Please, Thank You, I’m Sorry

The world is on the edge of an abyss. They try to deal with you, they teach you to hate, do they teach you to love? They teach you to create suits of armor, layers and layers of self-protection which bury your natural being, you learn and create your own unconscious reality which is missing from your natural self, and you create your own world where you are invulnerable. A house of cards with a hardened case, armor-plated, analgesic and amnesiac fear. You are the most wonderful and imperfect creature in the world, your purest moment was when you were born and you give yourself over Moloch every day, you are educated in the restrictions of culture, in the staunchest materialism and in the concept of happiness as a state. You have been stripped of your own nature, human beings are no longer human, you are an altered creature, and you are trained and imperfect. You despise and commit cruelties.

Is this a happy world we’ve created? Are you happy? Your actions reflect your unhappiness inside you. Soul of rat food, trash, malnourished soul, soul with Ethiopian hunger, it is scraggy to death. It’s starving! What does it eat? Look at the beings around you, in the street, in the train, in the elevator, not only anonymous people, does introspection exercise in the deepest of your closest relationships, how do you perceive them? Actually, you just need to put in a test tube the acts of an individual and you will know the results of his/her happiness or lack thereof. What brings happiness? The question is not “where is it?”, but “how to walk over it”. It is not a state, it is a path. The only full happiness is that you have to rummage as an archaeologist, that which enlightens you from inside to out, the best drug ever invented and the less shot up, that happiness is not the happiness Coca-Cola sells you.

I am not going to give you the “Money doesn’t buy happiness” speech, I’m just going to tell you a mental delirium, and do you want one? I tell you another’s delirium who I share the spiritual outlook on life with. The difference between him and me: he is a master; I am just, in 140 characters, an elephant.

These days I’ve been strolling among superficial and messianic reviews about Terrence Malick “The Tree Of Life”. The most precise quote I’ve read comes from my colleague Pedro Moral: “It is not much of an effort to understand, it is an effort to feel”. Are films not an art? Is it not an exact subjective interpretation of the beauty of art? So abstract but simple, Malik has no modesty when it comes to the best ode to life, without narrative coherence, it is poetry. The origin of life on Earth from the first cells, dinosaurs, the illustration of a human being life symbolized in the own author’s dream (by the way he changes the story of the stork), the human growth, the murder of nature, the establishment of limits, of what you must do, the dilemma of two paths intersecting, the natural one and the divine one where they launch you blindly and submitting you to please yourself, to please others, to find reasons to be unhappy when everything around you shines. Finally, death is also outlined under Malick’s chimera.

All of this is wonderfully presented, mixing film genres, from a nature documentary under a magnificent production about the millions of years before our existence, to the family drama and an epic representation of death as part of life, including the continuous sensitive changes of the musical crescendos which show a child’s growth learning, understanding, exploring…Malick again turns back the documentary genre in this part of the movie, but this time it is a human documentary (I recommend “Babies” documentary to establish a simile) where he teaches an impressive patient to reflect the natural reactions of a kid using cameras as the parent’s eyes. It is a detailed tender piece, it caresses every detail, every drop in a leaf, every ray through the trees, not for nothing has this piece been building up in American filmmaker’s minds for the last forty years; it is not just personal, it is exceedingly personal, for that reason some reviews say it is his own mental masturbation (masterpiece or great sham?, “El Mundo” states), but actually he is the only one who has dared to photograph, paint or draw the essence of life in a film (with images, sounds and the human imperfection), A religious philosophical opera.

Who are we to you? Answer me! why does that happen?, we beg you!, are you watching me?, I want to know what you are, I want to see what you see, where are you?, where were you?, you let a child die, was he bad?, you let bad things happen, why should I be good if you are not? With a disarmed sincerity, Malick asks the questions we did ourselves when we were kids and now we are too polluted to repeat them. Malick looks at the sky as if it was a dialogue, and it is a monologue to God. In fact, he looks God straight in the eyes pointing the camera at the sky. He brilliantly drowns himself in the delirium of the kid’s character for more than an hour because he has a desire to capture the kid’s frustration who is guided by the father’s path who knows he is perfectly aware of the wrong choice he made. But, like from dramatic overturn which flourish in the father’s character (it is still a movie, with its drama, but it also appears the director’s educational side for the free interpretation), your path is not infinite (“look at the glory around us, trees, birds. I lived in shame, I dishonored it all, and I didn’t notice the glory, I’m a foolish man”, he reflects). You shouldn’t say I can’t, you can accept people that forget you, snub you and hurt you. You can be both vulnerable and weak; you can accept the divine path.

You seek happiness like a junkie seeks cocaine, it is not a permanent state which distracts you of what is really happening (circumstances don’t determine us), it is a path, maybe a conception derived from Buddhist-nature but actually it is not far from Christianity’s primary ideas, not today’s Christianity which has distorted itself where sheep like masses go to worship what they believe God is, but it is another golden calf. 140 minutes of a dialogue with God, I mean, a monologue to God, a religious piece of art.

And because of Malick’s pantheistic conception, reviews of conservative media (therefore the closest media to Catholicism) should share the same meanings. However, we are talking about today’s Catholic Church, stramonium Catholicism which has been distorted by centuries of crusaders against the natural being, that Catholicism whose God created us with purity but his/her own religion decapitates it, they forget the most primary concepts of Christianity, good ones, after a two thousand year propaganda campaign. They are unnatural.

The rest of us, we are conservative. I am talking about the most intellectual stream (theatrically intellectuals should “understand” it better) of critics and even so they spit on it. I don’t want to dissect words like “Public” states (“the movie is ridiculous sometimes, whereas the emotional micro story of the family is touching”). Journalism (if it can be called that) for the masses, content for the masses, they didn’t even border the surface; for anyone, for you or for me because I exteriorize little divinity when I look down on other’s analysis of the work if they are based on the fatuous rationality and not on the sensitive beauty, the answers are in the movie. It is not about being intelligent (even though there’s a vast difference between people who work in the arts and the mass-man, that mass-man which Ortega and Gasset quoted as potentially bad and good), it is about living: “help each other. Love everyone, every leaf, every ray of light. Forgive. Appreciate the smallest things. Savor every second”.

There are three expressions you don’t hear too often: please, thank you and I’m sorry. For whoever wants to save them, don’t let yourself be swept away by the tide, give up every toxic thing in your life, life goes on, people pass away, nothing ever stays the same, the tree of life is everlasting like the movie. Seek your happiness, feed your soul. As time goes on it is arduous to alter your nature, to turn back and to seek the other path, the tree roots grow and they are very thick, the tree you have is the tree you grew up with. Ortega and Gasset said; “some people only live the appetizers and garnish of life; they never try the main dish”. For that reason, I sign with the Terrence Malick masterpiece epilogue: “The only way to be happy is to love. Unless you love, your life will flash by”. Be good with everyone, hope and be amazed.

Original article in Spanish: Por Favor, Gracias, Lo Siento (September ‘11)