Terrence Malick’s latest film, The Tree of Life, has confused and divided critics.
It has been described as incoherent, self-indulgent and grandiose. Some have added that it is ‘Christian’, using this as a negative description. Others have described it as an inspirational, deeply personal meditation on life, the universe and everything.
Of course any film critic or fan will approach a new Malick film with high expectations. Three of his previous films, Badlands, Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line have an assured place in the history of cinema. When Days of Heaven was released in 1978 Variety unhesitatingly claimed it as ‘one of the greatest cinematic achievements of the last decade’ and Newsweek described it as being ‘hauntingly beautiful, unashamedly poetic, brimming with sweetness and bitterness, darkness and light.’ Malick has been described as American cinema’s great poet-philosopher. After Days of Heaven he did not produce another film until The Thin Red Line in 1998. Opinion was then, and is still now, divided on that film, but it is certainly unique among World War 2 movies in its portrayal of the spiritual, emotional, ethical and physical needs and dilemmas of men facing violent death on a daily basis. Malick universalized these issues, exploring the cosmic drama of death and birth, destruction and creativity. All three films addressed the particular and personal, the horrific killing spree of Kit and Holly in Badlands, the farmers losing their harvest to locusts in Days of Heaven, and the daily life of soldiers at war in The Thin Red Line, but each attempts to relate them to the greater themes that concern us all.
The Tree of Life attempts the same, but this time the particular is much more directly personal to Malick. In this film the O’Brien family are raising their 3 sons in Waco, Texas, Malick’s home town, during the 1950’s, Malick’s own teenage period. The O’Brien family mirrors Malick’s own - tragically so in that the middle brother in the film, RL, dies aged 19 and one of Malick’s own brothers killed himself when he was 21. Both were guitarists. The O’Brien story is told almost impressionistically, with little dialogue or exposition. The narrative seems to be the memories of Jack, the oldest boy, recalled during a mid-life crisis of his own.
The voice-overs are often confused, as the young Jack struggles with his Oedipal feelings towards his parents. The power of the ‘dare’, the fear of failing to fulfil such a dare, or to go against the gang’s group mind, make young Jack feel guilty when he does things that he hates doing.
Young teenagers may not always have a moral code, but they do have powerful emotional responses to right and wrong, and when Jack steals from a neighbour’s house an item that has clearly erotic connections with his feeling for his mother, he is deeply ashamed.
When the tragic telegram arrives Malick introduces a long sequence depicting the birth of the universe, the formation of stars, the shaping of our planet and the emergence of life on Earth and this has confused and troubled many audiences. The disparity of scale seems to have shocked them. But Malick is interested in exploring the depth of the ordinary and its connection with the over-arching, even the transcendent. His films are not about heroes and heroines, or grand dramatic figures undergoing extraordinary experiences. They are about people like you and me. And they are about scale.
In their book The View from the Centre of the Universe (1) Joel Primack and Nancy Ellen Abrams suggested that human beings have a unique view-point on the Universe. We can glimpse both the microscopic and the macroscopic, the inner workings of the atom and the vastness of time and space.
‘Consider the size of a living cell and the size of the universe. Think of a single cell on the tip of your finger. That cell is as tiny compared to you as you are compared to Planet Earth. A single atom in that cell is as tiny compared to you as you are compared to the sun.’ (p177)
This awareness of the ‘little and large’ may not be comfortable for us. In comparison with the lifetime of the Universe, calculated at some 3,700,000,000 years, our short span seems insignificant. Compared to the vastness of space, which we measure in millions of light years, our local reach is laughable.
In The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy Douglas Adams wrote of the Ultimate Perspective Vortex, a device that would drive any human being mad simply by revealing to them their utter insignificance in the grander scheme of things. (It is true that Zafod Beeblebrox III came out of this device even more impressed with himself than before, but he was crazy before he went in to it).
But I also remember an anecdote about a Professor of Astronomy who told his students that ‘from the point of view of astronomy we are miniscule organisms crawling on a speck of dust, orbiting around a pin-point of light, a sun that is only one of a hundred thousand million suns in our galaxy; a galaxy that is only one of a hundred thousand million others. From the point of view of astronomy’, he concluded, ‘we are utterly insignificant.’ But he was contradicted by a student. ‘No, Professor, I beg to differ. From the point of view of astronomy, we are the astronomer.’
We have invented the telescope and the microscope, and are poised betwixt the views they offer. We try to connect these perspectives and make sense of them, and of our own lives, caught in this parallax view. Philosophy and theology, science and art each attempt this in their own ways. Very rarely, movies also explore the tension between the cosmic and the quotidian, the life of the Universe and our own all too brief lives. Charlie Kaufmann introduced a brief resume of cosmology into his film ‘Adaptation’ (2002) as a joke, and it was a good joke. But The Tree of Life attempts to make this connection in a very serious and explicitly theological manner.
Malick asks ‘how can we live in this universe and believe in a benign creator God?’ His film explores the very nature of the Creator of the universe, the God for whom, as the theologian Sally McFague suggests, the Universe is the best metaphor. (2) In The Tree of Life Mrs. O’Brien is in love with God – and with God’s Creation. She delights in the glory of light and the playfulness of water, she walks beneath trees in the dappled sun-light and plays with her three boys with uninhibited pleasure and freedom. She believes in Grace, not Nature. She sees Grace as self-less; Nature as self-ish, Grace as yielding; Nature as power seeking. And she believes that the point of our God-given life is love.
‘There’s a joke among cosmologists that romantics are made of stardust, but cynics are made of the nuclear waste of worn out stars.’
Mrs. O’Brien is certainly some kind of romantic. Oscar Wilde quipped that a cynic knows the price of everything but the value of nothing, and the values we bring to our appreciation of the universe and our place in it dictate if our view is inspirational and hopeful or despairing and resigned.
Jeol Primack is a professor of physics and his wife, Nancy Ellen Abrams is a science philosopher, artist and lawyer. They believe that we exist at Midgard, the unique point of scale in the universe. We are midsized. And our size makes it possible for us to be intelligent.
They wrote that ‘Creatures much smaller than we are could not have sufficient complexity for our kind of intelligence because they would not be made of a large enough number of atoms. But intelligent creatures could not be much larger than we are, either, because the speed of nerve impulses – and ultimately the speed of light – becomes a serious limitation.’ (p174). Without intelligence there can be no evaluation. Being the size we are we cannot only think the Universe, we can value it.
Primack and Abrams recount the cosmologist’s joke about romantics and cynics (p279) and describe these attitudes as a choice between an existential or a meaningful response to the scientific facts.
‘When the Newtonian picture destroyed the comforting medieval universe and people stared out into endless space and shivered at how small they were, they felt for the first time the existential terror of cosmic insignificance’ (p120) But they argue that we are not insignificant, we are capable of giving meaning to the universe, and therefore to our part in it In this sense we are central.
There is no evidence for or against this; it is an attitude. ‘There is nothing in modern cosmology that requires the existential view, nor anything that requires the meaningful view. The bottom line of both views is scientific accuracy. Both hold that interpretations of reality where science is compromised for ideological purposes should be rejected. But given this bottom line an attitude towards the discoveries of modern cosmology is every person’s choice.’ (p274f).
Malick also sees humankind as ‘meaning-makers’. We not only observe the Cosmos, we can make a meaningful connection with it, despite the disparity of scale. He believes in the Creator God. Primack and Abrams also believe in the Creator God. They once adopted the existential attitude, a position initially reinforced by Primack’s work on the Cold Dark Matter theory in the mid 1980’s. But the more they explored the implications of scale, and our mid-placed position at the Uroboros, the center of the universal scale, the more they were able to see the unique value of humankind – and of our ability to value the universe. Thus the possibility of a loving God, the One who gives ultimate meaning to all things. They saw that ‘the more that people discover about the universe, the faster God keeps expanding, always ahead, pulling yet teasing scientists. As God expands, God also deepens at all levels.’ (p277)
This is close to the medieval view that all science is a sub-set of theology, the meta-physic, the study of ultimate reality (qua Paul Tillich).
This film is a work of art, not a scientific or philosophical argument. But the same distinctions between the existential and the meaningful, the natural and the graceful, is explored here, and at a deeply personal level.
This film also addresses the question raised by the existence of suffering in a universe created by a loving God. What can be more deep and personal than grief? The death of Jack’s brother weights down on him, and contributes to his mid-life crisis, which is the framing device of the film. This is not simply the crisis brought on by middle-age, the waning of powers, the force of gravity, and the prospect of death, but also a crisis of faith. Was his mother, who he loved, right to believe in Grace, or was his Father, who he feared, right to believe in Nature?
‘I am more like you than I am like her’ Jack once told his father. Mother and Father reflect differing images of God. Can he love and be faithful to the mothering God of Grace, when grace means yielding to the power of death? Can he believe in the gracious nature of a God who created a universe in which suffering and death are inevitable, and our struggles against them are ultimately futile? Or should he embrace his father’s determination to be strong, to survive even if it means looking after number one at whatever cost?
For me the movie makes the clear point that Grace and Nature are inextricably connected. Grace needs a natural form inhabit. Grace needs the cradle of Nature to find a home in.
The Tree of Life starts with a quote from The Book of Job, and that Biblical psychodrama is literally preached about to later in the film. At one point in the O’Brien’s family’s life Jack’s father is made redundant. He never took a day off work and every Sunday he went to church and paid his tithes, and yet he was made redundant. This was not fair. There are explicit references in the film to the Book of Job, directly quoted from and explored during an overheard sermon. Job was a good man who did not get what he deserved. Or rather, he got it and then lost it. His harvest, beasts, children, home, fortune and health were taken away, and Job raged against God, asking in effect ‘why aren’t you being fair to me?’
The poet who wrote the book of Job painted in words what he knew of the majesty of creation – and therefore of the Creator – and rebuked Job for his arrogant assumption that he knew how creation works, and could therefore find grounds to complain that his life was not working according to plan. Job’s faith was being tested, but not his faith in God. Job never stops believing in God. If he did he would have no-one to blame. No, what was tested was Job’s understanding of the very nature of God. Job wanted God to be fair. Just as we do when we complain that arbitrary suffering exists in the universe created by a loving God, as if love meant the negation of suffering. As if love was safety. As if we had a better pain-free working plan for the universe.
Suffering and the God of love, the Theodicy question, has burdened Christians since the earliest days. As Jurgen Moltmann puts it in ‘The Trinity and the Kingdom of Heaven’(5) ‘The suffering of a single innocent child is an irrefutable rebuttal of the notion of the almighty and kindly God in heaven. For a God who lets the innocent suffer and who permits senseless death is not worthy to be called God at all,’ (P 47). This is, Moltmann goes on to say ‘the open wound of life in this world. It is the real task of faith and theology to make it possible for us to survive, to go on living, with this open wound. The person who believes will not rest content with any slick explanatory answers to the theodicy question. And he will resist the temptation to soften the question down. The more a person believes, the more deeply he experiences pain over a suffering world, and the more passionately he ask about God and the new Creation.’(p49)
For Moltmann, and for many, this is an eschatological question; it can only be answered at the end of time. In the meantime we have to ‘survive, to go on living’ and it seems to me that the question of ‘suffering and the God of love’ is most problematic when we, like Job, want God to be fair and just and even nice, and therefore the universe, that metaphor for God, to be fair and just and nice.
But the universe is what it is. It is all we have got. It is not nice, but it is profoundly beautiful. Among the infinite reaches of space, and in the light of impersonal stars, intelligent life and self-giving love have sprung into existence. God is found in both Nature and Grace, in the cruelty and splendor of natural processes. God may not be nice, but God is beautiful, even when this is a terrible beauty. God is life-giving love. Our proper response, as living, loving elements in this universe should not be that of resignation and despair, but of gratitude and hope.
In ‘Being a Person; where faith and science meet’ (3) the Anglican Archbishop John Hapgood recalled the Jesuit priest and paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin’s thoughts on death and suffering in his book Le Milieu Divin. de Chardin’s work, bringing together theology and cosmology, was controversial, but Hapgood, also a scientist and priest, writes that ‘(de Chardin) is surely right to believe that human being need some grand vision of the cosmos by which to live, and which can make sense of both the heights and depths of experience. Scientific visions currently on offer tend to marginalize the very things which are most central and precious to ordinary human life, those most closely associated with our consciousness of being persons.’ (p235.)
In ‘A Big-enough God; artful theology.’ (4) Sarah Maitland wrote ‘We need to accept all the data that we have got; we, you and me, our experiences, identity, history, personality, our selves, are an integral part of the revelation of God in creation. (p10)
The Tree of Life brings together the cosmic and the mundane, the immensity of Creation and the apparent inconsequentiality of human life. But it tells us that these are inseparable. That the one only finds meaning in the other. Without the Cosmos being the way it is there could be no life, no meaning and no love. We, as human beings, may not be the point of the Universe, that would be an hubristic assumption, but the ability to know, to value and to love, which we sometimes - imperfectly - embody, may well be. The Creation miracle is that the first light has evolved into what we are, or may be becoming.
The Tree of Life is a grand cosmic vision, addressing the heights and depth of human experience, and seems to be seeking to acknowledge all the data we have got, cosmological, evolutionary and personal, in ways that may be unprecedented in cinema. It has left audiences and critics divided. That is hardly surprising, because so has the question of the existence and nature of God, which is this film’s explicit focus. It will divide believers from non-believers, but it will divide believers too.
There is very little dialogue in this film, the emotional details and depth and complexity are conveyed by old fashioned acting and directing skills. This film shows rather than tells. The cosmic and evolutionary passages are literally luminous, guided by Douglas Trumbull, the special effects master-mind of 2001: a Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Star-Trek who temped out of retirement to help bring this vision to the screen. These last two characteristics, the reliance on image and the ground-breaking use of light, connect The Tree of Life to another film that Trumbull worked on, and also severely divided critics 30 years ago, Blade Runner. That film was also concerned with the meaning and value of life. ‘What is life?’ it seemed to ask. And it answered ‘life is precious’. That is not life’s definition, but its value. If we so choose.
In The Master and his Emissary, the Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (6) Iain McGilchrist reminds us that purely intellectual enterprises only use half of our brain, or rather, one of our brain’s two hemispheres. Our left hemisphere offers us explanations, and we like explanations. Our left-brain’s capacities for logic and rationality are essential, but they are not, McGilchrist argues, the roots of wisdom. Wisdom pays attention to the emotional, spiritual, intuitive and relational capacities of the right-hemisphere. Art is an expression of our right-brain’s capacities. Art is not logical, or explanatory, but it is meaningful. As Robert Ornstein wrote back in the 1970’s, ‘the left brain is as brilliant as the sun, but unless the sun sets we never see the stars.’ (7)
Malick has produced an essay in light, not words. He has not only used left brain rationality and logic (for making a film is huge logistical problem), but also right brain emotional intelligence and eloquent images.
Some may find The Tree of Life confusing, even shocking. But it is a visually poetic work of art that addresses a complex philosophical and theological question. It is also, in my view, a thing of beauty and grace. We may have devalued the word adult in art and entertainment, but this may truly be the most adult film I have ever seen.
Bob Vernon. August 2011
1 Joel Primack and Nancy Ellen Abrams. 2005. The View from the Centre of the Universe Fourth Estate. London
2 Sallie McFague 1993. The Body of God; An Ecological Theology. Fortress press. Minneapolis
3 John Hapgood. 1998. Being a Person; where faith and science meet.
Hodder and Stoughton. London
4 Sara Maitland. 1995 A Big-enough God; artful theology .Mowbray. London
5 Jurgen Moltmann 1991 The Trinity and the Kingdom of Heaven SCM. London
6 Iain McGilchrist 2009 The Master and his Emissary, the Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World Yale. New Haven & London
7 Robert E Ornstein. 1975 The Psychology of Consciousness. Jonathan Cape. London
Addendum; Malick and Tarkovsky.
In Malick's film the mundane is set in the realm of the spiritual, the domestic in the context of the cosmic. Some say the cosmic renders the domestic meaningless, but the opposite is surely what Malick and Tarkovsky are saying.
The evolution of the Universe, and of life on earth is our context. The death of star in a galaxy a million light years ago is absolutely connected with the birth of a child on earth. Hydrogen, helium and light have evolved into matter that can both grasp (and gasp) at the scale of the Universe, and learn (failing, failing again, failing better) to love.
Both film makers invite us to travel on journeys in which the images show more than the words can say, and the emotional import and juxtaposition of images is more important than their literal meaning. They are not 'easy', and do not try to be. Tarkovsky's films Nostalghia, The Mirror, Solaris and Makick's The Tree of Life all meditate on themes of memory, love, loss and growing to maturity, and do so in ways that confront our normal modes of viewing and reading films.
