Tree of Life: Terrence Malick's Meditation on Death, Love, and Life

Malick’s Meditation on Death, Love, and Life

by Leila Kincaid

2023

I first saw Terence Malick’s Tree of Life when it came out in 2011, when my mother was dying of cancer. The slow, painful meditation on the O’Brien family grappling with the fractured and malformed consciousness and suicide of Jack was too much for me to take in at the time. Though I am in the film industry and have often been encouraged to revisit Tree of Life, I have been reluctant to do so for fear of reliving the psychological and physical state that I was in at first viewing. Because of my respect for Allan Leslie Combs and everyone facilitating and participating in this course, I watched Malick’s three hour and eight-minute extended cut, available through The Criterion Collection, this week.

Wow.

A few takes…

This is gorgeous filmmaking. The cinematography evokes several states and structures of consciousness depicted by his characters, and by the filmmaker himself as auteur, and ultimately brings us into a meditative state of consciousness, as Malik poetically explores the big questions of life that his characters grapple with and Combs points to as he as a filmmaker, grapples with his brother’s suicide and the bigger questions we each have about our life and life in general:

Where did the world come from and what is it made of?

What is the ultimate fate of the world and of humanity?

Who am I?

Where did I come from?

What is my role here?

Will happen to me after death? (62)

Indeed, Malik captures states of consciousness more than he elicits or unfolds a plot. Tree of Life captures a sense of the cycles, and origins, and processes of life, and this evokes a magical structure of consciousness. Perhaps it even transports us as viewers into this state, one that is characterized by a sense of wonder and oneness with our loved ones, of the Cosmos, and of the processes and connections of life (Combs, 64). While each character is in their own state of consciousness, the filmmaker as auteur presents an integral and meditative state of consciousness as he explores the meaning of his brother’s suicide.

Combs says of Charles Tart and his systems theory of consciousness, "When one enters a state of consciousness one tends to enter it completely" (51). Malick captures this completeness in the meditative quality of Tree of Life, as a meditation on his brother's suicide and the journey of a life, from the birth of the cosmos to the birth of a child, to the death of the individual, and ruminations on immortality and what is beyond life. Not only does Malick enter into the meditative state completely, he brings us with him, casts a spell on us the way films can and do. This vulnerability as a viewer can open us to experience pain and even injury, the way I did in the depictions of Jacks’s state of consciousness.

While Tree of Life transports us into Malik’s meditative state of consciousness, as the auteur, he saturates the film with his point of view, which includes Jack’s nightmarish state of consciousness as he tries to navigate his boyhood. Malik hurls us into Jack’s reality, into his state of consciousness that make parts of the film feel like pure horror. This horror is depicted by extreme camera angles and chaotic zooms, tilts, pans, and barrel roles and quick editing of Jack as he flounders through his youth, yearning for love from his father and mother. The horror is also captured in Jack’s face, in his expressions, frowns, and downcast eyes. His eyes look both tormented and angry, lost and confused. The cinematographic and editorial style of Jack’s scenes elicit a non-integrated state of consciousness while most of the scenes of Jack’s mother are shot with slow motion, dreamy, soft lighting, and a voice over that speaks of hope, faith, and love. Her consciousness is reaching toward the integral.

Malik's Tee of Life captures an integral consciousness and poetic sense of time. We experience in Malikc’s film what Combs describes as “Gebser's notion of integral experience as bringing together all the structures of consciousness into a single living fabric” (75). This is perhaps how Furstenau and MacAvoy say that “Malick has assumed the role of the poet-philosopher, putting the cinema to poetic and philosophical ends” (Verse, Voice, and Vision: Poetry and the Cinema, 2015. 150). It is as if Malick takes us as the viewer through an entire exploration of the experience of life, including a sense of the miraculous creation of being, through the love and wonder, into the pit of despair and psychological dysfunction, and back to hope and love. He dips us down and lifts us up, integrating all of the aspects of being a person in all the chaotic, terrifying, beautiful, and unifying states of consciousness. Watching Tree of Life is an emotional rollercoaster ride, and terrifying and ugly, and gorgeous and hopeful all at once! We, as viewers, enter the states of consciousness depicted in Malick’s film, immersed in both wonder and awe, philosophical musing, horror, despair, and finally integration (Combs, p52).

Combs describes of Gebser’s categorization of structures of consciousness when he says they are a “way of understanding and relating to the world that represent modes of perceiving and understanding reality (Consciousness Explained Better, 50, 62). Malik captures a diaphaneity that Combs describes of Gebser’s integral consciousness in the film’s several scenes of the dancing light against a black background. If images could be orchestral, Malick’s montage (twenty-five minutes into the film) is exquisitely beautiful with images of light, galaxies and the cosmos playing out to operatic singing that feels holy, divine, and glorious.

End of film voiceover by the mother: The only way to be happy is to love. Unless you love, life will flash by. Do good to them. Wonder. Hope. I came from this viewing, feeling a sense of unity with humankind regarding our consciousness of mortality, and the integral consciousness that can arise as we contemplate a larger picture of the processes of life and movements of the Cosmos. Perhaps watching Tree of Life again, all these years after my mother died, has helped me further grieve and mourn her, and let her go, into the light. With hope and love, Leila References Combs A. (2009). Consciousness explained better: towards an integral understanding of the multifaceted nature of consciousness (1st ed.). Paragon House. Malick, T. (2011). The Tree of Life. Twentieth Century Fox. Santos, M. (Ed.). (2013). Verse, voice, and vision: poetry and the cinema. Scarecrow Press, Incorporated.