William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, famously, began as an image of a particular moment:

It began with a mental picture. I didn’t realize at the time it was symbolical. The picture was of the muddy seat of a little girl’s drawers in a pear tree, where she could see through a window where her grandmother’s funeral was taking place and report what was happening to her brothers on the ground below. By the time I explained who they were and what they were doing and how her pants got muddy, I realized it would be impossible to get all of it into a short story and that it would have to be a book. And then I realized the symbolism of the soiled pants, and that image was replaced by the one of the fatherless and motherless girl climbing down the drainpipe to escape from the only home she had, where she had never been offered love or affection or understanding.*

From that image Faulkner built an astonishing novel, one of the great achievements of 20^th century American literature. I was reminded of this story while watching Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. Sitting through the film, I couldn’t help but continually think that the it began as a series of beautiful and inspiring mental images in the director’s mind. Unfortunately, unlike Faulkner’s mental pictures, Malick’s ultimately, do not cohere into anything beyond the vivid beauty they maintain as images.

The loose plot of The Tree of Life intertwines the lives of a family in Waco Texas in the 1950’s with images of the creation of the universe and the earth’s ultimate dissolution. This plot allows for some truly stunning visual, amongst them some lovely dinosaurs, and summery scenes diffused with the kind of Bradburyesque light found in Dandelion Wine. There is a darker side to these images too, and the most successful point of the film is Brad Pitt’s performance as a domineering father who is physically and emotionally abusive.

This is all strangely anchored, not very successfully, by the statement at the beginning of the film that “The nuns taught us there were two ways through life – the way of nature and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you’ll follow. Grace doesn’t try to please itself. Accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepts insults and injuries. Nature only wants to please itself. Get others to please it too. Likes to lord it over them. To have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it. And love is smiling through all things. The nuns taught us that no one who loves the way of grace ever comes to a bad end.” This I suppose, is intended to serve as a kind of hermeneutic, or interpretive framework, for the rest of what follows. The full scene where this guiding hermeneutic is established is here:

From this perspective Brad Pitt’s character signifies nature, while Jessica Chastain’s doting mother signifies grace. While there is a lot to be said about the opposition the film sets up between these two pseudo-philosophical positions (particularly in regards to this blog’s obsession with interest in Nature and Culture) what strikes me as more interesting (from a film-goers perspective) is the way in which this kind of hermeneutic really sidetracks the most compelling portions of the film, the abusive relationship between Mr. O’Brien (Pitt) and his children Jack, Steve, and R.L.

You see, if I were to characterize The Tree of Life without taking into account the preamble, I would have described it as an astonishing portrait of child-abuse. There are the very intentional sequences that slowly build to an understanding that O’Brien’s manhandling of his three sons is more than fatherly horseplay, but then there are also more ambiguous elements. The few intercut scenes of an isolated attic room, and the animal cruelty displayed by Jack are just a few examples. To me these speak of an underlying sexual abuse as well as physical and emotional abuse, something just at the margins of the film.

Jack’s lashing out seems clearly to be a response to the abuse (sexual or not) he receives at the hands of his father, however Malick’s hermeneutic urges us to read this differently. His model suggests a concrete choice, a choice to follow the path of nature, rather than the path of grace. Jack is not responding to his father’s abuse, he is seeing him as a model, consciously choosing one of two (and only two) paths available to him. In this reading the manifestations of a traumatized psychology evident in numerous moments of Jack’s adolescence are reduced to a choice of a philosophical paradigm.

It is really this kind of dynamic, heavy-handedly placed at the beginning of the film and used as a means of creating coherence between a number of disconnected scenes, that robs The Tree of Life of much of its power. The pseudo-philosophical dilemma is so flat that it is hard to engage with, though it has led me to think about the idea of Christian grace as a cultural construct in opposition or tension with Nature in the Nature/Culture dynamic I’ve been employing.** Ultimately The Tree of Life is a failure, a beautiful, interesting failure, but still a failure. Still, the dinosaurs were great.

*This is from a 1956 interview by Jean Stein in the Paris Review. It can be found here in its entirety.

**I expect I’ll work up a post soon examining precisely what I mean when I use the terms Nature and Culture and why I find them valuable.