Tits and Gore

In Days of Heaven, writer and director Terrence Malick uses an essentially simple story to show viewers exactly how tied to the earth we are. Beautiful, captivating studies of the landscape are punctuated with shots of the farmer’s obnoxious and towering, vibrant and gaudy Victorian-style house. Malick really got this one right. This is what plantation houses feel like: huge monstrosities rising up from parts of the earth so flat you could believe we’re not living on a sphere at all, surrounded by swaths of farmland, cut off from anything that could be considered a community. Community, certainty, accomplishments, friendship, love, life, and even heaven are all fleeting. At some point, no matter how high we fly, how close we get to heaven, we all must return to the ground.

The idea of heaven in the film is really interesting. At one point, when Abby has accepted the idea of making a life—fake or not—with the farmer, she explains to young Linda why she’s doing this. She talks about how hard her life has been in the past, and as the two of them sit indoors for the first time since they’ve been on the farm, relaxing and enjoying the easiness that life can sometimes offer, Abby says, “This is not so bad.” This is a little piece of heaven. A taste. A view. But our protagonists are tied to the earth.

There are many ways that Malick gets this concept across in Days of Heaven. Perhaps one of the most effective ways is his use of animals—birds and dogs in particular. There are birds and dogs everywhere in the film. The migrant workers seem to identify with the birds. Everyone wants to fly, to be closer to heaven. They are usually not successful. Even as the workers come to the farm, leaving the last chapter of their lives in the past, they “fly” in on the tops of the the train cars. The camera’s suggestion of this “flight” is reinforced by the perky music of the soundtrack, which is so different from the eerie music and ambient sounds that had made up the soundtrack before that point in the film.

The circus performers fly in more literally, in their man-made attempts to become like birds—airplanes. This is when I really started to notice the divide between those who long to fly, and those who are content to hunt and live always tied to the earth. Those who manage the earth try to hunt and tie down those who work the earth. Bill, Linda, and Abby are immediately enamored of the flying circus, while the farmer takes a bit longer to see their appeal, because the farmer doesn’t see the point of flying away.

The workers repeatedly identify with birds throughout the film, but the scenes with the hunting dogs are a successful counterpoint to the workers’ need for flight. There are many scenes of Bill and the farmer involved in the various stages of hunting, including an especially striking scene where the farmer holds the dogs off the birds they are hunting. Bill always seems uncomfortable hunting, and at one point, the farmer brings this up. Bill stops dressing his bird, stands, and confesses that he just can’t do this anymore. The farmer doesn’t seem to understand: this is simply a part of life. But Bill is a bird, not a dog. Even in the climactic scene where the farmer/hunter/dog comes after Bill who is working on his bike, Bill kills the farmer, but Bill was the one being hunted. He never initiates fights or confrontations; and when presented with the fight or fly scenario, he may fight, but afterward he always flies. And as I mentioned before, birds and those who want to fly must always return to the earth, and that’s where Bill ends up at the end of the film—dead, returned to the earth.

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