Badlands and the “Innocence” of American Innocence

Laconic: a. Short, pithy, curt, epigrammatic, terse.
Taciturn: a. Habitually silent; not apt to talk.
Sociopathic: a. From the noun: a psychopathic personality whose behavior is aggressively antisocial.

A few moments after it opens, Badlands locates its hero, Kit—Martin Sheen, back before he became our Wednesday night president—standing over a dead dog, and not reacting the way we would hope. His opening lines have to be some of the most idiosyncratic any hero’s ever uttered in a Hollywood movie. He says to a fellow garbageman, “Give you a dollar to eat that collie.” He sounds serious. And it’s a measure of the kind of world we’re in that the garbageman claims it would take more than a dollar. And the dog isn’t a collie, anyway.

Terrence Malick doesn’t make many movies. He’s only made three in the last thirty years. Mostly because Badlands, which he wrote, produced, and directed in 1973, as his first, was one of them, he’s a cult figure.

The story is based on the Starkweather-Fugate killing spree in the Midwest in the late Fifties. Most of the movie’s details are taken from that dismal saga of two sociopathic dimwits—Charles Starkweather and Caril-Ann Fugate—who killed eleven people for no good reason before being caught. And Badlands wants to suggest that there was something peculiarly American about their dimwittedness and the particularly lethal forms it took. Badlands was the first movie to really taxonomize a particularly American species, a species which right about now could use some taxonomizing: the sentimental sociopath.

For decades there’d been movies about young people in love and on the run, living off their guns, but they’d all had one thing in common: The couple had always been forced into violence by accident or circumstance. You know the drill: They just wanted to rob a store or bank, occasionally for kicks, occasionally to eat, but some unpleasant establishment type tried to take them out, and next thing they knew, they’d killed somebody. They’d never meant to hurt anybody. Now they had to keep killing. In other words, they were killers you could root for.

Kit and Holly—a teenaged Sissy Spacek, in a role that mobilized all of her girl-next-door spaciness in the most unsettling ways—are not. They’re not forced to kill and they’re not fazed by killing. Mostly they feel bad for themselves. As far as they’re concerned, they’re the most admirable people they know.

Badlands was—and still is— amazing for its insight about the ways in which a kind of hopelessly shallow romanticism, leached down from pop culture, intersects sinisterly with—and in...