The world was like a faraway planet, to which I could never return ... I thought what a fine place it was, full of things that people can look into and enjoy.


(Holly, Badlands)


Loosely based on the true events of 1950’s spree killer Charles Starkweather (of whom Bruce Springsteen sang: “They wanted to know why I did what I did/Well sir I guess there's just a meanness in this world), Badlands follows James Dean obsessed Kit and his under-aged girlfriend from murder to murder until Kit stops the Cadillac and turns himself in. Very unlike either Straw Dogs or A Clockwork Orange, seminal violent films released two years before Badlands, Malick is not interested in the psychology of his characters. Unlike Peckinpah, he doesn’t see a need to make us complicit in the act of violence, or like Kubrick, aware of its ecstatic properties. Rather, each violent movement of the film is posed as a poetic moment in Heidegger’s sense of the term, an eruption of the possibility of transcendence in a world that has lost its potential for meaning and direction.


And this is not to say that Malick understands violence as poetry or transcendence. That is, unfortunately, fair to say of Peckinpah. But that Malick has taken the Starkweather myth and understood it in Heidegger’s terms. Having extensively studied, taught, and translated Heidegger, a recognition of his influence seems to unfold Malick’s films, which are cast at a poetic distance and uninterested in modern questions of psychology, motivation, and causality. Badlands lacks any interpretive framework. We wait for it to appear in Holly’s naïve voiceover, but it never does. We are poised for the gavel of moralism to fall when Kit gives himself up, but we find that all the police are enchanted by the murderous myth he has enacted. They are attracted to the pure freedom he embodies in the same way James Dean remains an icon of cool indifference. (As Malick said to Sheen during production: "Think of the gun in your hand as a magic wand.") Malick fails to mark different spaces of the film with any indication of his own personality, and in this way the film quietly grows under the logic of its tangential connection to Starkweather.


And this is all an intentional practice of Heidegger’s dictum on art: "Color shines and wants only to shine. When we analyze it in rational terms by measuring its wavelengths, it is gone." Likewise, Malick’s genius lies in his ability to limit access to Kit and Holly. Any attempt to think of either as monstrous or evil causes each character, as poetic figures rather than moral figures, to evaporate. And this in no way absolves Kit and Holly from their crimes. It actually puts any moral reflection on their story on better footing, freeing it from immediate directorial commentary or audience response, and attaching it to the deeper questions of meaning and existence in which Malick is interested.


The central image of the film is that of Kit and Holly jetting across the flat plains to Montana in a stolen Cadillac. Its total incongruence best expresses Malick’s interest in holding us at arm’s length, forcing us to read his poem stanza by stanza. It may be during this sequence that we see some of Malick’s thought unconsciously slipping through, the camera often drifting off to the right or left on the empty earth they are crossing. But if anything, these seeming indiscretions are part of his attempt to demonstrate how connected Kit and Holly are to their barren world. Throughout there are overtones of Swiss Family Robinson, Tom Sawyer, and Huckleberry Finn. But these literary echoes only more closely link the two lovers immediately to nature rather than circumstance - anticipating the possibility of any analysis, they emerge from it before any thoughts emerge from them. This sense of “nature” and “earth” is well-captured in Adam Kirsch’s brilliant essay on Heidegger and Poetry, “Taste of Silence”:

To understand exactly what Heidegger means by this numinous formula, it's necessary to sketch his complex argument. To answer the abstract question "What is art?" Heidegger begins by setting the reader before a particular artwork—a Van Gogh painting of a pair of shoes. When you wear shoes, he points out, you seldom think about them. Shoes, like all kinds of tools and equipment, are at their best when they are most reliable, that is, when they perform their function silently and unobtrusively. In fact, you only begin to pay attention to your shoes when they stop working properly—when they pinch your foot or when the sole comes off. And most of the objects that surround us share this quality of being instruments, things that we use and ignore.


Looking at Van Gogh's painting of a pair of shoes, Heidegger suggests, something different happens. For the first time, we become aware of the two dimensions or axes in which a pair of shoes exists. On the one hand, we are struck by their physical reality: their weight and texture and color, all the qualities we tend to overlook when we wear them. At the same time, the painting allows us to imagine the life in which these shoes belong—the life of a peasant woman, Heidegger imagines, with her "toilsome tread." Crucially, these two aspects of the shoes—what they are and what they do—are inextricable in the painting. "In the stiffly rugged heaviness of the shoes," Heidegger writes, "there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the far-spreading and ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. On the leather lie the dampness and richness of the soil. Under the soles slides the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls."


In this way, he suggests, the Van Gogh painting demonstrates the double purpose of art. Art confronts us with "the earth"—the sensuous reality of the non-human, which we tend to forget or ignore when we are engaged in practical tasks. At the same time, art sets the earth into "the world"—the historical human context in which we work, suffer, and hope.

Malick brings us into contact with the “shoeness” of Kit and Holly. Having ceased to work properly, we become aware of their condition in the world, and the direction their story takes as a consequence. And at the same time, Badlands roots the characters in an actual context from which we can sense despair and its eventual counterpart. Kit is far too engaged in his own myth to ever need anything like hope, and Holly too swept away by the pace of their self-narrating to have discovered a story in which hope is possible. But this really doesn’t matter, as Badlands is more about the possibility of its viewers living in worlds from which the potential for self-discovery has been stripped. It is by no means a hopeless film.