I have to say, huge fan of Malick, always, always, since I saw Days of Heaven when I was maybe 12 and became obsessed with it and I thought “I only ever want to watch movies like this.” Such romantic light! I have not disliked any of his movies, but I really feel like killing a kid is a cheap, easy devise. There is almost none cheaper! It is tied with “threat of rape” and “threat of harm to pregnant woman and unborn child”. I almost thought I might stop watching the so totally good-bad American Horror Story on this second episode because it played on the threat to Coach Taylor’s Wife fetus so much, but then it ended up just being a blip in the story, and it weighs no more heavily than the threat of the the face-eating hundred year old baby/phantasm in the basement. THAT SAID, American Horror Story is a cliche-driven show on a second string cable network that is like, 13% Dylan McDermott’s sexual rage/flashes of side-peen. Terrance Malick won the Palme D’or! He is an American Auteur. I woulda booed this shit at Cannes, too. I feel like killing the weak and most vulnerable person in the story is so Hollywood hangover, and the preggo-peril/rape threat so a lingering tide of so much torture porn (SAW,etc.,etc.). I am not saying no child should credibly die, or the weak should never be killed–I mean, I love some Dogville and some other Von Trier stuff and he loves to sacrifice the sufferer, for the innocent to suffer, for the kid and poor blinded Bjork to die, their lives wasted. I know plenty of people argue that LVT does this to “manipulate” the audiences emotions (uh, what movie is not made for this express purpose?) but there is a moral hinge, something that baits and hooks us and he shows us up, he shoves our sympathies in our faces, he says “no, this is really how women are treated in the world, like garbage.” etc. He does so as an allegory about greed or fate or ‘morality’ or wrath or god’s indifference to us.

I mean, does Tree of Life end or continue in such a way where it does not play to our emtional cheap seats? Beautiful people in beautiful places, but you know, they have feelings. Oh, and here is the sunlight, and here are tears and here is outerspace, life is small, our suffering is small, a dead kid is small? THE END?