Badlands (Malick 1973)

And what do the trees have to say for themselves, huh? Just gonna hang out and be tree-houses? Or waft in the wind? Well sir, I guess there's just a meanness in this world. A

Blondie: I don't think those are Badlands right there, Slothy. Also: they used to know how to make a G-D movie poster, did they not? And as for the film itself, as you know, if I could watch the films of only one director for the rest of my life, it would be those of Malick. I also found myself realizing that this is the only one of his films that actually has a plot, really, let alone a three-act structure. I am in the minority in my preference for the meandering and mournful Days of Heaven; but really, how can you say no to a film entirely shot at the magic hour?

Koko: Expertly quoted, Slothrop. It's strange that Malick's first feature film is his most philosophically uninteresting. Only a few years earlier he had translated Heidegger for American students (not the chaotic late essays on peasants' shoes, alas) and settled into a teaching job at MIT, where he played Martin's pusherman to kids jonesing for mystery. Now, I don't mean to suggest that Badlands is an empty-headed movie. On the contrary, Malick twists its simple story like a fun house mirror on whose tortuous plane no light of reason can rest without risking its image. Moreover, Badlands is the first movie of which I'm aware to use "remote narrative" in which voice-over systematically conflicts with what we see through the camera's eye while also retaining a specific, subjective integrity of its own. Many films have exploited the disjunction between words and images, but none, so far as I know, has done so systematically, as does Badlands, in order to forge genuinely opposing experiences that must somehow synthesize rather than simple temporary ironies that undermine the movie's structure. In this thrust for synthesis, Malick experiments with the contrapuntal method that will become his signature. (In his later movies this counterpoint can grow so complex as to be nearly unlistenable, though no less prodigious. Watching The Thin Red Line can feel eerily like living inside a Bach fugue for two hundred voices.) Badlands seethes ethical and aesthetic wonder. But it doesn't reach toward silence and space--what Heidegger calls "disclosure"--as Days of Heaven and The New World do. And it's that modest orientation toward its own processes, rather than any want of thoughtfulness, that makes Badlands, relative to Malick's later works, philosophically flat. It's too interested in art, too much about art, to be about anything else or to pursue every beam refracted from its surface. The film's eye is on the angles. Not that any of this means that Badlands isn't speculative and open. Of course it is. But it doesn't have a philosophical mode. Whereas The Thin Red Line and especially The New World embody a bold, baldly subjective approach to experience, Badlands plays traditional narrative strategies against themselves in order to pry apart their inner logic. It uses old materials in new ways. The later films are entirely unprecedented; they speak a self-created language. Not surprisingly, Malick fills his new view on life with thoughts and feelings imported from Heidegger. Badlands, by contrast, is an American novelty, persuasive in its violence, beautiful in its coldness.

Badlands is probably, from a purely technical point of view, Malick's most accomplished film. With its masterful control of distances, personal as well as environmental, Days of Heaven tells a more difficult and, I think, rewarding story, and its practical achievements with lighting and sound eclipse even the chilling austerity of Badlands. But even as early as 1978, we see Malick substituting atmosphere for concreteness--and I believe successfully--in order to move his aesthetic closer to an absolutely inhabited frame of reference, such as we find in The Thin Red Line. As the method evolves, we will struggle to adapt our critical philosophies. For now, while we await more virile vocabularies and more supple syntax, we may need to exercise a reluctance to judge these later works, or, at least, to refrain from judging them by film's conventional standards. For the moment, perhaps, all we can say is "Holy fuck!" and "Hmm, Heidegger. . ." On that note, Badlands, the most canonical and conventional of Malick's four features, gets an A, although I should add that, had we inherited Heidegger's brain along with his unbreakable Nazi code, we would probably disintegrate concepts like "grade" and "movie" and thus land ourselves in the school of dunces and Malick on a cloud in complete, perfect thereness of Being-there.