The Softness of Her Hair and the Texture of Silk: The Mother’s Body and Klein’s Theory of ‘Love,Guilt and Reparation’ in The Treeof Life (Malick, 2011)

Abstract

Within a cluster of images in Malick’s The Tree of Life, there is a moment of small wonder which is both universal and utterly subjective. A mother and her son stand at the edge of a lake, its waters spreading outwards and flooding the horizon.³ Their silhouettes are ghostly: two figures, one dressed in a long, white cotton dress and the other in a pair of summer shorts (see Figure 6.1). The mother leans towards the boy and whispers something only he hears: it is a simple, yet sublime moment of kinship, love and adoration.

It is not simply that film captures an animated world, a world in motion; film animates. It animates the inanimate: the still, the unmoving, the concrete. It reveals that which is already moving as an animated body. And it animates us as we watch.¹

The symbolized maternal body that emerged … was a richly populated centre of unconscious psychical activity which reflected the infant’s earliest apprehension of his human environment. In these archaic perceptions of the mother’s body comprised a kind of totality which was experienced as the whole of existence.²