Classic Movie Review: Gates of Heaven
By Josh Spiegel
May 2, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com

I'm happy.
What is it about the human race, that we’re hardwired to have more sympathy for animals than for our fellow man? As a random example, the second episode of HBO’s Game of Thrones climaxes (spoiler alert) with one of the human characters being forced to kill a direwolf, which looks like a very cuddly Siberian husky. While the act isn’t shown explicitly, we know what’s happened and are meant to feel as bad as the character doing the deed does. After the episode aired, there were headlines on sites such as EW.com about the viewer outrage that a fictional human character had to kill a fictional animal. When said article also mentions that one of the actors on Game of Thrones adopted the dog who “died,” I find it hard to feel too bad. But we’ve seen this happen across pop culture for decades.

Not everyone has pets, but those who do have equally unique and universal stories about their dogs, cats, and the like. When we watch something in pop culture where an animal has a sticky fate, a fate that might be typical for humans in action or horror movies, we become more empathetic because we’re imagining it happening to our own pets. Of course, some people don’t have pets. Some of you probably don’t have pets, and you, most likely, think that some pet owners are absolutely crazy. Who would dress up a dog for any occasion, right? There are, of course, levels of pet owners. Some of us don’t dress up their pets, but some do it on a daily basis. Some of us like tiny animals, and some of us like bigger ones. You may not have a pet, but you love something as passionately as I love my cats. What’s more, you may think I’m crazy for being a cat person, but I might think the same of you and your passion.

Before my wife and I owned cats, we’d visit her parents’ house. Her parents, like she and I, are cat people. They’ve owned many over about 40 years, which means that many of them have passed on. My in-laws decided to go the route of cremating these cats’ remains and keeping the urns in their house as a remembrance. I remember that, when I first saw this, I couldn’t believe how strange and creepy it felt. Why would you want to keep an urn of your cat’s remains (or of any pet’s remains) in your house? I’m still not too sure about the whole process, but as I type this sentence, I’m looking at an urn, with our cat’s remains. Losing a pet is a surprisingly intense experience, if only because you don’t realize until the moment when you’re faced with never having this animal in your life again that you cared for it as you would for a child.

Some people don’t cremate their pets; some bury their animals in a pet cemetery. I’ve never been to a pet cemetery, but seeing one on film in the 1978 documentary Gates of Heaven is both moving and somewhat distancing. Having an urn may be equally odd, but there’s something about a personalized gravestone that makes the whole affair seem weirdly unemotional and rigid. Gates of Heaven, the documentary that vaunted its director and editor, Errol Morris, to a level of fame within the genre, is more interested in how the pets residing in one cemetery in California made the trek to another in Napa Valley, and the people who created each cemetery from the ground up. Yet there’s something fascinating and compelling about the men who ran each cemetery. The first, run by Floyd McClure, was an idealistic failure from the beginning, as he was tied up in bad loans and debt from square one.

The second is run by Cal Harberts and his two sons. Each man has a different point of view when it comes to Bubbling Well Pet Cemetery (a place that still exists, according to the Internet), but all seem strangely as passionate about making sure this place of grieving and memory can run as smoothly as possible. Gates of Heaven is a unique movie, one that baffled audiences when it was first released. Nowadays, people might wonder if Morris is pulling a long con on his subjects (who also include various people whose dogs or cats have been buried at the cemetery) in the same way that Sacha Baron Cohen has done with Borat and Bruno. In short, is Morris making fun of these people? Is he revering them? The answer, as I see it, is the third option: he has no opinion.

Each of the subjects in the film has their own warped sensibility, a way to describe and defend their point of view without actually feeling like they’re on trial. McClure, in particular, is a sad case. More than anyone in the film, his passion is almost visible in each syllable he utters when he talks about the existence of his long-gone pet cemetery. There’s some question as to whether or not his idealism was as pure as he makes it sound, but his defeat is emotionally resonant in no small way. What makes McClure stand out is partly the form in which the film is presented. Morris doesn’t make any attempt at presenting the story of Gates of Heaven (what little story there is) in a cinematically satisfying or dramatic sense. The movie, which has talking-head interviews and no narration to guide us, leaves McClure behind about 30 minutes into its 85-minute length, because that’s where he exited the story in real life.

Yet, even as Gates of Heaven resists being a Hollywoodized version of a documentary, various characters stand out among the rest. Danny Harberts, the more wistful, younger son who helps run Bubbling Well, is the lonely hero of the second half, in many ways. Without going too far back into his past, we know that Danny’s had to take a long road to come back to work for his dad. Danny seems like one of the solitary ex-hippies who was shown as somewhat pathetic on a fictional TV show like Freaks and Geeks. From his barely-there mustache to his shoulder-length light brown hair to the stereo system he sets up in his little house overlooking the cemetery grounds, Danny is a more fully realized character than most characters in fictional movies of the time.

Danny is contrasted not just with his father, Cal, who seems like, back in the 1950s, he was the prototype for Ward Cleaver, but with his more opportunistic brother, Philip. Philip’s left a cushy sales job because he felt like he was hitting a wall. While he says that he’s glad to be away from the nine-to-five lifestyle, when he does a confessional in front of and about his many trophies and plaques, you wonder whether he’ll ever figure out how much he’s lying to himself. Even the nameless pet owners have full life stories through their pets. One woman philosophizes about how, when she and her husband die, they’ll be reunited with their pet’s spirit because the spirit can’t just vanish, right? Where does the spirit go when an animal or a person dies? It can’t just leave, we tell ourselves.

In short, that's what makes Gates of Heaven so intriguing to watch: the lies we tell to make us feel better are worth it. The people who Morris interviewed all have a specific worldview that’s worth listening to, but they all are convincing themselves that the existence of a pet cemetery is worth it for the pets, not just for our peace of mind. Our pets’ spirits may or may not meet us in the afterlife, but thinking that it could happen without knowing one way or the other about what really faces us in the end is enough consolation. Gates of Heaven is an odd duck of a movie, but it deserves its place in the history of documentary films.