Sean Penn, the architect, is the first person you hear in the “Tree of Life” (after Job’s quotation), speaking whit Thomas Wilfred's Lumia playing on the screen: “Brother, mother – it was they who led me to your door”. This “door” is very obviously the desert’s door we see in his dream.
Whose door? That is the question. Let’s carefully consider the dream. This door has a women on the other side, a women that counducts the architect to it and waits for him in that other side. He must make the move to reach her. Must take the decision. Malick made it easy for us (as long we watch the film carefuly enough) to identify her. She gives the architect “looks” just like Jack’s school love (“The next word is VOLCANO. The next word is SOCKET”, said the professor), that girl he didn’t had the courage to reach in the way home. If you remember, the girl stopped in front of the camera, as if waiting. That moment is definitely the axis of the “Tree of Life”.
But the dream didn’t start here. To understand it we must go back right to the beginning: “How did I lose you? Wandered? Forgot you?” We can only understand that beginning of the dream on the base of the episode of young Jack’s escape into his seductive neighbour house. The dream starts whit Jack refreshing and drinking a bit of water, like everything started with the women: she first gives young Jack to drink from the garden hose. Then he enters the canyon. We hear the wind. He touches the rock. This is all about the disturbing scene in the empty dining room before ascending to her bedroom: touching the curtain, feeling the wind. Then he’s out. Gets to a plain. Sees a hill. Runs for it: and he has the vision of the “disappeared house”. Something that is not there. This was what happened to young Jack: when he returned home (to his mother; that woman his nothing but his mother’s substitute and that house a “heterotopia” where he can enter in the parents room to investigate certain things), it was not there anymore, was something else. And so he saw his house in a grassy plane, like if it was removed to some far country. It is a very short shot and you may not remember it. The same image had appeared before in a painting in the room of the dead son, just over the bead.
What really was that Jack found out in that house? What made him panic? You must go back to the “origins of Life” sequence. You see the white jellyfishes. Then you see a rose/red one between the white (poisonous?). It will turn into a fish (very phallic, by the way). The next being you’ll see is the dying fish-dinosaur (sorry about the unscientific terminology) in the beach at sunset, wounded by another animal on the side. Then blood. Then the sea full of sharks.
Did the fish become the dinosaur? We tend to believe it. It seems to search light. But if the white jellyfishes became the dying dinosaur and the rose one/fish became a shark? To serious movie lovers (and Malick is one of them) “Blood” + “sea full of sharks” means just one thing: Orson Welles’ “The Lady from Shanghai”:
“Once, off the hump of Brazil I saw the ocean so darkened with blood it was black and the sun fainting away over the lip of the sky. We'd put in at Fortaleza, and a few of us had lines out for a bit of idle fishing. It was me had the first strike. A shark it was. Then there was another, and another shark again, 'till all about, the sea was made of sharks and more sharks still, and no water at all. My shark had torn himself from the hook, and the scent, or maybe the stain it was, and him bleeding his life away drove the rest of them mad. Then the beasts took to eating each other. In their frenzy, they ate at themselves. You could feel the lust of murder like a wind stinging your eyes, and you could smell the death, reeking up out of the sea. I never saw anything worse... until this little picnic tonight. And you know, there wasn't one of them sharks in the whole crazy pack that survived”
In Jack’s boyhood, the rose/red jellyfish reappears in the form of the dress in the drawer of the women’s bedroom (check the “mosaic” poster of the movie). He admired it trough the sun light. Putted it in bed. Then the camera turned to his mouth, where all the tension concentrated. Cut. Panic. Jack ran to the river and the dress transformed into the fish again.
What did Jack felt, discovered? Not just “sexuality”, in that common sense: he is a “man”, his mother a “women”, etc. Something a thousand times more powerful and dangerous. He experienced the “hunger”, “the lust of murder like a wind” (the scene in the dining room, where he touches the curtain and you hear the wind that is evoked in the architect’s dream). He felt he was an animal, a shark. Nothing will be the same. For some reason he will then start to hurt R.L. For Malick, when you “take it by the root”, like Mr. O’Brien puts it, that “lust” is the core of the way of Nature.
The important question is: can we assimilate the women in the house with the school girl? Or is this a “lust” vs. “pure love” situation? Nature vs. Grace? If we consider the first, the meaning of the movie seems totally inverted from what we expected: how can we make sense of the rest of it this way? The architect would have chosen to enter just trough the way of Nature to embrace total lust and destruction. But the fact is that the first possibility doesn’t seem very solid. As the architect finally crosses that “door” in the desert, he enters the women uterus; we see magma, a “river of lava” and the destruction of the earth, burned by the sun. Jack “prays”: “Brother. Keep us. Guide us. Until the end of time”. And if this was not enough trouble, Jack, the boy, seems the kind that can never fully choose one of the ways, like the architect does. He says to himself: “Father. Mother. Always wresting inside me. Always will.” He tries to hurt R.L., thinks of killing his father, thinks of his school love, but accomplishes nothing. He asks for forgiveness to his brother, he makes peace with his father, but he knows he’s half good, half bad, half Grace, half Nature. Could he make the choice the architect did, whatever it was?
Do you remember what in the film was between the girl and the women? Death. When the girl disappeared, death took her place. This was the episode of the drowned boy. The one that made Jack question: “Why should I be good, if you aren’t?” It is then he meets the women. I believe we must go back to that episode of the drowned boy to try to understand all this.
Who died on the river/pool? Who was Mr. O’Brien not able to save? A boy with no face (the film is full of men with no faces, people you can’t see the face). Remember Steve’s reaction? He plays with R.L. at the funeral, they somersault. This means transformation. The next time you’ll see Steve is in the macabre scene in the cemetery (watch the name on the grave). Steve ends buried alive. He asks: “Was he bad?” The next question Steve asks is: “Will you die too, mother? You’re not that old yet.” We see Snow-White in her beautiful glass coffin.
Why is Steve, almost always quite, that makes these questions? Now I must enter Malick’s biography and its connection with this film project. You see, as strange you may find it, if there is one of the three boys you can associate with Malick and to his reaction to his brother’s suicide, that boy that died at 19, is Steve, and you can find all this in the episode of the drowned boy. Steve is the diminutive of Stephen. Malick was a pupil at St. Stephen's Episcopal School in Austin. It is a subtle way to refer “the child that I was”, as the architect puts it when lights the candle. Young Malick is certainly not Jack. I will try to explain why. That is the root of the “Tree of Life”.
To solve this puzzle (there is a puzzle in the film, noticed?), we will have to go to that final shot just before the Lumia plays on the screen for the last time. There is a bridge across a river, a bird flying along it, and a big building in the far shore. Contrary to what you may imagine (it looks something like the final shot of “The Thin Red Line”), this is a very precise reference. It is a reference to a poem by Hölderlin called “Heidelberg”. There is absolutely no doubt Malick knew this poem and wanted to refer it in the end (it was even extensively commented by his favourite philosopher, Heidegger). It goes like this:
Long have I loved you and for my own delight
Would call you mother, give you an artless song,
You, of all towns in our country
The loveliest that ever I saw.
As the forest bird crosses the peaks in flight,
Over the river shimmering past your floats
Airy and strong the bridge,
Humming with sounds of traffic and people.
Once, as if it were sent by gods, enchantment
Seized me as I was passing over the bridge
And the distance with its allure
Shone into the mountainscape.
And that strong youth, the river, was rushing on down
To the plain, sorrowing-glad, like the heart that overflows
With beauty and hurls itself,
To die of love, into the floors of time.
You had fed him with streams, the fugitive, given him
Cool shadow, and all the shores looked on
As he followed his way, their image
Sweetly jockeying over the waves.
But into the valley hung heavy the vast
And fate-acquainted fort, by lightnings torn
To the ground it stood on; yet
Eternal sun still poured.
Its freshening light across the giant and aging
Thing, and all around was green with ivy,
Living; friendly woodlands ran
Murmurous down across the fort.
Bushes flowered all down the slope to where,
In the vale serene, with hills to prop them, shores
For them to cling to, your small streets,
Mid fragrant garden bowers repose.
You’ll certainly remember that the architect hears R.L. calling him (“Find me.”) on a bridge full of people: “Once, as if it were sent by gods…” A very special and modern kind of bridge – a glass and steal passage linking two skyscrapers – but still a bridge. R.L. was in the «distance with its allure» and «shone into the mountainscape». And if you have seen the movie carefully, you’ll remember also that R.L. is persistently associated with water: the waterfall and the river (think, for example, of the scene where Jack hurts him in the finger – first he shots the river; we see the river when R.L. cries – and the one where he forgives him: “What did you show me?”).
R.L. is something, not somebody. An “imaginary brother” (he’s even stamped at the fridge in the scene where the father says to Steve: “Leave the table!”).
Thinking in advance that the fall destroys him is wrong. You see, he might be the fall to which the architect jumps «to die of love, into the floors of time». And so he prays to him (“Keep us. Guide us. Until the end of Time”). The same thing for the “mother”: “Long have I loved you and for my own delight / would call you mother...” For Malick, she is something, not somebody.
Finally, let’s remember “it where they that led me to your door.” This film is all about an artist, Terrence Malick, and his creation. It was never made a film so much self-referential. Like we read in the Sacro Bosco di Bomarzo from which Malick took the “Mouth of Hell” shot, “resembles only itself and nothing else”. Or like Mr. O’Brien says to Jack: “Subjective point of view? You know what that is? It means it comes from your mind, cannot be proved by other people.”
What’s Proust’s “Recherche” all about: it is the story of itself. The “Tree of Life” is much the same. For 30 years his director tried to do it. Crossed a long and difficult desert (remember the architect crossing the desert: “Before I knew I loved you, believed in you...”). Finally made it and gave it to us and him: “I give him to you. I give you my son/sun.”
Let’s concentrate in those too much despised contemporary sequences. They start with a reference to Kubrick and a question: “How did you come to me? In what shape? In what disguise?” The architect wakes with a dream: the “door” in the desert, a room of a house and a door to the exterior, the bird flying, the white desert. You will see all of this latter. He is dreaming about the moment when he finally crosses that “door” to embrace the women, fire and destruction. His present world is scaring. Has no communication. But something starts to awake inside him: the dream, the water coming from the tap (the fall). His wife is responsible for some kind of cult you imagine inside his residence, that looks like a fancy prison (she puts a flower in something that looks to be an altar). He ignores her, but she cares for him. He lights the candle. We see the boys. She stands just in Jack’s back. The shot is an explicit quotation from “Vertigo” (Barbara Bel Geddes visiting James Stewart in the asylum).
Jack goes to the city. We see the skyscrapers. We see a poster. We hear: “ting, ting, ting”. That is made to rhyme with the bell of the school, where young Jack will get in love. He enters the building. Enormous. People walking (the school again). Has more visions. Has a short conversation with a colleague that looks just like you would imagine young Steve grown up. He’s talking about to “experiment”. This term will be used one more time in the film: in the episode the boys put the frog in the skyrocket (“Did he go to the moon? ... It was an experience.”). He sees a women passing by and looks to her (“I feel like I am bumping into walls.”): another association with the school episode and the girl in the desert (an even the final “offer” scene). Water seems to be pressing those glass walls. The entire ambience is aquatic. Jack is between meeting rooms and sombre persons that might come from the “Fountainhead”. He obviously hates them: “The world is left to the dogs. People are greedy and just keep getting worst. Try to put you into their hands.” (Saw the picture with the desert in that room?) We will skip for now that phone call to his father. That can only be understood in the end. The thing is that someone asks him: “What are you thinking?” He doesn’t answer. Suddenly he will get projected to the tree, filmed in “contre-plongée”, like you’ll see in some shots of baby Jack period. Then comes the wave and the: “How did I lose you? Wandered? Forgot you?”
I would say that this is nothing more and nothing less than Malick imagining his “Tree of Life”. Not for a single second you’re outside his head. If you’ve seen the film carefully enough, you’ll understand all is in that cotemporary house and those skyscrapers. We even see the big tree inside them as the elevator goes down after the “I give him to you.” sequence.
So, who is Jack and what’s this all about? Now things will start to get sombre.
You know what was in the beginning the idea of the “Tree of Life”, or the “Q” project? Nothing but the Genesis. And so the critics easily started to understand the episodes and the Grace vs. Nature speech in those terms, identifying situations similar to the ones described in the first (and not only the first) book of the Bible, etc. But they would never think they were Adam and Eve and that if there is some God in this film he’s Terrence Malick (“Where do you live? Are you watching me? I want to know who you are. I want to see what you see.”). Not even if they would “close the door quite 50 times”, as O’Brien tells Jack to do (not by chance a “door”). The true is that the entire film is the Garden of Eden and the Grace vs. Nature speech is made to you and only to you. There are two ways of seeing it and you’ll probably only get in one piece at home trough the way of Grace. In this film, you’re nothing but Jack, the diminutive of Jacob, the man who fought with God. Not just for poetics the baby comes out from his uterine house to Waco. He was already conceived. You see, until then, the film functioned as a preparation, like that story about Carlotta, the dead women possessing his beautiful wife, Gavin Elster told his old friend, Johnny O, in “Vertigo”, the most powerful and explicit reference of the “Tree of Life”. He knew he had vertigo, he knew he couldn’t go all the way to the top of the tower (the same thing as trough that “door”). He knew he would fell in love for his creation. And, more important, he knew he trusted him (“Do you trust in God?”, asks the priest during the sermon). He was perfect for him to commit his crime.
The uterus is father’s garden (remember the first shot?). The Women tells something to the baby and shows him a little book (Grace vs. Nature speech; you even have a little blond Eve), she guides the boys trough the garden and then you see two ways: the “Mouth of Hell” and the staircase (this are the two ways you see in the final, the ladder and the sombre church door, where the architect chooses to enter; that colonial church is an obvious reference to the San Jose convent of “Vertigo”, the place of the crime; it is the first thing you see when Sean Penn asks: “When did you first touched my heart?”). And then you see a baby in his house, a baby whose conception his shown as a luminous mystery (the lamppost; all began with light, Wilfred’s organ), a secret between “father” and “mother”.
Must I explain what your vertigo was in this case? Remember Jack’s fight with is almighty father? Wasn’t as lucky as the one in the Bible. Ended on the ground in a few seconds (“Hit me! Come on Jack, hit me!”). K.O. The one of the Bible was hurt on his thigh during the fight. You see, Malick is kind of a perfectionist. A Toscanini, as he tells us. His Jack (you) is fighting with him and must hurt himself in the same place. Don’t remember when it happened? The problem was you were distracted. You shouldn’t. “If you’re good, people take advantage of you”, as father warns Jack. You, like Jack, were looking to that disabled man walking to his car. You couldn’t see what was in front of you. That’s why Jack bumped into a car and hurt himself in his thigh. (The previous scene has a similar meaning: he made you drunk.) Can’t you imagine who this disabled guy that made you so serious was? Suffering is always serious, at least to serious people. Death. The “big questions”. Things like the story of a man whose brother committed suicide when he was 19 and a mother asking God why. You get serious if you think you going to hear that kind of story. And then people like Malick can “take advantage of you”. Trick you. Try to hurt you. This film is nothing but that. All you’ve seen until the baby’s birth was Galvin Elster’s speech to his old friend, Johnny O, but much, much more powerful, because who tend to think this is not “just a movie”, that it has a “real story” behind (all those long shots where the camera follows Chastain walking and the stained glass spiral are nothing but “Vertigo”).
I will leave the “why” of all this for latter, for the end. For that I will have to go back to the drowned boy’s episode, Steve’s reaction and the words the architect said when he lighted the candle (I skipped them for purpose).
Now it is the time to speak of the most important philosophical reference of the “Tree of Life”: Michel Foucault’s “Of the Other Places” (“Des espaces outres”, 1967). Because this is the film of the “other places”, the “heterotopias”: the “tree house”, the “Indian tent” (look for it in Jack’s “No!” to his mother), the parents bed, the bathtub, even the house itself when father goes on the trip and his authority his absent (etc.). All these are spaces where some kind of “normality” can be suspended or inverted (for those not familiar with Foucault, a “heterotopia” is just that). But the real “heterotopia” of this film is itself. The “Tree of Life” is Malick’s “heterotopia”, the cinema theatre the place where he can suspend normality, that belly you see the O’Brien putting his ear to listen what’s inside, the place where he can play God and make all of you his sons: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth, when the morning stars sang together... and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” – weren’t you seated at the cinema’s chair? I was. It is nothing but a riddle, like the Sacro Bosco ones.
If you know Foucault’s famous work, you’ll remember it ends with reference to the sea (as Malick’s last film, “The New World”, with the men going to the Americas to conquer it):
“… the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea and that, from port to port, …, it goes as far as the colonies in search of the most precious treasures they conceal in their gardens…
… the boat … has been … the greatest reserve of the imagination. The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.”
To put it simply, this is a film of a pirate (“D’ont let anyone tell you ther’s something you can’t do.”). If you have seen it carefully enough, you noticed it is full of maritime imaginary: O’brien is in the navy and wears its uniform, the sea seems to want to enter trought Jack’s skyscrappers and there is that wave, that faboulous wave that Steve makes “sing” in “paradise”. (Did you notice there was a boat in Steve’s t-shirt in the scene he plays at the window with Jack, before leaving the house? Did you saw R.L. burying a fish by the tree with his toys?) There were even pirates’ games (and Indian and cowboys) with the father at the kids’ room.
There where policeman too in the “Tree of Life”, both in “stricto senso” and “lato senso”. Do you saw the kind of policemen’s Malick showed you? One of them, the one conducting the blond furious prisoner, was a dwarf. In “lato senso” they are about everyone else: the people at the church and looking at the criminals, the people at those courtrooms where O’brien tries to make is way, the people you see at the funerals, in those skyscrappers, etc. They are all caricatours that could come from the “Fountainhead”. “Middle class morality”. They are “normality”, the world that lives by other’s rules.
In the so called “real life”, also is Malick. He could be one of thoes. But not in his “heterotopia”, his “other place”. There his dreams come true. There he can be an imaginary shark.
Let’s now enter this world. First, understand that Malick the “pirate” has a most strict “code of honor”. Not because he has some “moral”. No. Because it his essential to his plesure. He never lies to you during the entier film. Not a single time (“Was I false to you?”). Think in the scene where O’brien hurts R.L (“Be quite... Please.”). What says Jack just before that happens, touching the gramophone record? “Lies…” That’s it. All about you were going to hear next was a lie. The idea came obviously from Orson Welles’ “F for Fake”. This film is evoked most subtly during the “Tree of Life” (“The world lives by trickery”; “Is there a fraud in the scheme of the universe?”: never trust a priest that speaks like a poker gambler; Welles says on his film: “this is a film about trickery, fraud, about lies. Tell it by the fireside or in a marketplace or in a movie, almost any story is almost certainly some kind of lie”). At the very beginning of the documentary Welles tells his spectators that all they’ll hear the next hour is absolutely true. And it is. Incredible but true. Just as the chronometer touched the first second after that hour, Welles started to lie compulsively. Because we trusted him, we weren’t looking to our watch. Didn’t even think about it. That’s the point: “At the very beginning I did make you a promise, remember? I did promise, that for one hour, I'd tell you only the truth. That hour, ladies and gentlemen, is over. For the past 17 minutes I've been lying my head off.” The thing was that in the “Tree of Life” the only person who was really responsible for it promised you nothing but this: keep in the way of Grace and you’ll get in one piece to the end, that’s all the nuns promised you. When the architect lights his candle, you start to see images of the boys. The first two are very puzzling: Jack trows a ball to someone; in the second shot, very fast, he’s eating that same ball back with a bat. A way of telling this is a “mirrored room”, you cannot be sure of nothing you see. Malick never “illustrated” words with images, much less in the “Tree of Life”. You believed in what you wanted to believe.
As you enter Wako, like a good father, Malick must prepare you for the core of his game of humiliation and profanation, a game that only starts really in that first family dinner (Come home, boys! Come home!). He has to baptize you (to protect you from “sin”, “world” and the “devil”, from the “way of Nature”), educate you, telling you the name of things (the crocodile in the arch is one of Malick’s jokes, it is an animal associated with the power of God in the Book of Job); introduce you to R.L., is “imaginary brother” and son (by the way, R.L.’s room is inspired in Polanski’s “Rosemary’s Baby”, just check; got the “There is where God lives?” joke); fell in love for mother, what is essential: “Where you afraid? Come here...”; call a doctor to see you, etc. Make yourself at home in his little “heterotopia”, in that house that remembers so much the one of “Badlands” (the house is on the kitchen table when O’brien goes for his trip: “Where’s dad?”).
During this time you where always the “sucker”, that fish in grandmothers hand, that boy running for soap bubbles and dreaming about God in the public swimming pool or in the bathtub; looking for his mother in the mirror; smiling with joy in her hands (“He was in Gods hands all the time. Wasn’t he?”); dumb as an elephant (the baby with the elephants in his hands: “You found me!”); etc., etc.
Most important, he made a rule for you, an imaginary line that separates that house from the neighbors. Outside you will find Nature (the family riots; the women house, the perverse games of the boys, etc.). You’re warned. Not for a chance you see the boy hurting himself in the face in that scene.
There are several animals in these first Waco times. You are almost all of them: the dinosaur whose bone Jack found, the frog you see climbing a stem, the grasshopper, Peter Rabbit.
The dinosaur: this film is summarized in the dinosaur episode. What do we see? Very simple. After the sharks you see the formation of two fetuses (not one, attention): the “bad” dinosaur and the “good” one. You see the eye of the “good” one and then “Vertigo’s” sequoias (the heart of Joohny O’s alucination). The dinosaur starts to explore. You see the fall, but it is almost dry. The “dinosaur” appears at the river, very badly hurt, or so it seems. Comes the “bad” one. Puts his foot on his (your) face. Looks at him with interest. He goes on, letting you think you saw some eternal truth, some advent of Grace. But not for chance that sequence ends in Saturn, the planet of with the worst connotations (naturally cold and dry) and with the meteorite that will kill everything on earth, including that dinosaur.
The frog: in the boys games in the backward they put a frog in the skyrocket: “We found a frog! Let’s put him in a skyrocket! Did he go to the moon? ... It was an experience.” What was the creation sequence more than that ride to the moon?
Peter Rabbit: certainly remember mother telling you the very well know story. “You may go into the fields or down the lane, but don't go into Mr. McGregor's garden: your Father had an accident there”. Did you notice that Jack reconciles with is father exacly in Mr. McGregor's garden? (Allways suspect of too much ironic situations.) Of course mother didn’t tell you the next line: “he was put in a pie by Mrs. McGregor” (better not to know what they’re eating at those famally meals).
I finish with the grasshopper. I have already told you a thousand times you are Jack in that very private “heterotopia”. What’s the first thing Steve tells in the movie? Asks his dog if he wants to eat a grasshopper. And then he puts it under Jack’s sweeter (you had already seen Jack associated with such an animal in the Halloween sequence). You can come for diner now. Father is waiting you.
Is it necessary to enumerate all the savage ironies that will follow? Of course Jack is the more direct victim of them. Of those thousand times he puts his hands on him, hurts him, tells him what to eat, makes him work, reach his lighter, kiss him, tells him that he “must take it by the root”. He knows he will not choose the way of Nature when he leaves the house so he can try to take his place. You have accepted being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepted all insults and injuries you can imagine without even notice (literally; the Grace vs. Nature speech). You were “full of Grace”.
The scenes of the sinister attic where the only ones where Jack/you were seeing something of what was really going on around there. That’s the irony. The scene of the nightmare, where Malick appears as the clown. You read: “Creation”, “Amazing attractions”. The sunflower in the clown’s jacket, the supposed image of grace, throws water at your face. He makes a full out of you. Then you see the priest telling you stories. Making you spin eternally on yourself.
He had to profane everything. That’s the “Glory” O’Brien talks about in the end. He’s not talking about “Trees, birds” (the way he pronounces these words is actually ridiculous; living in “shame” was having interested himself in such things). What do you see? Not trees and birdies: Steve and his mother, more sensual than ever. He and his creation. This film is about to spit on everything and everyone. Not just religion, science (the creation sequence is a complete parody, life seems to be created in some devil’s land; mother cell is like a shark; it’s all summarized in the act of destroying the egg in the boys games) and intelligence (of everyone, including the one’s that found it naive, etc.). Not just Good, Beauty, Art and feelings like the loss of son by a mother or something similar. That would be too partial. Those tree sinister three chimneys at O’Brien’s mysterious factory (where we see him giving orders and nothing else), that too much defensive fence around his cabbages, that gate of his uterine garden: doesn’t that remember you of something? Why do you think O’Brien uses that kind of haircut? And that lunch in the black neighbourhood, what’s that? And the scene in the restaurant, where O’Brien plays with the waitresses? It must include the producers, the consultants, the actors, the critics, the spectators. The believers, the non-believers. Childs, adults. Everyone. Malick needed to do something unforgivable or it wouldn’t fit his purposes. And they are the sensation of power – to see and not to be seen, the “eye of God” – and the “acceleration”, the adrenaline (“Why does our father hurt us?”). Because he obviously as pleasure in leaving the clues everywhere.
O’Brien is so much our image of Malick, citizen and artist. Persistent. Perfectionist. Sublime (no matter what he says, O’Brien plays every piece of music fabulously).Violent (by the way, his fight with mother is inspired in the “Fountainhead”). Controller and making all the rules in his house (his films). Religious (“tithed every Sunday...”). An artist trying to sell his mysterious creations, failing and being cheated by others but not giving up. Like happened whit the “Tree of Life” for 30 years: “You make yourself what you are. You have control of your own destiny. Can't say ‘I can’t’. Say ‘I am having troubles’. ‘Not done yet’. Can't say ‘I can't’.” Malick’s secrecy is also O’Brien’s. When he arrives from his trip around the world, he carefully opens the case. He shows a certain number of objects to his sons, but when Jack tries to see what’s inside his Moleskine, he tells him immediately: “Put that down son”. There is a testimony of his late wife about this:
“Michele Morette, his late ex-wife of 13 years, revealed that while they were together she wasn’t allowed into his office, and that he would rather buy her a copy of a book than lend her his own. He also liked to leave his books and cassettes face-down, so people couldn’t see what he was reading or listening to.”
Not difficult to imagine why he was like that.
Consider the scene in the car coming from church. The father talks to their sons of some “Jack” that started as a barber and now is in the real estate business: this film is nothing but “heterotopic real estate” (after all, why do you think the Sean Penn character is an architect?). He “ows half of the city”, he says: Malick rented several blocks to shot his film. He built something big: the “Tree of Life”. “Now he thinks he is the fourth person of the Holy Trinity”… They “never talk about their money”, etc.
There are more subtle jokes. Like putting O’Brien at the organ in the church before Jack’s wondered eyes: Malick plays the Wilfred’s “colour” or “light organ” in the movie. The entire sermon is a big joke. You see a kitsch stained glass with an “Ecce Homo”. You see O’Brien lighting a candle for his creation (“never know when sorrow might visit his house...”, we read “Glory to God Almighty” in the stained glass).
But the core of the thing is not this yet. It is putting you Carlotta’s necklace (“Vertigo”: the scene where James Stewart sees the dead women’s necklace in his lover and understands he was used, that he “was in “God’s” hands all the time”) in front of your eyes. The moment you noticed it, it would be the indubitable prove that something was terribly wrong around there. Because if there is a Carlotta, there must be a killer and a sucker. That was the night O’Brien was at the piano, the only night he was. Mother was about giving Jack a goodnight kiss. He touched her necklace, remembering himself of the one he saw on the drawer of that house. He says: “Father (pause). Why was he born?” In the “way of Grace”, we all tend to think father is talking to his mother. Malick’s private jock is that he isn’t. Mother doesn’t open her mouth. Jack is asking father why R.L., or the “Tree of Life” idea, was born. And that’s about what the architect was talking in the elevator: “I think about him every day. I am sorry. Shouldn’t said what I said”. The scene ends with mother advancing to her husband with frightened eyes and we never see the pianist’s face. That’s the adrenaline that makes Malick fell alive. Next scene O’Brien is under his car and Jack thinks about to kill him. He’s that close. O’Brien points to him, like saying: “I am watching you”. That is the sensation he searches: “The only way to be happy is to love. Unless you love your live will flash by.” You just weren’t imagining the kind of “love” mother was talking about.
The “I am sorry. You’re my brother” scene is paralleled with two others. The priest blessing (“...until they enter your everlasting kingdom) and the big dinosaur spearing the little one (“You can hit me if you want”). You see a dead animal’s head skeleton over R.L.’s. It wasn’t there before. Explanation not necessary, I believe.
And when Jack gets reconcieled with his father? You hear some abstract “they” is closing the plant: the film/game must end (you didn’t even noticed that in the 70’s or so they live in a much bigger house with a pool, more sophisticated ?). He must leave his “heterotopia”. Speaks to his son about how tought he has with him and how he doens’t get proud of it. He even makes Jack say “I am as bad as you are” (this has a second meaning: you must be somehow “bad” to understand the perversion of the game going on). “You (my “suckers”) are all I have and all I want to have”. It all ends with a phony handshake.
And then he must leave and all ends in the candle lightening that world that was “left to the dogs”. (Not for nothing R.L. and Steve are the most sad; The shot whit mother looking back to the house trough the back window of the car has a perfect cinemascope format.) But we don’t see the architect in contact with anyone. We just see the canion and the him going trough the “door”. The world is destroyed. Then we review the film. The girl opening the door. The architect folowing Jack. But Jack stays at the vision of the “desapeared house”. He doesn’t enter “paradise”. He stays forever in that desert.
The next can only be understtod in the light of the “Tell us a storie from before we can remenber” R.L. asked mother: “I went on a plane once. It was a graduation present.” This is nothing but self-referentiality: that “graduation present” was “Badlands”, Malick’s first movie, a roadmovie about two psicopats wandering in plaines under the sunset light. It is evoked subtely (by the lonely plaines, the ambience), but undoubtefully. In that film Sissy Spacek ends burned lying on a iron bed inside a house. You see, that was the girl at the other side of the “door”, nothing but her or what she meant to Malick. When you look carefully to the way he filmed the schoolgirl (specially the last shot in the way home), you understand he tries to get her nose the most similar to Spacek’s one. Like in “Badlands”, that girl is the way to fire and destruction. But she will ressurrect. Let’s see how the architect enters “paradise”.
We see the convent inspired in “Vertigo”. Two dead corpses (that stays for latter). The ladder. The church door (“Vertigo’s” crime place). It is the equivalent to the “Mouth of Hell”. Jack enters in the dark: “ogni pensiero vola” (“all thoughts flie”, it was writen in Bomarzo) A dead women ressurrects. A dead bride ressurrects from an iron bed. We had seen her searching light in the baby’s born sequence. This is nothing but the ressurrection of the “Badlands” spirit. Just that.
Now the architect enters “paradise”. He sees R.L. Knees. A women comes from his back and he kisses her feet. This seems to be an association with his wife, that was looking to him when he lighted the candle. She plays some kind of an “angel”. She consoles the “burned boy” (that will have to stay for the explanation of Steve too). And then the architect gets his imaginary famaly all together forever in a kind of “utopia”. Steve will be finally in peace, happy, make the sea “sing”. We see mother and R.L., the candle of hope in the girls hand and the fall of love/lust/life, etc.
The mother and the architect have just one more thing to do: “to give us their son/sun”. But that cannot be made in that place: that’s Malick’s “paradise”, it cannot be profaned. The mask falls dow (another ironie). So mother must go to that white desert, say goodbye to R.L. and offering him to us like some priest performing mass whit the assistence of the girl and the “angel” (the shot of R.L.’s departure is inspired in Ford, “The Searchers”; Debie is home, the cowboy can “fly away”).
All ends up in those suposedly graceful sunflowers. As we saw, they weren’t, they thrown water at your face, spit on you, like in young Jack’s clown nightmare. The cows were the graceful. That’s the joke. Cows don’t know they’re cows. As long there is grass, they are happy. They don’t now they will someone’s meal. (By the way, the idea of the girl getting to sleep and waking as a woman in a swing is taken from the beginning of Sternberg’s “The Scarlett Empress”.)
When the architect gets finally out of the skyscrapers he is for the first time in black tie in the “real world”. He finally “killed himself”, was re-borne and can now admire his creation. Can finally say like Jacob: “I have seen God face to face and lived.”
In the last Lumia apparition all ends with an anthropomorphic suggestion. And the Desplat music runs two times at the end. The second time in a completely phony way, like coming out of a bad music-box.
We can go back to that first sequence to understand how Malick’s reversible-jacket works. Now we know what was on the telegram that “Mary full of Grace” received (that’s nothing but an Annunciation, filmed from “grace” to “gravity”). Mrs. O’Brien dresses in a quite different way and her face is never seductive. She’s Malick’s “mother” no more. The father is at some military airport. He hears that he was discovered. There are two boys entering an airplane. They probably represent Malick’s next movies (just imagine what must be in that head).
And then it’s the grieving for what we have lost. Father never tells a word. Mother looks painfully at him. Imagines her dead son playing for her (all the music you took in this movie!) in that empty room where is a photo camera, the brushes (whit which he painted the “morning stars” for us; some of those “creation sequence” images are just like paintings, Turner aquarelles or something) and the painting of the “disappeared house” (it disappeared to you now as well). The priest telling her “He’s in God’s hands now.” The answer taken from Lewis’ “A Grief observed”. “My son! My hope! My God!” The shadows. “What did you gain?” Those lost women consoling each other. Then the father: “We are all right. Go on. Go on now.” Got it?
And then the Grandmother’s speech, Job’s consolation: “Life goes on. People pass along. Nothing stays the same.” “You still have your memories of him.”“You still have the other two”: this refers simply to Malick’s previous two pictures, “The Thin Red Line” and “The New World”. They were the corpses in the convent. The “spiritual, lyrical, pantheist, etc.” movies he done. That was the subject of the architect’s colleague conversation, that one that looked just like you would imagine adult Steve, the only person you see him to communicate relatively well in that office: “She wants us to get together again. The chapter is closed. Stories have been told” “What you gonna do?” “Experiment.” The experience was the “Tree of Life”, the ride to the moon he gave his beloved frogs.
Grandmother continues: “The Lord gives and takes away. That’s the way he is. He sends flies to wounds he should heal” (“wounds”: “Badlands”). The camera turns to the tree: the “Tree of Life” turns into the “Tree of Death”.
And there is that most incredible father’s speech where he’s crying for you. “I never had the chance to tell him how sorry I was”. “One night he hurt himself in the face for no reason. I was sitting at the piano and I criticized the way he turned the pages. I made him fell shame... My shame... Poor boy... Poor boy...” Remember that night? It was the night he putted Carlotta’s necklace just in front of your eyes, the most evident proof of his crime. If he hadn’t done so, you might never have abandoned the “way of Grace”. But that had to be done: he wanted to be sure you would fell “shame”, be naked in his eyes, and be expelled from paradise. He wants specially to play that part of God’s role. I will skip the creation questions because it gets very obvious: “Why?”, “What are we to you?”, “Did you knew?”, and so on. It all ends with the meteorite hitting the earth: death.
I promised to end with Steve. What were the architect’s words?
I see the child that I was.
I see my brother.
True.
Kind.
He died when he was 19.
Something as simple as this: the two “he’s” of the last sentence refer not to the same person. The child that Malick was died when his brother had 19 – and committed suicide. Just that. Nothing of true and kind remained. Some people fell this way. It is not so uncommon. Stalin confessed a similar thing in his diary.
From that moment Steve was “young Ivan”. If you watch carefully the “Tree of Life”, Tarkovski’s “Ivan’s Childhood” is precisely alluded a moment before the question: “Will you die too, mother?” I am speaking of the ruined house with the well, Ivan’s well. (It will appear one more time, when Jack quotes Saint Paul: “What I want to do I can’t do. I do what I hate.” And you see the boys playing in the empty house.) Ivan’s story is very simple. His parents were killed during the war and he wants to be a soldier and fight the Germans. Lives in a semi-real world of dreams. The soldiers don’t take very seriously his wishes. Neither does the spectator. But in the end Tarkovki says you in one shot he was a killer. Nothing remained of the child. That’s what Malick is saying.
He had his dreams, but he is a killer and with this film he embraced the “way of Nature”. The other one was closed for him. Steve’s Snow-White is the bride waiting for him in the iron bed, in the other side of that door. His brother’s death was all that kept him from reach her. That separated him from those prisoners (“It can happen to anyone? Nobody talks about it.”).
So we see the burned house and the burned boy after the drowning episode (this is more “Badlands”). He’s Malick too. He was burned for good. The boy appears at the end conducting Jack to father. And in “paradise”.
It may seem preposterous, but the shots that show us the architect hearing R.L.’s call (“Find me”) in that bridge are inspired in “Death in Venice”: Aschenbach (an artist that choose Nature, like Malick; you’ll find Mahler in the soundtrack) seeing Tadzio in the sea. That is the film where it’s said: “Truth? Human dignity? What use are they? Evil is a necessity, it is the food of genius.”
