Mud Doctoring: On Days of Heaven

Mud Doctoring:On Days of Heaven Michael Parker (bio) I was twenty and had just flunked out of a mediocre land-grant university high in the Blue Ridge Mountains. When someone asked my father how I ever got admitted in the first place, he apparently said, "they took his pulse?" That I had gotten into any college at all was a miracle, but even more miraculous was that it had taken me two years to get kicked out, since I attended one-tenth of my classes, spent ten hours in the bars to every quarter-hour in the library, and was arrested three out of the four semesters I spent in town. The one worthwhile thing I had done there—besides walking around wistfully in the sleet equating sadness with art—was to accidentally attend a film festival. The winter of 1978 was the coldest in decades, and the parking lot in front of my dorm was lined with plowed snow banks twice as high as my head. One particularly windy February night, on my way back from the cafeteria, I ducked into the auditorium to warm up. Polanski's Knife in the Water was playing. I went back every night that week, for Breathless, La Dolce Vita, and Diary of a Country Priest. On the last night of the festival, I cried through the credits of The Bicycle Thief. Prior to that, my only exposure to film was the spaghetti westerns my little sister and I saw in the small eastern North Carolina town where we grew up, our hands-down favorites being They Call Me Trinity and Trinity Is Still My Name. (I'll be leaving out the "film" my junior high buddies and I climbed the pines behind the drive-in to see, a soft-porn retelling of Moby Dick called, I am not clever enough to make this up, Thar She Blows.) ________ After flunking out of college, I had reasons to travel far away from that mountain holler—reasons much worse than my grade point average—so I went to live with my older sister in Seattle. One night she took me to a tiny theater somewhere between the U-district and Capitol Hill. Days of Heaven was playing. I had never heard of Malick, but she'd seen and loved Badlands. Thanks to an icy wind and that intimidating berm of dirty snow in North Carolina, I was slightly familiar with movies that ignored traditional narrative techniques, but I'd not yet seen anything as lyrically impressionistic as Days of Heaven. And yet what I remembered about it were two things: a time-lapse image of a seedling pushing itself up out of the ground, and the voice-over narration of Linda Manz, who plays the little sister (also named Linda) of Richard Gere's Bill. "I've been thinking what to do with my future," the girl says a third of the way into the movie. She is—as she often is in this movie—wandering about the undulating amber waves of grain, and in this scene she has her ear to the ground, as if [End Page 43] monitoring the progress of that slowly sprouting seedling. "I could be a mud doctor, checking out the earth, underneath." That I was on the lam myself made the movie all the more appealing, since Bill and his lover Abby (Brooke Adams), posing as brother and sister, were on the run from Chicago, where Gere, in the sketchy, mostly inaudible opening scene set in a foundry, had clocked a foreman with a hammer. When they end up working the wheat fields of The Farmer (Sam Shepard) in the Texas Panhandle, Linda's role in the plot, peripheral to begin with, becomes more so. We see her talking to an older girl about cigarettes and boys. We see her eating, working, roughhousing, smoking. But she's observing, and her account of what occurred between Abby, Bill, and The Farmer is what finally makes the movie more than what Pauline Kael famously accused it of: "An empty Christmas tree which you can hang all your dumb metaphors on." Linda's narration sometimes addresses the dramatic action, supplying...

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