For those of you who don't know, the Criterion Collection is a visual-distribution company that specializes in "important classic and contemporary films" and markets primarily to film aficionados. Both their DVD and Blu-ray releases are known to be of the highest quality on the home entertainment market and their products are packaged with some of, if not the best and most comprehensive extra/bonus material out there. I am personally an enormous fan and huge proponent of the collection and, as such, thought it might be interesting to do an ongoing series on the collection that chronicles my thoughts on both some of my favorite films that have been given the Criterion treatment and films that I bought as part of the collection that I am seeing and appreciating for the very first time. And to kick things off, I thought it might be appropriate to do the film that kicked off an amazing, if not highly unusual career - Terrence Malick's debut feature, BADLANDS.
Holly describes her life as if she's writing a novel. "I could of snuck out the back or hid in the boiler room," she supposes, "but I sensed that my destiny now lay with Kit, for better or for worse, and it was better to spend a week with one who loved me for what I was than years of loneliness." It's this wandering, often poetic narrative voice that permeates and lingers throughout the film and speaks to the heart of what Badlands is - a beautiful and poetic fantasy about two young individuals trying to make a mark or find purpose in their seemingly minuscule existences and being diminished under the enveloping magnificence of the world around them.
Holly (Sissy Spacek) is outside on her front lawn in her leafy, perfectly trimmed neighborhood in South Dakota practicing her baton twirling when Kit (Martin Sheen) introduces himself. She's 15. He's 25 and has just abruptly quit his job throwing trash. We don't know much about Kit and we never really learn anything about his past. He saunters into Holly's life in his denim and cowboy boots and sweeps her up into his tornado of a life. Within a couple of days he's shot her father dead, packed up what little clothes and trinkets she has to her name, burned her house to the ground, and the two are on lam, fleeing across the Midwest.
Badlands is a story that's been told many times - that of two young lovers and criminals who are pursued across America's expansive vastness. It is commonly believed to be based (how loosely can be debated) on the 1958 killing spree of 19-year-old Charles Starkweather who, along with his 14-year-old girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate, murdered 11 people, including a small child, and 2 dogs. But it also brings to mind films such as the Arthur Penn's 1967 picture, Bonnie and Clyde. That being said, Badlands is far from a fictionalized retelling or derivative rehashing. It is a standalone story that is wholly and unequivocally Terrence Malick's vision.
Many, if not all of the artistic flairs that would come to define the range of Terrence Malick's future works are present in Badlands. The philosophical profundities, evocative voice-overs and visual fixation on the natural world are all present, though incipient, and the nascent fashion of their presence only adds to the film's genius. Terrence Malick's works have become known more for their poetic blending of visuals and music than for their stories, well constructed as they may be. And the beginnings of this beautiful marriage is no more present than in Badlands. It is a film that is just as free, experimental and unsure of itself as its young lovers. However, it is not simply more of the same. Despite it's similarities to his other works, Badlands is the least Malick-like film in the director's catalog.
While Badlands contains the humanism that would become a major component of Malick's work, it is clearly his most frigidly detached film. The dream-like reality created by the exquisite, sweeping landscapes and Holly's introspective monologues remove any impact that the violence in the film would normally have. Though perhaps shocking in 1973 for its then blatant depiction of inexplicable violence and gore, the gunshots that riddle Kit's victims now seem completely cold and strangely hollow. The film doesn't treat these deaths as momentous events. In a film like Bonnie and Clyde, the titular duo are treated as anti-heroes. Though the pair might not see their crimes as morally reprehensible, the film certainly does. In Badlands, however, they're simple inconveniences to the true focus of the film - Kit and Holly's affair. Though the film depicts some truly inimitable, beautifully warm moments between Kit and Holly, it also treats the rest of the world as a series of obstacles trying to pry apart and destroy the couple.
And that's the whole point.
In an early monologue, Holly describes as scene where Kit releases a large red balloon: "Kit made a solemn vow that he would always stand beside me and let nothing come between us. He wrote this out in writing, put the paper in a box with some of our little tokens and things, then sent it off in a balloon he'd found while on the garbage route." She continues, "His heart was filled with longing as he watched it drift off. Something must've told him that we'd never live these days of happiness again, that they were gone forever." You see, no matter how hard Kit and Holly try to make their mark in the world, they're just two more souls floating in the universe, so minute in comparison to the obtruding nature attempting to swallow them whole. The nature that plays such a major role in all of Malick's films - the trees that form a protective canopy over Holly's quiet neighborhood, the brush and dirt covered planes that Kit believes will carry them to their destiny, the forest that provides the couple with a momentary utopia, a slap-dash Garden of Eden - will all remain when all trace of Kit and Holly are gone.
But Badlands is not a cynical or nihilistic film. Yes, it is a film about two people who want to be the center of the universe only to find themselves being torn apart by it. And no, Kit and Holly will not be remembered for their murder spree across the Badlands of Montana or for the shoddy monument Kit builds for himself before surrendering to the police. Just as Malick's distant, unbiased camera hints at all along, how we make a mark or find purpose in our minuscule existences is through who we choose to share those existences with. "It hit me that I was just this little girl, born in Texas, whose father was a sign painter, who had only so many years to live," Holly opines, looking at slides in her father's 3-D Stereopticon. "It sent chills down my spine," she says, "and I thought - Where would I be this very moment if Kit had never met me?" In the awe-inspiring and all-consuming magnificence of the nature around them, a young girl looking at foreign landmarks in one of her father's trinkets, just like a young man releasing a balloon holding a promise, realizes that the couple have left indelible marks on each other's heart and on each other's existence.
