I’m so sorry for everything…

Do any of you have a best friend who you really, really hate? If you do, you may have approached something close to the relationship I had with Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead or “Founty” as I will refer to it here for the sake of continuing this metaphor.

During the autumn of 2011 I spent a lot of time with Founty. I was fascinated by him, attracted to him on one level and yet infuriated by him on all the others. He picked on my insecurities, made me feel worthless and all but manipulated me into hating myself in order to praise some guy, Howard Roark, whom he seemed incapable of shutting up about.

Perhaps astonishingly, Founty’s reputation hadn’t reached me before I met him. Therefore, who he actually was (and what I had actually gotten myself into befriending the dude) unraveled before my eyes the closer we got. As the “subtlety” of his arguments gave way to a more overt assault of humanity (not to mention the fact that I think he was cool with rape), I found myself writing him off as a big, fat (yeah he is), bully and yet even up to this moment, the personal implications of some of his taunts remain with me, like air-gun pellets trapped just beneath my skin the bastard managed to rattle off as I ran away.

Just hanging out with Founty...

It really unnerves me that Founty might have been onto something. I don’t care for his Objectivist nonsense or warped sense of sexuality, but is there not some social truth in his depictions of anxiety and insecurity in a guy like Peter Keating? More startlingly, does our society actually promote and value this insecurity and fear of failure like Elsworth Toohey does? 

Founty got me thinking: why are we so insecure? Why do our lives seem to float about in a soup of anxiety, self-depreciation and poorly guised vanity? Why must our success always be steeped in the irony that it was not what we deserved, expected or even wanted? Why do we apply ourselves to things so uncertainly that we end up relying entirely on someone else’s approval to validate us?

Is there a slice of Peter Keating in all of us?

The ever-increasing popularity of the rock band The National leads me to believe there is. Matt Berninger’s lyrics, often steeped in insecurity, anxiety and self-depreciative irony are earning the band worldwide success. It’s also really “cool” to like them. They cross genres and demographics, uncovering what seem to be vapid social truths by striking chords in people with sentiments like “I’m afraid of everyone”, “I was less than amazing”, “We’re half awake in a fake empire” and this song; Baby, We’ll be Fine, which reads unsettlingly like a journal entry out of Peter Keating’s diary; only better written:

All night I lay on my pillow and pray
For my boss to stop me in the hallway,
Lay my head on his shoulder and say
“Son, I've been hearing good things.”

I wake up without warning and go flying around the house
In my sauvignon fierce, freaking out
Take a forty-five minute shower and kiss the mirror
And say, “Look at me
Baby, we'll be fine 
All we gotta do is be brave and be kind”

I put on an argyle sweater and put on a smile
I don't know how to do this.
“I'm so sorry for everything!”

Baby, come over, I need entertaining
I had a stilted, pretending day
Lay me down and say something pretty
Lay me back down where I wanted to stay
Just say something perfect, something I can steal
Say, “Look at me
Baby, we'll be fine
All we've gotta do is be brave and be kind.”

I pull off your jeans, and you spill jack and coke in my collar
I melt like a witch and scream.
“I'm so sorry for everything!”

I’m still unsure whether Founty is the reason for my insecurities or if he just brought my attention to them. There is definitely something “human” about the anxieties and fears present in Peter Keating and The National’s music. I don’t think that “doubt” itself is necessarily bad or unavoidable. I wonder though, where should we draw the line and take charge, control and credit for who we are and what we can do? I’m scared of the kind of person I would have to become in order for Founty to stop picking on me, and yet, with that being said, it would also be nice to be able to say to someone one day; “Baby, we’ll be fine”, and mean it. 

The Tree Of Life

A film is not the telling of a dream, but a dream in which we all participate together through a kind of hypnosis . . . By dream, I mean a succession of real events that follow on from one another with the magnificent absurdity of dreams, since the spectators would not have linked them together in the same way or have imagined them for themselves, but experience them in their seats as they might experience, in their beds, strange adventures for which they are not responsible... - Jean Cocteau

“Guide us to the end of time” prays Jack’s voiceover in Terrence Malick’s new film The Tree Of Life. Jack’s appeal, undoubtedly meant for God, seemed to echo my unspoken petition of Malick whilst watching his new film. Judging by the varying degrees of bemused disappointment I overheard on my way out of the theatre, it seems that this surrender to, or acceptance of, Malick’s ‘guidance’ is the only way to experience the film without feeling as if you’ve just been forced to endure an unwelcomed two hour slideshow on ‘the meaning of existence’ by a crackpot door to door evangelist. The problems with this much-voiced reading are simple and lie in either misattributing the qualities of a cinematic vanguard to a religious crackpot, or in expecting this film to be Legends of The Fall II.

Personally, I loved the film. Not because I ‘understood it’ (a phenomena that people, standing outside on an increasingly crowded Market street sidewalk, seemed especially concerned in letting each other know they ‘had’ or ‘hadn’t’ done), but because it explored the very ends of things with the very ends of it’s medium. In Malick’s search for meaning in existence he gives cinema an ambition and purpose far beyond its previous realizations. The Tree Of Life asks questions I’ve never seen film ask in ways I’ve never seen film question. With this film Malick has well and truly developed his own cinematic language.

The death of the middle of the three brothers, revealed at the start of the film, casts its shadow across what is to follow, and considering the film’s action spans from before time to after it, this is no small feat. It is this lingering sense of loss that gives weight to images intent on taking off, floating around and jump cutting backwards and forwards in time- sometimes seconds, sometimes longer. To this end the camera seems never content with merely observing the action of the universe (a term that Malick makes sure to include both the young family’s life in the suburbs as well as the far reaches of the galaxy). Instead it thrusts forward and backwards, weaving through the lives of the characters, memories, dinosaurs, dreams and exploding consolations with images of the real and the abstract.

As far as family life in the 1950’s goes, it seems that Malick, his actors, his cinematographer and his production designer created a place where a story could happen and then hoped that it would. The moments between the children appear awoken from lost memories; with their mother they appear lifted from dreams; with their father they seem straight out of a nightmare. The ambiguity surrounding the source of the images (are they recollections, flashbacks, ruminations on what might have happened-what might happen?) is at once disorientating and exhilarating. Are they the visions of the characters’ or the director? I’m not sure. “The way of grace and the way of nature” we are told are the two ways through life. Are they made diametrically clear in the narrative of the film? I don’t think so. Does grace forgive nature? Grace is found in nature too, right? ‘I don’t understand!’ my friend whispers in my ear as the credits appear. ‘Neither,’ I reply, ‘I think it forgives us though.’

Never before has a filmmaker so beautifully, boldly and nakedly explored the existence of God, and the fabric of dreams, in our universe, our families and our cinema. I am still not sure what exactly happened in that theatre last night, but whoever it was that said Terrence Malick is ‘shy’ was wrong.