Why does the cultural and political traffic between the U.S. and
Europe so often involve our borrowing the worst features of each
other’s systems? Our most advanced thinkers somehow imagine that
Europe’s economically top-heavy yet largely undefended social
democracies and liberal internationalism are the dernier cri of advanced political thinking
while theirs just can’t wait to import our disastrous education
system along with the egalitarianism and feminist-inspired
political correctness which has done so much to ruin it.
Culturally, too, the exchange — though once fruitful on both sides
as Europe exported what turned out to be great American film
directors like Ernst Lubitsch and American film noir proved hugely influential on the
French New Wave — now seems barren at best. It wasn’t long ago
when the winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes was pretty sure to be a
good movie, or at least to be a pretty good movie, whereas now it’s
more like the Oscar for Best Picture and thus pretty sure to be a
bad movie.
Or like this year’s winner at Cannes, which was Terrence
Malick’s Tree of Life, to be
rewarded for its vices, which are an American-style (I’m afraid)
elephantiasis of the montage
and an absurdly overblown self-conscious artiness. But, like the
pursuit of the elusive White Whale of the Great American Novel,
that of some would-be ne plus
ultra of the cinema such as this can have only
deleterious effects on the artistic product. What the movies can
actually do well, in other words, is at odds with excessive
artistic ambition like Mr. Malick’s. Not only has his career-long
case of inert ponderousness continued into his new movie, but he
has added to it an even more pseudish metaphysical dimension. In
the midst of its evidently autobiographical account of growing up
in a small town in Texas in the 1950s, it produces images of what I
take to be the birth of the universe and excerpts (reluctantly but
necessarily!) of the earth’s evolutionary history.
This is presumably Mr. Malick’s way of attaching what might have
been an engaging story for its own sake to ultimate things, but the
presence of the latter can only seem arbitrary and distracting.
These ultimate things include what appears to be — he does not
provide any sort of critical gloss to confirm it — a vision of
heaven as a beach with not very happy-looking people milling
aimlessly around on it, among whom the now-grown boy from the 1950s
segments, played by Sean Penn, finds his father (Brad Pitt), mother
(Jessica Chastain), and now-dead brother as they were then. This
vision of the hereafter also seems rather arbitrary. Why should
their heavenly selves be identical to his memory of them instead of
as they were at quite another time of their lives? Perhaps it’s not
heaven after all but only a dream taking place inside the head of
Sean Penn’s character. And who cares anyway? The people involved
already have no substance apart from his memories of them.
The problem with trying to encompass ultimate things within a
two-and-a-half-hour film is that the bigger the vision the more you
stress its arbitrariness, and the fact that it is only an
idiosyncratic take of the filmmaker’s on realities that are vastly
more extensive than he can begin to represent with any pretense of
realism. Yet it is realism for which the movies were made and which
it is always, or nearly always, fatal for them to stray far from.
Anyway, Mr. Malick’s magnificent failure got me to thinking about
how these ultimate things have been represented in the movies by
people with a better sense of the medium’s limitations, and so I
chose for the fifth of my annual summer movie series — this year’s
like last year’s a co-presentation of the Ethics and Public Policy
Center and the Hudson Institute in Washington — the theme of
Heaven. All the movies I chose have a modesty of ambition from
which Mr. Malick would have done well to learn.
One, it’s true, Michael Powell’s and Emeric Pressburger’s
Stairway to Heaven (also known
as A Matter of Life and Death)
of 1946, offers us a full-on image of life after death seemingly to
rival Mr. Malick’s for ambition. But it has two things that his has
not: one is a sense of humor and the absurd, which I regard as
essential to treating matters so far beyond our ken, and the other
is a realistic framework in terms of which the heavenly scenes can
only be seen as a kind of dream vision. It helps that the main
character, a wartime RAF pilot played by David Niven, is having a
brain operation here on earth while he is ostensibly pleading his
case before a heavenly tribunal to be allowed to return to earth
and his new-found love for Kim Hunter. In Tree of Life, the other way around, as the
visionary stuff is allowed to function as the framework and thus is
much too insubstantial to bear the weight of the realistic scenes,
which take on some of its dream-like qualities as a result.
All the other films in my series, Heaven Can Wait by Lubitsch from 1943,
Between Two Worlds by Edward
A. Blatt of 1944, Defending Your
Life by Albert Brooks of 1991, and After Life by Hirokazu Kore-Eda of 1998, stop
short of ushering us into heaven itself, let alone the divine
presence, and instead modestly confine themselves to suggesting it
by means of indirection. All, including Stairway to Heaven, also imagine the
entrance of the soul into eternity in terms of an encounter, more
or less comic, with an apparently earthbound bureaucracy — which,
indeed, seems an inescapable image of authority for modern man,
whether here below or in the great beyond. The advantage of this
universal metaphor is precisely that it brings ultimate things very
firmly down to earth and, by anchoring them in the familiar, and
the familiarly annoying, create that sense of absurdity that I said
earlier was essential to the subject.
NOR IS ABSURDITY at all inconsistent with seriousness of
purpose. Another thing that all five films have in common is sexual
love which, as the movies’ great subject (along with violence) from
their earliest days down to the present, also helps to bring the
heavenly down to earth by translating, at least to some extent, an
unknown mystery into a more familiar one. It also goes with the
grain of the medium and with that of a whole cultural tendency that
dates back centuries in the Western tradition and that Philip
Larkin summed up in the much misquoted (or partially quoted) lines
from “An Arundel Tomb” about how “our almost-instinct” may appear
in a moment of such artistic epiphany as his to be “almost true” —
namely, that “what will survive of us is love.”
If today, in the world that the movies have done so much to
create during the last century, our moral life is centered in and
almost co-extensive with our sexual relationships, the question of
Judgment, once so interesting to Christian believers, becomes a
delicate one, to say the least. Each of the five films treats the
question of the Last Judgment differently, but each treats it
seriously. To Lubitsch in Heaven Can
Wait, sin is extramarital sex, as it was to a certain
Victorian sensibility, but the sex is kept almost entirely out of
sight and his Everyman hero, played by Don Ameche, is redeemed by a
lifelong devotion to his saintly and tolerant wife, played by Gene
Tierney. In Between Two
Worlds, Judgment falls most heavily on that favorite
hate-figure of the Between-Two-Wars, the war profiteer, played by
George Coulouris, but it is hinted that even he is not beyond
redemption, while an unfaithful wife pretends to be happy to be
sentenced to an eternity of solitude.
David Niven’s Judgment Day in Stairway
to Heaven is a deliberate parody, as Raymond Massey
plays a colonial American prosecutor who hates the British. But
heaven proves indulgent, to war heroes at least, and salvation for
him is life on earth with his beloved WAC. Albert Brooks’s Everyman
in Defending Your Life finds
that only cowardice is sin while sex is salvific, but it is more
than hinted that, for all the absurdist trial sequences that make
this the funniest of the five films, the only Judgment he has to
fear is that which he makes on himself. Mr. Kore-Eda’s Japanese
specters in After Life are
only asked by the heavenly bureaucracy to choose a memory to take
with them into eternity and seem to fear no other judgment — until
we realize that that choice is itself the Judgment that many of
them fear. Such subtlety carries with it a world of insight that
must be forever unavailable to Terrence Malick — too busy playing
God and judging himself to offer any insight into the Judgment, if
any, which awaits us all. That more modest and better-judged movies
are able to do so is a vindication of the popular culture, or at
least of what it might be once again.
