Of all the crime spree couple films to come out of the New Hollywood boom in the wake of Bonnie and Clyde, Terrence Malick’s Badlands is probably the least exciting. That’s by design of course; the acclaimed directors’ debut film is a slow and laid-back reinterpretation of that sub-genre, and perhaps a rebuke of the energetic, high stakes counter-culture-swathed format it inspired in imitators like Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway and Steven Spielberg’s The Sugarland Express. This approach definitely yields some drawbacks, such as a lack of any momentum through most of the film, and Malick’s weaknesses as a filmmaker make themselves apparent, but there’s something about the cool, lulling atmosphere of Badlands that makes it unique and fascinating, certainly when it was so noticeably going against the grain of what was popular in Hollywood at the time.
Loosely based on the Starkweather homicides, it’s about a teenage girl, Holly Sargis (Sissy Spacek) who falls for an older greaser Kit Carruthers (Martin Sheen) in a sleepy small town in South Dakota. When Kit suddenly murders Holly’s father (Warren Oates) for his disapproval of their relationship, the pair go on the run through the Dakotas, the badlands of Montana, even southern Saskatchewan, making a series of temporary refuges and murdering more people along the way.
Malick is a photographer more than a storyteller, and you can really tell watching something like Badlands. The cinematography is exquisite, capturing some mesmerizing scenery and an immediate sense of time and space that you don’t get from a lot of movies. The often natural lighting and serene stillness of many shots convey the sensation of gazing upon these natural wonders in person. Somehow even the prairies can look lush and beautiful through this kind of dedication. Malick seems very much like the kind of director who would sit for hours in a field just to get the perfect shot of a sunset -pissing off crew-members in the process unaware of what exactly he’s doing. Composition and mise en scene are also incredibly important, with shots in the wilderness framed in very particular ways to accentuate things like the car and the characters, distinctly modern, against a vast unbroken nature. Deep focus camera work creates the impression of a grand and endless world where even minuscule background elements have major significance. At times the movie feels like this little intimate narrative given the grandeur and scenic depth of a big Hollywood western like Stagecoach or The Searchers, an impression that puts me in mind of Nicolas Roeg’s visually similar Walkabout. Like that film, it’s certainly one of the best-looking and strangely most cinematic movie debuts of its era.
The story is also quite rich and interesting, with an important meaning somewhat unusual for its time. Like many a 70’s movie, it’s set in the 1950’s, but unlike its 1973 companion George Lucas’ American Graffiti, it isn’t doused in nostalgia. There are occasional references, most significantly a recurring comparison of Kit’s appearance to James Dean, Holly reads from a tabloid magazine at one point some gossip on the Frank Sinatra-Ava Gardner drama; but aside from these tidbits of pop culture the films’ setting doesn’t really date itself even with Kit’s explicit greaser attitude. I think a part of this is due to its environment: the Montana badlands and the American and Canadian prairies have looked pretty much the same for most of the century, even in the towns. But also the premise is fairly universal, and still resonates now, even if for slightly different reasons than it did back then. Because Badlands is about a violent young man taking advantage of a teenage girl, convincing her she’s in love with him, and roping her into abetting a series of crimes. This may not have been entirely apparent to audiences back then, given the film is told from Holly’s warped point of view that often dotes on him, but Kit never really cared much about Holly -he was just looking for the outlet for his murderous impulses her home situation provided. And possibly to have someone to impress with his superficial sense of self-reliance and masculinity. The romance of Badlands’ tone is not to be conflated with a romance of its plot. I mean the toxicity of this relationship is highlighted to some degree in the text that I’m sure Malick and his audiences were well aware of. In one of her narrations, Holly mentions sometimes wanting to kill Kit in the context of “regular couple fights” after all. But there’s an American romanticism to its style and presentation that clouds a lot of that, like how Easy Rider’s rebellious and entrancingly mellow atmosphere masked the fact it was about aimless and doomed drug dealers.
Luckily, modern audiences (or at least those who would seek out a Terrence Malick movie) are more capable of picking up on that truth of the story, and in understanding that, the movie ages better than it would through a Bonnie and Clyde interpretation of the central relationship. It’s a fascinating study in toxic masculinity and self-delusion then, as Kit’s emotionless casual killing and distant personality increases with Holly’s wistful contrivances to stay with him until even she can’t justify it.
Of course this all sounds more dramatic and engaging on its own terms than it is in the movie. Malick is never concerned with story and character as much as atmosphere and feeling. What a movie is saying isn’t as important to him as how it looks and what it’s “saying” on a deeper level, and that’s evident even as far back as this (one wonders why he’s never gone full experimental in a kind of Godfrey Reggio sense). The plot never seems to have the filmmakers’ primary attention, most of the greater narrative facets are told to us through Holly’s narration, and when she’s not narrating it’s an awfully quiet movie. That omnipresent voiceover is one of the films’ lesser elements. Spacek delivers it all in a singular cadence with a pronounced accent that wears thin in short order. The purpose of this delivery is obviously meant to reflect her naïve, rose-coloured, and emotionally detached mental state, but its’ effect is that of a dreary device that hinders the potential of Spacek’s performance. In a 2002 interview, Spacek said that the revelation she took away from being directed by Malick on this film was “the artist rules, nothing else matters” –which is of course not true; and I feel that if she had questioned a few of Malick’s decisions, her performance would have been more substantive. Indeed, Malick isn’t much of an actors’ director, though Martin Sheen manages to do alright with a physically and emotionally restrained performance that does fit this kind of character –in fact is shockingly accurate to real-world gun-toting psychopaths as we’ve found out, right down to the fiendish charm he can put on display when given media attention for his crimes.
But if feeling is what’s most important with a movie like Badlands, the mood of the piece and its’ easygoing, dreamlike pace is its triumph. Again, despite its subject matter, it doesn’t have much of an urgency or an energy to it; the violence is sudden, usually not graphic, and always objectively framed –nobody feels anything about it, almost as though it’s not happening. This numbs the audience to the murders, normalizes them as merely part of Kit’s routine, like styling his hair. The divide between the world as Kit and Holly see it and the world as it is is a central aspect of the films’ theme on youth and independence. Malick himself felt there was a fairy tale quality to the movie, and Holly has been compared to Lewis Carroll’s Alice. The lush and whimsical poetry of the pace and visuals accentuates and perhaps promotes this sensibility, but it wouldn’t have the desired effect if not for George Tipton’s music -specifically his samplings of Carl Orff’s Gassenhauer and other like motifs that lend the film a unique, offbeat, and transporting atmosphere.
Badlands is a flawed film, but it’s got far fewer flaws than most directorial debuts -indeed it has the tonal and technical skill of a movie one would assume is several along in a directors’ career. Its plot, characters, and drama are unfortunately secondary, but compared to something like Malick’s next film Days of Heaven, of which I can remember its vivid imagery (including perhaps one of the most gorgeous shots in cinema) but few of its story, thematic or character details, Badlands is more memorable and wholly enriching. It’s a movie that I hope would have pricked my attention had I been doing this back in 1973; and though Terrence Malick’s subsequent career has been …interesting to say the least, it can’t be denied he started from a place of impressive artistry and a keen eye for cinema.
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