“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, who only had just so many years to live.” Everything about Badlands, Terrence Malick’s debut feature made in 1974 for $450,000, aches with the loss of innocence. From the snatched innocence of baton-twirling teen Sissy Spacek, whose beautiful naivety narrates an epoch of compulsive violence with her older boyfriend, exposing herself to burgeoning thoughts of mortality, the futility of life and the desire for something more than the lot she drew at birth. The simple innocence of Martin Sheen, the twenty-something who believes he is meant for more in a chaotic world that doesn’t care about him. The decaying innocence of 1950’s America in a slow transition, bridging a gap between white picket fenced comfort and a nation gripped by conflict, murder and violence less than a decade later.
With a pack of Marlboro Reds rolled up in the sleeve of his dirty white t-shirt, Kit (Sheen) embodies a generation of American men, fuelled by the emergence of James Dean, disenfranchised with their place in society; too young to be trapped in the responsibility of life, and too old to be hopeful for the future. Emptying the bins in his South Dakota town pales to insignificance once he encounters Holly (Spacek), a free-spirited teen practising her twirling baton routine barefoot on the grass.
Through the hushed, unknowing narration, we hear how she feels about Kit murdering her father, as the two embark on an impulsive spree of liberty and violence. Malick’s trademark use of lingering, ethereal shots of their natural surroundings coupled with the repeated use of Carl Orff’s Gassenhauer perfectly present an unsentimental innocence juxtaposed with something far bleaker: their ephemeral spree isn’t fuelled by anger, or simply done on a whim, but rather it comes from necessity. The need to escape together; even if their short romance ends in death, it’s better than the slow demise that awaited them if they remained trapped, prisoners to their own mundane existence.
Malick took inspiration from the Starkweather-Fugate murders, in which two teenagers embarked on an eleven-person killing spree across two months in Nebraska during the late fifties. He never shies away from presenting the violence of Kit and Holly on screen, nor does he pass judgment. As viewers, we are lulled into a false sense of security: caught between disbelief at the savage innocence of their need to escape and the ferocious lengths they are willing to go to achieve it.
Like all of Malick’s work, there is something otherworldly about Badlands. The unforgiving Montana terrain looks like it will, at any given moment, swallow the two up whole without leaving a trace. Though it’s doubtlessly fifties America, it isn’t the presentation of the period we’ve grown to expect, doused in romanticized Americana. Kit and Holly could just as well be on a spree in the 1880s, their story emanating a sense of eternal tragedy that borders on the mythical.
Its denouement is shrouded in as much innocence as everything that has come before it; there are no great epiphanies or satisfying conclusions. Narratively, Badlands may end the way it has to, but the characters of Kit and Holly remain true to what they have been all along unknowingly out of their depth, and grimly aware of their inevitable fate.
Few directors have contributed to the canon of great American cinema as Terrence Malick who, even with the quality of his later work, arguably never made a better film. Days of Heaven may have been a more incisive presentation of his vision as a director, but Badlands combines his poetic genius with a raw, experimental beauty and ironic humour that ensures that it is deservedly considered one of the finest, and most important, American films ever made.
Badlands will be showing at The Screen at Nottingham Contemporary on Sunday 10 April 2016 at 4pm. Tickets £5. Available online, at Reception or by calling 0115 948 9750.
Contemporary Ticket Link
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