To Die and Kill in the American West

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 27
Terrence Malick (writer/director), Badlands

Kit Carruthers wants more from life than small-town South Dakota can provide. He’s cultivated a deliberate James Dean image and rebellious swagger, but his town will only provide him work collecting garbage in the late Eisenhower years. One afternoon, he happens upon the much younger Holly Sargis, who shares his big dreams. But Holly’s puritanical white-bread father disapproves of their relationship, so naturally, Kit buys a gun.

It’s hard to find a director more esoteric than Terrence Malick. In the 1970s, he produced two critically acclaimed movies, both considered classics, then simply vanished for twenty years. Though he has re-emerged, and become prolific, his Garbo-like silence has become his trademark; he remains hermetically sealed, communicating with humanity only through his films, which remain acclaimed, though often difficult to watch.

This film, shot independently on a shoestring budget, features two future Hollywood stars. In classic fashion, both play roles much younger than themselves: Martin Sheen, at 33, played Kit Carruthers as 25, while 24-year-old Sissy Spacek playes 15-year-old Holly. Though both actors convincingly play their characters’ ages, both characters have the kind of disappointment and premature aging that often characterizes small-town life. They look simultaneously young, and older than dirt.

Holly watches with remarkable dispassion when Kit shoots her father and torches her house. She neither commits enthusiastically, nor particularly resists; we’re left wondering whether she cares much either way. This becomes their respective characterizations: Kit cares deeply, but mostly about himself, and lashes out at insignificant provocations. Holly cares little, and despite her tender years, already drifts through life resigned to constant disappointment.

Martin Sheen (left) and Sissy Spacek in Badlands

The lovers begin a road trip across the American West, constantly accompanied by Kit’s gun. Everything else changes. They steal food, clothing, and cars almost randomly, but the lovers and their gun remain together, an unholy trinity for their own religion. Like traveling evangelists, they visit homes and towns across the Upper Midwest, but they don’t celebrate anything or bring hope. They just kill, because it’s all they have.

Malick subverts many tropes of movies set in the American West. Rather than glofifying the landscape, he trivializes it; despite the iconic vistas of the Black Hills and the Prairie, he holds focus on the foreground characters, keeping the background fuzzy. To the characters living in it, the landscape isn’t uplifting and honorable, it’s just the world around them, so constant that they can’t see it anymore. It’s bedroom, kitchen, and toilet to them.

Likewise, though American mythology celebrates the renewal created in wide-open spaces, Kit and Holly don’t somehow become, cowboy-like, the real people they’re meant to be. Without civilization to provide form, they become increasingly shapeless, unsure of themselves. They have nobody to talk to but each other, so they increasingly double down on their existing personalities. Kit becomes angrier, more passionate, while Holly becomes taciturn and fatalistic.

These tendencies are amplified because Malick doesn’t use much soundtrack music. Not that there’s none; one of Malick’s trademarks is the use of compositions by Carl Orff, and he samples from Orff’s percussion classic, “Gassenhauer,” so generously that recent recordings sometimes give that piece the parenthetical title “Theme from Badlands”. Yet in moments that cowboy directors would lavish with orchestral score, Malick backs with footfalls, the wind, the car idling.

This creates a stark, austere screen picture that forces viewers to pay close attention to the characters. Without familiar cues to guide our reactions, we simply stare, dumbfounded. Many audiences find this movie difficult to watch; I generally go years between viewings, because Malick’s lack of emotional signposts makes the experience very raw. Unlike, say, Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, this movie forces honest, spontaneous reactions, like pulling teeth without anaesthesia.

Malick’s supporting characters make much of young Martin Sheen’s resemblance to James Dean. Sheen himself cultivated this impression, and Malick permitted Sheen remarkable latitude in designing his character mannerisms. Kit genuinely excels at receiving attention; on those few occasions when he and Holly aren’t talking past one another, he becomes likeable and human. But his usual isolation makes his angry side recur; inevitably, he returns to being the killer.

Critics have assumed Malick meant some indictment of white, small-town America’s tendency to beige conformity. But Malick never says anything explicitly. Audiences have to decide what this movie really means, drawing from a palpable lack of clues. Like real life, we have to create meaning ourselves, meaning isn’t handed to us by the creator. That, ultimately, might be Malick’s message: in our most human moments, we’re totally alone.