About John Cope's recommendation
The Tree of Life: Great Events and Ordinary People, by Adrian Martin.
Adrian Martin mentions Charles Laughton's
The Night of the Hunter (1955). He heard Malick admires it very much. The Tree of Life and Malick’s cinema, from
Badlands (just see how Holly’s house is filmed in the night of Kit’s crime), is full of
The Night of the Hunter. It has been noted in more than one review.
Martin’s text is very interesting. He gets that the whole film is in the dinosaurs’ episode. He was never so right as when he said that
apprehension, doubt, fear, the ever-present hint or threat of violence is present in the entire film. We are like Jack. Things we got to learn. “How can we know stuff before we know it?” Grace cannot endure forever for the spectator of
The Tree of Life. Like “father Haynes” says in the sermon,
We must find that which is greater than fortune or fate. Nothing can bring us peace but that.
Malick wanted this film is to be a theological experience, not a theological reflection. I am afraid that “Ashley’s” 2006 “dinosaurs” + “rides in planes” + “father to son conversations” + “love for the sea” + “forbidden fruits” etc. literary milkshake is too particular and too good not to be Malick’s (see my previous post, or click
here). Like Brad Pitt promised in the trailer, but it wasn’t included in the final version
Someday you will fall down and weep. You will understand it all. All things. Such a strange thing in O'brien's mouth, no?
Martin talks about the “glory”:
Look, the glory around us... There are many “glories”, not only Witt’s “glory”. This one is put in relation with “shame”: “I lived in shame”.
I would really like to have an opinion about one thing, after all, this is a forum. In one of the skyscrapers rooms, the one with the aquarium atmosphere, we distinctively hear “attenzione” (Italian for attention). I checked this, I am sure. Eccentric, no? Like a warning, like that “exit” sign that Malick films very intentionally in the office. Maybe it is a reference to Alberto Moravia’s
L’Atenzzione (
The Lie, 1965; I will translate from a translation...). It’s an interesting hypothesis. L’Attenzione is a book about a writer watching himself writing it, a mirror reflecting a mirror. That book is a very particular kind of diary,
a diary [that] is always sincere, always true, you just have to search its sincerity and truth beyond the events. The identification between the narrator and the author is total, this is, factually a lie, psychologically true. Why Moravia gave that name to his book? In the end, he gives one reason:
I am afraid that the narrative might seem a bit complex, and so it will also be a way of inviting the reader to concede this book the same benevolent attention that, like we should admit, he usually grants the facts of life.
L’Attenzione is also a book about
"shame", about a man that was able to surpass it. Shame of what?
Nothing can be excluded from reality, not even dreams, lies, those vital illusions that for a certain time made me feel shame of being alive. Adrian Martin forgets one very simple but important thing: he was seeing a “film”, the “glory” of Malick’s cinema. O’Brien’s
I’m nothing sends us back to Welsh’s speech to Witt in
The Thin Red Line:
A man in this world is nothing. Welsh also says in that film:
Only one thing a man can do. Find something that’s his... make an island for himself.
Martin says:
It is a film about a house. The house is Malick’s main theme. And I think he finally built his Xanadu with The Tree of Life. There is a bit of every movie Malick did in that “paradise”: the mountains (
Badlands), an Indian man (
The New World), the beach filmed from a low angle, R.L. entering the water with mother and a “tree” (
The Thin Red Line), the beach pavilion with transparent curtains (the
Days of Heaven pavilion). Don’t you guess why? Think in Fellini’s 8½.
Adrian has one fine intuition.
I wonder whether, with the years, he has also worked (this is pure speculation) to divest himself of some good deal of this apparatus of learning, this cultural and intellectual sophistication. He is just one step from understanding what kind of tree Malick planted in the garden of cinema:
Grey, my friend, is every theory / And green is Life’s golden tree. (Faust) While Jack kissed his arm, R.L. played with a pine cone, a very complex symbol. I can’t precise Malick’s intention. Bataille’s “pineal eye”, that one that is like a tree, is a good clue, a very good clue: "delirium escapes from necessity, casts off its heavy mantel of mystical servitude, and it is finally only then that, nude and lubricious, it plays with the universe and its laws as if they were toys”.
One problem. From my point of view, the author is absolutely incapable of understanding what is the sea in Malick, that wave, that fabulous wave Steve makes “sing” in “paradise” with the seagulls. The Tree of Life (not to talk about
The New World, a film that ends with a shot of a tree…) is full of maritime imaginary: O’Brien is in the navy and wears its uniform, the sea wants to enter through the skyscraper (we can hear the water), that just before the architect enters that passage over the road (
Find me.) seem just like a ship starting to depart; Steve’s t-shirt had a boat in the scene he plays at the window with Jack, before leaving the house; R.L. buried a fish and a shell under the tree with his toys; there were even pirate’s games with the father in the kids’ room; and that night Jack heard his mother crying, after playing in the doorway steps, he was reading the
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, or so it seemed to me. More examples: the paintings, the ship’s wheel lamp mother turns off, mother showing Jack the boat in the chinaware. And there was the sound of the sea under Wilfred’s Lumia and even in the architect’s house. Michel Foucault’s
Of the Other Spaces:
… the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea and that, from port to port, …, it goes as far as the colonies in search of the most precious treasures they conceal in their gardens…
… the boat … has been … the greatest reserve of the imagination. The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.
The moment you see the kind of policemen Malick filmed since
Badlands, you get that Michel Foucault’s
Of the Other Spaces is the best guide through his cinema. But first you must leave the “way of grace”.
Adrian asks:
That kid who dies swimming, is he one of the central three brothers? I immediately found myself straining to catch a glimpse of all three of them alive again, as the shots and the bodies flew past me.
The Tree of Life shows you most clearly that Steve died in that river, that he was that boy with no face,
you just have to search its sincerity and truth beyond the events (Moravia). Why do we see GRACY (diminutive of Grace) just in front of our eyes in one of the graves of the cemetery, the cemetery where Steve ends buried alive (
Was he bad?)? Steve (diminutive of Stephen), “mother’s boy”, is a
portrait of the artist as a young man (Joyce)...
Just follow the River of Life (RL) to which Malick prays (
Keep us. Guide us. To the end of Time) –
And that strong youth, the river, was rushing on down / To the plain, sorrowing-glad, like the heart that overflows / With beauty and hurls itself, / To die of love, into the floods of time. – and you will get to “mother”:
Long have I loved you and for my own delight / Would call you mother, give you an artless song,… (Heidelberg, Hölderlin). And to Malick’s nature, his
cosmological ambition:
What super-earthly ecstasy! at night,
To lie in darkness on the dewy height,
Embracing heaven and earth in rapture high,
The soul dilating to a deity;
Feel in your labouring breast the six-days’ birth,
With prescient yearnings pierce the core of earth,
Enjoy, in proud delight what no one knows,
The earthly lost in beatific vision,
And then the lofty intuition –
I need not tell you how – to close!
(Mephistopheles, Faust, Goethe)
Thanks for your recommendation, John Cope.
