Today’s guest blog is written by the mastermind behind the Larryville Chronicles blog, who prefers to remain anonymous, even though everyone in Lawrence knows who he is. Everyone in Lawrence also knows about his cultural sidekick, who happens to be invisible just like Harvey the Rabbit, which makes him more intriguing. Follow him on Twitter (@larryvillelife), and be sure to tell him you read his guest post. Follow his invisible sidekick not on Twitter, but by simply closing your eyes and imagining him. He might even look a lot like your own childhood imaginary friend.
If you wandered to the far end of your multiplex this summer, far past the cowboys and aliens and giant fighting robots and fart jokes, you might have found yourself (unexpectedly, for many) in an impressionistic, immersive film of ideas; a film that takes us from the beginning of time to the end of it; a film in which the characters occasionally address God directly (usually in whispers).
This is Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life, of course, and so much has been written already on its views of Nature vs. Grace (not to mention its dinosaurs!) that I probably can’t add much to the conversation at this point. But I’ll offer my short interpretation nonetheless. A friend of mine who disliked the film sees it as a statement of humanity’s insignificance against the grand backdrop of human history: humanity as a flash in the pan between the vast expanse before us and after us. It didn’t play that way at all for me. I came away with the conviction that the film, via its remarkable dissection of childhood moments taking place in the natural world, posits a sort of immortality and divinity within the mundane, within the often sadly brief amount of time allotted to us.
Malick, as we’ve seen in The Thin Red Line and A New World and now Tree of Life, is obsessed with nature. But he does not use the techniques of Thoreau, transcending nature to reach the divine. Rather, his method is far more Emersonian: nature is the divine (the “transparent Eyeball” and all that, if you remember your Emerson from grad school … I barely do, at this point). Nor do I buy the other critical extreme: that the film is essentially a sermon from a born-again Malick that culminates in a happy, heavenly reunion on a beach. In fact, it doesn’t culminate there, but with final shots of Sean Penn back among the city, forced to find meaning not beyond but withiin the temporal world he currently inhabits.
This leads me to another recent film – one that is narrated by a kitty cat. This is Miranda July’s The Future, and it’s as twee as Malick’s film is somber. They would make a decidedly bizarre double-bill, but the differences aren’t as vast as you’d imagine, at least thematically. Whereas Malick’s film begins with a mysterious light, July’s begins in absolute darkness, but both are meant to suggest some other realm that we can occasionally perceive within our own. Out of this darkness emerges the voice of Paw-Paw (I kid you not!), an injured cat at a shelter about to be adopted by Sophie and Jason (Miranda July and Hamish Linklater). Paw Paw (voiced by July herself) sees the adoption as an act that will, in a sense, launch her (him?) into being, out of the unformed void and into the mundane world that Sophie and Jason inhabit – a world in which they lounge around their apartment a lot, watching Youtube videos.
The film is (probably wisely) pretty light on Paw-Paw’s narration and centers primarily around Sophie and Jason learning to re-experience the beauty of existence, which somehow involves a talking moon and a shirt that comes to life and a boldly lengthy section in which Jason seems to stop time altogether and the film proceeds apace along an alternate narrative line for awhile. Like Tree of Life, the final moments threaten to leave us in an abstract, life-beyond-death realm, but instead pull back, depositing us once again in Sophie and Jason’s apartment as they are forced to deal with some “terrible things” that have crept into their formerly peaceful existence of lounging around doing nothing. Our final image, however, is one of Sophie and Jason lounging around, doing nothing, just being, just figuring out a way to be together. Ultimately, it is within these moments, both films assure us (and reassure us), that the deepest meaning can be found.
