Although released many months ago in the US and now out on home video, Terrence Malick’s THE TREE OF LIFE has been slow arriving to Korea. That will change next month, when the film will play the Busan film festival, and then apparently begin a theatrical run later in the month. Despite being available on video, it is a film that should be experienced theatrically. I was lucky to see it this summer in Prague, and think it may be the best film Malick has made since his masterful debut, BADLANDS, in 1973. It is a film that has been widely debated by North American critics already, and it certainly will not appeal to everyone. In fact, if you disliked his other movies from the past decade, such as THE THIN RED LINE and THE NEW WORLD, this one probably won’t change your mind. However, I feel it is a stronger film than either, with a stunning combination of grand ambition and deeply personal, emotional image-making. It has been described as religious or at least spiritual, which is true to an extent, but I think it is more accurate to see it as mythic. The following thoughts on the film are fairly personal and tangential because I find it rather impossible to appreciate this film in any other way. (MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD)

The opening quote from the film sets up its mythic quality, and throughout I keep reflecting back on the images, projecting them forward from the opening scenes into shots in the later half in a way I haven’t experienced since Bela Tarr’s SATANTANGO. I think this is at least partially due to the formal nature of Malick’s shots, quick glimpses of images that are constantly moving, establishing a rhythm that makes the shots both dynamic and yet as vivid as still photographs.

The images that most resonated for me were the shots of the jellyfish, which get many other mirroring images throughout, including the scene that has stayed with me the most. The young protagonist breaks into a girl’s bedroom and goes through her clothing. Malick then cuts to him throwing the nightgown into the river, and then having an emotional confrontation with his mother.

When thinking about this sequence, I was reminded of the work of another visionary artist, the singer-songwriter Neil Young, specifically this verse from his song “Broken Arrow” (recorded when Young was with the band Buffalo Springfield):

Eighteen years of American dream,
He saw that his brother had sworn on the wall.
He hung up his eyelids and ran down the hall,
His mother had told him a trip was a fall,
And don’t mention babies at all.

Like Malick, but using words rather than moving pictures, Young creates a poetic evocation of childhood sexuality and repression and the way in which stories and myths work to reinforce this shame. I think this is important to discuss because I feel many critics simplify what Malick is presenting, especially the Good Mother/Bad Father binary. Certainly the mother is the better and more loving parent, but the very saintliness that is projected on to her hides the way in which she is eroticized by Malick’s images. Read from a psychoanalytic perspective, the mother and the father are more than just individual people and characters. Symbolically, they stand for much more, especially since this is primarily a flashback/memory. If the father is less sympathetic, our main protagonist nevertheless admits he is more like his father than mother, an identification that gets naturalized through entering into the social order.

While the strength of THE TREE OF LIFE is definitely in the scenes of childhood, the more controversial framing material is still important to the overall meaning and ultimately works thematically, even if it is less emotionally compelling. Although I’m an atheist, the religious nature of the sequences had power for me, probably because I viewed them as less about some vague metaphysical striving and more as a concrete expression of how one searches for meaning. Once again, it brought to mind another song lyric, this one from Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne.” Why I linked this stanza with the protagonist and his conclusion is not something I can fully articulate. Perhaps it is the use of the religious/mythic as an attempt to understand and deal with the world as humans experience it.

And Jesus was a sailor
When he walked upon the water
And he spent a long time watching
From his lonely wooden tower
And when he knew for certain
Only drowning men could see him
He said “All men will be sailors then
Until the sea shall free them”
But he himself was broken
Long before the sky would open
Forsaken, almost human
He sank beneath your wisdom like a stone

Few have ever described Malick as a particularly allusive director, seeming to be much more of an original than a cinephile/plunderer like Quentin Tarantino or even Martin Scorsese. But few recent films had me recalling and rethinking other works of art more than this one. Its unique achievement is that the allusions may be different for every single viewer, despite the mythical line that allows it to cohere. Easily the best American movie of the past five years.

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