The Tree of Life
This a very personal note/review on what I felt by watching “The Tree of Life”.
Is life really a cosmic ballet? A dance of souls? I guess that’s what the Tree of life invokes. The beauty of the photography is overwhelming, still a bit below the supreme Baraka’s mood, but still with one of the highest moments I’ve ever witness on screen. The pace of the film is slow, very slow, the dialogues almost nonexistent. Sounds like heaven to me, sounded like hell and a waste of time considering most of the comments I’ve heard on the movie and on youtube comments afterwards. Why did I loved it?
— It’s another chapter of the Life & Darkness / Good & Evil. Not in a twisted Lynchian way, but on a more philosophical and tender tone. Just like if evil and darkness are not bad things, but just an unexpendable part of humanity, a necessary complement to our life. More than the good/evil balance, the nevralgic point of the movie is the suffering involved along the process. The loss of innocence, the quest for our identity, with some bits of expectations, leadership, group dynamics, love, struggle. It’s all there. Life learning’s and choices, how we think we want to live and how we end up living. All this exposed with utter sensibility and very few dialogues and very few people on the plot.
— 2001, A Space Odyssey/Music. You’ll get a lot of Kubrick’s 2001 reminiscence’s on this movie. Specially on how the music replaces dialogue. Kubrick did it well with Ligeti’s Requiem’s when humanity reaches the monolith, in here we have the same feeling almost along the entire movie. Music immerses you, and if you allow it, drowns you. I only wish I could watch the movie again on IMAX.
— Loss. The movie starts with the most unbearable felling humanity has over their shoulders: Loss. Loss is simultaneously the opportunity to question the meaning of life and why we are here, and why did “God” takes from us the ones we love. Loss is the opportunity that engages the movie from religious into science. Because everything that we can’t answer so far, everything that transcends us, directly and invariably points to a higher level: “God”. Think about it, we’re just not ready to accept the loss of a child of ours. For those who had the misfortune to go through this extreme event, the words spread on those occasions are repeatedly the same and always get into the same idea that “we can’t do anything about our own existence other that to accept what we have, and get over it with time”.
No one has done better on summarise loss than Jay Rosenblatt on his excruciating superb Phantom Limb. Written and filmed by him, it’s about the impact that loosing a brother had on his family. Check this piece that I’ve uploaded a year ago to my YT channel.
“Know that you will survive.”
”Know that you are not alone,”
“Keep in mind that grief does not proceed in orderly predictable stages.”
”Be prepared for the enormous effort it will take to have a normal, mundane conversation.”
”Cry.”
“Prepare to answer the question: How many children do you have?”
”Go easy on people who say stupid things such as: At least you had her as long as you did. You can always have another child. You’ll grow so much stronger through this. I know how you feel. It’s God’s will.”
“Don’t expect the pain to ever fully go away.”
By picking up the “Why did You took my son” question, the film surprisingly turns into science. Not religion, but science. Not to answer WHY, but to compile HOW did we get here. We make very difficult questions that we can’t answer, but give science time and eventually we’ll get there.
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— Learning. What we learn from our parents is not even compared to what we must learn by ourselves, experiencing, failing, winning. This learning is the measure of our presence on earth. The sum of all learning experiences is humanity’s legacy, history. The movie picks up several moments from the darker human’s side such as violence, greed, rage or even the more psychoanalytic theory of personality side such as Oedipus complex or even the urge to kill, a reminiscent of our evolution that will endure with us for the rest of our days.
Still, I think the movie scales humanity with good over evil, just like the dinosaur decides to spare the other one, sick by the river. Is humanity good or bad? Well, it depends.
— Evolution. All that we’ve learned with science so far, on HOW we get here, is pictured on the film. Since the dawn of times on this planet. This systematization of scientific learning on a very spiritual movie is very important, in fact if one of the main characteristics that makes it special. People can choose to focus on the religious side, the spiritual side or scientific side, but it’s the Sum of the 3 that might be the best starting point. For the first time in my life I read more than 20 insinuations to GOD and never in one second admitted to myself that I was reading a religions common GOD. To me it was nothing but a spiritual/philosophical statement. Hard to explain, specially if I think to myself that all the innuendos to GOD with capital words never made any sense to me. Of course it has a meaning, it’s above us because we still can’t explain WHO/WHERE he is. But give us humanity time and we will answer that.
Another funny fact is that all the learning that we do along our life, specially since birth to our adolescence, are so raw and strange that only years after we really understand what we were missing to get the full picture. When I first read the name of our solar system planets back on school, the distance, the full data, the mental image that I’ve made was adapted several times along my learning process. Even now I can’t be sure that’s it’s the right one. It’s not, it’s just my truth regarding the damn planets of our solar system and it’s enough for my existence. Just look at the 3D Map of Universe featuring 43,000 Galaxies.
What this movie tries to do at some point is to gather our current learning state, using Hubble’s imagery of what’s OUT THERE and on the blue planet history, because that’s what matters to us, the reality we can relate to, and urge to understand.
— Nature. If we look carefully on the scenes of the movie there’s always 3 elements from nature: water, we came from water and we keep our bonding to it ever since. The wind, present in a lot of scenes but the winner is the fire/light — sun. If we think about omipresence what can better represent God than the sun/light? Malick’s use of the sun on the film is awesome, the characters are flooded with light almost along every scene of the film. Another innuendo to God’s/Nature metaphor, and quite frankly the only that makes some sense to the omnipresence issue. Lastly architecture vs nature strongly connected and mimetized as one.
— The search for an answer. People won’t find an answer to their personal beliefs on this film. Just like in life, your spirituality must be found only by yourself. That’s the whole purpose of the film. A quest for the mandatory search on our inner-self and the quest for our own life meaning.
— Heaven/peace/spirituality. I really don’t think the dysfunctional family on the movie is important. Nor the final Heaven’s Gate/Heaven Gathering by some extent. The end of the movie symbolizes the moment when Sean Penn’s character is in peace with himself. The moment when he finally gets his spirituality sorted out. This is a very important step to every human being. It’s the event that makes us not question WHY, but instead makes us ready to look on WHAT can I do here in the blue dot. Yes, it’s a very sensible matter, some people since early ages believe on what we are taught regarding religion and spirituality. But the movie didn’t make any distinction between them, because there’s no right or wrong answer. It’s up to you to find yours.
Just like I didn’t understood how the planets relate to the whole cosmos when I was a child, humanity is still on his fragile growing process. We’ve just born out of the primordial water (goddammit!) how the hell should we already know why we are here, and who rules all this. It still transcend us and it will take us a lot of time and effort to know in its plenitude WHY+HOW+WHEN.
Humanity is an infinitesimal sum of learning, individuality is most likely irrelevant to humanity itself. Individualism is our life’s story, important to our family and friends. It’s up to us to have it the best way that we can and be relevant to ourselves, the people we love and, recently, to our twitter’s/facebook followers. Humans are compiling information the best way they can and we get it instantly. The learning curve is speeding up, hold on to your seats, we’ve just started.
