Watch the trailer for The Tree of Life below.

Here’s what we know about Terrence Malick.

1. He doesn’t give interviews, or appear in public and refuses to be photographed, or at least have his photograph used for promotional purposes. Except this one where he wears a big hat.

2. He’s a philosopher. He wrote a book about Heidegger, taught at MIT and spent some time teaching in France. His films have become increasingly ambitious with the years and more self-consciously ‘philosophical’, culminating in The Tree of Life, which takes on nothing less than Life, the Universe and Everything as its subject matter. Add to this the kudos given to an artist who is also something else. Like John Updike working as a doctor in a hospital as well as being a novelist of international repute.

3. He hasn’t made many films. Only five in almost 40 years: Badlands (1973), Days of Heaven (1978), The Thin Red Line (1998), The New World (2005) and The Tree of Life (2011). A work rate that makes Stanley Kubrick look like Woody Allen means each film appears loaded with expectation as an event. It also adds to the mystique of a man who could probably be making a film a year, but who deliberately chooses his subjects with care and then spends time polishing and fiddling.

However, each of these points is complicated. Why?

1. The nature of being a recluse these days is defined by an intrusive busy-body media and a promotional sausage-making machine that churns out sound-bites and waffle-snacks. Malick’s reticence is now effectively more voluble than Quentin Tarantino’s mouth, standing as a little pocket of stubborn silence in contrast to the twittering overload of the blogosphere. Shutting up has become the new way of saying something, the way not being on Facebook says much more than being on Facebook.

2. The philosopher tag combines with the recluse label in giving Malick an otherworldly feel. It is a kind of back-handed compliment that promotes to dismiss. Ultimately, Malick is as much a historian as he is a philosopher. All of his films have been period pieces and three of them are based on true events: Badlands is a true crime flick, The Thin Red Line is based on the battle of Guadalcanal and The New World is an interrogation of the foundational myths of European America.

3. Although it is indisputable that his output has been limited, each film has resolutely carved its place into cinema history. There are filmmakers who have made more films, certainly, but there aren’t many who have created more masterpieces.

Taken together, Malick’s films create a remarkably consistent universe. A river runs through all his films. There is always a birdcage. A fire burns in every one of his films, usually burning down a house, usually deliberately ignited. Life is lived outside and houses are often foreign environments, to be invaded. The intrusion into somebody else’s house happens in every film.

If the furniture of his cinematic universe is consistent, so is his way of viewing it. In fact, Malick’s style is so recognisable as to veer occasionally towards becoming his own cliché, especially in his later films: the magic hour photography, the use of music and the dislocation of image from sound, often dropping the sound out of scenes that look noisy; the use of voice-over rather than dialogue.

Initially, the voice-over was an ironic counterpoint. Sissy Spacek’s massively unreliable narrator provided a disingenuous commentary to the inarticulate violence and loquacious double-speak of Martin Sheen’s Kit. In Days of Heaven, the commentary luxuriates in its own meandering irrelevance, giving the film some of its most memorable lines: ‘he wasn’t a bad man: you give him a flower and he’d keep it forever’. The Thin Red Line is an oratorio of questions, anxiety and uncertainty. The voice-over in The New World and The Tree of Life triumphs as a mixture of meditation, introspection and prayer – whispered, sighing, internal mutterings – almost entirely does away with the traditional dialogue-rich scene.

Despite diverse subject matter (juvenile crime, poverty, war, colonisation and grief), Malick’s films share some big themes. The loss of innocence is often cited as a central concern in all the films, but innocence is a sticky topic. In Badlands, Holly’s innocence facilitates Kit’s violence, who is in his own way untouched and innocent of the pain he causes. Days of Heaven begins with the protagonist Bill (Richard Gere) launching a possibly fatal attack against his foreman. The paradise of the opening of The Thin Red Line is a truant paradise, preceded by the lurking crocodile and one that, we later learn, exists only via an act of wilful deafness and blindness. John Smith begins The New World in chains and the indigenous peoples are warlike and intent on murdering him.

Innocence is then something that we feel the loss of without ever having fully understood its presence. The Tree of Life begins with loss and grief. A grown son, a middle child, perhaps as a result of a war, has died. The rest of the film is an attempt to understand life through the lens of absence, loss and death. The fifty-minute symphonic opening abandons narrative in favour of a mapping of the origins of all life from the cosmic to the microscopic and finally to the human scale. This is certainly Malick the philosopher, but it is also Malick the historian going back to primary sources, and Malick the scientist. Theological ideas, such as that of a lost Eden, give the film images to work with, just as the quotation from Job sets an overtly religious tone to the film, but Malick is interested in DNA and evolution as well. In fact, although there is a religious striving throughout the film, God is a presence that can only be felt through a series of absences. There might be prayers in the films, but whether they are answered or not is open to question. In the cosmic vastness, there is a big God-shaped hole, fringed with doubt and questioning.

And yet for all the philosophy, theology, etc., Malick is always grounded. This might seem like an odd claim, when viewing the visual poetry that at times is almost overwhelming, but his films can only get to the spiritual via the intensely physical. The sudden sunshine on a waterfall looks magical, but it is real. The upside down shadows of children playing on wet tarmac might make us think of ghosts, and in a way they are, being the projections of projections of projections, but they are also the shadows of the children. The magic hour is just a certain time of day, albeit a time of day when we feel that something is going, has almost gone, is gone. Just as The Thin Red Line, for all its questions and despair, included a thoroughly delineated combat operation, so The Tree of Life always comes back to a young family in 1950s Texas over which the shadow of a death foretold falls.

Even more than the pyrotechnics of the opening and closing sequence, it is this intimate portrait of an ordinary childhood that achieves moments of sublime cinema. The ordinary is elevated, tinged though it is with the elegiac. Two children trying to touch hands through the glass of the window anticipates a moment of final separation. When the children leap from their bicycles and run into the long grass the camera follows them joyfully. Even here, among the games and the energy of youth, Malick is not going to give us an untroubled innocence though. There is sexual awakening, the heartbreaking realisation of parental fallibility and the banal cruelty of siblings. In a sly self-reference, the first word the baby pronounces is ‘alligator’, reminding us of The Thin Red Line‘s very first image: a crocodile slipping under the water. The Tree of Life is Malick’s most magical film, in being his most grounded.

John Bleasdale

Watch the trailer:

If you’re watching television and there’s a series of news reports occasionally interrupted by zigzags of old-fashioned static and if, on the television, there are fires in foreign streets, and a superficially calm but increasingly panicked newsreader talking about disorder / a mystery disease / environmental disaster / scientists being flummoxed / authorities losing control / calling for people not to panic / populations being evacuated and / the growing tension between Made-upia and Inventedland; in other words if you have the distinct impression that what you are watching is the teaser, trailer or prologue for the long-awaited apocalypse, then I have one extremely important piece of advice to offer: buy a dog.

Preferably an Alsatian, or German Shepherd, but the breed doesn’t really matter. Just buy a dog. Even a mongrel. Better still a telepathic mongrel. Start stocking up on food and other essentials: water, a generator, generator fuel, warm clothing, torches, guns, ammunition and dog biscuits. Board up the windows, clear wall space to make room for art treasure to be purloined from deserted and unguarded national art galleries, get yourself a shopping trolley if you’re thinking of going mobile and put down some newspaper and a water bowl.

Why? Dogs make survivors happy. No dog and you just might as well not bother surviving the cataclysmic (but often vaguely defined) event at all. You’re just going to be in a grump.

Evidence:

Robert Neville (played by Will Smith) in I Am Legend (Lawrence, 2007) is having a grand old time of the end days with his dog. He tools around Manhattan in a sports car, hunts elk, plays golf off the deck of an aircraft carrier, watches Shrek so many times that he could act in it (playing any of the parts) and kills the odd unconvincing CGI zombie. OK, he’s going a little stir crazy and he’s upset that his wife and child were killed, but when his dog gets infected and he has to kill him, that’s when it really all goes wrong. That’s the moment he properly loses the will to live.

He should count himself lucky though. In The Omega Man (Sagal, 1971), an earlier adaptation of Richard Matheson’s first novel, which itself is a kind of science fiction melding of Bram Stoker’s Dracula with Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, poor old Robert Neville (here played by Charlton Heston) doesn’t get a dog at all and spends the whole film in a chronically bad mood. Superficially, he does the same kind of stuff Will Smith does. The opening sequence involves Heston in a sports car, the wind in his thinning hair, and he also watches a film so often he can recite whole tranches of it, but whereas the young bereaved father’s love of Shrek is understandable, Heston’s enthusiasm for Woodstock (Wadleigh, 1970) is bewildering. It could be ironic, because Heston is constantly uttering bitter and not very funny one-liners. Even when he gets himself a new car and conducts an imaginary conversation with the car salesman, he gets jipped. ‘You cheap bastard,’ he yells over his shoulder to thin air. The art treasures he hoards go unnoticed (the bust of Caesar is reduced to a hat stand) until the anaemic ‘survivors’ of the plague, a pseudo-religious cult called the Family, decide to destroy them. Heston looks mildly annoyed, but he doesn’t tell them to stop, plead or anything like that. His one reason to be properly cheerful is his relationship with Lisa (Rosalind Cash), but even this has an uneasy edge in keeping with the extremely confused racial politics of the film. On the one hand, one of his main enemies is a black man, turned white by the plague, who has a particular animus towards the Honky, and on the other there’s Lisa, anticipating a Blaxploitation vibe that will definitively appear that same year in Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. Rosalind Cash will go on to star in Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde (Crain, 1976). Heston’s discomfort comes in another of his one-liners to Lisa about his good old Anglo-Saxon blood, which is going to cure Lisa’s brother, the non-Anglo-Saxon Richie. His determination to hole up in his house and his refusal to countenance any attempt at accommodation with the Family, even when a cure is at hand, has the echo of the credo of a right-wing survivalist who appreciates the simplicity that the apocalypse offers.

Somewhere in between the two, but actually the first attempt at an adaptation of Matheson’s book, is the Italo-American production The Last Man on Earth, starring Vincent Price. Filmed in Rome in 1964 and directed by Ubaldo Ragona and Sidney Salkow, the film is brave in giving us a dour version of the End. Life for Price’s Robert Morgan is drudgery and loneliness. Here’s a typical day: up early, collect corpses, get some gasoline, take corpses to the pit, burn corpses, lunch. Make wooden stakes, kill vampires while they sleep, collect garlic. Home before dark, repair boarding, loud jazz and a sleepless night of listening to the demented cries of people who want to kill you. Price is superb, his hang-dog features and his deadpan voice-over never stray towards the inviting pastures of camp, there to frolic the way a bare-chested Heston occasionally does in The Omega Man. There’s even a moment when he looks glumly at a sports car before deciding on the station wagon because it’s easier to load it with corpses.

His dog turns up halfway through the film, offering Morgan a brief moment of joy and happiness, but unfortunately he too gets infected and Morgan must stake him and bury him. It is while doing this that he meets another survivor who will bring about his ruin. As in I Am Legend, the death of the dog is a crucial moment.

But why? What is it with dogs and the end of the world? This is not (entirely) a facetious point. The dog in I Am Legend is partly a link to Neville’s family (the puppy is handed over by the daughter just before their helicopter explodes), but it is also an iconic vision of a man paradoxically alone while still being in command. When nature has gone wrong and society breaks down, the last man on earth regains an element of mastery via man’s best friend. He even gets on the poster.

For Morgan, the dog simply represents happier times and uncomplicated company. He chases the dog for a significantly longer amount of screen time than he does the woman he meets. And whereas the dog is a possibility of salvation denied, the woman is his downfall. The dog in John Hillcoat’s The Road (2009) is initially a threat, but ultimately a sign of normality returning and the proper relationships (man, dog, family, etc.) that had melted down, being restored.

Based on a Harlan Ellison novella and directed by L.Q. Jones – one of those actors you see in tonnes of Westerns but can’t name – A Boy and His Dog (1974) is set after World War IV and features a baby-faced Don Johnson playing Vic, an amiable rapist, who is accompanied and helped by his telepathic dog, Blood, as they wander the post-apocalyptic wasteland. As in the other films, the lone survivor is offered various alternative societies to join or to be threatened by – The Family in The Omega Man, the new hybrid society in The Last Man on Earth and, perhaps most terrifyingly, Vermont in I Am Legend. After encountering various scavengers, Vic is lured by a young woman, Quilla June, into an underground city where his semen is to be drained from him and used to impregnate the women of the community. The film plays on the extremely dangerous ground of A Clockwork Orange (1971) in making society so grotesquely awful (for obvious satirical effect) that the rapist becomes morally preferable, if not heroic, in at least being honest. The true horror is normalised by the harmless (and sometimes not so harmless, cf. the last line of the movie) banter and bickering of boy and dog and the black humour the film liberally indulges in. Ultimately, Vic doesn’t want female companionship, a family, love. He wants his dog, the occasional rape and freedom. It might well be the end of the world as we know it, but Vic feels fine.

John Bleasdale

At first glance, David Fincher’s two explorations of masculinity in crisis, bookending the noughties – Fight Club (1999) and The Social Network (2010) – look similar in the way a Facebook poke might resemble a full-on punch in the teeth. But there are connections. As his most concerted examination of dysfunctional bromance, the films stand alongside his best work, Seven (1995), The Game (1997) and Zodiac (2007), in probing the darker reaches of masculine loneliness. Of course, Alien 3 and Panic Room both feature feisty female protagonists, but they were missteps: the first being a fraught studio-conflict-riven debut and the latter a self-consciously big B-movie. You might think I’m forgetting The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), and you’d be right.

The First Rule of Fightbook Is You Have to Talk about Fightbook.

Fincher is a director who needs writers, working best when he has someone else’s powerful voice to put his images to. Seven was scripted by Andrew Kevin Walker and Zodiac featured Robert Graysmith (the writer of the book on which the film is based) as a major character. With The Social Network, the fame and prominence of its writer makes it easy to see this as an Aaron Sorkin production rather than a David Fincher film; and the Academy, for what it’s worth, duly did. Sorkin’s forte, as displayed in his TV work and most especially The West Wing, is quick-fire talk, and that’s what we get in The Social Network: a young man and a young woman talking; young men talking; young men talking together; young men talking to old men; young men’s lawyers talking and then young men talking again; then a woman says something. Add to this the fact that the nub of the drama is litigation, young men talking about what young men said and what they meant when they said it. It’s fast and witty, but there are also the acerbic silences. Mark Zuckersomething (played by Jesse Eisenberg) has the pout of a man whose best one-liners are zinging around the private theatre of his brain. For all the talk, no one actually seems to have a real conversation.

The Second Rule of Fightbook Is You Have to Talk about Fightbook.

Despite the film’s savage satirising of the talking cure and group therapy sessions, Fight Club is nothing if not a talking cure. Like The Social Network, this film is most definitely a talkie, breaking its own first and second rule again and again. Chuck Palahniuk’s first person prose is almost seamlessly cut and pasted into Edward Norton’s voice-over narration. But it’s not just that. The voice is a controlling element of the film, not only explaining what is happening or what the character is thinking, but directing the action. When Norton walks through his apartment, his words make furniture magically appear. His voice can freeze-frame the film. Telephone calls (from call-boxes and landlines, so 1999) are prominent plot moments. The voice is languid, persuasive, funny, deceitful, but in control even as it complains of helplessness and impotence. The second voice is Tyler Durden’s politically ambiguous radicalism. In fact, it isn’t so much ambiguous as wilfully contradictory: authoritarian anti-authoritarianism, fascistically organised anarchism, self-effacing narcissism. Ultimately, the film, especially on a second viewing, is about a man complaining that men (now) talk too much. And complaining. Following the novel more closely, a better ending might have located the whole story inside a group therapy session for ex-Fight Club men, trying to deal with their Tyler withdrawal.

The Third Rule of Fightbook: Only One Girl at a Time, Fellas.

Of course, it would be ridiculous to say that there are no girls in these films. But there tends to be only one significant other, and she is only there to starkly point out a rejection of, or by, the female world. Marla in Fight Club is a taunting, threatening presence who needs to be eliminated. More Tyler than Tyler himself (who anyway is only ever really half Tyler), Marla’s suicidal nihilism needs to be sidelined if the attempt to find a core masculine identity is to be taken seriously. The rejection of the female – ‘we were a generation brought up by our mothers, I’m thinking if another woman in our lives is really the solution’ – allows also for a freer homoerotic fantasy. But this kind of no-girls-allowed masculinity is really a heterosexual homosexuality, full of backslapping and angry repression. Whereas Fight Club wears its man-worries on its bare (but not particularly hairy) chest, The Social Network maintains an adolescent attitude to women, at once fearing them, despising them after the anticipated rejection and then vengefully commodifying them. Girls with names, there are few and but one of note. Like Marla, Erica Albright is the man-child’s worst nightmare, an intelligent, articulate woman who can see through pretence. Just as Fight Club is a retreat from Marla, so Facebook is a rejection of a girl like Erica Albright and initially an act of publicly delivered vengeance. Every other girl in the film is a trophy to be ostentatiously flung in Erica Albright’s face, girls with bigger tits and less lip. The question-mark endings of both films present similarly ironic and uncertain truces rather than genuine resolution.

The Fourth Rule of Fightbook: If This Is Your First Night at Fightbook, You DON’T Have to Fight.

The most obvious difference between the two films is the level of violence. The fighting of Fight Club has been variously described as metaphorical and whatnot, and yet it is there, a visceral, anti-intellectual attempt at life, at connecting. This late 90s wish for violence, for a self-defining and character-building war, is no longer sustainable post-9/11, in the phosphorous light of Fallujah and the Helmand Province. All the boys who really wanted to find themselves in the zing of battle are in The Hurt Locker (Bigalow, 2008) or Restrepo (Hetherington and Junger, 2010). The Social Network verbally spars where Fight Club smashes your face in, both in its content and in its stylistic vigour. And yet the total absence of violence in The Social Network leaves an outline where violence ought to be. Sean Parker’s flinch is a defining moment in the battle between him and Eduardo: ‘I like standing next to you, Sean,’ Eduardo says. ‘It makes me look tough.’ Fight Club‘s psychotic anguish about ‘being men together’ is more violently played out and the images of movie star masculinity (Brad Pitt and Jared Leto) are at least available, but the loneliness of the central characters of both films, their inability to connect, or even look at each other while talking is there throughout. [SPOILER] The ‘suicide’ at the end of Fight Club ought to be real (the statistics for suicide among young white men in the US make for grim reading), but both films reach out for a possibly hopeful resolution.

If only it wasn’t for that last cock, getting in the way of everything.

John Bleasdale