Page - 168 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 05/02

strate, leverages the tension between two strands of American religio-political thought to illuminate a politics not typically associated with traditional Christian theology. The two strands to which I am referring are Augustinianism and Emer- sonianism. By eschewing narrative in favor of an experimental approach to his filmmaking – an approach grounded in the American avant-garde cinematic tra- dition – Malick envisages a radical politics much as Ralph Waldo Emerson does in his best-known essays. Yet Malick does this while still centering The Tree of Life on traditional Christian theological inquiries. The result, I argue, is a cinema of religio-political possibility that contains meaningful insights for contempo- rary American environmental politics, which up to now has struggled to bring religionists and secularists together on shared projects and goals. AUGUSTINE, EMERSON, POLITICS For all the theological attention The Tree of Life has received since its release, the film’s politics has received rather short shrift. This is attributable to two main reasons. The first is related to what Mark Lewis Taylor has called theolo- gy’s normative “imperio-colonial sense”, by which he means the ways theology (insofar as it is taken up in academic discourse) is assessed without considera- tion of its extradisursive effects – that is, its cognizance of power arrangements in society.2 The discursive focus of professional theology is doctrinal. Analyses of topics like the nature of God, creation, sin, the Holy Spirit, the church, and eschatology serve to structure orthodox belief. Theologians’ interests in tran- scendental knowledge, Taylor argues, tend to swamp their concerns within the imminent, political frame. The second is the habit of interpreting Malick’s films through the lens of, as Hannah Patterson has called it, an “Edenic yearning to recapture a lost wholeness”, which means Malick is often assumed to be more interested in retrospective reflection than in considering present-day political possibilities.3 Beginning with The Tree of Life, all of Malick’s recent films – except The Voy- age of Time (US 2015), a two-part documentary examining the birth and death of the known universe – have been set in the present day. So while visions of nostalgic recovery may still be read in Malick’s work since 2011, perceived con- ceptions of a romanticized past in Malick’s films are not the hindrance they once were. That the political vision of The Tree of Life has not elicited more attention from theologians is more difficult to fathom, however, for it is not so easy to separate the political from the theological. To put this point in terms of a phrase made popular by second-wave feminism, it is not just the personal 2 Taylor 2011, 53. 3 Patterson 2007, 15. 168 | Russell C. Powell www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/2, 167–185