The Tree of Life

Days of Heaven is permanently tattooed into my memory for its incredibly beautiful cinematography, and The Tree of Life might as well be now, too. The nature and space montages were breathtaking. Malick posits that, perhaps, a rolling ocean tide arpeggios in the same rhythm that organizes the layout of nerves and veins in the human body. Or, that, if we look closely enough, our every heartbeat shares a common denominator with supernovae. That the avenues and turns a tree’s branches take are parallel to the ones that slithering creeks and streams follow to, eventually, empty into a river delta. 

Granted, it might be easy to brush off these relationships as a priori truths or banal platitudes or spurious correlations that we have noticed simply because humans have evolved over time to notice patterns in nature, since the ability to do so increased the likelihood of the species’ survival. Yet I feel that Malick implores us to be charitable, to set aside, for a moment, our potentially mechanistic explanations of various phenomena, and instead sit with and really consider the possibility of whole poems existing in the crevices between what seem to be vastly different aspects of our world.

That and the Brahms, of course. Fantastic soundtrack.