University of Bucharest Review. Literary and Cultural Studies Series (Apr 2012)
THE WAY TO GRACE: TERRENCE MALICK’S ECOTHEOLOGICAL VISION IN THE TREE OF LIFE
Abstract
Terrence Malick’s fifth and most experimental film The Tree of Life provides a fertile ground for exploring the various facets of Nature, along with the questions these raise and the implications they carry for understanding our fraught relationships with the divine. As I argue, by affirming its protagonists’ vital relation to the “deeper world” they inhabit, the movie projects an ecotheological vision that casts Nature as a matter-spirit continuum, a vast “church” filled with intimations of immortality, a place they can call “home.”
