Not Coming to a Theater Near You

Badlands / USA / 1973

Full review.

After seeing Malick’s new film, I’m especially conscious of the sensitivity with which he portrays young love here — especially in its decline. The film’s final pair of shots has Holly briefly glancing at Kit with amusement, affection, melancholy, and finally distraction, as she absently gazes out of the window of the plane toward the sun and a sublime, infinite cloudscape.

Love is strange. Let’s hope that young son of a lawyer understands.

by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Warner Bros. DVD
16 Jan 2006 11:41 PM | Comments (5)

Comments / 5 total / Submit Comment

1. Conor Dunphy Birch / 17 January 2006 / 4:55 AM

   I havent seen that one in a dogs age. But didnt the male protagonist kill someone in the movie. WOuldnt that be reason enough to question his cash value vis a vis the undescribable beuty of — maybe — as the poet says ‘make out faces in the clouds.’? If so we can see why this would be a standard of young love in its decline.

2. Rumsey / 17 January 2006 / 7:05 AM / URL

   The final sequence in this film I find to be among the most sensitive in any Malick film (having not seen The New World, that is). I don’t get the impression that Holly and Kit are actually in love with each other until these final moments, in which some sort of mutual admiration is implied. (Up until this point, and as in Malick’s other films, the main characters incur little sympathy.) Kit achieves the cool Holly wants in a boyfriend by getting captured, and Holly supplies the adoration Kit wants in a girlfriend—finally, each speaks in the other’s vocabulary, for the first time in their volatile, naïve relationship.

3. leo / 17 January 2006 / 10:11 AM / URL

   That’s a nice reading. Certainly, at all other times, their romance seems mere puppy love at best; at worst, it is a (variously) destructive relationship: submissive in Holly’s case, coercive in Kit’s.

   At the end of the film, I don’t so much see Holly’s adoration as a kind of motherliness or a humoring of Kit’s idiosyncrasy (as identified by the rather unamused state trooper). It seems almost that she has now moved on from this young love and is now viewing Kit from a distance (perhaps already with the hindsight of the lawyer’s daughter-in-law). It’s sad, but pleasantly so, and encapsulates that theme common to all of Malick’s films: that paradise only exists in the remembering or reconstruction, and never in one’s present life.

   Earlier, in the film’s most characteristically, beautifully Malick-ian scenes, Holly expresses this sentiment about her woodland paradise:

   At times I wished I could fall asleep and be taken off to some magical land, but this never happened.

   Of course, when she says this, she is more or less in a magical land, or at least the closest approximation that the film offers.

4. Listenn COnor Dunphy / 17 January 2006 / 7:27 PM

   Perhaps we have all felt this way once or twice. I would interject with the meaningful “lovehate” dynamic that Lacan added to the psychoanalytic discourse in his “Seminar, Book XX: Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972-1973.” This apparatus might provide a way to view the critical attachment to Holly as subject of both sympathy and apathy or, love and hate. This “hateloving” has been discovered elsewhere as in the critical reaction to the novel PASSING, a community of so-called paranoid interpreters who typically combine desire and knowledge such that everything and the non-thing (or the inconsequential thing) are included in their imaginary. Poor Holly is trapped in her own place, devoid of spirit or any such mystique. Save for the clouds.

5. goofbutton / 24 January 2006 / 4:52 AM

   The ending of BADLANDS always suggests to me the workings of a music-box: the Orff chimes in (and all other sounds cease) just as Malick cuts to the props begining to turn… He’s not necessarily excusing their behavior as the result of fate, but this ending lends a sort of inevitability to their actions, and denies any reasons or meanings to the question we ask ourselves incessantly throughout the whole film: “Why?”

   Also, THE NEW WORLD is a fugging masterpiece! The final montage (which seems to last 30 minutes) is utterly mind-boggling.