Malick and Me

The first time I watched a Malick’s movie, it was The tree of life, in 2011. I can perfectly remember this because it left a mark on me. Indeed, it was the first time - and only one to date - I fell asleep in a cinema.

But Tree of life was a click for me. It led inside me a reflection I had during a few years, and sometimes reappears. What’s the link between this everyday life, commonplace, and the existential concerns ? That is what Tree of life proposes as reflection, amongst others.

At the time, I have been reading Le silence de la mer of Vercors. This big work illustrates the idea according to which under the visible peace of surfaces takes place the great wars of the marine monsters. In its routine, the life seems to take the course of a quiet river. But in his inner-self, the Man is ravaged by questions without answer.

Whan I was 15 years old I realized that I had absolutely nothing to deal with the monstrous unlimitedness of the life.

How to sound the depth of the Being? The limit of the Being is it the Nothingness? But can the nothingness exist?

I was lost. Then I tried to learn about the philosophy. I joined an entitled course " Philosophy & Cinema " - less sexy than « Existence, Death & the meaning of Being human », fair point, but almost the same in the substance. I studied Matrix, compared the Wachowski brothers’s movie with the Discourse on the method of Descartes. With it I began to question everything - as far as the existence of others.

Over time, I understood that life in society was imposed on my man's condition. " Hell is other people. " Sartre says. And I fully agreed.

What’s the point of living if we cannot practice our freedom as we would like to ? We have to come undone the yoke of the life in society to try to live alone. The self in front of the nature is necessarily faced with its own limits and can be self-aware so better. So, the connection with the Creation glorified by the plans of Malick finds finally a harmony.

Life is flowing out like endless rain into Badlands

« Kit, I have a question for you. Do you like people ?

- No sir. »

At this level of my thought, I had become the Kit from Badlands.

How could we like people ? A young boy fighting against life to understand the meaning of it cannot stand society around him. To define himself he has to feel different than other people.

« Who am I ? What am I for ? Can’t I choose my life ? » Kit asks, with his James Dean’s style - white t-shirt above blue jean.

Either life is useless, or it worths to be lived. In this case, I have to can exercise my freedom completely, what implies to live in spite of the others. To be able to touch all that passes at hand, to hope to enjoy the essence of the dreamed life. Badlands multiply the philosophic references -as the existential quest and the inescapability of the determinism. Nothing surprising when we know that Malick, when he was a pupil in Oxford, was the author of an unfinished thesis on the notion of world in Kierkegaard’s work.

I was then a perfect misanthropist.

" People are stupid, it is an obvious fact. I am one myself. So leave me alone. "

I was reading Céline, frowning myself.

I looked at people. All are waiting for their Godot without knowing if it exists. They let their life pass by without doing anything, amusing with their ‘’pascalian entertainments’’.

I do not claim to have totally had a change of mind and solved my teenager's problems in search of sense. But I think I have an exit way.

To cope with the urgency of the life and the imminence of the death, best is to take its time.

Take time to create some link with the nature as Kit, then (it is essential) with the Men. Not all at the same time but one by one, slowly.

It is necessary for us to become attached to what is the stronger to not sink into the Nothingness which frightens us so much.

What could be stronger than an attachment in its deepest roots: the Earth and the Humanity?

Therefore we can claim as Nietzsche in Thus spoke Zarathustra : « What? was this the life ? Let us go ! Let us start once again! » (the famous « eternal recurrence »)

Definetly, The Tree of life helped me growing up.