikeambs reblogged this from lilithfilm and added:
For everything I’ve said so far about...was “a battering ram
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cryptocleveland said:
“And it is this challenge to our Enlightenment which advances us above the Enlightenment, that to not know everything is to truly understand our existence. ” - I call bullshit on that one
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v3getarian said:
Unfortunately you’re right, the masses have been condition to want the ‘standard’ romantic comedy that only ends one way, and only has so many predictable twists and turns. Sadly most don’t want to go to a movie and actually have to contemplate it.
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