TY - JOUR
AU1 - Carman, Colin
AB - You should have looked to it! –Sophocles, Oedipus the King (25) My wood, my wood, it never shall be yours. –Fowles (7) The source of my second epigraph is The Tree (1979) by British novelist John Fowles, which is an instructive complement to American filmmaker Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” (2011) insofar as it foregrounds the social, specifically filial, relations that inform a person’s relationship to the natural world. Fowles’ long essay forms the root-system of the following argument, which is focused mainly on Malick’s films but branches outward to other instances of tree-worship. These two works help to close the gap between ecology and psychoanalysis, two fields of study thought to be incompatible though each combines the social and biological in some way.1 In a 2008 ISLE article entitled “Green Film Criticism and Its Future,” Adrian Ivakhiv argued that a more fully developed form of “eco-cinecriticism” has to explore the interdisciplinarity of environmental philosophy, psychoanalysis, and visual culture (1). Why not braid together all three lines of inquiry to produce a hybridized form of eco-film studies equally attuned to the role of trees in our fantasies and in our ecosystems?2 To that end, in this intertextual analysis of Fowles’ environmentalist confessional and Malick’s ecologically-minded film, I will first illustrate what seems to me an oedipal ecology at work in Fowles, then connect this psychic dynamic to “The Tree of Life” in order to explain some of Malick’s more puzzling imagery and narrative structure; from there, I conclude by stressing the secret value of humankind’s persistent constructions of nature solely in terms of what Freud famously termed the “family romance” (e.g., mother/earth, father/sky, family/tree) (92). The eco-positive, neo-Freudian aim of this essay is to try to think beyond the strictly familial and thus familiar terms of experiencing nature. Fowles and Malick, while ineradicably trapped in the narrative conventions and fantasies that drive storytelling, encourage readers and viewers alike to imagine a nonhuman world and the intrinsic otherness of their environment. If, as Scott Knickerbocker writes in Ecopoetics: The Language of Nature, the Nature of Language, the “mission of environmentalism is to help us gain a meaningful relationship with the nonhuman world and to encourage more ecologically oriented behavior,” these nonfictional and filmic works by Fowles and Malick can be easily enlisted in such a mission inasmuch as they force us to confront the sublime otherness of nature while still utilizing the subject–object relations that make knowing nature, and representing it, even possible. To begin, The Tree has three main parts, each of which is occupied by three male figures, the first of whom is the writer’s father Robert John Fowles; the second is the eighteenth-century taxonomist Carl Linnaeus, and, finally, the author himself who, as I will argue, struggles to supplant these paternal precursors. In order for Fowles to assert himself as the highest limb of a family tree that is at once biological and cultural, he must first begin with his upbringing in Essex, about forty miles northeast of London, in the 1920s. The first section of The Tree pits his father’s sense of order against the author’s own closeness to nature but it does so in arboreal terms. “These trees had a far greater influence on our lives than I ever realized when I was young,” he recalls, speaking of the pedagogic power of trees to teach him something and to rival his own father’s influence over his offspring (5). Robert Fowles’ control over his son John is manifested in his meticulous management of the five orchard apple trees, fenced in by a gridiron espalier, and subject to what John calls “constant debranching and pruning,” which left them “cunningly stunted” (4–5). Secretly, John longs to escape the confines of his father’s hortus conclusus (or walled garden) and to experience the outdoors for himself. Excursions with an uncle (an entomologist) and two of his cousins (a big game huntsman and a nature-photographer) provide him with his first encounters with a natural world untamed by man. The opening pages of The Tree read like the Book of Genesis in reverse because his paradise is lost from the start, even “highly unnatural” (6), while the openness of farms and parks in the English countryside appear to him as “real” nature. “More and more I secretly craved everything our own environment did not possess: space, wildness, hills, woods,” writes Fowles, “I think especially woodland, ‘real’ trees” (7). Fowles lays special emphasis on the “realness” of the untrimmed tree when he writes that only by leaving his father’s garden did he “learn nature for the first time in a true countryside among true countrymen” (my emphasis, 14). This love of the countryside does not equate with a jingoistic fervor for his native England, however, as there is an Anglophobic streak in Fowles’ teenage rebellion. According to Rachel Crawford, the apple had been used as a symbol to define the British character in agricultural texts and kitchen-garden manuals since the eighteenth century. Fowles admits that the names and flavors of different fruits, such as Lady Sudeley and Peasgood’s Nonsuch (a traditional English cooking apple), “haunt me still” (4). The “eating of apples and drinking of cider,” writes Crawford, would become a “patriotic, quasi-sacramental act of national faith,” which means that Fowles’ rejection of fruit-trees disguises a deeper dislike for his father (land) (29). With the specter of Hitler on the rise in the 1930s, the Fowles family relocates to Devon where John soon discovered his own private paradise, which, interestingly, he again empties of its Englishness by describing this new world as “my America of endless natural [trees] in Devon” (8). Even when his father was functioning as the family’s provider, the son struggles to get as far away as he can. The reader is given the most significant details of Robert Fowles’ life, such as his service in World War I, the death of his brother at the battle of Ypres, and his attempts to run a successful business in postwar England, but the tone sours considerably when John Fowles reveals the secret that his father had long kept from him. Robert Fowles was himself an aspiring writer and with this revelation, his son’s Bloomian anxiousness regarding influence spills over.3 (The more than seventy epigraphs inserted into Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman also bear out this anxiety.) Before he even shares the details of his father’s unpublished book, for example, he provides context only from a narcissistic vantage point (“I became a novelist,” “My first book,” “suddenly one day he announced to me”) (my emphasis, 11). Only on the release of his debut novel The Collector in 1962 did Robert Fowles feel safe to share his own writing in the hopes that his manuscript might also make a good film. Yet Fowles is brutal in his assessment of his father’s craft, calling it “stiff and old-fashioned,” naïve, unsophisticated, and written as if its author had no knowledge of the great First World War poets like Owen, Rosenberg and Sassoon (11). Despite his criticism, Fowles admits to using fragments of his father’s fiction in the war scenes in 1965’s The Magus, which is another way of swallowing up all competitors. Bragging that the book’s success meant that he could abandon his teaching career for a full-time writing career, he characterizes Robert as bourgeois capitalist only interested in fruit-trees because they turned a profit in the marketplace. Throughout his treatise, Fowles posits that to believe in nature’s “purpose,” or even that nature must produce something—what he calls the wrongheaded notion of nature’s “usability”—is to misunderstand nature (40). But as much as he protests nature’s purposefulness, he is blind to the way nature is coopted in his adamant refusal to identify with his father. The darkest of all the memories recounted in The Tree involves John Fowles at his father’s deathbed in a nursing home. Laced with adolescent bitterness, it suggests another kind of battlefield since Fowles begins by describing their lives in the vaguest terms imaginable only to shatter it all with a sudden homicidal rancor. “Beside his bed that day I thought of all the crossroads in our two lives where I had murdered him,” he writes, “or at least what he believed in” (14). The sentiment is more bellicose than it is remorseful, and even with his ailing father on the brink of a coma laid before him, the author is direct in his desire to kill him off, both through prose and through his embrace of a purposeless void, a chaos that only exists in relation to paternal law, or in the parlance of Lacan, the name-of-the-father and its severing impact on the mother–child relationship.4 If the threat of castration isn’t palpable enough in Fowles’ aversion to his father’s pruning shears, the oedipal tension at play in The Tree rises to the surface in a passage in which the author concedes that the Freudianism is plain to see, but only in a defensive manner as if to dismiss even the possibility that Freud, as another paternalistic figure and failure in terms of influence, could be right. Forget Freud, says Fowles, forgetting that the will to forget is itself a repressing tendency. He writes: That I should have differed so much from my father in this seems to me in retrospect not in the least a matter for oedipal guilt, but a healthy natural process, just as the branches of a healthy tree do not try to occupy one another’s territory. The tree in fact has biochemical and light-sensitive systems to prevent this pointless and wasteful secondary invasion of one branch’s occupied space by another. (21) The main thing to notice about this passage is its disorienting shift from the psychological to the arboreal, from blood relations to insentient trees guided by photosynthesis and the cold-sounding “systems” rather than by negative affect (e.g., “guilt,” and elsewhere in the passage, “repression,” “sublimation”) (39). In short, thinking/feeling human beings stiffen into trees so as to not be noticed. Proleptically, the it’s-not-what-you’re-thinking logic instates the very thing it wishes to deny. This selfsame bias resurges later in The Tree when Fowles repudiates the idea that nature can have therapeutic effects on people, for nature is not “therapy,” he writes, nor is it “a free clinic for admirers of their own sensitivity” (39). Yet, in an interview published in 1988, Fowles said that it was the “symbolism” and “mechanical structure” of Freudian psychiatry that he found most satisfying (qtd. in Tarbox 188). Regardless, on this anti-Freudian note, the first part of The Tree is cut short. The second part of Fowles’ essay marks a transition from familial to scientific history, and throughout, he advocates a sensitivity to nature that differs from that of Robert Fowles and from the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707–78) who rears his head as a second father-figure in The Tree and is cautiously praised as a “founding father” of the natural sciences (52). Here Fowles broadens the antiauthoritarianism of his essay since he is throwing off another influence, this time, Linnaeus—the so-called “great warehouse clerk and indexer of nature”—and his will to put everything in its place (24). Donald C. Goellnicht notes that in taking on the “herculean task of describing and categorizing all plants according to their class, order, genus, and species” in the widely-read Genera Plantarum (republished repeatedly between 1740 and 1770), Linnaeus’s “encyclopedic works of taxonomy” are responsible for bringing “order to the chaotic field of botany” (85). “Order” seems to be the operative word in Goellnicht’s assessment of Linnaeus’s achievement in the sciences since Fowles privileges chaos, or what he extols as the “green chaos” of the woods, over logos (53). Linnaeus, then, is no better than Robert Fowles since he too sought to rearrange the natural world in his own image by assigning purposefulness to what John Fowles terms “primordial nature and reality” (52). The “historic place” in which he stands in the essay’s second part is Linnaeus’s own walled garden in the university town of Uppsala in Sweden, and he confesses to puzzling his hosts after he insists on seeing the garden rather than the university library (24). Fowles claims to be a self-professed “heretic” when it comes to the taxonomist’s achievements, which he praises as an extension of Aristotle’s efforts to systemize the field of natural science, but ultimately criticizes as blind to the essential chaos of the exterior world (25). Aristotle is usually credited as the first to write about plants and, as Ruth Kassinger notes in A Garden of Marvels, “he might have started with, ‘First, we must consider the purpose of a plant’” (28). According to Fowles, the classificatory schema pioneered by Linnaeus is the residue of the taxonomical efforts privileged by the Victorians—by empirical-minded men like his father—and their love of categorization. In contrast to order, wildness is what the Linnaean system denies, and through this denial, man detaches himself from his environment. Only when man disavows the impulse to project purposefulness onto the natural world and recognize the intrinsically anarchic sprit of the outdoors can he foster an ethic of conservationism. To protect the planet means to respect the restrictions that the exterior world places on human subjectivity. It also means that we should stop thinking about barley, for example, only in terms of grain and trees only in terms of starting fires and making paper. In his opposition to the ordering (and exploitative) impulses of the sciences, Fowles appears to associate the unknowable and uncontrollable aspects of nature with otherness, or, in the words of Noah Heringman, the “limitations on human agency” in object relations (55). In his study of Romantic-era rocks and what he calls “geological otherness,” Heringman notes that rocks, like trees, have long operated as obstacles to such intellectual enterprises as technology, art, and what he calls “forms of human ordering” (55–56). The Tree ends on a didactic note when Fowles urges his readers to learn that such “inalienable otherness” lies at the “heart” of a more progressive ecological paradigm. Yet the heart of Fowles’ ecological sense is a glaringly oedipal one to the extent that the author clings, in a compensatory way, to nature just as strongly as he jettisons the father for standing in his way. For Freud, in The Ego and the Id, the son’s relation to the father is colored by hostility, rivalry and, at the very least, ambivalence, and the Oedipus complex is only dissolved through the boy’s identification with his father, a “more normal” outcome than the boy’s identification with his mother, which is more anomalous and neurotic in character (27). Tellingly, there is absolutely no mention of Fowles’ mother, Gladys May Richards, in The Tree. Saying nothing, however, often speaks volumes. A clear parallel to Malick’s “The Tree of Life” takes shape when Jack refers to the loved ones he has lost and asks: “Brother. Mother. It is they who brought me to your door?” He is addressing nature whose door is closed, and whose mouth is mute, but who leads man on nonetheless. If Fowles wishes to connect the awe-inspiring essence of nature to an ethic of respect and reverence, surely the sublime as an aesthetic category should be expressly evoked. Is this Fowles’ argument? He never directly alludes to eighteenth-century conceptions of the sublime, but that esthetic certainly springs to life in his description of wild nature as “unphilosophical, irrational, uncontrollable, incalculable” (37). The sponsors of this fear-based response to the natural world include Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Immanuel Kant, all of whom were interested in formulating conceptions of the sublime. Kant may be the most germane of those thinkers since he singles out the oak tree while differentiating the sublime from the beautiful, as was standard practice in such works as Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) and Wollstonecraft’s Letters written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Demark (1796). Verticality, as well as vastness, is an essential qualification for Kant’s definition of sublimity since snow-capped mountains are sublime, whereas flower-covered meadows are merely beautiful. Similarly, “tall oaks and lonely shadows in a sacred grove are sublime,” whereas “low hedges and trees trimmed in figures are beautiful” (271). Man’s manipulation of his environment, manifested in the trimmed figure of the topiary, yields the beautiful while the sublime encompasses that which cannot be rationally processed by humans. This is a centuries-old impression of nature’s sublime otherness and one, unsurprisingly, that explains Fowles’ love of Wistman’s Wood, the high-altitude oakwood in Dartmoor, which is the setting of the essay’s last part. Pace Kant, Fowles singles out the qeuercus robur, or the English Oak, as the “reigning tree” and the “ancient king of all our trees” (84). “Our” implies a nationalistic sense of belonging otherwise missing in The Tree though a strong attachment to place, and a specifically British place, resurfaces before too long. The third and final part of The Tree—I should concede that the subdivision of Fowles’ un-chaptered, ninety-page essay is symptomatic of my own impulse to systematize—offers additional proof that its author conceives of nature as sublimely other. Forests, he argues, are like works of fiction since they hide things, and all narratives, since The Epic of Gilgamesh onward, have used the forest as a setting in which mystery and adventure abound. The ending of his essay deals primarily with the relationship between art and nature; Barry Lopez comments that art is exalted by Fowles since art alone perceives “no threat, no great evil in unlimited chaos” while the artist’s connection with nature is “personal, intimate, and without objective” (14). The Tree ends with a brief survey of western art vis-à-vis trees, from the role of forests in literature (Shakespeare), myth (Robin Hood), and the fine arts (Pisanello) to a philosophical take on forests as the epistemological (and erotic) unknown in popular folklore. The otherness of the woods lies in conceptions of the forest as dark, even diabolical—an “immense green cloak for Satan,” writes Fowles (68). Some of the more famous works of tree-worship, ranging from John Muir’s The Yosemite to Robert Frost’s “Birches,” vary in terms of whether a tree’s alterity can be overcome or not.5 But the aspects of the essay’s final part that I wish to emphasize before turning to another work of tree-worship, the critically acclaimed film “The Tree of Life,” pertain to representing trees on film—a topic seldom discussed—and Fowles offers two interesting insights about celluloid trees.6 First, he likens the act of viewing a film to moving through a forest, which is not, for him, a “static” physical entity but a moving picture. Even when standing still, it is “the images in the projector gate that shift,” writes Fowles, “as do the words on the page and the scenes they evoke” (54). This is a useful way to bridge the topography of any wooded place and the theatrical space of the cinema, for “The Tree of Life” unfolds like a forest of images and cut-up scenes. “Scene” as it was once applied to landscape painting, as John Barrell explains, has its roots in the Greek theatre and in the skenê, or tent, that lay opposite the viewer.7 Milton understood as much since he describes his prelapsarian paradise as that “Silvan Scene,” that “woodie Theatre/Of stateliest view” (IV.140–41).8 Second, Fowles argues that the two predominant tools used by artists to capture reality—“the word and the camera”—are incapable of reproducing the sound, smell, and size of a woodland. Like the sea, the forest defies both language and photography since it “cannot be framed” (60). With its unique power to overwhelm the human spectator, the forest is sublime because of its perpendicular vastness. Malick, in collaboration with Oscar-winning cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, appears to follow Fowles’ lead to the extent that he films a few forests, modern-day and prehistoric, in “The Tree of Life,” but focuses mainly on a few individual trees. The oak outside the O’Brien family home in Waco, Texas, for example, is meant to contrast the tree with its roots balled in a concrete planter at the base of Jack O’Brien’s office building in the city (an objective correlative for Jack’s detachment from nature in an urban environment). Malick carefully couples image with voice-over, so, for example, just as we see this urban tree, we hear, in a voice-over, a question that only compounds the desolation of the scene: “How did I lose you?” Given that the tree, like the spider’s web, is a fairly standard signifier for any kind of relatedness, it is easy to see how Fowles, by the end of The Tree, climbs his way to the tree-tops in order to assert himself, his artistry, and his ecological dogma as superior to his father’s and to Linnaeus’s.9 By the end, The Tree elevates the literary artist above the businessman (Robert Fowles) and the scientist (Linnaeus) and posits Wistman’s Wood as real nature and true countryside. The message may be ecological but the medium is overtly oedipal in its anxious desire to bury the past and plant something original in its place. Despite his belief that language is ill-equipped to represent the woods, The Tree is an attempt to do just that: worship the tree as a synecdoche for all of nature and disavow the father as a synecdoche for law and society. A book, after all, is a paper commodity and through the act of publishing, Fowles needs the raw materials to promulgate a new and more eco-conscious kind of law for his readers. Moreover, every text (from textum, Latin for woven cloth) is like a tree in that its roots are interwoven with other roots invisible to the naked eye. The Tree is an effort, then, to supersede all influences excepting nature itself, which the writer alone perceives in a way others do not. What connects The Tree and “The Tree of Life” is its interest in representing the otherness of the nonhuman world, but whereas Gladys Fowles is omitted in Fowles’ paean to nature, the fictionalized mother in Malick’s film is indispensable in a work no less obsessed with nature, origins, and the family romance. The first two words heard in “The Tree of Life” are delivered by Sean Penn (as Jack O’Brien) in a soft, benedictory tone: “Brother. Mother.” Jack’s father, Mr. O’Brien (played by Brat Pitt) is an even more forceful (even fearsome) presence than Robert Fowles in The Tree, which is why “Father” is omitted from that opening formulation. Throughout the film, Malick balances the harshness of paternal law with the unyielding tenderness of Mrs. O’Brien (played by Jessica Chastain). We see the couple only in flashbacks as the grief-stricken, fortysomething Jack recalls the death of his nineteen-year-old brother (whose name is R.L.) years earlier. In one such flashback, we see Mr. O’Brien teaching his son to box on the front lawn where he goads Jack into striking him harder, saying “C’mon son! Hit me!” His pugilism, and total control over his wife and sons, offsets the glow of Mrs. O’Brien who only scolds Jack twice in the film. Otherwise, she functions as the hortus conclusus, a protective bower insulating her sons from Mr. O’Brien’s authoritarianism. Malick could have just as well as used Proverbs—“She is a tree of life to those who lay hold of her/those who hold her fast are called happy”—as he did Job (3: 18). Loving the father is something that does not come naturally to the O’Brien boys. Thus, when he sternly demands that a teenage Jack kiss him on the cheek and tell him what he wants to hear—“Do you love your father?”—Jack answers him dutifully: “Yes, father.” Later, when he reprimands Jack for calling him “Dad” and not the obligatory “Father,” Jack replies: “You’d like to kill me.” Dumbfounded, O’Brien grabs him by the nape of the neck but says nothing. With the exception of Shawn Lohte’s essay, in which he notes Malick’s “extensive onscreen displays of the interactivity of nature and human life” (166), the scholarship produced since the 2011 release of “The Tree of Life” has focused exclusively on its metaphysical and Judeo-Christian themes, which means a fully eco-conscious understanding of the film is still incomplete.10 By arranging the natural world and the human family (the O’Briens) as organizing forces in life, Malick’s masterpiece continues the same line of questioning evident in “The Thin Red Line” (1998) as it relates to the so-called “heart of nature”—Malick’s leitmotif as of late. Continuing this question of what resides there, “The Tree of Life” asks whether humans can really access and comprehend a heart, or any ontological state, that is nonhuman, outside of them, and sublimely other. The problem, then, is one of representation since Malick appears to be asking: what does nature see, hear and feel like? His use of silence can be jolting since it forces the viewer to enjoy the silence of nature for its mute and unintelligible otherness. In “The Tree of Life,” the heart of nature is the heart of the mother, which is in keeping with the ancient association, in Near Eastern creation stories—the most foundational of which is the divine garden in Book of Genesis—between the tree of life, femininity, and fertility.11 Malick’s twist on traditional tree-worship, however, is that he oedipalizes it, for his films suggest that the sentiments of guilt and shame are necessary stages in the development of man’s ecological ethos. Lacan calls the Oedipus Complex the “central motivation” behind the Freudian unconscious, and the “laws” on which all marital and kinship ties are based (“The Freudian Thing,” 142). It is also the central motivating force upon which Malick’s worship for the earth, and trees in particular, rests. Such a conflation between mother and nature has long vexed eco-feminists sensitive to the Cartesian rupture between man and nature, and man’s marginalization of woman and nature since he reveres and fears them both in equal measure.12 “The Tree of Life” takes even more liberties with cinematic storytelling than Malick’s previous films as it is deeply nonlinear and somewhat jarring in its free-associations. A brief shot of O’Brien bringing his ear toward his wife’s pregnant belly, for example, shifts to iron gates opening into a green forest and the hand of Mrs. O’Brien beckoning the viewer forward. More dizzying is when she is seen levitating Peter Pan-style in front of the family tree. “The Tree of Life” is part nature documentary, part family drama, part classical music video, and the rest is a Kubrickian space odyssey. It also charts, as we shall see, an ecological ethic that idealizes the household, specifically the mother, and its interconnectedness with all organic life. After winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes, “The Tree of Life” received Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Cinematography, but it appears to have confused, even angered, many American moviegoers. Perhaps the popular frustration with this film is attributable to the “green chaos” (to borrow from Fowles) of its overlapping and vine-like plotlines. Malick does not allow his audience to sit idly by, like (no pun) a bump on a log, but forces them to be active participants who must connect the parts to comprehend the whole. Not everyone is up to the task. One movie theater in Connecticut posted a no-refunds sign after disgruntled viewers claimed a bait-and-switch had duped them into an “art house” film through Brad Pitt’s name on the marquee. Pitt’s costar Sean Penn, meanwhile, confessed to Le Figaro that he is uncertain what role he even serves in the film and that Malick never clearly explained the part to him (qtd. in Brody). Despite their perceived incoherence of Malick’s structures, the six films Malick has written and directed since 1973’s “Badlands” are experimental in their own way and they lend themselves to literary analysis because the most recurrent adjective used by film scholars to describe his filmography is “poetic.”13 Malick the auteur is also something on an anomaly in Hollywood as the interview-shy director graduated from Harvard University, studied philosophy as Rhodes scholar at Oxford University, and published a translation of Heidegger’s Vom Wesen des Grundes in 1969. “The Tree of Life” continues to ponder the same question about humanity and its relationship to nature that his war film, “The Thin Red Line” (1998) raised over a decade earlier. Based on James Jones’s 1962 novel about the World War II battle of Guadalcanal, “The Thin Red Line” begins in manner tonally untraditional as far as war films go. One can draw a straight line from the soldier’s voice-over that opens “The Thin Red Line” to the sotto-voce declarations of Jack O’Brien at the start of “The Tree of Life.” The former begins eerily with a low, extended chord from Hans Zimmer’s score and the image of a predator, the crocodile, slipping slowly below a river’s surface green with algae. Malick cuts to the base of a giant tropical tree, the light streaming through its branches, as Robert Witt (a US Army Private played by Jim Caviezel) asks: “What is this war at the heart of nature? Why does nature vie with itself? The land contends with the sea. Is there an avenging power in nature? Not one but two?” Malick bears out this weighty question through the symbolic contrast between good (sunlight through treetops) and evil (the reptile). To date, Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit have given us the most perceptive and complex analysis of “The Thin Red Line” to date, and, in Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity (2004), they note the important relationship between first-person voice-over narration and visualization in Malick. Voice-overs are, they write, “a way of making the entire film the repetition of an immense question,” so that the viewer comes to see how, in fact, war is “brought into the heart of nature by men” (131–34). Nature appears only as a blank slate that the clashing armies effectively destroy prior to the Allied victory. Given the virtual absence of women in “The Thin Red Line,” and the total absence of those who speak, Malick’s war film can be viewed as an indictment of male aggression; thus, the commander (played by George Clooney) and his address to Charlie Company: “We are a family. I’m the father … family can only have only one head and that’s the father. The father is the head and the mother runs it.” This all-male family is missing its mother, however, and thus hostility and bloody chaos serve as the engines of war and the sacrificial death its demands. In contrast to the masculinist violence at the dark heart of “The Thin Red Line,” “The Tree of Life” extols what appears to be the maternal grace at the heart of nature. In Mrs. O’Brien’s opening voice-over, she instructs: “There are two ways through life: the way of nature and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you’ll follow.” But these pathways are by no means mutually exclusive, for nature and grace combine to form the luminous figure that is Mrs. O’Brien. Within the film’s first five minutes, Malick announces his indebtedness to two influences: literature and nature. The epigraph that precedes the film’s first image, that of a flickering red light, is from the Book of Job and the speech in which God speaks from the whirlwind. Malick selects the very rhetorical question—“Where were you when I founded earth?/and all the sons of God shouted for joy”—singled out by Edward S. Casey, in The Fate of Place, to discuss theories of creation in terms of place and what Casey terms “cosmogenesis,” that is, the development of measurable places in Job, which he calls the “inaugural creation text of the Judeo-Christian tradition” (14). At its center, the text features a largely silent godhead who finally appears in the form of father/sky to ask Job pointedly, “Does the rain have a father?” This is an important question that not only frames the natural elements in familial terms, but provides the biblical template for all of the unanswerable questions raised in “The Tree of Life.” It was not uncommon in antiquity to think about nature in such anthropocentric terms, for as Kassinger writes, the earliest scientific investigations into the life of the tree speculated that the tree was an undeveloped animal without warmth but whose “roots were like mouths, branches like arms and legs, and leaves like hair” (28). This human/tree overlap is stressed later in “The Tree of Life” when the O’Brien family attends a church service in which the priest quotes Job: “Like a tree, we are rooted up.” Mrs. O’Brien also worships the human-like qualities of the tree (and vice versa) when she starts a race between the growth of a newly planted tree and her oldest son. At one point, she points toward the sky and says: “That’s where God lives.” The idea that trees are ladders to god is as old, if not older, than the creation myths of the Zuni Indian tribes that once occupied the American Southwest.14 Another poetic touch is Malick’s use of the voice-over and the philosophical questions—often unanswered and unanswerable, in keeping with the Job-God showdown—that his characters consistently raise in their confrontations with the natural world. I will also be discussing the ground-level camera angle that aligns the viewer’s eye with nature’s vantage point. On what he terms the “aesthetic sublimity” of “The New World” (2005), Malick’s adaptation of the John Smith-Pocahontas legend, Robert Sinnerbrink contends that the audacity of that film (Malick’s fourth) is that it “allow[s], through cinematic poetry, nature to reveal or disclose itself as a ‘subject,’ as a participant in mythic history” (193). His films are unusual, in other words, because they grant agency to animal and plant life, as evidenced by long shots of locusts in “Days of Heaven” (1978) and the owl perched in a tree in “The Thin Red Line.”15 Equally revelatory is the sacred role of the mother/spirit since, in a voice-over by Pocahontas, she queries: “Mother, where do you live? In the sky? The clouds? The sea?” Here a Native-American woman addresses a mother that straddles human and nonhuman realms and, in effect, unifies the two. “The Tree of Life” goes further through the mother’s voice-over whereby she becomes a mouthpiece for nature, saying “Nature only wants to please itself and have others please it, too. Likes to lord it over them, to have its own way.” This declaration implies a possible reciprocity in man’s love of nature despite the fact that we are used to thinking of nature-lovers as the unrequited kind. It also explains the deadpan humor behind a recent cartoon in The New Yorker in which a man—or more aptly, a tree-hugger—is pictured with his arms wrapped around a tree trunk as he laments: “This is never going to work—You’re a tree!” There are a few scenes in which trees figure as objects of worship that I wish to explicate before I conclude since, collectively, these trees help to clarify Malick’s narrative and the film’s eco-commitments. First, there is the live oak in front of the house that, like the dinner table, helps to unify the O’Briens on a daily basis. In the opening sequence, we see Mrs. O’Brien from the tree’s perspective as she swings gleefully back and forth on the lawn, and later, Mr. O’Brien models an ethic of environmental stewardship by planting and watering a fledgling in front of his wife and sons. Here the mother is shot from below, in one of those bottom-up angles that connects the child’s viewpoint with hers, as she smiles: “You’ll be grown before that tree is tall.” This oak stands at the center of much of the film’s action but it is also an object of worship since the tree and the mother are twinned in “The Tree of Life.” In the spirit of ecological culture, Malicks worships an earth-household. In addition, there is a brief but important scene of education at the base of the oak wherein Mrs. O’Brien teaches the infant Jack to connect shapes and sounds. “Two alligators,” she says, then “kangaroo,” which he mimics verbally as he holds up those corresponding wooden blocks. There are many animals onscreen in “The Tree of Life”—birds, dinosaurs, frogs, even a lizard that the boys use to frighten their mother—but the wooden alligator is a self-referential joke on Malick’s part. It recalls the countless close-ups of animals in his films, especially the crocodile in “The Thin Red Line.” It also evokes Lacan’s provocative formulation on the subject of maternal jouissance: “The mother’s role is the mother’s desire. That’s fundamental. The mother’s desire is not something that is bearable …. A huge crocodile whose jaws you are in—that’s the mother” (112). Lacan grants the mother a different kind of authoritarian power over the family structure, for it is her desire rather than her fist that reigns supreme. But since desire is always what the subject lacks, it is something other and, to the adolescent Jack, something no less scary than a crocodile’s power to castrate him. Thus he clings to Mrs. O’Brien since, like a tree with its overhanging branches, she has the power to protect him from his father’s aggression. Malick’s definition of the mother’s desire may not be as violent as Lacan’s—she is more like a bower than a crocodile’s jaws—but it does accord an equally formidable power to Mrs. O’Brien in Jack’s memories. If anything, Malick’s tree-worship is more consistent with the animistic traditions of Native American philosophy, from the Hopi Badger Clan and its ceremonial use of the spruce tree to certain Pueblo prayers directed at the pine tree before it was cut down.16 In Malick’s unique Americanization of indigenous tree-worship, Jack’s attraction to an older woman in the neighborhood results in feeling ashamed, and it’s shame that nips his mother-complex in the bud. With O’Brien away on a business trip, Jack is free to explore; we see him creep into the woman’s house and steal her silk nightgown from a dresser drawer. Panicked, he tries to hide the garment in the forest but sends it down the river instead. As he is returning home late, he sees his mother with her arms folded, waiting for him on the curb. He remains mute as he swings from the oak at which point Malick cuts to Mrs. O’Brien wiping away Jack’s tears as he tells her: “I can’t talk to you. Don’t look at me.” Regardless, only with the controlling father out of the picture does a temporary paradise take shape, allowing the boys to roam the woods and discover other sources of desire beyond their primary object-choice. All of this is characteristic of what Robert Silberman has called “Malick’s Edenic mythologizing” though with a direct development of the sexual aspect of the Genesis myth since Jack’s access to the tree of (carnal) knowledge is followed by his return to the tree of life (embodied by Mrs. O’Brien) where he is too ashamed of his newfound sexuality to look her in the eye (165). Malick’s interpretation of origin is that the son betrays the mother once he discovers external sources of pleasure. The mixture of trees and sexuality is more explicit in “Badlands” where Holly (Sissy Spacek), one half of a Bonnie-and-Clyde couple on a killing spree, loses her virginity to Kit (Martin Sheen) in the crook of a tree, and after seeing him kill her father, hides out in a tree-house before their capture. “We built our house in the trees,” she says of their grove of cottonwoods, “There wasn’t a plant in the forest that didn’t come in handy.” In addition to Jack’s sexual awakening, another obvious sign that the O’Brien sons must fall from their mother’s paradise is when a truck carrying barrels of DDT enters the neighborhood and the local children excitedly chase after it. Without this scene, Malick’s film might be guilty of “greenwashing,” which David Ingram defines as the “attempt to deny or cover up the fundamental causes of environmental degradation,” so plain to see in works of mainstream cinema like Disney’s The Lion King and Pocahontas (14). Malick’s camera moves slowly from beneath the oak to the side of the truck, which is marked “City of Waco, Department of Mosquito Control.” The scene is short but horrifying inasmuch as the children, and the trees in the background, are defenseless against lethal poisons, or against what Rachel Carson once called “sprays, dusts, and aerosols” that “coat the leaves with a deadly film” (6). The poisonous intrusion of law and public “safety” is consistent with the father’s hand in the O’Brien boys’ upbringing since their old man, like Robert Fowles in The Tree, embodies the super-ego, or the voice of authority that squelches the delights found within the mother’s sylvan space. The oedipal aggression climaxes when Jack sees his father working beneath the family car, fantasizes about it falling and crushing him, and whispers a homicidal prayer, which only the viewer hears: “Please God, kill him, let him die, get him out of here.” “Here” refers to the household where, despite Fowles’ protestation in The Tree, sons are often afraid that their fathers will invade their space and block their access to personal fulfillment. Thus, we see a defiant Jack, in the oedipal triangle below the oak, walk past his mother only to scream in O’Brien’s face, “She only loves me!” Anyone familiar with “The Tree of Life” will remember the scene involving dinosaurs as seemingly out-of-place though this non sequitur of sorts serves, in fact, a thematic purpose. The scene is also full of trees, which makes it the last sequence in “The Tree of Life” that I wish to unpack vis-à-vis the art of tree worship. It occurs roughly thirty minutes into the film and after the viewer has been ferried back in time to the creation of the universe with Big Bang-like eruptions of cosmic light and volcanic lava. Malick presents us with his own “cosmogenesis” (Casey 14). What makes the sight of trees, and the dinosaurs below them, sublime is the instability of it all; everything is beyond our comprehension and, in the parlance of Job, “without limit” (Job 9). Again, in the context of Kant, Peter Szendy writes that the sublime starts where there is no “point of view at all … no standpoint where one could stand to see, evaluate, measure, or judge” (107). In short, the sublime begins where man loses his footing. First, we see a dinosaur foraging for food alone in a dense network of ferns and redwoods. It reaches the riverside where three more dinosaurs, standing downstream, scatter, leaving behind a sickly member of the pack to die by the river’s edge. It approaches the dying creature slowly, then, steps on its skull as if to crush it, but after making prolonged eye contact, it suddenly spares its life and joins the others. Sublimity lies in the fact that the dinosaur’s eyes are unreadable, and that the viewer has no idea what motivates this act of mercy, much less what this scene means in the larger context of “The Tree of Life.” The only source of continuity is the voice of Jessica Chastain who intones: “Who are we to you? Answer me.” Nature, like the godhead in the Book of Job, is mostly silent, but Malick’s use of silence is important because it underscores the degree to which our anthropocentric projections are neither confirmed nor denied by the external world. In short, they are all we know. In order to make sense of this mise-en-scène, then, be apprised that there are five dinosaurs present, just as there are five members of the O’Brien family, and that the sympathetic dinosaur could be a prehistoric version of Jack who, eons later, will contemplate his father’s murder but ultimately sublimate this wish. In the case of the dinosaur, his actions can be explained in terms of what ecologists call “altruistic behavior,” such as the alarm call, which alerts other individuals to the presence of a predator at the expense of the individual alarming them.17 Malick presents his own creation myth in order to trace the development of human morality, which, for him, began when animals began to think of the other, and since the sequence is meant to connect disparate time frames, it is a less literal version of the prelude to Kubrick’s “2001: Space Odyssey” where an ape throws a bone in the air and it morphs into spaceship. In terms of other cinematic influences, Malick’s dinosaur is Spielberg’s Tyrannosauraus-rex but defanged. The late Svetlana Boym, in The Future of Nostalgia, has connected the mythical figure of the dinosaur with what she calls the American “nostalgia industry” (a.k.a. Hollywood) and all the longing (algia) for home (nostos) that nostalgia implies (33). The dinosaur in “The Tree of Life” manifests Malick’s obsession with home, with origins, but also with America itself. Whereas Europe longs for folklore and dragons, Boym writes, “the dinosaur is America’s unicorn, the mythical animal of Nature’s Nation” (33).18 Accordingly, Malick shows us modern-day examples of altruistic behavior, such as Mrs. O’Brien giving a sip of water to a prisoner and Jack’s apology to R.L. after injuring him with a BB gun (“I’m sorry. You’re my brother”). Meanwhile, to synthesize the ecological and the psychoanalytic, the gaze seems of the utmost importance because the dinosaur looks long and hard at its potential victim before it glimpses its own reflection in the other’s eyes and walks off. Conversely, Jack refuses his mother’s gaze— “Don’t look at me”—since he wishes to split himself off from her desire and adopt, finally, the father-identification demanded of him by society. In their famous critique of classical psychoanalysis, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari argue that the process of oedipalization cannot be separated from a capitalistic dialectic between family/society and the self since, in effect, the bourgeois ego is forged through this process. Resisting what they call the “analytic imperialism” of Freud’s formula, they criticize the causal logic that underpins the equation: “daddy-mommy-me” = my ego (23). Regardless, Malick is an oedipalist who follows this formula faithfully whenever he turns toward nature with an impulse to worship. In the dinosaur scene, he stages the evolutionary birth of the human ego, or the restraint placed on the dangerous impulsivities of the Id.19 By its conclusion, “The Tree of Life” comes full circle in several ways. Jack adopts a father-identification when he looks O’Brien in the eye and confesses: “I’m as bad as you are. I’m more like you than her.” In the present day, Jack appears as the “exact copy of his father,” as Freud once put it, modeled “after the image of him he had formed in his memory” (Moses 100). A successful architect, he has become the creative professional that his father wished he could have been. Unlike his father, he inhabits a modernist glass-and-steel house that sharply contrasts the cozy environs of his childhood home in Waco. Another difference is that Jack is childless, which is visualized by Malick through a long tracking shot of Jack’s wife carrying a cut branch of a tree into their sterile-looking home. The film’s final sequence is set in a holy place, possibly the afterlife, where Jack is reunited with his dead family members and embraced by Mr. and Mrs. O’Brien (dressed vibrantly in green). Closing the loop, Malick returns to the mysterious red light that opened the film and confirms a real belief in the unifying force of nature through Jack’s voice-over, which now includes the name-of-the-father in one last prayer: “Father. Mother. Brother.” The narrative shape of “The Tree of Life,” then, resembles a loop, a strange loop that Timothy Morton has identified as oedipal in shape. “Ecological awareness requires us to realize the truth of Oedipus,” writes Morton, and to dispense with the escapist strategies by which we blind ourselves to our real and catastrophic impact on the environment (17). Despite such familiar shapes and patterns, Malick still offers his viewer new ways of seeing (and being seen by) the earth. Seeing people from the ground-level, as a child sees his parents but also as the grass and roots of trees might see us, means seeing ourselves as other, which is good for the earth and for us since it enables new ways of experiencing nature but from a perspective not necessarily our own. It’s a humiliation long overdue. In sum, the thematic convergence between Fowles’ The Tree and Malick’s “The Tree of Life” lies in their attempts to represent a “true” and “real” nature. Fowles scholar Katherine Tarbox observes that in each of his novels, we see how “limited our seeing is in everyday life, how time bound and tradition bound we are … and how sullied are our true natures” (8). As a companion to Fowles’ fiction, “The Tree of Life” reveals the ways in which the uncovering of a so-called “true nature” is always motivated by the dynamics of the family romance which, in the words of Deleuze and Guattari, is always “already oedipalized” (121). This is why, despite the film’s spiritual acrobatics, Malick does not even try to transcend the family plot but, in keeping the primal loop, and Jack’s return from the woods to his oak/mother, comes back home. In Fowles and Malick, this inevitable process of oedipalization functions as the precondition to a wider reverence for the sublimity of nature, a nature defined by patrimony. This is the oedipal ecology that, for better or worse, underpins tree-hugging, nature-loving and a whole range of other ways of bonding with our Earth. Fowles’ and Malick’s ecological sense whereby all roads lead back to the earth-household has many advantages, for it forces us to face, rather than repress, the family relations that lie at the heart of ecology. The Tree and “The Tree of Life” ask that we face, rather than outright reject, an oedipal landscape that must be crossed rather than canceled out. By extension, it forces us to interrogate the ways in which man’s ambivalence toward his environment is rooted in his family history. What happens when we begin to think of conservationist practice, or the lack thereof, in affective terms? The refusal to recycle and accept the realities of climate change, then, start to feel like willful acts of denial and betrayal. Conversely, a loving embrace of the earth, and the determination to defend it, is always a nostalgic return to filiation and all the discomfort it entails. Given our failure to act and to fully embrace the Gaia of our unconscious, oedipal ecology could help to restore a healthy dose of guilt in the ecological equation. In the words of Sophocles’s Oedipus himself, “He should not be afraid to name himself the guilty one” (24). If the works of Fowles and Malick have any effect on you whatsoever, you will only know for sure when you see the branches of a tree in the distance and suddenly recall the open arms of your mother. Footnotes 1 Psychoanalysis is now understood as a theory of strictly social, specifically familial, relations though Sigmund Freud was trained in the sciences, chiefly anatomy and physiology. The more biological passages in his writings portray nature as a hostile outside influence. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, for example, he makes an evolutionary argument that primordial living matter was threatened by “deadly stimuli” that forced them to form a “protective crust” (95). 2 Too often in psychoanalytical approaches to eco-film criticism, David Ingram argues, the real-world materiality of nature takes a back seat to semiotics, so that, for example, the birds in The Birds (1963) or the shark in Jaws (1975) are understood as signs and not as actual organisms that share our ecosystem; see Ingram (469–70). Incidentally, Fowles cites Jaws, in a pro-animal passage, as the product of a “purely medieval mentality” (71). 3 Novelist Jonathan Franzen offers a precise and personal response to Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence when he notes that Bloom’s theory was “steeped in Freud and turned on the literary ephebe’s willfull but unconscious misreading of his (always his, never her) strong precursor’s work” (173). See his The Kraus Project (FSG, 2013, 173–81). 4 For a concise précis of the Symbolic order and the name-of-the-father in Lacan, see Sarup, Jacques Lacan, 105–07. 5 Muir wrote The Yosemite only two years prior to his death and just as the National Parks Department was debating whether automobiles should be allowed inside Yosemite Valley. He sets out, in Linnaean fashion, to document the measurements, colors, textures, and fragrances of conifers, firs, sequoias, spruces, et al., but admits to feeling a pious awe in the face of trees older and vaster than he is. Muir ascribes a sense of virility, or what he calls a “noble illustration of Nature’s immortal virility and vigor,” (81) to the forests, not to mention a serene holiness (“the priests of pines”) (75). In contrast to Muir’s sequoias, Robert Frost’s birches, in the poem “Birches,” are not only “subdued” and made supple by the tree-climbing boy but anthropomorphized, and indeed feminized, as “girls on hands and knees that throw their hair” (118–20). The paternal phallus is also conquered, thus “Until he took the stiffness out of them, / And not one but hung limp” (119). 6 One notable exception is Sean Cubitt’s discussion of trees in terms of biosecurity in “Mediating Middle Earth: Talking to Trees in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings” in Eco Media (Rodopi, 2005, 7–23). 7 See Barrell (23–24). 8 For Milton and his sense of place, see Ken Hiltner’s Milton and Ecology (Cambridge UP, 2003). 9 Neil Shubin calls the “tree of relatedness,” and the idea that “our family history extends to all other living things,” the major insight of modern biology (17); see his The Universe Within: Discovering The Common History of Rocks, Planets, and People. Pantheon Books, 2013; Eula Bliss notes that Silent Spring author Rachel Carson preferred the metaphor of the web for word ecosystem since a “disturbance anywhere on the web sends tremors across the entire web” (43); see On Immunity: An Inoculation. Graywolf Press, 2014. 10 Emblematic of the religious readings of “The Tree of Life,” which range from the problem of evil to the relationship between nature and grace, see McAteer (2013), Manninen (2013), Brereton and Furze (2014), Sinnerbrink (2016). 11 As opposed to the tree of knowledge, the tree of life figures prominently in the following biblical passages: Genesis 2:9, the aforesaid Proverbs 3:18, and Revelation 22:2. 12 One such critique of the dichotomy between man and mother/nature is Vandana Shiva’s “[From] Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development” in Reflecting on Nature. Ed. L. Gruen and D. Jamieson. Oxford UP, 1994. 35–36. 13 Silberman describes Days of Heaven as “poetic” (168); Patterson notes that writers use “poetic” repeatedly to describe Malick’s work (2); Sinnerbrink calls The New World a “lyrical, poetic work” (182); Rybin refers to Malick’s “poetic, phenomenologically ‘thick’ cinema” (19). 14 For the Zuni tradition in which spruce, piñon and cottonwood trees are used as ladders around which priests sing and worship the Sun Father, see “Talk Concerning The First Beginning” in The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Vol. A. Ed. P. Lauter. Wadsworth, 2014. 26–41. 15 Bersani and Dutoit discuss nature as a witness, and the owl in “The Thin Red Line” as a “spectator of the terror and the imminent violence below and around it”; see pp. 159–60. 16 See “The Badger and the Sacred Spruce” for the Hopi ceremonialism in Frank Waters’ The Book of the Hopi. Penguin Books, 1964. 47–53 and, for the Pueblo one, see Waters’ Masked Gods: Navaho and Pueblo Ceremonialism. Ohio UP, 1984. 165–81. 17 For altruistic behaviors as they relate to natural selection, see Krohne (2001, 32–33). 18 For Susan Sontag, the visual image and nostalgia go hand-in-hand: “When we are nostalgic, we take pictures” (15). 19 Timpanaro describes the ego as the “superficial veneer of respectability which conceals this brutality” though the subject is never wholly ignorant of what he calls his or her “true nature” (205). Works Cited Barrell John. The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place: 1730-1840 . Cambridge UP , 1972 . Bliss Harry. “Cartoon.” The New Yorker, 27 Aug. 2012 . Boym Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia . Basic Books , 2001 . Brereton Pat , Furze Robert . “Transcendence and The Tree of Life: Beyond the Face of the Screen with Terrence Malick, Emmanuel Levinas, and Roland Barthes.” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 8 ( 2014 ): 329 – 51 . 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Oedipus the King. The Oedipus Cycle . Trans. Bagg Robert . Harper Perennial , 2012 . 11 – 105 . Szendy Peter. Kant in the Land of Extraterrestrials: Cosmopolitical Philosofictions . Trans. Bishop Will . Fordham UP , 2013 . Tarbox Katherine. The Art of John Fowles . The U of Georgia P , 1988 . The Tree of Life. Directed by Terrence Malick, performance by Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, Sean Penn, Fox Searchlight, 2011 . Timpanaro Sebastiano. Freudian Slip: Psychoanalysis and Textual Criticism . Verso , 1985 . © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Tree-Worship and the Oedipal Ecology of The Tree & The Tree of Life
JF - ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
DO - 10.1093/isle/isy055
DA - 2018-10-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/tree-worship-and-the-oedipal-ecology-of-the-tree-the-tree-of-life-hTdGHDnfs0
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