One of the least prolific but most admired filmmakers to emerge in the 1970s, Terrence Malick remains a true enigma today. Rarely if ever interviewed, Malick’s poetic films must literally speak for themselves, with critical comment long swirling around the director. The son of an oil company executive, Terrence Malick grew up in Texas and Oklahoma, and went to Harvard and later to Magdalen College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar. After failing to complete his thesis, he drifted around doing various jobs, including working wheat and oil fields, as well as attracting writing gigs from Life and The New Yorker. In 1969, Malick arrived in LA to study at the AFI, and started getting work polishing scripts, including Dirty Harry and Pocket Money. In 1972, he wrote and hoped to direct an original screenplay called Badlands, loosely based on the famous Charles Starkweather murder spree of the fifties, and shot from the perspective of Holly, the girl that Kit (the fictionalised Starkweather) takes with him across the American Midwest. Boasting extraordinary performances from newcomers Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek, Badlands was an amazing debut for Malick, who would go on to make other modern classics in the form of Days Of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, The New World and The Tree Of Life. This excerpt from Terrence Malick and the Examined Life looks at the response and inspirations behind Terrence Malick’s first masterpiece…
Badlands flummoxed early viewers. Some admired its artistry, but many others struggled to understand how its seemingly naive, teenage protagonists, young lovers on the run Kit Carruthers (Martin Sheen) and Holly Sargis (Sissy Spacek), could be so blasé about the trail of violence they leave in their wake. At its most basic level, Badlands is a movie about a murder spree. Although later filmmakers, such as Quentin Tarantino and Oliver Stone, would glorify this aspect of the film, creating works that borrowed heavily from its precedent, many of Badlands’ first critics failed to see the point of putting a couple of affectless murderers up on the screen to be imitated or admired. Pauline Kael dismissed it as an overly “intellectualized movie.” It was “shrewd and artful,” she conceded, but otherwise empty.
To be sure, other critics were less demanding. They praised Badlands as a well-executed genre film — a backhanded compliment, but nevertheless true. Malick’s first feature film has everything an outlaw road movie should: car chases, shoot-outs, sex, and violence — well no sex really, but quite a bit of violence. In cold blood, Kit murders not only Holly’s father (Warren Oates), but also a trio of bounty hunters; his best friend, Cato (Ramon Bieri); and a young couple who happen to show up at Cato’s place at just the wrong moment. Plenty more blood is shed before the final credits roll. None of it seems to mean anything. Largely frustrating viewer expectations when it comes to the magical cause-and-effect calculus of movie violence, Badlands offers no motives for all the killing. There is no dramatic resolution to the film, either, no cathartic narrative closure.
Critics kinder than Kael interpreted Malick’s reticence to wrap up his story neatly as a subtle subversion of the road movie genre, which was already sputtering to a stop. In this light, Malick’s debut could be viewed as something of a statement. Malick’s “vision of violence and death,” Vincent Canby wrote in the New York Times, was a comment on mass cultural “boredom.” “Kit and Holly are,” he famously suggested, “members of the television generation run amok.”
As Canby noted, Badlands mines the 1950s true-crime story of teenage killer Charles Starkweather and his underage girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, who together terrorized midwestern communities in their home state of Nebraska and neighboring Wyoming, where they were eventually captured. Between December 1957 and late January 1958, Starkweather murdered eleven people. For some of these killings, Fugate was by his side, though whether as a willing or captive accomplice was open to interpretation. It was a senseless string of violence, one that mobilized not just local law enforcement but also the National Guard. The young outlaws did not escape the elaborate dragnet that was put into place to capture them: Fugate eventually surrendered and Starkweather, after being wounded in a wild car chase and shoot-out with police, was taken into custody. Extradited to Nebraska, he was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death, executed by electric chair a little over a year later. Fugate was given life in prison. She was later paroled, after serving seventeen years of her sentence.
The Starkweather-Fugate story had all the elements of tabloid gold: a gun, a car, a girl, even a leather-jacket-wearing antihero who styled his hair like James Dean. News coverage of the interstate pursuit of Starkweather and Fugate captivated the Midwest and, in time, the nation at large. The fact that the murders seemed to resemble the plot of a Hollywood movie — Joseph H. Lewis’s Gun Crazy (1950), for example — only heightened popular interest, fueling a moral panic: if this is what the kids were up to, they were not alright. Many thought Hollywood was to blame. Teenagers raised on Saturday afternoon double features had finally gone movie-mad. Could they no longer separate out fantasy from reality?
Although it is loosely based on actual events, Badlands is not a true-crime story. It is a movie about the movies — and about our relation to them. It is a picture preoccupied with playacting. Malick seems rather uninterested in the murders that propel his plot forward, focusing instead on the mid-century American anxieties that the Starkweather story, as a story, came to represent in the popular imagination — anxieties about authenticity and individuality, freedom and constraint, rebellion and conformism, performance and personhood. In the modern world that mass entertainment had made, just what did it mean to be an individual, somebody who stood out from the crowd? In what ways do the movies help us to find ourselves? In what ways do they lead us astray?
Badlands explores these themes in a highly mediated, self-referential way. In repurposing the story of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate for his own ends, Malick was making a statement not just about the conformism of the 1950s Midwest but also about 1970s Hollywood and about the place that he, a cinematic upstart, hoped to claim in it. Instead of focusing on moralizing questions of good or evil, right or wrong, he emphasizes chance, ambiguity, and incomprehension. One of the most unsettling aspects of Badlands is that Kit and Holly never really seem to know who they are, even and especially as they embark, almost by accident, on their life of crime. They fall in and out of things by happenstance, without so much as a moment’s reflection. “How’d that be?” Kit often asks, as if he were trying out an idea, not knowing what to do next. He is constantly looking for approval, always trying to convince himself he is the person he pretends to be.
Malick knew something about falling into things and looking for approval. After having tried his hand at academic philosophy and long-form journalism, he was, in the early 1970s, trying to make a name for himself in that most fanciful of professions, the movie business. Like everyone else in Hollywood, he was putting on a show. Badlands is a film about posturing made by a filmmaker playing the role of the big-shot director.
Only at the American Film Institute could a film like Badlands have been imagined, developed, and brought to fruition. From the start, the Center for Advanced Film Studies styled itself as an independent alternative to the corporate conformism of the studio system. It tried hard to stand out. But it also hoped to bathe itself in the allure of old-time Hollywood glamour. AFI wanted its fellows — many of whom, like Malick, had only limited exposure to actual instruction in filmmaking before entering the program — to create rebellious, avant-garde cinema; but not too rebellious and not too avant-garde. The mixed messaging was, for some, rather anxiety inducing. The roles these filmmakers in training were expected to play were hazy and indeterminate. Just what did it mean to be a film worker in the era of the New Hollywood? Did it mean adapting to genre conventions or subverting them? Was directing just another technical skill to be learned through imitation and repetition, or was it an exercise in authentic self-expression? Everything, it seemed, was up for grabs. No wonder Malick felt like a “total imposter” when he was shooting his first feature. “I had read about directors who just go out there and express themselves on the set, who have total authority,” he told an AFI audience in 1974, not long after making Badlands. “Here I was, shaking like a leaf. I literally felt embarrassed just saying ‘Action!’ I tried to find some other way to say it.”
Terrence Malick and the Examined Life is published by The University Of Pennsylvania Press. For more information and to purchase a copy of the book, head to the official website.
