Review of The Badlands by Terrence Malick, 1973
This movie is like a book of poems. It is divided into sections, each with its own tone, look, and feeling. For me, that was the most remarkable thing about it. It’s like a song that changes tempo several times. But it holds together because it’s telling one story.
There are other reasons why it’s like poems. Sissy Spacek narrates the whole movie, so she is like the intrusive first person we see in so much poetry. The two main characters are emotionally distant, observing their own lives and their own emotions. Poets can get like that, observing their own feelings the way a photographer might not enjoy nature because he is setting up a a photo in his head.
The movie is calm. I know the tone changes but overall there is a calmness. Even the violence is calm. People suffer and die quietly. It starts with a dead dog that is seen simply as garbage to be picked up or not picked up. Another dog is shot to discipline a child. This dispassionate leaning into death continues and the body count grows. It is not too different than the pile of stones that Kit creates to mark the location of his capture. At one point, Kit shoots his coworker, who then slowly walks over to his bed and sits down. His murderers continue talking to him as if they’re just visiting.
I don’t say all this to mean the movie makes light of death. We all know what death is, and we know that it is more dark than light. Instead, the movie shows us the vast distance in the American soul, the desolate badlands of our hearts. And maybe it’s something more universal than just the U S of A, something about how we all observe ourselves, how emotion comes in quick stops and starts like a faulty faucet.