I’ve been thinking lately about Terrence Malick’s “Tree of Life” which I saw a few month’s back. It’s a grand, ambitious and for thoroughly problematic film. Plus, dinosaurs. A review and comments in the Guardian: (http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/jul/07/the-tree-of-life-review?commentpage=all#start-of-comments) sum up well the range of responses and genuine difficulty people have had in processing what the film represents.
Here’s a selection:
cinemike
“(The Tree of Life) Like faith, requires a leap.”
LurcherMan
“I conclude that Malick doesn’t do emotional manipulation.”
bobs123
“The visuals, constantly on the verge of cliche.”
circling127
“It does something that nothing else is doing, something good. Plus, dinosaurs.”
jusquin
“This would seem like nonsense or platitudes unless you are deeply embarked on your own personal journey.”
lemonhat
“I actually felt guilty about my cynicysm towards parts of it as it was so passionate and honest in its feelings.”
I’m not going to add my own critique. It’s a great film regardless of whether it actually succeeds in fulfilling anything let alone its own ambitions. The thing that caught me though, and this is reflected in some of the comments above, was my strong desire for the film to convince me, to win me to its emotional argument, and uniquely I felt I was in the hands of an artist with the back catalogue and capacity to do just that.
Alas, I too found cynicism rising at certain points and the beach scene at the end was near unwatchable. My response to this cynicism though was genuine disappointment in Malick’s failure as an artist to consistently compel me. It brought home to me the extent to which we yearn to live in the world in a way which allows us to be open, vulnerable and unguarded and how much we need our art to allow us to believe in the possibility of such a world.
The painter Francis Bacon towards the end of his life spoke sincerely of longing to paint a sunrise like Claude Monet but lamented that the possibility was simply not open to him. His lack of belief in the possibility of hope simply prevented it. In the Tree of Life, Malick has undertaken a kind of methodical spiritual examination of our grounds for believing in the possibility of hope at all, and while the early results as filtered through his lens are promising, in art like anything else, it’s a let down when someone overpromises and underdelivers.
California Dreamin’
In an end of year radio round-up yesterday I heard again an excerpt from Steve Job’s celebrated Stanford Commencement speech where he urges the crowd to never lose sight of the reality of death and the renewed value its looming certainty should give to all our lives.
“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent.”
Stark words to deliver to a fresh faced audience but it was clearly spoken from the heart and it would be hard to dispute that Jobs hadn’t used the awareness of his own death to spur him in building Apple into the brand it is today. A brand which ironically it could be argued, contains at its core, the wormy promise of hope in a pristine white technological future where death can (unconsciously) be dispelled as being unmodern and almost medieval. If you think this is far-fetched, consider Job’s own death and our collective response to it.
By most informed accounts a difficult and it is said an often disagreeable person Steve Jobs was driven to an exceptional degree and while we accord such people leeway in matters of courtesy, civility and even decency: (they’ve got more on their mind after all), his death and the outpourings of grief and loss which followed seemed oddly disproportionate and excessive even to someone who interacts daily with an orchard’s worth of Apple devices. Who or what was actually being mourned here? Something more than an individual, however eminent he may have seemed. A backlash was inevitable as reflected in the discussion here:
http://m.gawker.com/5847338/steve-jobs-was-not-god
The post and comments stir up so many issues it’s difficult for any mortal not to feel rankled by something but one comment is worth quoting in full:
“DrClamSalad @kyrow promoted by CapitalOrange Thu 06 Oct 2011 4:51 PM I think what sickens me about the adoration that people are giving to him is the fact that they give him this adoration because he created a fucking brand. It was his intent to make Apple an inherent piece of the urban sophisticate’s lifestyle and he did this very well. Whether he was important to the creation of computer’s is entirely beside the point because it is not why people are mourning him. If Alan Touring were alive and died tomorrow, no one would give two shits. It is because they see this brand and its Messiah as a part of their lives, they are defined by their Ipods and the music they listen to on it and they thank Steve Jobs for all of these wonderful things. As the article pointed out, he has not done anything for you. In fact, he has made the world a worse place with iphone sweatshops in china. If he revolutionized anything, he revolutionized branding and advertisements. Does that make him bad? No. What is bad is that people consider this more important than people who fought for civil rights, their country, etc. It is a sign that corporations control everything, right down to our wants and desires. Not only that, but when their CEO’s die, they get a fucking heroes burial. We might say that we want equality and for the Obama adminstration to crack down on Wall Street, but what we want more is an Iphone and the person that brings the Iphone to us is more important. Sorry, this one kind of struck a cord with me, I usually am not as hostile over the internet.”
There’s plenty here to take or leave but in case you missed it however the point that rings true as a bell is that the grieving masses define themselves through their Apple branded lifestyle. Apple products represent important signifiers of their superior taste, education, wealth, attractiveness, creativity and soulfulness but most fundamentally they represent hope for the future. A sleek machined future, free of crashes and enveloped in the peace of “backups in the cloud”. That’s a big investment to have in a phone which is systematically and literally devalued by the hand that fed it to you.
It was less Steve Job’s passing which was being mourned but the comforting security of social identity and the collective faith in an all conquering technology which Steve at the helm represented. Like a Messiah who has symbolically banished death from the collective psyche his own death exposed the terrible truth. Death was never beaten; we were just sleeping for a hundred years, enchanted by the “Designed in California” packaging.
The pity isn’t that more deserving dead aren’t celebrated in a similar fashion but that our collective sense of perspective is skewed to the point that even now that the curtain has been pulled back, we confuse a hero to mankind with a frail man crafting and selling beautiful and enticing machines to countless people, now more than ever, hungry to believe in a safer world of technological hope, where nothing dies and where everything finally and eternally “just works”.
Sad to read of the death of artist William Crozier (Born May 5th, 1930; died July 12th, 2011) . I had an opportunity to buy a startling beautiful little print of his back when my income was supplemented by state butter vouchers and I still regret not going hungry for it. A wiley and thoughtful painter, using the simplest of means, his work played endlessly with colour, pattern and composition in an atypical way for Irish based painters of his generation. I saw a documentary about his life and working practices a few years ago and I was greatly impressed by the openness and unfussiness of his approach.
http://williamcrozier.com/indexnew.html
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/obituaries/2011/0716/1224300822051.html#.TiazK4On0a0.facebook
Sailing against the wind
After messing around with canoes, currachs and different boats peripherally over the years I finally decided last year I’d like to learn to sail. My brother in law agreed to take me out on the water initially to literally show me the ropes and it was with him that I first experienced the strange harmony of a boat sailed properly.
I’d never given much thought to how a sail boat gets around and vaguely assumed that the wind pushed it and that like skiing it was basically a one way street except that in a sail boat you had to zig-zag laboriously to get back to where you started. As I learned, the reality is that sail boats are pulled by the wind better than they are pushed and that (to a point) you can sail in the direction of the wind pretty quickly. So far so counter-intuitive, but it clearly worked and I accepted it. My brother in law let me helm the small dinghy and we settled into an upwind course which I concentrated on maintaining. Now here’s the thing; maintaining the correct course involves constant minor adjustments - exactly like riding a bike and at a certain point you literally feel the boat slip into a groove where the many, many forces acting on it (and you) are momentarily harmonised. While I glimpsed this for a few seconds on the first day I’ve since come to know it a bit better and it intrigues me no less.
I acknowledge the physics at play here; of course we are propelled by forces harmonising every time we walk, cycle, drive or indeed trip. In the way that the architect’s drawings or the golden mean as used in the composition of paintings contains the mathematical principles underpinning what’s happening - the reality of actually engaging with the harmonising forces can be disarmingly vivid. The balance achieved has a quality and character in itself, separate from its parts. In the case of sailing the presence of the very alive variables of wind and water also deepen the sensation of harmonising with the elements themselves which was something I wasn’t prepared for.
What I’m getting at here is that there is an inherently deeply satisfying quality when we encounter this harmony and it occurs in unexpected places. Artists and designers do like to claim ownership over the aesthetic experience but anyone who appreciates say Lionel Messi (he of the “beautiful game”) or the driving say of Aryton Senna, understands that when a human through skill and talent attains a degree of harmony with their environment and its forces the result can undeniably be called beauty. At this level the harmony is not a zone or plateau - it’s a knife-edge and our sense of the fleetingness of the balance makes it all the more beautiful.
Every creative endeavour is a search for its own natural resolution which in the arts the designer or artist recognises immediately as the work being “finished”. The design has achieved the optimal balance between the internal forces of form, light/dark, colour, texture etc. The finished work might not be “harmonious” (it might be a wall of feedback or a flayed canvas) but its internal forces ARE harmonised. It has fulfilled its own promise and answered a question only it could have asked. It has been true to itself and resolved its interior demands.
That this should happen is one thing but that it should affect us immediately and intuitively - impressing us with a sense of “this is how it should be” is what surprises me. It seems we are constantly moving towards or away from the perfectly balanced moment. The difference is that, sailing against the wind in a boat - you really know it when you get there.
The debate the world forgot
Here’s a fascinating debate between two important architects of their day, which neatly encapsulates the opposing mindsets and attitudes which have so shaped all our environments, our art, culture and our cultural values. Christopher Alexander espousing an approach to our built environment based on feeling and intuition and Peter Eisenman arguing that our built environment necessarily needed to reflect intellectually the dis-harmony of our world. It’s one of those arguments that humanity so needed to resolve but instead it never even actually had the debate, outside of events like this - the battle was won before it began and as the footnotes elegiacally put it:
“After this debate, as Alexander became more peripheral – his work confined so far to the small- and medium-scale – Eisenman rose to architectural eminence, his buildings becoming ever larger. In a recent review of The Nature of Order, Eisenman was quoted as saying that Alexander “sort of fell off the radar screen.”
It’s sad to consider that perhaps the only way we have of resolving questions like this is through failure after failure. Building inhuman worlds for generation after generation, nourishing ourselves on art and culture which mocks us until at some point in the far future, we weakly acknowledge that the freedom to do this, is in itself not enough.
Contrasting Concepts of Harmony in Architecture: The 1982 Debate Between Christopher Alexander and Peter Eisenman
But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song: then worms shall try
That long preserved virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust:
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
To His Coy Mistress, Andrew Marvell.
I wonder if she fell for this?
