God and The Tree Of Life

By Isaac Butler

I finally got around to watching The Tree Of Life today and I loved it, but I mainly loved it for its contradictions and incoherences, for the ways it cheats around some of its core questions. Oh and this is spoiler city below, so be warned.

Those core questions are the same core questions of the source text for the quote that begins the film, The Book of Job from The Bible.  The Tree of Life is not the only recent film to draw on Job, recently there was A Serious Man from the Coens. But while the Coen brothers were content to use a couple of plot points from the Bible as yet another staging ground for their now de rigeur nihilism (mixed with a new ingredient of Jewish self-loathing), Malick completely drops all of Job's story and instead takes both the text's central questions and its ultimately unsatisfying answer.

Those questions revolve around the problem of suffering and why God allows it to happen. Job-- a righteous man-- is afflicted by God with a series of torments (the death of his children, the ruination of his business, boils etc.) as part of a bet God has going with Satan. (Keep in mind that in the Jewish tradition, Satan is a temptor angel rather than the Devil). Rather than losing faith in God, Job begins to question him.  Job knows that he is a righteous man and thus knows that his torment is unjustified. Why, he asks, do bad things happen to good people? Does divine justice exist? And if it does, does it make sense?

Job is visted by several friends who declare that divine justice does exist and therefore Job must've done something wrong, even if he doesn't know or believe he has. After a period of time with Job and the chorus arguing back and forth (some theorists advocate the idea that Job is a lost Greek Tragedy, but that's a post for another day) God finally appears in a whirlwind.  His answer, which supplies The Tree of Life's opening quote is "Where were you when I laid the Earth's foundation?" Like a good Jew, God answers Job's question with another question and then proceeds to list all the ways that He, God, is really awesome and totally not grokkable by human kind and not to be fucked with.  Job apologizes. God restores Job and then goes to Job's friends and tells them that Job was right, that he did nothing wrong, and Divine Justice is sometimes a bit capricious.

I am an atheist. And I love the Book of Job.  I love that the Bible contains something this contradictory to so much of its message.  I love how weird the Book of Job is, and I love that its answer is essentially unsatisfying, its central question and answer are ones that any belief system that believes in an all-powerful deity must reckon with. 

The Jewish and Christian faiths differ on their approach to Job (painting with broad strokes here).  Believe in the Jewish faith and tradition in no way necessitates believing in a solely benevolent deity. While God is great, and blessed, and to be thanked for choosing the Jews, for delivering us from bondage, for creating light and wine and all sorts of other things, God isn't necessarily benevolent. Understanding God as benevolent would, after all, be admitting that one knew God's true nature and on some level, as the Book of Job teaches us, God is unknowable. He is to be feared as well as loved, not understood. Thanking God for delivering us from bondage necessitates looking away from the fact that God allowed the bondage to happen in the first place and there are plenty of prayers that offer a bit of fear mixed in.

Actually, at times (particualrly in Exodus) the God of the Hebrew Bible is not unlike Brad Pitt's character in The Tree of Life: stern, controlling, inscruitable, perhaps capricious, at times abusive, needing His children to constantly declare their allegiance and love to him and yet capable of enormous gestures of affeciton, generosity and love. And let's not forget that Pitt's character, like God, has a plan for his children, one they are at times incapable of understanding no matter how hard he tries to explain it.

This is why the rage the film (and Jack, its protagonist) feels towards the father slips very quickly out of its mortal coil and touches God himself.  In constant whispered voiceover, God is interrogated. Why is Jack's brother allowed to die? Why is an abusive father allowed in God's universe? Why isn't Jack's dad killed somehow?  Does God love humans at all? 

The Jewish question of Job: Does divine justice really exist? (or exist in a way that is comprehendable by humans?) switches instead to a Christian one: is the suffering of the world compatible with the idea of a benevolent God? 

The problem with the Christianizing of Job--the inflection of this question with the idea of goodness on God's part (as opposed to power)--is that it makes it impossible to answer the question "yes" persuasively.  It appears in order to answer it yes, you have to cheat or change the ground rules. (Keep in mind, this is simply from an atheist's perspective, I'm not trying to argue anyone out of their faith and I have deep respect for people of faith, but I do think that one should be honest about their worldview on this stuff). 

And this is exactly what the film does.  It cheats all over the place before changing the gounrd rules of the conversation. 

It cheats both acutely and pervasively.  As in Job, God responds to all of this questioning in The Tree of Life by taking us back to the very origins of the Universe, showing us creation up until the extinction of the dinosaurs and its here, in the film's most widely derided scene, that we're treated to a Velociraptor that decides for no reason other than its own sense of conscience to spare some napping prey.  The portrait this moments paints of the universe and life is remarkably unpersuasive (a friend of mine called it "a load of hippie bullshit") and its almost immediately contradicted by an asteroid coming and wiping everything out anyway. It's the one moment of consummate failure on the part of the film.  Aesthetically, intellectually, compositionally, the moment doesn't work. The dinosaurs look worse than what you'll find in a garden variety console video game, and it's hard not to laugh at the idea of a raptor deciding in a moment of Grace that it doesn't need dinner after all.

On the pervasive end, there is, well, the way the film is shot.  The Tree of Life is ostentaciously beautiful. Image after image arises in the film that will make you weep. This isn't just beauty for beauty's sake, even if this is a Terrence Mallick film. The beauty is part of the film's philosophical investigation. Again and again, we see moments of suffering and pain, along with moments of joy and bliss, of violence and degredation, of wonderment and epiphany, of music and painting, of light and dark, or dresses and water and water and water. All of these moments are gorgeously shot, impeccably put together and again and again the film returns to the idea that the beauty and wonder of the world is argument enough of God's existence/greatness/benevolence/grace.

But here's the thing. The world we are seeing is constructed by its director/writer to constantly underscore its beauty.  The actual world around us doesn't have Mahler playing in the background. It isn't shot during magic hour. It isn't impeccably groomed by a legion of set dressers and costume assistants.  It is, instead, a giant, big, beautiful, terrifying, sloppy, fucked up, amazing mess. The Tree Of Life takes place within a rigged Universe. Like high school physics, it ignores wind resistance because taking it into account would queer all of the equations.  The beauty of the world of The Tree of Life is Malick's not God's, just as the plan of Signs is M. Night Shyamalan's rather than the almighty's. 

At the end, the film changes the ground rules of the benevolence/suffering question in exactly the way Christianity does: it invents Heaven. Just before the film's conclusion, Sean Penn-- playing an adult Jack who is so haunted by his childhood that he can barely funciton-- is granted a vision of the afterlife that gives him his first moment of peace.  It's a heaven on a beautiful beach, where Jack is reunited with his childhood visions of his parents (with Dad given an inner peace he was unable to attain in life) and siblings (all alive) and self wandering under a perfect, loving sun. Shortly afterwards, the film ends, returning to an image that is possibly curtains, possibly a womb, possibly God and possibly the beginning of the Universe. 

This is the benevolence and justice that Christianity promises.  God is, indeed, good, so long as you're willing to play the long game, so long as you're willing to accept that you won't get all the evidence for the defense until after your death.

It is to the film's credit that it takes its questions of suffering and the divine seriously, that it refuses to rest on simple bromides, that it is a real and pure and complex investigation of a belief system. It's an investigation that reveals to me the flaws and problems of that belief system, but I'm pretty sure that someone who devoutly ascribed to a Christian worldview would find their perspective reified by it.

 I suspect that there isn't a One True Reading of this film. There's something prismatic about it, impossible, reflective of the viewer.  Not because it's ultimately empty the way a "serious" Coen Brothers film is (or the way The Dark Knight is in its examination of its central political questions) but rather because it burrows so deeply and sincerely into its subject matter that what it ultimately brings back from its voyage is a chest full of contradicitons, because few questions worth asking  have only one answer, particularly the ones that fuel a work of art. 

Comments

[Anne]

Speaking as half of a mixed-faith couple, I think you've nailed one of the key disconnects between Christianity and Judaism. Part of what is so interesting to me about Job is how much the story is used within Christian discourse even though the God that's portrayed in the story definitely falls on the "Judeo" side of the Judeo-Christian split.

Although I suppose any faith needs some declaration of how and why the world sometimes doesn't make any fucking sense.

Do you know the 18th-century novel Clarissa? The heroine escapes from her evil family with this classic Rake who then (of course) rapes her and she dies. The interesting thing is that she uses the text of Job as a rhetorical weapon against her actual evil dad, as proof that she didn't do anything to deserve being raped. Thoughts? Do you think a feminist repurposing of Job makes sense? From this perspective, Brad Pitt isn't God, but evidence of the capriciousness of the universe. Abusive dads are another part of the world that just doesn't make sense...

[Anne]

PS: I love this post.

[Sean]

Too often, I read something you wrote and say to myself, "well, that was just great." But I don't tell you. So let me just say, that was just great.

[Isaac]

Anne, Sean:

Thanks! It's always nice to get some kind words about a piece of writing. I felt very inspired by the film... the bulk of this was written about forty five minutes after I watched it, so I'm glad that that paid off into a piece you both found well-written.

I do not know the 18th century novel Clarissa, but it's use of Job is fascinating (if I ever got a PHD, I'd probably write about uses of Job in literature, and this book would likely be on my list).

A feminist repurposing of Job is an interesting feat, not least of all because women are almost inconsequential to the text itself. After Job loses everything (except his wife and life) his wife says to him "Curse God and die" and then... promptly vanishes from the narrative, never to be seen again. When Job is restored by God, he's given a new wife (and new land, livestock and children) and the original wife is never mentioned.

But back to your comment, which sees a different role for Pitt, Pitt as evidence of the capriciousness of the universe. I certainly think this view on his character is valid, and I don't necessarily think Pitt represents the film/Malick's view of God, which is largely Christian in nature. What I do think connects the two is the rage in the film. From that rage's perspective-- and its a rage that envelops both the character of Jack and the film itself-- the two are kind of interchangeable. For the young Jack, God is to be hated because he acts like Jack's father, mainly through not finding some way of removing the father from Jack's life.

[Tommer Peterson]

I'm with Anne. This is a fine piece of writing. Thank you! Now I will see this film which I have previously ignored.