Everything that makes Terrence Malick’s ‘Badlands’ the ultimate examination of America
“My girl Holly and I have decided to kill ourselves,” Kit casually utters into a recorder, “same way I did her Dad.” This iconic moment typifies the poetic paradox at play in the Terrence Malick masterpiece, Badlands. This 1970s classic is an opus of novelistic filmmaking, and in the 50 years that have followed its release, it has remained a pastiche that epitomises America in every which way.
The fairytale of Kit and Holly timelessly endures as a tranquil journey through The Land of the Free in search of the American Dream. Besieged by horrors that barely register and violence that fails to muster a flinch, this is a fairytale in the truest sense: grim. However, for all of its grisly flaws, everything unfolds in dreamlike wonder, just as the green bulging lands of the Midwest tumble into the frightful terrain of the scarred and fractured Badlands of South Dakota.
Along the way, you are beguiled by the enveloping beauty of the landscape. It seems to subsume the stark violence around it with an air of fiction that unspools just like a film—and everyone loves those… even the characters who have cast themselves into this horrific caper. As Cormac McCarthy wrote about the beloved United States: “This country will kill you in a heartbeat and still people love it.” That’s a tale that goes right back to the bloody-minded butchering that draped red, white and blue across the epic continent, and it is no coincidence that the killing spree of Kit casts a similar serpentine slither of crimson across the scenery of the unravelling sets.
The writer Samuel Beckett once said, “The mistake I made [was] to have wanted a story for myself whereas life alone is enough.” He was Irish, so clearly this drive to forge a fairytale is universal—ingrained somewhere in the human comedy we are forced to perpetuate by our nature. However, it is all the more apparent in a country that comes with the word ‘Dream’ as part of its tagline.
In a wildly different film, this is somewhat laid bare, weirdly by Owen Wilson in You, Me and Dupree. “Some of you – and this is the group that no one ever comes into career’s day and addresses, and it’s criminal – are just going to float along. […] This group of pods is going to do a lot of languishing and you’re going to take some heat for it. Sadly, you will. Europe’s a little easier, and so is South America. I went to Argentina one time, and everybody just seemed to be sitting around and it was beautiful.” In a land that promises so much, such an existence leaves little room for the disenfranchised to languish. So, Kit decides to drive out there and grasp it: violence, the great eviscerator of aimlessness.
In Badlands, this is laid out bare. At one point Kit is asked by a clerk, “What kind of work do you think you’d be qualified for?” At the time, he responds, “I can’t think of anything at the moment.” But in the end, he admits, “I always wanted to be a criminal, I guess. Just not this big a one. Takes all kinds, though.” At that stage, he has killed seven people in cold blood and is facing the death penalty.
This casual calamity perfectly epitomises both the rampant violence that pervades the history of America and the social engine of fame and fairytales. A perfect pastiche of this is the killer that Kit is based on. The real-life murderer, Charles Starkweather, has been the basis of countless novels, songs and films. His name is etched into the infamy of American cultural history like Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer.
Starkweather, like Kit, idolised James Dean. That mostly seems to be the aim of Malick’s Kit, in fact, to be a rebel without a cause. He is not a malicious, bloodthirsty psychopath, as a matter of fact, he abides by the American ideals of good manners and keeping the streets clean. These virtues are subverted into molehills alongside the sheer violence that he unleashes in a state of utter detachment.
This is a point that Malick once made himself. “I wanted the picture to set up like a fairy tale,” he explained. “[kit] is so desensitized that [he] can regard the gun with which he shoots people as a kind of magic wand that eliminates small nuisances.” Adding: “Kit and Holly even think of themselves as living in a fairy tale.” You half wonder whether the falsehoods that continue to fill America are still perpetuating violence in a similar sense today. In a place of violent dreams, blood can often be seen as a means to an end.
This is an age-old appropriation. “Children’s books,” Malick says, “were often filled with violence,” it’s just that on this occasion the lovers on the run were not fleeing dragons or king’s men, but the sorry grips of a dower, languishing reality, and their only costumes were a James Dean cut-out and a twirling baton. However, such is the mesmerising wonder of the dream that they drag the audience into, much of the upheaval plays out like a somnolent unspooling as though the greater reality beyond their own existence is moot and other people are simply pawns in their game.
Thusly, Malick used the fairytale tone “take a little of the sharpness out of the violence but still keep its dreamy quality.” This allowed the film to gloss over other narrative points that often escape the microscope like how Holly is only 15. In fact, the paedophilic relationship barely even gets a mention amid all the violence.
Everything, in every sense, is bloodstained and airbrushed. Virtues are twisted, motives and consequences are muddied, and the whole thing somehow proves lyrically mesmeric. As Sheen said about the script years after he read it: “It was a period piece, and yet of all time. It was extremely American, it caught the spirit of the people, of the culture, in a way that was immediately identifiable.” It still lingers in that captivating timeless lurch with more to say than could ever be revealed. It is not only one of the greatest American movies ever made but in a perfect poetic paradox of its cinematic ways, one of the truest.