生命之树 The Tree of Life7.2

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• 来自网友【Laplaisanterie】的评论 To grasp properly the acceptance of such radical End, one should risk a comparison between Trier’s Melancholia and Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (released in the same year). The story of both films involves the same two levels: family trauma versus cosmic catastrophe. Although one cannot be but repelled by The Tree of Life’s excessive pseudospirituality, the film contains some interesting moments.13 It opens with a line from the Book of Job, God’s answer to Job’s complaint about why all the misfortunes have hit him: ‘Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth … while the morning stars sang together?’ (38:4, 7) These lines obviously refer to the O’Brien family, which finds itself in a Job-like position of suffering an undeserved catastrophe: at the beginning of The Tree of Life, Mrs O’Brien receives a telegram informing her of the death of her son, RL, aged nineteen; Mr O’Brien is also notified, by telephone while at an airport, and the family is thrown into turmoil. How are we to read this series of rhetorical questions offered by God as the reply to Job’s question of why the misfortunes hit him? Similarly, how are we to understand the tragedy that befalls the O’Briens? In his review of the film, David Wolpe points out the ambiguity of God’s reply:God’s recounting of the wonders of nature can be seen in one of two ways. One possibility is that the immensity of the natural world, in its merciless indifference, has nothing to do with the concerns of human beings. The desert does not care if you pray, and the rushing cataract will not pause for pity. Nature shows its blank, grand face to us, and we are nothing. Indeed Job recants of his protest, proclaiming ‘for I am but dust and ashes.’ … But gradually we see that each image, from the cell to the cosmos, is not only grand, it is beautiful. The second half of the quote from Job, how the morning stars sing, reminds us that the appreciation of wonder and beauty is also possible. We may lose our ego in nature’s indifference, but we may also lose it in nature’s magnificence. Do we see the world as heartless or as sublime? The drama of our life and death is fleeting, but it is played out on a stage of unparalleled wonder.14 The most radical reading of Job was proposed in the 1930s by the Norwegian theologian Peter Wessel Zapffe, who accentuated Job’s ‘boundless perplexity’ when God himself finally appears to him: expecting a sacred and pure God whose intellect is infinitely superior to ours, Job ‘finds himself confronted with a world ruler of grotesque primitiveness, a cosmic cave-dweller, a braggart and blusterer, almost agreeable in his total ignorance of spiritual culture … What is new for Job is not God’s greatness in quantifiable terms; that he knew fully in advance …; what is new is the qualitative baseness.’15 In other words, God – the God of the Real – is das Ding, a capricious cruel master who simply has no sense of universal justice. So where does The Tree of Life stand with regard to these readings? Malick relies on the link between trauma and fantasy: one of the possible reactions to a trauma is the escape into fantasy, i.e., to imagine the world in itself, outside our subjective horizon. He shows us the universe being formed, including the Milky Way and the Solar System. Voices ask various existential questions. On the newly formed Earth, volcanoes erupt and microbes begin to form. Early sea life is shown, then plants on the land, then dinosaurs. From the vantage point of space, an asteroid is seen hitting the Earth … This logic recently reached its climax in Alan Weisman’s book The World Without Us, a vision of what would have happened if humanity (and only humanity) were suddenly to disappear from the earth – natural diversity blooming again, nature gradually overgrowing human artefacts. In imagining the world without us, we, humans, are reduced to a pure disembodied gaze observing our own absence, and, as Lacan pointed out, this is the fundamental subjective position of fantasy: to observe the world in the condition of the subject’s non-existence (the fantasy of witnessing the act of one’s own conception, the parental copulation, or of witnessing one’s own burial, like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn). The World Without Us is thus fantasy at its purest: witnessing the Earth itself retaining its pre-castrated state of innocence, before we humans spoiled it with our hubris. So while The Tree of Life escapes into a similar cosmic fantasy of a world without us, Melancholia does not do the same. 摘自：事件8.6[斯洛文尼亚] 斯拉沃热·齐泽克 / 2016 / 上海文艺出版社