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Visualizing the Cosmos: Terrence Malick's "Tree of Life"

and Other Visions of Life in the Universe

Article  in  Journal of the American Academy of Religion · May 2012

DOI: 10.2307/23250993

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Visualizing the Cosmos: Terrence
Malick’s Tree of Life and Other

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Visions of Life in the Universe
S. Brent Plate*

As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous,

branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by gen-
eration I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with
its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the
surface with its ever-branching and beautiful ramifications.

—Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species

“SURPRISING.” “Ponderous.” “Overlong.” “Breathtaking.” “Love-it-

or-hate-it.” Terrence Malick’s Palme d’Or-winning film The Tree of Life
(2011) generated a variety of such verbal responses. Critics saved their
strongest adjectival gulps (“Freaky,” “Eye-popping,” “Jaw-dropping”) for
the CGI dinosaurs and manipulated Hubble telescope imagery that por-
trayed visions of life in the cosmos inaccessible to the naked human
eye, beyond and before the here and now.
On their own, such images would surely be stunning, but what
struck audience sensibilities was the visual clashing of micro- and

*S. Brent Plate, Hamilton College, 198 College Hill Rd, Clinton, NY 13323, USA. E-mail:
splate@hamilton.edu. Thanks to Edna Rodríguez-Plate, and to Christian Goodwillie and Marianita
Peaslee for assistance with images. An earlier, much shorter version of this article appeared as
“Visualizing the Cosmos: Terrence Malick and an Imaginary History of the Universe” in Killing the
Buddha (11 July 2011): http://killingthebuddha.com/mag/exegesis/visualizing-the-cosmos/

Journal of the American Academy of Religion, June 2012, Vol. 80, No. 2, pp. 1–10
doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfs026
© The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press, on behalf of the American Academy of
Religion. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com
2 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

macrocosmos, the movement from Waco, Texas, to nebulae light years

away, from the 1950s to the Pleistocene era. As is typical for Malick, a
sensuous soundscape meets a lush landscape, and spoken dialogue is at
a minimum. A closer look at The Tree of Life’s cosmic images, along-
side other films and historic images from a variety of media, reveals
that such cosmic correlations are actually situated within a long visual
and religious history. Malick’s most recent film is simply the latest in a

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millennia-old project, shared by cultures across the world, of visually
reconciling the microcosmos with the macrocosmos, finding our local
lives situated within the grand scheme of things.
What follows are a series of encounters that situate the imagery of
The Tree of Life within a larger religious, cultural, and cinematic visual
history, juxtaposing the new and the traditional through three historical
plateaus. This does not pretend to be a comprehensive historical survey,
nor is it a film “review.” Rather, by touching down in three historical
sites, we see an account of visual cultural portrayals of the cosmos, and
the imagery of Malick’s film within a continuum.1

1968: FILM AND THE COSMOS

Critics and audiences have gasped, sometimes in astonishment,
sometimes in disgust (Kilday 2011), at the insertion of cosmic imagery
in The Tree of Life, fumbling to place it within a proper cinematic
frame of reference, and generally only coming up with connections to
Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). A great many films
throughout cinematic history, especially since the 1960s and the politi-
cal–cultural Space Race, have portrayed life on earth in tandem with life
in “outer” space. I am not writing about the science fiction genre in
general, but about those works that display interconnections of life “up
there” with life “down here.” Andrei Tarkovsky’s (1972) Solaris comes
quickly to mind, as do two other films from 2011, the wonderfully crea-
tive Another Earth directed by Mike Cahill, and Melancholia (2011),
from the always-controversial Lars von Trier. More importantly, it is
the contractions of cosmic time that stretch the imaginations of
Kubrick’s and Malick’s audiences. The cosmic imagery is not just out
there, it is “back then,” in illo tempore, and it impacts life “now.” (Even

1
The strategy is indebted to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), and while I am perhaps finding some
rhizomatic structure at work, I am in no way intending my reading to match their theoretical
approach.
 Plate: Visualizing the Cosmos 3

the spatial metaphors begin to tell us something about the imagery con-
structed in and through these films, and through our cosmic language.)
These interrelations, and the imagery accompanying them, should
come as no surprise. Film production companies have been doing such
things for ages. Figures 1 and 2 show a prominent film production
company alongside a still from Malick’s film. The Universal company
logo (like many production company logos, including: Dreamworks,

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New Line Cinema, Relativity Media, Lionsgate, Orion, Vivendi,
Columbia, Paramount, Warner Bros, and BBC Films) demonstrates its
place in between the heavens and the earth.
In other words, we might say that film productions are in the busi-
ness of linking the macro- and microcosmos. This finds curious support
in Peter Berger’s now-classic The Sacred Canopy, published one year
before Kubrick’s film:

Religion legitimates social institutions by . . . locating them within a

sacred and cosmic frame of reference. . . . Probably the most ancient
form of this legitimation is the conception of the relationship between
society and cosmos as one between microcosm and macrocosm.
Everything “here below” has its analogue “up above.” By participating
in the institutional order, humans participate in the divine cosmos.
(Berger 1967: 27)

Reread this with only a couple of changes (in italics):

Film production companies legitimate cinema by . . . locating films

within a sacred and cosmic frame of reference. . . . Probably the most
ancient form of this legitimation is the conception of the relationship
between society and cosmos as one between microcosm and macro-
cosm. Everything “here below” has its analogue “up above.” By partici-
pating in the cinematic order, humans participate in the divine
cosmos.

FIGURE 1. SCREEN SHOT FROM THE TREE OF LIFE.

4 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

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FIGURE 2. SCREEN SHOT OF UNIVERSAL STUDIOS LOGO.

By visually setting themselves up with their cosmic logos, industrial

cinema productions stake their claim in the universe, and invite viewers
into a world that transcends the microcosmic world of the local
theater.2 In this way, we might even compare the success of The Artist
(Michel Hazanavicius, 2011) to The Tree of Life, since what captivates
the audience is the temporal displacement, back to a “beginning” of
cinema itself; The Artist is a cosmogony of the world of talking films.

1493: PRINTING AND THE COSMOS

Film is not the first medium that has visually attempted to reconcile
micro- and macrocosmos. The printed book is another. Once Johannes
Gutenberg figured out how to put the Asian technologies of printing
presses to use among the languages of Europe, some radical shifts
occurred in Western literature. Among the early publishing fads was a
genre of epic chronicles—illustrated histories of the world that directly
extended from the creation of the macrocosmos by a Christian Creator
God to established cities in Europe. One of the most famous accounts
of such a history was the Liber chronicum, often called the Nuremberg
Chronicles, created by Hartmann Schedel along with many others:
engravers, designers, patrons, publishers, and printers. (Some promi-
nent art historians have postulated that a young Albrecht Dürer helped
create some of the woodcuts.) Initially printed in 1493, and thus con-
sidered an incunabulum, Schedel’s stories offer a marvelous mixing of
macro- and microcosmos, words and images, with over 1,800 woodcuts
to help reimagine the story. Here is the history of the world, from
beginning to end, a grand verbal–visual mythology that ultimately lands
in fifteenth-century Europe (Figure 3a and b), and extends briefly

2
I deal with this in more detail in Plate (2009).
 Plate: Visualizing the Cosmos 5

FIGURE 3. (a) IMAGE OF CREATION, WITH GOD ENTHRONED ABOVE THE COSMOS, Downloaded from http://jaar.oxfordjournals.org/ at Referral based access control for AAR - OUP on May 5, 2012
FROM THE NUREMBERG CHRONICLES, 1493. COURTESY OF HAMILTON COLLEGE
LIBRARY, SPECIAL COLLECTIONS. (b). FULL-PAGE WOODCUT OF THE CITY OF
NUREMBERG, AS IT WOULD HAVE LOOKED IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY, FROM THE
NUREMBERG CHRONICLES, 1493. COURTESY OF HAMILTON COLLEGE LIBRARY,
SPECIAL COLLECTIONS.

beyond to the end of time and the return of a Cosmic Christ (Füssel
2001).
In Malick’s rendering, history unfolds from birth to the present and
beyond. The origins of the universe are imagined through evolutionary
schemas that nonetheless do not discount the possibilities of a Creator
God in action. At the same time, though many have done so, the
film does not necessitate a theological interpretation either. Cosmic
6 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

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FIGURE 4. (a) MANIPULATED ASTROPHOTOGRAPHY. SCREEN SHOT FROM THE TREE
OF LIFE. (b). DDT SPRAY IN WACO, TEXAS. SCREEN SHOT FROM THE TREE OF LIFE.

beginnings coalesce in the microcosm of Waco, Texas, circa 1950s,

eventually moving on into some other realm of an afterlife (looking a
lot like Utah). The film delights in visual connections between the
macro- and microcosmos: far off gassy clouds of nebulae look like the
gassy clouds of DDT sprayed for mosquito control in Waco (Figure 4a
and b); an asteroid strikes the earth, beginning the mass extinction of
the dinosaurs, while the young Jack O’Brien throws a rock through a
window, beginning the extinction of his childhood innocence; Jack
emerges dreamlike from an underwater house as a cosmic metaphor for
birth, and later another dies by drowning in a pool.
There is, in both media, a direct lineage from the origin of the uni-
verse to the origins of the local community, and then extending onward
and briefly into an imaged and imagined life to come. Ancient mythol-
ogies, Schedel and Malick visually posit, bear on us in the here and
now, shaping our lives.

1859: SCIENCE AND THE COSMOS

Touching down in another place and time, and re-viewing the
imagery of cosmic origins, we begin to see an intriguing relation
between an evolutionary view of the macrocosmos and the mythic
 Plate: Visualizing the Cosmos 7

symbols that continue to hold sway in scientific endeavors. In his

Transmutation Notebook (B) of 1837, after five years of globetrotting
aboard the Beagle, at the age of twenty-eight, Charles Darwin hit on a
visual metaphor that galvanized his thinking and set a course for his
later work. In the jotted-down style of his notebooks, he realizes how
“organized beings represent a tree, irregularly branched some branches
far more branched—hence Genera—many terminal buds dying, as new

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ones generated” (quoted in Eldredge 2005: 103). Darwin made a pre-
liminary sketch to accompany this thought, an image that would stick
with him for the next two decades and re-emerge as the only illustra-
tion in On the Origin of Species of 1859 (Figure 5). His prose changed
too, offering a naturalistic, arboreal metaphor that is cosmic in its
reaches. He ends the “Natural Selection” chapter: “As buds give rise by
growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on
all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been
with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken
branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever-
branching and beautiful ramifications” (Darwin 1885: 105). He was not
the first, or the last, scientist to imagine life along a tree-like continuum,
but for Darwin, it was this visual conceptualization that created a cogni-
tive breakthrough in the ways he was to think about the taxonomies of
life, about the beginnings as well as the ends of life.
While evolutionary biology posed a grand challenge to traditional
religious orthodoxy and its cosmogonical accounts, it is yet curious to
note similarities between mythic symbols used to tell stories of origins.
Darwin’s quote from Origins comes startling close to the Bergerian
metaphor of the “sacred canopy.” As with the Scandinavian Yggdrasil,
the Vedic-Puranic Asvatha-Tree, the Hebrew-Edenic Tree of Life, the
Christian-New Jerusalem Tree of Life, Siddharta’s Bodhi tree, and other
religio-cultural traditions’ mythologies (James 1967), biological trees of
life are points of connection between the here and now and time before
time. In each instance, there is origin, continuity, and extinction. Berger
states that while most of history has seen religion as key to creating a
meaningful totality of the universe, in modern times, “there have been
thoroughly secular attempts at cosmization” (Berger 1967: 27), with
science as the key agent.
Cinema too creates its own “audacious attempt.” Malick takes in
mythic and scientific symbols and images, and resituates the story yet
again in The Tree of Life. Trees are a continual reference within the
film’s mise-en-scéne; they are filled with life, guarding, watching over,
relatively immutable, usually seen from the ground up (Figure 6). The
O’Brien family, in 1950s Waco, is part of the great tree. On the one
8 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

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FIGURE 5. “TREE OF LIFE” FROM THE FIRST EDITION OF CHARLES DARWIN’S ORIGIN
OF SPECIES, 1859. THE ONLY ILLUSTRATION IN DARWIN’S BOOK. COURTESY OF
HAMILTON COLLEGE LIBRARY, SPECIAL COLLECTIONS.

FIGURE 6. SCREEN SHOT FROM THE TREE OF LIFE.

hand, the storyline of the film recalls Jeremiah’s ancient prophetic

praise of the macrocosmic–microcosmic link: “Ah Lord GOD! It is
thou who hast made the heavens and the earth by thy great power and
by thy outstretched arm! Nothing is too hard for thee, who showest
steadfast love to thousands, but dost requite the guilt of fathers to their
children after them” (Jer. 32:17–18, RSV). Guilt and sin are carried on
through generations; from trunk to limb to branch, we carry the sap of
our ancestors, inheriting their genes for weak hearts and addictions,
while some branches end prematurely.
 Plate: Visualizing the Cosmos 9

On the other hand, as Darwin suggests, “buds give rise by growth to

fresh buds,” and The Tree of Life seemingly tells of two choices to
follow through the paths of the ancestors: the paternal “way of nature”
or the maternal “way of grace.” Follow one branch, or follow another.
Malick ultimately disturbs the neat either–or dilemma by opening a
third space, what I have called the “way of the brother,” and it is the
brother, a parallel branch, that offers another way of being. The first

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word of the film in narrative voiceover is “Brother,” and that is set up
before the “nature vs. grace” distinction. Further, the final words are
addressed to the brother as well: “Guide us, to the end of time.” (Note:
the narrator is not talking to God here, nor anywhere else in the film.)
The entire final section is not oriented parentally but fraternally, as Jack
and R.L. explore the woods with BB gun in hand, tempting (and some-
times torturing) the other, finding forgiveness, and finding in a deep
way what forgiveness actually is. It is R.L. who embodies a synthesis
between nature and grace, father and mother, charting new ways of life
with the cosmos (see Plate 2011).

Visualizing the Cosmos

Cinema is part of the symbol-creating apparatus of culture, yet it
also aspires to more: to world-encompassing visions of the nomos and
cosmos. Cinema allows us to see in new ways, through new technolo-
gies, re-creating the world anew, telescoping the macrocosmic past and
far away, and bringing these visions to bear on the microcosmic struc-
tures in the here and now. Filmmakers, artists, scientists, authors, and
the rest of us seek to legitimate personal stories and grander histories.
Such legitimations are found in words, but equally so in images. By re-
viewing some historical imagery, we find new and very old ways of
mythologizing, which is to say: finding our lives relevant beyond our-
selves, in the past, present, and future, in word and image.

REFERENCES
2001: A Space Odyssey Stanley Kubrick, director.
1968
Another Earth Mike Cahill, director.
2011
Berger, Peter The Sacred Canopy. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
1967
 10 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

Darwin, Charles On the Origin of Species, New Edition.

1885 New York, NY: D. Appleton and Company.
Deleuze, Gilles and A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis, MN:
Félix Guattari University of Minnesota Press.
1993

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Eldredge, Niles Darwin: Discovering the Tree of Life. New York,
2005 NY: W. W. Norton & Co.
Füssel, Stephan Chronicle of the World: The Complete and
2001 Annotated Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493, by
Hartmann Schedel. Köln, Germany and
London, UK: Taschen.
James, E. O. The Tree of Life: An Archaeological Study.
1967 Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill.
Kilday, Gregg “Brad Pitt’s ‘Tree of Life’ Sets Off Mixed Frenzy
2011 of Boos, Applause.” Hollywood Reporter,
May 16, 2011: accessible at http://www.
hollywoodreporter.com/news/brad-pitts-tree-
life-sets-188621, accessed February 1, 2012.
Melancholia Lars von Trier, director.
2011
Plate, S. Brent Religion and Film: Cinema and the Re-Creation
2009 of the World. London, UK: Wallflower Press;
New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
Plate, S. Brent “The Way of the Brother.” Religion Dispatches,
2011 July 12, 2011: accessible at: http://www.
religiondispatches.org/archive/culture/4857/
the_way_of_the_brother%3A_how_critics_
missed_the_boat_on_tree_of_life/.
Solaris Andrei Tarkovsky, director.
1972
The Artist Michel Hazanavicius, director.
2011
The Tree of Life Terrence Malick, director.
2011

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