Badlands

dir. Terrence Malick (1973) USA

Terrence Malick is one of the most prestigious members of the generation of American filmmakers commonly known as the Hollywood Renaissance. With a strong interest in visual cinema that recalls the aestheticism of Hollywood’s golden-age directors, particularly John Ford, Malick’s work is characterised by an innate fascination with symmetrical compositions and landscape vistas. A true artist, utterly indifferent to the conventions and commercialism of the American film industry, he wrote, produced and directed just two films (Badlands and Days of Heaven) in the 1970s before withdrawing from the fray for a reclusive twenty-year hiatus, becoming both a revered legend and a terrible loss to American cinema in the process.

Whereas Days of Heaven derives its power from its exquisite beauty and evocation of mood, it is the disturbingly fatalistic study of a mindlessly violent odyssey that makes Badlands the more arresting and influential cult favourite. Stark and austere in its visual beauty, which seems less a designed artifice, Malick’s cinematic debut is more naturalistic and energetic than its 1979 follow-up. Far from dating, the film has a timeless quality and has become increasingly relevant in an age of little innocence, categorised by a mass hankering for celebrity.

In the roles of Kit and Holly, Badlands’ about-to-be stars are extraordinary. In his early thirties, but looking much younger, wild and edgy, Martin Sheen is explosive as the aimless and alienated mid-western misfit eager for notoriety – a garbage man who fancies himself a James Dean lookalike. Sissy Spacek, twenty-four but utterly believable as a fifteen-year-old, is unnerving as his blank, freckle-faced, passive nymphet moll. Inspired by the real, shocking 1950s case of the delinquent teenaged Bonnie and Clyde, Charles Starkweather and Carol Fugate, there is a horrible fascination in this narrative of bad boy and his baton-twirling baby doll. The casual disposing of the girl’s dour father, the building of a tree house love-nest, and a cross-country killing spree and chase are all reminiscent of Bonnie and Clyde.

Badlands is cool, bleak and scary in its awareness that a seemingly ordinary adolescent girl has thrown in her lot with a sociopath, simply because she doesn’t have any other ideas. It is also singularly literate, with Malick finding a dispassionate, humourless distance from the violent psychodrama through clever writing. Central to all of Malick’s work is his characters’ insistence on behaving as though they are the protagonists of fictional narratives, viewing the world as a stage and other people as mere supporting players. Badlands, narrated by Holly in the style of a romantic novel (or like the trashy 1950s movie fan magazines that she reads), is particularly clear on this point.

Whether it’s entirely retrospective or a commentary that’s happening in real-time, a good filmmaker will always be conscious of the effect a voiceover will have on their story, and exactly what kind of voiceover it is that they want. Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, for example, is telling the audience a story from the perspective at the end of the film, whereas Scorsese’s Taxi Driver works more though diaries. In Badlands, the narrator is female, called upon to describe and explain the behaviour of men, especially their embracing of violence, which seems contrary to their better nature. Spacek’s gauche reading of her character’s romanticised but banal diary entries is interesting, in that the voiceover is almost like a court deposition, alluding to the film’s eventual outcome and adding pathos to the duo’s nihilistic progress.

The picture’s details, using the iconography of the era, are both disarming (the couple, heedless of their situation, dancing like carefree kids to Mickey and Sylvia’s ‘Love Is Strange’ or dreamily in the beam of their headlights to Nat King Cole) and eloquent (Kit checking his hair in the rear-view mirror during a high-speed car chase or cheerfully tossing souvenirs to his captors). The contrasts – of the American heartland landscapes with their run-down dwellings, tedious lives and tawdry dreams, and of the bright, vibrant musical score with recurring images of death – are continually striking.

Both of Malick’s debutante features, Badlands and Days of Heaven, follow very much the tradition of outlaw couple narratives such as Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde. But the crime element at the heart of these stories is hardly what is most memorable. The cinema of Terrence Malick is undeniably an intensely pictorial experience, and echoes of the auteur’s majestically brooding, moody style, as well as his startling and divisive experiments with narration continue to reverberate in the love-on-the-run genre to this very day.