Days of Heaven
We have many passages found long ago that we continue to love. Here is one of mine:
“…the western and the gangster film have a special relationship with American society. Both deal with critical phases of American history. It could be said that they represent America talking to itself about, in the case of the western, its agrarian past, and in the case of the gangster film, its urban technological present.” (Colin McArthur, Underworld USA, 1972)
What I love is the thought of a nation “talking to itself” through its cultural forms, in this case, Hollywood genres. Let’s pause to remember the basic meaning of that term: taken from the French genre, it refers to a type, class, or ‘kind’ in literature, music, film, and various art forms. But genre has a peculiar and belated history when it comes to cinema:
“While literary genre criticism has a long history - going back to Aristotle… it was introduced into Anglo-Saxon film criticism comparatively recently, in the mid-1960s and early 70s. In cinema itself, generic forms were one of the earliest means used by the industry to organise the production and marketing of films, and by reviewers and the audience to guide their viewing… The genres, each with its recognisable repertoire of conventions running across visual imagery, plot, character, setting, narrative, music and stars, enabled the industry to predict audience expectation… All this made it easier to standardise and stabilise production.” (Pam Cook, The Cinema Book, 2007)
So, think of it this way. In classical Hollywood, genre enabled the making and selling of films to be run - by the big studios - along Fordist lines: the budgeted production and distribution of a high number of films annually by applying assembly line tactics. Musicals, gangster films, westerns, war movies, and more could be churned out by stables of directors, stars, and crews under contract and adhering to the conventions belonging to those genres. Each new film, in principle, would add to the genre but also deliver just enough variation to keep the genre vital and marketable to the film-going public.
On this last point, Stephen Neale provided the early insight that at the heart of genre, there is both repetition (the identifiable elements that, for example, make the western recognizable as a western) and difference (variations in those elements that keep the genre dynamic).1 To take a simple example, if you love gangster films, then you know the kinds of plots, imagery, settings, characters, etc. that make the gangster film what it is, and you go to each new release with the expectation of finding those elements in the film: repetition. But of course, perfect repetition is as impossible as it is undesirable. So, you also expect each new gangster film to deliver a sense of difference from previous gangster films by ‘playing with’ the genre conventions in some novel way: difference. Neale was keen to point out that repetition and difference are a relation without which the genre could not make and remake itself:
“There can be no difference except in so far as it emerges from repetition and vice versa, it is only the element of difference that allows repetition to become visible.” (Pam Cook, 2007)
I am delivering this history crudely, but the point here is that genre is created and maintained through the interplay of repetition and difference. It is therefore, to some extent, only as real as ‘we’ - an indeterminate group of film producers, directors, viewers, critics, and theorists - continue to believe in it and perpetuate it. As Jane Feuer puts it, “A genre is ultimately an abstract conception rather than something that exists empirically in the world.” (Feuer, Genre Study and Television, 1992.) And John Hartley contends, for example, that “the addition of just one film to the Western genre... changes that genre as a whole.” (Hartley, Key Concepts in Communication Studies, 1994).
In classical Hollywood, all of this took place in a capitalist-run, big studio system banking on reliable generic formulae to sell films to mass audiences and make a profit. Those old Fordist principles again. So for early film critics, the Hollywood system of genre did not lend itself to a view of cinema as ‘high art’. Many film writers were more concerned with auteur criticism: the director as artist and author of the film, expressing his (at that point, rarely her) vision despite the industrial nature of cinema.
So, here was the rub. The studio system could make life difficult for the filmmaker as auteur. How does the visionary artist navigate a system run so tightly along capitalist lines, where profit resides in the maintenance of the social and political status quo?2 Yet, many film writers loved Hollywood film. Or if they didn’t love it, they saw the value in analyzing it in greater depth. They also saw that numerous directors surely must be considered great auteurs, despite the formulaic demands of Hollywood. They saw too, that Hollywood films regularly represented something important about American history and culture, about the American character, and yes, finally, that mysterious old notion known to us as the American Dream.3 All of this is where ideology meets culture, and what better place to track ideological expression and change than those genre films that treat our past and present? Again, consider the gangster films. Were the bootleggers of the 1930s films (and reality) or the Corleone family (of the later Godfather series) bands of terrible criminals unworthy of our admiration or acceptance? Were they - at the same time - an unavoidable expression of the American Dream, one changing decade by decade but always with tragic consequences for the dreamers? And if the latter is so, then what does that say about the demands and fate of the American Dream itself?4
I have lived away from my homeland for so long now that watching from afar, it often seems unrecognizable and inhospitable to me. I sometimes wonder if my persistent love of country derives as much from its cinema as its reality. So, it is no accident that those directors I love most are the ones who, intentionally or not, gave me some new way of thinking about the American Dream and those who dreamed it. It should come as no surprise that the film heroes who dream most poignantly or fiercely tend to be those who for one reason or another, are excluded from the Dream. Then, we find other heroes who appear to have reached it only to find themselves desperately unhappy or alone.
I leave it to each reader to determine which films speak to them about the Dream. I have dozens of them for every decade of film and Hollywood history. The decade of the 1970s ranks highly for particular reasons. This is the decade now widely seen as the first “New Hollywood” when the studio system itself was challenged by young directors, as were approaches to narrative and virtually all conventions of filmmaking and genre.5 Terrence Malick made his first two films during that decade - Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978). Together with Malick’s The New World (2005) and The Tree of Life (2011), they remain for me, painfully beautiful studies of American history and the Dream.
I have written about Badlands and its American dreamers elsewhere, but as time goes by, I have become more drawn to Days of Heaven, which has just been re-released. Set in 1916, and rich in the ‘sense’ of period, landscape, and Americana, it is a tale of three drifters from Chicago who hobo their way to Texas in the hope of finding seasonal farm labor. If they are losers in the dream stakes, Sam Shepard’s wealthy farmer is the melancholy and ailing winner. The crossing of these paths makes the story.6
So many films in the 1970s were elegiac, but few more so than Days of Heaven with its bittersweet voiceover narration by the character of Linda (wonderfully played by Linda Manz). But now, in the era of Trump, such elegies for a dream and history seem so long ago and far away as to be hard to recognize. We might even see them as elegies for the simplicities of genre itself, which, in truth, was never simple. All I know is we need them more than ever. I love this film with all my heart. Go see it again, if you get the chance. And wonder about the Dream.
Stephen Neale, Genre, London, BFI, 1980.
For the best example of this tension, look no further than the story of The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), the second film Orson Welles made in Hollywood, and radically re-made by the studio bosses. The missing 40-plus minutes of Ambersons (cut by the studio in Welles’s absence and without his consent) together with a tacked-on ‘happy ending’ remains one of Hollywood’s saddest tales. “They destroyed Ambersons and it destroyed me,” Welles said later. Yet the curious thing is that Ambersons is still lauded (and rightly so) as one of the great American films. It is equally true that many visionary directors appeared to thrive in the studio and genre system. Consider, for example, the 1950s melodramas made by Douglas Sirk, eventually beloved by feminist film theorists, auteur, and genre critics alike.
For a look at the history and changing meanings of the American Dream, see Sarah Churchwell’s Behold America: The Entangled History of ‘America First’ and ‘the American Dream’, Basic Books, Hachette (2018). An interview with Churchwell on this topic can be found here.
See Robert Warshow’s classic essay on this question, “The Gangster as Tragic Hero,” Partisan Review, 1948. The essay was ahead of its time in taking the hugely popular gangster genre seriously, marrying it to the classical meaning of tragedy and finding, in the gangster, a figure who could restore to Americans the tragic aspects of individualism and the American Dream. (A more detailed discussion of Warshow’s essay can be found in my earlier essay on Badlands for Bright Lights Film Journal.)
For a terrific look at ‘70s American film, see Thomas Elsaesser ed. The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s, Amsterdam University Press, 2004. For more about this book, see the AUP page, here.
Rebecca Solnit has pointed out that few reviewers take note of the film’s Biblical references, including its replication of the story of Abraham and Sarah in Egypt. And it is certainly true that Malick regularly treats religious themes in his works. Although this is not what draws me to the film, it undoubtedly adds to its power, and Solnit’s point is well-taken.