Meditations on The Tree of Life or Can You Be Completely Humorless and Still Be Profound and Thought Provoking?
Of all the profound questions Tree of Life asks us about the nature of our existence in a Universe which often seems hostile to us, this seems to be the most profound, the very profoundest, if you will. The profondo di tutti profondos. Can a film and a filmmaker who take life totally so so soooooooo seriously that he can barely allow a character a smile (unless its in some slow motion, sea of bliss moment), can such a filmmaker really have anything to say about human existence? Which is to say, is being self-serious in the end not in fact to be very serious but to be kinda dumb?
I ask these questions sight unseen, as I haven’t seen the Tree of Life and probably am not going to unless someone can persuade me why I just didn’t get the point Mallick was trying to make in his previous marathon montages of simple people muttering unintentional profundities intercut with ignaunas walking across rocks.
But this question, whether self-seriousness = very serious or = stupid is in fact the great question that the entire American intellectual experience asks us. From the beginning, from its Bostonian puriticanical roots to Tom Paine to Walter Lippmann right down to the NY Times Book Review today, America’s would be thinkers have had little room for funny people. There has always been a place for “humor” (as opposed to “comedy” for which there is none), a squalid little corner that Dave Eggers and Sarah Vowell, for instance has been allowed to occupy at the banquet, allowed to make the great thinkers chuckle, but please never to actually laugh. But there’s never been room in America’s philosophical elite for the likes of Clive James or Kingsely Amis, genuine thinkers who are genuinely not just a little funny.
If you want to show you are a Great Mind in American life, throw around some big subjects, questions about the nature of existence, or about our public officials, and do it an expression so pained it looks like you’ve had a gallon of lemon juice just shot straight up your nose.
Thus, no comedy has won the Oscar since Annie Hall…Our great political thinkers write memoirs with words like “Truth” and “Meaning” and “Conscience.” (Somehow Jennifer Egan’s Visit from the Goon Squad, which is terrifically funny, and not just “humorous” is winning all kinds of awards, but for the moment I’m going to consider that an anomaly.
But the thing that I keep coming back to is if you met someone at a party, or sat next to someone at a dinner who was talking about the big questions not only humorlessly themselves but if every time someone made a joke had no response to it; either didn’t that it was a joke, or just kinda looked sad that someone would be so small minded to employ such low devices when human existence was so fraught with suffering, at some point you would think that person was either straining very hard at a very tiresome act, or missing some big piece of his brain, ie. kinda an idiot.
The Frankfurt School thought that all capitalist civilization was horror and art was only art if it communicated to people what misery their world actually was. I suppose there’s an argument to be made for that. There’s also an argument to be made that if that’s all you see in the world, that is your only message to your fellow man, that maybe it’s not all of us that’s missing something…
God, this movie looks boring.
Source: richardrushfield
