The Tree of Life Trailer 2011 HD

The Tree of Life, Malik and a Bit of Fun.

I recently seen this trailer of Terrence Malick's new film The Tree of Life that is scheduled to come out sometime during May of this year. The cinematography and music look beautiful from the short clip but something struck me to the core when seeing this trailer. According to the Wikipedia on Malick he is said to not only been born in Waco Texas but was ardently mixed up in the existential philosophy of Martin Heidegger (apparently Malick taught philosophy at one point in his life at Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Malick's Heideggerian influences throughout many of his films has been long pointed out.

The main character in the film is a young boy (apparently growing up in Waco - very little information has been released of the film's story) who grows up wrestling with his existential angst on the meaning (and origins) of life. Autobiographical I dear say? To those of us familiar with philosophy the connections are clear. Can this movie be about the larger question on evolution / creation and a boy's/man's coming to terms with a choice between these two great worldviews? We all know the teaching of Heidegger and his lifelong commitment to the Nazi party sometimes even called the 'philosophical force behind Hitler.'¹

Wherever Malick has chosen to take this film it looks to be interesting but the walkway of this narrow bridge is a slippery and dangerous one if not treaded on carefully.

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¹ E.g., Jean-Francois Lyotard, Heidegger and the Jews (University of Minnesota Press, 1990), Victor Farias, Heidegger and Nazism (Temple University Press, 1991), Alan Milchman ed., Martin Heidegger and the Holocaust (Lynx House Press, 1997), Tom Rockmore, On Heidegger's Nazism and Philosophy (University of California Press, 1997), Karl Lowith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism (Columbia University Press, 1998), Julian Young, Heidegger, Philosophy, Nazism (Cambridge University Press, 1998), Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger. The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-35 (Yale University Press, 2009) are a few examples.