Why I Feel Bad For Not Liking Badlands More Than I Did

Badlands is unquestionably a good movie - it is probably even a great movie. It explores questions of innocence and loneliness, desolation, isolation, and making your way both into adulthood and finding your way in the world. Sissy Spacek's innocence is heartbreaking, while her falling-into and out-of love with Martin Sheen could be rendered as tragic. Martin Sheen's wandering eyes morph from unsettling into something slightly-less than full blown psychotic. Its a twisted, modernist anti-fairy tale and Terrence Malick has certainly achieved something unique. I recognize that the movie will grow in my consciousness, and that I may find myself puzzling over how the isolated incidents of violence, distanced from the surrounding psychological violence of society take on a different dimension and succeed in a subtle shift of meaning.  And plaudits and plaudits and plaudits can continue to follow. All of these are true and not to be marginalized - it is a great piece of art.

Withthatbeingsaid, Badlands for me, groaned under the weight of its own (potential) transcendence. I cannot remember a movie that had so much to say, seemingly achieved it with such felicity, and yet pushed me away from the experience so much. It would be trite to blame an overly hokey-ness of the constructions which Kit (and perhaps Holly) seem to be rebelling from. Yet I could never shake the notion - his one insightful existential scene aside - that Kit was a young man with little to offer, who made violence his excuse for holding himself above the norms of his world. Holly does what any teenage girl might do with a perverse fascination - she gets sick of Kit. Simple enough. Try as he might, not even Kit's violence can disconnect him from a world of triumphant normalcy. He is doomed to be a forgotten episode of crazy violence. While Kit's selfishness and braggadocio brings about the death and downfall of himself and others, being unable to care for him seems to render the rest of his universe, and therefore his actions, meaningless. The film's nihilism isn't what bothers me; to the contrary it is not unsettling enough. Trapped in its own perspective, we are left remote if we simultaneously cannot enter in. The journey from life as traditionally-defined, to outlaw status in a world of your own making requires an investment in the journey's origin.

While it would be tempting to say that such disconnects irredeemably flaw the experience, I can conversely understand how all of this gives the film its evocative power in the first place. Or maybe I cannot see beyond its almost universally acclaimed status. Perhaps the normalcy that is meant to begin (and end) the journey is never meant to be so normal. Perhaps the journey is one into the self more than out into the barren expanse. Rupture rarely come as a cosmological tearing of fabric; we fall in contradictory times, simultaneously bound by the moment and imbuing a folded time into it. We depart, only to return. Is it any wonder that our grip is lost through subtle shifts and  perturbations within and across moments we never would have expected? The film is contradictory: sparse and jam-packed; vacuous and full-of-meaning. Perhaps hinting at a deeper statement. Surely, it is fitting that I felt similarly conflicted watching it.