Badlands
Terrence Malick (1973)
This superior, cold-hearted film about an inferior, cold-hearted killer and his sidekick is based on the Charles Starkweather-Caril Ann Fugate case of 1958. Written, produced and directed by Terrence Malick (his first feature), it begins in South Dakota and ends in the Badlands of Montana but the title has a moral significance larger than geographical location. It seems to refer to the cultural anomie of wherever the film’s protagonists, Kit (Martin Sheen) and Holly (Sissy Spacek), pass through as they evade arrest for the murder of Holly’s father (Warren Oates) and an increasing number of others.
The grim tale is told in voiceover by the teenage Holly. The style of the narrative is the clichéd romanticism of the teen magazines which, Malick suggests, feed – or undernourish – Holly’s imagination (‘Kit was the handsomest man I’d ever met … I dreamed of just falling asleep and being carried off to a magic land …’). More distinctive details occasionally interrupt the witless hyperbole and help to individualise Holly – but only occasionally. Sissy Spacek, in her first starring role, intones the story in a flat, affectless voice to get across Holly’s remarkable detachment from the events she’s witnessing. Martin Sheen’s Kit is similarly uninvolved but the assumption that because Kit is a psychopathic killer he must be incapable of experiencing and expressing emotion about anything (Holly, for example) seems at best dubious. This was Sheen’s breakthrough role but it now looks familiar: as usual, he works hard; as usual, you can see him working hard and remaining an unexciting presence.
Having Kit and Holly not feel anything for each other is less a matter of psychological truth than of film-making expediency. If they connected, it would mess up the immaculately worked out scheme of Badlands. Malick (who makes a cameo appearance as one of the few people who survives an encounter with Kit) is less interested in trying to understand the murderers’ minds than in using them to dramatise a commentary on the impoverished ethos of the Midwest. The pair’s detachment hardly seems abnormal, given that most of those they encounter appear to be as unmoved by the prospect of being killed as Kit and Holly are by killing them. The characters are tyrannised by the false god of celebrity – Holly (a child of Hollywood?) with her fan-magazine mentality, Kit with his much remarked upon (though not actually very striking) resemblance to James Dean. When they go on the run, Kit tells Holly they’ll start a new life with new names, James and Priscilla (perhaps a nod to Priscilla Presley: she didn’t meet Elvis until 1959 but Malick doesn’t announce the action as taking place at exactly the same time as the Starkweather-Fugate crimes). It’s not only Kit who’s narcissistically aware of and anxious to cultivate his increasing public notoriety. When he’s eventually captured, the admiration of the police is quite explicit as they wish him luck and gratefully accept his personal effects, which he throws to them like a succession of bridal bouquets. In a significant departure from the facts of the real-life case (Starkweather was executed, Fugate imprisoned), Malick has Holly tell us that she was put on probation and married her defence lawyer. This feel likes a cheap dig at the mores of a society that loves headline-makers and happy endings indiscriminately.
The effect of Malick’s bloodless (that does seem the right word, oddly enough) visual style and his incisive, censorious dialogue is curious. You may be less disturbed by the spectacle of a series of people being fatally shot than by Holly’s recounting Kit’s (believable) elastic self-justifications. The interesting collection of music is consistently used to counterpoint the characters’ emotional vacuum. Even when Kit and Holly dance to ‘A Blossom Fell’ and he says he wishes he could sing a love song like Nat King Cole, Kit speaks in a cold monotone that’s the antithesis of the lovely voice on the soundtrack. More dislikeable is the juxtaposition of the perfectly composed images with colourful, beguiling bits of Carl Orff and Erik Satie. These not only don’t fit with the images (except for a lyrical inferno, when Kit burns down Holly’s father’s house – and which doesn’t connect with anything else in the film). The pieces of music seem designed to make us aware of the impressively educated sensibility behind the camera – in case that’s not evident from what’s on the screen. (It isn’t that difficult to feel more civilised than a serial killer. It’s worrying if you have to achieve that feeling by stressing that you’re culturally a cut above.)
Badlands was hugely admired by many critics, perhaps because its clinical, intellectual style leaves no doubt that Malick is not exploiting the material for excitative effect (it’s harder to feel insulated from the heat and ambiguity of a Taxi Driver). Yet it’s still possible to find the film offensive in that it chooses to reduce the aberrant Kit and Holly to figures in the Badlands landscape, to use the Starkweather-Fugate story merely to make a cultural point, to produce accomplished imagery and observe rather than investigate the relationship of the characters and their setting. Badlands is absorbing but its power derives from a queasy combination of the callousness of the killers and the matching dispassionate expertise of the film-making.
Original score by George Tipton – the soundtrack also uses a theme by James Taylor. The three cinematographers included Tak Fujimoto. The art director was Jack Fisk (Mr Spacek).
[1990s]