Badlands
Our movie this week is Badlands, written and directed by Terrence Malick and first released in 1973. From every point of view—script, direction, performances, cinematography, music—it’s a little masterpiece, a pure gem of the kind that comes along once in awhile and which deserves to be re-seen and remembered.
The story, loosely based on real events in Texas during the 1950s, follows a young couple on the run from the law. The pair consists of Sissy Spacek in her first important movie role, and Martin Sheen, who was also near the beginning of his career—and both of them are brilliant. The characters these two play show a bizarre originality that’s evident from the moment they open their mouths. In Spacek’s case, that’s continuously, since it’s given to her to provide the voice-over narration that chronicles the indescribably strange trajectory of their adventures. It’s not just the things these two—especially Sheen—do that are strange, it’s their attitudes towards everything. Literally nothing, no matter how extreme, seems to interfere with the banal scenarios both of them are running in their heads with themselves as the central character—scenarios which to our view are most of the time as out of touch with real priorities as they could be. Spacek’s flat Texas voice and passive teenaged blankness, Sheen’s self-conscious charm and constant project of self-glamourization and self-mythologization—these roles played out without a hint of irony or self-critical awareness make both characters teeter between charming innocence and outright psychosis.
Undoubtedly Sheen is the crazier of the two. He has a constant need to strike a pose, to play to an audience, to live out some kind of model of charismatic behaviour drawn from popular stereotypes and twisted by his own personal self-centredness and lack of perspective. And he’s constantly mixing up the important with the trivial, in both directions—so that his most appalling behaviour comes out as though it were normal and his most trivial behaviour as if it were intensely significant. He likes Spacek exactly because she’s blank—a blank screen, a perfectly receptive audience for his self-dramatizations. As soon as she quits the game, he quits too, and moves on to a different audience of cops and reporters. As for Spacek, she attempts to interpret all her astounding experiences using the framework of trash-culture romance, again employing absolutely the wrong model to make her life meaningful.
The script is what really creates these characters. It’s a virtuoso piece of writing. Spacek’s narration alone is constantly throwing off sparks—and they’re the scriptwriter’s sparks, not the character’s, since most of what she says has a kind of celestial stupidity that leaves the audience saying “I can’t believe I just heard her say that.”
Maybe the writing and the wonderful performances are what people will notice most, but really Badlands is virtually a perfect movie whatever aspect of it you look at. Cinematically, it’s as striking a piece of filmmaking as you’re liable to see from Hollywood—except that where most Hollywood movies are striking through kinetic energy and noise and colour, Badlands is striking through its quietness and restraint, its painterly photography, its visual repose. If a recent lovers-on-the-run movie like Natural Born Killers tries to look like a Jackson Pollock action painting, Badlands tries to look like a Vermeer. Every shot has a balance and a detachment, there’s a wistful and poetic sensibility running through the whole process of visualization. The photography is just ravishing, but again in a deliberately quiet way that’s intensely satisfying. And the music, which features the sublime simplicities of Carl Orff and Erik Satie and a hauntingly minimal principal theme, all arranged for cool mallet instruments, strikes the same pose of serenity in the face of the overpowering strangeness of human nature.
And so Badlands emerges as a masterpiece, albeit a miniature and quirky and idiosyncratic masterpiece. The movie’s extraordinary creator, Terry Malick, was educated at Harvard and Oxford, and before he turned to movie scriptwriting in the early 70s had been a philosphy professor at M.I.T.—not your usual filmmaker’s credentials! Although he had a hand in a couple of other scripts, Malick’s entire legacy as a director—actually a writer-director—consists of this movie and another very fine film made 5 years later called Days of Heaven. He’s scarcely been heard of since, which is a real sadness in the context of a Hollywood industry starved for truly individual voices over the past quarter-century. But even with only two fully-fledged creations to his name, neither of which made much of a splash, Malick can still be thought of as a master—as he could, indeed, if he’d done nothing other than Badlands.
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Criminal Romeo-and-Juliets on the run form a strong tradition in Hollywood from the late 1930s to the present day. But Badlands holds a unique place in this tradition. Of course six years earlier, Bonnie and Clyde had given the story type a tremendous boost, and had in particular shown how to combine popular story-elements like gangsters and cops with art-film elements drawn from French New Wave cinema. It also showed how to take an ironic distance on central characters who in many ways aren’t very smart, to produce a movie that’s simultaneously simple on the level of content and sophisticated in its viewpoint and presentation of that content. And that last quality is something that Badlands picks up on pointedly. But Badlands goes way past Bonnie and Clyde in establishing this gulf between the naivety of the characters and the sophistication of the film itself.
As I was saying earlier, what makes the central characters in this movie so bizarre is the surreal contrast between their fatuous ideas and their extreme actions. So Kit can put on a totally convincing—and convinced—show of sociability, chivalry, kindness and consideration one minute, and shoot his friend through the stomach the next. And Holly can regard the problems piling up around them alternately with True-Romance clichés of the lowest denomination and with a sublime underreaction. And the movie seems to be suggesting that there’s something peculiarly American about their delusions—that in America it seems particularly possible to lose your perspective so totally, and in just this way, especially since there are so many guns lying around.
What makes these characters fascinating and horrifying, then, is their lack of intelligence and their lack of feeling. Well, they don’t really lack feelings towards themselves, only towards others. They’re unable to see the monstrousness of their actions because of their self-absorption, their ignorance, their possession by the banal mythology of their culture, and a quality of sheer human shallowness. The technical term for their kind of moral numbness is sociopathy. But the most arresting thing in these sociopaths is, again, the sheer tackiness of their aspirations and ideology. And the film’s juxtaposition of violence and triteness strikes a real chord in the context of American culture.
In this respect Badlands is a kind of harbinger of a whole stream of movies in the 80s and 90s that juxtapose violence and triteness or stupidity—you could name Pulp Fiction, To Die For and Fargo as prominent recent examples of the type. Movies like these offer the spectacle of dumb, vapid people killing and maiming others without the faintest trace of remorse or indeed awareness that they’re doing something monstrous—and they offer this spectacle from a viewpoint of extreme sophistication and selfconscious cleverness. Look how great the gulf is, these movies say, between the stupidity of these people and our smartness—look how unaware they are and how aware we are! And at the end of this process lies the dismal practise of laughing out loud at spouting blood and the explicit spectacle of people dying. Of course this kind of attitude is carried over from that other dreadful genre, the stupid-people comedy. Dumb and Dumber and all its relatives perpetuate the ugly audience practice of feeling superior to other people and laughing yourself sick over how clueless they are.
Badlands is not completely innocent of this syndrome, of course, and it did provide a powerful model for later filmmakers like the Coen brothers and Quentin Tarantino. But Badlands has other qualities which prevent it from sliding down that slippery slope towards self-congratulation and the comedy of obscene violence. Malick’s attitude towards his monstrous protagonists is not at all one of contempt—instead it seems one of amazement. There are times when Badlands looks like a Werner Herzog movie about deluded megalomaniacs whose insanity provokes a feeling of wonder, because one can see the crazed individual simply following a sort of inner genius that’s utterly unique and human, even if it’s also impossible and intolerable. When Kit shoots the football, or decides to bury a time-capsule of worthless personal junk, when Holly throws out her fish, when the pair of them hide out like Robinson Crusoes in their elaborate Boys’ Own encampment in the woods, this feeling comes out strongly. Of course there are totally American aspects of the story that make it quite different from anything of Herzog’s—aspects like gun culture and mythical models ranging from rural gangsters of the Depression era to teen-rebel James Dean. But the surrealism of the action is allowed to take on a poetic flavour quite different from anything in, for example, Fargo, where the people are just appalling and stupid.
Putting all these things together, Badlands emerges as a special and treasurable film, one of those little miracles that occasionally happen at the edges of American moviemaking. The only pity is that there aren’t more of them from Terry Malick.
[Since this was written, Malick has of course returned, with The Thin Red Line in 1998 and The New World in 2005.]