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.

Mild spoilers for How I Met Your Mother 5.15, “Rabbit or Duck” (February 8) and The Bible, Genesis 1:1

On Sunday, a football game was televised on CBS. More Americans watched it live than have watched any other television show in history. CBS ran a clever spot for How I Met Your Mother that just showed the show’s break-out character, sex-obsessed Barney Stinson, holding up a poster with his telephone number on it. (A friend I was with called immediately and got to a voicemailbox message by Neil Patrick Harris, in character.) This fed nicely into the next day’s show, in which Barney receives call after call from women interested in him because they saw him on TV.

Barney, sadly, runs into a problem. No matter how attractive the woman sitting across from him is, each time the phone rings he thinks that the next girl might be a little bit hotter. So he abandons whichever woman he is with to pursue the next one. And this slowly drives him crazy.

The show does a nice job of pointing out the problem faced by having too many choices. There’s a vast literature in psychology on this point, which has been summarized in an easy-to-understand book by Barry Schwartz called The Paradox of Choice. The basic point is that more choices can lead to less happiness.

But there is a different problem suggested by Barney’s particular struggle, and it is a problem that many philosophers and theologians have suggested might be one faced by God. God’s problem is this.

God decides to create a world, because that’s what a good God does. But being God, not just any world will do. God must choose the best possible world to create; anything less would be un-godlike. But there is no best possible world. There are infinitely many possible worlds that God could choose to create, and if we lined them all up from worst to best, the line would go on forever. So for each world that God could create, there would always be a better one. If this is the case, then it seems like God would not create any world.

So that leaves you with three choices. (1) There is no God, and this is just another reason why. (2) There is a best possible world, which we know because God created one (spoiler: it’s this one), so it is not true that for each possible world, there is a better one that God could have created. (4) God does not have to create the best possible world, just one that is good enough. This problem has been noticed for hundreds of years, so each of these has been defended by someone.

Barney’s situation is disanalogous to God’s in a lot of ways. For one, Barney doesn’t know if the next girl is hotter than the last, but God presumably knows if there is a better world. For another, God’s motivation seems a lot, well, healthier, than Barney’s.

But they both reveal the same problem. When presented with many choices, a reasonable maxim for acting (sleep with the hottest woman, create the best possible world) can lead one to not acting, which is worse than any (or many) of the alternatives. If one could be a satisficer (pick one that is just good enough) instead of a maximizer (pick the best one), one might be able to lead a much happier life.