In a recent number of the Times Literary Supplement,
Peter Singer paid an extravagant tribute to Derek Parfit, the
ethicist whose magnum opus, On What Matters, he calls “the
most significant work in ethics” in more than a century. Whether he
is right or not, I am not competent to judge, but I do notice a
blemish on the great man’s splendid surface that has apparently
escaped Professor Singer’s attention. See if you can spot it.
Parfit also asks a less obvious question about all of
human existence. If a massive asteroid hit Earth tomorrow, ending
human history, would it have been a good thing that humans existed
at all? Our answer may depend, Parfit thinks, not only on how we
balance the suffering that has resulted from human existence
against the happiness it has brought, but also on what weight we
give to the badness of the fact that some people suffered greatly
without having anything to compensate them for their suffering.
Parfit answers his own question affirmatively, holding that human
existence to this point has been a good thing, but he acknowledges
that this may be wishful thinking.
Yet first of all, surely, our answer must depend on the
fact that we ourselves are human, and that questions of value such
as this are questions that only human beings are equipped to
answer. They are therefore meaningless apart from the very humanity
which is supposedly the matter under debate. In other words, it
would not be possible for human existence to have been other than a
good thing, since without human existence there would be no
knowledge of good and therefore no good things. If the notion of a
good thing is itself a good thing — as how can it not be? — then
human existence must be a good thing. Indeed, the first and
indispensable good thing.
Both of these professors are guilty, in my view, of a
category mistake, and I bring it up because a director considered
by many to be as great in his field as Professor Parfit is in his
has made a similar mistake in his (inevitably) great movie, The
Tree of Life, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year.
This is Terrence Malick, director of previous pretentious movies
like The
Thin Red Line and The
New World whose new movie, for all
its visual splendor, outdoes even them in its pretentiousness. Like
the poet John Milton in Paradise Lost, Mr. Malick sets out
“to justify the ways of God to man” but seemingly without any
recognition of the same disproportion between question and
questioner that eludes Derek Parfit and Peter Singer. Like them,
Mr. Malick is a man who does not know his own place in the scheme
of things — which is inevitably one of humility before the Creator
or at least the reality principle. And just as we suspect they
cannot have much to tell us about ethics, so Mr. Malick has little
to tell us about God, save for a few banalities about
bigness.
Theodicy implies this essential recognition of
disproportion. God, we must understand, simply by taking up the
subject, is our Judge and not to be judged by us — by putting “God
in the Dock” in C.S. Lewis’s words. The most we can hope for is to
give some account of Him that will make Him marginally less
inscrutable to our fellow creatures. There is no such humility or
sense of proportion in The Tree of Life. Terrence Malick
himself assumes the role of God, his camera showing us what only
God could see, including the formation of the earth’s surface from
primordial volcanic eruptions, the early aeons of evolution and the
destruction of the dinosaurs by the silent impact — perhaps since
none but dinosaurs are around to hear — of what we surmise is the
asteroid supposed to have caused the Cretaceous extinction. Mr.
Malick’s CGI dinosaurs smell of popcorn and Junior Mints, however,
and look annoyingly like Jar Jar Binks. No wonder God smote them
with the asteroid.
There are also various star-scapes and space-scapes placed
side-by-side with what appear to be microscopic views of life on
earth (“The ant’s a centaur in his dragon world/Pull down thy
vanity,” as Uncle Ezra Pound once put it in words that Mr. Malick
should take to heart), but such insistence on disproportion between
man as questioner and the cosmos does not bring God any closer to
us and to our human understanding, as Milton seeks to do, but
instead just drives us further apart from Him. The justification of
God to man here is that God is too remote from man to be justified.
Like Derek Parfit, Mr. Malick is reduced to asking questions of the
cosmos only to show us that he’s wise enough to know there are no
answers. What’s the use of that? It looks like disingenuous
posturing to me.
And where he and his everlasting voiceovers wax
sententious it too often comes out in pseudo-profundities like
this: “There are two ways through life: the way of nature, and the
way of Grace. You have to choose which one you’ll follow.” Really?
It’s always seemed to me that most people follow both at different
times. And to say that “no one who lives the way of Grace ever
comes to a bad end” is absurd — unless he’s teasing us about what
we’re meant to think is the end. Or how about: “The only way to be
happy is to love. Unless you love, your life will flash by.” But
love doesn’t always bring happiness, and anyone of Mr. Malick’s age
must know that your life will flash by even if you don’t love. Most
remarkably, I suspect we are supposed to take seriously the child’s
reproach to God: “Why should I be good when He’s not?” In the same
way, his dad tells him not to put his elbows on the table and then
does it himself. Not exactly a Miltonian reflection.
The child in this case is the apparently autobiographical
figure of Jack O’Brien (Hunter McCracken), a boy of ten or eleven
whose story (such as it is) dominates the middle part of the film
before and after the much bigger events and images of the beginning
and the end. Jack is one of three boys living in Waco, Texas, in
the 1950s, the sons of a partly tyrannical and partly sensitive and
loving father, played by Brad Pitt, and an entirely loving and
strikingly beautiful mother played by Jessica Chastain. But these
people just are. They have no place to go. In keeping with what is
now standard Hollywood procedure, the movie is all mood and no
narrative. There is almost no story and what there is is carefully
flattened and purged of shape and meaning. Typical scenes from a
1950s-era boyhood are well observed but have no obvious connection
to anything else, let alone everything else — life, the
universe and God.
There is, it’s true, an implied narrative involving the
death of an unidentified boy by drowning and, later, that of one of
Jack’s two brothers at the age of 19, or about a decade later than
the time in which the rest of the film’s events (apart from the
cosmic ones) are set. Both deaths set up a questioning of God, but
the latter exists only as a flash-forward to the parents’ reactions
to the news — and those of an otherwise absent grandparent played
by Fiona Shaw. We don’t know how he died or even what happened as a
result of his death, apart from the initial shock of the news, but
we are informed of it by cinematic telegram only so that periodic
whispered voiceovers asking God (or Whomever) “Why?” have the bare
minimum of context — if still no answers.
No, I take that back. There is a kind of answer. The
grown-up Jack, an architect in Houston and in our own time who is
played by Sean Penn, is depicted near the end of the film walking
on the beach like Richard Nixon, in a suit and tie, and
encountering lots of other people on the beach similarly just
milling about, though they are not so well-dressed as he. As these
others include mom and dad and brothers as they were decades
earlier (though Jack remains his grown-up self), I assume that we
have here a representation of eternity, if not one that promises
very much in the way of consolation for Jack’s losses, let alone
ours. It’s nice to know that everybody’s still around, somewhere.
Perhaps Jar Jar and his extinct pals are as well, though we don’t
see them on the beach. But none of this makes any more sense of
existence than we had before we paid our ten or twelve dollars.
Maybe it’s movies like this that make people wonder whether human
existence can really be a good thing.
