Page - 176 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 05/02

humans and nature, and what vision of politics should order that relationship? I have already noted that a kind of Augustinian soul-searching compels much of the film’s progress. A combination of humans’ disordered loves and the alien- ation which results therefrom has led to our fractured relationships with each other and with nature. This is imaged in the strained interpersonal dynamics be- tween characters like Jack and his father, Mr. O’Brien (played by Brad Pitt). Sim- ilarly, the built environment of downtown Houston, with its impersonal symme- try, dramatizes Jack’s overall sense of estrangement (see figs. 3a–b). As both a child and a grown man Jack is a stranger in a strange land. All this grounds The Tree of Life’s Augustinian theological rationale. But the means whereby Malick suggests individuals might overcome their alienation are expressly Emersonian. Malick reveals American avant-garde cine- ma’s influence on his work – and similarly, the Emersonianism that grounds the American avant-garde tradition – by instantiating the sort of politics of exem- plarity I have been pointing up. The autobiographical nature of The Tree of Life (Malick, like Jack, grew up in small-town Texas in the middle of the twentieth century, and he too lost his younger brother when he was a young man), paired with Malick’s habit of shooting without a script, using only a Steadicam to fol- low his actors to catch the truth of their condition and circumstances, indicate Figs. 3a–b: Father-son relational dynamics and the built environment of downtown Houston serve to invoke a sense of modern alienation in The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, US 2011), 01:43:54; 00:15:34. 176 | Russell C. Powell www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/2, 167–185