The Tree of Life by Terence Malick - An Interpretation

This essay is not intended to be a review of the movie though at some points I will feel like praising Malick's genius work in this particular film. This essay will talk about the film candidly. If you haven't seen the film yet, you may not want to read any further. While the movie certainly doesn't operate like a murder mystery of which I could spoil the ending, I still feel like the unfolding of the film to my lack of expectation was part of what I enjoyed about it.

That being said, I did approach the movie with some expectations. I expected it to be great as I have enjoyed everything Terence Malick has done and respect him as a film maker and a thinker. I have always considered his films to be like tracks on an album rather than entirely separate entities. Somehow, even though the individual expressions and characters of each movie span different times and spaces, each movie explores the same themes with the same motifs. As if to say, throughout Western civilization (as we could at least put that time limit on them all), human beings have struggled with understanding the world around them in these terms.

So which terms? I feel that many of his characters are often caught between two binaries. Their stories (however subtle) are their struggle to find a place and a relationship between these polarities. The two I see most often, and I suppose they could even be conflated into one are: Nature vs. Civilization and Love (or Free Will) vs. Duty (often to civilization).

By all accounts, Malick is a Romantic. The pace of his movies are meditative as is the silence and the choice to let the setting and land of the film speak and breathe as if they were a character. The beauty of the natural world holds a certain truth for him and his characters are often taking refuge amongst it. There they find a unity in stark contrast to the broken world they are running from.

I also happen to be a Romantic to an ever shifting degree. Malick's films speak to me then and I suppose they are the sort of thing you either hear or you don't. Good film/Bad film and Like/Dislike don't apply so much as what is Malick saying and do you hear him?

For me it has always been loud and clear.

So there I was in the dark of the theater ready to drink in this film.

Almost immediately, the film opens with a binary: "There are two ways through life... The way of Nature and the way of Grace," says the voice of the mother in the film. She goes on to explain Nature as this force that is always trying to please itself. I wish I could remember exactly the way she puts it, but a deeper understanding of the two sides arose from the rest of the movie which I will explain shortly.

I was struck. This is different. This is not more of the same Malick. Nature was being cast in this selfish and greedy light.

The movie opens with a general sense of cloudiness. We slosh back and forth between childhood scenes and adult scenes with Sean Penn representing the grown up son of Brad Pitt. There's scenes of an older Mother and Father receiving news of their son's death as well (Sean Penn's brother). There's a bit of confusion but then ultimately we get taken to the actual beginning, the beginning of everything.

There is a long sequence of images that represent the creation of the universe and the subsequent evolution of life on Earth which carries us to the specific evolution of life in the specific family of the O'Briens. This is the story that the movie follows. The evolution of Jack and the dynamics of his family.

Throughout much of the movie there are shots of the camera looking up at trees. These are paralleled by similar upward-looking shots of the office building landscape in the large city where the adult Jack works. To me this spells out a shocking revelation for the movie and for Malick as a director/thinker. Civilization is Nature . Civilization is an extension of the same force behind Nature, that selfish, self-centered force that allows for everything to propagate. At one point adult Jack sits silently and pensively with his colleagues in a high office building. As one man in the room claims, "Everyone is getting greedy," the camera slowly zooms in on the city below through the office window. This is a primal force at work. The selfish drive to accumulate and maintain.

But nowhere in the movie is Nature and Grace more clearly highlighted than in the ways the Mother and Father interact with the children. The Mother representing Grace and the Father representing Nature. If my memory serves me correctly, the mother's name is Mary. "Hail Mary, full of Grace."

The O'Brien family is a small branch off of the larger trunk of evolution and of life; therefore, the way of Nature still exists amongst them as they are a fractal of the larger whole. The Father is always trying to teach his sons through tough love the ways to get ahead in the world: responsibility, conformity, selflessness, all of which can be boiled down to a numbness: a lack of emotional recognition and responsibility. But, in the face of Nature, humans have developed Grace: a force of compassion, inter-subjectivity, understanding and relation. The Mother exudes this throughout the film. She is a gravity away from the enculturation the Father is always pushing.

The Father winds up being the saddest character of the movie: always at a distance from the real life of the family: a practical arm's length away from the foundation of love and understanding that the mother offers. Always running and searching, he always misses out on the human connection taking place between brother and brother, mother and sons.

But is Grace really a solely human force? I believe Malick tells us very subtly that it is not. During the sequence that represents the evolution of life on the planet, we hang on an extended vignette regarding a couple of dinosaurs. A helpless baby dinosaur lies ill beside a river. An obviously predatory dinosaur approaches. It places its foot on the head of the baby dinosaur. It observes for a long while and then lets go and moves on. Grace expresses itself here in the most primal existences.

Grace, therefore, exists externally. It exists as a primal force that runs along side Nature. And as the Mother clearly states, it is for us to choose. Maybe humans have been (and still are) the most capable of such a choice.

Let's hope so.

On a personal note, I sat in the theater absolutely mesmerized. Absolutely every single scene in that movie was in some form an analog to my own childhood. It was like watching home movies. Even the minutest details, for example, the sense of relief and celebration that coursed through the Mother and her children when the Father went traveling for his job, was entirely familiar to me. I imagine that these scenes are a representation of Malick's childhood as well, and therefore I see why I have always connected to his films, and a great curiosity arises in the fact that we have come to see the world with similar eyes. Was it because of our childhood?

In terms of cinematic accomplishment, the representation of the passage through childhood is like nothing ever rendered on film previously. Malick's representations, the fisheye lens of infancy, the focus on the way women adjust their hemlines and how it suddenly becomes more apparent in adolescence, strike a deep chord in me. The best actors in the film wind up being the toddlers as they can express nothing else besides their toddlerness. Every twenty minutes I would gasp at how much I was absorbing of these characters from the minimal offering on the screen.

The film opens with a quote from the book of Job. It is the last sequence of Job where God, in what I interpret as a snarky sarcasm, asks Job where he was while God was creating the universe. If Job thinks he knows so well and understands so much, he is forgetting that his knowledge is based on the foundations of an existence which only God has created. We are merely a branch of the tree of life then, and that understanding leads to a humility which leads to the acknowledgment of Grace’s existence and that to a sense of trust in it. As the Mother also says, “Unless you love, your life will flash by.”Unless we open ourselves to Grace, we will live blindly and arrogantly. We will will live wrapped in greed.

I left the film quite shaken. I felt a true paradigm shift had taken place. (Some day, maybe on this blog maybe elsewhere, I can finally explore my understanding of the following claim: "The only cure to postmodernism is the incurable illness of Romanticism." Did Malick just finally help me understand how Romanticism is both a cure and an illness?) In the old Nature vs. Civilization binary, I clearly sided with Nature. But now I side with Grace and I have no problem with seeing Nature as this greedy force now that the perspective has been place before me. So why this initial misconception? What lies in Nature that initially seems like Grace if that indeed is what has resonated with me all along? There is still a beauty and balance to the natural world that seems to contrast the injustice, immorality and violence of civilization. Is it just that we are so far removed from Nature? We see the violence of civilization because it is the matrix to which we belong most wholly, but from such a vantage point Nature looks unified and peaceful. Or maybe, if dinosaurs can offer each other Grace, the beauty and balance of Nature is a whisper of Grace which resides ever in potential, waiting to be birthed, to be branched and sprouted, like leaves on the tree of life.