Terrence Malick (dir.), Badlands (1973)
Seminar handout
“At opposite ends of the auteur spectrum, Penn and Malick share one
crucial thing. They lay bare … the process of American myth-making
as a practice of historical becoming, precisely because they show the
movement of history into myth in the arena of spectacle, spectacle
that can be murderous, destructive and tragic. Thus there is no
romantic nostalgia for the myth of an ‘old west’ foundering on
modernity as in …The Wild Bunch (Peckinpah, 1969). John Orr,
‘Malick and Pen and the Western Re-Myth’ in The Cinema of Terrence
Malick, (2007).
“At the heart of Badlands is a cycle of repetition forcing us to question
the validity of received mythic American themes of transformation,
making us revise these beliefs and ask different, complex, existential
questions that destabilize the genre assumptions and values implicit
in these very American forms.” Neil Cambell, ‘The Highway Kind:
Badlands, Youth, Space, and the Road.” Ibid.
“Malick’s dialogic approach questions these underlying visions
produced by cultural myths and simulations and perpetuated in
Holly’s daydreams and Kit’s emulations. Living a life constructed
through such signs and images reveals the contradictions inherent in
the values they espouse and the impossibility of fulfilling myths that
assert mobility and settlement, freedom and restraints, individualism
and conformity.” Ibid.
“I wanted to remain at a distance from my characters, which is why I
refused to film with a handheld camera. In a fairy tale, you shouldn’t
interfere with a story that follows its own logic. I hope that the
voiceover and the cinematography create some distance without
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alienating the viewer too much. They should distance you, and then
make you participate, then distance you again, in a back-and-forth
movement. … If you feel that you understand them perfectly, you have
no respect for them in the end; you reflect them. I didn’t want their
lives to end with the end of the film with the sort of autonomy that
people we encounter, but never befriend, have. This is particularly
true for Kit. (Terrence Malick interview in Lloyd Michaels, Terrence
Malick – on the VLE)
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