The word "pre-moral" kept floating through my head as I watched Badlands. I've never used the word before, but it seems particularly apt in describing Kit (Martin Sheen) and Holly (Sissy Spacek), two abnormally naïve lovers on the run. Movies often present amoral psychopaths, but these are two carefree souls—one of whom kills without any notion of consequences—who see everything with unmitigated wonder; conscience doesn't yet exist to them. When Kit kills, not only is he unaffected by the act, but he views it as an almost natural course of human relations. A young teen, Holly's just happy to be with a loving someone, fascinated by her newfound freedom. Spacek narrates the film's events in a tone of childlike fascination, rife with questions about her destiny and matter-of-factly bearing witness. This is her coming-of-age story.
The couple's primitive exposure to the world is beautifully dramatized in their Edenic forest safe-house, in which Kit hunts for food and sets traps as Holly tries on makeup and peers through her father's stereoscope while musing on what might have been and what will be. The leisurely pace of these sequences and the exploration of their peaceful, makeshift universe is incredibly disquieting following Oates's murder. Their pie-eyed fascination with forest sounds and cloud shapes—captured photographically in impossibly radiant tones—evokes Thoreau's ideals about subsistence and rebirth through nature, but since the subjects lack the intellectual (let alone spiritual) capacity for such ideas, the cinematographic beauty creates a cognitive dissonance that lingers and haunts. This contrast of sublime creation and human underdevelopment gives Badlands its consistent, implacable power.
Malick brilliantly tips the film's moral equilibrium further askance by inserting disarming touches—e.g., Spacek grabbing her school books from her locker so she won't fall behind; Sheen's irrelevant dusting off of his fingerprints—to illustrate the couple's youthful ignorance. However, rather than justifying or diminishing their crimes, Malick sees this inexperience as dangerously seductive. (Pace Bonnie and Clyde, their recklessness is not an expression of antisocial rebellion, just the natural drift of arrested children suddenly unleashed on the world.) Skip ahead to the ending, specifically in how Kit's fresh-faced geniality appeals to the officers. Seduced by his easygoing attitude, the guards warm to Kit's amiable display of disaffected machismo ("just like James Dean"), the likable flipside to a fanciful grip on reality. Everything he knows he's learned from magazines and movies. With this movie, Malick explores the face of crime, implicating no one and everyone, somehow staying true to the complexity of human experience. It's a masterpiece.
The couple's primitive exposure to the world is beautifully dramatized in their Edenic forest safe-house, in which Kit hunts for food and sets traps as Holly tries on makeup and peers through her father's stereoscope while musing on what might have been and what will be. The leisurely pace of these sequences and the exploration of their peaceful, makeshift universe is incredibly disquieting following Oates's murder. Their pie-eyed fascination with forest sounds and cloud shapes—captured photographically in impossibly radiant tones—evokes Thoreau's ideals about subsistence and rebirth through nature, but since the subjects lack the intellectual (let alone spiritual) capacity for such ideas, the cinematographic beauty creates a cognitive dissonance that lingers and haunts. This contrast of sublime creation and human underdevelopment gives Badlands its consistent, implacable power.
Malick brilliantly tips the film's moral equilibrium further askance by inserting disarming touches—e.g., Spacek grabbing her school books from her locker so she won't fall behind; Sheen's irrelevant dusting off of his fingerprints—to illustrate the couple's youthful ignorance. However, rather than justifying or diminishing their crimes, Malick sees this inexperience as dangerously seductive. (Pace Bonnie and Clyde, their recklessness is not an expression of antisocial rebellion, just the natural drift of arrested children suddenly unleashed on the world.) Skip ahead to the ending, specifically in how Kit's fresh-faced geniality appeals to the officers. Seduced by his easygoing attitude, the guards warm to Kit's amiable display of disaffected machismo ("just like James Dean"), the likable flipside to a fanciful grip on reality. Everything he knows he's learned from magazines and movies. With this movie, Malick explores the face of crime, implicating no one and everyone, somehow staying true to the complexity of human experience. It's a masterpiece.