Review: The Tree of Life
In October of last year, Mark Greif wrote a (fairly brilliant) article in the New York Magazine entitled, “What Was the Hipster?“, in which he scathingly summarised the artistic tendencies of the hipster movement thus: “It did not produce painters, but graphic designers. It did not yield a great literature, but it made good use of fonts.” I evoke this old dichotomy between Art and Decoration not to suggest that Terrence Malick’s latest film, The Tree of Life, should be dismissed as merely decorative (though he has always made pretty films). I’d argue that all art is decoration until it produces an idea. It’s the idea that gives art its value and this only occurs in the encounter between art and audience. Here then is the division of labour with regards to artworks: The artist makes the work and the spectator makes it art. You may have noticed a kind of critical debate going on at the moment about whether The Tree of Life is a masterpiece or a piece of pretentious wank. This is the wrong debate. The real question is: Have we been able to talk about The Tree of Life in a constructive way such that it might be termed a “work of art”?
It is easy to see why some people might be skeptical of this film. If the genre films of Hollywood’s Golden Era fostered a certain critical neglect by virtue of being perceived as “low culture”, The Tree of Life can be seen as an inverted version of this phenomenon. In the first instance, “art” (the production of an idea) doesn’t happen because critics have wrongly assumed that there is nothing of worth to be discovered in genre films. In the case of The Tree of Life (what we might call an “art event”), art doesn’t happen because critics wrongly assume that what is of worth is already there and doesn’t need elucidating. “It’s a masterpiece! It’s so immersive!” they exclaim and then never quite get around to telling us why it is so. The art event is often a case of art announcing itself but never actually happening. Malick’s films are prone to foster this kind of response, The Tree of Life especially: the constant hypnotic music. The enigmatic voiceovers. The epic time scale (from the dawn of time to the present). The stream of consciousness editing. All of this has the effect of announcing to us that we are watching an art event. But as the Groucho Marx expression goes: “He may look like an idiot and talk like an idiot but don’t let that fool you. He really is an idiot.” In this case let us say, “The Tree of Life may look like a masterpiece and sound like a masterpiece but don’t let that fool you. It might be a masterpiece.”
The Tree of Life is both a continuation of Malick’s particular obsessions and a departure. There are his usual voiceovers, a vaguely biblical story about a paradise lost, an eye for natural phenomena and his typically gorgeous cinematography. Malick’s films have all explored a tension between the virtual and the material but his camera has generally been on the side of the material. Take for example that moment in Badlands when Sissy Spacek asks herself what her life might be like if she had never met the Martin Sheen character. She is imagining something but we only see the photos she is looking at. The Tree of Life continues this concern with the relationship between the virtual and the material but in a way that marks a departure: the camera is no longer on the side of materiality but witness to a multitude of fantasy images – a boy’s mother floating above the ground; a dinosaur showing mercy to its prey; a desert space where protagonist Jack wanders with figures from his boyhood and performs obscure rituals. Even the film’s middle section – the most narratively concrete – has the air of a fable: Cain and Abel with a fair dollop of Oedipus.
This logic of imaging virtual concepts reaches a limit with God, the major presence in the film who is never seen. The Tree of Life opens with a quote from the Book of Job wherein God rhetorically asks Job whether anyone could divine God’s intention given his infinite greatness. What follows in the film is indeed grand and wondrous but there are no suggestions of divine intention. Consistent with his previous films, the world of The Tree of Life is a universe of beautiful chaos – meaningless maybe but with striking echoes, reverberations and repetitions. The troubling nature of these echoes, reverberations and repetitions are at the heart of The Tree of Life. The film’s dinosaur scene has predictably resulted in much derision, partly because Malick audaciously stages the scene as one in which the interaction of two dinosaurs has an ethical stake as serious as those of Jack’s childhood. How can we take seriously the notion that God’s law existed for the dinosaurs when we are not even sure whether to take the notion of universal ethical truths seriously? Malick’s film is a gentle provocation: it insists on a role for God even if God’s will is not discernible in the material world. What this role might be happily remains a question for the audience. Does any of this make The Tree of Life a masterpiece? I’m happy to call it a masterpiece yet to come.
Yosh
21/07/11 - 4:31 PM
I finally got around to seeing The Tree of Life, meaning I could finally read your review – and I enjoyed both. The film was not perfect, but it was moving, mesmerising and provocative. I don’t have much to add, but this review looks so lonely without any comments, so … I guess … nice one!
Conall Cash
22/07/11 - 2:43 PM
You should really read Walter Benjamin’s PhD thesis, “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism” — central to it is the argument that criticism makes the work of art a work of art; prior to its critique it can only be mere semblance, mere harmony, mere (false) totality. The additional point though is that criticism is not something that arbitrarily happens to a work — the work must be criticisable; its critique is in a sense already anticipated by the work (which of course does not mean that it is intended by the artist — the elaborate textual games of interpretability typically associated with moderns like Joyce or Nabokov are not what is meant here). Criticism is the immanent interruption of the work in its empty continuity, an interruption that engages it in the present, or what Benjamin will elsewhere call the ‘Now of recognisability’.
Seeing ‘Tree of Life’ for the second time on Monday, I liked it much more than the first time, but it also made me feel that in Benjamin’s terms and in the terms of your piece, it cannot be termed a work of art, because I think it is utterly uncriticisable. I’ve been dismayed and disgusted by the various pieces of worship that have passed themselves off as criticism in response to this film (of course, the negative reviews have been no less disgusting), but ultimately my feeling is that the film simply offers no point of entry other than one of devotion (or in other words, stupidity) – I experienced something of this devotion, this stupidity, during the second viewing (first time I was just dismayed), and its achievement is no doubt admirable, but it is I think ultimately a demonstration of the film’s worthlessness as a work of art. Of course, if someone does manage to write a serious piece of criticism about the film I will very willingly consider revising my position. The question of the relation between Malick’s religious devotion and the devotion of his fans (many of whom are, basically, religious fanatics — note the vitriol with which they respond to anyone who doesn’t worship alongside them) is also something worthy of investigation.
Brad Nguyen
22/07/11 - 11:56 PM
That PhD thesis sounds like something I should have read before writing this. That always happens.
Conall Cash
23/07/11 - 11:36 AM
Oh I dunno, sometimes it’s nice to find your own work has an affinity with some great text you haven’t read. But I’m sure you’d find it interesting and it could push you to extend some of these same ideas. (However be warned that it is extremely dense and not a fun read — it is basically Benjamin’s first and last attempt at scholarly work. His Habilitation or second PhD, which is even more impenetrable, was refused by the university as it was not suitably conventionally scholarly)