Sunday, April 8, 2012

The Tree of Life


This time watching The Tree of Life again, I was struck by the dichotomy that Jessica Chastain’s character makes at the beginning of the film between nature and grace. In a sense, she is articulating an old theological battle. But what I find interesting about the film is that it seems to acknowledge the dark aspects of nature, death and selfishness being primary among them, but also seems to clearly suggest that it is through nature that one comes to know God. The characters prayers are always accompanied by visual imagery of nature, sometimes as in the long sequence near the beginning, with the origins of the universe and images that show the creation of the earth and the process of evolution. So my sense is that Terrance Malik is attempting to say that this division we place between nature and grace is in some ways false. Nature is graced. It is the means by which we learn of God. St. Bonaventure, in the Catholic tradition, has a similar idea when we called nature “the book of creation” that we had to read as if it were another, and our first, bible. One does not need to look too deeply into Native American religions as well to see nature as somehow connected to a higher power. And I think this is what is so striking to me about this film. It is not a choice that we make between nature or grace as the film initially suggests. Rather it is that nature is graced, in spite of all of its pain and tragedy and impenetrable suffering, and this film, without a doubt does not gloss over that suffering. In many ways, suffering and pain are the heart of this film. It is not incidental that it opens with a quotation from The Book of Job, a text from the bible immersed in the question of suffering and the problem of evil. And I think that is also what I like about it. Malik could have made a happy film about how nature reveals the divine and it would have been sappy and we would have hated it  and thought it banal (maybe some of you hated it anyway J). Instead, he chose to confront the nature of pain and death head on and still say, somehow, that this glorious, troubled universe reveals something of God to us, and that maybe, part of that revelation is in our own experience with suffering…and so with healing and redemption. And yet suffering and death are never pretty, never anesthetized here. The oldest boy fights with God over the drowning of a friend and over a boy maimed in a fire…and the mother keens for her dead son.
But somehow, even through those bits of nature that are loss, the conversation with God keeps going.

11 comments:

  1. The dichotomies presented in The Tree of Life are overwhelming: between nature and grace, love and hate, youth and age, and a nihilistic versus God-inspired mode of creation. I found it quite hard to understand exactly what Terrence Malick is saying with this film because I saw the concept of God be both questioned and supported. I agree with you, Professor Berry, that the quote from The Book of Job in the opening of the movie is not incidental, but I cannot figure out whether Malick is portraying nature as inherently good (as in the quote) or bad (as seen in Brad Pitt’s character).

    The strongest message I took from the film is that the very fact that there are bad things in the world, seen I think with the oldest son struggling with death, hate, and the hypocrisy of his father, is something that should not be questioned. Or cannot be questioned because there is no answer. As God said, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?...”

    To me, the Tree of Life both asks and answers the question “what is the meaning of life?” Either there is not an answer, or if there is one, humans are not to know it.

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  3. The grace versus nature dichotomy is overwhelming, along with most of the other debates as well but what I did not understand was what Terrence Malik was trying to say with the implementation of the visuals associated with creation. It seemed random, but maybe that's just because I didn't understand it, but I did understand how nature was presented through Brad Pitt's character. Though his character was strict, and rather ruthless, I don't think he was meant to be inherently good or bad. It was just a contrast from his wife's graceful demeanor, and helped show the starkness of nature. His kids started misbehaving and became more rebellious when he left on that business trip but they also got more in trouble, as they were disregarding their father, and in a sense, nature.

    On a more personal note, this was one of the worst movies I have seen in a long time. Towards the end I started to get more into it but all the imagery of the world being formed so early on threw me off.

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  4. For my part, the whole creation of the world was one of my favorite moments. It showed the evolution of nature in a very scientific way, with the chronology of events from the Big Bang, to the creation of heavy elements in stars and the young planet Earth in the Solar system, and then the early beginnings of life and its evolution until the birth of the child. However this long scene is filmed in a very graceful way, with all the bright colors and light effects, the music played suggests a religious song to me. I thought about it as a way to show the presence of God in nature and emphasize this integration as something very positive.

    On a more general way, I thought the movie was very profound on its approach of the grace versus nature question. The two parents indeed clearly represent the two sides with the mother that is pictured as an angel at some point (she is actually flying in the sky)and the father that becomes violent as his children start rebelling during adolescence. The movie emphasizes very dark parts of humanity as anger, suffering and violence, but it also pictures the positive sides of human kind with the ability to forgive (through the brothers) and love (through the mother).

    I think Sophie was right about the question of the meaning of life that is clearly at the core of the movie and is however not given an answer.

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  5. One thing that kind of threw me for a loop in this movie was the grace versus nature motif, because I think I'm viewing the assigned elements of "death" and "selfishness" differently. I was under the impression that throughout the film, nature was really the only constant thing in most of the character's life (though this mostly applies to the mother), and it was nature that comforted them when they needed it. The flip side of this was that it seemed as though they, (mostly the older son, but also the mother, although she never said it outright perhaps out of fear) were angry with God for being selfish and taking their loved one away from them. At the beginning, the mother does outright ask of God why he did it, and is clearly having trouble understanding how God could think any of them deserved it. It is during this time that she is often portrayed as being surrounded by nature, and the scene in which she is flying around a tree particularly stands out. In addition, the more the eldest son sees death, poverty, and abuse, the more he begins to lash out himself, and is clearly confused and upset by the reality of the world, which he has been taught is under the control of God. For these reasons, I didn't feel as though it was a divide between nature and grace, but rather a divide between nature that is graced, and God who is selfish. This idea stayed in my head throughout the entire movie up until the last scene when the mother tells God that he can have her son, and essentially understands that she will never understand. At that point, I saw all of the associations I had previously deduced switch, and I was the one left angry at the selfishness.

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  6. Katharine,

    You bring up such an interesting idea: this idea that God is selfish. I think it would be interesting to explore that idea here in the context of this film because it is not something that struck me about the film, but it is something that strikes me about the Book of Job, which the film makes strong references to. I am wondering if you can expand on your idea as well as what the rest of you think about this.

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  7. This comment is from Tara. She was having some problems posting:

    I agree with Professor Berry's comment that pain and suffering are at the heart of this film. This becomes clear in the very beginning with the death of one of the sons. This idea of loss and pain is carried on throughout the film and begs the question of how God allows such pain and suffering to exist in the world. I can't help but be reminded of The Sparrow, which also tries to answer this question. Although the visual scenes between nature and grace are very mystifying and fascinating to watch, I didn't exactly understand what Malik was trying to get at. I'm not sure if Malik is trying to get the viewer to recognize all of the magnificent aspects of nature or to question the origins of how all this came to be. I agree with Ashkay that I did not enjoy this movie. The long nature scenes were really difficult to get through and made me feel like the movie had no plot line at times. Needless to say, this was not my "type" of movie.

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  8. I also agree with Professor Berry. I think the issue of the problem of evil, that we talked about in class, comes up in this movie. It questions the fact that if there is such thing as a good God, that is all knowing and omnipresent, why would he create such suffering and evil in this world that he himself created? I think that the movie poses questions such as is God selfish? Why wont he intervene if there is so much evil in the world, or did he simply create the world and now he is sitting back and watching it unfold, with no intention of intervening at all? I thought the movie posed interesting and thought provoking questions, but I also agree that it was hard to get through.

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  9. I found this movie to be incredibly thought provoking. The way the director chooses to address the problem of evil is interesting, and it really does force people of any faith to answer that unanswerable question: why do bad things happen to good people? I also found it interesting the way the director juxtaposed the big picture (creation, the universe, etc.) with the little picture (human life, normative aging, non-normative loss of a child, etc.). Not only must the audience member relate the problem of evil to their faith (e.g. Is God really benevolent if he lets this happen?) they must also question their role in the universe, especially as it relates to tragedy (e.g. How important is my life in the grand scheme of things? Is it possible that God has bigger things to worry about? Is it possible that this is just a part of existence? etc).

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  10. I find this idea of God being selfish very interesting and relevant to the movie. While watching, I found it extremely painful to watch the mother and brother suffer to accept the death of the child. I think that what we spoke about in class about whether God creates and then lets things unfold or is constantly interfering with events. When we spoke about how in The Sparrow the concept of having faith in God and having something terrible happen to you can falter this same faith. Whether God is responsible for the events that occur throughout the duration of his creation's lives, or whether he just watches these events happen on their own, it is hard to have strong faith in a person who makes or lets horrible things happen. The mother in the film struggles to accept the death of her child, all the while questioning God's motive to let this happen or lack of prevention from letting it happen, showing how this faith is constantly being questioned and making us ask whether or not God is as good and great as he is made out to be.

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  11. To be honest, I feel that the Tree of Life is a very painful movie. When I watched it, I could feel the pain of that woman who lost her son. I remember an impressive scene of the movie when she looked at her son’s guitar and all kinds of memories went out. At that time, I really did not want to go on watching. However, I think this movie is great for the connection and intersection among that middle-aged man's childhood memories, the imagery of the origins of the universe and the inception of life on Earth. I also like the special effect in this movie. I am interested in the idea that God is selfish. He took away a lot of precious things from people, such as the life of mother’s son in this movie. But I also remember what I learned from Christian culture, that is God makes sacrifice when he was crucified and became the scapegoat of human-beings. Therefore, one who believes in God will be forgiven of their sins. But I cannot see this from the movie. I cannot judge what on earth the sacrifice was and who made the sacrifice. Is death a pain of darkness or a release of brightness?

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