Abstract
This article examines the central image of the tree of life in Terrence Malick’s 2011 magnum opus by drawing on the work of Martin Heidegger. I argue that while traditional depictions of the tree of life face a representational challenge raised by the cultural polysemy of the concept (i.e., naturalism vs. mythology), and by its association with abstract concepts like interdependence and spiritual unity, Malick answers this challenge by examining the conditions for the possibility of representation as such. More precisely, following Heidegger’s suggestion that the disclosure of Being is only possible for the kind of existential being that asks the question “why,” I argue that the film’s examination of the O’Brien family’s confrontation with death is ultimately a study of how human wonder allows the tree of life to blossom.
History has bequeathed us many representations of the tree of life. Prima facie, these acts of representation may seem simple enough. They represent what has accrued under a certain concept within a given tradition. The task is complicated, however, when one considers the pluralism of these traditions. For example, according to a growing scientific naturalism the tree of life represents the common descent and interdependence of nature and humans. Perhaps the most famous expression of this is found in Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species: “As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications.”1
By contrast, in various religious traditions the tree of life represents the interconnectedness of God’s creation with the human’s spiritual inheritance. In this vein, the tree of life is related more generally to the Sacred Tree, which is a central symbol in both eastern and western mythologies. In the Christian tradition, in particular, the tree of life appears most prominently in Genesis as one of two forbidden trees (Chapter 2:9 and Chapter 3:22–24), and again in the Book of Revelation, as no longer forbidden, in the new garden of paradise (Chapter 22). In this way, the tree of life serves to connect the entire spiritual journey of humankind from its prelapsarian period in Eden to its postlapsarian inheritance of paradise.
Even were we to set aside the ineluctable problem of multiple traditions, however, we might further ask just how one is to represent such seemingly un-representable concepts as interdependence, wholeness, unity, or spiritual continuity. Is it achieved by the visual trope of enveloping the earth in a tree’s symbolic branches, or by painting to the margins of the canvas as Gustav Klimt does in “L’Arbre de Vie, Stoclet Frieze” (1909), or by elliptical allusion such as the tree that “stands forever green” in the ancient Norse Poetic Edda ?2
Terrence Malick confronts this aporetic question in his 2011 magnum opus, The Tree of Life.3 In his cinematic exploration of this topic, however, Malick relies less on previous representative techniques and definitions of the tree of life and follows a suggestion offered by the philosopher Martin Heidegger.4 Heidegger suggests that we should begin not by asking which representation is best, or even what the tree of life is, but rather by asking a different kind of question: Why is there something rather than nothing? According to Heidegger, it is this question that uniquely defines human being as “Dasein,” or the kind of being capable of making a presentation of Being.
In following Heidegger here, I want to suggest that Malick’s attempt to deliver a more originary presentation (Darstellung) of the tree of life begins by subverting the notion of representation (Vorstellung) itself. More precisely, taking as its guide the interrogative attunement of wonder enacted by the O’Brien family’s confrontation with death, I contend that the film identifies the tree of life with the onto-existential disclosure of Being. Finally, by situating this ontological disclosure of nature within the graceful gift of wonder, I conclude that the film helps overcome a false opposition between natural and spiritual representations of the tree of life.
I. Beginnings
Malick’s film begins several times. First with a quote from the Book of Job asking where Job was when the Lord “laid the foundations of the earth?”5 Next with a voiceover from Jack stating, “brother, mother, it was they that led me to your door.”6 And finally in a reflection on the two different ways through life: nature and grace. Grace, it is said, “doesn’t try to please itself. Accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepts insults and injuries.” By contrast, “nature only wants to please itself. Get others to please it, too. Likes to lord it over them. To have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it, when love is smiling through all things.” It is said that “you have to choose which one you’ll follow.”7
Pictorially, the search for a beginning is even less clear as the film opens with an image of a flame in space, followed by the character of the mother seen as child, then her adulthood with her husband and three young boys in 1950s Texas, the sudden death of the middle boy ten years later, a cinematographic exploration of the origins of the cosmos and life on earth, present day, the future, and an extended examination of the childhood of the three boys. This central examination focuses in particular on the eldest boy, Jack, and his struggle to follow the love of his mother against the hard ways of his father, set against scenes of childhood play and mischief, young joy, and deep sorrow. The film approaches a conclusion as the father loses his job and the family is forced to move, cutting back to the present day where Jack remains a wanderer in his grief, and glimpsing a future where the family is reunited on the shores of the afterlife.
Amidst so much time then, where do we begin? One of the most controversial elements of the film concerns its fifteen-minute exploration of the awesome origins of the universe. This strange interruption at the heart of the human story, coupled with the recurrent natural imagery throughout the film (trees, waterfalls, animals, etc.) has prompted some to speculate about what natural beginnings say about the significance of human beginnings. Nietzsche offers a useful illustration of this kind of question, asking us to imagine:
In some remote corner of the universe, glimmering diffusely into countless solar systems, there was once a planet upon which the clever animals invented knowledge. It was the proudest and most mendacious minute in “world history”; but it was only a minute. After nature had taken a few breaths, the planet grew cold, and the clever animals had to die. Someone could invent a fable like that, and he would still not have adequately illustrated how wretched, how shadowlike and fleeting, how pointless and arbitrary the human intellect appears with nature.8
In this tale of science fiction, Nietzsche highlights what has been evident to the natural tradition for at least two centuries now, and what is sublated into the social Darwinism of the father figure in Malick’s film. Put in its natural context, the beginning and ending of human being is not particularly important, and insofar as it is, it is ruled by the laws of nature, of competition, diffidence, and glory. To accept such a position is simultaneously to combat a certain crude anthropocentrism, providing a sense of perspective and reminding us that human knowledge and representations, including that of the tree of life itself, are metaphorical figures of what can never be accessed in-itself, of the nature we come from, and yet know only from one side.
However, this prioritization of the way of nature does not seem to bear out in the wider context of the film. Rather, in his childhood journey Jack appears to free himself from the self-absorption of nature, giving himself over to the graceful path of his mother. In turn, faced with the loss of her son, the mother, like Job, seems to make spiritual peace with this loss, ultimately stating: “I give him to you, I give you my son.”9 The opening passage from the Book of Job further supports this counter interpretation, and helps resituate this observation about naturalism in the spiritual context of creationism. For these reasons, along with the film’s pervasive religious symbolism (the classical soundtrack, candles, church sermons, etc.), a wider viewership sees the film’s understanding of the tree of life as subordinating the natural notion to the spiritual notion.
And yet, in another sense, the film begins neither with this naturalism nor this creationism. It is true that the opening passage from Job is chronologically first in the movement of the film, but it is also true that in the time of the narrative the film really begins with the grief-stricken wonder of the mother and family facing the loss of the middle boy. Like the phenomenological epoché that serves to bracket our absorption in the everyday, natural world in order to confront how the meaning of that world is constituted, the telegram that the deliveryman brings to the O’Brien house announcing this momentous death interrupts everything else and throws open the real time of the film. Similarly, it is important to note that the film does not end with the reconciliation of the family in the afterlife, but in the present time of Jack still wandering in his grief. Thus the final images of the film juxtapose this projected future and projected past with the image of a city bridge connecting the present day to these other times and places. To situate our interpretation then in the chronology of natural history or God’s creation is out of time with the onto-existential temporality of the film.
II. Endings
Elsewhere, Heidegger gives us another way to think about these beginnings. Contrary to Nietzsche, Heidegger observes that the advent of human being is not simply the introduction of another being (Seiende) in the wider scope of beings (Seiende). Rather, with the arrival of the human being there arises a different kind of comportment toward Being (Sein), namely the interrogative. With this interrogative attunement, however, Being changes from what is un-thematized to what is manifest. As Heidegger puts it:
To be sure—whether the question “Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?” is posed or not makes no difference whatsoever to beings themselves. The planets move in their orbits without this question. The vigor of life flows through the plant and animal without this question. But if this question is posed . . . then this questioning necessarily recoils back from what is asked and what is interrogated, back upon itself.10
Through this questioning, beings as a whole are first opened up as such and with regards to their possible ground, and they are kept open in the questioning.11
It is important to hear Heidegger in the right way. He does not dispute that beings preexist human beings. But he questions what it means to call them beings, to say that they exist. For the significance of such being takes on a different ontological status once the interrogative is introduced by the advent of the kind of being for whom Being is a question. In this interrogative move a being becomes ecstatic: It stands out beyond itself in its ability to make a presentation of Being. Accordingly, Heidegger suggests that it is not simply human being in the anthropological sense that is significant here, but human dasein, that is the kind of being for whom being-there is a question. This is the mystery that quietly stirs in Malick’s strange close-ups of the opaque, glaucous eyes of the newborn child, reflecting and unfolding the images of the Earth and cosmos elsewhere in the film. Following Heidegger’s suggestion then, we might say there is another beginning and another time at work in Malick’s film here, chronologically younger, but ontologically older, a temporality that is tied to the possibility for the meaningful disclosure of Being itself.
In a sense, we are still stuck at the beginning. And yet, for Malick this beginning already stands in essential relation to its end. This is shown in the inextricable relationship between childhood and death at the heart of the film. We might ask what is so significant about childhood and death. This question appears to be answered easily enough. Childhood is the beginning of wonder. It is the time when everything is new, unfamiliar, to be wondered at and about. The child sees what it has never seen before and asks why. Or it asks why, and it sees what it has never seen before. After childhood, meanings become familiar, sedimented, fossilized. Then one day the sudden interruption of grief strips us of our habitual relationship with the world and returns us again to wonder.
Heidegger reminds us, however, that these two phenomena belong together in a more intimate manner. It is not the case that there is first the wonder of childhood, and then there is the wonder of death. Rather the possibility of wonder is already introduced by the possibility of our death. Indeed, it is just this concern with one’s death that first opens up the time and space of Dasein’s own being, and thus also the time and space of the world about which it wonders.12 Admittedly, this relationship with our death remains largely in the background of our attention, repressed, out of sight. As Heidegger observes, “initially and for the most part, Dasein does not have any explicit or even theoretical knowledge of the fact that it is delivered over to its death.”13 And yet, the facticity of death remains, and it is from just this background that everything in the foreground is opened.
Significantly, Malick both follows and challenges this Heideggerian insight in the film. For example, while he clearly follows Heidegger’s emphasis on the interrogative significance of the human relation with death, Malick also shows us that the event of birth opens up a similar possibility for parents and loved ones, redoubling in the special joy of new life the why-question that comes with the mourning of death.14 Moreover, as this emphasis on family and intersubjectivity already begins to suggest, the film also indicates that being-with others (mitsein) is, in a certain sense, prior to being-toward one’s own being. Indeed, in the context of the film’s emphasis on familial relationships one might say that a singular encounter with one’s own death is not only impossible but, taken to its extreme, it would entail a return to the self-absorption of the path of nature.
Thus we see that the more Jack becomes estranged from his family the more he loses the wonder of childhood. In turn, the retrieval of this wonder is made possible only through his return to the family. This is not only exhibited in his prayer to his parents that “always you wrestle inside of me,” or in how he learns hate in his father’s eyes, or in how he learns shame in his mother’s eyes, but ultimately in how he encounters death.15 He does not first encounter death as an explicit retrieval of his own death, but when one day a boy suddenly drowns at the public pool, he wonders why, in a revision of Heidegger’s question, “anything” is possible?16 This death, in turn, opens him onto other deaths. He imagines the death of his mother, her corpse lying in the copse behind their house in a transparent coffin. Elsewhere, watching his father work underneath a car, he looks at the carjack and considers dropping it before fleeing from this impossible possibility and asking God to kill him instead. Finally, when, in a version of the Cain and Abel story, Jack shoots his brother with a BB gun in the woods, it is the role-playing of his brother’s death that calls Jack from his self-absorption, opening him up again to the loving possibilities of his family and world.
This wonder comes to a head, however, with the real death of the brother. For it is in this event that each member of the family explicitly confronts their own death from the shared space of their intersubjectivity. The mother laments, for instance, “I just want to die, and be with him.”17 In turn, the wonder that emerges in this explicit encounter with one’s death is no longer the same as childhood wonder. It becomes self-reflective, meditative, a kind of wonder at wonder, figured for example in adult Jack’s long, objectless gazes at nothing. As a confrontation with the condition for the possibility of wonder, this event may be described as the ontological end of childhood. Indeed, while age delimits childhood in a biological sense, it is never the ontological indication of childhood. Individuals in their twenties, thirties, forties, and beyond can remain children where they have not yet confronted their mortality. Similarly, a mid-life crisis is not so much a confrontation with the why-question, as the side-effect of refusing for too long to confront the significance of the why-question—a phenomenon powerfully illustrated by the father’s observation that in his failure to ask why he “dishonored it all and didn’t notice the glory.”18
The family’s confrontation with this death returns us to the film’s provocative, cinematographic montage of the cosmos in a new way. In his seminal study, The World Viewed, Stanley Cavell suggests that Malick’s special cinematic insight is actually a photographic one, tied to the way that the camera allows the object-being to show itself in a form of self-appearing.19 Cavell’s observation is correct to an extent here. Indeed, one might say that this montage functions like a testimony of nature: black hole, red dwarf, volcanic gurgle, glacier crevasse, oceanic force, microbial dream, dinosaur reign, meteoric heat, continental drift, vegetation rebound, animal rebound, life after life. At the same time, however, it is clear that for Malick the unique power of film extends from its subversion of the photographic fixation with individual being-images. Instead, Malick’s films self-reflexively emphasize the way that in film, as in life, Being is disclosed through the process-oriented juxtaposition of being-images, that is through the relationality of Dasein’s intersubjective experience with both nature and other Dasein.
Attending to this relational quality, one observes that the testimony of the cosmos montage is not a soliloquy, but a dialogic response to the O’Brien family’s why-question. This leads to two conclusions. On the one hand, the presentation of the natural universe depicted here cannot be one that is indifferent to the human being. Rather, showing itself precisely in response to the why-question that beckons it, this scene further attests to the onto-existential power of Dasein to disclose the beginnings and the endings of the world as part of its own finitude. In this sense, the life and death of stars, the compassion of dinosaurs, the songs of galaxies mourn right alongside the very family that has invested it with meaning.20
On the other hand, in this same sublimity, prehistory, and giganticism the montage of the cosmos simultaneously confronts Dasein with what Heidegger calls the thrown (Faktizität, Geworfenheit) quality of its existence. Here the mystery of one’s existence is tied to the parallel mystery of the origin of these origins and the end of these ends. Accordingly, while Dasein’s onto-existential interrogation is responsible for the meaningful disclosure of such a world, Dasein likewise finds itself thrown into the midst of this world without full control or explanation. In this way, the testimony of the cosmos both affirms Dasein’s special ontological being and reveals its limits, reminding us that our disclosive way of being-in-the-world is born of questions, not answers.
In the end, it is this doubled quality of the montage’s testimony that invites a transformation from the way of nature to the way of grace in the film. The attunement of grace, which the mother and boys seek throughout the film, and which is ultimately signaled in the mother’s rejoinder: “I give him to you, I give you my son,” befalls the human only in this deepest encounter with wonder.21 Following this reading, however, it is clear that this gift of grace belongs neither to naturalism nor theology nor anthropocentrism. For Malick, grace does not issue from the subjectivity of the human agent. Neither is it reducible to the evolution of nature into which and out of which human being may equally pass. Finally, it cannot be directly attributed to any traditional, theological conception of God. Rather, born out of the recoil of Dasein’s wonder in and from nature, and in the ensuing recognition that we do not deserve any of this, the way of grace is a giving thanks to the mysterious grant of Being found in the existential clearing of our lives.22
III. TREES
Elsewhere, reflecting on the power of the artwork to help show this special relationship between Being, nature, and grace, Heidegger compares the artwork to the blossoming of the tree. He writes:
The poem names the tree of graces. Its sound blossoming harbors the fruit that falls to us unearned—holy, saving, loving toward mortals. In the golden-blossoming tree there prevail earth and sky, divinities and mortals. Their unitary fourfold is the world. The word “world” is now no longer used in the metaphysical sense. It designates neither the universe of nature and history in its secular representation nor the theologically conceived creation (mundus), nor does it mean simply the whole of entities present (kosmos).23
Malick’s film is full of trees. These trees lead our gaze upward and outward, they line the neighborhood within which the O’Brien family dwells, they hold the swing from which the young boys move to and fro through memory, they shade the prehistorical jungles of the dinosaurs, they line the inter-historical rivers that these beings share, they are the mirrored buildings of modern cities that bid us to look outward while reflecting inward. Which tree then shall we say is the tree of life in Malick’s film?
Neither in the beginning, nor in the end, but somewhere in the middle the family plants a small tree in the yard. Planting and watering this sapling, the mother says, “You will be grown before this tree is tall.”24 What do these words mean? If the foregoing reflections bear truth, it cannot simply mean that the boy will become an adult before the tree becomes botanically mature. Rather, hearing the mother’s claim in light of Malick’s broader interrogation of wonder, her words might tell us simply what the film itself seeks to say: Only where wonder grows does the tree of life blossom.
Contributor Details
Joe Balay is an assistant professor of Philosophy at Christopher Newport University. He specializes in twentieth-century continental philosophy and the philosophy of art, literature, and film.
Notes
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (New York: Bantam, 2008), 132.
“Völuspá,” in The Poetic Edda: Vol. II: Mythological Poems, trans. Ursula Dronke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 11–12.
The Tree of Life, directed by Terrence Malick (Los Angeles: Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, 2011), DVD.
The biographical and philosophical connection between Malick and Heidegger is significant. As a graduate student at Harvard, Malick was deeply interested in Heidegger and translated his essay, Vom Wesen des Grundes (1929) as The Essence of Reasons (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1969). This relationship has been well documented by critics. For example, in his seminal text, The World Viewed, Malick’s teacher, Stanley Cavell, argues that in Malick’s films there is “a realization” of Heidegger’s philosophical examination of how the “Being of beings” appears to Dasein (Stanely Cavell, foreword to The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979], xv). For a good overview of Heideggerian themes in Malick’s The Tree of life, see: Natasha Hay, “Cosmic Mourning: The Birth of Transcendence in Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life,” TRANS 18 (2014), accessed January 20, 2016, doi: 10.4000/trans.1065.
Malick, 0:39–0:52. The fuller quote reads: “Where 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?” (Job, 38:4,7).
Malick, 1:04–1:32.
Ibid., 1:57–3:44.
Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra Moral Sense,” in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1954), 42.
Malick, 2:10:42–2:10:56.
Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 6.
Ibid., 5.
See, in particular: Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh and Dennis Schmidt (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010), æ50.
Heidegger, Being and Time, 241.
On the topic of natality and its underdevelopment in Heidegger, see: Dennis Schmidt, “On Birth, Death, and Unfinished Conversations,” in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics and the Art of Conversation, ed. Andrzej Wiercinski (Münster, Germany: Verlag, 2011), 107–14.
Malick, 1:55:14–1:55:41.
Ibid., 1:10:44–1:14:41.
Ibid., 6:42–6:44.
Ibid., 1:54:35–1:54:37.
Cavell, xv–xvi.
The majesty of this montage has been overshadowed by a certain controversy about the dinosaur scene. This scene depicts a larger dinosaur coming upon a smaller, injured dinosaur, placing its foot on the latter’s head before pausing, hesitating, and leaving. The ambiguity of the interaction between the two creatures here and its relevance for the human story has raised much debate. In particular, it invites the question whether there is something like consciousness or conscience before the human. This question, however, presents a double trap. First, it is a mistake to suggest that the human rewrites this prehistoric past, importing a graceful wonder onto these creatures. This would be the myth of idealism, which is only another form of spiritualism. Second, it is just as mistaken to say that this scene indicates that wonder is a natural feature of evolution. This would be the myth of naturalism. Rather, as has been shown, Malick’s accomplishment is precisely his integration of both views without a reduction to either. Accordingly, a better interpretation of this scene is to observe that precisely because the human’s ontological inheritance of this world is a mysterious inheritance, what Heidegger calls “thrown being” (Geworfenheitsein), this mystery is preserved in just these kinds of speculative projections. That is, the question itself—whether other creatures share in this wonder—belongs to the nature of our own wonderful being, and thus to the interrogative attunement of the film.
Malick, 2:10:42–2:10:56.
I would like to say a special thank you to Byron Brigham George for his graceful dialogue on this topic. As always, I learned much from it.
Martin Heidegger, “Language,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper, 2001), 198–99.
Malick, 44:22–45:01.
