BADLANDS (1973) : T.Malick : 10/10 : rough notes

Published on: August 31st, 2008

1. The film is full of wild disparities and disjoints. A mixture of the poetic and the gritty : opens with garbage (talk of dead dog… dead cow). Incongruous touches.
2. Both of the main characters have a self-image which proves notably at odds with the reality we are able to perceive. Their self-images float above reality like the red balloon which lifts off into the evening sky.
3. Holly's voice-over is dreamy and airy, in contrast to Kit's compulsive chatterbox chatter.
4. Three cinematographers are credited.
5. Offbeat sound-editing decisions (we only hear the voice-over when Holly's father shoots her dog.) Germanic choirs – and Carl Orff music – for this most American of subjects.
6. Posterity is a major concern: a time-capsule is buried; Kit narrates comments into a rich man's dictaphone; a 7"vinyl voice-record is made in a booth (cf Brighton Rock); Kit instinctively assembles a rough roadside cairn to mark the location of his capture by the police. He is closely attuned to the specifics of his hair, look and clothes. And this film perpetuates their mythos (and that of Kit Carruthers's real-life counterpart, Charles Starkweather). They were entirely correct, as it turns out. History will remember them, alongside the subjects of The Honeymoon Killers, Bonnie and Clyde and Thieves Like Us. A sub-genre of the picaresque progress across the USA, by an outlaw couple (see also Wanda.)
7. Unexpected flashes of humour abound, though "screwball" (David Thomson's line) is pushing it. Deadpan/absurdity, perhaps even proto-Lynchian?
8. The time-frame is unspecified, carefully and deliberately. Eddie Fisher is the favourite singer of the cop and the cop-killer (1959?). Fisher was born Fisch; Kit adopts numerous pseudonyms along the way. Self-mythologising. He's acting in his own movie – one that probably doesn't look or feel very much like Badlands. Peripheral figures remark on his resemblance to the James Dean of East of Eden, Giant and Rebel Without a Cause. Evidence of a nascent celebrity/crime culture (with a streak of violent death, Nathanael West-style) 
9. Soundtrack: many tracks and cuts are played twice.
10. A film of colours and light. Transcendence is the aim. Attains the level of a 20th century fable. Full of reality's disjoints.
11. He is 25, she is 15. But when is she narrating this story (talks of her marriage, after her trial)?
12. Nature abounds: the terrain, and the fauna upon it.
13. Mallick's first feature: the audacity and confidence of his offbeat, unexpected touches. His manipulation of tone. Interpolation of humour. Incongruous delicacy of the poetry. Satie, Orff… unlikely juxtapositions, nearly all of which come off.
14. Her teen-dream world is evoked: the first image is of Holly and her (very large) dog on her bed. And it ends straight after she finally looks straight into the camera (and up into the clouds we go.)
15. Very real and shocking violence… Her dreamy disregard. (First shooting is that of her beloved dog — does this trigger her disconnect? Is this the only death that really bothers her?)
16. Odd, droll/daft black-and-white newsreel interlude: Boston detective in a white hat. It's like a Woody Allen spoof. Out of place? A rare mis-step from TM?
17. The sepia stereopticon, a mechanism allowing Kit and Holly to view people and places from a distant-seeming past. It's their kino-substitute.
18. The action is propelled by the Orff music.
19. The camera picks out tiny details. A gila lizard?!
20. A certain sitcom tone at moments.
21. Dust.
22. Uneasy grasp of geography: the lights of "Missoula" refineries on the horizon: not physically possible. Missoula is Lynch's home town.
23. Kit's "costume." His final line is a question about a cop's hat. It's the poetry of the dirt and the dust.
24. "Tex", "Red", "Priscilla"
25. Sheen looks more like Elvis Presley or Warren Beatty than James Dean.
26. Kon-tiki.
27. Her narration is illustrated (Jules et Jim) — allows us to jump ahead, obtain a speedy digest of a sprawling tale.
28. Two boys on a kerb. One tells the other to go with him as he leaves. The other refuses, beckons him back to inspect something on the concrete. Some kind of bug?
29. The point of badlands is that they are infertile.

Neil Young
17.Jan.09

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USA 
94m (BBFC timing)

director : Terrence Malick (debut : later Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, The New World.)
editor : Robert Estrin (also The Candidate, Internal Affairs, A River Runs Through It, etc)

seen 29.Aug.08 London
(BFI South Bank : public show : complimentary ticket)
with thanks to Kieron Corless

also online my review/preview for Tribune magazine