Swide Magazine by Dolce&Gabbana

How everything physically interconnects in Terrence Malick’s masterpiece: kinetic energy, mass and speed of light, life, hatred and love.

I’ve been thinking all day about the relationship between macro and micro. I thought about Osmos, a game I discovered couple of years ago on my tablet. It recreates a universe governed by the obvious relationship between energy, speed and mass. The game changes the speed and the mass of imaginary planets and it gives the impression of looking through a microscope at nuclear reactions in which atomic masses play a magnetic role on smaller particles. The relationship between macro and micro is not very clear. This is what makes the game interesting.

 

Last night I saw the movie “The tree of Life” by Terrence Malick at the Colosseo theatre, Milan. The movie won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Two hours and a half with no plot, no dramatic twist, and only one macro story to tell, an obvious one nonetheless: the birth of our planet and our civilization.

 

Totally linked to the Bible and Job’s parabola, “The tree of life” puts together the micro story of a family and the macro story of nature, through their manifestations. It’s true that there isn’t a story in  Malick’s but it still manages to create two distinctive metaphors.

  

 

The landscape of the earth and the great transformations of our planet: star explosions, oceans shaping the earth’s crust, proliferation of bacterial life. A jubilee of actions and physical reactions that shape our Evolution. Malick is grand in sawing together the macro story with the micro story. The Texan film director takes us into the life of a foetus, father and son fighting , the secondary and sensitive role of a mother and wife: starting with the Universe, he magically transitions into the life of an ordinary family in any given time. The petty obsessions, the great gestures, the frustrations, the hatred, the kindness, and the rage that comes from the mere fact of being alive and having thoughts. Hatred for the father that erupts like a Vulcan and covers the sky, the love between brothers as big as a stellar explosion that takes everything in, the love of a mother as great as the universe, keeping everything together, creation and destruction, all the way up to a biblical moment of milky light.

 

The answer to emotions, love and hate, seems to come from the same atomic force, the relationship between kinetic energy, mass and speed of light, and has the same origin in physics. A movie that wants to make peace between the physical and the metaphysical. It made me come out of the theatre feeling exhausted , for the rest of the day, I felt clouded and absorbed, divided between my micro fears and the macro nonsensical functions I exert in the infinity of the Universe. It’s necessary to show “The tree of life” to our children followed by an explanation.

 

Giuliano Federico
(editor in chief Swide.com)
Video clips from THE TREE OF LIFE

 

 

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