Analysis Of Terrence Malick 's The Tree Of Life

Bryant writes, “Go forth, under the open sky, and list / To Nature’s teaching, while from all around‒ / Earth and her waters, and the depths of air‒ / Comes a still voice” (14-17). This quote refers back to the basic belief of the goodness of the natural world in this: while one has their highs and lows of life, nature will always be there to provide a “still voice.” At the same time, it motivates the reader to go beyond his or her own senses. Bryan also expresses the belief that all nature is important through lines 29-30 when he says that “The oak / Shall send his roots abroad, and pierce thy mold.” Before these lines, the author elaborated on the being of a corpse in the ground, but he brings back its contribution to the rest of nature with this

This essay depicts a relationship between society and nature, referring to the woods. Society is changing rather quickly which prevents an individual from truly seeing everything around them. It has destroyed nature and the clarity that the woods provide. Berry notices how people do not see where they are anymore. Many are going through life never actually looking to see what is around them or observing closer. He goes into the woods and immerse himself in nature. As Berry states, “The faster

There was only water and bare, empty land. In the center of this nothingness was a great mountain. This mountain stood tall and proud and it reached all the way into the heavens. At the very top of this mountain lived a pair of every kind of animal. In the center of this heaven grew a tree. This tree was not just any tree, it was the sacred tree of life, and it was not to be harmed in any way.

In “The Trouble with Wilderness,” William Cronon illustrates the paradox within the notion of wilderness, describing that if wilderness is that which lies beyond civilization -- beyond humankind, then so is the notion of nature outside the realm of the human... that humans are therefore, unnatural. Further, he explains that if our concept of nature (and ultimately our concept of God) is outside of humanity, then our existence is synonymous with the downfall of nature. That wilderness is purely a construct of civilization is central to this argument.  For example, Cronon asserts that “the removal of Indians to create an ‘uninhabited wilderness’---uninhabited as never before in human history of the place---reminds us just how invented, just how constructed, the American wilderness really is” (pg.79). Instead of in isolation from civilization, Cronon finds that his most spiritual experiences with nature have always been closer to home… a sense of wildness (versus wilderness) can be found in one’s backyard, gazing from a front porch, and in the melding of the human experience with mother nature. One of Into the Wild’s final scenes drives home this idea by altering the literal point of view that main character, Chris McCandless, has had of both himself and of the world since the beginning of his two year journey.  Into the Wild attempts to dramatizes Cronon’s argument to rethink wilderness; we will examine how the film succeeds, and where it fails, to support its premise.

John Muir, a brilliant Transcendentalist, has written hundreds of enlightening environmental essay to emphasize the adamant need to save these sacred kings of the forests, the Redwoods. Within Muir’s vivid and emotional entries, specifically “Save the Redwoods”, John utilizes rhetorical devices such as personification, analogy, and Religious allusion in order to express the vital need to save the trees.

Thesis: Chris McCandless has found the meaning of his life with inspiration of Emerson's quote, “The foregoing generations beheld God and the nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe (“Nature” ). He has found this by trusting his decisions, living alone in Alaska, and seeing life through his own eyes rather than the eyes of others.

1968 was the year that North Vietnam launched the Tet Offensive against the United States and South Vietnam, the year that Martin Luther King JR and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, the year that started student protests and riots, the year that Black Power salute occurred and finally, the year that Night of the Living Dead came out. You may be wondering why a film would have anything to do with these historic events that occurred in 1968. Well, Night of the Living Dead is a zombie horror film directed by George A. Romero, this film that Romero created was a game changer for the film industry it lead to something bigger than purely entertainment. Romero’s goal behind his low budget black and white film was to construct subtext about social issues such as the Vietnam War and many other issues that went on during 1968. Romero’s zombie film’s present a sense of the failure of human co-operation.

The “Rise of ecology” was a very interesting and mind refreshing documentary film depicting the 10 different disasters that have devastated our planet. This documentary was a good teachable moment for us to take the necessary measure to ensure the safety of the citizens and the planet. The film also emphasized that we should minimize the amount to pollution that we release in to our atmosphere. We see that its always the people who suffer at the hands of major corporations who are just hungry for profits. The film mentions that these major corporations take the consequences of catastrophic events lightly. They do everything they can to increase the profits even at the expense of their own workers. The movie “Pandora” which I recently watched shares a lot of similarities to the documentary film “Rise of ecology” in a way that took me by a surprise. The movie tells a story of how human error came to cause the malfunction of a nuclear power plant causing the nation to go in to panic mode. The movie starts in an interesting way, a flashback where the main character and his friends were just children making assumptions of what the new mysterious development in their town was all about. Some of the kids responded by saying that the nuclear reactor plant was a rice cooker, another a robot and finally the little girl responded by saying that her teacher told her that “it was a box and that if it was open they would all be in trouble”.

Is it worth to give up your lifestyle and force yourself to live a different one? Some people are willing to quit their own lifestyles to live a whole new different life. In the story “Into the Wild” Chris McCandless was running from his family because of all the drama that he had to face growing up. He even left Washington D.C to move to Alaska, he did this because he was very fond of nature. In the book “Into the Wild” the Author Jon Krakauer explains how Chris McCandless was able to sacrifice his life in order to live a life in the wilderness. A lot of people wouldn’t want to do this because people wouldn’t to want to be willing to give up their own lifestyle in order to start a new one from scratch. It’s not worth it to lose your own lifestyle because it could also result into you losing your life as well.

Nature is truth at its purest form of life: cruel, ruthless and impartial. Dubious about the utopian society we live in, Mccandless vies to find the world’s underlying truth in his Odyssey. Some of us want to be as courageous as Mccandless and leave behind everything for the sole purpose of finding the truth, but can not bring ourselves to do so because of our attachment to material things. Mccandless wants to understand human nature and nature itself, to do that, he rids himself of all attachments and travels to the places where he knows nature would be at its peak. In the book Walden mentioned throughout the story, Thoreau reveals: “Nature was here something savage and awful, though beautiful. I looked with awe at the ground I trod on, to see what the Powers had made there… Night” (Thoreau 172).

A person can ponder the meaning of life for hours, days or an entire lifetime. A student can write an entire critical essay on the topic of the meaning of life and not truly understand it, but you will never understand the true beauty of life until you completely immerse yourself in it and experience it for yourself. The story about Christopher McCandless in the book, Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, gives the reader Insight on how Christopher McCandless searched for his soul through living one with nature. Everybody has their own set of needs, wants, and desires. But it isn’t until you go out and finally do the things that you’ve dreamt about, that you really discover what you love, and most importantly who you are.

Moreover, Crèvecœur further describes, in Letter III, the different types of Americans by associating them with the land around them. “For instance,” Crèvecœur proposes, “it is natural to conceive that those who live near the sea must be very different from those who live in the woods” hence, Crèvecœur’s statement, “Men are like plants,” is another example of that association (608). Another scholar associated with Crèvecœur’s idea of seeing the wilderness as an essential value of the Earth is Gladys Swan. Swan clarifies Crèvecœur’s message about men perceived as plants by analyzing how men have adapted and encapsulated the need of capitalism when coming to America. This need has shifted American Puritans focus on capitalism and has lost hope in valuing the land of Earth. Swan later expressing her reasoning’s through an article “The Tonic of the Wilderness” supporting that people living in the wilderness adapt to a slower pace of life. As supported through the text, “a perspective we are enjoined to recover the sense of value of the earth that sustains us and to practice an ecology that has become crucial: For it is only at the scale of our direct, sensory interactions with the land around us that we can appropriately notice and respond to the immediate needs of the living world” (Swan 326). Crèvecœur and Swan did have similar ideas in seeing how the wilderness would benefit an American Puritan. Thus, the wilderness affected American Puritans by creating a slower pace of

The Babadook is a haunting film filled with twists and turns that leave the audience terrified without ever utilizing a single cliché jump-scare. The audience is constantly in a state of dread and fear along with the protagonist. One of the final scenes in the movie shows the protagonist walking into her basement to feed the monster that she keeps down there. The scene is a unique ending that is not commonly seen in horror films. It revolves around implicit meaning and the interesting point-of-view editing. Without the implicit meaning of the film and the point-of-view editing in this scene, the emotional impact of the film would have been much weaker.

The film Forrest Gump uses a lot of information and historical events and expresses them using aesthetic techniques such as sound, cinematography, editing, etc. The director Robert Zemeckis uses form to explain the overall meaning of the film specifically with symbolism from popular phrases and gives visual examples throughout the story.

The American director Terrence Malick’s 2011 film Tree of Life can be properly called a philosophical film on an epic scale. Yet the way in which Malick achieves this almost transcendent feeling is through a radical contrast in the narrative between microcosmic and macrocosmic worlds. One of the most alluring sequences portrays the foundation of the universe, the advancement of life ( with the inclusion of a few deeply emotional dinosaurs), and then more precisely and figuratively, the termination of time, a period when the dead of each time period and all ages will emerge and move around on a heavenly beach. Whereas the main plot of the story, although not itself unfolding according to any traditional narrative structure, follows the lives of a Texas family from the perspective of one of three children, this family tale is contrasted with Malick’s inspired filming of the growth and formation of life as well as the universe. Malick therefore situates the family narrative within the grander cosmological development of existence itself, and thereby raises the simple, individual life to a position of simultaneous significance and insignificance: the problems experienced by the family seem trivial compared to the great cosmological accretions shown in the work, but the very fact that they are contrasted endeavors to show that every individual existence is as much a part of this great historical becoming. Malick therefore offers us in Tree of Life an almost impossible endeavor: