Badlands Movie Psychology

Murder should never be justified nor should it be displaced—this very demand to eliminate the justification interrogates the sincerity of society. Badlands (1973) is an American crime film directed and written by Terrence Malick. The film follows the story of a vulnerable teen Holly who lives in a small non-descript town in South Dakota and her garbage-collecting boyfriend Kit. The two go on a killing spree in the badlands of South Dakota. The film is based loosely around the 1950s Starkweather-Fugate murders, which inspired this film. Holly’s father struggled to keep the two lovers apart. Holly’s father in fact, was Kit’s initial victim, which initiated the psycho toward the killing spree itself. Initially when the film was first released,

Badlands stood out on it’s own for being a groundbreaking story new for its time. It was a revolutionary attempt at something that was innovative for the audience to witness because of the way the couple’s lifestyle was depicted throughout the film. Kit the one who committed the murders, as Holly stood beside him and passively watched and in a way—accepting his killing spree. Neither of the two characters truly knew that their actions were ethically wrong. The mere fact that audience was more aware than the characters and realized this flaw means more than it lets on. But then again, the audience usually is more aware than the characters.
The film focuses solely on the relationship of Kit and Holly, barely posing any weight on the murders. The murders are carefully placed throughout the film making them appear as minor mishaps. The lack of involvement in the action causes this film for obvious reasons, to question American moral values such as life vs. death and good vs. evil, as well as, social values such as leadership vs. passivity. Our main characters exist in a world of reassurance and ignorance, which allows them to easily pass from town to town without feeling any sense of regret or remorse. The characters personalities are inviting and intriguing. Kit’s an endearing handsome man have similarities to a sociopath while Holly’s a lost soul seeking connection who barely speaks. The deeper we dive into the story, the more their personalities become disparate in relation to the values they query. These values are placed in an opposite position when dealing with ethical wrongdoings. Through the experimentation of the formal properties such as point-of-view, identification, ending—these moral and social values are placed subject to easily being identifiable and questionable.
In Hollywood, the late 60s and early 70s advanced to an era of experimentation and New American Cinema. These decades were a time when filmmakers began experimenting the typical Classical Hollywood Style turning their films into what became known as Modernist Cinema. These changes grew out of the shifting society and the need for more original cinema to satisfy the thirsty spectators. Typically before, films were solely realistic. Unheard of before and exponentially influential,
“Terrence Malick’s film is in turns elegiac and dispassionate, presenting a fascinating portrait of opaque, vaguely motivated characters drifting across an ethereal landscape. While relying upon the basic framework and preoccupations of an established genre, the road movie, Badlands twists, de-familiarizes and critiques its familiar coordinates. The film presents a potent but immaterial portrait of its period” (Danks).
The typical thematic and formal properties used in film were then manipulated and with these new changes, which led to cinema questioning the moral and social values as well as creating changes in cinema’s ideology and subverting it rather than promoting it. Modernist films worked as a team with its thematic properties and formal properties. The thematic properties simply pose the questionable social and moral values while the formal properties demonstrate how these values were actually questioned.
Our two protagonists Kit and Holly embark on a journey in no particular direction—they both only hope to escape South Dakota and the memories that they’ve left behind. Their only motive is to escape their fated destiny—or perhaps it’s not that at all. Before leaving, Kit creates a recording telling the police that he shot the father and is going on the run but the two characters are killing themselves as well. Even more little unsettling is the detail that, “Kit left a record playing over and over for the District Attorney to find. He was gambling for time” (Badlands, 1973). It can be imagined that secretly Kit lived in hopes of getting caught, otherwise they could have just burned the house and left leaving no trace of the two of them. To reiterate, Badlands challenges both American morals values such as life vs. death and good vs. evil, as well as, social values such as leadership vs. passiveness. A large moral value that surrounds the everyday life of a human is that of life vs. death and the changes a person goes through after killing another being. Murder is just one of those things that goes against the norm of society and sets that person apart from the rest of humanity. They gain the label of a murderer and essentially become executed themselves through being distanced from society. This value goes hand-in-hand with good vs. evil. If a person remains a law abiding citizen and don’t inflict death open others; they’re a good individual, however if they choose the opposite route and slaughter an innocent or innocents lives for no reason; that places them in the pool of being an immoral individual. Leading is one thing and following is another—but when the follower follows without any sense of the morals and the leader lacks any ethical values our moral values are questioned.
The world of the film creates a nonchalant aura about the character’s murder spree. The tagline of this film is, “in 1959 a lot of people were killing time. Kit and Holly were killing people.” (Badlands, 1973). It makes it appear as a normal and casual occurrence. It would simply be unethical to state that this world lacks a sense of order, but there’s also not much of an order—so at the least; this world can be characterized as a world with a twisted order. Due to this twisted order, the American value of leadership vs. passivity is confronted. Kit wins title as the strong independent leader in this world, and Holly follows closely behind being the passive follower, which coincides perfectly with the modernist theory. According to one of the modernist theorists David Bordwell, “The art film character slides passively from one situation to another” (Bordwell, 651). Holly never comments on his murders; she merely accepts them as their norm. Even the murder of her father, Holly showed no sense of emotion while it was happening—no fear, remorse, anger. Nothing. In a world that values order while touching upon chaos, these two conflicting characters shape the world. Holly tells us that she “could of snuck out the back or hid in the boiler room, I suppose, but I sensed that my destiny now lay with Kit, for better or for worse, and it was better to spend a week with one who loved me for what I was than years of loneliness” (Badlands, 1973). Kit’s our psychotic leader colored with chaos while Holly’s our apathetic character who poses no question on the chaos that Kit creates in her ordered world.
Formulaically, these moral and social values are questioned through the experimented properties of point-of-view, identification and [the questionable open but as the same time closed] ending. The argument about that will go into great detail later. In the Classical Hollywood Cinema, point-of-view was omniscient, but in Modernist Cinema the camera generally chooses to follow one specific character and reveal their point-of-view on the subject matter. There used to be a clear identification with the characters in old cinema—and this identification allowed for emotional involvement with the characters. However, that identification turned into a form of distancing or estrangement that allowed the characters to become more complex individuals, thus creating more illusion to their motives. Lastly, in Classical Hollywood Cinema the conflict was never left resolved and felt closed while in a Modernist Cinema the sense of ambiguity is stressed on the ending. These three properties help shape the values in question and confront them on a pure state of reason.
The film follows the point-of-view of the female protagonist Holly.

More specifically, Holly also narrates the majority of the film. The narration allows the audience to understand what’s going on inside of her mind through her thoughts, which amplify the point-of-view the film has chosen to follow. Through trailing Holly and Holly’s thoughts, we learn more about her character’s personality and her lack of motives. The audience sees first-hand how unaffected she is from her boyfriend’s psychotic personality causing him to go on a killing spree. The clear-cut point-of-view question the morals and values of this film. Holly’s lack of concern really questions the moral values of good vs. evil. She shares with the audience that “I didn't feel shame or fear, but just kind of blah, like when you're sitting there and all the water's run out of the bathtub” (Badlands, 1973). As the spectator, we are placed in a situation where we watch these murders as they take place. The people that surround them obviously become affected, but the characters themselves are never impacted emotionally nor is the world that surrounds them. For these characters, there’s no stopping when it comes to life vs. death due to the fact that the murders are pushed so far. Their mortal selves personally question the morality of good vs. evil as they never feel remorse from committing such a deadly act—literally. It just goes to show that while leadership can exist so does a sense of passiveness in a corrupted

world, which exposes no anxiety over moralistically wrong situations.
There’s a lack, nearly a nonexistent emotional identification with either of the protagonists. According to our female protagonist, “It all goes to show how you can know a person and not really know him at the same time” (Badlands, 1973). As if she was addressing the audience directly, Kit truly has no reason why he’s gone off on a killing spree. Initially he had stated how he “always wanted to be a criminal, I guess. Just not this big a one” (Badlands, 1973). There’s no way that is a characteristic that is easily relatable. Holly’s lack of concern also creates a wall around her personality in terms of emotional identification with the audience. Her character is easier to relate too, but it still hones on the idea of isolation. In a Modernist Film, “[characters] lack defined desires and goals [and their] choices are vague or nonexistent” (Bordwell, 651). The idea of estrangement displaces the moral and social values and place them on the edge of a cliff. Because of this estrangement of the characters, we never get a sense of their values, which forbids the audience to finding a way of identifying emotionally with them. These values aren’t placed in any importance in the story itself, which only makes it easier for the audience to identify these values as a major asset in life.
Last but not least, but perhaps the most ambiguous property—the ending. It’s ambiguity lays in the ending itself and whether or not there’s a clear concise resolution or an unclear one. Badlands end with our protagonists both getting caught, supposing that is an ending. However, the spectator only learns about this through Holly’s voice-overs”
“Kit and I were taken back to South Dakota. They kept him in solitary, so he didn't have a chance to get acquainted with the other inmates, though he was sure they'd like him, especially the murderers. Myself, I got off with probation and a lot of nasty looks. Later, I married the son of the lawyer who defended me. Kit went to sleep in the courtroom while his confession was being read, and he was sentenced to die in the electric chair. On a warm spring night, six months later, after donating his body to science, he did” (Badlands, 1973).
This became a common strategy for ending a film because it saves time as well as the spectator’s sanity. If the audience were to see Kit being sentenced to death on the electric chair and Holly getting off of probation it would change the entire end feel of the movie. This is a movie that creates an uncomfortable feeling in place of a satisfied feeling. The ambiguity resides in the shot that ended the film. It ends with Kit and Holly in the plane as they’re taken back to South Dakota and the unclear ending dwells in the subconscious of the characters. Even after their killing spree, getting arrested and then the consequences of their altercations—neither character shows remorse, “you had to take the consequences, though, and not whine about it later” (Badlands, 1973). The complete mental dissociation enhances these values. Kit’s sentences to death as consequence for his actions while Holly is pronounced perhaps even rewarded as being innocent for being an accomplice and never saying anything.
Ideology serves as the backbone of cinema; it always has and always will.

However, upon the new changes in cinema—the idea of ideology shifted as well. Modernist Cinema subverted that typical dominant ideology. There is always a larger question poses about the film as a whole; why was this film made? Badlands situates the spectator in the position to decide whether or not murder is evil based on the visuals he or she views. The author’s hopes is that by creating unidentifiable characters and a nonchalant world that the spectator will realize that the idea of murder isn’t in fact being promoted merely the opposite—it’s being subverted. The subject matter of this film is one that is certainly unpleasurable in terms of entertainment but actually a dissatisfaction intending to comment on society as a whole. This intentional provocation involves “the attack on ‘entertainment’ cinema [as] part of a broader attack on the whole of ‘consumer society’” (Wollen, 424). Cinema serves as a distraction from society, but also operates to make a point to its intended audience. The point being the obvious, murder should never be morally acceptable. Its consequences typically should evoke a reaction that testifies against nature of the

crime.
As stated in the beginning, Badlands was loosely based on the case of the Starkweather-Fugate murder spree in the 1950s. Charles Starkweather went on a killing spree murdering 11 people in the state of Nebraska and Wyoming. His adolescent girlfriend Caril Fugate was his accomplice and to this day remains the youngest female to be charged for first-degree murder in American history. Despite Badlands being based on a true event, “‘cinema cannot show the truth, or reveal it, because the truth is not out there in the real world’, ‘cinema is a form of representation’” (Bordwell, 426). The depiction and in turn representation of the real-life event merely serves as a trope to show the effect of avoiding the impact of a crime against society and the values of humanity that are in turn questioned and neglected. Sadly, it is easier to acknowledge these moral values once they are placed behind a screen than in typical everyday life.
In a world when visually, the spectator is completely alienated from these moral and social values an instance is created when the fact that they’re being questioned becomes clear as glass. In the world there’s good and there’s evil, but there’s never truly a medium—both can’t exist in the same plane. The one in charge is the one who receives full responsibility while the passive one receives no recognition or but all of the freedom. The one that truly stands apart is life vs. death—in a way; both can exist in the same soul. A person alive can lack the qualities of life, while a person who dies could have died holding so much life within their soul. In their own way, each of these values carries the same weight as the other. Individually they each encompass the world itself and implementing an abomination against these values questions their existence. The cinema itself chooses to go along a path that shows how these life-threatening values expressed and then are distorted and questioned.