Badlands Critic Essay

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Terrence Malick was born in Ottawa, Illinois. He did his undergraduate work at Harvard, graduating “summa cum laude” –with highest honor- in philosophy in 1965. After graduating, Malick did not get his PhD –Doctor of Philosophy- in philosophy: Instead, he attended the American Film Institute Conservatory in its opening year (1969), taking a Masters of Fine Arts degree in film making. “Badlands”(1973), the extraordinary first film directed by Terrence Malick, inspired by wildly known 1958 killing spree perpetrated by Charles Starkweather (Kit) and his girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate (Holly). They killed 11 people including Fugate’s parents and younger sister. She was 13, he was 18. Badlands tells a popular story that has been told many times, of two lovers who are criminals and are pursued across the vastness of America. They meet when she is in her door yard practicing baton-twirling. He has just walked off his job on a garbage truck. She thinks he is the handsomest man she’s ever seen - he looks just like James Dean. He likes her because he never knew a fifteen-year-old who knew so much: “She could talk like a grown-up woman, without a lot of giggles.” But the film isn’t about the big love or the carnage. Likewise it makes no attempt to psychoanalyze its Kit Carruthers, and there are no symbols to note or lessons to learn. What comes through more than anything is the enormous loneliness of the lives these two characters lived, together and apart. Malick’s films feature narration in the form of a character within the story, in Badlands this is taken from the perspective of the innocent involved, in this case Holly. A central character who is an innocent is a repeated theme throughout Malick’s work. Within the film this innocent girl is in a situation which is over her head, something that she can barely understand. Holly played by Sissy Spacek, even takes her

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