When I saw the opening subtitle of this line, I gasped. It's an absolute display of authority, but it's an open question. So this is not a scolding. It asks people to see what it means to "build the foundation of the earth". It also includes a more general question group: where did it come from, why, where did it go... More interesting points This sentence is at the stage in the book of Job. After God's good servant Job suffered every kind of suffering for no reason, Job had questions about God. However, God's answer to him can probably be summed up as: You are too ignorant, and because of this ignorance, you are not qualified to find meaning in pain. At first glance, this sentence seems to be a demonstration... But if you say it loosely, it will be very clear. You are not qualified to find meaning in pain, you can only find it in love. This is probably the logic in "The Tree of Life" (Job, stepmothers...).
This plotless film boils down to saying "have love". But to have love is a topic that can be bloody, cheap, and affectionate. Another brainwashing concept, when it works, it's just the recipient exercising it. What interests me is how Malick ties together love, the tree of life—and preaching.
The first is the tree of life. I use this symbol a lot when I write. No matter how much I write about domestic violence, fear, destruction, death (and being shut out of heaven) in the volume titled The Tree of Life, when it comes to its symbolism, it’s not the dark plot above. What is the tree of life? It's a very stereotype intention - Genesis 3:22, "The man has become like us, knowing good and evil, saith the LORD God. Now lest he stretch out his hand and eat the tree of life, and live forever." From this It can be clearly seen in the sentence that the person who eats the above fruit in the story will live forever. What does the tree of life look like? Revelation 22:2, "On this side of the river and there was the tree of life, which bore twelve kinds of fruit, each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations." Its appearance and Its image is the same as the stereotype, and the twelve kinds of fruits even have the richness of the nouveau riche. But it is interesting that the tree that was planted in the first chapter of Genesis became one of the most visible landmarks of heaven in the last chapter: Revelation. Two simple main features can be seen from here, 1) eat to live forever, 2) from beginning to end.
After watching The Tree of Life, the biggest feeling of many people is that Malick buried many metaphors and did not dig them up, but all the metaphors "somehow" can be strung together into a "secret meaning". When an idea can't find its source, it ends up being indescribable, but it feels "there". At this time, the brainwashing function of this idea is maximized... So what material did Malick pour into the brainwashing pot? Malick planted the tree first when hiding the tree of life in the film. When the two sons were born, the family planted a tree, and my mother said that you would grow faster than this tree. In one sentence, the tree's sense of immortality is written, because the tree's time lags behind that of man, and man grows faster than it, and it still remains when a man dies. Immediately after that, there are repeated shots of light passing through the leaves, and the associations of this are various, the light of the Holy Spirit, the lawn in the afternoon sun, and others.
What I admire most about The Tree of Life is that Malick has the courage to directly express the stereotype side of the tree of life symbol. In other words, it is to write old stalks. However, the master wrote the old stalks not because the inspiration was exhausted, but because he had already thought of the new stalks, but still chose to write the old stalks, and burned the old stalks into delicious old-fashioned soup. The family in the film is a family of the same stereotype as the tree of life, which conforms to the audience's general imagination of the concept of "family". This kind of imagination is "secretly" "as if there", or "ineffable". Conceptualized stereotypes are embedded in the concept: the mother is loving, the father is strict, the family hugs, the child grows up bewildered by the pains, wars, etc. Others commemorate the dead, the family drives into town for Sunday Mass, the father struggles to become a more successful manager. Perhaps the Cannes judges thought The Tree of Life had created a new model because Malick was not refurbishing an old meme, but taking it seriously. He made old stems look like old stems, and seriously made every frame of them beautiful, all implicated in the root of the tree of life. And soberly aware that he was doing it.
This is also where The Tree of Life doesn't cut hard enough for me to say it doesn't cut deep enough. Malick is indeed a ferocious proof that Sterotype and cliche are not a matter of raw materials, but who made them. However, the stacking of over-conceptual daily life has always led to the fact that stories in The Tree of Life are not used to illustrate the problem - the stacking of concepts can never lead to an original story, just like although there are all the words in the dictionary, the dictionary is not a book Fiction. For example, when writing an event, it can be divided into at least two ways of writing: 1) write the whole beginning to the end of the event, let the reader think of some concepts from the event, 2) write some concepts, let The reader imagines some events to fit these concepts. Malick tries to mix the two, he writes about everything in family life, but it's conceptual. He has done a good enough job, but he still has a sense of inconsistency. When I watch it, I unconsciously remind myself every tens of minutes that this is not life, and this is not even a story.
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