Tree of Life - An interpretation.

*Spoilers, obviously.

A lot has been said about the film's daring montage sequences. Many comparisons have been made to Stanley Kubrick's 2001 for the film's scope and ambition. Leaving the theater I was less impressed with the all the dazzling natural wonders and their breathtaking epic-ness than I was with the earnestness of the lives portrayed and the amazing performances all around.

At the center of the film is its working thesis. There are two ways of living. There is the way of nature, and the way of grace. Nature cares only for itself. It seeks pleasure, and in doing so it is a destructive force. Grace is meek. In the face of nature it takes insult and returns only composure.

In the film these two forces are personified by Jack's Father and Mother respectively. More importantly, though, they are embodied by Jack himself as he comes of age. In his innocence Jack is meek under the heavy thumb of his father. He offers him fear and respect in the face of impossible expectations and harsh reprimands. Jack cannot understand his father, only his permissive mother makes any sense to him.

But, as nature would have it, Jack cannot be innocent forever. As adolescence sets in Jack's grace fades in the wake of his nature. By the end of the film young Jack concedes that he is more like his father than his mother, implying his fall from the grace. His young brother, presumably the one who is dead at the film's outset, remains disarmingly gentle and compassionate last we see him.

Seen through the same thesis. The ambitious montage near the beginning of the film, which begins as Jack's grieving mother questions her faith in the wake of her sons death, takes the form of the nature which she cannot fully contain. She chafes under well meaning bromides as her friend attempts to help her cope, knowing the answer to her grief lies in some darker corner of herself. In this interpretation, the montage which is the films devisive centerpeice is both an earnest representation of the makings of life on earth, as well as an impressionistic representation of Jacks mother's emotional state, and by way of her, the viewer and anyone else faced with such a natural and unavoidable occurance.

In the film's Felliniesque resolution Jack imagines or perceives his mothers acceptance of his brother's death as she symbolically releases him. This final scene I believe attempts to finally unite the films two divergent approaches. If Mallick's stunning natural wonders are at first implied emotional states, here they are fully reconciled, as people from Jack's life(including his younger self) inhabit this seemingly imagined landscape where they make peace with their earthly struggles. This purely subjective setting, while it might be a place in the sky where Jack's mother says "That's where God lives", is most likely the workings of Jack's subconscious where the two forces that "wrestle inside", through his empathy, find some reconciliation as well.

Summing Up.

Over the past 6 years I've been writing poems and making animations. Recently I've been compiling these efforts into a couple anthology projects.

Baby is Mama's Favorite Toy is a selection of short animations made by myself and my good friend and most frequent collaborator Matt Bryan.

The DVD contains over 2 hours of hand drawn and computer animation.





You can preview more animations and obtain this DVD at:





2847 Cherokee Street Saint Louis, MO
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Receipts is an anthology of poems written for the Internet. The thirty-two selected poems cherry picked from Myspace blogs and Facebook notes range from serious to comic, with many sitting comfortably on the fence.

Aug 28, 2006 10:35 AM

snake-oil placebos

the machinema hamlet

gave rise to the backlash

some 50 million luddites

with pitch fork and torch

they poked holes in the tires

of the toyota camry

and set fire to the wires

of the N64

but it was this day in history

in the year 2050

when a scientist finally discovered the soul

and he scribbled his notes

on the front of every newspaper

publication and tv station

in every home

and as it turned out

the souls only found

in a species of worms

found in beirut

and they extracted them out

and put them on ice

but when the worms died

the souls had died too

and 50 million viewers

reached for their electric blankets

as they listened to the statement

of the scientist that day

and 50 million cell phones

rang together in a prayer

but they weren’t sure if

the signal could be heard

that far away

Looks for these in the local section at:

6275 Delmar In the Loop St. Louis MO

Landscapes

My long in the making concept album "5" is finally officially finished. It's not so great. So it goes. On the other hand, I made the following landscapes to accompany each song, and they came out pretty ok. Enjoy.

In the mouth

A friendly race

And there you were

The devil knows your name

Five

Bitter blood

Within an inch

Rules of the game

The way you came

original Big List splash page animation

Click here for full page size

this pun's for you!

100 posts! Don't act like you weren't counting.

Five little films that could...

5 of the best films this year were serious ventures with big ambitions but slight budgets. Don't let these indie gems fall under your radar.

Dogtooth

Dogtooth takes a simple and elegant premise and makes it believable and disturbing-- Can mom and dad keep the influence of the great big scary world out of their children's reach? Maybe all it takes is a really tall fence and lots and lots of absurd and bewildering lies. What about when the children begin to come into adulthood? Oh, What tangled webs we weave.




Blue Valentine

Much like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Blue Valentine takes a relationship's sweet beginnings and juxtaposes them with it's painful and awkward disillusion. More like A Woman Under the Influence, it removes all barriers to its realism and plays the notes as earnestly as possible. What it amounts to is a powerful warts and all emotional experience that nearly won it an NC-17 rating for an "emotionally intense sex scene."





Greenberg

Greenberg is smart, but not as smart as he thinks. Life continues to clue him into this and he keeps refusing to listen. He casts nervous aggression haphazardly in all directions scoring a few hits but mostly missing his aim. He's the defensive little egoist many of us know and many of us are. Director Noah Baumbach(Squid and the Whale) and Ben Stiller bring this little monster to life with uncanny precision.



Winter's Bone

In our little corner of the woods...perhaps a little further into the woods, a desperate young woman and her derelict uncle are forced to confront a cadre of grizzled drug runners in order to save the family homestead her meth cook father put up as bond before disappearing. Her heroic story is set against a stark Ozark winter that hits every dismal detail on it's rotten toothless head.




Exit Through the Gift Shop

Fiercely Anonymous street artist Banksy plays puppeteer with a terrible little protege and perhaps the audience as well to ask a well crafted question about art and authenticity.



Of course there's also that insufferable big budget success from the Memento guy that despite it's being completely uninteresting and unimportant, never the less, has sparked more controversy and debate than we've seen sense the original Matrix. But, alas, my tastes are too refined. A great film cannot be properly enjoyed unless only a few people can enjoy it.

Point Omega - Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo seems at his best dealing in bits of minutia, character revealed in the slightest gestures, every detail mined for its significance. It's little wonder then that his newest book Point Omega, sets itself the task of digesting a heady peice of contempory art, where mining for meaning is the name of the game.

The brief novel, singles out a recent video work, a real-life installation by a German video artist entitled 24-Hour Psycho, a slo-mo rendering of the Hitchcock classic with a 24-hour run time. The artwork becomes the jump off point for the story, weaves throughout it, illuminates the story's central themes, to the point that the novel seems as much a work of art appreciation as it does a narrative.

DeLillo's attentiveness to seemingly insignificant detail within his observations reliably cut straight to the heart of the matter. His characters are real and sympathietic, but I feel that however ideosyncratic, they are at bottom a means to a conceptual end. I don't mean this to say that somehow he is a lesser writer for it, rounding the edges off his characters to fit nicely in a conceptual framework. On the contrary, i think he's one of the few writers who can take a top-down idea and see it from the bottom up. In this way he shares a vein with his conceptual artist counterparts.

Having never viewed 24-Hour Psycho, I feel I can appreciate it anyhow. Much like his similar book The Body Artist, all the conceptualizing does take place within the confines of a traditional novel. There are descriptions of art and interpretations of art. But through the words and because of the words, there seems to be very little lost in translation, its almost as if you were experiencing the art first hand with all those fleeting associations, quiet reverences, and little epiphanies caught in their tracks and brought to bear on the page.

Oh i almost forgot...there is a story too! A filmmaker follows an old man(a powerful ex idea-man for the war in Iraq) to his vacation home in Arizona in hopes of making an experimental film about him. Heady Ideas about time and space are rendered realistically and convincingly, and a hunger for film and media criticism is handsomely rewarded. Point Omega is the work of an aging yet powerful writer who still has much to tell us.