Also, we sometimes make this argument against ourselves. “Why did I get myself into this?”

And hey Jim, we moved to Columbus so my wife can attend OSU. Maybe we’ll cross paths sometime soon!

Things happen for reasons. We probably don’t know what they are, but we can’t stop trying to figure it out. We are puzzled, stumped, stymied.

Our conscious minds are behind the curve.

We are a dualism: nature and grace. Each operates on its own, independent logic, mostly inaccessible to each other, within us, and in the world. Ultimately, they are same thing.

Most of us can’t experience the world this way.

Environments, circumstances, and events evoke opportunities for what we imagine to be either, but how much control or choice do we have?

Whereas Kubrick relentlessly makes fun of what we think is going on in human society, telling jokes on us, Malick enters in, exploring emotion, the parts that slip away from us, the things we don’t understand when they are happening, but only (and then in part) while looking back in mental distance.

It’s a bit creepy.

Malick evokes 2001 visually, too, recalling the famous opening scene of Kubrick’s masterpiece: sun rising over Earth, Thus Spake Zarathustra rising triumphantly.

But in Malick’s vision, the accompanying music falls flat, failing to deliver any triumph whatever.

Instead, Malick gives us more of a sarcastic eye roll.

We’re not getting off this dirt.

No mind warp into deep space. No transformation. No resolution of human history. No next step.

Instead of waltzing spaceships and choreographed planetary orbits synchronized to The Blue Danube, we get lonely (almost dead) people in cold, super-sleek architecture.

There are no proto-humans, either. But there are dinosaurs, and a dinosaur bone as well, which a future Sean Penn tosses, before a jump cut–not into space, but, you guessed it, into a large, steel building.

Malick seems to say, Look what we are missing: the world we inherited.

Like Enter the Void’s attempt to create a first person intimacy and hallucinogenic experience, cinematography of The Tree of Life is psychologically immediate, light, and archetypal–an array of iconic memories, life’s mental events on screen, rolling, flashing, intruding, releasing.

Unlike Enter the Void, where nature is entirely random, and senselessly violent, leaving us to wander in the dark, The Tree of Life suggests that we can grab some grace, at least for the moment–because that is what our species does.

How meaningful is that moment of grace? Who knows.

It’s a strange, troubling, yet wonderful film. Kind of like life.