From The Blood Poets:
A Cinema of Savagery, 1958-99
They
say this is a wonderful world to live in, but I don’t believe I ever did really
live in a wonderful world.
—Charles
Starkweather, quoted in Born Bad
Terrence
Malick’s Badlands (1973) is an art
movie about murder. It’s a film whose reputation has grown over the years since
it was made, and which has now assumed its place as one of the key works of the
decade. It is a curiously affected work, one that creates a strange and
disconcerting (to some people off-putting) distance between the viewer and the
characters on the screen, and in turn between these characters and their
actions. The film is not only about murder—it’s about dissociation, about
alienation, and it’s one of the few movies that actually becomes one with its
characters, in which the medium and the message, if you will, become one and
the same. Badlands would seem, like Easy Rider, not merely to feature Kit and Holly, as the
disenchanted lover-killers, but to have grown out of them. The movie gives us the world in which they exist, seen
through their eyes, and for its duration we have little choice but to share
this world with them. What Malick is doing in Badlands is attempting to create an original vision, an original
sensibility, and a new style of filmmaking by which to communicate it. The film
is impressionistic, like Taxi Driver,
and the difference between the two films (which, for two films about psychotic
killers, is about as great as can be) is more or less parallel to the
difference between the films’ central protagonists.
Travis
Bickle is a tormented, lonely, deeply unhappy man with an internal rage and
confusion building up inside him, reaching such a level of intensity that he
simply has to explode, sooner or later, simply in order to let it out. The film
is accordingly raw, edgy, sultry, feverish—rich pulpy tones, deep reds and
sickly greens dominate Scorsese’s canvas, as he creates for us a steamy
volatility and takes us into a nightmarish vision of urban squalor. Badlands, on the other hand, features
Kit (Martin Sheen) as a detached, disaffected, apparently unfeeling young
drifter who seems to regard everyone and everything with a cool, ironic
indifference, perhaps even amusement (though that’s doubtful). One day he meets
14-year-old Holly (Sissy Spacek) and decides (like everything else he does on a
whim) to court her and make her into his girl. There’s nothing in the film to
suggest what it is in Kit’s character that leads him to murder—he seems to take
to it like he takes to everything else, out of convenience, or the vaguest
sense of curiosity. He kills Holly’s father simply because he’s in the way—it’s
the easiest, most obvious way to sort out the situation. Holly’s father—played
by Warren Oates—is no angel himself (as a punishment for Holly he shoots her dog), but he knows a bad piece of work
when he sees one, and does everything he can to keep Kit away from Holly. Kit
says simply, “I can’t allow that,” and then, “Suppose I shot you—how’d that
be?” Whereupon, without further ado, he shoots him. Neither Holly nor Kit react
overmuch to this development—they are as vacant and untroubled as the great
desert plains which they head for following the murder. The film, in its own
quiet, unassuming way, aspires to being a modern, movie version of “The Waste
Land”—it’s about the barrenness of the human soul, and about just what such
barrenness can lead to.
The
power of the film—and it’s a veritable knockout of a movie—is in this very
coolness, this indifference, and the vacuity that’s at the heart of the two
characters and of everyone else in the movie (it’s even at the heart of Malick’s
vision, apparently). It’s hard to say how an empty, soulless vision of soulless
emptiness could make a great film, but that’s exactly what Badlands is. It’s an enigma of a movie, something that defies
categorization, or analysis, that simply is, like some curious freak of nature
that seems both ugly and beautiful, depending on which way you look at it. Malick
may be something of an enigma himself: a true auteur (he wrote the film also,
though it’s based on the true story of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann
Fugate) and a genuine visionary (the film both looks and feels like no other). Malick has only made
two other films to date: the disappointing rural whimsy Days of Heaven, six years later, after which he disappeared into
whatever void he had come out of, until 1998 and the disappointing, much-lauded
The Thin Red Line.[1] Apparently
he had better things to do than making movies, but his twenty-year absence
added a certain extra something to the enigma of Badlands—which seems, like Malick himself, apparently, to not quite
belong to the American cinema at all.
Badlands is rather like a painting, or a poem, that has
metamorphosed into a movie. Malick’s sensibility is definitely that of a
European, and his film has none of the gaudy, explosive pulpiness of most other
films in the genre (that of the serial-killer), from Taxi Driver through to Natural
Born Killers. Indeed to compare it to the work of Stone or Scorsese, or
even Coppola, is to realize that Malick is interested in entirely different
effects than they are. The violence in his film is largely bloodless, and
there’s a peculiar cleanliness, a sterility almost, about the acts that Kit
commits. We’re not asked to be shocked or revolted by them, but only unsettled,
disturbed. The impression that Malick creates is not that America is an
explosive, dangerously repressed and brutal place where anything can happen,
but that it is an otherworldly, eerie, somehow inhuman place where nothing
really makes any sense—a twilight zone. This waking nightmare, in which all the
monsters are hidden away (they’re lurking in the hearts and minds of suburbia),
has something of the surreal quality of Lynch’s Blue Velvet—it’s as close to the sci-fi genre as to the crime
genre, with its disconcerting sense that nothing is quite right, that people’s
acts and words and responses are all somehow off. The result is that reality itself begins to seem precarious,
as if it might break down at any minute, like the economy, or anything else. Something
is definitely amiss in this “Amerika.”
Badlands seems to be populated by ghosts and shadows,
and the landscapes (the close-ups of blades of grass and insects and
what-have-you, all cut in montage to the sublime sound of Sati) are the most
real characters in the film—they’re the only thing that really seems alive. Malick
certainly intends this effect: he sets up his characters (or what there is of
them—they’re really just voids for the actors to fill in) with all the
detachment and scrutiny of a child assembling an ant-farm. Kit and Holly are
hopeless dreamers, whose dreams amount to nothing (they gossip about movie
stars, and Kit fancies himself as James Dean), just more lazy doodling to kill
the time. (The ad for the film is for once perfectly a propos.[2]) Kit
himself is mildly fascinated (he’s not capable of obsession) with the idea of
leaving his mark on the world—of enduring somehow, as if he’s aware of just how
Malick (and we) sees him, as a tiny spot (and blot!) on the vast and endless
landscape. When he and Holly make love for the first time (Holly asks what the
fuss was all about, Kit just shrugs), he suggests they take a rock and smash
their hands to pulp so as never to forget the moment. Holly vetoes the idea
with a simple “It would hurt” (“That’s the point, stupid”), so Kit decides to
take the rock as a momento instead; on second thought, he throws it away and
takes up a smaller one. It’s his idea also to assemble a collection of personal
items from their belongings, put them in an old balloon they’ve found and send
it off—to who knows where—as a bizarre and strangely empty gesture towards
posterity. When the authorities finally catch up with Kit, he pulls over to the
side of the road, shoots his tire (to make it look like a blowout) and piles up
some stones to mark the spot. Then, when the police arrive and handcuff him, he
obligingly points out the pile. The film is made up of pleasing, tender, eerie
little details such as these—and these eccentricities are all there is to
suggest Kit’s character. He is, as the rookie who sits beside him on the plane
says (while taking him to his execution), “quite an individual.”
Yet
these moments, for all their quirkiness, never seem gratuitous or arbitrary;
the film has a logic, and a meaning, all its own, but it’s not a meaning that
reveals itself easily. Malick (like Altman) works at an intuitive level; at its
best, the film achieves an unworldly enchantment that, in contrast to the
sordid pettiness of its characters, is almost sublime.
Pauline
Kael criticized the film for its “banality,” and this is one of the few cases
in which Kael’s faculties fail her.[3] She does point out astutely,
however, that Badlands is a work perceived by the director, more than it
is articulated. (“He’s done our work
instead of his . . . Badlands is so
preconceived that there’s nothing left to respond to.”[4]) She means, I think, more or less the same
thing that I have pointed out in favor
of the film, that it seems to exist, almost like a dream, inside the director’s
head, as if never having left it; and yet simultaneously, it’s up there on the
screen. The only way into the film, then (because it’s not like other films, and this is also perhaps why some people
require more than a single viewing to “get it”) is to get into Malick’s head,
or more accurately, behind his vision (his “perception”). Seeing as this vision
is as detached and as impersonal as that of Kit and Holly themselves, it’s no
easy feat. But I don’t think the film’s point of view is that of Kit and Holly,
even if it has certain similarities with it—on the contrary, Malick views them
with as much indifference as he views everything else (except the landscape),
and with the same detachment that they regard their victims.
My
impression is that the film’s point of view is that of Nature, that of the land
itself. In which case, the “bad” is used for ironic effect, the “land” being
the one thing in the movie that is beyond reproach. If this is so, then the
coolness and the detachment, the almost lofty indifference of the movie, is no
affectation of superiority (as Kael suggests), but a genuinely “transcendental”
vision of human follies. From the point of view of Nature, of the Earth, Kit’s
crimes are no more shocking or “immoral” than any other natural cruelties; Kit
is just another predator in the wasteland whose time is short and filled with
trouble, but amounts finally to no more than this—a “quintessence of dust.” What’s
intriguing about this reading of the film (which I admit never occurred to me
until I put pen to paper) is that it fits so well with everything in it and yet
seems somehow entirely incidental, almost irrelevant, to the work itself. It’s
a meaning that lies lightly and invisibly upon the film, like sunlight on a
window pane. Yet it’s undoubtedly there, because for a work with no human interest whatsoever in it, Badlands is a powerfully affecting and
beautiful creation.
I
think that the quote that gave Peckinpah his inspiration for the title of Straw Dogs (it comes from the Tao Te Ching) is far more suited to Badlands: “Nature is unkind—it treats
the creation like sacrificial straw dogs. The sage is unkind—he treats the
people like sacrificial straw dogs.”
If Kit and Holly,
then, are as much “straw dogs,” in this view, as their victims, then presumably
that would make Malick the sage? I don’t think it’s an undue estimation.
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3. Apparently twenty years withdrawal
from the movie business—whether he was up a mountain or working in a Parisian
Barbar’s shop (as one rumor had it)—did little to develop Malick’s cinematic
gifts. The Thin Red Line—the most
ponderous, interminable and self-indulgent war movie ever made—loses our
attention in the first three minutes of screen time, and for the next three
hours fails to get it back again. The impression the film gives one is that
Malick has spent a great deal of the last twenty years reading Krishnamurti and
Meister Eckhart, but almost none of it at the movies.
[2]. “In 1957, a lot of people were
killing time. Kit and Holly were killing people.”
[3]. To digress briefly into
Kael-ophilia, there are only two other films that come to mind on which Kael’s
judgment is, to my mind, totally off, and in all three cases (Badlands, Don’t Look Now, and The King of Comedy) the film is one that
I did not care for either on the first viewing, but only later came to admire. As Kael herself wrote, “taste is
the great divider,” and there’s nothing more subjective in this world than our
feelings about movies (and the other art forms). But of all critics, Kael is
the most infallible, and though she often (in my opinion) overpraises a
mediocre or negligible work, she almost never unjustly pans a great one. Her
critical drubbing of Raging Bull, for
example, even though perhaps a tad bilious, is mostly persuasive. Since Kael’s
retirement, the world of film criticism has pretty much been reduced to a
desert bearing little or no fruits. Kael herself retired due to illness and
exhaustion (she is in her late 70s), but also, one suspects, due to general
apathy in the face of the progressive drout of quality movies.
[4]. From her review in Reeling, p. 306.