Ideas of Reference

Wikipedia says: "Ideas of reference and delusions of reference involve people having a belief or perception that irrelevant, unrelated or innocuous phenomena in the world refer to them directly or have special personal significance: 'the notion that everything one perceives in the world relates to one's own destiny'." It can often be a sign of paranoia or schizophrenia.

This is not the case when one experiences a great work of art. Nor is it the case when there are objective points of reference. Seeing Terence Malick's "The Tree of Life" had a powerful emotional affect upon me. It sent me into that space where everything is related, everything is connected, everything is about me. That space where creation happens. As a rational human being—I have a graduate degree in Philosophy and a Law degree—that can elicit panic, but the film is so beautiful, it brings, instead, a feeling of ecstasy.

Let me explain: According to the credits, much of the movie was filmed in a place called Smithville, Texas. I lived for three of the first six years of my life in a town called Kirbyville, TX, some 250 miles from Smithville, which is a dead ringer for the town in the movie. The main street, the slant-in parking, the long straight residential streets, the trees, the green. My time there was not far removed from the time of the film, and my age not far from that of the boys. My first elementary school was architecturally identical to the one in "The Tree of Life." My father was the pastor of the church in K'ville; Jack O'Brien's is the organist. Like Jack, I ran across the tops of the pews when people weren't there. I roamed the town in a pack of my young peers—it was safe to do, even at that young age. I threw rocks through shed windows. I had my first little girlfriend there. Our family left precipitously, packing up in the family car and moving to North Carolina, for reasons that were obscure to me then.

On this score, I would like to point out one tiny factual error in the film: In the scene where a child drowns in the swimming hole—again, not unlike the pool where I learned to swim—we see boys and girls swimming together. This didn't happen in that time and in that place. Swim days were segregated: boys had to play in the gym or on the playground on the days when girls swam at the pool and vice versa. Other details were shockingly accurate. And that's the point.

Unlike Jack, the in-breaking of conscience—the obtaining of a knowledge of what's right and wrong, the specific choice to do the wrong thing (again and again), and the regret for having so chosen—which is the central trope of the film (the bridge [of the last frame] between the two world) for him, came for me some years after my sojourn in Texas. Notwithstanding, I felt like Malick's movie was about me. I felt it could've been made just for me.

Of course, my rational mind knows better, but that's the way I feel after having seen it.

As a writer, I connected with the film as well. Often I find myself wandering aimlessly along the shores of mute memory—like Jack—trying to make some sense of who I am and what it all means. The novel I'm currently working on begins with a present day narrator who has just received a death sentence from his doctor. He, too, calls up isolated instances from the past… blah, blah, blah…to try and make sense…blah, blah, blah. In my piece, however, the hero opts for one last coup to try to sum it all up, to create meaning, as it were. To go out with some style. In other words, the form of the novel I'm struggling to write takes much the same form as Malick's movie—except he's a tremendous artist, with all the pageantry and music and imagery of the film medium available to him. Oh yeah, and Sean Penn and Brad Pitt, too.

These points of confluence—call it serendipity—I do not believe, constitute ideas of reference in the DSM sense. ["I'm not crazy!"] It has to do, rather, with the universality of Malick's art—its essential humanity. It touched me profoundly, but I also think it can and will touch others equally as profoundly. The fact that it has parallels—if not intersections—with my own life only served to heighten the personal/emotional nature of my response.

You've seen my 'objective' take on the film in yesterday's post. This is my more subjective take. My personal connection.

Did I mention that the soundtrack music is transporting?

Picking Up A Few Acorns

I fear I must insist you see Terence Malick's new film "The Tree of Life." I'm not normally a shill for the latest movie or book, but in this case you'll thank me.

I don't know quite how to put it, but I'll try: there were moments in this film when I found myself pinned to the back of my seat—even more so than in, say, the flying sequences of "Top Gun" or the driving sequences of "Days of Thunder"—breathless, clinging to the arms of the chair, riveted to the screen, afraid to move because I might miss some minute, meaningful detail of the experience. But that's me.

You can track down any number of reviews on the Web. Anthony Lane's in The New Yorker is a good place to start. But the ones I've seen miss what I take to be the point of the piece.

The first two scenes set the table, leisurely introducing the characters, the crisis, the pace, the idiom, the imagery, the voice, etc. Every frame seems about to burst apart with meaning. Then, there is an abstract sequence about the creation of the universe—reminiscent of that in "2001: A Space Odyssey," but much more pointed and, as Lane points out, coherent. After which, we get back to the main story line—Jack O'Brien's mid-life angst.

Most reviews I've read, tell us this film is Malick's "prayer" or his "message". This, I feel, misreads the movie. The film does pose the Miltonian question of how to justify the ways of God to men. Specifically, how can we relate in our Ur-situation [that's my word] of mortal loss and grief to the majestic, cosmic forces that created the vast Universe in which we find ourselves? Malick does not, however, answer the question. I take away no authorial message. And all the better.

We do, however, get the answers of his principal characters: Mr. O'Brien's (Brad Pitt) solution is to conquer his disappointment and grief by struggling to build big, lasting monuments to the ego. Mrs. O'Brien's (Jessica Chastain) solution is to love it all, good and evil, when we have it and, when it goes, release it all back to the infinite in the same spirit. Jack's (Sean Penn), their son, solution is to wrestle with the soul and wander about, lost, along the shores of memory, seeking out the infinite, searching for the transcendent in a world where it does not readily present itself: the search itself being the BRIDGE. [Maybe he's supposed to be a cut-out for Malick, but that's not for me to say.]

This is the artistry of the narrative. But the artistry of the film extends to the cinematography, the soundtrack, the imagery, the dialogue—in short, it is a masterpiece that uses all the elements of the medium to craft a work of art.

There are moments of surpassing beauty. There are moments of shocking violence—but only insofar as they are moments of true intimacy and trust betrayed. There are moments where souls are riven, and evil intrudes on the basic goodness and innocence of the young. There are many moments when the music is simply transporting.

All-in-all "The Tree of Life" is a movie where you have to work for the meaning, but it all works together so beautifully that the experience leaves you, as I said, breathless.

Please, do yourself a favor. See it. I took Wesdom and some other high schoolers. There were some tears. There were some questions. They want to see it again. They've gone to see "X-Men" now.



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One hole in the story has to do with the third O'Brien son. He seems to get lost, and one suspects Malick had to banish his story to the cutting room floor. As it is, the film comes in at about 2:30.