LIFE OF PI & THE TREE OF LIFE: Films for the anti-intellectual life
Life of Pi: directed by Ang Lee, 2012.
Tree of Life: directed by Terence Malick, 2011.
Click on poster to view trailer.At the Academy Awards ceremony of 2013, Ang Lee received the "Best Director" Oscar for Life of Pi (2012), perhaps the most beautiful anti-intellectual film ever made. Life of Pi could also be titled Life of Lie, for the film's conclusion suggests that we should not care which story of the universe or story of our destiny is true. Surely human meaning and destiny deserve something better than childish thinking. Given the visual beauty of Life of Pi, one can find equal or better natural beauty — not made with special effects — in the Planet Earth documentaries produced by the BBC. Why not choose a narrative based on the sciences of biology and ecology? When are we going to grow up and embrace a cosmology based on the universe as it is (and not as we wish it was), as revealed by our most powerful media technologies?
Much has been written about the beauty of Life of Pi, with its 3D visual effects, yet very little has been said about the underlying premises and conclusion of the film, with its 1D intellectual effort. That's because the premises and conclusion represent the dominant epistemology of our culture, mired in shallow relativism, anti-intellectualism, and "doublethink." In this sense, Life of Pi is much like The Tree of Life (2011), the acclaimed "spiritual" film from auteur filmmaker Terence Malick. That both of these spiritual and religious films have "life" in their title is instructive and ironic, for surely many people are seeking a meaning and purpose for their lives, yet both films show little real spirituality or any real understanding of the cosmos from which life emerged.
Based on the best selling book of the same name, Life of Pi recounts the journey of "Pi," as told in flashbacks by Pi (as a middle aged man) to a writer interested in telling his story and "finding God." Most of the film centers on the journey of the youthful Pi, an idealistic young man brilliantly portrayed by Suraj Sharma. Born with the first name of Piscine, Pi opts for the abbreviated name because he tired of being called "pissing" by fellow schoolboys. In a fabulously clever scene, Pi earns the respect of his teachers and classmates when he writes the number for "pi" on the chalkboard, extending the well-known 3.14 out to hundreds of decimal places. Of course, the number for pi reaches an infinite number of decimals. That "Pi" is his preferred name and "pi" is infinite is philosophically revealing. When confronting the infinite, many people comfort themselves with the infantile, or the notion that we are the center of the vast universe with a special destiny. And that is what Life of Pi asks us to accept as deep thinking about the cosmos.
While growing up in India, Pi samples among the world's theisms in the apparent quest for a meaningful and purposeful destiny. The substance of these religions are presented with the usual sophmoric assertions that impress uncritical thinkers. The film also presents shots of Pi reading books by Fyodor Dostoevsky (Notes From the Underground, I think) and Albert Camus (The Stranger), yet saying nothing about the ideas of these thinkers.
Shortly after the Camus scene, Pi's father sells his zoo to a company in Canada and the family soon embarks on the fateful journey aboard a ship that sinks in a storm in the Pacific. All of his family drowns, but Pi manages to make it to a lifeboat, along with a zebra, hyena, baboon, and Bengal tiger. The Darwinian state of nature appears immediately as the hyena kills the zebra and baboon; the tiger kills the hyena and eats them all, leaving Pi to negotiate his continued existence with the tiger on the lifeboat. Pi quickly and cleverly builds a companion raft made of life perseveres and oars. So while the tiger rules the life boat, Pi's makeshift raft floats along with it, attached by a rope. Thus commences the months-long ocean journey of Pi as he manages to survive the tiger, first by securing food and fresh water from the lifeboat's supplies, then with fresh water from the rain and fish from the ocean.
So here is the supposed philosophical meaning of the film. Just as Pi is about to lose all hope, he prays to God and soon finds the lifeboat and life raft floating up to a strange tropical island populated by thousands of meerkats and containing various unusual fruits. Hoping to be found rather than staying lost on the tiny island, Pi accumulates enough food to embark on the ocean again. Eventually, Pi learns to tame the lion, so they have a peaceful co-existence on the path to starvation, dehydration, and death. Just as it seems Pi is about to die, he washes up in Mexico.
While Pi is in the hospital recovering, shipping authorities interview him in hopes of learning why the ship sunk in the storm. Pi recounts his fantastic journey and they do not believe him. So he concocts an alternative story about his journey, one in which the survivors include the ship's mad cook, his mother, and others, with Pi eventually being the lone survivor after a Darwinian struggle among the humans.
When the hopeful writer inquires about which story the authorities believed, Pi states it does not matter which "story" is true. According to Life of Pi, what matters is that you find God or a deity, regardless of whether the story of God or the deity is true or not. Also, we are supposed to believe that God intervened in Pi's fate, yet was too busy or disinterested to prevent the ship from sinking in the first place. If this God is omnipotent and did nothing, then this God seems picky or perhaps evil. If this God is not picky or evil, then it cannot be omnipotent or he would have prevented the ship from sinking, thus saving Pi's family, the animals, and the ship's crew. Of course, such easy critical thinking is beyond Hollywood.
As he is losing hope, we see Pi screaming out to stars above, yelling for God. This is understandable. In his place, I might be screaming out to the stars, too, but I would never expect any cosmic intervention. After all, if we believe the meaning of the film, we must accept the absurd proposition that the deity who created hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars and planets (with likely untold numbers of life forms and civilizations, would also have the time and interest to intervene on Pi's behalf (yet not prevent the ship from sinking in the first place). What this means is that Pi's destiny is "special" and he is existing at the center of the deity's universe, if but for a moment. It is a prospect that is utterly ludicrous and for which there is no logic or evidence. Since childhood, we are told that "God works in mysterious ways," but this kind of thinking is easy to spot — it is called "cosmic doublethink."
Cosmic doublethink has so permeated culture that it now informs films labeled as “masterpieces” and nominated for best picture Oscars, such Life of Pi and The Tree of Life.
The term “cosmic doublethink” is a reference to George Orwell’s concept of “doublethink,“ which Orwell extended to the realm of cosmology in his dystopian masterpiece, 1984. The cognitive contradictions of Life of Pi and Tree of Life are made possible by doublethink — the method of “thinking” in which people accept and believe that two opposite and contradictory propositions are both true at the same time and in the same respect (1984, 176-177). The following dialogue from 1984 includes O’Brien (the state torturer for the nation of Oceania) and Winston (the resistor being tortured):
O’Brien: Before man there was nothing. After man, if he could come to an end, there would be nothing. Outside man there is nothing.
Winston: But the whole universe is outside us. Look at the stars! Some of them are a million light-years away. They are out of our reach forever.
O’Brien: What are the stars? They are bits of fire a few kilometers away. We could reach them if we wanted to. Or we could blot them out. The earth is the center of the universe. The sun and stars go round it. For certain purposes, of course, that is not true. When we navigate the ocean, or when we predict an eclipse, we often find it convenient to assume that the earth goes around the sun and that the stars are millions upon millions of kilometers away. But what of it? Do you suppose it is beyond us to produce a dual system of astronomy? The stars can be near or distant, according as we need them. Do you suppose our mathematicians are unequal to that? Have you forgotten doublethink? (219)
As Orwell understood, cosmic doublethink and the dual system of astronomy allow people to remain in denial of new knowledge by holding two oppositional cosmic beliefs, one of which allows them to pretend they and their tribe, nation, and destiny are central to Spaceship Earth and an imaginary universe. In Life of Pi and The Tree of Life, we are supposed to conclude that we have a special destiny in the cosmos, under the guiding hand of a benevolent deity, regardless of whether it is true or not. This might look like an innocuous relativism or healthy skepticism, but it is a veiled attacked on reason and the foundations of human knowledge.
The Tree of Life encompasses the life of a Texas family, living in a small town of the 1950s and headed by a patriarchal father (played by Brad Pitt). The film sets up a cosmic duality between “grace” and “nature,” and a dual system of astronomy between a deity and the cosmos. Similarly, Life of Pi sets up a duality between faith and nature, clearly suggesting that faith is what separates humans from animals and the natural world, even though that beautiful and Darwinian natural world would have been created by their deity, too.
Click on poster to view trailer.In The Tree of Life, we are supposed to believe grace is the gift of the deity, while nature is a mysterious and incomprehensible force (not unlike the tiger in Life of Pi) that must be tamed, if not understood. As for the cosmos, it is beyond meaning and comprehension. It is grace that gives us meaning, it is nature and the material world that leave us empty and alone. This worldview is typified by Sean Penn’s character, an architect and the grown-up son of Pitt, looking bewildered as he sits in a twenty-first century glass skyscraper and later looking lost as he wanders in a desert landscape. Later Penn walks on a beach with the apparent ghosts of his parents and dead brother. The problem with ghosts, holy or otherwise, is they are not really there. Like Pi, Penn's character is lost — Pi is lost at sea, Penn is lost in the city.
Meanwhile, during the film, Malick provides cosmic images meant to suggest the big bang, cosmic vastness, and the beauty of galaxies and other cosmic structures, drawn from images captured by the Hubble space telescope. These images are accompanied by choral music and lighting effects that can only suggest the universe was created by a deity, though no evidence or explanation is provided for this deity’s existence. We even see a dinosaur spared his life in a random event of nature, though one wonders if most moviegoers in America understood the dinosaur did not walk among humans. After all 46% of Americans embrace the creationist view that the universe is 10,000 years old; the creationists number 51% in Texas, home to former president George W. Bush.
Since The Tree of Life suggests the deity is overseeing the cosmos, it apparently spared the cute dinosaur, but not Sean Penn’s cute brother, who was killed in an accident. As in Life of Pi, we are to conclude the deity has yet another mysterious plan for everything in the vast universe, a plan which relieves the omnipotent deity from an responsibility for not preventing the deaths in the first place.
The Tree of Life is supposed to be about the search for meaning and finding peace in the awe-inspiring universe, yet offers little more than masculine posturing and mainstream anti-intellectualism. To find the meaning and peace, we apparently have to shut down the scientific, curious, and creative parts of our brains. What’s with those clouds in the sky? “That’s where God lives,” says Mom. And reputable critics report this film is some kind of a philosophical masterpiece. Roger Ebert writes in the Chicago Sun-Times:
Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” is a film of vast ambition and deep humility, attempting no less than to encompass all of existence and view it through the prism of a few infinitesimal lives. The only other film I've seen with this boldness of vision is Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” and it lacked Malick's fierce evocation of human feeling. There were once several directors who yearned to make no less than a masterpiece, but now there are only a few. Malick has stayed true to that hope ever since his first feature in 1973.[1]
Nick Pinkerton writes in The Village Voice:
Better than a masterpiece — whatever that is — The Tree of Life is an eruption of a movie, something to live with, think, and talk about afterward.[2]
The Tree of Life is a masterpiece that equaled 2001 and exceeded it emotionally? Better than masterpiece, an eruption of a movie to live with and think about? These are startling claims. What about the intellectual premises of The Tree of Life? What about the cosmology? After all, as Ebert explained, “it all happens in this blink of a lifetime, surrounded by the realms of unimaginable time and space.”[3]
Click on poster to view trailer.Let’s briefly look at Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the space age masterpiece which explored humanity's three deepest existential and cosmic conditions, based in the new known universe of “unimaginable time and space.” What follows in no way covers all the complex meanings of the film. What I want to show here is simply how the film’s three part trajectory embraces our existence in a vast universe and does not sugarcoat the situation with conventional narratives of deities planning our destiny.
Part 1: “Dawn of Man.” The opening section of the film shows humans to be one of the evolutionary species existing in the biosphere on Earth. With the unexplained appearance of the black monolith, it seems that it is either a symbol for technology or it was created by an ancient space faring species and it inspired the early apes to create technology. Once the apes contemplated and touched the monolith, they soon invented tools from bones. Kubrick’s famed cut from the bone tossed in the air to the space station floating in space brilliantly captured in a single moment and in a single thought the entire trajectory of human cultural and technological evolution, from the stone age to the space age. 2001 suggests evolution has provided us with a brain and human reason, precisely because there is no one to shape our destiny or give us meaning except ourselves and the best within our arts, sciences, technologies, and secular philosophies.
Part 2: “Jupiter Mission.” This section of the film shows the roles of art, design, science, and technology in human survival, on Earth or in space, as illustrated by the various space crafts and technologies. 2001 shows how we have extended a complex technological system around the planet and far out into the cosmos. The space station, space craft, architecture, furniture, clothing, computers, chess game, video phone, and drawings of the astronauts illustrate the essential role of art and technology in human existence and human identity. Art and media technology are ways to extend our consciousness and expand our knowledge, to represent reality to ourselves, to create our identity, to shape our destiny. In the Discovery spacecraft, we see a symbol of the cradle-to-grave womb of our technological existence, the push-button automated world with ambient media and interactive computers, running 24/7, all the time. Cruising through outer space, Discovery is controlled via cyberspace. Within the ambient media technology, everything is under human control except the humans, who place themselves under the control of the HAL 9000 computer. Amidst the wonders of technology in the film, 2001 also warns us about the danger of placing our selves under total surveillance and under the total control of machines.
Part 3: “Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite.” This section of the film shows we exist in a vast cosmos of deep space and deep time. Deep space extends across the light years of the universe, while deep time extends back prior to human evolution and far into the future. In this part of the film, Dave’s journey is our journey, into an awe inspiring and perhaps terrifying voyage into deep space, which, it seems, is human destiny, personified by the star child gazing upon Spaceship Earth. Evolving from stardust, humans have made the leap from apes to star children, transforming their existence and destiny through art, science, and technology, all in an expanding universe of vast voids.
In the end, the film clearly suggests that it is up to us to make our destiny and discover what it means to be human in a vast cosmos. The film does not necessarily tell us what those meanings are, only that we will need art, science, technology, and philosophy to find those meanings as our existence evolves. Apparently, the final scene of the star child gazing at Spaceship Earth suggests our destiny is traversing the stars. Unlike Life of Pi and The Tree of Life, the star child scene offers no creation myth, only soaring music to inspire the journey.
Compared to 2001, The Tree of Life embodies cosmic doublethink and a cultural reversal. When the cosmic-cinematic masterpiece of the new millennium is set in a small town in Texas in the 1950s, with a domineering dad and passive mom, then we know something is deeply in reverse or someone is utterly lost. When patriarchy, warring against nature, and evangelical anti-intellectualism are “eruptions” for us “to live with,” something to “make us think,” then you know we are still living in George Bush’s America, even in Hollywood or New York City. The macho posturing, anti-intellectualism, and faith-based certainties are the very cognitive traits that fuel the Terror War, the total surveillance state, torture and secret trials, political assassination as foreign policy, the evisceration of the Bill of Rights, and a host of other oppressive policies at all levels of government.
The cosmological suggestions and depictions of The Tree of Life are sophomoric, even laughable, far below the intellectual and artistic quality of science television documentaries, such as Carl Sagan’s Cosmos (1980) and Brian Cox’s Wonder’s of the Universe (2011), which are the most philosophical of the cosmological documentaries that regularly air on The Science Channel. The Tree of Life also seems unaware of Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe, Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Origins, and Stephen Hawking’s The Theory of Everything. Is Malick oblivious to twenty-first century cosmology? The cosmology of The Tree of Life can only inspire awe in the consciousness of doublethink and scientific illiteracy.
Rather than a display any humility or real spirituality, The Tree of Life and Life of Pi are films of deep-seated arrogance and narcissism, for what can be more arrogant and narcissistic than to imagine you are the center of the universe, with a deity making sure you are not lost. The Tree of Life and Life of Pi are really about a species unable to accept that it is not the center of the universe, not in possession of a special destiny, not the star of the show. So Sean Penn wanders amidst a desert and skyscrapers, clueless amidst the cosmic vertigo. Cosmic doublethink and cultural reversal were center stage in the first cosmic “masterpiece” in the twenty-first century, this generation’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Given the level of our scientific understanding of the universe in the twenty-first century, how can The Tree of Life, and its widespread praise, not signal a massive cultural reversal.
Rather than cosmology for a star child, we get creation myths for children. NASA gave us the infinite and Hollywood gives us the infantile. Given our current cultural conditions, the memes of The Tree of Life and Life of Pi are sure to replicate and dominate our future destinies.
[1] Roger Ebert, “The Tree of Life, Chicago Sun-Times, June 2, 2011; http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110602/REVIEWS/110609998. Web site accessed July 18, 2012.
[2] Nick Pinkerton, “The Difficult Gifts of The Tree of Life,” The Village Voice, May 25, 2011; http://www.villagevoice.com/2011-05-25/film/the-difficult-gifts-of-the-tree-of-life/. Web site accessed July 18, 2012.
[3] Ebert, “The Tree of Life.”
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