Days of Heaven

15/09/2025

Film    Download PDF  

Benign Despondencies

Days of Heaven is like a James M Cain adaptation tempered with the still stronger echo of Henry James’s Wings of the Dove. The film focuses on a love triangle as a couple (Bill and Abby) who claim to everyone that they are brother and sister head Southwest to Texas from Chicago. They are accompanied by Bill’s sibling, Linda, and start working as seasonal wheat pickers. The love triangle comes when the owner of the land, (Sam Shepard) takes a liking to Abby (Brooke Adams), and why shouldn’t he, since he assumes Abby and Bill (Richard Gere) are close relations? A more plotted work might show Bill and Abby’s decision to pretend to be brother and sister as part of a ruse, all the better to become the owners of the property. But instead, the film relies on contingency rather than deliberation, as Bill steals some medicine from a doctor’s van and overhears the doctor and the Farmer talking. The doctor tells the Farmer he has about a year to live. Bill is aware the Farmer likes Abby, and so she lets the Farmer court her, and soon enough, they marry.
If the story resists the bald motives of A Postman Always Rings Twice, and shares something of the nuance to be found in James’s novel, it rests on the difference between murderous impatience and patient happenstance. As in James’ novel, people with few means don’t want to kill their way to a fortune; they simply want to benefit from the death of another, as in James’s novel a couple keep from an heiress (who is in love with the man) that they are due to marry so that the couple can become comfortable after Milly’s death. In Days of Heaven or Wings of the Dove, this doesn’t make the characters good, but it does stop them from being vulgar, as if causality is a crude thing and fortuity more nuanced. There may be some truth to this, and director Terrence Malick adds to it by a digressive style that insists the milieu in which he places the characters is at least as important as the story he tells. As cinematographer Nestor Almendros noted, Malick is ‘‘very much oriented to photography, more than any other director I’ve met[...]he knows about light and mood. He knows that a light can almost be like an actor; that it will give a scene a feeling that is as strong as a good actor.’’ (Masters of Light)
For some, this is style over substance, a daft opposition but one proposed by Stanley Kauffmann when reviewing the film on its release. He reckoned Malick ‘‘swamped the film in pretty pictures,’’ adding, that the ‘‘film fails to grow.’’ (Before My Eyes) Yet these pretty pictures are partly what allows the film to grow on terms that we can call poetic, keeping in mind a French director Almendros often worked with. Paraphrasing Orson Welles and expanding upon the claim, Eric Rohmer reckoned, ‘‘Cinema is poetry. Given that cinema is poetry in the realm of forms (and sounds), it widens out perception: it makes us see (and hear).’’ Rohmer adds, ‘‘The cinema, even in its works of fiction, is an instrument of discovery. Because it is poetry, it reveals, and because it reveals, it is poetry.’’ (Realism and the Cinema)
This notion of revelation is quite distinct from narrative disclosure, and it is as though Malick wanted a ‘weaker’ story all the better to produce stronger images. The film’s plot is a secondary feature to the environment in which it takes place, and of course comes not only out of the situation and circumstances (that is so in The Postman Always Rings Twice as well), but also from the dispositions of the characters. Bill is hot-headed rather than violent, and the moments of aggression in the film don’t come from his deliberations, but from his inability to stay calm. The first occasion leads Bill and the others to head off to Texas after he floors the supervisor who confronts him at a steelworks; the second occurs when someone questions whether Abby is his sister, and he throws his dinner at the man, who in turn throws his dinner at Bill as they get into a fight. In the first, he loses his job; in the second, he loses his lunch. In the third, the Farmer loses his life as Bill stabs him with a screwdriver after the Farmer pulls out a gun and refuses to believe Bill and Abby are brother and sister. All three acts are self-destructive rather than self-aggrandising, while of course many a plotted aggressive act (like the murder of the husband in The Postman Always Rings Twice; in Double Indemnity, in Body Heat) are motivationally clear and the aggrandising unequivocal. Malick so undermines motive that when Bill attacks the foreman, we cannot hear the discussion because of the sounds of the steelwork factory. Malick proposes that what matters is Bill’s immediate frustration in being caught in his given milieu, and this might be one way of understanding the purpose of Days of Heaven. It wants to comprehend mood rather than motive, dispositional desires over plotted mechanics. It is important Bill stabs the Farmer with a screwdriver: an object he was using to fix a motorbike when the Farmer faces him with a gun. Even after the deed, Bill wishes to try to save The Farmer’s life by suggesting he pull the screwdriver out. Bill may theoretically want The Farmer out of the way so he can have Abby back and enjoy the good life. But Malick proposes this is more hope than intention, no matter Bill’s plan – one that didn’t include The Farmer living longer than expected, and Abby falling for this sensitive and besotted fellow.
Malick’s interest in a lateral rather than concentrated approach to the noirish triangle is reflected, too, in using Linda Manz’s voiceover. This is a fourteen-year-old’s view of the world, and if James was famous for his unreliable narration in works like What Maisie Knew, Malick has always been drawn to naive yet wondrous narrative voice-overs. Manz’s here is the antithesis of the hard-boiled, ironic or hindsight-ridden noir narrators in Double Indemnity, Laura, or The Lady from Shanghai. When Linda says, "You’re only on the earth once. And I – to my opinion, as long as you’re around, you should have it nice,’’ this is someone moving between the most metaphysical of musings and the most simplistic of claims. Yet Malick surely expects us to take them straight; that these are Linda’s thoughts just as Sissy Spacek’s are hers in Badlands, and the various soldiers in The Thin Red Line, and they all have things to say that are somewhere between the banal and the profound, as they find themselves in a life-threatening situation. What Malick’s voiceovers never do is move the story forward; they reflect inner feeling over projective narrative.
Kauffmann claims Malick so little knows what he is doing or what he wants that ‘the story soon becomes background for the scenery’, as he reckons, ‘‘it gets ludicrous. A man drops a wineglass in a stream, so we see the glass underwater. Seeds are planted, so we see one those science film-hurry-up shots in which seeds sprout.’’ (Before My Eyes) But this is the sort of criticism that could be directed at any number of directors working in a hieratic or poetic way, and would rule out Tarkovsky or Paradjanov, as well as early Bruno Dumont, and some of Majid Majidi’s work. This isn’t to suggest this will produce automatically fascinating work (Dumont’s can be spiritually exhausting; Majidi’s merely icky). But Kauffmann proposes that Days of Heaven is a failure, instead of a different type of success. If we have made so much of the noir angle, it rests partly on Malick deviating from a wonderful genre’s set of presuppositions, and combining them with a type of cinema that is antithetical to the calculative drive of noir. When Vlada Petric reckons ‘’Malick belongs with those directors who resist the dominance of the narrative in film by developing events which are linked associatively instead of dramatically’’ (Film Quarterly), we are inclined to agree, or at least agree much more wholeheartedly than with Kauffmann’s remarks. Petric quotes numerous well-known and well-regarded critics denouncing Malick’s film, including David Thomson, Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael – who called it an ‘‘overwrought artifact.’’ But perhaps they were reacting to the film’s potentially disjunctive elements: a Tarkosvkian interest in metaphysical beauty with a noirish fascination for triangular emotional conundrums. There may have been more recent films that have combined these elements with even greater despair, including The Banishment, Three Monkeys and Damnation, but Days of Heaven refuses the visual despondency these three works entertain, and insists on seeing beauty no matter the narrational misery the film encapsulates.
It will surely be this disjunction that made critics so aware of the images, and not only that they are indeed very nice to look at. Yet this is often where style can become a commentary on the film itself, a self-conscious if not quite a self-reflexive aspect of the form. The philosopher Stanley Cavell notes that ‘‘I assume anyone who has taken an interest in the film wishes to understand what its extremities of beauty are in the service of.’’ Cavell adds, ‘‘I think the film does indeed contain a metaphysical vision of the world, but I think one feels that one has never quite seen the scene of human existence –call it the arena between earth (or days) and heaven – quite realised this way on film before.’’ (The World Viewed). Cavell has a lot more to say on the film than that, but what we might wish to extract from his argument is a further claim that in film an ‘‘object’s presence refers to their absence." This is both often diegetically pertinent and, in films based on celluloid, a technological fact. Cinema takes objects and puts them on the screen. They are there in front of our eyes as they are then usually absent as they once were. Movie locations might be a growth area of the tourist industry, but often what one will see when visiting a place won’t be anything the film has put there. It was there and the film happened to capture or use the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building or the Houses of Parliament. Occasionally, this can be haunting when we think of all the 70s, 80s and 90s films with the Twin Towers that are now no longer present. But film is usually an amalgamated mise en scene, a mixture of the world and the imagination, of the fact of location and the fiction of the story it tells, and this might be central to its uncanny affect as everything seems vividly present and nostalgically absent at the same time. It may be anecdotal to state that Days of Heaven, while set in the Texas panhandle, was filmed in Alberta, with the help of the Canadian agriculture department. And it is no less so to note that designer Jack ‘‘Fisk built not just the façade but the inside of the house and learned an important lesson that he carried on to all of his future films: the more complete the set, the more freedom the directors and actors have to do their best work.’’ (Indiewire)
However, these anecdotes illustrate well the absence and presence of cinema. People going to Texas to see the places in Days of Heaven will find nothing, and least of all a house that was put up thousands of miles away from Texas and would have been taken down afterwards. Perhaps cinema’s uncanny relationship with reality rests not only or even chiefly on its capturing of spaces and places, people and things, but also on their impending absence as things in the world. An argument could be made that digital cinema increasingly loses that relationship. Fisk says one reason why he likes to build complete sets is “it’s something I’ve always liked to do just because I like to build.’’ (AP) Many of the things he built for Terrence Malick, David Lynch, and Paul Thomas Anderson films were at least there, capable of exhibition, while most of the special effects work in digital cinema was never there in the first place.
This takes care of the technological, but what about the diegetic pertinence? Malick’s work is often in thrall to objects on screen, to the details that don’t further the story but stall it. This might be items of furniture, animals, photographs, or that wine glass under water that so irritates Kaufmann. In making most objects active or irrelevant, film obviates the problem of absence and presence because they so clearly serve a narrative function or disappear into background functionality. When a film shows us an establishing shot of a beautiful house or light streaming through the windows of a country house with gorgeous rugs, paintings and furniture, this might seem to be giving more than functional purpose to mise-en-scene. But only in the general sense of luxury observed. And of course objects often come into their own: guns, knives, horses, hats, and so on, as the viewer might wonder if that left hat is a clue to the whereabouts of a villain, or if the character terrorised by a hitchhiker realises there is gun we know about in the glove compartment. Objects are given narrative point all the time, but that isn’t the same as recognising their object status. Sometimes a film uses things symbolically: a broken mirror shown after lovers fight and break up, a smouldering fireplace we see after the film cuts away from lovers kissing, an empty rocking chair after a grandmother has passed away. These symbolic moments will be obvious or subtle, but viewers are in little doubt what they stand in for. We could say the former are examples of forwarding narrative; the latter represents cinematic style. Up to a point that is so, but Malick’s relationship with objects doesn’t seem quite to do one or the other, as if he is seeking an awareness that subjects and objects are all capable of transformation because they don’t have a purpose but possess a ‘thereness.’
This might sound a little abstract, but this is perhaps partly what Cavell (once Malick’s philosophy teacher at Harvard) means when he talks about the extremities of beauty that the film is in the service of as he goes on to quote passages from Heidegger, including ‘‘the first service man can render is to give thought to the Being of beings...the word [being] says: presence of what is present.’’ (The World Viewed) Such a remark may seem to add nothing to our attempt at concreteness, but Malick did translate Heidegger’s The Essence Of Reason, and his work seems to be an escape from viewing things as hierarchically given; instead seeing them as pluralistically present. This might seem contrary to elements of Heidegger’s thinking (that gives a privileged status to the human). Yet there is in the philosopher’s work a consistent concern with nature and a resistance to its functional purpose, and Malick’s oeuvre can seem to coincide with some of its claims. But what interests us is to see Malick’s style as something more than slickness or emptiness, to view in it a determination to give images a freedom that the narrational and symbolic deny. It isn’t so much that his work is flaccid as some commentators will insist. It is that the image is manifold, where frequently in film the image is contained by the parameters of meaning we have just proposed.
Malick isn’t impervious to these meanings, and some will no doubt see the glass in the water as symbolic as the smouldering fireplace, with Petric reckoning the fish circling the glass is an ‘‘ironic underscoring of their fragile illusions about happiness,’’ and sees too water as one of the motifs passing through the film. But while Petric views Days of Heaven as much more than its narrative components, he potentially still falls into formalist analysis, as he speaks about the number of shots and their rhythm, which doesn’t quite capture the singularity of Malick’s project. Gilberto Perez comes closer when saying ‘‘the plague of locusts that descends upon the farm at the film's climax is not to be taken, it seems to me, as some kind of objective correlative for the characters' feelings, but as a brute force of nature incomparable with the personal drama.’’ (The Hudson Review) Perez also speaks about a perspectival irony evident when the Farmer sees, at a distance, Bill and Abby showing affection to each other and reads in this their devotion, when it is closer to the opposite. It is a parting moment with Abby, having chosen the Farmer over Bill. As Perez says, the farmer's reaction is a misapprehension that has nothing to do with a flaw in his character, and most would have viewed events similarly, as he is limited to his own perspective on the world. Another filmmaker might have seen in this a moment of irony, and Rohmer has scenes in his work that bring it out very well as characters misread events. (Pauline a la plage , for example). But Rohmer still wishes narrative event to triumph over manifold being – the presence of what is present, the Being of beings isn’t the French director’s project.
What Malick appears to have done is plop a love triangle into a geometry that seeks something that has far more sides than we can comprehend. It is partly why the knowing narrator of noir is replaced by the ostensibly naive who can sense far more than she can understand. It gives to Malick’s film a comprehensive incomprehensibility, as the story can seem small next to the world Malick invokes. However, this shouldn’t be an attack on the story’s limitations; more a reason to praise how much beyond it the director incorporates into the telling.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Days of Heaven

Benign Despondencies

Days of Heaven is like a James M Cain adaptation tempered with the still stronger echo of Henry James’s Wings of the Dove. The film focuses on a love triangle as a couple (Bill and Abby) who claim to everyone that they are brother and sister head Southwest to Texas from Chicago. They are accompanied by Bill’s sibling, Linda, and start working as seasonal wheat pickers. The love triangle comes when the owner of the land, (Sam Shepard) takes a liking to Abby (Brooke Adams), and why shouldn’t he, since he assumes Abby and Bill (Richard Gere) are close relations? A more plotted work might show Bill and Abby’s decision to pretend to be brother and sister as part of a ruse, all the better to become the owners of the property. But instead, the film relies on contingency rather than deliberation, as Bill steals some medicine from a doctor’s van and overhears the doctor and the Farmer talking. The doctor tells the Farmer he has about a year to live. Bill is aware the Farmer likes Abby, and so she lets the Farmer court her, and soon enough, they marry.
If the story resists the bald motives of A Postman Always Rings Twice, and shares something of the nuance to be found in James’s novel, it rests on the difference between murderous impatience and patient happenstance. As in James’ novel, people with few means don’t want to kill their way to a fortune; they simply want to benefit from the death of another, as in James’s novel a couple keep from an heiress (who is in love with the man) that they are due to marry so that the couple can become comfortable after Milly’s death. In Days of Heaven or Wings of the Dove, this doesn’t make the characters good, but it does stop them from being vulgar, as if causality is a crude thing and fortuity more nuanced. There may be some truth to this, and director Terrence Malick adds to it by a digressive style that insists the milieu in which he places the characters is at least as important as the story he tells. As cinematographer Nestor Almendros noted, Malick is ‘‘very much oriented to photography, more than any other director I’ve met[...]he knows about light and mood. He knows that a light can almost be like an actor; that it will give a scene a feeling that is as strong as a good actor.’’ (Masters of Light)
For some, this is style over substance, a daft opposition but one proposed by Stanley Kauffmann when reviewing the film on its release. He reckoned Malick ‘‘swamped the film in pretty pictures,’’ adding, that the ‘‘film fails to grow.’’ (Before My Eyes) Yet these pretty pictures are partly what allows the film to grow on terms that we can call poetic, keeping in mind a French director Almendros often worked with. Paraphrasing Orson Welles and expanding upon the claim, Eric Rohmer reckoned, ‘‘Cinema is poetry. Given that cinema is poetry in the realm of forms (and sounds), it widens out perception: it makes us see (and hear).’’ Rohmer adds, ‘‘The cinema, even in its works of fiction, is an instrument of discovery. Because it is poetry, it reveals, and because it reveals, it is poetry.’’ (Realism and the Cinema)
This notion of revelation is quite distinct from narrative disclosure, and it is as though Malick wanted a ‘weaker’ story all the better to produce stronger images. The film’s plot is a secondary feature to the environment in which it takes place, and of course comes not only out of the situation and circumstances (that is so in The Postman Always Rings Twice as well), but also from the dispositions of the characters. Bill is hot-headed rather than violent, and the moments of aggression in the film don’t come from his deliberations, but from his inability to stay calm. The first occasion leads Bill and the others to head off to Texas after he floors the supervisor who confronts him at a steelworks; the second occurs when someone questions whether Abby is his sister, and he throws his dinner at the man, who in turn throws his dinner at Bill as they get into a fight. In the first, he loses his job; in the second, he loses his lunch. In the third, the Farmer loses his life as Bill stabs him with a screwdriver after the Farmer pulls out a gun and refuses to believe Bill and Abby are brother and sister. All three acts are self-destructive rather than self-aggrandising, while of course many a plotted aggressive act (like the murder of the husband in The Postman Always Rings Twice; in Double Indemnity, in Body Heat) are motivationally clear and the aggrandising unequivocal. Malick so undermines motive that when Bill attacks the foreman, we cannot hear the discussion because of the sounds of the steelwork factory. Malick proposes that what matters is Bill’s immediate frustration in being caught in his given milieu, and this might be one way of understanding the purpose of Days of Heaven. It wants to comprehend mood rather than motive, dispositional desires over plotted mechanics. It is important Bill stabs the Farmer with a screwdriver: an object he was using to fix a motorbike when the Farmer faces him with a gun. Even after the deed, Bill wishes to try to save The Farmer’s life by suggesting he pull the screwdriver out. Bill may theoretically want The Farmer out of the way so he can have Abby back and enjoy the good life. But Malick proposes this is more hope than intention, no matter Bill’s plan – one that didn’t include The Farmer living longer than expected, and Abby falling for this sensitive and besotted fellow.
Malick’s interest in a lateral rather than concentrated approach to the noirish triangle is reflected, too, in using Linda Manz’s voiceover. This is a fourteen-year-old’s view of the world, and if James was famous for his unreliable narration in works like What Maisie Knew, Malick has always been drawn to naive yet wondrous narrative voice-overs. Manz’s here is the antithesis of the hard-boiled, ironic or hindsight-ridden noir narrators in Double Indemnity, Laura, or The Lady from Shanghai. When Linda says, "You’re only on the earth once. And I – to my opinion, as long as you’re around, you should have it nice,’’ this is someone moving between the most metaphysical of musings and the most simplistic of claims. Yet Malick surely expects us to take them straight; that these are Linda’s thoughts just as Sissy Spacek’s are hers in Badlands, and the various soldiers in The Thin Red Line, and they all have things to say that are somewhere between the banal and the profound, as they find themselves in a life-threatening situation. What Malick’s voiceovers never do is move the story forward; they reflect inner feeling over projective narrative.
Kauffmann claims Malick so little knows what he is doing or what he wants that ‘the story soon becomes background for the scenery’, as he reckons, ‘‘it gets ludicrous. A man drops a wineglass in a stream, so we see the glass underwater. Seeds are planted, so we see one those science film-hurry-up shots in which seeds sprout.’’ (Before My Eyes) But this is the sort of criticism that could be directed at any number of directors working in a hieratic or poetic way, and would rule out Tarkovsky or Paradjanov, as well as early Bruno Dumont, and some of Majid Majidi’s work. This isn’t to suggest this will produce automatically fascinating work (Dumont’s can be spiritually exhausting; Majidi’s merely icky). But Kauffmann proposes that Days of Heaven is a failure, instead of a different type of success. If we have made so much of the noir angle, it rests partly on Malick deviating from a wonderful genre’s set of presuppositions, and combining them with a type of cinema that is antithetical to the calculative drive of noir. When Vlada Petric reckons ‘’Malick belongs with those directors who resist the dominance of the narrative in film by developing events which are linked associatively instead of dramatically’’ (Film Quarterly), we are inclined to agree, or at least agree much more wholeheartedly than with Kauffmann’s remarks. Petric quotes numerous well-known and well-regarded critics denouncing Malick’s film, including David Thomson, Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael – who called it an ‘‘overwrought artifact.’’ But perhaps they were reacting to the film’s potentially disjunctive elements: a Tarkosvkian interest in metaphysical beauty with a noirish fascination for triangular emotional conundrums. There may have been more recent films that have combined these elements with even greater despair, including The Banishment, Three Monkeys and Damnation, but Days of Heaven refuses the visual despondency these three works entertain, and insists on seeing beauty no matter the narrational misery the film encapsulates.
It will surely be this disjunction that made critics so aware of the images, and not only that they are indeed very nice to look at. Yet this is often where style can become a commentary on the film itself, a self-conscious if not quite a self-reflexive aspect of the form. The philosopher Stanley Cavell notes that ‘‘I assume anyone who has taken an interest in the film wishes to understand what its extremities of beauty are in the service of.’’ Cavell adds, ‘‘I think the film does indeed contain a metaphysical vision of the world, but I think one feels that one has never quite seen the scene of human existence –call it the arena between earth (or days) and heaven – quite realised this way on film before.’’ (The World Viewed). Cavell has a lot more to say on the film than that, but what we might wish to extract from his argument is a further claim that in film an ‘‘object’s presence refers to their absence." This is both often diegetically pertinent and, in films based on celluloid, a technological fact. Cinema takes objects and puts them on the screen. They are there in front of our eyes as they are then usually absent as they once were. Movie locations might be a growth area of the tourist industry, but often what one will see when visiting a place won’t be anything the film has put there. It was there and the film happened to capture or use the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building or the Houses of Parliament. Occasionally, this can be haunting when we think of all the 70s, 80s and 90s films with the Twin Towers that are now no longer present. But film is usually an amalgamated mise en scene, a mixture of the world and the imagination, of the fact of location and the fiction of the story it tells, and this might be central to its uncanny affect as everything seems vividly present and nostalgically absent at the same time. It may be anecdotal to state that Days of Heaven, while set in the Texas panhandle, was filmed in Alberta, with the help of the Canadian agriculture department. And it is no less so to note that designer Jack ‘‘Fisk built not just the façade but the inside of the house and learned an important lesson that he carried on to all of his future films: the more complete the set, the more freedom the directors and actors have to do their best work.’’ (Indiewire)
However, these anecdotes illustrate well the absence and presence of cinema. People going to Texas to see the places in Days of Heaven will find nothing, and least of all a house that was put up thousands of miles away from Texas and would have been taken down afterwards. Perhaps cinema’s uncanny relationship with reality rests not only or even chiefly on its capturing of spaces and places, people and things, but also on their impending absence as things in the world. An argument could be made that digital cinema increasingly loses that relationship. Fisk says one reason why he likes to build complete sets is “it’s something I’ve always liked to do just because I like to build.’’ (AP) Many of the things he built for Terrence Malick, David Lynch, and Paul Thomas Anderson films were at least there, capable of exhibition, while most of the special effects work in digital cinema was never there in the first place.
This takes care of the technological, but what about the diegetic pertinence? Malick’s work is often in thrall to objects on screen, to the details that don’t further the story but stall it. This might be items of furniture, animals, photographs, or that wine glass under water that so irritates Kaufmann. In making most objects active or irrelevant, film obviates the problem of absence and presence because they so clearly serve a narrative function or disappear into background functionality. When a film shows us an establishing shot of a beautiful house or light streaming through the windows of a country house with gorgeous rugs, paintings and furniture, this might seem to be giving more than functional purpose to mise-en-scene. But only in the general sense of luxury observed. And of course objects often come into their own: guns, knives, horses, hats, and so on, as the viewer might wonder if that left hat is a clue to the whereabouts of a villain, or if the character terrorised by a hitchhiker realises there is gun we know about in the glove compartment. Objects are given narrative point all the time, but that isn’t the same as recognising their object status. Sometimes a film uses things symbolically: a broken mirror shown after lovers fight and break up, a smouldering fireplace we see after the film cuts away from lovers kissing, an empty rocking chair after a grandmother has passed away. These symbolic moments will be obvious or subtle, but viewers are in little doubt what they stand in for. We could say the former are examples of forwarding narrative; the latter represents cinematic style. Up to a point that is so, but Malick’s relationship with objects doesn’t seem quite to do one or the other, as if he is seeking an awareness that subjects and objects are all capable of transformation because they don’t have a purpose but possess a ‘thereness.’
This might sound a little abstract, but this is perhaps partly what Cavell (once Malick’s philosophy teacher at Harvard) means when he talks about the extremities of beauty that the film is in the service of as he goes on to quote passages from Heidegger, including ‘‘the first service man can render is to give thought to the Being of beings...the word [being] says: presence of what is present.’’ (The World Viewed) Such a remark may seem to add nothing to our attempt at concreteness, but Malick did translate Heidegger’s The Essence Of Reason, and his work seems to be an escape from viewing things as hierarchically given; instead seeing them as pluralistically present. This might seem contrary to elements of Heidegger’s thinking (that gives a privileged status to the human). Yet there is in the philosopher’s work a consistent concern with nature and a resistance to its functional purpose, and Malick’s oeuvre can seem to coincide with some of its claims. But what interests us is to see Malick’s style as something more than slickness or emptiness, to view in it a determination to give images a freedom that the narrational and symbolic deny. It isn’t so much that his work is flaccid as some commentators will insist. It is that the image is manifold, where frequently in film the image is contained by the parameters of meaning we have just proposed.
Malick isn’t impervious to these meanings, and some will no doubt see the glass in the water as symbolic as the smouldering fireplace, with Petric reckoning the fish circling the glass is an ‘‘ironic underscoring of their fragile illusions about happiness,’’ and sees too water as one of the motifs passing through the film. But while Petric views Days of Heaven as much more than its narrative components, he potentially still falls into formalist analysis, as he speaks about the number of shots and their rhythm, which doesn’t quite capture the singularity of Malick’s project. Gilberto Perez comes closer when saying ‘‘the plague of locusts that descends upon the farm at the film's climax is not to be taken, it seems to me, as some kind of objective correlative for the characters' feelings, but as a brute force of nature incomparable with the personal drama.’’ (The Hudson Review) Perez also speaks about a perspectival irony evident when the Farmer sees, at a distance, Bill and Abby showing affection to each other and reads in this their devotion, when it is closer to the opposite. It is a parting moment with Abby, having chosen the Farmer over Bill. As Perez says, the farmer's reaction is a misapprehension that has nothing to do with a flaw in his character, and most would have viewed events similarly, as he is limited to his own perspective on the world. Another filmmaker might have seen in this a moment of irony, and Rohmer has scenes in his work that bring it out very well as characters misread events. (Pauline a la plage , for example). But Rohmer still wishes narrative event to triumph over manifold being – the presence of what is present, the Being of beings isn’t the French director’s project.
What Malick appears to have done is plop a love triangle into a geometry that seeks something that has far more sides than we can comprehend. It is partly why the knowing narrator of noir is replaced by the ostensibly naive who can sense far more than she can understand. It gives to Malick’s film a comprehensive incomprehensibility, as the story can seem small next to the world Malick invokes. However, this shouldn’t be an attack on the story’s limitations; more a reason to praise how much beyond it the director incorporates into the telling.

© Tony McKibbin