{"id":10426,"date":"2012-06-05T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-06-05T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/thenewatlantis.com\/publications\/points-of-light"},"modified":"2020-09-26T14:05:22","modified_gmt":"2020-09-26T18:05:22","slug":"points-of-light","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/publications\/points-of-light","title":{"rendered":"Points of Light"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Rumors of our civilization\u2019s collapse have been somewhat exaggerated. When the National Society of Film Critics announced its awards for the year 2011<\/a>, the top two films \u2014 Lars von Trier\u2019s Melancholia<\/a><\/i>, in first place, and Terrence Malick\u2019s The Tree of Life<\/a><\/i>, in second \u2014 were separated by a single vote. It is fitting that they should vie so closely: they are opposite and in some ways equal attempts to show the essential nature of reality and the best way to live in it \u2014 openly flouting the au courant<\/i> truism that art is fit chiefly to interrogate, unsettle, and subvert. Both films debuted at Cannes. If there had been any separation between their release dates, it would seem certain that one was made as a rebuttal to the other, for while the symmetry of the two films is striking, there is a deep philosophical quarrel between them. Von Trier and Malick can\u2019t both be right: Melancholia<\/i> argues that reality, including life, is best understood in the light of death; The Tree of Life<\/i> argues that reality, including death, is best understood in the light of life. These propositions are familiar enough; more surprising and important are the force and grandeur with which the two films substantiate them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before the plot of Melancholia<\/i> begins, there is an impressionistic prologue in which, among other things, birds fall dead from the sky and a gigantic blue-and-white planet collides with the Earth, swallowing it up. The prologue is set to Wagner\u2019s Liebestod<\/i> (or \u201clove-death\u201d) and it sounds a note of foreboding that rings throughout what follows. The action is set in the present day, on a great country estate overlooking the ocean, location uncertain \u2014 it seems to be anywhere and nowhere. The sky is almost always dark or overcast.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first half of the movie takes place over the course of a long, lavish wedding reception, and is titled \u201cJustine,\u201d after the bride (played by Kirsten Dunst). Justine is beautiful and successful, and she has just married a handsome, successful, doting man named Michael (Alexander Skarsg\u00e5rd). The stone-and-ivy mansion belongs to Justine\u2019s sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and her proud but eminently reasonable husband John (Kiefer Sutherland). The party is flawlessly arranged and the setting is tastefully opulent; the whole affair is swathed in a rich golden light. This is, von Trier seems to say, as good as life gets. And yet, Justine is ill at ease. She apparently has a history of depression, and on her way into the great house she glances anxiously up at the stars. It\u2019s an adumbration of things to come.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite the bounty of her situation and the pleading of the level-headed Claire, Justine becomes increasingly tormented and erratic over the course of the evening, falling asleep, locking herself in the bathroom, evading her new husband. Though he does not seem to share or even much understand her inclination to melancholy, Michael bears her behavior with supreme patience \u2014 perhaps too much. She seems to feel genuine affection for him; but some deep, destructive misery overwhelms this. When she refuses to consummate her marriage \u2014 opting instead for spiteful sex on the ground with a feckless young wedding guest whom she\u2019s just met \u2014 Michael finally leaves in defeat. It seems that the choreographed bliss of a perfect wedding is too warm and heavy a garment for Justine to wear with equanimity. She is obliquely aware of some truth that exposes such bliss as unconscionable falsehood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second half of the film is titled \u201cClaire,\u201d and is set once again on her and John\u2019s estate, and placed over some indeterminate number of days rather than a single evening. Justine arrives at the home, now wracked with depression so severe that she is barely sentient. Claire plays the dutiful, worried sister, doing what she can to rouse Justine from her state, but to no avail. It soon becomes apparent that Claire herself is also tormented. There is, we discover, a heretofore unknown planet called (rather winkingly) Melancholia, which is hurtling toward Earth. John, the archetype of a cheerfully confident modern rationalist, assures Claire that all the scientists\u2019 projections show that Melancholia will just pass by closely. He and their elementary-school-aged son Leo (Cameron Spurr) spend the few days leading up to the near-miss fooling around with telescopes and anticipating the show. Claire, however, is haunted by the specter of apocalypse. She has taken to reading on the Internet alternate predictions that the planet, after it flies by Earth, will swing back around, pulled in by gravity, and collide with it \u2014 a scenario labeled in the diagram as a \u201cdance of death.\u201d Doom seems literally to hang on the horizon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The night before the planet\u2019s closest approach, Claire, unseen, follows Justine into the woods. There she watches her sister, naked and prone on the bank of a creek in the forest, bathed in the sharp, alabaster light of Melancholia. Justine languidly caresses her naked body; it seems clear that this is precisely the consummation that she could not achieve with her eager, good husband. She has given herself over to the vision of death. It is the most beautiful nude scene I\u2019ve ever seen in a movie, and also one of the least alluring. The softness and warmth have been blanched from Justine\u2019s lovely body. What remains looks like porcelain: lovely to behold, cold to touch. It\u2019s the turning point of the film \u2014 a conversion experience. Justine had previously squirmed under the cold light of truth, but she has now allowed it to penetrate her. In so doing she has passed into a sort of adulthood, and for the rest of the film, she is impassive and strong, no longer crippled by vague mordant premonitions, staring coolly into the darkness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The next night, Melancholia does exactly what the scientists said it would: it passes very near to Earth, but does not touch it. The family assembles on the patio and watches it pass. The spectacle is breathtakingly beautiful, and even literally takes their breath away \u2014 John explains that the planet is sucking away some of their atmosphere, only momentarily \u2014 but it soon recedes, and Claire is relieved. Death has passed them by, and John raises a toast to life. Justine, however, seems to know something that the others do not. She alone is prepared for what happens next. The following day, we see John peeking again through his telescope, scribbling on a pad \u2014 and a sudden change in his expression tells us his earlier predictions were wrong. The doomsayers Claire had read were right: Melancholia, evidently tugged by Earth\u2019s gravity, has swung back around. Destruction is assured. Without a word \u2014 for what words do technocratic triumphalists have in the face of death? \u2014 John slips away and swallows a fatal dose of pills, alone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Earth\u2019s atmosphere begins to go haywire: birds stop chirping, strange hail falls, and arcs of electricity spark up from telephone poles. Claire realizes what is happening, and desperately, hysterically, grabs onto her son and tries to flee with him to a nearby village. But the cars won\u2019t start, and she ends up trudging through the hail, struggling for breath, her son\u2019s gangly, boyish legs hanging down to her shins. The air of futility is horrifying and deflating. Justine sits, demonically cool and contemptuous, watching her sister flail. \u201cThe earth is evil,\u201d she tells her; \u201cnobody will miss it.\u201d In the end, Justine becomes von Trier\u2019s anti-heroine, uniquely able to cope with the harsh reality. Claire is weak and undone; but Justine calmly helps her nephew to build what she tells him is a \u201cmagic cave\u201d that can protect him from any danger. Under her direction, the three family members gather in the \u201ccave\u201d \u2014 a teepee made of branches, with no cover \u2014 where they sit and join hands. Claire sobs and shakes, but Justine and Leo sit calmly while Melancholia looms closer and closer, finally swallowing all of life in a white roar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

T<\/i>he Tree of Life<\/i>, like Melancholia<\/i>, opens with an evocation of death, this time a reference to the Book of Job. God has allowed Job\u2019s ten children to be killed, and Job asks why a good and just God would sanction this. God answers with a question, which Malick uses for the film\u2019s epigraph: \u201cWhere 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?\u201d This is not so much an answer, of course, as an invitation to ruminate on the nature of existence and our place within it. Malick\u2019s film attempts to take up this invitation, and to help its viewers to do likewise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Tree of Life<\/i> explores facts of human suffering and death in the context of the miracle and majesty of reality. Its most central theme, as the title suggests, is the crowning achievement of existence: life. After the epigraph, the screen goes black, and then is lit from the center by a shimmering, undulating figure of light, somewhere between a flame and a ghost. Over this picture we hear the sounds of seagulls and waves on sand, and the voice of Jack O\u2019Brien (Sean Penn) speaking to God: \u201cBrother … Mother … it was they who led me to your door…. \u201d These words are a dispatch from the end of Jack\u2019s journey to redemption, and the rest of the movie is a retracing of the steps he followed, through suffering and evil and everything else, to God\u2019s door.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This way is, fittingly, a complex and elliptical one. Such large stories are never perfectly linear, unless they are falsified. The successive scenes do hang together, but they do so in a way that is not entirely obvious upon one\u2019s first or second or even third viewing. The viewer must trust Malick that all of this is going somewhere, but at the same time must work to make sense of the journey as it progresses. The very next scene recalls the childhood of Jack\u2019s seraphic mother (Jessica Chastain), who is never named in the film. She is seen viewing the natural world with wonder, and recalling the instruction of \u201cthe nuns\u201d that there are two ways through life: the way of nature and the way of grace. Grace, she says, \u201cdoesn\u2019t try to please itself. It accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked.\u201d But nature \u201conly wants to please itself,\u201d and \u201cfinds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it, when love is smiling through all things.\u201d One has to choose which way to follow. She, for her part, pledges to be faithful to the way of grace, and her pledge is immediately tested \u2014 we suddenly see her in middle age, being informed by telegram that her youngest son, R. L. (played as a child by Laramie Eppler), has died at the age of nineteen. She is now in the position of Job: unfailingly good, cruelly afflicted, and questioning God\u2019s justice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Scenes of the grieving Mrs. O\u2019Brien are interspersed with those of Jack\u2019s own middle age. He is a rich and successful architect, married to a beautiful woman, and utterly without hope or joy. His environs are starkly modern and antiseptic \u2014 a sterility that contrasts sharply with the film\u2019s starbursts and explosions of life. They are filled with sleek steel and glass, but Jack sees through the glass only darkly; he is painfully blind to the beauty arrayed outside his massive windows. He is distracted and enervated, unable even to look his wife in the eye. He is haunted by the loss of his beloved brother, and all that it implies about the human condition. Over a scene of his grieving mother, Jack asks, in voiceover, \u201chow did she bear it?\u201d The implied subtext is Jack\u2019s own question: \u201cHow should I?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jack\u2019s consideration of the question begins, like God\u2019s reply to Job, on a cosmic scale. For the next half hour, Malick guides his viewer through a mostly wordless exploration of the roots of life. There are lush depictions of the Big Bang, volcanic eruptions, the cellular origins of life, early sea creatures, dinosaurs, an asteroid, and an ice age. Then jumping seamlessly forward into the twentieth century, there is a series of impressionistic vignettes that present the courtship of Mr. and Mrs. O\u2019Brien, the gestation and birth of Jack and his two younger brothers, a mother\u2019s tenderness, the wonder of childhood exploration, the arcing spray of a garden hose in the sun, light sparkling through tree leaves, the thrill of boyhood horseplay, and the first exposure to death and disease. Simple description will not do; these scenes must be seen, and also heard \u2014 they are magnificently scored, with works by Berlioz, Smetana, G\u00f3recki, and others. In all of this, the camera seems to have come loose from any earthly moorings \u2014 it glides over landscapes, spins to capture rays of light and follows romping boys in tall grass.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But if life is truly the central fact of reality, then the film must also be able to illuminate our ordinary days and nights. Nearly an hour in, Jack\u2019s thoughts return to the story of his childhood in the Waco, Texas of the 1950s. The twelve-year-old Jack (Hunter McCracken) is the central figure of this portion. The camera follows him and his two brothers through the rough-and-tumble of boyhood: swimming, riding bikes, discovering girls, breaking windows for the thrill of it, attending school and church. Malick has an extraordinary knack for provoking and capturing unforced, lifelike behavior from his child actors. The three boys loaf and wrestle and laugh like real boys do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Malick\u2019s eye for what Mrs. O\u2019Brien calls \u201cgrace\u201d does not blind him to the ugliness of life, or the pervasiveness of \u201cnature\u201d \u2014 of course it requires a depiction of both. Much of the drama of the family story comes from the fraught relationship between Jack and his affectionate but stern father, Mr. O\u2019Brien (Brad Pitt). He had once dreamed of being a great musician, but gave it up in favor of a more practical engineering career. His disappointment with himself comes out in severity toward his boys. Early in the movie, after learning of R. L.\u2019s death, Mr. O\u2019Brien laments, \u201cI made him feel shame. My shame.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jack and Mr. O\u2019Brien are complicated figures, but both tilt toward the way of nature. They are hungry. They wrestle and claw to get what they want. Jack and his father frequently butt heads, as Mr. O\u2019Brien attempts to impose his will on his equally willful son \u2014 who asks God, at one point, to kill his father. By contrast, Mrs. O\u2019Brien and R. L. are exemplars of artless grace and unconditional love. Mr. O\u2019Brien warns his sons, \u201cYour mother is na\u00efve. It takes fierce will to get ahead in this world. If you\u2019re good, people take advantage of you.\u201d And it is hard to deny that R. L. and his mother are almost too righteous \u2014 forgiving, gentle, submissive \u2014 to seem fully real; they appear at times to be soft, wispy foils for the troubled but robust humanity of Jack and Mr. O\u2019Brien. Malick, it seems, is not quite convinced by the nuns\u2019 stark dichotomy of nature and grace, hinting at a more complex, complementary relationship. Indeed, the long stretches of the three-hour film devoted to gorgeous footage of natural processes, from the cosmic to the microscopic, suggest that there is more grace in \u201cnature\u201d than the thesis allows.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jack\u2019s recollection of his childhood culminates after Mr. O\u2019Brien is laid off, and the family is forced to move. The boys mourn like they\u2019re being expelled from Eden. For Jack, that makes sense: he no longer belongs there \u2014 the pure wonder of childhood has become adulterated by grown-up sin. Jack has no illusions about who he is. He whispers in a voiceover, \u201cFather, mother, always you wrestle inside me. Always you will.\u201d Mr. O\u2019Brien, shaken by the trauma of losing job and home, confesses to Jack that he has been too hard on him, but explains that he only meant to make his boys strong. Jack answers, \u201cI\u2019m as bad as you are. I\u2019m more like you than her.\u201d The two men \u2014 and Jack seems like a man now \u2014 embrace with real tenderness and regret. The whole scene is a masterpiece. Both actors express genuine vulnerability, while carefully preserving the hard masculine shell that is their armor. They are no longer at odds, but cobelligerents, reluctantly, helplessly, waging war on the world. As Jack says, channeling the Apostle Paul, \u201cI do what I hate.\u201d As the family drives away from their home, Mrs. O\u2019Brien gives one last word of instruction, again in voiceover: \u201cThe only way to be happy is to love. Unless you love, your life will flash by.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Jack\u2019s trajectory is predictable, and known, and we jump back to the present, thirty or so years later. We can easily imagine the professional victories that have been won, and the quantity of life that has flashed by in the interim. Jack is a hard, successful man, whose core is consumed by spiritual hunger. Happily, his reflections have not been without fruit. We see him one moment riding up a glass-encased elevator shaft, but in the next, he is in an arid, rocky desert, deciding, with some hesitation, to step through a freestanding wooden door frame, and follow the twelve-year-old version of himself over a rocky hill. Images of death and resurrection flash before us, and then Jack emerges onto a paradisiacal beach. The horizon is wide and luminous. The score turns exultant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jack, still dressed for the boardroom, drops to his knees in the wet sand, surrounded by his young brothers, his parents, children from his old neighborhood, his young self, and many others. Seagulls sing overhead, and the waves lap the sand \u2014 the same sounds that played behind the movie\u2019s opening scene. It is the arrival we\u2019ve been waiting for. As the sun sets over the water, the various characters walk languidly, embracing, smiling, gazing at each other. It\u2019s meant to be a crescendo of reconciliation. Mrs. O\u2019Brien caresses R. L.\u2019s young face, and then peacefully releases him from her care. One senses that this is meant to be reality viewed through the eyes of grace. After the beach scene, Jack finds himself again in the city, but his eyes, it seems, have been opened. The sun and sky are painted on the glassy surfaces of skyscrapers, and Jack looks around in wonderment. He can finally see that all the world is, ultimately, shining.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The tone and the source of light in The Tree of Life<\/i> are vital to Malick\u2019s philosophical vision. He is a rhapsode of the Emersonian order \u2014 plainly enchanted with the stuff of existence. His world is one of illuminations. Rich, clear light suffuses leaves, grass, fabric, hair, water, even skin. The lovely, if sometimes flickering, radiance of earthly life echoes a deeper, more enduring light. As Mrs. O\u2019Brien says, love smiles through all things. We simply need eyes naked and patient enough to see them as they are. The journey of the movie, from Jack\u2019s conjuring of the Big Bang onwards, is an effort not to impose a novel vision, but to shake the scales from his eyes. In Melancholia<\/i>, by contrast, things in themselves don\u2019t shine. Life has nothing to say for itself. Illumination always comes from without, whether it is cast by the comforting artifice of human technology, the very occasional glimmer of sunlight, or by the sharp white light of heavenly death. Only one of these sources of light has the power to reveal the truth. For von Trier, to bathe in the stark, blanching light of death is simply to become reconciled with reality; death is the one star that illuminates everything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These differing sources of light tell us something about how Malick and von Trier see the world \u2014 but at the same time, ethics is never far away, especially for Malick. In The Tree of Life<\/i>, the bare-toothed ethic of unmitigated \u201cnature\u201d is both a cause and a result of blindness. Jack fought and grasped because he couldn\u2019t see reality as the loving, luminous gift that it is, and his belligerent posture further clouded his sight. For Malick, living well makes you see rightly, and seeing rightly makes you live well. For von Trier, ethics and epistemology are related in a less powerful way. In Melancholia<\/i>, the warm, hospitable light of the first half of the movie is exposed as a comforting illusion, barely painting over the underlying reality of our condition. Doing away with this light is a matter of getting straight about truth and falsehood. And indeed, when this illusory paint begins to flake in the second half, only the death-illuminated Justine is calm and self-possessed enough to smooth over the last moments of her young nephew\u2019s life. This is a matter of ethics, of course, but the connection is less integral for von Trier than it is for Malick; Justine\u2019s nihilistic enlightenment also inspires her to relish in ghastly contempt at her stricken sister\u2019s panic. It is an ambiguous ethic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another way to put the difference is to say that Malick demands much more work from his viewers. In fact, the ambition of these two movies is only superficially symmetrical. Malick is calling on his viewers to search for something deep and hidden in our daily lives. A successful search would both call for and produce a radically new way of being in the world. He wants us<\/i> to ask and discover what truly lies behind the phenomenon of life. Von Trier is not really trying to open his viewers\u2019 eyes to some hidden reality. He is merely making manifest a cold reality that we all at times seem to recognize, with the added assertion that death really is the<\/i> end for each of us. From this he draws some rather banal conclusions about the clarifying power, at least within the context of the film, of a pessimistic worldview. This is not to say that Melancholia<\/i> is not a powerful film; it is. It manifests with great if exaggerated urgency the bleakness of a worldview that gains increasing traction in our day. The first time I saw it, I was awestruck. I left my seat in a quiet lull, floating through the bright lobby and dark parking lot with my eyes on the ground.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But upon repeated viewings, von Trier\u2019s vision begins to seem a bit too tidy. It relies for its power on the brute shock of our physical annihilation. The punch is well-thrown, but it loses some impact upon subsequent viewings. Malick\u2019s vision, by contrast, becomes more powerful with each viewing, as the viewer comes to see more and more the structure that he intimates but doesn\u2019t presume to spell out or prove. Malick invites where von Trier asserts. Both have crafted compelling works of art, encouraging for what they tell us about the state of our culture. It seems that even in a moment of dwindling seriousness in the public sphere, we are still able to make, and appreciate, art that explores what Hegel thought it should: \u201cthe Divine, the deepest interests of mankind, and the most comprehensive truths of the spirit.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two powerful recent films, ‘Melancholia’ and ‘The Tree of Life’, offer rival depictions of reality \u2014 one understood in the light of life, the other in the light of death. Ian Marcus Corbin examines the way each film embodies its own forceful message.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19219,"template":"","article_type":[14],"noteworthy_people":[],"topics":[5031],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/10426"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/article"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/10426\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19219"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"article_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article_type?post=10426"},{"taxonomy":"noteworthy_people","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/noteworthy_people?post=10426"},{"taxonomy":"topics","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topics?post=10426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}