Inessentials

Vague spoilers for The Tree of Life and more specific spoilers for Meek’s Cutoff

I just finished Kelly Reichardt’s wonderful, challenging Meek’s Cutoff, a film with more ideas informing each sequence of shots than any other I can recall seeing recently. It manages to find pure cinema in the act of negating so many of the things that we typically expect from films (e.g., dialogue, clear narrative arcs established early and conclude late, scenes with a beginning, middle, and end). It also serves as an anti-western, unsettling any clearly defined good guys in white hats or bad guys in black hats or headresses, forcing the viewer to watch events unfold from the edges, with the women and children and cattle.

What I find myself focusing on the day after is the film’s profound take on the Tree of Life, which received a different treatment by Terrence Malick this year within the film of that name. Malick’s The Tree of Life really is about life, about its beauty, its origin, its eventual eschaton. The Tree of Life is soteriological, that is, it is concerend with the nature of the soul or spirit, and Malick seems particularly interested in noting how it develops in a human life, especially in the crucial early adolescence when he apparently thinks choices become morally significant and (if this is when the soul develops) a human being becomes a person. Malick wants to show us the beauty of life, from birth to the afterlife. A tragedy begins the film, and prompts the question “Why?” Malick suggests that the only way to answer this question satisfactorally would be to understand the entire history of the universe, which would give us insight into God, the only one who could answer this question. Unfortunately, God turns out to be as inscrutable as any other person, so Malick’s theodicy (explanation for why there is evil) is ultimately a combination of aesthetic considerations and an appeal to mystery. But the tragedy, which the film takes as a launching point for larger questions, is ulimately a tragedy because it is the (perhaps temporary) end of a life, and life for Malick really is beautiful, worthwhile, and perhaps even sacred.

Reichardt gives us the other aspect to the Tree of Life. The first spoken words in the film, I believe, were of a prepubescent boy (comparable in age to Malick’s central character for much of his film) who reads from Genesis 3 about Adam and Eve being forced from the Garden of Eden. I haven’t matched up the dialogue, but here is the passage I think he reads,

And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.

For Reichardt, the imagery of the Tree of Life is the imagery of banishment, of work without reward, of the impossibility of Eden. Like the first couple banished from Eden, the characters in Meek’s Cutoff are intimately connected to the ground, but the ground is cursed, it is without the life-sustaining water that could keep them going. (And when they encounter water early on, even that poses a danger, since they must ford the river.) We could talk further about the ways in which Meek’s Cutoff plays on the various curses of Genesis 3, most notably the more significant impact on women. But returning to the Edenic imagery, Meek at one point refers to their destination as a “Second Eden,” which suggests that the struggle is ultimately a struggle to return to that original state. But of course, the film never gives us Eden, it gives us only the slow struggle to stay alive, a life not filled with beauty but with pain and suffering without any clear reward. (For all the beauty of the film, not a single character seems to notice the beauty of where they are, only the dangers.)

The closing scene of Meek’s Cutoff shows the travellers finding a tree that they hope signifies water and thus life. To this point, though, the film has undermined the travellers’ confidence in each of their guides (Meek and the nameless Indian), and they are left yet again wondering if they should follow their new guide. The question is only partially whether this tree is the Tree of Life, which marks the entrance to Eden (more specifically, the Second Eden that Meek promised), since in Reichardt’s vision, we have no guide we can trust and no reason to think the next stage will be any less painful or fruitless than the last. Even if this is the Tree of Life, it is not a trustworthy sign of hope because it is not ultimately a sign of life, but a reminder of the toll that the mythical banishment from Eden had on humans, especially women.

Very big spoilers for The Box, A Serious Man, and Days of Heaven

Biblical allusions were once standard fare in literature, and film has seen its fair share of epic tales of biblical heroes. But (with one notable exception) it has been at least forty years since Bible stories were winners at the box office. More than this, references to the Bible have never been as important to classical cinema as they have been to classical literature. References happen, but they’re not as central to understanding cinema as references to other films, popular music, or Shakespeare. Cinema (with the exception of the one mostly forgotten genre) is much less interested in the stories of the Bible than it is in many, many other things. So I was a bit surprised to view three films in the past month that draw on the Bible in three different reasons.

Richard Kelly’s The Box takes a sci-fi story that had been worked over a couple times before and adds in Kelly’s unique blend of half-baked ideas to make his most successful film yet (successful artistically, not commercially). Norma (Cameron Diaz) and Arthur (James Marsden) get a button in a box from a mysterious stranger (Frank Langella) who tells them they have 24 hours to push the button; if they push it, the get $1 million dollars but someone they don’t know dies; if they don’t, life goes on as normal. Kelly’s tale is surprisingly suspenseful, even after it incorporates bizarre elements of the supernatural. The Box, like Southland Tales, overstuffed with references, but to no discernible purpose. What are we supposed to make of the Jean-Paul Sartre references, for instance? More immediate to our purpose, what is the point in connecting Arthur and Norma (and the other button-pushers) to Adam and Eve? In each case, a woman pushes the button. Is there some misogyny lurking in this decision? The mysterious stranger is a Serpent figure (from out of this world), and their consequence has Tree of Knowledge-like implications, but what exactly are these implications? Kelly seems content to make the reference, even if it clouds what’s really going on. But the sneaking suspicion in all three of Kelly’s films is that there is nothing deeper going on. There’s just a story crammed full of references. There are a lot of ideas, but none that are fully pursued, none that make the film stronger, none that are important because none matter to the story. No one needs to know the story of Adam and Eve to understand what is happening in The Box, and the references to that story only muck things up.

On the other hand, A Serious Man from Ethan and Joel Coen can only be understood if one is familiar with the biblical story of Job. Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlberg) watches his life fall apart, and his journey of anguish parallels that of Job’s. Gopnik even visits three rabbis who mirror the advice offered by Job’s three friends. A Serious Man is less effective than other Coen Brothers films at presenting a world in which we sympathize with a protagonist cut adrift in a cold, heartless, amoral world. But it nicely summarizes some of those themes. When the film ends with a tornado, it is hard to make sense of what is happening unless one is familiar with the story of Job. When God finally appears to Job (chapter 38 of the eponymous book), it is after a devastating wind. When the film leaves off this deus ex tornado, we see that the Coens are reinforcing what the film hammers all the way through: either the world is random and nothing matters, or there is a God out there who is just screwing with us. God isn’t going to save the day, because our lives show us that if there is a God, then the universe isn’t just disinterested, it’s a cruel joke. Knowing how Job ends is essential to understanding why A Serious Man ends where it does.

Finally, Days of Heaven, the wonderful 1973 film from Terrence Malick, takes a more traditionally literary approach to biblical allusion. The story of Days of Heaven (which hardly matters in a Malick film, where you just want to soak in the gorgeous images and fascinating edits) centers on a trio of early twentieth-century drifters. When Bill (Richard Gere) meets new people he says that his girlfriend (Brooke Adams) is really his sister. (Why? For Malick, it doesn’t matter. He just does.) This story recalls three different accounts in Genesis where Abraham and Sarah (twice) and Isaac and Rebekah are travelling in a foreign land and the husband introduces the wife as his sister. This ends badly for the local leader, who takes the wife/sister as his own (either wife or harem) and then suffers for it, before the truth is revealed and all is restored. In the film, this suffering happens in the form of a locust plague, which is a smart way of connecting to another Pharaoh story. Malick’s allusion deepens the appreciation of his film without depending on it. It doesn’t matter in Days of Heaven as it does in A Serious Man when and how the film diverges from the story to which it alludes. You don’t have to “catch” the reference to appreciate what he is doing, but your appreciation is deepened when you do. By treating the wife-sister narrative as an archetypal story, there is no need drop clues about what the writer-director is thinking, as Kelly too often does. The story speaks for itself, and if you are familiar with the Bible, history, literature, film, you’ll further appreciate what is happening, but you can enjoy it plenty even if you don’t.

I just happened to watch these films in near succession, but I like how they represent three different approaches to allusion. There’s postmodern name-dropping (Kelly), required background reading (the Coens), and archetype (Malick). Malick’s is simultaneously the most subtle and the most successful, but I’m not convinced that this is essential to the approach; it’s at least as likely that Malick is the most talented of the filmmakers (all of whom I admire a great deal).