It surprised me watching Days of Heaven that the movie did not seem to take place during the “golden hour” in the way that I thought it would. Going into the movie, I fully expected it to be obvious that the sun was about to set. Instead, the movie seemed to constantly hide where the sun was. It is common practice for films to show sun rising, high above, or setting to show both the passing of time and when a particular shot takes place. Days of Heaven does not do this and thus the fact that the film talks place during the golden hour is more important conceptually than visually. Visually, the setting might be seen as more ideal and the colors might be richer than otherwise but more importantly we see the time of day as a metaphor for the overall narrative. We begin the story at the beginning of this golden hour; the entire story takes place at the doorstep (dusk) of the farmer’s and Bill’s deaths (night). Once night falls, however, day breaks and life essentially goes back to “normal.”
I think someone said something in class about the movie being essentially a nature film. This seems to be very apt considering how many long shots there are of the “Texan” plains. This vision of nature is a very important and lends to the films cyclical motif. Plants are planted, grown, harvested and then planted again with the seeds harvested. Everything has a cycle that it runs, it may change over the course but it always returns to its original form and thus it is fitting that the movie takes place over a year because we see this cycle as it occur in the plants. On the characters’ side of this cycle, the movie begins with Bill killing his boss (or a co-worker, we do not know). From then on, Bill, Abby and Linda’s lives are very different not only in setting but in lifestyle. In the end, though, they all return to who they were. Bill starts by killing someone and ends by not only killing someone but also being killed (that is a completely different type of cycle – what goes around comes around). We see this same thing in both Abby and Linda. They start running and end running. For them, this seems to be much more of an inherent choice than it does with Bill, however. Concerning Abby and Linda, they have everything lain out for them. Abby is now a widow and presumably has a small fortune to take care of her and yet she jumps on a train having dropped Linda off at some sort of boarding school or orphanage. Seemingly not long after that Linda runs away with a girl she met on the farm. Once again, they are both running, they are who they are. Just as plants grow every year in the same they did the year before, everyone returns to whom they really are eventually.
Good stuff, Jonathan. Your last comment seems very apt, and I think it bears examining who these characters are at the beginning and end. In a sense, as much as Bill and Abby's "crime" is cruelly manipulating the farmer's affections (or planning to), it's also their attempt to use this ploy to move up in the world, for the "big score," in Bill's words. If there's a kind of Biblical tone here, we can see this as mythological, as well, a kind of examination of the American myth of opportunity. Could Bill and Abby have made it honestly? Maybe, and Linda's "escape" at the end actually seems to reinforce another American myth about freedom.
ReplyDelete