Terrence Malick The Tree of Life

High-tech Hollywood meets high art: Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life is historically significant for being the first film to combine the most recent high-budget special effects with formal innovation and the most serious artistic ambition. In terms of formal innovation, it is not the high-quality special effects in themselves that are most interesting (the fusion of astronomical imagery with abstract representations of the divine is almost a sci-fi staple) but the fact that they form part of a disjunctive structure that departs from Hollywood's narrative conventions. Not that the film eschews narrative entirely - indeed I would suggest that it's most important formal innovation is precisely the way it combines standard narrative techniques (enabling us to enter the protagonist's Texas childhood with genuine emotion) with genuinely poetic, 'avant-garde' juxtapositions.

One juxtaposition in particular dominates the film: images of deep space and deep geological time side by side with a narrative of human loss. The epigram from Job with which the film begins (together with certain whispered voiceovers, and the sermon that occurs within the narrative) clearly suggests that we interpret this juxtaposition as an attempt to evoke the strangeness and at times cruel incomprehensibility of God through the strangeness and incomprehensibility of His creation. Understood in this way, the attempt may be judged successful; on the other hand, a more radical film might have refrained from overdetermining this interpretation and instead allowed the images and narrative to speak for themselves, thereby secularizing the strong Christian metaphysics.

However, the film's biggest failure is its lack of irony. It is not so much that great works of art must be ironic (though many are), but that a film so self-consciously sincere in pressing high-tech Hollywood techniques into the service of high art ought to have been more conscious of the meaning of such a strategy. Like the gleaming monuments to corporate America in which the protagonist moves (and of which he, and Malick himself, is clearly critical), The Tree of Life cannot help but appear as a slick, high-definition monument to Hollywood's big-budget culture industry (which it implicitly affirms by its mode of production, its use of special effects and its star Hollywood actors). Had this theme been raised and explored within the film, it might have been a great work of art (following on from my previous suggestion about secularizing the Christian metaphysics, one might imagine a similar film in which Hollywood special effects were themselves presented as a successor to religious art in a non-religious age). As it is, however, the film appears ignorant of its own preconditions and thus to some extent both pretentious and naive.

Benjamin, Baudelaire and a Dilemma of Contemporary Aesthetics.

Contemporary artistic practice can seem to face the dilemma of a choice between an antiquated aesthetic of meditative contemplation (postmodernism as neo-romanticism) and a fruitless skeptical fragmentation (postmodernism as intensification of modernism). In Walter Benjamin's terms, a purely contemplative aesthetic is antiquated because it aims at an experience of aura that no longer has a place in post-industrial capitalism, while a skeptical aesthetic is fruitless because it merely reflects this loss of aura.

One way to escape this dilemma is suggested by Benjamin's essay on Baudelaire. For while, for Benjamin, "the disintegration of the aura makes itself felt in [Baudelaire's] lyric poetry", it does so in such a way that the lived experience (Erlebnis) of this loss, is "given the weight" of auratic experience (Erfahrung). Unlike, say, Eliot's 'the Wasteland', in which the loss of aura is experienced only in the mode of skeptical fragmentation, Baudelaire's experience of loss (both as nostalgia - 'ideal' - and pessimistic clarity - 'spleen') attains metrical, thematic and thereby contemplative coherence.