Terrence Malik Presents: God Hates Dinosaurs. |
Let us take a trip to the sacred Holly-wood and take an interest in the work of Terrence Malik. Mr Malik is a not particularly busy man. Every couple of years he makes a film which the media all get excited about and tell us that we also should get excited about it too, and many people, not knowing any better, jump on the media bandwaggon and do as they're told and decide to get excited. It's that comforting feeling that yuppies and hipsters get when they feel part of the clever club because they enjoy films that the media tell them are 'intelligent' or 'artistic' and 'challenging'.
Malik is an Arabic word which means King or Lord and is a form of the word Moloch and also Melchor, which are Phoenician names for Baal. One might assume a certain interest in the occult as Malik made a film called The Knight of Cups whose poster shows one of the magic sigils, the triangle of Solomon, used by the OTO and Satanic groups in demonic rituals. This film stars Christian Bale. It is also worth noting that the name Bale is also a name which evoke the Semitic name Baal leader of the Raphaim, the residents of the underword, or Lord, most commonly applied to the Demon God also known as Molech, Malchur and hence Malik.
The Tree of Life in reference is the Kabbalistic Tree of Life and we can expect when watching this film that the audience is likely to be inducted into the particular point of view of the OTO practicing Kabbalist.
The devious trickery of a film like Tree of Life in particular, is that it propagates its message, and it does have a message, it isn’t just entertainment it is proselytism and propaganda of the crudest kind. It is proselytizing its particular world-view by creating a story and a cast of characters, which it fully controls. It is not showing us reality, but an artificial reality which Malik has created in order to sell you his idea. And that idea is that the idea of a Christian God, or indeed any conception of God, is absurd and the kind of delusion shared only by the most foolishly naïve backwoods type of in-bred Christian hicks who probably live in Waco and have protruding chins and goofy children with big jug ears.
And so Malik literally sets the scene and shows us what he wants us to see. He shows us backwoods Christians hicks who live in Waco, have protruding chins and have goofy children with big jug ears. He paints an image of human self delusion against the endless cruelty of life and an impassive cold universe which seems to have no connection with human beings and their problems and shows us a specially created cast of characters along with specially selected music and images, to show us the absurdity of their beliefs.
He creates the image of the world as cruel and chaotic and asks the question 'why does God allow this suffering?' Real life is much more nuanced than a propaganda film for Satanic OTO God haters of course, but the power of film and the stars and machinery of Hollywood is such that the average movie gooer doesn’t really suspect he or she is being indoctrinated into atheism for the price of admission, popcorn and a Big Gulp, particularly when it’s an ‘art house’ film, the paying public are already on their knees in deference to a big exclusive Hollywood director and ‘auteur’ like Malik, whose reputation and career the media have mythologised to the level of some kind of Hollywood prophet dispensing holy Hollywood truths and conditioning the gullible hipsters and telling them what to think while the sheep like bearded trendsters and faux intellectuals obediently chew over the cud of Malik's diatribe, with glazed unthinking eyes. For instance Salon strongly promoted this movie, calling it a ‘domestic epic’ and ‘the most talked about movie of the summer’. The NY Times said: "(the film) envisions the origins of the universe and ponders some of life's deepest questions."
The whole point of films like this is for people to go to who want to prove that they are not popcorn chomping plebians and have some kind of depth within them. So they go to films like this, and feel confused for two hours, and emerge even more confused, much more so than when they went in, and talk to their friends about how confused they feel and somehow imagine that this is what passes for intellectual fulfillment.
The film starts with a quote from the book of Job, the theme of patient suffering is a key theme of the film but the film subverts this and asks us why we should suffer at all. At one point someone in the film says:
"Do you trust in God? Job too was close to God. The very moment everything was taken away from Job, he knew God had taken it."
It begins with a feeble female voice-over, her voice throughout the film scarcely seems to register at times and it's hard to know what she's saying. She is thus portrayed as a weak withdrawn character. She is the confused and pitiable Christian which Malik serves up as part of his polemic discourse.
“The nuns taught us there are two ways through life
The way of nature and the way of grace, we have to choose which one to follow.
Grace doesn’t try to please itself, accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked, accepts insults and injuries.”
This is actually more in tune with the Kabbalah and the book of Zohar which believes that there are two paths through life, the path of pain and the path of light.
“Nature only wants to please itself, get others to likes to lord it over them, it has its own way. Finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it and love is smiling through all things. They taught us that no one who loves the way of grace ever comes to a bad end. I will be true to you whatever comes."
I've Got a Letter from God. He Hates You Too |
The film then comes to a scene with a woman in a sunny conservatory receiving a letter which she opens and after a moment of shock appears to collapse in grief after which there is a sudden jump cut. We assume that the woman has just received news that her son has been killed. It is as if her faith has already proved fruitless and she has been rewarded for her belief in God with the death of her son. The sequences of events is such that it is almost made to seem like a cause and effect relationship, that having faith in God will lead to the death one's children. At the very least the inference is that God does not listen to those who worship him and is unworthy of worship since he is apparently keen to visit random acts of tragedy on even his most faithful supporters.
The movie has the mother in a continuous process of grief, calling on a God which within the tableau of the film is either impassive or absent. It pays to remember that what we are watching is an artificial construction of images and ideas designed to create an overall impression, this is propaganda, as pure ruthless and artful as that of Leni Reifenshahl, and while Reifenstahl wanted us to reject and hate Jews, Malik wants us to reject and possibly hate God.
God is presented by one of the Christian women, while she is trying to apparently console the mother, in the following way:
"The Lord gives and the Lord takes away and that's the way he is. He sends flies to wounds that he should heal."
Not only are we presented with the idea of an absent God but also a malicious and capricious one.
The feeble narrative continues in an manner utterly convincing to the character Malik is trying to convince us actually exists. The apparently simple minded naïve Christian woman is now further interpolating a God she does not know. The whole point of Christianity and Jesus’ ministry is that we as Christians DO know God. We know God through his son Jesus and the message of love and forgiveness which Jesus showed us. She says to God:
“What are we to you? Answer me.”
Someone with faith wouldn’t interrogate God because they know the presence of God is not something which is immediately going to climb down from the clouds, brush his beard and start merrily explaining himself and all of creation. The presence of God is within all of us and is necessarily not directly perceivable in the material world. Of course, creation and life itself is evidence of God in the first instance. Also this kind of search for God as a spokesman is a baffling idea and instances in the news of people claim to have been speaking to God usually don’t end well. Either a schizophrenic carried out a murder because God told him to, or George W Bush invades Iraq which leads to the death of upwards of a million people. God then, seems to shun direct human dialogue, this seems to be more the domain of ‘the other guy’, the one with the horns.
The next shot, juxtaposes a mother’s yearning for some sign from God over her dead son and some sort of prayer with a shot which shows vast gas clouds and nebulae, terrifying in their remoteness to daily human suffering. And Malik shows us an impassive unconcerned universe of Gas giants and galaxies which just don’t seem to be listening. We see the surface of the sun, terrifying in its power and, again, seen to be remote from Earth and the life of a simple human family. A shot of bursting lava and forces of apparent chaos and incredible power, so far removed from the human experience as to seem to relegate human concerns into insignificance. I am rather saddened that a film like this is seen as intelligent and of great spiritual depth, the artifice is obvious and the labored propaganda directed specifically against Christianity and theism itself, is of the most paltry and simple minded kind. This film is simply not worthy of the medium, and Terrence Malik himself is rather a second rate film director lacking the subtlety which has distinguished certain propagandists of the past to at least a certain level of artistic merit.
What the film fails to tell you is that suffering is a choice which we as humans make. One can choose to suffer from the events of life or one can choose to move on and make the best of your life and its circumstances. This fear of death and obsession with human suffering seems to be something which we find within the typical Satanist. Pain. This pain seems to inform their whole view of reality itself. Also this view that death is some kind of disaster, is a materialistic one, not a spiritual or religious one. In fact from a certain spiritual perspective death is a blessing because it means one has become free and unchained from this fallen physical world, and I think there can be few doubts that what we are dealing with here on Earth IS a fallen world.
This terror of death which people involved with the occult experience was nowhere more pronounced than in the inglorious passing of David Bowie whose final album was a shameful display of a petulant child bawling his eyes out because his father told him it was bed time.
Not a happy Bowie. |
The parable of Jesus’ that it is easier for camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven, can be explained because the rich man with his life of luxury, ease and all his earthly pleasures instantly fulfilled, would feel at death that someone was taking everything away from him. This possibly partially explains the obsession which the rich have with longevity and the former fruitless fad with cryogenics. The rich simply cannot bear the thought of dying and losing everything, while the poor, as Jesus says, ‘yours is the Kingdom’ because they have nothing to lose by leaving this world and joyfully embracing the next. Personally I found this attitude highly prevalent when I lived in Egypt. I would talk to people in Cairo, most of the people who live in Egypt are poor, and many of them think another world war seems inevitable but the general consensus was not of fear but of a sense that death is not the worst thing, and in fact since their lives were so hard and they had so little to lose and so they were not afraid of leaving this world.
That's Where God Lives....Said No Christian Ever. |
Space: Jupiter Lives There! |
Yet for the second time this is just not what any Christian or anyone who followed a religion of any kind would even say. The dialogue and the character which Malik has created is a fraud. An unlikely and unbelievable artifice. A Christian bears their sorrows and keeps their faith until their sorrows become a vibrant part of their spiritual experience. A Christian knows this world and the conditions in it are far from perfect and would not expect them to be so, otherwise they would not be Christians who understand the nature of the world they are in and await entry into a better one. It is however just the kind of question someone in spiritual darkness might ask, and clearly, Malik is a man in spiritual pain and darkness. Malik lost his brother in a bizarre suicide, after he broke his own hands in frustration at apparently not being able to reach a certain level of excellence with his guitar lessons with a Spanish virtuoso guitarist.
Yet again, we find an inability to deal with pain and disappointment. In the case of Terrence Malik’s brother who killed himself because he wasn’t a guitar genius, and in the instance of Terence Malik himself who seems to be haunted by the pain of the loss of his brother. Isn’t there almost a petulance in their actions and ways of thinking? An unwillingness to progress and accept that life something is hard, but instead they react in excessively disproportionate ways, with suicide or Satanism.
If Satan himself were to make a presentation to mankind in order to convince him to collectively deny the existence of God, this is exactly the film he would make, and perhaps he has, using his human agent Terence Malik to speak for him.
Brad Pitt takes it on the chin to pull his Waco Christian 'Tard Face. |
The characters themselves, the apparently pious Christian couple at the centre of the film are depicted a pair of fools who seem to be huddling together somewhere near the bottom end of the autism spectrum. Jessica Chastain mumbles her way through the film as if the character she is playing has just escaped from a secure facility and is still heavily sedated.
Brad Pitt 'Tards Hard for this Movie. |
Brad Pitt’s pulls every facial expression he can think of to show that his character is somewhat below Forrest Gump in intelligence, in fact at one point Brad Pitt ludicrously at one point has his chin sticking out like the literal retard face you pulled as a kid in the playground, except that, rather incongruously this idiotic semi-retarded backwoods Christian owns a nice house and can play piano. But then again we’ve all seen Deliverance and we know that in-bred hill billies sometimes play a mean banjo.
Brad Pitt plays with his organ while pulling Christian Tard-Face TM. |
You Just Went Full Retard. |
Goofy looking Christians. Collect the whole set!
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A Straight Flush of Goofy Christians. |
The children in this film are shown staggering about like animals, witlessly, almost appearing to drool at times and the inference is that human beings are no different to animals, particularly children who belong to Christian families. The characters in this film are deliberately played as ridiculous and pitiable because the viewer is supposed to find their religion ridiculous and pitiable. There is even a scene where the group of neighbourhood children are seen playing in clouds of toxic DDT mosquito killer. This scene seems to embody the idea of senseless cruelty and again, is such a clearly contrived idea to labour a particular sense of hopelessness.
This seems to connect with the scene where the children are wantonly cruel to each other and animals. One scene has the children tie a frog to a rocket while another scene shows children inflicting pain on each other.
The key theme of the film is pain and the movie revels in it and would try to tell the movie-goer that this is all there is to life. Pain, cruelty and loss.
A deliberately nihilistic skewed vision of reality which is a million miles removed from most of our lives which generally tend not to revolve around pain and wanton cruelty.
In fact the actors playing his sons in the film also seem to have been especially chosen to most resemble the backwoods hillbilly boy. With big jug ears and dopey witless bovine expressions. Most movies choose conventionally attractive or cute child actors, but not this movie, that’s because the characters in this film are not supposed to be aspirational or heroic, or even likeable, in fact the opposite is the case.
“My soul, my son" Jessica Chastain mumbles, and we are reminded of course that the only thing of importance in the whole universe is of course, a human being’s lack of knowledge about the transition between this world and the next world, and the pain and sorrow which this lack of understanding causes.
The Jellyfish, the Most Religious and Pious of All God's Creatures. |
It is the scientists’ vision of the world, but not the first rate innovative scientist like Tesla, Newton or Max Plank, but the media idea of a scientist. The materialist with something quirky about him. Whether it be a scientist who used to be in a dance band singing songs to Tony Blair or the scientist trapped in a wheelchair. The scientist who has been initiated, likely by watching films such as this, into forgetting his own experience of the infinite and being forced to reduce himself to a blood cell travelling down a capillary to feed a chicken embryo.
The astonishing thing is that it all smacks of some incredible arrogance, as all such atheistic concepts do, that somehow the natural world is not good enough for us, that why should we be pumped full of blood and little different to a chicken. Why should we be subjected to the laws of the material world and have to suffer birth, life and death. Why should we? Aren’t we so much better than a mechanistic universe?
Obviously the idea is inane, and very possibly insane, and it takes a man of an especially warped creative ability to be able to convey such an idea in film.
The Mistake Malik makes is to try to Prove God's Non-Existence by Offering the Evidence of the Macrocosm, but God Lives in the Quantum Microcosm. |
While this woman is breathlessly droning on about the search for her lost child we are shown an image of Jupiter and images of bodies of the solar system. The inference of course is clear, that your child is not here. Indeed, they are not anywhere. All that is up in the sky are terrifying large planets while scary and tumultuous classical choral music plays.
The Tree of Life has been largely misunderstood by its media audience, or at least as I suspect, deliberately miss-sold as a religious film when it is thoroughly and completely an atheist’s film, however Richard Brody makes the correct analysis of the film:
“…there’s no God in ‘The Tree of Life’, but rather, the scientific origin and development of the world – which he depicts and nonetheless miraculous.”
Film critic Roger Ebert wrote: ”human lives diminish beneath the overarching majesty of the world”. What he means is that human lives are insignificant compared to the force of blind materialism, which of course, is a key belief to atheistic humanists.
Films like this appeal to people who cannot grasp metaphysical or spiritual concepts for themselves and need to be told that there is no God.
The website topsecret writers seems to share my concerns and asks:
"Should he inform the public about his philosophies and religious beliefs that he spreads in his films?
Or does Malick essentially use his films for unlabeled propaganda for new-age beliefs. In short, what does Terrence Malik have to hide?"
Are Malick’s Films Simply New Age Propaganda?
Malik is arguably using his films as ‘unwitting’ propaganda to distribute his ‘new age’ and Gnostic beliefs that “knowledge has a redeeming and liberating function that helped the individual break free of bondage to the world.”
http://www.topsecretwriters.com/2011/05/what-does-filmmaker-terrence-malick-have-to-hide/
The website also notes his lack of public appearances and the specific banning of photographs. Nor was he even present to accept the Canne D’or from the prestigious Cannes film festival, surely the high point in the career of any film maker? My suspicion is frankly, that Malik knows it’s all a sham and that he is nothing but a propagandist and knows too that the whole of the organized media from television, press, to even supposed ‘avant garde’ film festivals are all part of the same rotten club, and he frankly just couldn’t be bothered to play his part any further than he really had to. For him, making his beastly odious films is all he is willing to do. He will not speak for them, nor will he accept awards for them.
Oh the sheer creepy crawly Goldnessness of creation. Malik subtext: Praying is for idiots and insects. |
Watching The Tree of Life is like experiencing life through schizo-vision. For instance there is a shot of a child playing with its father which is quickly cut to a tree frog climbing a blade of grass, then an anatomical drawing or a praying mantis (a shorthand for the hidden terror of the natural world) to a child wearing a Halloween mask.
But why? Noone experiences life like this. Noone makes rapid associations between a child playing in a garden to frogs and praying mantids. Noone except someone who is suffering with mental illness and wants to share his living nightmare with us.
Everything is deliberately made sinister in this movie. But we know that much of life isn’t sinister at all, maybe mundane at worst. But here, we are experiencing life through the lens of schizophrenic confusion and the terror of false and anomalous associations.
The film is very keen at all times to attempt to correlate human activities to those of animals. All the boy seems to do is sleep and run around and fight with each other. The one moment when the boy is not seen running around is a meal setting where Brad Pitt has again evoked God and shown that Christian parents are tyrannical and have no human relationship with their parents.
The relationship between Brad Pitt and his Christian family is depicted as slightly unnatural and oppressive. When the son asks if his father can pass the butter, his father rebukes him saying ‘pass the butter please sir’, The sons have the timidity of tortured or abused children. I half expected the Brad Pitt character to punch his wife in the face and say ‘stop talking woman.’ In fact he and his wife do actually have a physical confrontation at one point in the film.
“Do you love your father.” The son responds meekly with a ‘yes sir’ of an abused air of someone suffering from Stockholm syndrome.
The sinister element is also evoked with the reliance on pieces of heavy classical music as a kind of short-hand for the blind and dangerous mechanistic forces of the universe does become a bit tiresome after a while, and one wonders how Malik would possibly have conveyed 90 percent of his ideas without the use of selected suites, opuses and overtures. He simply wouldn’t. The music did 90 percent of the work in this film and as far as I know Malik had no part in that. The movie is basically people wandering around in a variety of locations. With foreboding choral classical music in the background, while a mother kisses a boy. And that’s about it. It makes one realise what a fraud Malik is and how several well esteemed actors including the legendary Christopher Plummer vow never to work with the man again and demand that he obtain a script writer. Malik doesn’t seem to believe in scripts. He probably just asks his actors to wander around while afterwards choosing which composer’s music will actually decide what it all means.
In 2015 Malik released the Knight of Cups, and according to the film’s star Christian Bale, not only was there no script, but Bale literally knew nothing about his own character or the events of the film. He didn’t even know who else was in the film and one of the film’s stars Teresa Palmer, he had initially thought was a stripper. The film spent two years in post production and in all likelihood it was here that Malik actually decided what the film would actually be about since all of the dialogue from Bale is provided in narrative voice-over. Malik would also send actors unexpectedly into a scene in order to get a reaction from the actors who were performing.
From all of this one gets the impression that working with Terrence Malik is less a professional engagement and more an initiatory ordeal. The key to the initiatory ordeal is the unknown and fear, also sudden surprises. All of these elements would be experienced to anyone working with Terrence Malik and is the reason many well known actors have vowed never to work for him again and have expressed disillusionment with his methods.
The public and actors themselves, for their own mental well being, be very wary of having anything to do with Terrence Malik and his films.
Interesting intellectual reads! TY!
ReplyDeleteOutstanding analysis! I don't know if you noticed, but there is a momentary pyramid in the sunrise scene that made me feel uneasy at the time that I saw the film. Malick's films have always made me feel uneasy. As with Stanley Kubrick, Malick's atheism is palpable, and your suggestion that Malick (or, "Moloch") is OTO makes perfect sense. It seems to me that they love knowledge and being clever and being on the inside of something they know is an illusion (i.e., esoteric) because it gives their lives a sort of "meaning" (namely, notoriety and a whole lot of money) to fill the void of their having parted ways with God, probably because they read Ayn Rand in their adolescence (so, they are stuck playing "army man" in "platoon" scenes of their own making: think, The Thin Red Line), or they saw (or heard of) a Kenneth Anger film in a formative stage when they couldn't tell the difference between, or at least couldn't conceive of the connection between, "art" and "propaganda."
ReplyDeleteThis is the same problem I have with the absurdist irony of the Coen Brothers, on the one hand, and the heavy-handed Gnostic nonsense and the Wachowski brothers (now, "sisters"), on the other hand. As for Darren Aronofsky, I turned the movie off immediately after I read the epigraph that opens "Noah." I do appreciate Aronofsky telegraphing the message of the film right up front, so I didn't have to watch it to know it would be a waste of time.
As an aside, many "Christian filmmakers," C. Thomas Howell and Alex Kendrick have a hard time even blurring the line between art and propaganda. (Don't even get me started on the "portrayal" of African Americans in contemporary Christian movies such as the former crack-addict- turned-prophet-of-the- Apocalypse in David A. R. White's one of the Revelation Road films, the African pastor, who dies in an arson fire in God's Not Dead 3, God as a black woman who plays God in The Shack, or the disturbingly insane black man carrying a cross around town, but not as a social or political comment of any kind, in "Do You Believe"?)
Getting back to Malick, though, and the atheistic, Satanistic, and Luciferian materialism of Holly-wood, it is, especially as we see exemplified with the awards shows (and to quote Shakespeare's Macbeth) all "sound and fury," an open deception generated from the void of a lack of relationship with the Creator of us because the reality of a human life in Father God in Christ is not glamorous, nor easy, nor simple, nor convenient, nor free of pain or grief, but there is discernment and peace that surpasses all understanding in the midst of life's difficulties with the indwelling of His Holy Spirit that cannot be received through the simulacrum of reality that is the "cinematic universe." There is also a trust in God, as His Word (i.e., Scripture and Christ) continually reveals truth that is not possible to be found, nor advisable to be looked for, in the idolatry and deceptions (i.e., light-bearing illusions) of Holly-wood.
Should we, as Christians, have no commerce with contemporary filmmakers? (I mean, how many times can you watch the original version of Ben-Hur in a year?)
Surely, it is best to keep our film-based entertainment to a minimum in this "new age," when we need God's Word and Holy Spirit to permeate and pervade our lives so urgently and utterly.
So, may God give us discernment and have mercy on us all in Jesus's name, amen!