Tree of Magic: Religion and Conspiracy in Popular and Art Cinema
In the following article, I call out a current and historic trend regarding the universal, the primitive, and the creator in film art. The trend has reversed the usual trajectory: Rather than innovations in art film trickling down to the popular cinema, a two-decade fascination with afterlife, vampirism, dissociation and quantum physics in popular media has been taken up by master such as Terrence Malick.
But are they doing it any service, or are they sapping its sense of humor and offering dangerous dogmatism? If the inversion of realities in 60s and 70s films reflected a political climate of paranoia and hopelessness, what zeitgeist is manifest in this present era of unreality?
God Said, “Meh.” – Terrence Malick’s Religious Panacea
It seemed that at some point we were going to gain our footing. As the images flowed out from the screen, as we shuttled through decades, we looked for some indication of what was really happening, and it never came. Or else it came too late, like a punchline. Famously, The Tree of Life has prompted art house cinemas to post “no refund” caveats: Your money will not be refunded if you fail to “understand” the work.
Oh, I grasp it, as much as someone can grasp it. I just don’t appreciate it. Not any more than I appreciate Insane Clown Posse’s “Miracles”. An ode to ignorance is identifiable at fifty paces.
A synopsis: A boy is born, then his brother. He rises and nearly slays his infant brother. Abel later dies.(1) The man and the mother beg for answers from a silent god. Groping the darkened theater for some meaning amid the generalities, I wondered, “Is this how we are experiencing the world?” Then I kicked myself. The unity of “we” and of “the world.” I remembered “We are the World”, and I realized I had succumbed to the author’s universalizing trick: the semi-profundity of the vague. As long there is a Global North, a developed and developing world, or whatever euphemism we want to apply to the fact that there are essentially still colonizers and colonies, the concept of The Tree of Life that applies to all men is as offensive as it was when Roland Barthes wrote about it the “The Great Family of Man.”
Upon leaving this highly acclaimed film, I wondered, how does Terrence Malick’s untethered religious gesture resonate with anyone at all?(2) What does it mean to them?
Striking around for meaning, I would like to use its pure visuality to assert my own critical license: to project upon its profound unmeaning my own metonymies and little rhymes. In other words, I’m gonna use this disappointing film to talk about a lot of other films, most of which I think are better.
The acclaim that this film is receiving reflects a greater lack of seriousness about the capabilities of cinema. To be sure, The Tree of Life is full of visual beauty. An ever-present God-light fills its suburban vistas with nostalgic grace and spikes them with sunbeams like a spiritualist art print. Instead of being printed on the mat-board along the bottom of the frame, homilies are whispered by off-screen characters. We follow generations of men, meet a fantasy stern father: What grown man does not dream of being disciplined by a stern Brad Pitt in his childhood?
Then we visit the beginning of the universe. We see the sun’s roiling surface. I’m reminded of the lurching solar flares at the beginning of A Texas Chain Saw Massacre. That film’s unforgiving sun fills us with dread. The light cast by that particular orb is an unwelcome overexposure of the conditions of post-industrial capitalism, manifest in the robbing of graves that spurs the film’s deadly investigations.
Conversely, Malick’s sunlight provides not uncomfortable lucidity, but halos and blindness. It is difficult to grasp what is going on, but we recognize anodyne homilies about family, nature, death, and finally heaven: the promise of reunited spirits.
At some point in the story, the protagonist’s family loses its home. The home they move into is, inexplicably, more beautiful. It rests on a suburban street of dreams. Where are they? Another uninvited comparison: Studies reveal that North American homeowners are, contrary to popular belief, fatter and less happy than their renter counterparts. This cuts across time and generation, through the recent bubble, to the core of some kind of truth (or untruth) about property, stewardship, and the untethered soul. Could it be that in the Western world, (as we now euphemize our good fortune), as capitalism’s hegemony (3) is more assured than ever, most people are opting out? We long for a landlord on the planet; in turn, each monadic soul clings more anxiously to the afterlife or to a secret order.
Premises of recent serial juggernauts: a scullery boy is secretly a wizard, a teenager has everlasting life (countless vampire series), nerdy teenagers have magical powers and with them, great responsibilities. In the HBO series Lost, the entire cast is in purgatory, working out their passage to the afterlife. Yes, that afterlife.
Nothing Like a God to make a Man Feel (In-)Significant
Below, spoilers abound. This critic refuses to keep the secrets of this abortive narrative trend that repeatedly inverts content. My intention is to draw links between the dangerous, free-floating apotheosis of Malick and larger trends away from realism. What in the individual entertainment instance is surely an innocuous instance of trickery begins, as it overpopulates the cinematic landscape, to threaten the survival of other species. It does not deserve my protection.
For at least the past two decades, there has been a trend that thus inverts content and aborts causality. I’ll start with Jacob’s Ladder (1990), a film written by Bruce Joel Rubin, who also wrote Ghost, released in the same year. The story is a visualization of a soldier’s attempt to reach heaven by understanding good and evil after massacring his own platoon in a failed military acid test. The reveal of Jacob’s actual circumstance is left to the film’s end. Jacob’s Ladder was a rough antidote to Rubin’s more reassuring spiritualism in Ghost. Both rephrased the themes in his 80s new wave/new age hybrid, Brainstorm (1983), which is the most like The Tree of Life, but which bears more critically on our present historic moment. In his recent work, Rubin continues to play with afterlife and the visual possibilities of escaping the reality that we know.
In Malick’s film, as in each of these, the natural world is left behind, and we drift in a miasma of visions and dreams in which nothing is what it seems. But it seems to me that the 90s was the last time that such a trip through the looking glass produced more than narcissistic gazing. Today, each time I go to a suspense, science fiction or arthouse film, there is a niggling question at the back of my mind: Is this another of those tiresome mysteries that will use the recursion to the supernatural, the mystical, or the idiosyncrasy of unreliable brain architecture to explain away its inconsistencies?
Religious Subject, Paranoid Subject
“Deus ex machina,” exclaims Jake Gyllenhaal at the end of Donnie Darko (2001), just before a chariot swoops in and provides the final plot twist. Darko stands apart from the pack in that Donnie’s grandiose phantasm may be the ramblings of a paranoid’s psychosis, or it may be the sort of minor magic that we wish were possible. In this way, it resembles the finest works of Polanski (more on those to come).
Inasmuch as they make causality irrelevant, gods undermine the narrative. And yet … as we invent them, gods and visions make us especially significant. Even as the gods obviate our narrative attention (“let go and let god”), they reassert our preconceived notions and morals in place of the particular events and facts that might be positioned to challenge them. The paranoid suffers from a delusion about his own life’s significance. What makes Donnie Darko so compelling is that an adolescence entrance into adulthood is complicated by a Hobson’s choice between incomplete scientific and pseudoscientific worldviews (quantum physics, cognitive psychology), and the pollyannaish religiosity of the religious right. This prompts the titular character’s dissociative break, creating a palindrome that can be read in sequence or in reverse. (4)
If there is one common intervention that marks each radical scientist’s challenge to religious philosophy, from Galileo to Darwin and to Sagan and Dawkins, it is this simple statement: Whatever this universe is, it is not about us. Scientists and artists who topple man from his privileged perch do so at a risk to narrative. Man is the interpreter, the egotist par excellence. So how is it that this most recent decades’ narrative ruptures fail to produce the radical aperture of their antecedents?
The list of such films is long. M. Night Shyamalan’s Sixth Sense (1999) is the film that most distinctly reintroduced the afterlife twist to the mainstream (the boy is not dead, but his psychiatrist is). Identity (2003) with John Cusack gave away its premise in the title: the hunter doesn’t only get captured by the game. He is the game.(5) Need more evidence that this is a trend? Fight Club (1999), Inception (2010), and Memento (2000), seem almost to delineate a new genre: the “Ain’t it Cool” reality loop picture whose viewers can hardly be coaxed to the cinema without the promise of an existential reversal that snaps like a mousetrap. The B-Movie Brain Dead (1990) (Charles Beaumont and Adam Simon) lampooned them all before they were released.
Contrast to these Polanski’s long history of cinematic paranoia. In Repulsion (1965), insanity is a self-lacerating resistance to capital, and while Catherine Deneuve’s Carole slowly disintegrates behind her mask, the demands of capitalism become more and more merciless upon her body.(6) Rosemary’s Baby (1968) uses faithlessness as a metaphor for post-hippie malaise. A neurotic’s induction into parenthood and the petit bourgeoisie becomes a psychological vulnerability. Satanism, or Rosemary’s ridiculous imagination of such, is metaphor for a loss of control. On some level, Rosemary is quite literally inseminated by the devil, but perhaps more chilling is the way she releases control of her body and her life as a matter of course. Chinatown (1974), with its quite literal conspiracy, exposed a hidden matrix of capital that floated above the law and even above ancient law. Power’s contempt for law inverts the Oedipal myth. Who can forget its final scene, which emblematizes wealth’s ultimacy?
In his most successful experiment in altered states, The Tenant (1976), Polanski explores the descent into madness as a slow crescendo of everyday nuisances and attacks.
But what happens in The Tree of Life that could possibly anchor its flights of religious fancy? It is not clear. We see the dominant father that we both crave and loathe but Pitt’s character registers only as cliche. This spectacle is blinding.
And so the sad arc of Malick’s career becomes apparent: from neo-savagery as an escape from adult responsibility (Badlands, 1973), to glorified barbarism as an escape from semiotics (The New World, 2005), and now stupefying spectacle as a retreat from meaning. To regard this film as any more significant than any of the summer’s CGI extravaganzas is to confuse status with content.
By being about everything, by turning introspectively outward, by abandoning the objectivity of the visual, these films become about nothing at all. There is more meaningful inquiry in almost any of the Summer’s CGI blockbusters than there is in Malick’s assemblage of free floating realisms, which should be dedicated, “To God,” whatever that means. As spiritual leader, Malick offers nothing but mirror gazing. He uses his powers of spectacle and his considerable artistic capital to dispense a religious panacea of a particularly dulling kind. If you didn’t understand it, you weren’t meant to, and confusing you is a devil’s game.
Parting Shots: Two Views from the New Museum
On a recent visit to New York City, I struck out looking for new trends in large-scale video installation work. The Cory Arcangel work at the Whitney left me nonplussed and slightly numbed, but the New Museum’s video work had a distinct resonance to this new upward-looking trend.
On the basement level cinema, French-Algerian filmmaker Neil Beloufa’s Kempinski (2008) played on a continuous loop. In the top floor gallery, an installation by Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul entitled Primitive plays loudly on half a dozen surfaces. Both Beloufa’s 20-minute short and Weerasethakul’s more elliptical work merge storytelling, ideas of the primitive man, and mythologies of the alien.
In the case of Primitive, a spaceship links the dispossessed inhabitants of a village’s lost generation to their childhood and masculinity. In Kempinski, a near-primitive farmer whose best friend is a cow, contrasts his isolation to his belief that he communicates with aliens.
These works, addressing serious matters of representation and history through the phantasmagoric juxtapositions of incongruous mythologies, suggest a way out of our current predicament. I recall the 1980s, when cold war anxieties led us to see reflections of aliens in the Nazca Lines and alien builders behind the man made wonders of the world. The literalism seems to be a kind of destiny for a man who can’t grant his fellow man the possibility of imagination. What could be explained away by a camera obscura, or the most rudimentary understanding of physics combined with a rather prescient sense of looking beyond the self is instead explained through the most improbable means, until ancient man flies in a spaceship into the sun.
1. In an unnamed war? The telegram comes from a civilian, one more unreadable element.
2. Metacritic currently places the movie’s approval at 85%. Among elite critics, the number is even higher.
3. Are we taking about post-colonial capitalism now, still thriving on the resources of the non-West? Or the zombie capitalism kept alive by jolts from ever more byzantine “financial instruments?”
4. A disappointing director’s cut closed some of these possibilities and forced a single reading upon the captive audience by reading itself in reverse before the final credits, suggesting an outside to the dialectical subjectivity of the first iteration.
5. Is this the mock thriller that Donald Kaufmann is writing in the superior Adaptation (2002)?
6. Updates to this story of autophagic resistance to capital such a Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl (A ma soeur, 2001) and Marina de Van’s In My Skin (2002) maintain their relevance and their ability to horrify precisely by refusing to retreat from the rhythms of everyday bourgeois life.
Image List:
1-2. The Tree of Life. (2011).
3. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. (1974).
4. Repulsion. (1965).
5. The Tenant. (1976).
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