I web-udgaven af magsinet af Little White Lies er en vis Mark Asch i en stor
artikel helt oppe at køre på lighederne mellem Peter Adolphsens roman
Machine og Terence Malicks film
The Tree of Life, artiklens begyndelse:
"
We begin in Austin, Texas in the second
half of the 20th century, before flashing back to a time when all matter
in the universe exploded outward in a radiance of creation, forming the
earth and all living things, including a confused prehistoric animal,
who injures its leg by a river. We move forward again, the earth takes a
more familiar shape; we’re in the deserts of the American West, and
eventually back to Austin, where our narrator mourns a premature death
with mixed empathy and survivor guilt in a profound display of
interconnectivity.
Only this isn’t a brief summary of Terrence Malick’s
The Tree of Life, but Danish
author Peter Adolphsen’s 2006 short novel ‘Machine’.
An English-language version of ‘Machine’ was published in 2007, around
the time my girlfriend was indulging her wanderlust by reading all the
translated Scandinavian literature she could get her hands
on. I was interested by her description of ‘Machine’: the book is one of
those stories that follows a particular object through space and time
as it interacts with different objects and people, each opening up into
its own distinct, digressive world, and I probably thought it was a
neat, familiar metaphor for the web of life.
I had seen The Tree of Life when it came out in 2011, and when I
picked up ‘Machine’ two years later I had a vague inkling that the novel
and movie had a similar hook: the ancient past and familiar present,
together in a chain of causality. But my pulse quickened as I began to
read. Like many small-press authors, Peter Adolphsen maintains a very
active social media presence, and had friended my girlfriend on Facebook
after she reviewed ‘Machine’, though they’d never actually spoken. I
sent him a message to ask if he’d ever seen The Tree of Life. He hadn’t.
Over email, Adolphsen describes ‘Machine’ as “in the genre of
tingseventyr (fairy
tales about objects).” After a brief overture, the novel, which you can
read in about an hour, starts at the very beginning: the Big Bang – the
expansion of time and space outwards from a single point, and the
formation of the elements and everything else, “from amino acids to
galaxy clusters.” The same quantity of matter has always existed, writes
Adolphsen, in various recombining forms, and it is one particular piece
of matter that ‘Machine’ follows.
A prehistoric horse (a mammal from the Eocene period, not a
dinosaur), spooks at a watering hole, runs away, falls off a cliff, and
dies. Cellular decomposition, putrefaction and the heat of the earth
take their course – over several million years and a couple of pages –
and the matter that had once composed the animal’s heart becomes a
single droplet of oil, which is extracted in the 1970s from the Utah
oilfield where an Azerbaijani immigrant named Jimmy Nash works. It is
eventually pumped into the gas tank of a Ford Pinto, turns to engine
exhaust, and is inhaled by the car’s owner, who, some decades later,
shows up on the narrator’s doorstep coughing up blood – dying of cancer
spread by that very particle that was once something else’s heart.
Adolphsen tells me that though he’s eager to see The Tree of
Life, he was previously unaware of its similarities with his book. I
have not reached out to Terrence Malick to ask if he’s read ‘Machine’,
but it’s widely reported that he had been developing a project about the
origins of life since the late 1970s. By 2007 the idea has taken shape
in a script incorporating elements inspired by Malick’s childhood in
Austin – where he grew up as the oil-rich grandson of Syrian and
Lebanese Christian immigrants – and the lingering emotional wound left
by the suicide of his younger brother in 1968. This personal tragedy
informs the world-weariness of Sean Penn’s character in the present-day
scenes that bookend The Tree of Life, as well as that of Christian
Bale’s protagonist in Malick’s latest,
Knight of Cups.
“I guess it’s a coincidence, a nice little one,” Adophsen says. “I
think that many more than just Mr Malick and myself have done the Big
Bang thing in some form or another; we’re not the first, won’t be the
last. The birth of the universe is naturally a recurrent theme. It’s the
end station for the train of where-do-we-come-from questions.”"
