Badlands was my second experience of a Terrence Malick picture. It was Terrence Malick’s first.
Before watching this film today, the only Malick film I’d seen was The New World, his most recent. It’s been one of my favorites since the first time I saw it. At first glance, Badlands is a little more accessible than that film – more intently focused on its characters, tighter and more forthrightly linear in its narrative, more reliant on its dialogue and more traditional in the way it uses it.
The films have kindred spirits, though – or, rather, they share Malick’s one spirit, in their shared refusal to judge their characters (almost to the point of disinterest in this case), and in the way they both shun symbolism in a story that carries the potential to be laden with it. It couldn’t be any other way with Malick, who never veers from his unique brand of realism and puts his first trust in nature, an entity with no use for symbols.
Despite its lack of symbolism, though, Badlands, like The New World, is made up of a tapestry of motifs, woven to create a richly layered meaning that is both gloriously clear and impossible to express in words. It’s this beautiful opacity that makes Malick’s work so difficult to critique. You could make a reasonable argument for the presence of a few symbols in Badlands – Malick, after all, had never directed a feature film before – but it’s remarkable that he had as much of a voice as he did so early. The use of dogs and barking is especially striking, as is the role of nature in the film and the characters’ differing and changing attitudes to it, but these seem more motivic to me than symbolic. These link the images, events, and ideas of the film, but I can’t find any indication that they stand for anything in particular. Like the film as a whole does to your world-view, they add extra meaning that enriches the film but is impossible to describe.
As you might expect from a film without symbolism, Badlands has as unprepared an opening as in any film I’ve seen. No credits or establishing shots precede it; instead, the film fades in quickly on 15-year-old Holly Sargis (Sissy Spacek) sitting on her bed, playing with her dog. In a film with different priorities, we might take the map of Africa tacked above her bed to indicate some key to Holly’s character – a bit of wanderlust, perhaps – and I admit to almost immediately jumping to that conclusion. But seen from Malick’s objectivity-transcending point of view, it’s no more than a welcome detail, made important by the fact of its existence in the world of the film, but for nothing more or less than that.
Holly’s matter-of-fact voice-overs, which practically never change their languid tone, underscore the entire film, and she begins talking as soon as it first fades in. Over this opening shot, she flatly explains the circumstances of her mother’s early death and her subsequent move from Texas to South Dakota with her father (Warren Oates). Interestingly – and this is merely a curiosity from which there’s probably not much to be drawn – I was struck by Holly’s reference to herself as “the little stranger [her father] found in his house” after watching the last film I reviewed, Little Children, where the lead character’s daughter is referred to (incidentally, also in voice-over) as “this unknowable little person.”
If anything, this fleeting description of herself is an early hint at the essentials of Holly’s character. It’s tossed off without any indication of analysis, as though Holly, at least at this point in her story, doesn’t and couldn’t know or care what this said about her or her father. She’s the kind of person you could live your entire life with and never get to know. She herself admits that she was never popular in school owing to the fact that she “had no personality”; it’s a credit both to Malick’s writing and the subtle honesty of Spacek’s performance (unbelievable in its restraint considering how young she was) that this turns out, at least at first, to be true, and that no attempt is made at this point to prove otherwise. Holly’s big-eyed, blank opacity is fascinating, not because we wonder what’s really going on in her head, but because we’re enthralled by the fact that there seems to genuinely be nothing there. This isn’t to say that Holly is stupid, or not thoughtful – she will go on later in the film to prove both of these assumptions flat wrong, becoming truly poignant at certain moments – but she lacks some basic elements of understanding. It might be her youth, but it seems more likely that it’s a basic fact of her personality, and without the requisite understanding she has little chance of having the emotional knowledge to react the way most might to the situation she gets herself into. The way she reacts – or doesn’t react – to seeing her father, the only family she has left, killed in front of her is unreal in this way, though not “chilling” in the usual sense of the word. She makes progress as the film goes forward, but she never loses this quality, even as her acumen grows, and I could never decide what exactly the balance was in her character between emptiness and dreaminess. This is fascinatingly elusive, hypnotic acting for both the actor and the audience.
Everything about Holly’s life changes when, while twirling her baton in her front yard, she meets Kit Carruthers (Martin Sheen, coyly apologizing that his last name rhymes with ‘druthers’), a garbage man and vague James Dean look-alike. I won’t say that it alters the direction of Holly’s life, since I doubt that her life has ever had a real direction, and even if it did, Dad would surely take care of that.
Kit is ten years older than Holly and comes from the wrong side of the tracks (“whatever that means,” Holly says, more wisely than she knows), but he shares something of her detachment – though, in Kit’s case, we come to realize it’s masking something, or at least it’s not all there is to him. Holly thinks Kit’s just about the handsomest boy she’s ever seen, and damn if she isn’t right. Martin Sheen gives what is perhaps my favorite film performance of all time, not least because of his irrepressible, boyish, oddball sexiness, or his irresistible charisma. I can’t remember another time I saw an actor’s look so perfectly joined to his character. Sheen spends most of the film slouching, shrugging, loping, especially when he’s around Holly or someone else he’s trying to impress, when it takes on an almost self-conscious “Aw, shucks” quality; but when he’s in action, he moves with a lean, menacing, reckless physicality. He uses his voice – a chilly, gravelly drawl that once or twice rises to a savage bark – in the same way. It’s hard to tell how much of his personality is a put-on, and even when he’s at his most charming this deliberately dispassionate film seems to think it’s beside the point. I found myself agreeing; there are plenty of more interesting things to worry about, like just plain watching the movie, which is a reward in itself. Kit, like Pocahontas, is a perfect Malick character because he defies analysis, and wouldn’t care even if he didn’t.
Dad thinks the boy’s no good, and tells him off in no uncertain terms in one of the film’s best conversations, Sheen’s cockiness parrying with Oates’ quiet intensity in the first of many scenes set in the barren infinity of the northern plains (though, unlike the views of this part of the country we get later in the film, its broken up by a colorful man-made object in the billboard that Mr. Sargis is painting). Soon afterwards, Kit goes to their house when nobody’s home, goes up to Holly’s room, and begins to pack her things for her. But his timing’s bad and Dad catches him at the top of the stairs, Holly in tow behind him. Before we know what’s what, Kit’s shot Dad dead. Holly doesn’t scream, or cry; she knocks Kit on the head once, but otherwise she just stares, beginning to get used to the fact that, as she herself says, her destiny is tied to Kit’s, someone who, in spite of what he’s done, loves her for who she is.
We can take for granted that Kit and Holly are indeed madly in love as they both claim, though they’re both such strange ducks it seems wrong to muddy their feelings for one another by assigning words to them. Their relationship retains a cool detachment, though even in voice-over Holly has no doubts that she loved Kit, and his weird romanticism – he has a penchant for leaving souvenirs; letting keepsakes and tokens of theirs float away in a balloon, for instance, or burying them in a time capsule – seems like it might be the only genuine thing about him, besides his delight in playing his part well and being recognized for it.
Their relationship is oddly sexless. Early in the film, before Kit murder’s Holly’s father, he takes her virginity (the classic first step in stealing a daughter from her father, though I don’t get the impression that this is primarily what Malick had in mind). In a perfectly judged piece of storytelling, we only are allowed to see the immediate aftermath. It has none of the raw, hormonal, adolescent heat we’re used to seeing in such films. Dressing themselves in the shade of a tree next to a stream, they both seem underwhelmed, not with one another, but with the act itself. She just says she’s glad it’s over and asks if that’s really all there is to it. He answers affirmatively, and she responds that she doesn’t know what all the fuss is about. He agrees; they change the subject to something they both find more interesting. It’s a small, economical miracle of writing, and it makes me wish that Malick had retained more of this blunt, straightforward style in The New World, a film whose dialogue - its only significant weakness - is poetry of a more abstract sort.
After Mr. Sargis is murdered, Holly and Kit burn down the house, along with all that remains of Holly’s childhood (she doesn’t reference this at all, though the camera certainly does), and they escape to the forest. It’s now that we first get to see Malick really immerse himself in the natural motifs with which his name has become synonymous. This film impressed me, maybe even more than The New World, in how breathtaking its natural imagery is in spite of Malick’s tendency to shy away from vistas that are conspicuously gorgeous or majestic. This is, in fact, true to the extent that he finds more poignancy in a close shot of a single cottonwood branch than he does in the distant mountain vistas of the film’s final minutes -- silent, unemotional scenes which he seems to deliberately imbue with banality. The forest scenes, however, with their focus on small details like beetles and pine needles, are by far the most emotionally charged of the film, and the choice to underscore them with the film’s unforgettable musical theme (Carl Orff’s “Gassenhauser”) makes this sequence all the more significant. In Badlands, it’s always the little things.
Holly and especially Kit, who really seems cut out for the life of a survivalist, find the forest agrees with them. Holly falls in love with her surroundings, and at this point her voice-overs begin to be a little more sophisticated, and far more poetic and self-aware. Her comparison of the forest to a “big marble hall” seems to comprehensively sum up everything the film – and, I think, Malick in general – means (or doesn’t mean). They argue occasionally, but stay in love in their odd way, and do nothing much except stare at the sky, steal or forage for food, and have quiet conversations, with a little awkward dancing thrown in.
Kit constructs for them a pretty impressive shelter in a treetop, using every growing thing he can find. He teaches Holly to use a gun in case she should ever need to go on without him, but, as we learn by the end of the film, it’s quite unnecessary; she’d never be the one to use it while Kit was with her, and if he were to be killed or captured, she’d much rather give herself up than go down in a Bonnie and Clyde-style hail of bullets. I’ve never seen Bonnie and Clyde, but I’d be interested to in order to compare it with this film; I have the impression they’d share some superficial details, both obvious and subtle, broad and minute, but that in spirit they’d have very little in common.
Malick’s respect for nature – if “respect” is the right word – is perhaps the most striking and readily recognizable aspect of his style, and most on display in this sequence. The protagonists of Badlands, though, share almost none of that respect. Through the frame of Malick’s far-seeing, earthy eyes, we can see their detachment from nature as a clue to their essential emptiness. Kit is seen early in the film standing atop the corpse of a dead cow as though it were something no more consequential than a junked car or a piece of driftwood. Holly’s father callously and remorselessly shoots his daughter’s dog dead in order to inflict a relatively petty punishment on her. Holly herself throws her fish out in the yard to die when it gets sick, but her troubled reaction provides an early clue that she, like Pocahontas in The New World (another young Malick heroine who must live through and learn to deal with the influences of older, dominant males), might have the seeds of something in her that the men who populate her life lack. Paradoxically, it could be this glimmer of conscience that accounts for her almost non-reaction to witnessing the death of her distant, gruff father, and her equally calm, almost passive rejection of Kit near the film’s end, when his death wish has finally pushed her too far away to come back to him.
It’s also worth noting that the demise of both of Holly’s pets early in the film is a precursor to a series of losses she will bear on her way to becoming the one character in the film to undergo any significant growth – unlike Kit, who single-mindedly pursues his goal without any significant shifts. The fact that some part of him – perhaps the whole of him – must know from the beginning that he will almost certainly end up dead, either by a bullet or the electric chair, gives him no motivation for growth. Reflecting on this truth about him is what brings Holly, inadvertently, to her far different end.
As mentioned previously, it’s during the chapter in the forest that the film repeatedly uses Orff’s “Gassenhauer,” which will become its primary theme, for the first time since the opening credits. Along with Malick’s use of Wagner in The New World, this is one of the best uses of non-original music I’ve heard on film. Orff wrote the piece to be played by children, and its earthy but detached cheerfulness perfectly captures the specific type of fairy tale world Kit and Holly have constructed for themselves out in the woods. It dovetails beautifully with the feel of the first part of the film – though Malick has been careful to be faithful to the film’s 1950s setting, there’s a sense of fairy tale timelessness throughout, as was Malick’s stated intention. I found myself noticing the musical motif, played almost entirely on percussion instruments, extended through Holly and Kit, who throughout the film are associated with percussive sounds – Holly running her finger over the rim of a glass; Kit ringing a little service bell in the home of a wealthy man they rob; the clacking of rocks as Kit builds a monument to his own arrest on the Montana plains; and, of course, all the gunshots.
Towards the end of this “Gassenhauer” sequence is the first time we get to see Holly really become introspective in her voice-over. Looking at vistas on her dad’s old stereopticon, she comes to the sudden realization of her own mortality, and ruminates on what her life might have been like if Kit had never shown up, if he’d never killed anybody, if her parents were still alive, and so on. It’s a little free-associational gem, frequently singled out by critics, and it may be the only moment in the film you could accurately describe as touching. The succession of images she scans – old family portraits, photos of famous world landmarks she’ll never get to see – are, typically of Malick, not explicitly related to what she’s saying in any direct or obviously symbolic way, but they somehow manage to provide a visual underline or counterpoint to her train of thought, just as the music does aurally. Watching this for the first time on DVD, I had to rewind it and watch this little monologue again so I could relive its enchantingly childlike but somber honesty.
What may have surprised me most about Badlands, though, given what I was expecting of Malick after The New World, was its sense of humor, which it never let go; the last line of the film is even a joke, and a pretty funny one at that. There are little laughs throughout the movie – the way Kit cocks his head and giggles boyishly looking at pictures in a National Geographic; the quick comebacks he has for his captors at the film’s end; the way Holly reveals little by little her growing cynicism towards Kit as he shows his true colors and she understands what she’s gotten herself into, momentarily making this shy little Midwestern girl seem somehow droll. The best of these moments comes at the end, when she speculates in voice-over that Kit’s claim that a flat tire was what allowed the sheriff’s car to finally catch him was probably false, while simultaneously we see Kit climb out of the car and shoot the tire himself. It’s an attitude that lends some breadth to Holly’s character, and it’s the reason that those blank stares she’s been exhibiting the whole time begin to acquire some real significance, and even understanding, in the last half hour. The film’s last shot of her – or, indeed, of anyone – puts a cap on this by showing her meeting Kit’s wry gaze for a moment in that same way, before shifting her attention out the window of the plane carrying her to her destiny, disquieted, maybe, but almost disinterested. It’s a brilliant way of showing that Holly, without any scolding or punishment or even Kit’s lecturing, has learned some lesson, even if it’s something as shallow as her earlier stated determination never again to “tag around with the hell-bent type” – and is going to have to move on. You can’t help but wonder how Kit would have looked in response if Malick had allowed us one more glimpse of him.
If you haven’t figured it out by now, Kit’s one murder eventually turns into a string of them; by the end of the film, I’d estimate the body count at about eight or so. And as those bodies accumulate, so does our understanding of Kit, though it might differ a little from Holly’s, since she seems to share many of his dreams and ideas, albeit on a smaller scale. Looking over the other essays I’ve written on film so far, it’s easy to see that the most prevalent common theme tying those films together is an emphasis on the way people perceive one another, particularly in the public sphere, often in opposition to the way they do in the private one (one film I rewatched recently, Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 version of Hamlet, does this on one of the grandest scales imaginable). This makes Badlands a particularly apt choice to follow up, though I have to say it was just a happy accident borne of my interest in getting to know the Malick oeuvre.
In The New World, Malick explored the way alien cultures begin to interact with each other; In the Name of the Father and Little Children shared an interest in demonization as a means of mass self-deception; in Badlands, the variation on the theme is celebrity. Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, the characters upon whom Kit and Holly are very loosely based, are still familiar names to many Americans, and as such they might legitimately be described as folk heroes. I don’t know if I’d go that far, but you get the sense that, if anyone could have a chance of coming out of a completely senseless killing spree with his underage girlfriend in tow looking like a hero, it would be the irresistible Kit Carruthers. Malick and his photographers – who, lest I forget to give them their due, performed a visual miracle with the magnificently sprawling look of this film, given that they had less than $300,000 to work with – certainly don’t seem averse to putting Kit in a heroic visual context at times, a lone armed maverick figure against a vast, unforgiving American landscape; the film makes no conclusions itself, of course, but it leaves the option open to us to see Kit this way – if we do, so much the better for the film, since it’s bound to unnerve us. And, as we come to learn in the film’s dénoument, which forcuses primarily on Kit after Holly gives herself up to the law, this may have always been the way Kit wanted it to happen.
“I had a feeling today was going to be the day!” he shouts triumphantly over the roar of a police helicopter flying towards them over the prairie. He giddily cocks his gun and prepares to make a run for his car, but when Holly refuses, he returns her the same blank stare she’s been giving him the whole movie. This look, though, is borne of frustration, a kink in the Bonnie and Clyde fantasy he had in his head of how their wild days would end. Holly told us earlier in voice-over that Kit sometimes despaired of not having a girl who would cry out his name as the police shot him to death, and we understand now just what that meant to him. Kit can improvise, though, and, after telling Holly where and when she can meet him again if she chooses – Coulee Dam, New Years’ Day, 1964 (that made me laugh) – he makes a break for it alone.
And for a while it looks like he might make it. He manages to pick off one policeman and gets to his car, speeding away across the prairie, but somehow, after a car chase (shown almost in real time and just long enough, significantly and perhaps deliberately on Kit’s part, to make a good chase scene for a movie), he decides eventually that it isn’t worth it anymore. Why he gives up and shoots his own tire is heavily hinted at, though Holly’s voice-over wonders as it happens what exactly was going through Kit’s head at that moment. There are a few ways we could take it. Does he despair of not having Holly by his side anymore? Is it a grand narcissistic gesture calculated to ensure his celebrity? My guess is that it’s a combination of both – that, without Holly, he decides that the best he can do now is take a real stab at the fame that he realized at some point could be his. Kit’s a little too off-the-cuff for me to believe that he had the whole thing planned from the beginning, when he and Holly were hiding out in the forest – or at least that he didn’t misguidedly think the two of them had some chance of making it together. Certainly he knows what he’s doing on some sub-conscious level, as there are small clues littered throughout the film that he’s deliberately accumulating little details that will make his capture the kind of media event he wants it to be — he fixes his hair in the rear-view mirror as he prepares for his capture, and earlier in the film he even picks out the hat he’s careful to be wearing at his arrest far in advance, though with what specific intention he does it is unclear at the time. But Kit and his lack of foresight are a slim rod on which to hang a theory that someone like him could calculate a plan like this to become famous right down to the smallest detail. It seems rather more likely to me that it’s a possibility that reveals itself to him gradually. Maybe it occurs to him in the scene where Holly, something of a star-fucker herself, reads aloud to him from a teen gossip magazine that features stories about Frank Sinatra, Rita Hayworth, and –- you guessed it -– James Dean. Or maybe it’s during Holly’s narration of a sequence of sepia-colored newsreel-style footage earlier in the picture, when she and Kit start catching wind of militias and posses being rounded up all over the Midwest to protect against the specter of a crazed gunman stalking the plains with his girlfriend.
Whenever it happens, we can be at least somewhat assured of what’s going on in Kit’s head when, frantic to get the job done before the sheriff’s car reaches him, he builds a little tower of rocks on the ground; as he’s being cuffed, he gestures to it with his head and informs his captors, “that’s where you caught me.” And we can see the triumph in his smile — a smile that he shows only a handful of times in the film and is always fixedly associated with themes of celebrity, whether it be his or someone else’s — when the deputy remarks to the sheriff in their squad car how much Kit looks like James Dean. Mission accomplished.
A fascinating, easily overlooked aspect of Kit’s James Dean emulation – a prominent motif throughout the film that is referenced by Holly almost as soon as she meets him – is that he either fails or doesn’t care to copycat anything but the most superficial characteristics of his supposed idol. We can suppose that this is because neither James Dean nor anyone else but himself is Kit’s idol at all. Kit himself is Kit’s raison d’être. This isn’t to say, necessarily, that Kit is a narcissist (yet another label he stubbornly defies); just that Kit uses James Dean merely as a template for what he hopes to become, and to become yet more than. For just one example, Kit doesn’t ever really exhibit what could be called a rebellious streak. Speaking into a Dictaphone at the rich man’s house during the film’s second act (one of several stabs he makes throughout the film at leaving traces of himself for posterity), he seems to be encouraging his listeners towards a reasonable, well-considered conformity. He never espouses, by word or action, anything like “sticking it to the man,” so to speak. Kit, who, despite his resistance to easy labels, might most easily be described as a sociopath, displays one of the chief characteristics of a sociopath (and, it must be admitted, of a narcissist) in that he doesn’t take the true essences of others into great enough consideration for rebellion against them to even be an option. Kit simply doesn’t have the need to rebel. He is merely himself without a trace of defiance, because there’s simply nothing else he could possibly be. In a way, it’s strangely admirable.
I’ve read interpretations of Badlands, which Malick himself might have substantiated when the film premiered in 1973, that read Holly and Kit as incarnations of the effects of celebrity culture on youth, and which see the way Kit uses and views his gun as a sort of “magic wand” (Malick’s own words to Sheen on set) that exists primarily to get rid of inconveniences. This kind of reading leads us to believe that, led on by his screen idols whose stories always came in neat packages that were over in 90 minutes and so never had any real consequences, Kit could become the kind of casual, almost catatonic killer he is, and why Holly can watch so impassively. Indeed, that unfazed stare of hers makes it seem like she might as well be watching the whole thing play out on television, as though anything unpleasant doesn’t matter because any minute now it’s going to be interrupted by a commercial break. So is she really in love with Kit the way she says she is, or does she just say that because she doesn’t have a real understanding of love, and, as she’s learned from the training given her by the melodramatic “true romance” films that populate her adolescent imagination, if she’s on the run with Kit then she believes she must be in love with him?
These questions are legitimate, as is the reading of the film I just laid out. In fact, I don’t think I can find anything to argue with in it, except perhaps in the premise that it’s even been made in the first place, and — if you’ll allow me to be a little self-righteous — the idea that Holly’s narration sounds like something out of a pulp true romance novel when she is at times capable of sharp dispassion and true insight despite her inherent shallowness. This whole argument just seems too limiting to give Badlands the credit it’s due. It’s a picture that leaves so much open to observation and interpretation that to hitch it to a reading as compartmentalizing as this one seems absurd, and it undermines the skillfulness with which Malick avoids judging his protagonists. Kit and Holly are directionless, yes, and they’re bored with their lives and with themselves, and they take their cues from movie stars, and their attention spans leave a lot to be desired (especially Holly’s), and both of them see their lives in terms of how they would look on a screen (especially Kit); yes, yes, yes, all of this is true, and not only is it true, it relates directly to the film’s specific attitude to celebrity. Yes, Kit and Holly are all of these things, but there’s very little chance that minds like theirs would be in any way aware of it, and part of the film’s genius is that it has no pretense of knowing anything that its two central characters don’t – maybe even anything that Holly alone doesn’t know; after all, we only get to know the reality of Kit’s inner life once she starts to figure it out.
And they might be so much more transcendent than these labels make them seem. To write Kit and Holly off as potentially bright young lives turned in a bizarre and frightening direction by their cultural poverty is to take the same position as the disapproving citizenry that we see forming posses to defend themselves from them, many of whom are no less ignorant than Kit and Holly and are giving in to an instinct that, it can be argued, is no less base than the one Kit responds to. It’s a misguided view to take, and shortchanges the glimmers of sublimity both of them show, Kit in particular. If you ask me, in the context of this film, if you espouse that kind of thinking you’re probably asking for a cap in the ass from the world’s next Kit Carruthers. He’s the ultimate Rebel Without a Cause, not just James Dean, but the man who takes James Dean to his furthest logical conclusion. He doesn’t need a cause, but he doesn’t not need a cause. He needs nothing except food, shelter (an old station wagon will do just fine), and his precious gun, and maybe Holly, though any other vacant-faced teenager too bored with her life to care about being ripped away from it would probably do just as well — and I have no doubt she could say something similar about him. If you asked Kit what he was rebelling against, his response wouldn’t be “Whaddya got?” — he’d probably just shrug, then either thank you for your time or pop you.
It doesn’t seem that Kit believes in much of anything, except for how wonderfully handy it is to have a gun when life gets you down, and in his one-man cult of celebrity, mostly out of apathy, I guess, or boredom. To call him a nihilist, though, would be wrong, I think. He lies frequently and easily, but doesn’t seem really to have the energy to try to make his lies credible — he justifies his second batch of murders to Holly by telling her the victims were bounty hunters; if they were officers of the law who were just doing their job, he says, they would have deserved better. She seems to accept this even though one of the men is clearly wearing a sheriff’s badge, which she notes in her voice-over. And in another one of the film’s many — almost constant — uses of tension between what Holly’s voice-over tells us and what Malick’s camera sees, we learn that Kit told her that he overheard the men discussing the reward they were going to get for their capture, even though it’s clear that Kit overhears them say exactly nothing. He anticipates and looks forward to the moment when he gets caught, but he’s also paranoid about getting tracked down: he won’t sign his real name to anything for fear of handwriting sampling, even before the killing spree (another hint at how much he may have already had it planned), and he rationalizes his continued murders to Holly by telling her that when you’re really trying to evade the authorities you’ve got to play for keeps and not leave witnesses; then, inexplicably, he spares two potential victims who have gotten a good look at his face. He also hates litterbugs, says hello to old ladies he doesn’t know on the street, and in general treats everyone he meets with respect, even those he murders. He gives away his material possessions generously and without regard, though we get the impression that it’s very important to him what he looks like, and that the reason he does it is so he can leave little pieces of himself behind and thereby allow the world and its inhabitants to accumulate an idea and a memory of him though them, rather than any Robin Hood-esque magnanimity. Kit’s strange genius is in his recognition that to be a folk hero in America doesn’t mean having a heart of gold; it means having animagination that’s bizarre, original, and unpredictable enough to captivate the public. What he values and devalues changes from scene to scene. Much of Kit’s charm is his inconsistency. It’s also the best evidence available for making a case for his nihilism, but, like everything in a Malick picture, giving Kit a label like this undermines what he’s really all about. You’d do better to judge him by his haircut or his taste in music or the way he dances, which tell you more about him than a word like ‘nihilist’ ever could. As Kit’s fond of saying, it takes all kinds.
When Kit’s taken to the hangar where he and Holly are processed before being flown off to be tried and sentenced – the chair for him (he falls asleep, we learn, when his confession is read in court), probation for her – he turns into a dynamic hybrid of Bob Hope and Marilyn Monroe, standing on the wing of an airplane, providing entertainment for the troops who have done their jobs so well in capturing him, a feat which he never hesitates to praise them for. The guardsmen, all of them happy to do him small favors like a little more slack on his restraints or a cold Coca-Cola, gather around him, asking him questions about his vital statistics and musical tastes, eagerly taking the souvenirs he throws at them – a lighter he’s had for ten years, a comb. He always did love souvenirs. And he seems always to somehow manage to give them exactly the answers they want to hear to their mundane inquiries. There’s a smile on his face that could light up Montana throughout this scene, unlike anything we’ve seen from him up to this point in the movie. I, for one, felt happy for him; I don’t dare presume to know what that says about me. But that’s neither here nor there; this is the scene that finally nails this down as one of the great film performances. Let me be as plain as I can: Martin Sheen's performance as Kit Carruthers — sex symbol, folk hero, maverick and madman — is, in no uncertain terms, for all time.
The Bottom Line: Badlands is one of the most American of Great American Masterpieces, and a truly unique experience. There’s so much to be seen and understood in it that I know I’ve still only scratched the surface. I have every intention of watching it again — and musing on it again — and soon. Must-See.