BADLANDS

The girls, they do love a good-looking bad boy who plays by his own rules, and Kit Carruthers (Martin Sheen) is certainly that. With his sideburns, pompadour and broodingly intense manner, Kit has the James Dean thing going on big time, and his pet teenybopper, Holly (Sissy Spacek) is just wild about him.

But while Kit may look like he just stepped off the set of Rebel Without a Cause, unfortunately this rebel does have a cause; he’s a serial killer, cruising through the Midwest, leaving a path of corpses in his wake and taking Holly along for a wild ride.



Hopefully this all doesn’t make Terence Malick's 1973 film Badlands sound more romantic than it is, for while there is a certain awful, Bonnie and Clyde glamor of these two, what we mostly feel for them is pity tinged with revulsion.

Kit has the swagger and the cool of a teen juvie, but he’s actually a garbage man who is ten years older than his jailbait girlfriend. Holly, for her part, is a “good girl” from a “good home” who is happy to tag along on Kit’s murder spree if it means she can escape her suffocating suburban existence. Kit’s a dumb psycho who kills pretty much anybody who crosses him (including, early on, Holly’s dad) but he also seems to think that murder makes him a non-conformist, a bigger man than the loser who used to lug sacks of people’s trash around. Holly has spent too long lost in her world of pulp fiction and movie magazines, and when Kit comes along she’s so desperate for a real, live romantic hero that she’ll follow him straight to hell without a look back.

Martin Sheen has now been a puffy, avuncular, respected character actor for so long that it’s a shock to look back and see what an intense, wiry little rooster he was when he started out. Looking quite a bit like one of his own sons (well, his sons back before they themselves started looking puffy and avuncular), Sheen plays Kit with such conviction that the role could have easily typecast him if anybody but the critics had seen the film when it came out. Spacek was well into her twenties when she played the 15-year-old Holly, but her tight little face and spooky innocence were extremely successful in putting across this raw, dangerously malleable girl.

Some critics have seen the film as a scathing indictment of the American media and the way it makes heroes out of bloody zeroes like these. Others have seen it as a critique of the nation’s shallow values, at a culture that pumps dumb kids full of big dreams and no way to realize them. Kit and Holly have been held up as counter cultural heroes (this was 1973, remember) nearly as often as they’ve been cited as the poster children for the banality of evil.

Tak Fujimoto's cinematography sometimes lifts us right out of the action; suddenly we see these characters lost amid the awesome beauty of the Montana plains, and they, their crimes and their victims hardly seem to matter any more; they fade to insignificance, upstaged by the unchanging, uncaring natural world. The film simply presents this ghastly couple, records their ghastly doings, and leaves it to us to draw our own conclusions.

(This post originally appeared, in an altered form, as an article for OC Weekly.)

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