No, I think zeitgeist is actually a very apt way of describing The Tree of Life. It appears you've forgotten the entire narrative takes place as a personal retrospective of one character's childhood, one we can surmise is living in present day and is obviously supposed to embody as much impotent postmodern malaise as Sean Penn can make humanly possible, with unbiased refrains of cosmological development speckled throughout for contrast. Am I wrong to assume the entire film is a guy looking back on the last time he was happy, wondering where it all went wrong, before his inevitable spiritual and physical demise (both of which you could argue happen by film's end)? The entire film is built on that three-fold contrast and its relationship to the rise to dominance of American culture, as seen in the film's use of architecture: the idyllic, homespun grandeur of the '50s gives rise to the spacious, clinical sepulcher of empire, with nature's presence withering in the process but casting a no less unbiased eye on human folly. If anything, the film is taking a hard look at the cyclical nature of culture, particularly American culture and its ideological inculcation, and trying to cast a somber eye on it, wondering what the future holds, if even there's a future at all: Malick's youthful bounty has inexplicably given rise to careers, marriages and futures entirely devoid of meaning -- because there's a complete disconnection with the natural world and because there's little evidence of a incumbent generation responsible enough to clear away the mess Penn and Malick's generation has so carelessly provided. Calling my outlook on the film a "construct" at the "height of absurdity" is just scrounging for an excuse to take my internet lunch money, because it's obvious Malick wants to make a comment on contemporary life, using the oh so wonderful '50s where everything was gay and right to emphasize how woefully futile the current world has become. I think that has a certain zeitgeist quality to it, and while Malick tends to emphasize familial pandering more than an imminent economic, environment, religious and cultural collapse, all that is there, too: one need look no further than the almost infantile obsession with Daddy's personal ambitions v. his actual career; Penn's upbringing as a child v. his lack of any children; his parent's troublesome marriage v. his arguable lack of any marriage; his exuberant soul at youth v. his powerless soul at middle age; and, again, the compulsive obsession with the architecture/nature dichotomy that emphasizes this diminishment of vitality with the subtlety of a jackhammer. The entire narrative looks back on a life and its influences to discover where its liver went wrong to in turn find out where his culture went wrong, and if that doesn't have a certain zeitgeist flavor I'm not sure we watched the same movie, even with nature's unbiased cosmological eye used for a spiritual counterbalance. Or, if anything, my reading of the movie happened to accentuate different elements than your own. Pardon me for being glib and clever, or anti-clever, or whatever my thoughtless analysis of the movie cause you to accuse me of.hollyharry wrote:I can't take any of this post seriously after this piece of writing. A "zeitgeist epic" is a construct that you (and other people) are imposing on the film, and then to have the audacity to criticize the film for "posing" as said imposed construct is the height of absurdity (also, I don't know how "zeitgeist" a film that takes place largely in the 50's can be anyway ; if it's trying to be zeitgeist, it has a funny way of going about it).
Calling me a philistine doesn't even warrant a response, not to mention comparing my previous post, which has more to do with my excitement for Melancholia, to what anonymous people on Twitter quipped months before The Tree of Life "even fucking premiered." I assented Tommaso's underwhelming response to a film that catered quite a lot of critical attention, and won the palme d'or over the film in discussion here, which arguably may have won instead if its director didn't have a questionable sense of humor and dodgy social decorum. Not liking The Tree of Life isn't the first time I've gone against majority opinion and it won't be the last, and I won't be the only person who meets the film with a polite displeasure as opposed to some puerile, over-aggressive adoration that borders on fundamentalism. I didn't like the film as much as you: time for my public pillory. I think you arguing the lack of intellectual complexity in Whitman, and poetry in general, demonstrates this isn't so much a critical discussion than you throwing a cyber temper tantrum because someone doesn't agree with your aesthetic archetype. Off with my head.
