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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. “SURPRISING.” “Ponderous.” “Overlong.” “Breathtaking.” “Love-it-or-hate-it.” Terrence Malick's Palme d'Or-winning film The Tree of Life (2011) generated a variety of such verbal responses. Critics saved their strongest adjectival gulps (“Freaky,” “Eye-popping,” “Jaw-dropping”) for the CGI dinosaurs and manipulated Hubble telescope imagery that portrayed visions of life in the cosmos inaccessible to the naked human eye, beyond and before the here and now. On their own, such images would surely be stunning, but what struck audience sensibilities was the visual clashing of micro- and macrocosmos, the movement from Waco, Texas, to nebulae light years away, from the 1950s to the Pleistocene era. As is typical for Malick, a sensuous soundscape meets a lush landscape, and spoken dialogue is at a minimum. A closer look at The Tree of Life's cosmic images, alongside other films and historic images from a variety of media, reveals that such cosmic correlations are actually situated within a long visual and religious history. Malick's most recent film is simply the latest in a millennia-old project, shared by cultures across the world, of visually reconciling the microcosmos with the macrocosmos, finding our local lives situated within the grand scheme of things. What follows are a series of encounters that situate the imagery of The Tree of Life within a larger religious, cultural, and cinematic visual history, juxtaposing the new and the traditional through three historical plateaus. This does not pretend to be a comprehensive historical survey, nor is it a film “review.” Rather, by touching down in three historical sites, we see an account of visual cultural portrayals of the cosmos, and the imagery of Malick's film within a continuum.1 Critics and audiences have gasped, sometimes in astonishment, sometimes in disgust (Kilday 2011), at the insertion of cosmic imagery in The Tree of Life, fumbling to place it within a proper cinematic frame of reference, and generally only coming up with connections to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey(1968). A great many films throughout cinematic history, especially since the 1960s and the political–cultural Space Race, have portrayed life on earth in tandem with life in “outer” space. I am not writing about the science fiction genre in general, but about those works that display interconnections of life “up there” with life “down here.” Andrei Tarkovsky's (1972) Solaris comes quickly to mind, as do two other films from 2011, the wonderfully creative Another Earth directed by Mike Cahill, and Melancholia (2011), from the always-controversial Lars von Trier. More importantly, it is the contractions of cosmic time that stretch the imaginations of Kubrick's and Malick's audiences. The cosmic imagery is not just out there, it is “back then,” in illo tempore, and it impacts life “now.” (Even the spatial metaphors begin to tell us something about the imagery constructed in and through these films, and through our cosmic language.) These interrelations, and the imagery accompanying them, should come as no surprise. Film production companies have been doing such things for ages. Figures 1 and 2 show a prominent film production company alongside a still from Malick's film. The Universal company logo (like many production company logos, including: Dreamworks, New Line Cinema, Relativity Media, Lionsgate, Orion, Vivendi, Columbia, Paramount, Warner Bros, and BBC Films) demonstrates its place in between the heavens and the earth. SCREEN SHOT FROM THE TREE OF LIFE. SCREEN SHOT OF UNIVERSAL STUDIOS LOGO. In other words, we might say that film productions are in the business of linking the macro- and microcosmos. This finds curious support in Peter Berger's now-classic The Sacred Canopy, published one year before Kubrick's film: Religion legitimates social institutions by … locating them within a sacred and cosmic frame of reference… . Probably the most ancient form of this legitimation is the conception of the relationship between society and cosmos as one between microcosm and macrocosm. Everything “here below” has its analogue “up above.” By participating in the institutional order, humans participate in the divine cosmos. (Berger 1967: 27) Reread this with only a couple of changes (in italics): Film production companies legitimate cinema by … locating films within a sacred and cosmic frame of reference… . Probably the most ancient form of this legitimation is the conception of the relationship between society and cosmos as one between microcosm and macrocosm. Everything “here below” has its analogue “up above.” By participating in the cinematic order, humans participate in the divine cosmos. By visually setting themselves up with their cosmic logos, industrial cinema productions stake their claim in the universe, and invite viewers into a world that transcends the microcosmic world of the local theater.2 In this way, we might even compare the success of The Artist (Michel Hazanavicius, 2011) to The Tree of Life, since what captivates the audience is the temporal displacement, back to a “beginning” of cinema itself; The Artist is a cosmogony of the world of talking films. Film is not the first medium that has visually attempted to reconcile micro- and macrocosmos. The printed book is another. Once Johannes Gutenberg figured out how to put the Asian technologies of printing presses to use among the languages of Europe, some radical shifts occurred in Western literature. Among the early publishing fads was a genre of epic chronicles—illustrated histories of the world that directly extended from the creation of the macrocosmos by a Christian Creator God to established cities in Europe. One of the most famous accounts of such a history was the Liber chronicum, often called the Nuremberg Chronicles, created by Hartmann Schedel along with many others: engravers, designers, patrons, publishers, and printers. (Some prominent art historians have postulated that a young Albrecht Dürer helped create some of the woodcuts.) Initially printed in 1493, and thus considered an incunabulum, Schedel's stories offer a marvelous mixing of macro- and microcosmos, words and images, with over 1,800 woodcuts to help reimagine the story. Here is the history of the world, from beginning to end, a grand verbal–visual mythology that ultimately lands in fifteenth-century Europe (Figure 3a and b), and extends briefly beyond to the end of time and the return of a Cosmic Christ (Füssel 2001). (a) IMAGE OF CREATION, WITH GOD ENTHRONED ABOVE THE COSMOS, FROM THE NUREMBERG CHRONICLES, 1493. COURTESY OF HAMILTON COLLEGE LIBRARY, SPECIAL COLLECTIONS. (b). FULL-PAGE WOODCUT OF THE CITY OF NUREMBERG, AS IT WOULD HAVE LOOKED IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY, FROM THE NUREMBERG CHRONICLES, 1493. COURTESY OF HAMILTON COLLEGE LIBRARY, SPECIAL COLLECTIONS. In Malick's rendering, history unfolds from birth to the present and beyond. The origins of the universe are imagined through evolutionary schemas that nonetheless do not discount the possibilities of a Creator God in action. At the same time, though many have done so, the film does not necessitate a theological interpretation either. Cosmic beginnings coalesce in the microcosm of Waco, Texas, circa 1950s, eventually moving on into some other realm of an afterlife (looking a lot like Utah). The film delights in visual connections between the macro- and microcosmos: far off gassy clouds of nebulae look like the gassy clouds of DDT sprayed for mosquito control in Waco (Figure 4a and b); an asteroid strikes the earth, beginning the mass extinction of the dinosaurs, while the young Jack O'Brien throws a rock through a window, beginning the extinction of his childhood innocence; Jack emerges dreamlike from an underwater house as a cosmic metaphor for birth, and later another dies by drowning in a pool. (a) MANIPULATED ASTROPHOTOGRAPHY. SCREEN SHOT FROM THE TREE OF LIFE. (b). DDT SPRAY IN WACO, TEXAS. SCREEN SHOT FROM THE TREE OF LIFE. There is, in both media, a direct lineage from the origin of the universe to the origins of the local community, and then extending onward and briefly into an imaged and imagined life to come. Ancient mythologies, Schedel and Malick visually posit, bear on us in the here and now, shaping our lives. Touching down in another place and time, and re-viewing the imagery of cosmic origins, we begin to see an intriguing relation between an evolutionary view of the macrocosmos and the mythic symbols that continue to hold sway in scientific endeavors. In his Transmutation Notebook (B) of 1837, after five years of globetrotting aboard the Beagle, at the age of twenty-eight, Charles Darwin hit on a visual metaphor that galvanized his thinking and set a course for his later work. In the jotted-down style of his notebooks, he realizes how “organized beings represent a tree, irregularly branched some branches far more branched—hence Genera—many terminal buds dying, as new ones generated” (quoted in Eldredge 2005: 103). Darwin made a preliminary sketch to accompany this thought, an image that would stick with him for the next two decades and re-emerge as the only illustration in On the Origin of Species of 1859 (Figure 5). His prose changed too, offering a naturalistic, arboreal metaphor that is cosmic in its reaches. He ends the “Natural Selection” chapter: “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” (Darwin 1885: 105). He was not the first, or the last, scientist to imagine life along a tree-like continuum, but for Darwin, it was this visual conceptualization that created a cognitive breakthrough in the ways he was to think about the taxonomies of life, about the beginnings as well as the ends of life. “TREE OF LIFE” FROM THE FIRST EDITION OF CHARLES DARWIN'S ORIGIN OF SPECIES, 1859. THE ONLY ILLUSTRATION IN DARWIN'S BOOK. COURTESY OF HAMILTON COLLEGE LIBRARY, SPECIAL COLLECTIONS. While evolutionary biology posed a grand challenge to traditional religious orthodoxy and its cosmogonical accounts, it is yet curious to note similarities between mythic symbols used to tell stories of origins. Darwin's quote from Origins comes startling close to the Bergerian metaphor of the “sacred canopy.” As with the Scandinavian Yggdrasil, the Vedic-Puranic Asvatha-Tree, the Hebrew-Edenic Tree of Life, the Christian-New Jerusalem Tree of Life, Siddharta's Bodhi tree, and other religio-cultural traditions' mythologies (James 1967), biological trees of life are points of connection between the here and now and time before time. In each instance, there is origin, continuity, and extinction. Berger states that while most of history has seen religion as key to creating a meaningful totality of the universe, in modern times, “there have been thoroughly secular attempts at cosmization” (Berger 1967: 27), with science as the key agent. Cinema too creates its own “audacious attempt.” Malick takes in mythic and scientific symbols and images, and resituates the story yet again in The Tree of Life. Trees are a continual reference within the film's mise-en-scéne; they are filled with life, guarding, watching over, relatively immutable, usually seen from the ground up (Figure 6). The O'Brien family, in 1950s Waco, is part of the great tree. On the one hand, the storyline of the film recalls Jeremiah's ancient prophetic praise of the macrocosmic–microcosmic link: “Ah Lord GOD! It is thou who hast made the heavens and the earth by thy great power and by thy outstretched arm! Nothing is too hard for thee, who showest steadfast love to thousands, but dost requite the guilt of fathers to their children after them” (Jer. 32:17–18, RSV). Guilt and sin are carried on through generations; from trunk to limb to branch, we carry the sap of our ancestors, inheriting their genes for weak hearts and addictions, while some branches end prematurely. SCREEN SHOT FROM THE TREE OF LIFE. On the other hand, as Darwin suggests, “buds give rise by growth to fresh buds,” and The Tree of Life seemingly tells of two choices to follow through the paths of the ancestors: the paternal “way of nature” or the maternal “way of grace.” Follow one branch, or follow another. Malick ultimately disturbs the neat either–or dilemma by opening a third space, what I have called the “way of the brother,” and it is the brother, a parallel branch, that offers another way of being. The first word of the film in narrative voiceover is “Brother,” and that is set up before the “nature vs. grace” distinction. Further, the final words are addressed to the brother as well: “Guide us, to the end of time.” (Note: the narrator is not talking to God here, nor anywhere else in the film.) The entire final section is not oriented parentally but fraternally, as Jack and R.L. explore the woods with BB gun in hand, tempting (and sometimes torturing) the other, finding forgiveness, and finding in a deep way what forgiveness actually is. It is R.L. who embodies a synthesis between nature and grace, father and mother, charting new ways of life with the cosmos (see Plate 2011). Cinema is part of the symbol-creating apparatus of culture, yet it also aspires to more: to world-encompassing visions of the nomos and cosmos. Cinema allows us to see in new ways, through new technologies, re-creating the world anew, telescoping the macrocosmic past and far away, and bringing these visions to bear on the microcosmic structures in the here and now. Filmmakers, artists, scientists, authors, and the rest of us seek to legitimate personal stories and grander histories. Such legitimations are found in words, but equally so in images. By re-viewing some historical imagery, we find new and very old ways of mythologizing, which is to say: finding our lives relevant beyond ourselves, in the past, present, and future, in word and image.
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