Badlands (1973)

Overview

Terrence Malick’s Badlands is one of the most assured and influential debuts in American film history. A quiet, poetic, and unsettling crime drama, the film loosely adapts the 1958 killing spree of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, a real-life pair of teenage lovers who went on a rampage across the American Midwest.

Yet Malick’s film isn’t a true-crime exposé or a gritty thriller. Instead, Badlands is a dreamlike, meditative exploration of alienation, youth, and the American mythos. Through his characteristic use of detached voiceover, painterly visuals, and ethereal music, Malick reframes violence not as moral panic but as existential emptiness—viewed through the eyes of children playing dress-up in an adult world.

Plot Summary (Spoiler-Free)

Set in the late 1950s, the film follows Kit Carruthers (Martin Sheen), a 25-year-old trash collector with James Dean’s cool and a sociopathic detachment, and Holly Sargis (Sissy Spacek), a naive 15-year-old girl from a small South Dakota town.

When Holly’s disapproving father forbids her from seeing Kit, Kit kills him almost without remorse, and the young lovers flee into the badlands of Montana. What follows is a crime spree marked not by frantic chases or adrenaline-fueled action, but by quiet, episodic interludes in nature, isolation, and surreal detachment from consequence.

Themes and Analysis

The Banality of Evil

Unlike traditional cinematic outlaws, Kit and Holly don’t seem fully aware of the implications of their actions. Kit commits murder with the same emotional register he uses when lighting a cigarette. The violence is swift, casual, and disturbingly matter-of-fact, reflecting Hannah Arendt’s concept of the "banality of evil."

American Innocence and Mythmaking

Kit consciously models himself after James Dean, while Holly narrates their journey in the tone of a dime-store romance novel. Both characters are consumed by media-fed ideas of rebellion, love, and destiny, revealing a cultural myth of romanticized outlaws that Badlands quietly critiques.

Alienation and Emotional Detachment

Holly’s narration is crucial: she describes horrific events with the bland, colourless tone of a teenager recounting a vacation. This narrative technique creates an emotional distance that both lulls and unnerves the viewer, reflecting a broader theme of detachment from meaning in post war American life.

Nature and Transcendence

Malick, a trained philosopher, imbues the film with transcendentalist imagery. The couple’s hideout in the woods becomes a fleeting Eden, and nature continues to exist indifferently as violence unfolds. Trees, stars, and animals appear frequently—silent observers to human folly.

Direction and Style

Terrence Malick’s directorial debut already reveals his unique, unmistakable style:

Voiceover: Sissy Spacek’s narration, written with simplicity and understatement, is used as ironic counterpoint to the visuals. This would become a Malick trademark.

Visuals: Cinematographer Tak Fujimoto (later of Silence of the Lambs) frames the American landscape with a painter’s eye. Sunlight, wheat fields, and wide skies create a natural beauty that contrasts with the violence.

Minimalism: Dialogue is sparse. Malick avoids conventional plot beats in favour of vignettes that feel more observational than narrative-driven.

Sound and Music: The use of Carl Orff’s “Gassenhauer” and other classical compositions lends the film an almost fairy-tale tone, further disorienting viewers from its violent subject matter.

Performances

Martin Sheen as Kit

Sheen gives one of his most nuanced performances, equal parts charming and terrifying. He captures Kit’s surface-level charisma—his posturing, his affectations—but beneath it, there’s a chilling vacancy. It’s a restrained, hypnotic performance that avoids caricature.

Sissy Spacek as Holly

At just 23 (playing 15), Spacek is extraordinary. Her Holly is an enigma: sometimes passive, sometimes curious, occasionally romantic, but mostly adrift. Spacek’s uninflected narration and wide-eyed expressions perfectly mirror Malick’s tone—innocent yet unknowably distant.

Soundtrack

The score, especially Orff’s “Gassenhauer,” is one of the most iconic uses of classical music in film. It appears deceptively cheerful, lending scenes an air of tragic innocence and fatalism. Other pieces add a haunting stillness to the story, underscoring the film’s contrasts between serenity and horror.

Reception and Legacy

Though modestly received upon initial release, Badlands is now considered a masterpiece of American cinema and a foundational work in the New Hollywood movement.

Influence: Its poetic detachment and morally ambiguous protagonists paved the way for later films like True Romance, Natural Born Killers, and The Virgin Suicides.

Critical Acclaim: Widely praised by critics such as Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert. Ebert called it “one of the most cold-blooded, heartless movies ever made—and one of the most poetic.”

Restoration and Preservation: In 2011, Badlands was selected for preservation in the U.S. National Film Registry for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”

Conclusion

Badlands is a quiet, beautiful, and deeply unsettling meditation on youth, alienation, and the myths we construct to give life meaning. With painterly visuals and an eerily affectless tone, it reimagines the lovers-on-the-run genre not as romance or tragedy, but as an existential dream—where violence is as meaningless as a change in the weather.

Terrence Malick’s debut established him as a filmmaker of rare vision, and Badlands remains not just a landmark of 1970s American cinema, but a timeless study of innocence corrupted and myth turned inside out.

A poetic and disturbing masterpiece of lyrical minimalism.

Would you like a comparison between Badlands and Malick's later films like Days of Heaven or The Tree of Life?