The Tree of Life

04 Monday Jul 2011

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The Tree of Life is a rare film – so ambitious and so directly concerned with the meaning of our existence. The last film I saw to attempt so much was Synecdoche, New York, and the scale of that was smaller, because The Tree of Life places our puny lives against the scale of aeons, of the earth forming and life evolving.

We learn early in the film that Jack O’Brien’s brother died at 19 and Jack has never got over it. Grief, then is the frame through which we watch the rest of a film centred on the experience of being a child and the meaning of life.

Most of the film is a series of fragments of the childhood of the O’Brien boys. Significance, perspective, scale is all through the eyes of the children. The film reminded me of what it was like to be a child, surely one of the most incredible things a work of art could do. (The only other piece of art which has done this for me is Randolph Stow’s The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea; perhaps also the beginning of James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.)

The boys love their parents. The stories their mother tells them have the same dreamy truth of all of life, the fascination of light and objects, and the unsettled laws of the universe. Their mother reads them Peter Rabbit and then they see a rabbit running through their garden. The gap between the story world and their world is still thin.The boys ask their mother to tell them a story from before they can remember. She tells them about the time she got to fly in a plane as a graduation present. It has the magical quality of all stories. And it also echoes our own imagined request of the film-maker: he tells us stories from before we can remember, the primordial history of our planet, to set our lives against and give us the right scale.

The boys mimic a crippled man in the street and feel guilty when he notices. They live in fear and admiration of their father and his tough love which can so easily turn to anger. They torture and admire frogs. Jack looks longingly at a girl in his class when he should be doing a spelling test. He follows her on his way home; it comes to nothing, and yet he felt something so strongly at that moment that it should have come to something.

And that is the experience of life shown in the film: intense moments of fear or love or insight not necessarily coming to anything so grand as the movies we watch might make us expect, but instead being followed by another day and another, much the same.

The film starts with a quote from Job – “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation…while the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” One of the narrators echoes this through the primordial sequence – ‘Where were you?’, ‘Where were you?’. It is a theological vision of the world similar to Job’s – who are we to complain about our suffering, measured against the infinity, the scale of God?

It is not an easy film to watch, nor a necessarily enjoyable one, but it will be talked about for decades and decades and rightly so.

Further reading – a great post on the religious dimensions of the film.

‘When I had finished reading the last of Rossi’s letters… I felt a new desolation, as if he had vanished a second time’

27 Monday Jun 2011

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When I had finished reading the last of Rossi’s letters, my father said, I felt a new desolation, as if he had vanished a second time. (119)

In this opening sentence to Chapter 15 of The Historian, Elizabeth Kostova captures the gist of the genre of ‘biographical quest’ or ‘romance of the archives’. People from the past come to life again in the pages of the documents they have left behind. The quester comes to know them, only to love them again when the trail goes cold, when the last document is read.

It is an experience many of us know in part from reading letters of dead people, perhaps our family who we knew, or our ancestors who we didn’t. It is also the thrill of a kind of life beyond the grave, and the sophistication of a plausible ghost story. Perhaps this is part of the genre’s attraction.

A Tour of Bourgeois Hell: Hanif Kureishi’s Something To Tell You

04 Saturday Jun 2011

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Theologian Tom Wright understands hell as a process of dehumanization as people reflect the image of God less and less and come to resemble the things they worship. I don’t agree with him, but if he was looking for a modern day Dante’s tour of such a hell, he would find it (without Dante’s genius) in Hanif Kureishi’s Something To Tell You.

There is not a nice character in sight. Jamal is the narrator, and perhaps the most detestable of them all. Now a famous middle-aged therapist, he obsesses over his first love thirty years earlier, which ended with him murdering someone. Meanwhile, his hedonistic playwright best friend Henry embarks on an affair with his hedonistic underworld sister Miriam, and we are mildly amused by a clash of manners. Jamal himself vacillates between his estranged wife Josephine, a prostitute named Goddess he likes to confide in and his former lover Lisa, who’s always ready to get into bed with him. Things are complicated further when three of the figures from his past return.

We learn about halfway the ‘terrible secret’ in Jamal’s past, and from then on it feels the drug-addled sex-obsessed characters are dragging themselves sluggishly from scene to scene. They’re not entirely self-focused; as left wing intelligentsia they do complain about Blair’s Britain from time to time, but the complaints are not very convincing.

I’ve been trying to put my finger on my own snobby, classist tastes in film and fiction – the fact that I tend to be bored by ‘kitchen sink’ working class realism, my resonance with John Fowles’ line in his journals about ‘to hell with the inarticulate hero’. I would have said that I tended to identify more with middle class characters, with articulate middle class angst. This book proves that I can’t generalise too much; it reminds me of how boring the middle class can be.

A quote from Glenn Duncan

15 Sunday May 2011

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The joke on me is the joke on everyone: youth makes life mythic; then leaves. If you’re lucky, first love comes along and makes it mythic again. Then leaves. For a few God, the fit having inexplicably taken Him, steps in and makes life mythic again. Then most likely leaves. For the rest only death – the mother’s funeral, the aftershaved doctor and the test results – retains the heft to make life mythic again, and that’s an awfully high price to pay.
– The Bloodstone Papers, p. 105

He’s a writer obsessed with death and God, so I’m glad my friend introduced me to him.

The debasement of language

12 Saturday Mar 2011

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We have no language left to talk about the tsunami and the earthquake. Every day we ratchet up the intensifiers, referring to rather mild things as ‘incredible’ or ‘stunning’ or ‘powerful’ or ‘phenomenal’ or ‘awful’. And then when something comes along which is all these things, we can’t use words to treat it with the import it deserves or convey its magnitude.

[Turning 30 #2] The End of Exceptionalism

01 Tuesday Mar 2011

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One thing I’ve learnt in my twenties is the end of exceptionalism. It’s probably a common delusion of youth to think oneself exempt from the laws, patterns, forces which shape everyone else. Unlike those weak people I will not put on weight, do anything I don’t want to do for the sake of money, stop listening to loud, aggressive music, suffer medical indignities, grow hairs on my chest, long to sit quietly at home watching television, save for a house, or fail in my burning but impractical ambitions.

The ultimate expression of exceptionalism is the refusal to believe in one’s mortality. As a small child, I assumed I would live to 100. I did better than everyone else in every other test; wasn’t it only fair I receive the best mark in that too? I was the Judge, Fox Clane, in Carson McCullers’ Clock Without Hands, whose mortality was inconceivable, even at the end of his life.

Immortality, that was what the Judge was concerned with. It was inconceivable to him that he would actually die. He would live to a hundred years if he kept to his diet and controlled himself – deeply he regretted the extra toast. He didn’t want to limit his time for just a hundred years, wasn’t there a South American Indian who had lived to be a hundred and fifty – and would a hundred and fifty years be enough? No. It was immortality he wanted. Immortality like Shakespeare, and if ‘push came to shovel’, even like Ben Jonson. In any case he wanted no ashes and dust for Fox Clane. (p.87)

The end of exceptionalism is inevitably tied to the dulling of idealism. They are not identical, but they tend to go together. Idealism has in its twenties the quality of believing that you can make things work that no-one else has made work or that you can solve problems no-one else has solved. I used to despise the way people lost their idealism as they got older. It wasn’t going to happen to me.

I have a small hope of coming through the end of exceptionalism, and the disappointments of the last years and  compromises I’ve made for various reasons, to a post-exceptionalist idealism, the kind of wise idealism which lives quietly for what is right while no longer burning with naive certainty that things will turn out right if only one believes hard enough.

I hate vagueness, and I’ve veered toward it in the last couple of paragraphs. Yet vagueness is sometimes the price of being public. (At other times the price is writing fiction.)

[Turning 30 #1] Travel Is So Broadening

01 Tuesday Mar 2011

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I turn thirty in a few days and I have been to very few places in the world. I rationalise this as a counter-cultural decision, a radical resolution to stay put. Of course, it has more to do with a certain strange inertia. I also make myself feel better by getting irked at my peers who are always on the move, always restlessly preparing for the next big trip to Europe or Asia to find themselves.

I once lived with a Singaporean girl in student village who was contemptuous of how little I had seen of the world – and I was only twenty then. ‘You don’t understand the world yet,’ she said. But once I asked her about atheists in Singapore and she asked what an atheist was. When I explained, she said she didn’t know there were people in the world who didn’t believe in God.

I will see the world, don’t hassle me. But I’m also uneasy about the idea of tourism. I don’t think it’s possible to experience other places. Of course it’s possible, but what I mean is, it’s nothing like the experience of actually living there, it is only like the experience of visiting there. How much does it tell you of what it is to live in Perth to visit King’s Park or the Bell Tower or the Perth Mint? And then again, who wants to spend several decades living in a house with a view of a cul-de-sac in Belmont or Bibra Lake and getting stuck in traffic jams every morning, which is more like what actually living in Perth is like?

I have this nostalgia for Thomas Hardy’s village life. They didn’t travel very far in those days. (It’s always ambitions beyond one’s station which destroys Hardy’s idyll, ambitions like seeing the world.) And then I have a soft spot for Isaac Asimov’s detective who had never been further than thirty kilometres from his house in his whole life. I think he was stuck in a wheelchair. I read a number of his stories sitting in the sunlight in the brown hues of the Collie Public Library some time in 1996. I cannot remember the detective’s name, although these days I could so easily find out.

Don’t worry, I will get to Europe. I will go through the motions. I will take in the sights. But I’ll probably still be questioning the value of seeing. I’ll be outside looking in on me as a tourist and not liking it. What I will try not to do is come home and try to convey my experience to others, those long winded travel narratives people tell each other. So often masked boasts and so often self indulgent.

The Worst Piece of Casting in Literary Adaptation History

10 Thursday Feb 2011

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I hate it when people go on about how film adaptations spoil their favourite book. Don’t watch it and shut up. No-one likes a pedant. But first let me go on about this one point. It’s okay, it’s acceptable going-on, because it’s the worst piece of casting in literary adaptation history.

A.S. Byatt’s Possession describes literary scholar Roland Mitchell as shy and awkward. His nickname is Mole. Let me repeat that he is a literary scholar. And he is shy and mole-like. Now no-one likes typecasting or stereotypes. No-one would insist that literary scholars all look shy and awkward, but it is crucial to this story that he is.

Whatever the case, has anyone ever pictured a literary scholar to look like this? Like a big chinned Hollywood star?

Obviously some movie producer did. He read the script which described a shy, awkward literary scholar with a nickname of ‘Mole’ and the first name which came into his mind was Steven Segal. But Steven being unavailable, the next name that came into his head was Aaron Eckhart (whom I have nothing personal against). And so Eckhart became Roland Mitchell, with predictable results.

(On the other hand, Gwenyth Paltrow is perfectly cast as Maude, might I add.)

The Long Sunset

10 Thursday Feb 2011

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His early success, and now his long sunset. His brief peak in 1971 and now everyone wants him to play That Song. He talks a lot on stage. Like a sad old man in a pub, except the audience has paid to listen to him. He tells us stories, drops some names. He has had to become a performer. Once he was going to change the world. When you are a performer, you have to get the baby boomers to sing along, and you have to ‘play it like you mean it’ – when you don’t really mean it, because this is, in his estimation, the 15th-20th tour of Australia.  He told the audience they had a paid a lot of money, so he and the band would play it like they meant it.

He is polite, but the audience can hear the bitterness. At MP3s, at music these days, at the youth these days. And he keeps talking about That Song. Everything is dated by it, and if he’s not mentioning it directly, he’s hinting at it obliquely. He’s 65 now, and he said he imagines he’ll do this for another five years. His stories, they were trying to explain to the audience why he had done what he had done. An account of how he had spent his life. But it wasn’t to the audience, it was part of the inner struggle to keep his chin up, pull out that guitar, night after night, in the long sunset.

T-shirts: a memoir

19 Wednesday Jan 2011

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The other day, I saw a teenager in the supermarket with a t-shirt that said, ‘When I’m God, Everyone Dies.’ I wondered what made him pick it out at the shop and decide that he wanted to buy it, that he wanted this slogan to represent him in public.  Does he hate the world and wish we would die? Was he just being ironic? (There’s nothing indicating irony in the design.) Or did he not particularly think about it? Later, a google search revealed it’s a line from the Marilyn Manson song, “The Reflecting God”. Which doesn’t really answer the questions.

What does it mean to wear a t-shirt with a message?

For a time in my early twenties, I would nearly only wear t-shirts with messages. I was a billboard of anti-war and anti-capitalism messages as well as bands I liked. It showed the world what kind of person I was, I suppose. Maybe I thought it would also convert some people.

I don’t have too many t-shirts-with-messages. I have a Clash t-shirt, but that’s an accident, because I didn’t pack enough clothes for my honeymoon and when we got to Christchurch on a Sunday, it was the best option from the markets. I feel dishonest, as these days I don’t listen to the Clash, as the very low play count of their songs on my itunes will prove.

I didn’t consciously turn away from t-shirts-with-messages. But these days I’d rather be more anonymous. Maybe it’s a part of being old.

I should be understanding of people who do wear t-shirts-with-messages. But many of them are disturbing. Not usually in the way of the ‘When I’m God…’ example. More often in their banality. What does it mean to wear a t-shirt saying, ‘I can only please one person per day. Today isn’t your day…and tomorrow don’t look good either’?  There’s quite a few of these kind of t-shirts with a standing joke, often postured slightly against the world or against women, or against men. I can understand a t-shirt promoting a cause, or a band, but what do these do? Is this as close to an ideology as a certain kind of person goes? Perhaps people are actually wearing their philosophy of life and they just wanted to share it with us. I don’t know.