The Tree of Life

There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy might be the literary motif for Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. The movie looks at anything and everything through the lens of the eternal. It’s like being served a pizza with one slice containing a character-driven narrative and the other seven slices containing prehistoric creatures, the creation of the universe and the myths of Job and Mary Magdelene. The narrative slice is an odd contraption that starts out with the loss of a son in wartime and then circles back to the story of a boy and his two brothers, centering on a period in their pre-adolescence. The father (Brad Pitt) is an inventor with 27 patents whose greatest ambition in life was to be a concert pianist, a dream he never fulfilled. He is loving yet demanding and cruel towards his boys, particularly the oldest. The man blames his wife for not supporting him when he plays the disciplinarian, but it’s clear that this theme is secondary to the film’s organic and at times inorganic imagery (huge skyscrapers and the oldest son’s inventions), which place the ontogenic events in a phylogenic context. Several marvelous scenes dramatize this. For example, following the drowning of a child in the Waco town pool, we see the church where the service is held far in the distance in a vanishing perspective, with the families of the other children scattered through the foreground. Thornton Wilder used what was at the time an avant-garde dramatic style, with the Stage Manager in Our Town breaking the forth wall to present the story of an American town. In The Tree of Life, Malick’s device is to have his powerful story upstaged by the history of the world.

Lady Gag Order

It used to be that spanking was a playful S&M activity, a holdover from the world that Steven Marcus described in The Other Victorians. Regressive childhood associations were reinforced when the naughty boy or girl, having had his or her pants pulled down, got a red bottom after being bent over someone’s knee. It was all fairly mild stuff that played upon notions of good and bad. But the ante is going up when it comes to the sexually explicit material that can be found on the Internet. Gone are the fake squeals of pain and pleasure that used to accompany old-fashioned videos, with their nurses or police uniforms, depending on the side of the dominance/submission divide a porn actor or actress was portraying. What seems to be selling now are real tears. The fourth wall has broken down and many online sexual sites specialize in producing scenarios in which the “actors” fall apart on camera. For all the viewer knows this could be part of the script, in much the same way that the Stage Manager addresses the audience in Our Town. Or it could be real. If an actress has had enough of being whipped, gang raped, gagged, facialized, asphyxiated, golden showered or expectorated on and she has a nervous breakdown on camera, all the better. The metteurs-en-scène, rather than feeling irritated by the divagation, seem to revel in it in the same way that credit card companies enjoy making more money when their customers fail to fulfill their obligations. Why do people enjoy seeing sex that appears to be a violation? Why do car drivers slow down to ogle horrible accidents? Why is this trend in pornography more prevalent today than it was in the past? Who knows?