Badlands (1973) Review

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 is inside.

Everything Malick built a career on is already here in his first feature. Natural light, a voice that does not match the image, landscape given more attention than plot, and a refusal to explain anybody.

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 would report weather.

Sissy Spacek delivers it flat, unhurried, with the intonation of somebody reading aloud in class. There is no irony in the performance, which is what makes it terrifying, because the film is not signaling that she is wrong.

That gap is the film’s entire mechanism. The audience watches a murder and simultaneously hears it described as an incident on a trip, and the mind has to hold both, which is a far more disturbing position than being told how to feel.

It also does something no condemnation could. Holly is not a monster and not a victim exactly. She is a bored fifteen-year-old who has been given the plot of a film she likes, and she narrates it in the only register she has.

Spacek was twenty-three and reads as fifteen, which matters more 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 has not 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.

Kit Is Performing Somebody

Martin Sheen plays a man who has constructed himself out of a single image and is maintaining it under pressure, which is 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 is 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 is polite, he is 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 not interested in why. It 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, which suits him. He is 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.

The Treehouse and the Rich Man’s House

Two long sequences carry the middle and both are about domesticity, which is 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 is 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.

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 is not a tyrant and he is not cruel, he simply disapproves of a man who is obviously wrong for his daughter, which 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.

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 does not 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, which refuses the audience any guidance about tone.

Malick was not 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, which is to give the killers a philosophy. Kit has no philosophy. He has 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, which is 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 has arrived at the only ending he ever wanted, which is being looked at.

Holly gets a last line of narration that is 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 is describing at a reunion.

Should you watch Badlands?

Yes, and it is Malick’s most accessible film by a distance. A hundred minutes, a clear plot, two performances that never once ask for sympathy, and a narration that describes murder in the vocabulary of a movie magazine while the camera watches the grass.

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