Badlands (1973) Review
9/10
Kit is twenty-five, collects garbage, and has decided he looks like James Dean. Holly is fifteen, twirls a baton, and reads celebrity gossip. He shoots her father in the kitchen, they burn the house down, and they drive north. The 9 is for a film that solves the hardest problem in the true crime form. Two people do appalling things across a hundred minutes and the film neither condemns them nor invites you to admire them, because it hands the narration to somebody who has no vocabulary for what she’s inside. Everything Malick built a career on is already here in his first feature. Natural light, a voice that doesn’t match the image, landscape given more attention than plot, and a refusal to explain anybody.
Badlands frightens me more than most horror films, and it does it in broad daylight. I admire Malick’s patience here, the way he trusts two calm young faces and an enormous empty prairie to carry dread that a louder director would spell out in dialogue. Of all his films, this is the one I’d hand to somebody who thinks Malick isn’t for them.
The Narration Is the Horror
Holly narrates in the cadence of a teenage romance serial. She describes a killing and then mentions that Kit was in a good mood afterward. She reports a body the way she’d report weather.
Sissy Spacek delivers it flat, unhurried, with the intonation of somebody reading aloud in class. There’s no irony in the performance. That’s what makes it terrifying, because the film isn’t signaling that she’s wrong.
That gap is the film’s entire mechanism. The audience watches a murder and at the same time hears it described as an incident on a trip, and the mind has to hold both. That’s a far more disturbing position than being told how to feel.
Spacek’s voice-over is the thing I’d single out if I could praise only one part of this film. Hearing her mention that Kit was in a good mood after a killing made my stomach drop, because she says it in the same breath she’d use for a school dance.
It also does something no condemnation could. Holly is a bored fifteen-year-old who has been given the plot of a film she likes, and she narrates it in the only tone she has.
Spacek was twenty-three and reads as fifteen. That’s more important than it sounds. An adult playing the part with any knowingness would turn the film into a study of complicity, and what the performance delivers instead is somebody who hasn’t yet worked out that any of this is really happening to her, and who may never work it out at any later point in the whole of her life.
An unreliable narrator doesn’t have to lie. Holly reports everything accurately and the unreliability is entirely in the vocabulary. That’s the more sophisticated version of the device and much harder to sustain.
The technique works when the narrator’s tone belongs to somebody specific. Holly’s comes from magazines and paperback romance, so every phrase is traceable to something she’s read, and the source tells you who she is. Never have the narrator notice the gap. The moment she says that it was strange how little she felt, the effect collapses, because the audience is being handed the interpretation they were doing themselves.
Kit Is Performing Somebody
Martin Sheen plays a man who has constructed himself out of a single image and is maintaining it under pressure. That’s a much stranger and better idea than a charismatic killer. Everything he does is for an imagined audience. He records a message on a dictation machine explaining himself. He leaves a stone to mark where they stood. When he’s finally caught he asks the officers whether he looks like James Dean and is pleased when they agree.
The performance is built on a small vanity operating continuously. He’s polite, he’s helpful, he shoots people without changing expression, and the through line is that he wants to be regarded as somebody worth watching.
The real Charles Starkweather killed eleven people in Nebraska and Wyoming in 1958, and Malick keeps the shape and discards the psychology. The film is interested in a man who has confused being famous with being a person. Sheen was thirty-two playing twenty-five and the small excess reads as the character trying slightly too hard. That suits him. He’s a man imitating somebody younger and more beautiful than he is, and the physical strain of the imitation is doing work the script never mentions.
Sheen is terrific, and the moment that stays with me is the arrest, when he asks the officers whether he looks like James Dean and is pleased when they agree. I think that’s the sharpest portrait of a killer’s vanity I know of in American film.
The Treehouse and the Rich Man’s House
Two long sequences carry the middle and both are about domesticity. That’s the last thing this story should contain. They live in a forest for a stretch, build a shelter in the trees, set traps, and keep house. Holly narrates it as an idyll and the film photographs it as one, with dappled light and a stolen record player, and the audience knows what’s coming down the road. Later they occupy a wealthy man’s house, eat his food, use his rooms, and Kit records his message on the dictation machine. Nobody is harmed and the sequence is unbearable, because the tension is entirely in whether this is the visit where he decides otherwise.
I find the rich man’s house harder to watch than any of the shootings. I kept waiting for Kit to change his mind, and the film makes me wait a long time without ever letting me off the hook. Those two stretches are why the film works. Almost nothing happens in either, and both are more frightening than the killings, because the audience has learned that the violence arrives without warning or reason. Warren Oates as the father is the other piece of restraint. He’s not a tyrant and he’s not cruel, he simply disapproves of a man who’s obviously wrong for his daughter. That makes him correct. Killing a reasonable man in his own kitchen over a reasonable objection is the film establishing exactly what kind of story this will be.
Once you establish that violence is arbitrary, ordinary scenes become tense at no cost. The reader supplies the dread because they’ve been taught the rules.
That’s the most efficient economy available in a thriller. Two early unpredictable acts buy you an hour of quiet scenes that read as suspense, and the alternative is manufacturing threat continuously. The condition is that the arbitrariness must be genuine. If your character only kills when the plot requires it, the reader works that out and the quiet scenes go slack again.
The Landscape Does the Commentary
Malick shoots the Midwest as enormous, indifferent and beautiful, with long takes of grass, sky and distance that have nothing to do with the plot. Those shots are the film’s moral position. The country doesn’t care what these two are doing, the space is too large for them to matter in, and the fires they set are small against it. Much of it was shot in Colorado standing in for South Dakota, largely in natural light with a small crew, and the visual approach was unusual enough that the film looks like nothing else from 1973. The Carl Orff music does the other half. A simple repeating figure on xylophone, childlike and mechanical, playing under both the idyll and the killings without changing. That refuses the audience any guidance about tone. That Orff music disturbs me. It plays like a music box under a murder, and it does more damage to my nerves than any scary score could.
Malick wasn’t yet thirty when he made it, had trained as a philosopher and had written for other directors without much satisfaction, and put twenty-five thousand dollars of his own money into it. Nothing about the film suggests a first feature except the willingness to try something nobody had asked for.
Why It Beat Everything That Copied It
Three hundred thousand dollars, half of it raised by Malick himself from private investors, and now the template for a whole strand of American film.
Everything from True Romance to Natural Born Killers borrows this structure, and almost all of them make the same mistake: they give the killers a philosophy. Kit has no philosophy. He’s an idea about how he looks. The other common error is style that comments. Later films in this line use the visual grammar to signal that the violence is transgressive or exhilarating, and Malick’s camera stays entirely neutral. That’s the harder and more disturbing choice.
The last scene is the proof. Kit is on a plane in custody, chatting comfortably with the officers, giving away his possessions as souvenirs, entirely at ease. He’s arrived at the only ending he ever wanted. That’s being looked at.
Holly gets a last line of narration that’s the coldest thing in the picture. She reports, in the same magazine cadence, who she eventually married and how things turned out, as though the preceding hundred minutes were a summer she’s describing at a reunion.
Resist giving your antagonist a worldview. A killer with a philosophy is arguing with the reader, who can defeat him intellectually. A killer with a vanity can’t be argued with, because there’s nothing there to engage.
The rule generalizes. The most disturbing characters in fiction usually want something small and understandable, pursued without proportion, instead of something grand.
Neutral presentation is harder than commentary and worth the difficulty. A camera or a prose style that declines to signal how you should feel forces the reader to arrive at their own position, and positions they reach themselves are the ones that stay.
Should you watch Badlands?
Yes. It’s a 9 because Malick gets the hardest thing in this kind of film right: he never tells me what to think about Kit and Holly, and that refusal leaves me more disturbed than any sermon would. Spacek’s narration, Sheen’s vanity and those long, indifferent shots of grass and sky make it his most accessible film by a distance, a tight hundred minutes. I’d have liked a little more of Warren Oates before the kitchen, and that’s about my only gripe.
