Badlands

Deputy: You like people?
Kit: They’re OK.
Deputy: Then why’d you do it?
Kit: I don’t know. I always wanted to be a criminal, I guess. Just not this big a one. Takes all kinds, though.
Deputy: [to Sheriff] You know who that sombitch looks like? You know, don’t you?
Sheriff: No.
Deputy: I’ll kiss your ass if he don’t look like James Dean.

First off, if you want to feel old, watch Badlands. First, you’ll think, “Wow, Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek are such babies here…” and then you realize that the movie’s almost fifty years old and then you do the math and…..is Lent almost over? Can I have a drink, please?

More seriously. Badlands was Terrence Malick’s first film, and while I’m not a Malick aficionado, my Movie Guy son is, so you can get his more informed take here, as well as his rankings of all of Malick’s films here.

In brief, Badlands was inspired by a real-life killing spree, described here, an event that also inspired Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers among other works. Released in 1973, but set in the 1950’s, the film could take place anywhere at any time. That’s the meditative eye of Malick at work.

It’s a fascinating film because it chooses to ignore the question most of us ask when hearing about such horrors: Why?

Everything about the film – from the landscape that is specific but also removed from reality, to the flat affect of both Sheen and Spacek – and especially Spacek in her voice-overs – contributes to building a piece in which that question of why is not only unanswerable but also irrelevant.

And I would like to remind you that Malick, by training, before he got into films, was a philosopher. So maybe pay attention.

It’s not that there’s no moral aspect to these events. It’s that Malick seems to want us to be in the moment and place in which we’re confronted with a kind of existential question – sure, we could go into Kit’s background and try to answer this question, but who, in the end, can explain anything they do, completely? Think about something – anything – you did yesterday. Why did you do that? You can probably answer it from a number of different angles – need, desire and circumstance – but at root – at the very root – there is no answer but …I don’t know.

The most powerful scene to me, in the film, occurred when Holly, Spacek’s character, in the woods and on the lam with Kit, looks through some stereopticon images from her (murdered by Kit’s) father’s house (burned down), and she reflects:

One day, while taking a look at some vistas in Dad’s stereopticon, it hit me that I was just this little girl, born in Texas, whose father was a sign painter and who had only just so many years to live. It sent a chill down my spine, and I thought – Where would I be this very moment if Kit had never met me? Or killed anybody? This very moment? If my Mom had never met my Dad? If she’d have never died? And what’s the man I’ll marry gonna look like? What’s he doing right this minute? Is he thinking about me now, by some coincidence, even though he doesn’t know me? Does it show on his face? For days afterwards, I lived in dread. Sometimes, I wished I could fall asleep and be taken off to some magical land, but this never happened.

I will say that this motif of throwing fruit away – or at someone – recurs in this film several times. Very Eden-ish – throw the good fruit that God’s given you away or even try to harm someone with it –

Anyway, those of you who have read me for a while would know that this quote above is, as the kids say, my jam – the role of happenstance and serendipity in life? What if…..?

Yes.

And so, with Badlands, we witness actions and we wonder why they happened. The answer is not that there’s no reason. It’s that the answer involves some unknowable (in this world) mixture of accident, boredom, provocation, stubbornness, self-preservation, selfishness, stupidity and the desire to be seen. Even the good things that happen, probably.

Short version:

Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast……