Page - 182 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 05/02

An awareness of the world’s fragility undergirds Emerson’s thinking on the outsized role individuals of visionary genius play in social transformations. “There are no fixtures in nature”, Emerson writes in the essay “Circles”. “The universe is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees.”26 This be- ing the case, revelation derived from exhilarating, ecstatic experience, Emerson contends, should set the course of history, not traditions of the past nor the dic- tates of institutional authority. To receive revelation is to receive a kind of divine power, much as Christ did millennia ago. For it was Christ, Emerson writes, who fully realized “that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his world”.27 The implication is that those who pro- fess a belief in Christ should do the same. Historically Augustinians have found an idea like this contemptuous, fearing the chaos that would result from a soci- ety composed of individuals believing themselves capable of all that Christ was and accomplished. Conversely, Emersonians respond by charging Christians of acting, in Emerson’s words, “as if God were dead”.28 Augustinians and Emersonians will both assent to the idea that God still deigns to reveal Godself to human beings, despite their disagreements over how the politics of that revelation should be chastened by the church or civil authority. That Malick so integrates an Emersonian cinematic experimentalism into a traditional Christian framework for theological inquiry is what makes The Tree of Life so politically remarkable. For a film so attuned to the fundamen- tal questions of Christian theology – What is the character of God, as well as of the natural world? And what is the nature of humans’ relationship to both? Whence are suffering and death derived? Will they be overcome in this life or the next? – Malick is not satisfied to give his audience many answers. Jack, at the culmination of his euphoric vision during The Tree of Life’s finale, may be said to have come upon a few answers himself, but our own perception of Jack’s exhilaration only bolsters what I take to be the heart of Malick’s rather Emersonian point – that it is the audience’s task, not the filmmaker’s, to see their way through the process of overcoming their alienation from the world. Like Emerson, the most Malick is willing to do is detail the ways in which he has conceived of a perfect exhilaration wrought by revelatory insight. It is up to us, however, to seek out whatever it is we eventually might find through whatever means revelation (and its attendant exhilaration) finds us. Perhaps in the end visions like that which Malick portrays Jack undergoing at The Tree of Life’s conclusion will lead individuals away from the church, as was the case for Emerson in the late 1830s, after he experienced his own exhil- 26 Emerson 1983, 403. 27 Emerson 1983, 80. 28 Emerson 1983, 83. 182 | Russell C. Powell www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/2, 167–185