- Dante (Autumn Song)

Why is Days of Heaven my favorite film? I have been asking myself that question ever since I read about the user-review idea at IVIOTS. First I couldn’t figure it out, like reading something too close to my face, but then after much contemplation I concluded that it is because Days of Heaven is the embodiment of everything I think great art must be. Great art, as I see it, must not be ego-driven, or in other words it must be a partnership between the artist and the audience. Maybe this has to do with my philosophy of life, that Man can become Infinite only through realization of his Nothingness. When you own twelve things, you’re the owner of twelve things; but when you own nothing, you’re the owner of it all. This is not to say that art must be a communal process, but that art must be shared, and not preached. Subjectivity, as I see it, is not the means for Rand-ian hyper-individualism (or rationalistic solipsism), but is a tool to evoke conversation about our shared essence. This applies more so for cinema than any other art-form, since it is the most “complete”, for lack of a better word, of them all. As an audience, one can listen to the music and use the imagination to complete it visually and vice versa for painting, thus making them collaborative experiences between the artist and the audience. However, since cinema controls both the audio and the visual facets, it has a tendency to overpower the senses, leaving no room for the audience participation.

This is the major beef I have with the Kubrick-ian brand of cinema; it allows the director to be a God-like figure controlling the entire environment of a film, more often than not leading to egocentric (and in some cases narcissistic) artistic masturbation. In other words, I like to do my own chewing. Retreating from the tangent, it is because of this overwhelming power that cinema has over the senses, that historically it has been predominantly used as a tool for narrative filmmaking; which for the most part cannot really be considered art, not that it can’t possibly be, but that it usually isn’t. Loving narrative films is a stage that every cinephile must go through in order to progress to the really good shit, after all most of us have blood on our hands for making The Shawshank Redemption #2 on IMDB’s Top 250 List. The art in cinema lies really in its ability to capture the “poetic truth”. This poetic truth is different from what Herzog calls the accountant’s truth (or verité truth) because it can’t be written down or explained since it transcends the intellect, but can only be expressed through art. Almost like a mystical experience, artist can communicate it only through abstraction and audience cannot understand it, but only perceive it. Great cinema, like great poetry, is not interested in telling a story as much as it is interested in evoking a mood, in transporting us to regions of our collective unconscious that have thus far remained undisturbed.

Ever since I saw the Days of Heaven again to write this review, I have been stuck on what it is really about? Obviously this is an excruciating task because Malick’s narrative style is incredibly oblique to the point of being opaque and because it is structured elliptically, the pieces that fit are usually far apart. He brushes away major themes as background chatter while keeping in long takes of turkeys and skunks. Of course, that’s also why we love him, because this ambiguity is not committed to screen on purpose to be hip, but almost like a caveman he creates his petroglyphs solely to pleasure himself. Assessing his films is like putting a jigsaw together with pieces from different puzzles or like writing a coherent essay on this most amazing dream you had in which you were a three-legged banana. But as far as Days of Heaven is concerned, I think I’ve been able to put at least a few pieces together to recognize some running elements if not themes.

The first clue comes from the year the film is set in, 1916. This was a key time in the history of the world, when it was in the middle of the First World War. Unbridled capitalism had flourished throughout most of the developed world for more than a century leading to class differences wider than ever before. Of course, after the war the world was different place altogether, with the advent of the Russian Revolution in the same year. Like he always does, Malick never really makes a direct reference to the war, other than one short scene in which Abby boards the train carrying the soldiers making their way to the front; but in fact there are various oblique references to the approaching war. One can even argue, rather lightly though, that the entire film is an allegory for the First World War, the world before it and the world after. At first look, the film seems to have a Christian Marxist leaning, vilifying the capitalist oligarchy. It starts from the first scene when Bill is pushed around by the factory supervisor who he ends up injuring (or killing); then when they get to the farm, the foreman docks a day’s pay from Abby after she’d worked the entire day, for missing twelve bushels. On top of that, he threatens to fire Bill when he resists, despite the fact that the farmer had the record profit into six –figures that year.

But if that’s the case then why instead of ennobling Bill’s character as representative of the proletariat he is developed as being greedy and selfish; while the farmer is probably the only real honorable character in the film? A sly answer for this could be that because it is Linda that narrates the film, the character of the farmer is really her impression of him, and not him. After all it is fair to assume that foreman was simply an employee of the farmer and it was really the farmer who was subjecting the sackers to low wages and harsh conditions. No good guy could just become the richest man in Texas panhandle off of sheer luck and decency. Linda actually mentions her fondness for him in one of her narrations, when she says:

A clue behind the psychology for her liking of him could possibly come from Terrence Malick’s only interview ever, which he did with Sight & Sound in 1975 after Badlands:

He [Kit] wants to be like them, like the rich man he locks in the closet, the only man he doesn't kill, the only man he sympathizes with, and the one least in need of sympathy. It's not infrequently the people at the bottom who most vigorously defend the very rules that put and keep them there.

After all, if we think about Linda, the time she spent at the farm could’ve possibly been the best time of her life, good enough for her to call them her “days of heaven”, all on the farmer’s expense. That would surely have at least some impact on her impression of the farmer. She says about her time at the farm:

So now presuming that the farmer wasn’t as decent as is portrayed and Bill wasn’t that nice either as proven by his actions, this really sheds light on Malick’s perspective on the matter. He sees both the rich capitalists and the proletariat as having basically the same primal ego-centric characteristics; greed and selfishness. Of course, this view would be considered as being that of a capitalist apologist by the Marxist intellectuals and that of a socialist defender by the capitalist economists. But Malick’s perspective is really just common sense, that most of the planet can be divided into two categories: the assholes and the idiots who get exploited by the assholes; but what unites them is their avarice. Anthropologically speaking, maybe this assessment is too reductive, but even if it is, giving either of the two groups a higher moral standing over the other is a sociological sin many modernist intellectuals, from both sides, have committed in the past.

Bill, in a candid moment with the Farmer, his oppressor of all people, confesses:

This is an example of Malick’s unique observational skills. I don’t believe there would be another person to whom Bill would admit that to, especially in his own class. He admits it to the farmer, his oppressor, almost out of unquenchable insecurity that he feels around the guy. The farmer is someone that Bill wants to be and destroy at the same time, which reveals something curious about the proletariat-psyche and also provides the reason behind the failure of the socialist experiment. It is just against the primal human nature. Man is greedy and selfish, regardless of whether he is rich or poor. This is something the bleeding liberal hearts don’t realize; they love the idea of the poor rather than the poor themselves. And they would go to hell and back to fight for them, in complete denial of the fact that the ones that they are fighting for are just as ugly as those they are fighting against. If a sweat shop worker making sneakers at 10 cents an hour could run Nike, you know what changes he would make? Absolutely none. Those getting fucked are really just waiting for their dicks to get hard so that they could go fuck someone weaker than them. Compassion, in its truest form, is a luxury afforded by those with full stomachs.

This train of thought allowed me to understand the bizarre interlude of the flying circus that lands at the farm, something I couldn’t do before even though I was fascinated by the sequence. It is, to my understanding, an incredible expressionist perspective on the bourgeois, the proletariat and the war that separated the two into the major blocs that controlled the volatile political climate of the world for more than half a century since. The essence of the sequence lies in Linda’s narration about the big and the small clown:

Malick literally portrayed the two opposing classes (bourgeois and proletariat) as a couple of quarreling clowns not to be taken too seriously, a clash that couldn’t be sorted out and made absolutely no sense. This interlude was literally in the film, as a representative of Malick’s and possibly Linda’s perspective on the absurdity of the conflict between Bill and the farmer over Abby, as herself and as a representation of the Mother Nature. Linda shed more light through her narration:

This is a key passage that makes us ponder on the driving force of socialism. Is the impetus for socialism, egalitarianism or the collective envy of the have-nots towards the haves? In other words, can Bill’s continual deception of the farmer and the sins he committed at the farm be justified in light of the oppression that the farmer inflicted on him and those of his class? Does an eye for an eye make the whole world blind? I think, Malick seems to believe so as depicted through his apocalyptic ending of the film. The farm goes up in flames and they both end up dead. Whatever “days of heaven” the world had are now over, with the approaching storm of the first big one. And unlike most intellectuals, Malick isn’t interested in the blame-game or the “Only-If…” scenarios. He sees war as the natural extrapolation of human nature, something that cannot possibly be avoided for too long until it pops its ugly head again. Like a poet, he sits at the edge of it and sees it unfurl itself; keen yet detached, contemplating the source of “this great evil”.

Days of Heaven has often been criticized for being emotionally inert, keeping the audience at bay from the characters. I never found that to be true even though I couldn’t articulate why that was. Somehow Linda’s narration just struck me as true to her character. It just seemed right to me that this is how she would tell her story to someone. I would be asked why I thought that was and usually I was in loss for words and end up answering it with some tame non-argument like “It’s instinctual.” Then one day I remembered an incidence from my childhood in India involving my friend who is also my front-door neighbour, his father committed suicide when we were ten. There was a big scene in front of my house that day and I and my younger brother were asked to stay in because we were young. I sneaked up to the roof out of curiosity and saw my friend’s mother completely hysterical, bawling her eyes out on the street. Then I saw my mom bringing my friend with her to our house. So I ran back down in fear of being caught, getting back just in time. My mom brought him in and he seemed quite normal and not too disturbed by his father’s death. We played for while, and when I just couldn’t hold it back any longer, I said, “So your dad died, huh?” “Yeah”, he replied not too upset, and that was that. Over the months, I didn’t notice any major change in him but he did become denser and more numb, neither very excited by things nor very disappointed by them. Even when I go back now, I can see traces of the unalterable change that his father’s death brought in him. Linda, in Days of Heaven and her tone must have subconsciously reminded me of him.

Then I came across the Sight & Sound interview in which Malick claims:

“Holly's Southernness is essential to taking her right. She isn't indifferent about her father's death… but she wouldn't think of telling you about it. It would not be proper. You should always feel there are large parts of her experience she's not including because she has a strong, if misplaced, sense of propriety. You might well wonder how anyone going through what she does could be at all concerned with proprieties. But she is… People who've suffered go around in movies with long, thoughtful faces, as though everything had caved in just yesterday. It's not that way in real life, though, not always. Suffering can make you shallow and just the opposite of vulnerable, dense.”

He’s right.

The plot of Days of Heaven can really be summarized as an interpretation of the seven verses from Genesis 12 that tell the story of Abraham and Sarah in Egypt:

10 Now there was a famine in the land; so Abram went down to Egypt to sojourn there, for the famine was severe in the land.
11 It came about when he came near to Egypt, that he said to Sarai his wife, "See now, I know that you are a beautiful woman;
12 and when the Egyptians see you, they will say, 'This is his wife'; and they will kill me, but they will let you live.
13 "Please say that you are my sister so that it may go well with me because of you, and that I may live on account of you."
14 It came about when Abram came into Egypt, the Egyptians saw that the woman was very beautiful.
15 Pharaoh's officials saw her and praised her to Pharaoh; and the woman was taken into Pharaoh's house.
16 Therefore he treated Abram well for her sake; and gave him sheep and oxen and donkeys and male and female servants and female donkeys and camels.
17 But the LORD struck Pharaoh and his house with great plagues because of Sarai, Abram's wife.

LINDA (V.O.)
The sun looks ghostly when there's a mist on the river and everything's quiet.

The “ghostly” sun is a key motif that provides insight into Days of Heaven. It appears three times in the film. First, just after Bill suggests to Abby that they should stay on the farm because it may lead to marriage between Abby and the farmer, who is alone and mortally ill. Second, after Bill sneaks Abby out of the farmer’s bedroom and they commit adultery on the river side. And third, after Bill kills the farmer, who had come to kill Bill in a fit of rage. Anyone who has seen any of Malick’s films closely knows that the sun is a recurrent motif in his films which he uses as a visual representation of God. There is in fact an entire monologue in The Thin Red Line addressed to God which starts with a frame of the sun through the leaves. Thus the “ghostly” sun is the motif for the vengeful God of the Old Testament, who watches patiently for the sins of Man to amount to a level where it becomes necessary for Him to “strike down with a great vengeance and furious anger”.

I’ve always had a problem with the Old Testament God. He is vengeful, authoritarian, ruthless and dictatorial; adjectives that I would never associate with God. In fact, the entire Book of Genesis makes little sense to me from that perspective. Let’s start with Adam, God made him in his image, so obviously in Eden, Adam was God himself. Then he metaphorically, bites the apple from the Tree of Knowledge, and thus is kicked out of Eden. Now the question is, did God kick Adam out because he disobeyed God? Or did he kick himself out as a logical conclusion of biting the apple? Book of Genesis would have us believe that it is the former. But let us consider it differently. Because Adam was made in the image of God, he was also omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent supreme consciousness (for those who don’t get that, it’s like when you’re dreaming, you’re everything in your dream; you’re the table and the dog and your high-school teacher. Now think of the world in the same way as God’s, not unconscious, but super-conscious dream in which he is active and inactive, awake and asleep, interventionist and detached; all at the same time) perfectly contained in eternal bliss within himself. Now Adam wanted Knowledge of Dualisms; good and evil, subject and object, light and dark, body and soul; i.e. Adam wanted some action with Eve to discover the creative energy that God utilized to create Adam. God told him, if you do it you die, not as a threat or out of vengeance, but a matter of fact.

See, because Adam was ubiquitous, the entire universe was contained within himself, so to discover the knowledge of dualisms, he would have to become a part of a dualism, that of life and death. Adam chose knowledge over eternal bliss, and thus had to die, not because of an authoritarian God but a merciful one that knew what was to come as a result of Adam’s action and thus warned him against it. As the existence of God would imply the existence of order; so nature (not only physical, but also metaphysical) as a result would act as a closed adiabatic loop of action and reaction, not only in the physical world governed by the laws of conservation, but also as that of karma. For God to be active and inactive simultaneously, the attachment to the cause and effect of His action would have to be eliminated. That logically refutes a vengeful God because vengeance would imply attachment to the action, which would then eradicate the eternal bliss. Thus, God couldn’t logically be vengeful, because otherwise he won’t be God any longer. I see more of psychological and sociological reasons behind the re-construction of the vengeful aspect of God in the Old Testament, but I’d rather not delve into that since I’m not entirely sure of the alterations that may or may not have occurred in the book over the millennia.

The most irritating (and frequent) error I came across reading some of the reviews of Days of Heaven was the constant labeling of it as minimalist. If it were the usual and recurrent misuse of words like “minimalist” or “existentialist”, I would simply ignore it, but in this case it annoyed me because the tag couldn’t be further from the fact. If anything, the film is the complete opposite, it’s holistic. Where minimalism is the process of breaking down into only the essential “parts”, holism is the process of building up the “parts” to show that their sum does not amount to the “whole”. Instead, there are ontological forces at work that guide the system to resolve the way the “parts” behave. See, a film like Elephant is minimalist, because it elucidates its “whole” (high-school shootings) through its “parts” (by following various students). The idea behind it is to focus the audience attentions away from the negative spaces and solely on the essential elements. Malick functions in the completely opposite manner, by assembling the “parts” the way a minimalist filmmaker would interpret the verses from Genesis 12, but then suggesting the presence of metaphysical beings (God, devil, nature etc.) as being the forces that actually govern the functions of the “whole”. In other words, he naturalizes mythology without rejecting the metaphysical elements that form its identity. The first thing Linda talks about when reaching the farm are the apocalyptic visions of the revelation:

This passage works almost as a warning of the predestination that the three bring with them to the farm. That even though they were going to enjoy their days of heaven, they wouldn’t last too long and end badly because their foundation would be on sin. This is the perfect example for what I mean when I say that Malick naturalizes mythology without being overbearing or ego-centric. He shares his art without preaching it. A secular humanist can see the climax at the farm and see it as simple progression of events that logically follow each other without anything supernatural about them; and a theist could see an apocalyptic event with the plague sent to destroy the greedy farmer’s wealth, and his death and that of Bill that follows as their retribution. Malick’s reason behind naturalizing the events of plague and hellfire are also to nullify the idea of the vengeful Old Testament God. He tells the simple stories of a farmer that accumulates wealth through misery of the laborers he exploits and how nature catches up to him by plaguing his fields ready for harvest leading him into a fit of murderous rage; of a laborer who forces his lover to marry the farmer so that they can acquire his wealth when he dies and then commits adultery when she marries him, leading him ultimately to murdering the farmer; and that of the lover who commits adultery. Even if the apocalyptic climax to this love triangle could be considered an act of interventionist God, He didn’t act outside the bounds of Nature, did He? All the retributions seem fair and follow the law of action-reaction. They all got what was coming to them, other than Abby, who doesn’t seem to have got her due. An explanation of this comes from Linda:

She escapes the punishment for her sin through penance. So if anything, Malick paints a merciful God rather than a vengeful one. There is a beautiful poem about God in the middle of Thin Red Line, the same that starts with a shot of the sun through the leaves, which exfoliates Malick’s idea of God also in Days of Heaven:

Malick has a similar holistic approach when it comes to war. Where a minimalist would see war as being simply a sequence of causes and effects, Malick sees larger forces working in the background. In Linda’s narration regarding the big and the small clowns (the bourgeois and the proletariat), she continues:

The same war, if it were to be fought in the times of Old Testament, would’ve been mythologized with its share of ruthless tyrants, mad hordes and other mytho-elements. Vengeful God would’ve been on the side of the good and virtuous, presumably the winner, and would have prevailed over the evil. The point is that reality is perception. The faith in God in the ancient times was so strong, especially in those who wrote the books, that all that was natural was mythologized. And by having a young impressionable girl as his narrator, Malick takes something that may appear to be naturalistic and mythologizes it. But instead of ramming down his way of looking at it, he leaves enough room for each member of the audience to interpret it the way they please. Where a secular atheist can read the ontological elements as workings of a young girl’s mind, a theist would see the glory of order and beauty in the tragedy; the splendor of cycles of construction and destruction, order and chaos, heaven and hell as manifestation of sacrifice and sin. There is a passage of dialogue in The Thin Red Line that has always stuck with me:

I thought this would be a good time to review Days of Heaven; because one, I have never reviewed anything before and it’s about time, and two, because it’s coming out in September as part of the Criterion Collection. The reason I think Days of Heaven is a great film is because even though it focuses on the darker angels of human nature, the ugliness comes of as just very sloppy and human. Malick is the true humanist, because he doesn’t judge his characters on basis of their sins, but he believes in cosmic order that prevails in the universe and so shows them each meet their consequence based on their actions. Days of Heaven ends on a relatively positive note:

Despite of all the flaws in humanity, Malick hopes things would work out for us, and like a good friend he would be along for the ride observing, but not judging. He is truly the Saint of Cinema.