The Tree of Life

Want to solve the mystery of Tree of Life? This is one of the most original films to come along in some time, but most people don’t know what to make of it. They suspect something important is going on, but they don’t have the experience to know what it is. The secret is in the genre and the story structure.

One of the best techniques for standing above the crowd in professional screenwriting is combining two genres that don’t normally go together. Writer-director Terrence Malick has done just that, connecting the Masterpiece form with the Memoir-True Story.

To really see how and why Malick creates this bizarre hybrid, you really need to go back to his 1978 masterpiece, Days of Heaven. The story is so primal it seems Biblical: a man pushes his girlfriend to marry a dying farmer to get a piece of his fortune. This moral tale takes place in a magnificent but incredibly harsh natural world, in the turn-of-the-century American West, complete with betrayals, revenge, fire and locusts. Sections of the film are connected by fast-motion photography of plants growing and the earth moving through its daily cycle, like a nature documentary. And the whole story is told through the memory of a 13-year-old narrator. 

Notice that Malick’s basic technique in Days of Heaven is to set up a very top down Biblical story while also setting up a very bottom up view of man deeply embedded in the natural world. This combination of Biblical with naturalistic is unique in modern film, but it was a hallmark of late 19^th century authors like Thomas Hardy. The combination seems like it shouldn’t work because the Biblical and the natural feel like opposites. But in fact Malick shows that they are both grand systems that try to explain how human life works.

This background from Days of Heaven points up the key story technique Malick uses to combine Masterpiece with Memoir-True-Story in Tree of Life: he sets up an extreme contrast between vast story frames and incredibly short scenes.

A mainstream Hollywood movie usually focuses on a few characters in some generic present, and tells its story through 50-70 scenes that average 2 minutes apiece. Tree of Life places the characters within massive frames of nature and history, but tells its story in 200-300 scenes that are often without dialogue and no more than a few seconds long.

These frames include the creation of the universe, the evolution of life on earth, including dinosaurs, the Oedipal battle between fathers and sons, 1950s suburban America and ultra-modern, present-day city America.

Malick’s use of huge story frames isn’t without precedent. Most famously, in James Joyce’s story of a boy growing up in Catholic Ireland, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, hero Stephen Dedalus writes in his geography book: “Stephen Dedalus, Class of Elements, Clongowes Wood College, Sallins, County Kildare, Ireland, Europe, The World, The Universe.” 

As in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, these story frames are not just categories by which Malick defines his characters. They are also systems, and they quietly but inexorably lock the hero of Tree of Life, along with his family, within a powerful slavery.

Of all the many frames in this story, the main one is the “storyteller,” oldest brother Jack as an adult, played by Sean Penn, who remembers his childhood upon hearing of his younger brother’s death. If we recall the discussion of genres and story shapes in the Anatomy of Story Masterclass, we can see why this storyteller technique is the second key to combining the Masterpiece genre with the Memoir-True Story in Tree of Life.

The desire line, the spine, in a Masterpiece story is always some version of “finding a deeper reality, contrasting time, perspective and system.” For Memoir-True Story, it’s “to find the meaning in one’s own life.” Using his brother’s death as a trigger, Jack recalls his boyhood and in the process tries to make some sense of the meaning of his own life. Because this is a memory story, Malick is free to play with the past in any order he chooses, and show time frames that vary from the evolution of the universe to a memory only a second long.

After setting up all these massive frames of time, space and character in the early part of the film, Malick then goes in the opposite direction, the sensual, to tell the main story. One effect of the 200-300 short scenes is that the viewer gains a sense of flow, process, and becoming at every level of life. Just as Van Gogh’s paintings of objects are simply packages of lines of force, the objects here, from bursting stars to desert rocks, have energy literally flowing through them.

The combination of sensual images with short scenes becomes a different kind of story language, a visual poem, and much of the film plays like a silent movie. This is Malick’s cinematic version of stream of consciousness, far more believable and emotionally real than most voice-over narrations that play over standard-length scenes of dialogue.

No matter how short most of these moments are, each is an event, an action which, when strung together in sequence, gives us the story of a boy growing up in America. The father is a harsh, sometimes physical disciplinarian while the mother is a gentle ethereal woman with infinite love for her three boys. Our hero is the oldest of the three, and he does some things to the middle brother, now dead, that show a jealousy, a nastiness, and make him feel guilt now that he remembers those actions as an adult.

Over the course of the story, the outside world, the killer systems, invade the boy’s life. The father loses his job in the factory, along with his belief in the American ethic of working hard to rise to the top. And the boy has to leave the house that he grew up in.

Unlike his father, Jack has grown up to be a successful man in business. But the modern skyscraper environment he lives in seems a major loss compared to that house of his childhood. That’s why he remembers. And that’s why he mourns, not just for his dead brother but for a community, a fleeting moment in the span of a human life when he was free and loved and full of potential.

As this naturalistic story plays out, the second strain, the Biblical, the spiritual, comes through in the scenes as well. First by the fact that these aren’t just brothers in their actions. Our hero is Cain to his brother’s Abel, even if he didn’t finally kill him. Then there are the voices of the heavenly choir that play throughout. There’s the use of voice-over where we hear the beliefs of Mother and Father.  And of course there’s the communal ending.

In Jack’s mind, they are all together again at the seashore, walking through the water as requiem music plays and the ethereal choir sings. Father carries the dead son. And Mother says, to death, to the universe, to God, to something, “I give him to you. I give you my son.”

I wish I could say I loved this incredibly ambitious film. But I didn’t. My response to it was similar to what I’ve discovered about Citizen Kane: everyone respects it as one of the great films of all time, but I don’t know a single soul who loves it.

If you want to take a shot at writing a masterpiece of your own, it’s instructive to see why this occurs. Story frames, whether of time, point of view, or system, are fundamental to advanced storytelling. They are what allow the audience to see deeper and to see bigger than they can with their own eyes.

But there is a great danger. The more frames you place on a story, the more you literally back the audience away and drain emotion from the experience. It’s like placing a window frame around a window frame around a window frame around a character. You can see intellectually what the person is doing, but finally you just can’t feel it.

Disney's Earth

Earth, the most ambitious nature documentary ever made, is coming out, appropriately, on Earth Day, and I had the great pleasure to have worked on it as story consultant. A project like this is quite rare, first because it had the potential to be an historic film, and second, because the creative team behind it was both extremely talented and open to outside ideas. Because of the role I played on Earth, I’d like to take you inside the creative process to explain how this remarkable film came about.

The nature documentary is a sub-category of the very broad genre known as True Life stories. Like the biopic and the memoir – other kinds of True Life stories – the nature doc hits all the key story structure steps but also bends them in several severe ways. The most obvious special characteristic of a nature doc is that the main character is not human. Surprisingly, the only one of the seven steps that this strongly affects is the self-revelation. Animals, especially as we move down the chain of being, don’t really have self-revelations, although they do learn.

Another restriction in nature docs is that the storyteller must work with what actually happened, and worse, with what he or she actually got on film. (While working on Earth, I was amazed to learn that no filmmaker has ever gotten footage of a black jaguar in its natural habitat.) If you don’t have film of the opponent step, for example, you’ve got a huge hole in your story and no amount of rewriting is going to fix it.

Besides these substantial restrictions common to all nature docs, Earth brought a slew of its own story challenges. The film’s title suggests one of the biggest: this film had to be the epic of all nature epics, covering the entire planet and potentially every plant and animal on the planet. A second challenge was the opposite of the first: how do you create a strong emotional bond between the audience and the animals – the main characters – with so many characters to depict?

Yet another challenge had to do with creating dramatic build: animal behavior is almost always cyclical, driven by the four seasons, with animals all over the earth undergoing physical changes at any and all times. The final major challenge (I won’t get into the hundreds of minor challenges) had to do with the inherently episodic quality of a story covering so much time and space, and so many animals.

So here’s what we did. First we realized that the epic and the personal don’t have to be mutually exclusive. We could show the massive scope of the planet more effectively by making the story more character driven. And that meant focusing on fewer characters more intensely, showing a complete seven steps drama of each main character in condensed form.

The key then was which animals to focus on. To heighten the epic scope and provide an easy-to-follow narrative line, we would track the sun from north pole to south pole. The character line would be built around three families: polar bears in the north, elephants near the equator, and whales in the waters of the south.

Choosing these three animals as the main characters and focusing on one family in each was the crucial decision in the entire story process. These three animals are among the most popular with audiences, and linking them on a path from north to south allowed us to make quick forays to other animals without losing a sense of the spine.

Showing a family instead of an individual animal gave us all the benefits of the family as the basic unit of drama. The struggle of each to survive wasn’t just the drama of predator and prey resulting inevitably in death. Instead, it became the story of a mother’s love, of teaching the babies and watching them grow, of the wonder of life rather than the horror of death. In fact, the biggest revelation I took from the film is that the most powerful and heroic being on this earth is Mom. What mothers do in this film, emblematic of what they do a billion times a day on this earth, will blow your mind.

No discussion of the story work on Earth would be complete without mention of the amazing footage these filmmakers were able to get. What strikes you first is the extraordinary beauty of this planet. And the images you see in this film are far beyond what you have ever seen before.

But you quickly get caught up in the even more unbelievable pictures of the daily drama of life. Perhaps my favorite in a long list is a sequence where elephants and lions must share a watering hole because of a drought. That’s something that neither elephant nor lion likes to do. And I dare you to watch what happens without your jaw dropping open in utter disbelief.

Most of you reading this do not write or film nature documentaries. But you do write stories. Watch Earth first because it is a joy to behold. But then study it for the problems and solutions every writer deals with in the never-ending challenge we call storytelling.