Among the most reliable signs that one is regarding Hollywood schlock is that well-known narrative set-up whereby macrohistory functions as a mere backdrop to the unfolding of middle-class American lives. I had long thought that the limit-case of this was reached by Spielberg's version of War of the Worlds (2005), in which the culmination and termination of human history served as a mere occasion for single parent Tom Cruise to show his daughter he was doing his best. But now there is The Tree of Life, in which the early cosmos forms, molten lava erupts, eventually jellyfish and dinosaurs appear (at which point I'm thinking: are CGI graphics ever going to get good enough that dinosaur scenes will not make me think of Land of the Lost?), all so that, in the end, a family of two good-looking parents and three typical boys can live out its own drama in 1950s Waco. And yet this is not Hollywood schlock. It has a different pedigree, going back cinematically to Brakhage and Kubrick, and philosophically to Cavell and Heidegger, and the feel of it is entirely different from anything Spielberg ever even thinks to aspire to create.
For Spielberg it is as if all human history in fact leads up to Tom Cruise's bonding moment. Spielberg is not really capable of thinking much beyond bonding moments, and he caters to an audience that would really rather think about them, in their particular conventional American expression, than to think about whether or not we are alone in the universe, where all this is leading, etc. Malick's vision of an individual human's life, such as one that unfolds in Texas in the mid-20th century, takes it as an expression of a reality that includes things like cosmogenesis and biological evolution. It is not that the dinosaur is leading up to Brad Pitt, exists for the eventual sake of Brad Pitt, but rather that each being offers a point of access into what is really going on. And what is really going on (or so Malick seems to think) is conventionally described by the philosophers under the combined names of 'monism' and 'pananimism'.
It is worth recalling that just a few years ago Spike Jonze ridiculed in his film Adaptation (2002) not only the would-be screenwriter who relies on voiceovers (which Malick does heavily), but also the same writer, in the moment of his most frightening blockage, who imagines a film that runs through the entire history of the formation of the earth and the evolution of animal species before leading up to the main --human-- drama. Nine years later, we have exactly that film that was supposedly too ridiculous to be taken seriously by an intentionally ridiculous director such as Jonze. And yet, again, The Tree of Life is not ridiculous.
That one feels compelled to take it seriously has something to do with what we know about its pedigree. For one thing, we know that the cosmogonical prelude was made possible in part by Douglas Trumbull, who collaborated with Kubrick on 2001: A Space Odyssey. One thing I found myself thinking during Malick's film was: it's remarkable how little our rendering of the majesty of the cosmos has changed since 2001, which is to say since 1968. The same eclipses and slivers of some planetary or lunar body or other, the same milky nebulae; the same quick passage from this stuff to dawn-of-man scenes (whether reptilian or primate). Arguably the most ridiculous scene in cinematic history is the one with the guys in monkey suits whooping and hollering at the killing of some sort of tapir in the opening moments of 2001. But our by-now-canonized ability to suspend the judgment of ridiculousness there should serve as a useful guide to how to watch The Tree of Life. The conceit of it is just as ridiculous as the script imagined in Adaptation. But it just goes for it, and does so because it is generated in a different universe than the one Spielberg inhabits.
I learned only relatively recently that before Malick became a film director he published a translation of Heidegger's Vom Wesen des Grundes (Northwestern University Press, 1969). He brought it out under the title On the Essence of Reasons, which does not bode well for the rest of the translation. First of all, there is the matter of the uninvited pluralization of Grund; second, there is the question whether what Heidegger had in mind was the sort of reason that can be pluralized at all: explanations, the giving of accounts. Now of course Heidegger's own Wesen des Grundes is a translation of Leibniz's principium reddendae rationis, and ratio plainly is best translated as 'reason'. But Heidegger seems to want to play on the curious feature of the common Germanic root for the Latinate 'reason' --a root that may be drawn upon in English as well-- which identifies it with the ground. Perhaps a better English rendering of the title of Heidegger's work would be not On the Essence of Reasons, but rather On the Being of the Ground.
It struck me that this would have been a good title for Malick's film, too. It is certainly not about some tree or other. It is about the ground that pushes out molten lava and oceans and, sooner or later, trees and then, finally, people, such as that family in Waco. It's the same ground that draws them back in, and the all-encompassing character of this ground is precisely what makes theodicy-style questions --if God is good, why do bad things happen to good people?-- irrelevant. 'The ground' suits Malick's monism perfectly, whereas 'reasons' keep us asking why such-and-such Texan died too soon.
Geoffrey O'Brien wrote recently in the New York Review of Books that he "would not rush to read a verbal summation by Malick of his philosophical views," but that he would nonetheless "burn with irresistible curiosity to see the film of any text he might care to adapt, whether it were Spinoza’s Ethics or the phone book." I feel more or less the same way, but I note that early on in The Tree of Life Malick pretty much botches Leibniz's Principles of Nature and Grace (1714). Malick takes these to be two opposed and conflicting things, between which every mortal must ultimately choose. Leibniz took them instead to be complimentary principles for explaining one and the same order of being. And this brings me to my ultimate verdict on the film: philosophically, Malick is very much onto something as concerns the connection between cosmogenesis and our own seemingly little lives. He is wiser than Spielberg, and gets the relationship between the cosmic and the human right, whereas the director of E.T. simply cannot think beyond the human, and a fairly limited sliver of the human at that. This something that Malick is onto, however, is best expressed in images, and, as the screenwriter in Adaptation warned, can only be compromised by philosophizing voiceovers.
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