To
call Terrence Malick's The
Tree of Life a
religious or spiritual film would be, I think, a little too
simplistic. While there are certainly elements of religious imagery
throughout, the central image of the tree of life also has various
connotations in philosophy, mythology and science that I think can be
secularly applied to interpretation of this film. Analyzed through a
sometimes problematic autobiographical lens, it is true that Malick
himself is said to be a man of faith and this is evidenced in many
elements of his films — from the biblical imagery in Days
of Heaven
to the Christian hymns in The
Thin Red Line and
in similarly religious leitmotifs in The
Tree of Life's
soundtrack, as well as opening the film with a quoted passage from
Job
and following a church-going family. And I do believe there to be
religious elements in The
Tree of Life,
especially paralleling the Book
of Job,
but these elements are compatible with an inherently less religious
reading of the film (to Malick's credit) to the point where I would
not consider it to be, singularly, a "religious film."
In
the religious sense it is easy to see a great deal of influence on
The
Tree of Life,
even separate from the Book
of Job.
I think there are interesting parallels made between the scenic
suburban lifestyle and the garden of Eden in Genesis,
where the Christian idea of the "tree of life" comes into
play, as an idealized paradise that the O'Brien family is eventually
forced out of (although I do think Malick also portrayed the paradox
of this paradisal place with a darker undercurrent of repression and
a generally deceiving appearance). Narratively, it mirrors The
Book of Job
in testing the faith of a righteous family with trials and
tribulations and a general sense of injustice in their lives which
leads characters like Mrs. O'Brien to ask “why,” and leads the
central character of Jack as a young boy to doubt the existence of a
god altogether. In The
Book of Job,
God eventually offers his response in lyrical prose that Job is
unaware of so much about the formation of the world and how it works,
and that God is ultimately not subject to questions from men in the
grand scheme of things. This can, most easily, be seen mirrored in
The
Tree of Life
with the poetic and evocative imagery of Malick's cinema in the
creation sequence which takes the spectator from the universe before
the big bang to the Texas town where the O'Brien family had
eventually settled down in the 50s — offering a scale and scope to
possibly contextualize the perspective of God in these Old Testament
passages.
While
it seems like a convenient fit to understand this sequence within the
film in solely this religious context, it remains applicable to a
number of other interpretive lenses that can exist separately from a
religious reading. Malick doesn't inherently imply a role of a larger
hand at play throughout the sequence, which generally stays true to
what we know about the creation of the universe by current scientific
understanding. The sequence suggests an evolutionary lineage that
many believe contradicts how Genesis
specifically and literally describes the birth of life, and "the
tree of life" has a history of being used by Charles Darwin to
illustrate his evolutionary theory pertaining to the relatedness
among species throughout time. Any non-religious viewer can follow
the lives of this Church-going family and still accept all that goes
on in the sequence without a thematic conflict of interest, as the
generally universal question of why bad things happen to good people
can still be answered by Malick's illustration of nature's literally
awesome scope in a way that heavily minimizes the role of man and his
individual problems (a common thread in Malick's filmography) with
the family's religiosity used as a salient means to narratively
facilitate their disillusionment of how they understand life to be.
Other traditions of the central image include the mystical concept
pertaining to the interrelatedness of all life on Earth, which is
another theme Malick's films have expressed interest in exploring and
which the creation sequence here does. Historically, the use of the
“tree of life” image as appropriated by African American
communities in the wake of lynchings in the South can also speak to
the false facade of paradisal Texas suburban life in the 50s.
Ultimately, the religious allusions present throughout the film
should not be ignored, but the film should be seen as a work more
dense and complicated than to simply label it as a religious and/or
spiritual movie.
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