Badlands (Terrence Malick, 1973)

Been meaning to get around to Badlands for a while now, hearing many an enraptured account of it. It's certainly good, and fits into the books that have been falling into my lap of late – Kafka, Camus, DeLillo's Omega Point. All deal with existential themes, I suppose. (Then again, I'm increasingly aware of the operations of what Deleuze would call 'the dogmatic image of thought' - put simply, the tendency to get an idea in your head and then see it manifest wherever you look). One might ask What doesn't 'deal' with 'existence'? Huh.

Spacek of the gorgeous almond and alien eyes likens Martin Sheen's character Kit to James Dean in one of her naïvely romantic voiceovers, a description echoed (to Kit's pleasure) by the arresting officer. James Dean being that iconic rebel without a cause that, like Camus, was snuffed from lived existence in a car crash.

Badlands was inspired by the 1957 killing spree of Charles Starkweather and girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate, but these particulars of course dissolve in the general: the outlaw as emblematic of the American Western frontier pushing, and the outlawed lovers as an intensification of this mythology, the doomed romantic in doomed romance. As such Badlands takes its cue from 1967's Production Code busting Bonnie & Clyde. It also reminds me of Antonioni's Zabriskie Point (1970), the second in his MGM 'trilogy' (Blow Up, 1966, and The Passenger, 1975 - this latter cowritten by structuralist film critic Peter Wollen). There again we have the antiestablishment figures, growing up absurd, a backdrop of overbearing patriarchal authority and, crucially, the American landscape as both a liberating and crushing  space, regarded as beautiful or awesome but wholly indifferent to our regard.

I love Malick's use of the apparatus of media - private presses, Spacek's murdered father's stereopticon - that seem to underline the dreamlife that Spacek and Sheen's characters lead and Kit's need to establish himself in the pantheon of the outlaw, leaving messages from beyond the coffin he seems resigned to nailing together with each dubiously motivated shooting.

Spacek gets the last gaze though. Holding onto the image of Kit as a James Dean rebel, equally spinning out his public image even as he is chained and bound for the electric chair, her regard remains dreamlike and it is as if it were her gaze, doubled and held in counterpoint with her poetic monologues, that built Kit all along, that it is she and not Kit's violet inscription of himself upon the world that carries their story, cradle to the grave.