It starts in a girl's bedroom, the camera slowly retreating in a gentle arc around the bed where the girl lovingly pets and hugs her dog. A teenager's room is a private sanctuary, and this bed (with a blanket folded at the foot for the dog -- a bed upon a bed) is her own imaginary island.
Her name is Holly (Sissy Spacek), and her story (narrated in the first person) and her voice is as flat as Texas but colored with the awkward poetic aspirations of a teenage diarist who's writing her thoughts for herself, but also partly addressing them to some future fantasy reader. She begins:
My mother died of pneumonia when I was just a kid. My father had kept their wedding cake in the freezer for ten whole years. After the funeral he gave it to the yardman... He tried to act cheerful, but he could never be consoled by the little stranger he found in his house. [Fade to black.] Then, one day, hoping to begin a new life away from the scene of all his memories, he moved us from Texas to Ft. Dupree, South Dakota.
Moments later we meet Kit (Martin Sheen), a garbage man in Ft. Dupree, who discovers a dead dog in an alley. After examining the corpse with the curiosity of a child, his response is to say to his partner: "I'll give you a dollar if you eat this collie."
The story of "Badlands" (1973), Terrence Malick's first feature as writer-director, is loosely based on the 1958 Midwestern killing spree of 19-year-old Charles Starkweather and 14-year-old Caril Ann Fugate -- known in the movie as Kit and Holly. The movie first connects them through their associations with dogs. Holly shows more emotional attachment to her dog than to her distant father. Kit feels none of the empathy or emotion we would expect someone to show upon finding a dead dog. Something is missing in the lives of these two, a hole that each believes -- for a time, at least -- that the other can fill.
Holly's dog (who is nameless, like almost all of the characters except the young lovers themselves) becomes, in effect, the movie's first victim of violent rage, carried out with ruthless resolve. Holly's father (Warren Oates) uses her dog to punishes her for seeing Kit, and that's what sets off the murderous spree.
The idea of the "teenager" was coming into its own -- as a generation-defining phase in American adolescent development, and a marketing demographic. Starkweather saw himself as a rebel in the James Dean mold, and both Kit and Holly romanticize their exploits (as they themselves might call them), even as they express themselves in flat, understated terms that reflect both Midwestern manners and sociopathic alienation.
In his last interview (Sight and Sound, 1975), Malick described the distance both characters have from themselves. Of Holly, who shapes the story as if it were a fairy tale, he said she was guided by a need to be helpful, and not to dwell upon herself, which would be unseemly:
When they're crossing the badlands, instead of telling us what's going on between Kit and herself, she describes what they ate and what it tasted like, as though we might be planning a similar trip and appreciate her experience.
Kit, Malick said, sees himself
as a subject of incredible interest to himself and to future generations. The movies have kept up a myth that suffering makes you deep. It's not that way in real life, though, not always. Suffering can make you shallow and just the opposite of vulnerable, dense. It's had this kind of effect on Kit.
Holly and Kit have that in common. Their suffering has made them numb, callous. I've raised two German Shepherds, both rescued from shelters. These are sensitive creatures, and they're subject to something shelter workers call "Shepherd Shutdown," where the dogs just... shut down. Likewise, children adopted from orphanages sometimes fail to form emotional attachments to others. That seems to be something like what Holly is describing in the opening moments of "Badlands" -- the early death of her mother, the emotional withdrawal of her father... and then the description of herself in the third person as "little stranger he found in his house." In order to become free adults (as they see it), she and Kit will obliterate him and his house. And hardly appear to feel a thing.
That's shocking, but Malick makes it something else, as well. (Holly's narration is not, for example, that of the killer himself, as in Michael Winterbottom's chilling Jim Thompson adaptation, "The Killer Inside Me.") In "Badlands," Kit takes full credit/blame for the killings and Holly gets off with probation -- that news conveyed in the same monotone as the news of Kit's execution.
I find Holly's narration, like Linda's (Linda Manz) in "Days of Heaven" five years later, to be exceptionally moving because they don't supply the emotions (beyond a certain detached wistfulness). The images do. I don't know anything about Malick's religious beliefs, but he ends "Badlands" with an image of "heaven," and begins "Days of Heaven" with an image of hell (a factory with a roaring blast furnace).
In a brief cutaway at the airport after Kit and Holly have been apprehended, a father points out the fugitives to his son.
9 Comments
Mr. Emerson,
I don't know why I'm jumping in here after the ribbing I got from disagreeing with this forum last time. But once again, the opening of Badlands is more than just the single shot of Holly playing with her dog. Certainly the visual is important, but so is the voice-over and if memory serves the music as well.
By the way, Days Of Heaven begins with a wonderful photo-montage/title sequence underscored by Camille St-Saens The Aquarium well before the first shots of the steel factory.
I can attest after over 200 viewings of Days Of Heaven that the tone and mood for that film is clearly set by the time we get to the official opening shot.
From my introduction to the Opening Shot Project, Part 2: "No, not all movies begin with a key image -- sometimes it's just an unassuming ol' establishing shot, or one element in a montage. The first image is always going to be important, because it's the first image, but not all of them leave an impression -- and the ones that don't aren't the ones we analyze and discuss in the Opening Shots Project. But what may seem like nothing much in the first few moments of a movie could turn out to be significant when you look back on it afterwards. The most important thing is that you notice what you saw, from start to finish. The opening shot may not take on resonance until the picture is over."
The very first image in "Badlands" is the one I show and discuss here -- with the voiceover as quoted above. The music is also part of the "fairy tale" feel of the film. The titles for "Badlands" (yellow lettering over a black background) appear at the end. "Days of Heaven" begins with the title sequence you mention, but the first actual footage is of the factory, and the contrast (aurally as well as visually) is jarring. You may wish to consider the first photo in the montage as the "opening shot"; I don't. Titles are often separate sequences (see "The New World"), not necessarily involving the opening shot of the film proper. But this is called the Opening Shots Project. A survey of Opening Titles would be something different, and nobody is saying that both aren't important to setting up the film.
This feels like a weaker entry in the Opening Shots project. I usually agree with those OS entries but to me, Badlands doesn't reveal a whole lot about itself in its opening shot. I think the most important shots in the movie trump this one completely.
I recently saw the movie again, and to be honest, the connection you make between the two dogs feels kinda tenuous and ... unexplained. "The movie first connects them through associations with dogs." Hmmm. Ok? And what does that say about anything?
Fair enough. I fleshed it out a little more, pointing out how the film uses the dogs to tell us something about the inner lives of Holly and Kit.
From what I've read, Malick is a devout Episcopalian.
Wow. Nobody here is giving Jim enough credit for this piece, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Maybe I'm just a shallow Malick fan or something -- because I think Jim's comparison of Holly and Kit to the German Shepherds is, actually, pretty excellent. I've seen the movie three times, and until I read Jim's piece here I didn't even think about the opening shot with Holly and her dog, and the following scene with Kit and the dead dog. It's a brilliant insight.
The fact that Holly's dog gets shot later on in the film certainly says something about the characters, too. Holly enters the film a normal if troubled person; Kit begins the film as dumb as a dog. And Holly, even after she meets Kit, is still a normal person -- until her father shoots *her* dog. Then she is reduced to Kit's level of intelligence.
It actually reminds me of Sam Bottoms' Lance in Apocalypse Now, who is a normal, stoned-out-of-his-mind guy until he accidentally loses his new pet puppy (in the scene where Clean is killed, I think). Then Lance starts screaming, "Where's the dog!??" After that, Lance doesn't really speak in the movie ever again. Why? Because he has *become* the dog.
Awesome piece here, Jim. It's great fun to be talking about Badlands again, in anticipation of Malick's upcoming release.
Thanks, Adam. Animals -- and dogs in particular -- are pretty important in Malick's films. Of course, when you have a film based on the Starkweather killings that begins with the girl's narration about the death of her mother and her emotional distance from her father (as she cuddles her dog on the bed in her room), followed immediately by the boy who eventually kills her father (a garbageman who makes a sick blank joke out of finding a dead dog in an alley). This girl runs off with this boy, flatly romanticizes their fugitive life together, as he kills more people with the same lack of feeling he displays toward the dog. The first murder in the film is the father killing her dog, followed by Kit killing her father. I'm reminded of a moment heard in voiceover in "The Thin Red Line": "You seen many dead people? Plenty. They're no different than dead dogs, once you get used to the idea. They're meat, kid." (That's from a transcript I found online. What I heard was "You're meat, kid.")
God stuff, I really need to revisit Badlands.
and 200 times, really? REALLY?
Kudos to this fine analysis. I concur with your assessment of Holly. The opening shot estbalishes her bond with the dog, the emotional detachment from her father (and vice versa), her affinity for a personal space, removed from the outer social sphere (later mirrored in the makeshift home in the woods), and her passive, introverted demeanor. I also like the association of the voice-over with a diary, very apt. As for the shot choreography, I like the gradual shift from a very intimate space to a larger context. The camera first particularizes Holly and her dog on the bed, then proceeds to show the entire room. The entire film consistently juxtaposes Holly's and Kit's intimate relationship against wide rural locations reminding us that there are elements beyond their control, particularly environmental factors and social rules. Anyway, I applaud your effort in including this shot as I feel that it frequently (and unfairly) goes unnoticed.
Leave a comment