Maybe you want to discuss fire in Malick's cinema.
“Fire smolders in a soul more surely than it does under ashes. The arsonist is the most dissembling of criminals.” (Bachelard, Psychoanalysis of Fire)
From Badlands, Malick showed an intense attraction by fire. He has got a pyromaniac rib, no doubt. He is one of those guys that “hears the call of the funeral pyre.” (Bachelard)
In Days of Heaven, Linda tells us of apocalyptic fires:
I met this guy named Ding-Dong. He told me the whole Earth is goin’ up in flame. Flames will come out of here and there and they’ll just rise up. The mountains are gonna go up in big flames, the water’s gonna rise in flames. There’s gonna be creatures runnin’ every which way, some of them burnt, half of their wings burnin’. People are gonna be screamin’ and hollerin’ for help. See, the people that have been good – they’re gonna go to heaven and escape all that fire. But if you’ve been bad, God don’t even hear you. He don’t even hear ya talkin’.
The film’s love triangle is solved spectacularly in flames. In The Thin Red Line there is plenty of fire too. The Indian village is burnt in The New World.
In Badlands we never see extinguished that fire Kit starts on Holly’s home, burning gloriously while we hear the music. I believe Malick wanted that way. Somehow, her home is on fire since those days. That’s the way I see it.
Fire – cosmic or terrestrial, in flames or liquid, seen or evoked – is a most important presence in The Tree of Life.
It is an explicit symbol of the power, of the authority, of the father. O’Brien lectures Jack (that Toscanini talk) while he is at the barbecue. Malick shows us very clearly the burning coal. The control of fire signals manhood. Bachelard confessed in his famous studie: “I still take special pride in the art of kindling I learned from my father. I think I would rather fail to teach a good philosophy lesson than fail to light my fire in the morning”.
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This authority envolves O’Brien’s knowledge (and, I would say, Malick’s…). Bachelard speacks of the desire of “intellectual mastery of fire” as the Promethean Complex, “those tendencies which impel us to know as much as our fathers, more than our fathers, as much as our teachers, more than our teachers”
“It is the desire not only to surpass one’s father but, extended further, to deny any authority, to defy the gods, to steal their fire or their creative energy without attribution.” Goethe’s Prometheus (Ode to Prometheus) says:
I am no God. Yet look on myself as not less worthy.
So, bottom line, we are talking to be godlike. That’s a good bridge to Mephistopheles “Life’s golden tree” (Faust, Goethe)
Just follow the old proverb, and my cousin the snake, too: And then your likeness to God will surely frighten you!
Let’s talk about another "complex".
Penn lights a candle in his home and concentrates on its flame.
Would it be too much to approach this candle to the Lumia’s hypnotic flame like wavering movement that opens (with Penn’s voice) and closes the film? Bachelard devoted a book entirelly to The Flame of a Candle, with famous poetic considerations about its image producing and reverie stimulating powers (“un des plus grands opérateurs d’images”; “La flamme nous force à imaginer.”; “La flamme est un monde pour l’homme seul.”; etc), a work that Malick knew for sure. Did you noticed the way the camera is attracted by all the lamps in Waco, ex terior or interior? And how the ’50s narrative ends with the candle, like the architect had never left its vision, or, at least, had transported it in his mind? This candle has been understood as part of a ritual related to the architect’s brother death anniversary, but that seems to me only the pretext to light it.
Going through the “door” was for Penn’s character choosing the way of fire, the way of magma, the way of the volcano. Remember that the woman waiting for him on that door’s other side gives him “looks” just like that school girl to McCracken: “Next word is VOLCANO”, said the professor.
Bachelard would put this under the Empedocles complex: “In these circumstances the reverie becomes truly fascinating and dramatic; it magnifies human destiny, it links the small to the great, the hearth to the volcano, the life of a log to the life of the world. The fascinated individual hears the call of the funeral pyre.
For him destruction is more than a change, it is renewal.”
Bachelard shows, using Georges Sand as an example, that the fireplace enchantment is enough to evoke the volcano. If the reverie is strong enough, the candle as the same power:
As soon as the reverie becomes concentrated, the genie of the Volcano appears. (...) "Come, my king. Put on your crown of white flame and blue sulphur from which there comes forth a dazzling rain of diamonds and sapphires." And the Dreamer, ready for the sacrifice, replies: "Here I am! Envelop me in rivers of burning lava, clasp me in your arms of fire as a lover clasps his bride. I have donned the red mantle. I have adorned myself in your colors. Put on, too, your burning gown of purple. Cover your sides with dazzling folds." (...) In the heart of the fire death is no longer death. "Death could not exist in that ethereal region to which you are carrying me... My fragile body may be consumed by the fire, my soul must be united with those tenuous elements of which you are composed." "Very well!" said the Spirit, casting over the Dreamer part of his red mantle, "Say farewell to the life of men and follow me into the life of phantoms."
Maybe this will help you to understand the “shore of eternity”.
