Days of Heaven

At the beginning of the script for Days of Heaven, Terrence Malick transcribes two excerpts from Hamlin Garland's novel Boy Life on the Prairie (1899): «Hordes of nomads swept through the region at harvest time like a plague of locusts, reckless young men, handsome, profane, licentious, given to drink, powerful but fickle workers, quarrelsome and difficult to manage at all times (...) and who insisted on their freedom to come and go. (...) They spoke of the city, and of sinister and poisonous jungles that all the cities in their stories resembled. They bore scars from battles. They came from the distant and unknown and passed northward, mysterious as fleeing locusts, leaving the people of Sun Prairie as ignorant of their real names and characters as on the first day of their arrival.»

The theme was set: revisiting facts and myths from early 20th-century America, the film is about humans wandering the world, never about things with a beginning, middle, and end. It is this human condition that, less through the dialogue between characters and more through the exuberance or delicacy of the images, unfolds without ever fully revealing itself — a train crossing the sky, the terrifying gaze of animals fleeing the machinery of the harvest, the wheat seed that germinates, the shivering surface of the lake swept by the wind, the unreal light of twilight, the powerful apparatus of steam engines, fire, all of which speak of the human tragedy that unfolds. The characters dissolve into the poetics of the landscape; occasionally, a child's voice, Linda, verbalises what no one has yet told us: «We wandered the streets. There were people suffering, in pain and hungry. Some people had their tongues hanging out... We walked back and forth, looking and searching for things, living adventures.» It was Chicago, America, the hard work in the furnaces of the steel mills, the arrogance of the foremen, the misery of the workers. Then came the great exodus to the plains.

The Great Plains are part of the mythical geography of the race to the West, to freedom, to the frontier, in search of new worlds and riches hidden in the vastness of the prairies, territories long occupied by native tribes who jealously defended their domains. These were times of violence and extermination, of constant struggles for land, for the uncertainties of a volatile and arid climate, for the harshness of work, for disputes between pioneers, settlers and Indians, where the law of the strongest prevailed in a cacophony of cultures, as many as the origins of people coming from all over Europe, with their beliefs and worldviews. In this great turmoil, where only a few managed to succeed, the plains imposed themselves as the common ground that everyone, in some way, had to face. It was no longer the wilderness understood as virgin nature, as a promised land, untouched by humans and their actions and ideas. In Days of Heaven, nature exists as something transcendental, both physical and supernatural, that which situates us in the world and where a moral order is inscribed, the possibility of rebirth and restoring the harmony of the cosmos, or chaos, but also the contradictory clash with the power of machines and human greed.

From such a powerful confrontation springs an intense geopoetics, far beyond the contemplation of large spaces. On the contrary: the elements of this physical and metaphysical alchemy — earth, air, water, fire, bison, horses, wind, birds and insects, and all the myriad animals of the prairie — take on the leading role in a powerful and tragic poetics. Humans could not even exist outside of what simultaneously organises the materiality of life, but also, and above all, emotions, wonder, the unknown, luck. It is therefore no surprise that the dominant aesthetic confronts us with sublime and threatening landscapes, places of biblical cataclysms, beauty and violence. The extreme climate of the Plain, the intense cold of winter and the heatwave of summer, the sudden and violent storms, the dry continental wind, rarely softened into an occasional breeze that brought mildness and freshness to the treetops.

Extreme is also the social landscape unjustly divided between large landowners and those who had nothing but their arms for seasonal work in the wheat fields.

The biblical texts — referred to, immediately, in the film's title — underline the breadth of what the film aims to convey. According to Moses, the Days of Heaven are the good life that the Lord God promises to men who obey him and follow his commandments: «Therefore, place these words of mine in your hearts and souls; / (...) Write them on the doorposts of your houses and on your gates, / so that you may multiply your days and the days of your children, like the days of the heavens above the earth, in the land that the Lord swore to your fathers to give you.» (Deuteronomy 11:18-24) They will also be days of hell.

More than a story confined to episodes in the lives of a few characters — their loves, jealousy, hatred, calculation, dreams — Terrence Malick wants to talk about something that begins, no one knows how, and ends as if it were starting again: vagabonds. Paradise would be elsewhere, in a promised land. The journey on the train that crosses the skies is the image of this permanent exodus. However, the prevailing happiness is shattered by Linda's voice announcing the apocalypse: «I met a guy named Ding Dong. He told me that the whole Earth will burn in flames. The flames will appear here and there, and they will rise. The mountains will be engulfed in flames and the water will rise in flames. There will be creatures running everywhere, some of them burned, with half their wings on fire, and people will scream endlessly for help.»

So it will be. After passing through the large gate of the property, with the surreal appearance of the mansion that dominates the vastness of the great farmer's fields and stands out as a true character, after the abundance of ears of corn in the wind, the incessant work of the machines and the hired hands, one witnesses the evolution of happiness, work and deception. Once the happy times after the harvest are over, and during the new sowing, as soon as the wheat is ripe and another harvest is about to begin, tensions explode and the gates of hell open, heralding the violent death of the two men who love the same woman.

There is testimony to everything: the animals that sense disaster, the inglorious struggle to control the flames, the chaos, the wind that raises clouds of black smoke, the devouring fury of millions of locusts, the earth burned to the bone. «A land of problems and excessive sweat», said Heidegger, questioning what had become of the search for answers to the meaning of existence and the irrationality of the world, especially that which happens every day.

After Bill's death by the river, there is an abrupt cut and a close-up of a mechanical piano appears. Linda, who has run away from a boarding school for girls, runs with a friend who says she won't wait two hours for anyone. They talk as they walk along the railway line towards nowhere. On another occasion, Linda, the sibyl who spoke in the shadows, said: «The sun looks ghostly when there is fog on the river and silence reigns. (...) No one is perfect. There has never been a perfect person. A person is half demon and half angel.»