badlands

i hope someone will chime in with an erudite reading of badlands in the context of terrence malick’s whole production as a writer and as a director, or with some cool comments on its straddling different genres (the western, the psychopathic killer genre, the dissaffected youth genre, etc. — though, of course, these are genres that are often superimposed). i saw it two nights ago for the first time and i was most impressed. what a film. it would be cool to view this in our summer club, except the summer is almost over, if not astronomically, at least from the point of view of our employment (sigh). anyway, if you think this would be a good selection, read no further, otherwise, click here:

american gothic never ceases to amuse and astonish me, because of its reliably surreal character and because as much of it appears in the newspapers as in the movies. this starts off as a relatively light-hearted film, though sissy spacek’s pale, freckled face and her long white legs are a bit spooky, probably because hollywood has trained us to perceive albinos and very pale people in general as spooky. she is also spooky because of her extraordinary lack of affect. so when martin sheen, who looks strangely misshapen in his tight white t-shirt and tight blue-jeans, turns out to be a psychopath, we realize the film contains not one, but twopsychopaths: a violent one and a totally disaffected, disconnected one.

malick does nothing to give us a sense of the genesis of these psychopathologies. he is not interested in social critique, i feel, but in the bizarre ways in which modernity (cars, oil, blue jeans, james dean), the eerie and sublime landscape of the american west (and i’m aware south dakota is not exactly the west), and the human psyche intersect. sheen and spacek are children adrift in a world they don’t have the measure of. the shootings, the robberies, the encampments, their conversations are make-believe. these are children with guns, precursors of high-school shooters, minds too undeveloped to deal with the real, whatever that is.

what reality is, is, in fact, something the film interrogates. is reality the cold, cruel world in which spacek’s father lives, a mixture of decay and rust on the one hand, and lovely hand-painted billboards full of bright, pale green in the dusty desert on the other? or is it picking up trash and holding a job? or a wealthy, polite man who, alone, knows how to handle these kids and therefore survives his encounter with them? finally, is reality the predatory culture of bounty hunting? all these fantastic scenarios, with their endowment of bizarre characters, are the appropriate backdrops for kit and holly’s fabulous adventures, which are a travel into law-less land not dissimilar from that of huck finn, holden caulfield, and other literary children. there is no mercy for kit and holly, though. parentless and deeply alone, they succumb to the impersonal arm of the law.