American Transcendentalism and ‘The Tree of Life’

My friend (and fellow Hydra writer) Edgar Garcia once surprised me when he stated how much he disliked Ralph Waldo Emerson. This conversation was over text message, and he stealth-attacked me with this unforeseen indictment of one of America’s great prophets, friend to all humanity, the Sage of Concord. What he disliked so much about Emerson was the “erosive quality, the constant undermining” that seemed to “require the reader to move forward and backward in order to get what’s going on.”

It was true: Emerson’s peculiar style, which moved and swayed in giant steps and seemed to say something forcefully, lyrically, without saying anything in particular, drove the reader into some kind of rapture that necessitated the comprehension of great hermetic truths about life, about nature, about humanity, on just about everything ever said and made and experienced. Instead, “what the reader is fed in this novel redesign of the reading experience is washy Vedas. Its dreams of freedom and independence are cheaply purchased. Cheap tea for the American soul market.” Watching Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, I’m finally starting to understand what Edgar meant by the “washy Vedas” that lay concealed in the subterfuge of Emerson’s lyrical style. If Terrence Malick, the sage of Waco, Texas, is the new Emerson, then his Tree of Life introduces an updated, 21st century Transcendentalism that uses cinematic hyperbole and a barrage of ultra-scenic visuals that irk and distract rather than enlighten

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Shortly after watching The Tree of Life, I re-read Emerson’s seminal book-length essay Nature (1836) on a hunch, and something like a mystical apple fell and struck me on the head: Malick’s Tree has its roots firmly placed in Emerson’s Nature. The return of Transcendentalism! It had never gone away apparently, and it was sprouting from the transparent, all-seeing eyeball of a revered but media-shy American film director who’s only made five films up to now, his latest earning the Palme d’Or at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. A film of tremendous promise that had been hyped up for years since Malick finished principal shooting in 2008 (and spent almost three years editing it into several versions that changed in length over time), the wait-time spent for the completion and release of Tree of Life was a considerable improvement over the 20 years that divided his second film, Days of Heaven (1978), from his third, The Thin Red Line (1998). The smallness of Malick’s oeuvre seems to be due to his artistic commitment to one-up himself with each successive work. Badlands (1973), still considered by some to be his finest work, is a bona fide American classic. It gave definitive roles to Martin Sheen (impossibly cool and handsome) and to Sissy Spacek (simultaneously wise and naive), shortly before they would become established actors of the 1970s American film renaissance. Badlands proved to be a blessing and a curse for Malick: it was a film so spherically airtight, so instantly memorable and iconic, that its debut set a high standard for Malick the director; he had to reinvent himself at the very moment he was discovered by the industry.

Terrence Malick

Days of Heaven followed five years later, and it was the first attempt on the part of Malick to experiment with a different way of shooting and editing that seemed to grace or skirt straight narrative instead of directly involving itself in its parameters. The repetitive use of voice-over (a Malick hallmark) was used in Days of Heaven as a kind of tangential punctuation for scenes that seemed to always be in medias res, often in the middle or at the end of conversations in which words were barely heard or muttered, but in which landscape, American landscape, was the thing itself, the narrative captured in still life. Badlands was already a miniature study of 1950s Americana filtered through the eyes of two fugitive lovers, and Days of Heaven served the same purpose, only this time setting the period even farther back (circa 1916), and expanding the color palette, dilating the largeness of sky and terrain, which in turn diluted (and sometimes enhanced) the molecular intimacy of the characters who only happened to stumble into his camera sight.

The progression from the tight narrative and character development of Badlands to the looser, more contemplative style of Days of Heaven was the first step in creating the signature Malick style, in which the linear conventions of strong narrative are replaced or derailed by staccato rhythms of natural history scenes and American dreamscape. Malick was not so much interested in the stories he had to tell as he was in the geography that was traveled by the characters, the historicity that situated and authenticated them, and the search for a new land that drove them perpetually forward.

And I have said it elsewhere: Malick’s oeuvre is almost exclusively concerned with geography, American geography, and his image-ideas serve as historiographies of an American-oriented epistemology. An American epistemology is necessarily a geographical one: the endless search for the “New World,” whatever it was, if it existed at all. Badlands and Days of Heaven were enough to cement Malick’s reputation for good, to such an extent that there was quite a clamor raised for his late reemergence with The Thin Red Line. I do not want to spend much time analysing Malick’s war film, so I’ll only state that it was a significantly longer film (170 minutes) and even more elliptical in style than Days of Heaven had been — a continuation, but also a step forward, of the Malickian technique. Days of Heaven, even at 95 minutes, seems to feel epic, and its brevity belies the desire to show more landscape, to explore more geographical and historical strata, to perhaps develop the back story and the characters more (and its strange way of being edited, as if in a hurry to include all the shots and scenes that were filmed, points to the possibility of a different film, longer and slower, if Malick had to time to put it together).

The Thin Red Line, to some extent, liberated Malick from the constraints of producing a film within the 90 minute mark, and this newfound freedom was no doubt indebted to the 20 years that had served to increase his fame within the network of a new Hollywood generation that readily worshiped him. Everyone who was anyone at the time signed up to be in his film: the ensemble cast was so large that the initial edit of the film (running at 5 hours) took 7 months to get through, just to include all the star performances in the film. The same Malickian tropes appeared again: nature-worship, fraternitas, elliptical asides and voice-overs, geographical cognition, the search for and the destruction of Paradise. (So that all of his films play like variations on Paradise Lost — and The Tree of Life could possibly be Malick’s Paradise Regained.)

Whatever the merits of The Thin Red Line, Malick’s fame escalated high enough to secure a larger budget and expenditures, to dream bigger and shoot longer, to dare to top himself again and again. When The New World was released in 2005, some of the hype that tended to surround a Malick production had been depressurized (the wait time was no longer 20 years but 7), but the film received its due share of awards and praise. Even after watching The Tree of Life, I still consider The New World to be the culmination of Malickian technique or, at least, the most successful incarnation of his mass-aggregate style of shooting and editing. The New World epitomized the sort of dreamer’s naivete that characterizes all of Malick’s work with a grace and tenderness that was, indeed, sumptuous and myth-making, because it was so purposefully neo-romantic, so determinedly optimistic, and even sometimes delirious and foolish (as all love stories ought to be).

The New World was always about Pocahontas (just as Hart Crane had envisioned her), and it freely expressed itself in the permanent American idiom: the plural, the ecstatic, the Whitmanesque. As usual, different cuts of the film came to exist: a limited release version (150 minutes), the wide-release version (135 minutes), and an extended cut version (172 minutes), all of which were harvested from well over a million feet of film shot — Malick shot large, but he also shot long and hard. This is an important fact because, judging from the vertiginous plurality of shots and scenes that make up The Tree of Life, I would not be surprised if Malick and his team of filmmakers surpassed the exorbitant amount of film stock that was used up in the discovery of The New World.

Scene from "The New World" (2005)

Scene from "The Tree of Life" (2011)

The extraordinary thing about The Tree of Life is, firstly, its sheer scale. Nothing less than the Origin of Life itself is directly tackled, and this extra-large evolutionary scheme is anchored by the core story of a young family’s parallel evolution in 1950s Texas. The second extraordinary thing is the ease and velocity with which the film migrates through a succession of macrocosmic phenomena that envelop and comment upon microcosmic occurrences.

It is a film divided into 4 sections: the 1st works as a kind of prelude in which large scale astral events (let us group these massive events under the more generic term “the Macrocosmic View”) intertwine with the events surrounding a man’s recollection of his life growing up in Waco, Texas and his subsequent present-tense life working and living in what looks like modern day Chicago (we can call this other half, “the Microcosmic View”). A death in the family, received by letter and telephone call, disrupts the tight-knit peace of the family: we see them endure their suffering, as the camera gazes on their gestures and faces (there are a lot of close-ups that swoop in or rise up to the expressive faces of the characters, which often stand in for actual dialogue). We gradually discover that Sean Penn plays the grown up version of the oldest boy of the family, and we see him too inwardly suffer within the air-conditioned nightmare of his existence (or so we are led to believe by the dismal grays and silvers and blues of his sleek, well-cushioned [i.e. "empty"] lifestyle as a wealthy architect trapped in a nature-less modernity).

The 2nd section shifts into the Macrocosmic View: we start with a “Let there be Light” moment, and then we progress to starbursts, to cataclysmic eruptions, massive volcanoes, tectonic plate shifts, and so forth. Eventually we have water, eventually we have microorganisms, amoeba, fish, tadpoles, etc., until we arrive at the awaited moment: dinosaurs! Yes, the film contains dinosaurs, and it is no wonder: Malick takes his natural history very seriously, and having the American backing and resources to reproduce life-like prehistoric creatures (and even an American tradition of loving and supporting this kind of hyperrealism), why not? If Kubrick could have the Dawn of Man littered with bone-flinging apes, then why not go farther back and show every possible step in the evolution of life?

Yet by the time the dinosaurs make their stage entrance, the film has already lapsed into a semi-ridiculous, pseudo-Kubrickian mood. 2001: A Space Odyssey is the obvious model for many of the grandiose shots that Malick and his team indulge in (Malick even hired Douglas Trumbull — special effects supervisor for 2001 – to handle some of the special effects work), but Tree of Life never succeeds in achieving the strange and anomalous balance that Kubrick (in my estimation, still a far more accomplished, versatile director) had managed to construct in 2001. The antiseptic coldness and aloofness with which Kubrick envisioned impossibly large, astronomical events happening outside of time (and indeed outside of human perception) seems now more sincere, paradoxically enough, than Malick’s picturesque, New Age-y meditation on astronomical and molecular life processes.

Perhaps nothing exhibits this note of falseness in Malick’s vision of extra-human/pre-human phenomena more than the dinosaur episode, not ridiculous, as I said, because of the mere fact that dinosaurs appear (for certainly, depicting the ontological blossoming of the Cosmos cannot be considered any less outrageous than showing terrestrial lifeforms which really did exist a long, long time ago); rather, the dinosaur episode (albeit brief) is ridiculous because the saurians appear so ludicrously anthropomorphized that one has to question the whole reasoning behind the beginning-of-time setup.

A dinosaur (a “parasaurolophus” according to the author(s) of the Wikipedia article on Tree of Life) lies wounded by a shallow stream. Another critter (a “troodon” — as if it really mattered what a CGI-rendered creature happened to be) comes out and contemplates eating the wounded reptile, which seems to be condemned to die anyway: as a way of showing that the dinosaur “thinks,” it experimentally steps on the head of the wounded creature, repeats this process again, a little harder, a little lighter (I can hear a few gasps of alarm from the audience), and then, miraculously, decides not to eat it (now I hear “Ahhhs” and sighs of relief). An altruistic dinosaur! Who would have known?

The film happily skips along to show other pre-human formations and terrestrial events, but my attention has already been permanently damaged by the dinosaur’s altruism: what was the purpose of that, really? That “life loves life”? That we are all… One? That if a dinosaur can love its fellow brother, certainly we can, and we should, too? The message was irreducibly kitschy (a fresh dosage of hardcore existential alienation would have been welcome by this point), and as I looked up at other impossibly beautiful shots of cave formations, church spires, majestic trees, etc., I realized that Malick’s pan-historical travelogue mode had gone too far this time — he had run out of actual ideas, or he had grown bored with plain old narrative.

The mainly fatuous 2nd section of Tree of Life is nothing more, nothing less, than a miniature copy of the BBC and Discovery Channel’s Planet Earth series, an invariably impressive mosaic of natural phenomena, but Malick’s work seems to carry a kind of National Geographic aesthetic that tries to compensate for a dearth of actual emotion, actual thought, with the pull of wonder-baiting cinematography. Seen from this angle, the personal investment for the viewer is small because one has only to watch, to gawk in awe, to stare passively at a stream of pretty pictures, in place of reading and interpreting difficult, ponderous subtexts or deciphering the layered depths of more complex (i.e. less tourist-ready) images. The Attractive immediately becomes the True.

Malick seems convinced that staggering beauty is always enough — and that a surplus of it can overwhelm all the other faculties of intellectual engagement. Watching parts of Tree of Life is comparable to reading a pop-up children’s book on a pre-school level: the text is either absent or reduced to the barest minimum and the illustrations are maximized to ultimate, panoramic effect. Yes, pictures tell stories (picture theory is, after all, the primordial root of all cinema), but Malick leaves no room for doubt or speculation in his images: his sweeping camera movements, the compulsive rush of events that are always lunging forward, work as unquestionable assertions, injunctions even, “to believe.” Believe! Yes, but believe in what?

This sophisticated form of cinematic legerdemain simulates the gospel message of American Transcendentalism, a universalist credence made persuasive by the hypnotic but indeterminate fulcrum of Emersonian aesthetics: the will to believe, left on its own, and supplemented merely by a pseudo-pantheism that lacked the certainty of conviction or the repository of a well-defined doctrine. It is a kind of beauty-cult faith that circumvents definite, Kierkegaardian faith: as empty of meaning as it is large of target, it signals everything and beckons nothing in particular. Emerson had no “dogma” to adhere to or speak of (to the Concord Sage’s credit, he never pretended to subscribe to any religious doctrine but that of a  philosophical syncretism that based itself largely on self-reliance and private revelation), but he did place a tremendous semantic value on Nature — with a capital N — and it is this Emersonian spirit of nature-worship which has been consistently echoed throughout all of Malick’s work, so that we find him frequently

Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed in blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.

And if there is any gospel message to be gleaned from the surfeit of images that constitute Tree of Life, it is that last sentence from Emerson: “I am part or particle of God.” If we never received the memo, Malick makes sure that the incessant voice-overs (all of them irritatingly whispered and “poetical”) remind us of it. “Brother… sister…” becomes a kind of biblical invocation for Sean Penn to walk aimlessly around in a canyon (he is in Nature this time, outside of the sterility of the Office), or for Brad Pitt (who plays the father, Mr O’Brien) to mug a little and stand perplexed, or for Jessica Chastain (who plays Mrs. O’Brien, the uber-motherly 50s housewife who almost never says anything above a few words) to hover around magically and flash a smile at her children: “Mother, father… you wrestle in me.” (Or something like that.)

But I am only meagerly, maybe unfairly, bringing Emerson into the picture: indeed, Emersonian thought is not so simple or clear-cut as the stock of sometimes fascinating, sometimes generic, images Malick brings into his picture frame. Emerson invoked Neoplatonism and the Upanishads, he sought Nature not in natural scenery strictly but in the apperception of the human soul channeling nature or re-creating it — he found it nestled and functioning within “the infinitude of the private man.” Malick sees it quite the same, I’m sure, but it is a Nature so washed out by breathless whispering and beauty, beauty, beauty, that it does end up looking and feeling a bit like a “washy Vedas.”

All is not lost however: the 3rd section of the film, which should be considered the movie proper, is fortunately the longest part, and it is the section when Malick actually begins “doing cinema” (in the same manner that a philosopher finishes setting up the prolegomena to the problem at hand and begins “doing philosophy”). Malick shifts to “the Microcosmic View” and gives us a detailed portrait of a boy’s youth in 1950s Texas, from the moment of birth up to his early adolescence, and one wonders how many of the events that transpire during this section occurred to Malick personally. I would guess not too many: while many of the scenes are lovingly crafted and superbly paced (the sound design is impeccable here), they still retain a residue of generic standardization: we watch a photogenic anglo-saxon family grow up together through thick and thin, just as we would imagine them in compressed form, in Coca-Cola advertisements or on black-and-white television shows of the period (but with more doses of realism to temper the emphatic loveliness of everyone).

All of the actors are attractive and fresh-faced enough to star in commercials, the sons as much as the parents, and their growing pains, when attempting to simulate real friction and real family problems, embody the sheen of harmlessness that typify idealized family dramas. There is nothing overtly ugly or crooked in anything that happens in Tree of Life. The father is a disciplinarian who makes his sons fear and love him; but he is also something of a failed dreamer who makes us empathize with him; the oldest son grows to hate the father once he nears puberty, he wants to replace him, he is confused about life because fear and desire, sex and pain, begin to grow in him, etc. The mother is softer, kinder, more intuitive and empathetic, she teaches the boys how to love and be free, how to be kind to one another, etc. And the second oldest boy, who plays the guitar and has a “sensitive side,” takes after his mother, while the older boy adopts the more masculine behavior of his father.

In short, many of the literary and media-informed tropes that have gone into the historical representation of the everyday white American family are here exploited to great emotional effect. This family is not my family, but I’m so familiar with the themes, with the domestic arguments, with the quite universal forms of emotion that are exploited here, that I cannot help but understand and sympathize with their troubles or relate to Malick’s boyhood memories. Some of it is endearing, undoubtedly, but its montage of attractions has no real hold on singularity, on that indefinable eccentricity that makes each family fundamentally different from others, so that the O’Briens turn out resembling more of a blueprint for the quintessential American family than an actual collective of complicated individuals. (But maybe this was the universalist goal Malick had in mind: he wanted to build and reproduce the family archetype, “the family of families,” the family experience in itself.)

However meticulously wrought this 3rd section is, much of the hard work that went into its execution (majestically lensed all the way through by Emmanuel Lubezki) is instantly subverted by the lackluster, almost laughable, 4th section, the coda of the family’s evolution, in which (I presume) Sean Penn somehow escapes his waking dream-dilemma of wandering around canyons and through open door frames (surreal!), and finds himself on a beach with everyone he knew in life, Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, himself as a younger boy, his brothers. 8 ½ it absolutely is not, but the attempt to tie everything together after all that transpired, remains a partial failure of empty accretion — we are reminded of the washy Vedas again (literally this time, since the principal characters get wet while they walk around the beach or run through the lapping waves), but not before a final montage sequence of randomized scenery (micro and macro mixed in), seemingly in the attempt to fit in every shot which the editors could not find a place for in the opening section. Two of the final shots are, inexplicably, of a carnivalesque Eyes Wide Shut-style mask floating in the water (an art film!) and another of a modern-day bridge at sunset (the Golden Gate Bridge?), surreptitious moments which inspired a colleague of mine to quip outside the movie theater, “It would make a great screen saver.” I can’t think of a better summation.

Does Malick succeed in creating a new cinematic idiom with The Tree of Life? Yes and no. Yes, he has crafted a film that has pushed the Malickian technique to its breaking point, and the film’s true core (the 3rd or “main” section) is an undeniable spectacle of consummate, indeed transcendental, filmmaking — capturing emotions and intimacies as only a transparent all-seeing eyeball can.

The universality of Emerson assumes the universality of everyone else, of the American Experience specifically, but also of me and you and everyone we know (in the world of cinema anyway). It is the prayer for “all things”: an ornate rhetoric that disarms our skepticism and subdues our thought in aromas and sensations — we are pushed along, pulled here and there, because there is never any one place to stop at and think for a minute, because everything has got to be accounted for, no matter how fast or haphazard. But this love of speed and texture also collapses into structural disorder. The Tree of Life loses traction and a lot of internal coherence when it tries to augment and move forward, when it could be taking pauses, reducing its vocabulary and effusiveness, and sharpening its focus. This is the “erosive quality, the constant undermining” that diminishes (for me) the revolutionary aims of the film.

But I suppose it is in Malick’s nature to do more and more, to one-up himself, to constantly move forward at greater and more intricate velocities, leading one to wonder how on earth Malick could top himself after something so all-encompassing as The Tree of Life. Evidently, it would simply have to be even more of itself: a 6 hour version is reportedly being prepared already. A friend asked me what makes this film especially American, and I would answer that it would be this more-of-more-ness, this contagious audacity to film as much of everything (both the representable and unrepresentable, the objective and the inter-subjective) as is financially and technologically possible: the quantification of human experience in a nutshell. The optimistic belief that a million feet of film (2 million, 3 million?) could register the sum total of a boy’s life in Texas. A similar question would be: what makes Transcendentalism an American ideology? It could be answered something like this: the belief that one can transcend the perceptual limitations of history, of time and place, provided one invents one’s own medium for narrating it. A kind of metaphysical entrepreneurship. We produce our own history, or we bring the universal down to our size, if we can create a private, self-willed language for its mediation. Or as Emerson would say (and Malick approve of):

The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face-to-face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? . . . The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.