Page - 172 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 05/02

Often emphasized in these interpretations is the condition of alienation in which humans abide as a result of their misguided loves – a sure indication of a given interpretation’s Augustinian slant. Whether it is due to one’s failing to treat God as the highest good or otherwise some perversion of the will, The Tree of Life treats experiences of isolation and estrangement – the consequences of human sin – as dramatic fodder. Nowhere is this more evident than in the film’s depiction of Jack, the eldest son of the O’Brien family, who is the film’s main character. Yet for all this, there is something decidedly un-Augustinian about The Tree of Life’s cinematic complexion. I take this “something” – which I identify with the Emersonian artistic heritage – to be what makes the politics of Malick’s film so interesting. Consider the role (or lack of a role) narrative plays in The Tree of Life. The film plays out like a series of recountings from Jack’s formative years, tacking back and forth from the present to the past. On the anniversary of his brother R. L.’s death, Jack, played by Sean Penn and depicted in adulthood as an architect working in Houston, thinks back on his time growing up in mid-cen- tury suburban Texas (where the lion’s share of the film is set). A segment of the film is also devoted to imaging the birth and chronological development of the cosmos. Malick juxtaposes the progress of the physical universe with the progress of the O’Brien’s familial universe, where adolescent maturation and the dynamics of a marriage under duress are as complex as the dawn and emergence of all existence (figs. 2a–b). Aside from the basic progress of time, however, The Tree of Life is much less reliant on traditional narrative logic than Malick’s other films. Unlike Days of Heaven (US 1978), The New World (US 2005), To the Wonder (US 2012), and Song to Song (US 2017), there is no love triangle impelling The Tree of Life’s plot forward. The Tree of Life instead is far more attuned to quo- tidian experience than to narrative convention. And while the mystery imbuing the everyday – what Stanley Cavell termed “the uncanniness of the ordinary” – undoubtedly has a place in all of Malick’s filmography (most will attribute this to his Heideggerian philosophical bent), nowhere is Malick as attentive to the phenomena of common experience as in The Tree of Life.10 Eschewing traditional narrative as he does, Malick assumes the primacy of the visual. The result is similar to what the film scholar William Wees calls a “cine- ma of exemplarity”, or a cinema that involves the filmmaker offering their work as an example of how one might begin to see, and ultimately think, for oneself in novel ways.11 Narrative filmmaking and, more generally, representational film require conventions and norms of movement such as chronological relations 10 Cavell 1988, 153–181. 11 Wees 1992, 80. 172 | Russell C. Powell www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/2, 167–185