Watching Badlands in New Jersey

Growing up in New Jersey, I liked the classic movies on Channel 9. wvor Secaucus featured two weekend programs: Million Dollar Movie and Sunday Matinee. Who was the weirdo programming these slots? I was too young to understand the way Warren Beatty eyed Faye Dunaway on a dusty street, his gaze narrowing into the uncomfortable adult desire that launches the riotous killing spree in Bonnie and Clyde. I watched so much I should not have seen. Where were my parents? Carrie at the prom, her pale slip dress hanging on her body like a bloody wraith. An odd yellow light played a bit part in everything I saw. Was the image flawed, or was it the result of malfunctioning equipment? I knew then that I liked old things and open spaces. I liked the inexplicable feeling of threat, whether it was about to devastate a family or just lurked on the margins, an uninvited guest. I liked the privacy of one face pausing to look at another, not having anything to say.

And so when I found Badlands, what I liked most was Sissy Spacek shrugging by the river after losing her virginity to Martin Sheen. "Is that all there is to it?" she asks. Spacek is Holly, a teenager in South Dakota, the daughter of a widower who paints signs for a living. Sheen plays Kit, an aimless, chattering young garbage man, who murders her father and burns down their high-mannered Victorian house because he loves her. Holly's mother is mentioned once, I think, in voice-over, as Holly is looking through a stereopticon and imagining herself into another world, as images of white colonialists riding elephants in Africa fill the screen. We're looking at what she's looking at, and it's a dramatic contrast to the vast arid fields the young runaway lovers drive through after the killing. More people inhabit these photos than the town they're escaping from.

Holly is bored. Or she's tired of the inertia that marked a young woman's life in the '50s, when the film is set, pre–Civil Rights consciousness and before Second Wave feminism. She's either innocent or she's utterly amoral and thus utterly American. Mostly she wants to look at something new. When Kit steals his way into a rich man's house, it's Holly who sits herself in every chair, trying out new views and new postures.

________

What's strange about revisiting a film you watched as a kid is that you're not just watching the film. You're studying the kid you once were. Now I watch Holly more warily, but I'm wary, too, of the girl I was then. Back then, it wasn't just Spacek's performance that made Holly so real. She was real because I was eagerly projecting myself into the frame, paralyzed as I was by all that overwhelmed me: boys, forests, myself, the future. What I felt was not wonder, exactly. No ecstatic reverie shimmered out of me. My attentions were adrift, patternless. Like Holly, I was not vivid. I was also waiting for something to happen. We are innocent, I remembered thinking, and Malick invites that thought by making Spacek's character our stand-in, her gaze directing how the audience perceives Kit and their flight west. She has nothing to say, we have nothing to say. So we share her silent stasis while his temper ignites like grass fire. His temper, like a sudden and uncontainable weather system, deluges the calm, nameless fields with acts of violence, and we behold it all through Holly's glass-blue eyes.

Why does she stay? Why not stop him? Maybe it is apathy, or maybe it is power. When Kit shoots her father in the parlor, Holly watches, her lips slightly apart as if she might say something. But she won't speak, even when Kit invites her to call the "authorities." She wears a mint-green, cotton, shirt-front dress with short puffed sleeves and a sash around the waist, a mint-green picture of girlish femininity...