(This essay should help you compose your feelings for the film under appreciation)
Title
Spanning the Tree Of Life
Copyright (c) W.B.LEES
June 19, 2011
Formalities
Title: Tree Of Life (2011)
Director: Terrence Malick
Writer: Terrence Malick
Staring: Brad Pitt, Sean Penn and Jessica Chastain
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0478304/
What it's about
The Meaning of Life, Nothing More or Less
What would it mean if Father's Day is Arbor Day?
What this is like, this is like...something
"2001 A Space Odyssey"(1968) Stanley Kubrick; Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke; Keir Dullea)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062622/
"La Jetee" (1962) (Chris Marker; Chris Marker; Etienne Becker)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056119/
- "Twelve Monkeys" (1995) (Terry Gilliam; Bruce Marker; Bruce Willis, Madeleine Stowe, Brad Pitt) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114746/
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085809/
"What Dreams May Come" (1998) (VincentWard; Richard Matheson; Robin Williams, Cuba Gooding Jr.)
What a coincidence (you can't make this stuff up)
- I first watched this film on the day before Father's Day
- My father-in-law was visiting
- my daughter graduated high school this week; this was the last class in the 1949 building when is being demolished.
- In the morning of the day I wached the film, I worked on a trail restoration project in the woods while it was drizzling and misty and verdant.
- the Pacific Northwest is so green this time of year
- Just two days before I watched the film, I recounting my Maternal and Paternal family histories for a medical record; this saga included my Father's strict New England upbringing and utltimately my Father's research work at World Health Organization in the 1960's; which funding was short-sightly cancelled; which is how I came to be born at Bethesda Naval Hospital; and how cuts in NIH funding redirected him from his planned research career and into medical speciality; and subsequently how events became directed so I am here writing this to you
- I tried to plant a fruit tree once, but it died
- My father once built a platform 30ft up in a tree; He designed it to adjust in the wind and expand as the tree grew; I remember falling from it in an attempt to race to climb it the fastest.
- I recounted the story just this week, that as a child we played with Rhododendron buds as lipstick one time, and my father caught us with tree on our lipes, and thought we had ingested them; My father he sat us kids down with bowls and gave us Ipacac syrup and made us throw.
- I am recalled of my father cutting my brother and my hair with buzz razor to give us crew cuts; our mother cried because we looked 'like convicts'.
- There's a giant 30 year growth Rhodie outside the window behind me reflecting in the glare of the screen as I am writing this piece to you as we speak (type).
This quote appears at the opening of the film. It is Job 34:4 I believe. I don't know which translation. Here's one from KJV in context.
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Job+38:3-5&version=KJV
Job 38:3-5
King James Version (KJV)
3Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me.
4Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding.
5Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it?
Here's a memorable quote from the film, that unlocked a flood and host. He says, approximately:
"A Naval Officer must be present for the kneel-laying, but not necessarily for the launch."
Brad Pitt's character recites this line, which turns out to be a regulation from the naval code! He is a regulation disciplariane. It is a clue. It brings an added richness to the character and formality and regimen of se-a-men father.
I encourage you to read and ponder the roles and responsibilities of these two ceremonies in relation to the film.
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Ship_ceremonies
Top of Mind
Its Hard to (still) be Small
It was hard to sit through and watch this film and be "put through" your own life over again.
It was hard because I felt small. I felt powerless and trapped. I felt like a spearm rushing or being rushed through a fluid steam into a cosmicly large and infintesimal small happening that was becoming me and and I was becoming it. Watching this film is like being that cell and being powerless but to ride and experience and simply be those people and characters and situations. It's no coincidence the film is POV'd from a chid-like perspective looking up and being afraid to look up and being fearful and elated and ashamed.
It was hard because I felt beyond my control. Was my experience sitting in the theatre going throught he emotions and experiences in the film running time like my experience on earth? Fealing elation and joy and confusion and uncertainy and dread and generally not knowing what comes next or when the end would come which woud come but I didn't know which each frame whether the end was the end.
That was Me and I remember that but I don't remember it
I believe Roger Ebert's review of the film remarked that he feelt like he was that boy in the film and that was his life. Well no I was that boy. That was my upbringing. That was my youth and all those feelings and fears. I remember my father the disciplarian and one glass of spilt milk at the table brought a rage. I remember having to keep my elbows off the table and asking to be escused. I remeber the packs of children and the tree lined drives as the old houses with screened porches and waiting in the car while your parents talked to those older people. I was born in '63 and I remember riding without seatbelts and your parents smoking in the car and my Dad watering the hard and repairing the car and being lectured on the not-slamming of the door. This film seems to be more 1950's suburbia and more midwestern industrial, but still that was my house and that was how I felt to see my baby brother and to sit with my mother on the grass playing with wooden toy animals. The film did not depict my exact reality but yet that was my childhood and I felt all those things altough I couln't have exactly. I am wondering if other readers from post boom generations feel that childhood was their childhood somehow,
Father Space-Time; Mother Earth Nature; Sun of the New Day; Tree is a Span
These Metaphors might work in undertanding the film as a physics microcosm
Father = Law of Space and Time, Prime Mover, Time Keeper, Business Law, Patents, Intellect, Music Classical Theory and master operator of the pipe organizational; enforer and the do-er of that which must be done despite the personal cost
Mother = firey hair, billowing, floating, beauty and energy and good and nature and softness
House and Yard = your space and time and gravity and place and your earth
Garden = as the family works and tills and sows and reaps, so does the garden
Power Plant and Architectural Center = Clockwork of the Universe, the Man's Ladder
Tree = the lifespan of a man, the life of man or boy or child, its the promise of the planter in a parents eye
Life's Lesson Lost
At the theatre, a patron left abruply after only 10 minutes muttering What Is This? and I'm Getting My Money Back! This life didn't seem to be what he expected. It used to be hard for me at 5 years old to sit through adult fare. Watching this movie is like that again in spades, because you know, that you thought knew what it is to grow up.
This film, like the trees growing and falling in the forest and the cycles of life and death and the cosmic collisions in the cosmos and the sperms that didn't read the egg every second of every day, is like reliving living and reliving dying and dying and living all over again, in the span of a film-life.
It's like being back in the child seat at the adult table, being strapped in and forced to sit through dinner at the adult conversation being talked about rather than talked to and being stuck there, unable to speak unless you have some more important to say. It's a privilege to be there at all and there's wonderful tidbits floating around that you don't completely get but again its the longest two hours of your short life.
Decompilation Log Ends
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