The physician of cinema: Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life

ABSTRACT

This article contends that, in contrast to the broadly metaphysical (or “transcendental”) reading with which he’s associated, Terrence Malick consistently makes nature, or physis, the subject of his films. Returning to the his critical reception, the essay begins by suggesting that Malick’s biography has been leveraged to credentialize philosophical approaches readily identified with Stanley Cavell and Martin Heidegger. By contrast, his directorial itinerary reveals a commitment to the natural world—to different milieus, habitats, ecosystems, and topographies—that culminates with The Tree of Life. Above all, the analysis turns on the latter’s “cosmobiogenesis” sequence, especially in light of an early draft of the film’s script. The article broadly considers the relation between cosmology and biology (i.e., an “anthropic principle”), singles out four biological concepts (symbiosis, predation, coevolution, and self-organization) that clearly inform the film, and analyzes the “evolution of empathy” in the notorious dinosaur scene. Finally, the essay examines the formal means with which the film envisions life: on the basis, it seeks to refute “metaphysical club” by conceiving of Malick as the physician of cinema.

KEYWORDS:

• Terrence Malick
• film-philosophy
• physis
• metaphysics
• cosmogenesis
• Stanley Cavell

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In Little Did I Know: Excepts from Memory, Cavell recalls: ‘Those closer to me included Terrence Malick, whose academic major – “concentration” in Harvard patois – was philosophy, and whose expert honors thesis on a text of Heidegger’s I would be assigned to advise. Malick had taken a semester in Germany to attend Heidegger’s classes, and he knew, and we discussed the facts before he began writing, both that he had read and studied more Heidegger than I had and at the same time that I was the only member of the philosophy faculty at that time who respected and had studied any at all of Heidegger’s work, hence that he was likely to receive an unsympathetic judgment from the two readers who would be assigned to examine him, having in effect to be instructing his instructors, something I was hoping his thesis might itself recognizably begin to accomplish’ (2010, 426).

2. See Waldens’s ‘Whereof One Cannot Speak: Terrence Malick’s The New World’ in Terrence Malick: Film and Philosophy for a representative account of this philosophical approach.

3. ‘I was not a good teacher,’ Malick once explained. ‘I didn’t have the sort of edge one should have on the students, so I decided to do something else’ (Walker 1975, 82).

4. One senses here an almost lawyerly sleight of hand: under the pretext of full disclosure, Cavell’s admission seems intended solely to insert Malick’s biography into evidence. Far from diminishing his argument, Cavell’s acknowledgement – including the conspicuous mention of a renowned publishing series, established by SPEP (The Society Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy), the most enduring and influential organ of Continental Philosophy in the United States – seems to bolster it.

5. Cavell acknowledges that Days of Heaven played a role in his composition of ‘An Emerson Mood’ (1992, 157). As he explains: ‘(Here I must pause for the pleasure of identifying the title of one of the recent films I care most about as occurring in the mezuzah, Days of Heaven. “As the days of heaven upon the earth” is the phrase used in the King James version to describe our stay “in the land which the Lord sware unto your fathers to give them” – if, that is to say, we keep faith with the word of the covenant. Several reviewers of this film have felt that it has something to do with the story of America. The source of its title specifies the phase of the story as one in which this promised land, in forgetting its faith and serving foreign gods, lies under a threat. It has been sent the plague of locusts; it has been warned; and this film, in the prophetic tradition of American literature, takes up the warning. As the land was given, on condition, so it can be taken away.)’ (ibid, 155).

6. Aristotle, Physics II, 192b.

7. Notably, Malick’s subsequent three films, all set in the present, approach nature very differently.

8. The Lacrimosa (‘weeping’) constitutes part of the Roman Catholic Requiem Mass, and Preisner is one in a long line of composers (including Mozart and Verdi) who have set its lines to music as a movement of the Requiem:

Lacrimosa dies illa Qua resurget ex favilla Judicandus homo reus. Huic ergo parce, Deus: Pie Jesu Domine, Dona eis requiem. Amen. [Full of tears will be that day When from the ashes shall arise The guilty man to be judged; Therefore spare him, O God, Merciful Lord Jesus, Grant them eternal rest. Amen.]

Evoking final judgment and a plea for mercy to the condemned, the lines play with and against Mrs. O’Brien’s questions, cries, and pleas, which impugn God’s absence mercy.

9. See chapters seven and eight of Hawking’s A Brief History of Time for a concise summary.

10. See Eldredge and Gould (1972).