A Look into "The Tree of Life"

The ‘I’ who speaks in this story is not the author. Rather, he hopes that you might see yourself in this ‘I’ and understand this story as your own. Paradise is not a place here or there. The soul is paradise; it opens before us; here, today. The humblest things show it. We live in the eternal, even now.

-Terrence Malick

The Tree of Life is a divine journey that shows the momentary struggles of a small town family. Terrence Malick proposes life to be more than specks of dust; that life connects to everything in the universe since the knowable creation, using a tree as the allegory. Life needs more than thought or science to understand; it takes touch, feelings, and moments of love to connect to the system of the universe. Humans consciously only get one chance to achieve this spiritual nirvana of interhuman connections, recognized as love and compassion. The Tree of Life is a parable to display the proper way to treat other humans through the use of demonstrating ethical dilemmas of the past and one’s upbringing, and how a chain of oppression manifests within the individual and its scars it leaves for the future.

Terrence Malick was raised in Waco, Texas in the fifties, which became the setting of The Tree of Life. He grew up with Christian parents and attended an Episcopal school in Austin; later he studied philosophy at Harvard and went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. He never ended up getting his doctorate in consequence to a dispute with his tutor on his thesis on the concept of the world. He ended up teaching philosophy at MIT and wrote articles for Newsweek, The New Yorker, and Life. Though coming from a religious family, Malick certainly displayed a willingness to study life beyond the Christian faith in order to understand how the world works. In one way or another, that’s what this film tried to study.

The Tree of Life begins in a world closed off from nature. Tall buildings and uniform employees. The privileged first world collectively achieved this fake-city-nature through a repression of nature. The main character, Jack, is an adult trapped in this world and through the film comes to understand how to escape. He wakes up one morning and feels some phantom pain which the audience at first doesn’t understand. He’s starting to feel the deceit of the unnatural world. His thoughts and the images on screen guide the audience to his younger brother’s death years ago. Waves of nostalgia punch Jack and renders a pain indescribable with vain attempts to overcome his arduous countenance. We see through prolonged flashbacks that Jack’s father treated him too harsh in his youth. In order to release the built up anxiety from this, Jack takes out the same aggression on his younger brother, the one who dies later. Jack’s father is an angry individual because of his failure in becoming a great musician and ends up settling for an engineering managerial position. He had also lost an important court case in which his patent and original idea was stolen. The father is no monster, he was cornered in the artifice like a wild animal. The cycle is created and thrives off this world and the beings inside. The way out, according to Malick, is through forgiveness: “Forgiveness is the key to reality.” By the end of the film, Jack’s father asks his son for forgiveness; but it’s too late because Jack already spread the oppression to his younger brother. Through this realization at an older age, Jack understands the pain that he’s feeling to be in an unnatural world that’s stealing his soul. Evil and sorrow can be destroyed through love and beauty. This is how the world is restored to its original glory.

Cinematography

The camera in this film moves in such a way to make everything seem like a dream, or even a transcendent being viewing the family in a celestial way. It flows through each scenes with no motive, neither as a subjective point of view from someone in the family nor as entirely objective.

The man behind the camera is Emmanuel Lubezki (two-time Oscar winner) known for shooting: Ali, Children of Men, Gravity, and Birdman. Lubezki and Malick developed a list of shooting aspects that is followed throughout filming, which includes: shoot in available natural light, shoot in backlight for continuity and depth, shoot in crosslight only after dawn or before dusk, never front light, avoid lens flares, no filters, except polarizer, no zooming, Z-axis moves instead of pans and tilts; the list goes on.

The shots give the audience a regular reminder of the sun and with that, the family’s place in the universe; they cannot escape simply because they are connected. It also reminds the audience that there is a bigger presence that looks over us, creating the sense of a divine presence like that of God. The scenes are not introduced with wide shots, the characters do not line up on traditional geometries within the frame, and the camera follows Jack’s internal strife as if with guidance. The scenes shot at the fifties Texas set are mostly random. Malick secured an entire block to shoot through and around, giving the cast freedom to play around like a family would. The day would start with the actors told to ad-lib some activity in the most natural way possible, and the camera would just follow and capture what happened. These moments are not planned with a traditional storyboard, they follow the dogma and seldom stray from it. The camera tracks Jack’s reactions and his point-of-view through these sequences in order for the audience to understand the world through his perspective.

Throughout the film, the shots remind the viewer of the four elements:

Fire: Creator and destroyer. In this film, it appears in the beginning of the creation of the universe sequence as being one the essential element that creates the galaxies and their stars. In the biblical context, it equivalently represents the fertility of God.

Water: This element is discussed later on in this analysis when I talk about the ending. It represents femininity, purity, and cleansing. This element pervades most of the scenes in this film because of the color, blue, which is often associated with it.

Earth: Even more than water, earth is considered the most dominant feminine element (mother nature). It’s associated with fertility and the cycle of life. Even more representative in the creation of the universe sequence, which features the earth’s creation and the fertility of the planet that made life possible. The colors associated with earth is green and brown. The green is seen in most scenes by virtue of the abundant trees and plants in the neighborhood. The father wears a lot of brown, meant to represent his firmness and strength.

Air: This last element is connected with the soul and “breath of life.” Air is the great reliever to those who need conflicts to blow over and disappear. This element is not as prevalent as others, which may be because Jack is unable for the conflict to go away; the winds aren’t bringing him peace of mind. Air is associated with white, which is a color Malick tried to stray away from when he made his shooting style with Lubetzki. This is interesting considering the film has a lot do with with innocence, which is often given a white cloak. The reason Malick wanted to avoid this color is because Jack is neither pure nor innocent. He was being infested with the negative energy his father bestowed upon him, which is anything but pure. Instead, Malick forces the purity and innocence theme on the color blue because of waters theme of cleansing and purification. Jack needs to be purified of his sins.

Nature v. Grace

The off-screen dialogue of Chastain sets up the idea behind the narrative of nature v. grace:

When I was young the nuns taught us there are two ways through life: the way of Nature and the way of Grace. You have to choose which path you’ll take. Grace doesn’t try to please itself. It accepts all things. It does not mind being slighted, forgotten, disliked, insults, or injuries. Nature only wants to please itself. Love shining through all things. No one who loves the way of grace ever comes to a bad end.

I like to think of nature and grace in basic terms along the Freudian id and ego. Nature (id) is the primeval way of life, which is following the bestial instincts of staying alive and re-populating. Grace (ego) describes the more celestial qualities within a person, including love, compassion, reasoning, etc. These are the conditions that connect every form of life to the community and space they live.

In the sequence of events showing the formation of the universe and life within it, a dinosaur-thing is lying helplessly on the ground while another approaches. The latter steps on the helpless dinosaur’s face in the form of dominance (id). But then it releases it and runs away, leaving the other to live. This is Malick’s form of showing the early interaction between nature and grace. The compassion that the dinosaur felt that made it leave is the grace overcoming the nature that would have killed the helpless being. This form of nature v. grace further takes place within Jack and his father. The father shows no grace until after the fact, and so does Jack towards his younger brother.

Finale

The final sequence on the beach reminds me off Fellini’s final scene from 8½. In both, the central character is visited in a surreal setting of the people they remember from the past. The setting is something of a dream state projected to the audience to show the character’s inner thoughts. The difference between the two is the setting: The Tree of Life takes places on a beach and 8½ takes place on an expansive field in front of an unfinished sci-fi film set. 8½ features the main character directing all of the characters in a line with a carnival setting; The Tree of Life shows older Jack interacting with his 1956 family. Jack’s thoughts are at this moment in time specifically because he is remembering the loss of his brother, which triggers the remorse he feels for how he treated him back when they were kids. He feels a wave of nostalgia when looking into the eyes of his mother while embracing her, hugging his younger brother, watching his mother embrace her brother, and looking on his father with a certain reconciliation. These are the moments Jack wants to remember. These early memories of the innocence of youth is what everybody wants to remember.

It’s also important to note the final scene happening at the beach. Symbolically, the sea represents where all of humanity originated. By returning there with thoughts of forgiveness and compassion, Malick may be arguing for the purity of these traits in being as the fundamental units of life, or grace. Water as “feminine energy” in common folklore, is shown in Jack’s gaze being directed toward his mother during this final scene. In Catholicism, holy water plays a big part for prayers/rituals. Malick wanted to show this final scene in seawater because it happens to be the most pure kind of (holy) water because of its reproduction throughout nature. He’s going for the religious purification theme in a way (not to mention the soundtrack featuring a church chorus singing). The father’s sins against Jack are being purified by forgiveness, and Jack is being purified in this final scene.

Edited: 19 March 2021