Landscapes of Displacement and the Politics of Dead Pets

Our ties to the land are in crisis. We are living through the early years of an era of mass displacement. War, economic pressures, and climate catastrophe are forcing people from their homes.

Last year in Los Angeles, not far from where I live, devastating wildfires displaced tens of thousands of people—and uncounted numbers of pets and wild creatures. Even among those who still have shelter, many remain precariously housed and alienated from the soil. The struggle over access to and the meaning of land is a central political challenge for our time.

The emotional contours of this political struggle can be difficult to imagine, let alone represent. I want to suggest that the somewhat obscure first film by documentarian Errol Morris, Gates of Heaven, offers a window into the psychic prehistory of our own moment of mass displacement. Morris’s deadpan exploration of the suburban, California mind through the prism of two pet cemeteries is not only a singular and underappreciated experiment in documentary form. It is, in a sidelong way, a movie about land, and the ties we are allowed to have to the land under capitalism.

Dead Pets go to Napa

In the summer of 1977, Morris, a dropout from University of California-Berkeley’s doctoral program in philosophy, saw the headline “450 Dead Pets Go to Napa” in the San Francisco Chronicle. The Foothill Pet Cemetery in Los Altos had failed; the pets interred there would be exhumed and transported for reburial in Napa. Morris put together a small film crew and went down the peninsula to photograph the exhumation.

The failure of Foothill Pet Cemetery, owned and operated by the kind-hearted Floyd “Mac” McClure, raises the disturbing possibility that one’s loved ones might be evicted from their putatively permanent place in the hereafter.

The film captures an inarticulate anxiety about how fragile the human attachment to land and to each other can be. “I want to be able to find my pets,” states one patron, backed by prickly pear cacti and squinting in the sun. “I don’t want them dug up and scattered all over creation.”

Again and again, the film poses a question that is both ironic and deadly serious: Do pets go to heaven?

The question of a pet afterlife might seem like an odd, even neurotic, preoccupation. Considered more generously, however, it conjures the specter of a radical interspecies ethic, one that would grant all—human and nonhuman, living and dead—a place on this earth.

A Struggle for Collective Sovereignty

The housing situation in the United States is grim and only getting worse. While asset management companies hoover up ever more properties, the prospect of homeownership seems further out of reach for each generation. Nationally and globally, the consolidation of wealth and power devours wild habitat, degrades the soil, and turns more and more of us into tenants who must pay a monthly tribute for a place on this earth. That, at least, is what Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis assert in Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis (Haymarket Books, 2024).

Grounded in the Los Angeles tenant movement, Abolish Rent articulates a grassroots, working-class, land politics for the twenty-first century. Through tenant organizing against eviction, gentrification, and structural abandonment, the authors see the radical potential to not only revise housing policy but to remake our relationship to the land and to each other. “The tenant struggle is a land struggle,” they write near the end. “It is a struggle for collective sovereignty over the use of our resources and the places we inhabit.”

Abolish Rent locates transformative potential in a coalition of renters and the unhoused (the authors use “tenant” to include both groups) to remake our collective relationship to the land. Gates of Heaven expands the scope of the land struggle even further: both outward, to include the nonhuman creatures with whom we share our homes, and inward, to the murky territory of the unconscious. Taken together, these works clarify the difficulties that any radical, coalitional land politics must confront.

Breaking the Rules of Cinema Verité

Gates of Heaven is an experiment in documentary form.

The film consists almost entirely of interviews, shot like portraits against self-consciously arranged settings. Morris created a device called an “Interrotron” that allowed him to display his image above the camera during interviews, so that his subjects seem to address the viewer directly. The effect is both intimate and distancing. Without either voiceover or score to indicate how the documentarian wants the viewer to feel about the interviews, the film’s “tone” is unstable, even unsettling. The takes are long, and the film follows the cadence of the suburbanites’ rambling thoughts about business, love, justice, and the afterlife. With only the barest trace of narrative, the film comes to be “about” the digressions and the incoherence of the interviews themselves.

Part of what makes the film so jarring is Morris’s inversion of the stylistic conventions of nonfiction filmmaking. In the 1970s, when Morris shot the film, documentarians were expected to use hand-held cameras and available light to record “reality”—an approach to known as cinema verité (truth-cinema). Morris called verité an “epistemological meat-grinder,” which is to say that “if you follow certain rules…[and] put in the appropriate ingredients…magically, truth results.”

In Gates of Heaven, Morris “tried to break all the rules” by using harsh lights and a heavy camera on a tripod.

While Morris cemented his reputation years later with The Thin Blue Line, a neo-noir documentary that pursued the truth so doggedly that it freed a man on death row, his first film does not attempt to parse truth from error. This experiment allowed documentaries to pursue new questions. Rather than going “out” into the field to document the truth, Gates of Heaven turned inward, toward the psychic landscape of suburban America.

Capturing Love, Emotions, and Late Capitalism

What Gates of Heaven documents, above all else, is the incoherence of interviewees’ response to their pets’ market-driven displacement. The neoliberal era was just beginning at the time. That is, financialization was becoming the dominant force in social life, and social life was being “rendered totally open to the circulation of capital.”

The interviewees’ contradictory reflections reveal their complex, changing realities. Director Werner Herzog called the Gates of Heaven “the only authentic film on love and emotions and late capitalism. And maybe,” he adds, “it’s the only authentic film on loss of emotions, and distortion of feelings, and degeneration of feelings.” The “distortion” and “degeneration” of feeling that Herzog identifies in the film occurs when emotions are subsumed by market logics.

Morris’s Californians must learn to manage emotion if they want to survive the modern economy. Mac loses his business because the landowners decide to sell it. “A pet cemetery business is not a fast-buck scheme. It’s not a suede-shoe game,” he laments. “It has to be in your heart, not in your billfold.” His belief in a heart-centered business, led by his love for pets, leads to his financial ruin.

In contrast, the Harberts, in Napa, are able to take on the corpses displaced from Mac’s cemetery because they regard feeling as something to control. “Emotions aren’t always subject to reason,” says Phil, the older brother, “but they’re always subject to action.” Immersed in the corporate, motivational jargon of self-help, Phil dreams of one day taking over the business and expanding it across the state.

By constructing his film out of unstructured interviews with regular people, Morris documents the penetration of market logic into the intimate terrain of human feeling.

Dead Pets Are on the Move

The rambling interviews that compose Gates of Heaven give it an unfocused quality. It seems never to arrive at its point. Each time it seems like a plot might cohere, the film veers off into yet another digression. By rejecting story in favor of deep, open-ended listening, Morris draws out something more delicate: what the literary theorist Sianne Ngai calls “ugly feelings,” the dysphoric, noncathartic emotions that index “situations marked by blocked or thwarted action.”

The film’s amorphous structure reflects the amorphous feelings it indexes. Frozen in their static frames against meticulously arranged backgrounds, each of the characters in Gates of Heaven seems trapped in both an aimless film and an aimless life. And yet, aimless and ambiguous as they are, Ngai grants ugly feelings a diagnostic capacity: They can reveal the conditions of life under modern capitalism. Gates of Heaven documents a subtle subjective reality: the anxiety of the relatively privileged as they begin to sense the indignities that late capitalism can inflict on them.

Pets index both our enduring desire for connection with the wild and the nonhuman, as well as our capacity to capture and utterly transform nonhuman nature. A pet, in the modern United States, stands somewhere between a family member and a commodity. And the exhumed pet, transported by freezer truck to Napa, is a macabre parody of Marx’s description of the commodity. For Marx, the capitalist economy creates a gothic, fantastical world in which objects, as commodities, have a social life while humans, ruled by their own dead labor, become objects.

In Gates of Heaven, dead pets are on the move while humans stay stuck.

Not Even the Dead Will be Safe

Amidst the rise of German fascism in the 1930s, Walter Benjamin commented that “not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.” Gates of Heaven advances a similar message for the neoliberal era. Through the absurd, distorted lens of a failed pet cemetery, the film reflects the horrors of displacement and dispossession. Interviewees express a desire for their pets to have the dignity of a permanent resting place and an inchoate horror that their loved ones could become little more than trash.

Errol Morris is hardly a radical. He has a detective’s interest in the truth and a film buff’s interest in cinematic style. And yet, as Ngai suggests, formal experiments can diagnose situations even if they do not provide remedies. That, at least, was how Herzog saw the film at the time of its release. “You don’t know where the United States are standing after the State of the Union address,” he says. “But after seeing that film, you will know.”

The incoherent suburban response to the pets’ displacement shows that homeowners are too focused on their own interests and fantasies to be effective allies in the current land struggle. But it also clarifies a thorny problem that faces any radical land politics: Only a broad coalition of tenants, the unhoused, and small-time owners can hope to resist finance capital’s liquidation of our homes and resources.

While Abolish Rent centers on the houseless and the working poor, speculative real estate interests are coming for all of us. Gates of Heaven captures, like a specimen pressed in a microscope slide, the anxieties of homeowners as they sense the capitalist laws of motion turning against their interests. The uncanny figure of the exhumed pet corpse, transported by freezer truck to Napa, is a kind of anticipatory tremor of the displacements to come.

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Featured Image: Pet’s Rest Cemetery in Colma, California. Photo by Michael Ocampo, 2009.

Zak Breckenridge is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Southern California. His writing has appeared in Western American Literature, SFRA Review, and Public Books, among other venues. He hosts the podcast Erratics, which reflects on the life and death of Bard College at Simon’s Rock, the small liberal arts college he attended. Contact.