Film club - Badlands
Posted: 26 Apr 2009, 22:47
While I was watching Badlands, the one other film I was constantly reminded of was Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers. The similarities are clear: Malick's debut was clearly an influence on the latter - some might suggest that Stone simply ripped it off, so alike are the plots - and the themes, too, are much the same.
But the strangest parallell to draw is the presentation. While Stone's film was a mess of furious noise, flashy images and chaotic action, all employed to hide the fact that beyond its simple message, the film had nothing to say, Badlands is the complete opposite: quiet, simple and sparse, but conveying with incredible clarity a wealth of ideas.
It perhaps doesn't seem, outwardly, a particularly intelligent film: Sissy Spacek's narration is, throughout, blissfully moronic, as she reminisces happily and idiotically about the pointless killing spree upon which she accompanies boyfriend Martin Sheen. Sheen, a mouthy nobody who thinks he's a somebody, is a terrific caricature of the iconic 'outsider' that so dominated mid-20th-century American culture, his apparent indifference to his killings one of the most notable things about his portrayal of the character. He is neither shocked nor elated by his murders; indeed, after the first, he reacts by rooting around in the cellar and coming back upstairs with a toaster.
While the killing spree is shown in the most banal terms, to Sheen and Spacek it is clearly intended to be their ticket out of the nowhere town they live in; when Sheen is finally captured, he seems to revel in the celebrity he has earned - but tellingly, he is only a celebrity to the men of the police and military who have been chasing him. Nobody else's reaction is recorded, and indeed the other people he encounters on his spree - the rich man* whose house he invades, the man working in the desert and the gas station attendant - seem to have no idea who he is.
The desert and empty landscapes reflect the emptiness and pointlessness from which Sheen and Spacek try to escape; the mountain they head for perhaps symbolises Sheen's desire to be recognised and to stand out. However, they never seem to get any closer to it, and they head for it blindly and cluelessly, driving in straight lines through the darkness. And although Sheen fancies himself a celebrity, although the film supposedly shows his need to escape small-town life and make himself known, he and Spacek are at their happiest when alone, even more isolated - living an idyllic existence in their treehouse in the forest, or dancing to the car radio in the middle of the desert.
The most fascinating aspect, for me, was the film's take on the loneliness and isolation of small-town USA. It's something that has been portrayed so often in films and which is a truly strange phenomenon, to an outsider - the mix of the loud, social, urban side of American culture with the vast empty spaces it's placed in has rarely been demonstrated as well as it is here. The film really does capture the weirdness of the USA in a special way - by virtue of its familiarity and almost aggressive communality, the strange, frightening side of American life is more noticeable than it is in any other culture, and that is what really strikes me here.
But these are only my own impressions, on first viewing - I imagine that this is a film which produces different reactions in everyone who sees it, and which one could see five or six times without truly grasping everything it tries to say. Even writing this, I feel as if I've left out, forgotten and neglected some of the conclusions I drew myself.
*as an aside, I was left wondering why Sheen did not kill the rich man - the situation is similar to that on the ranch, when after locking the young couple in the shelter he shoots them through the door, but while he locks the door on the rich man and his maid, he chooses not to kill this time. Is it because he respects the rich man for having made something of himself, become a 'somebody'?