Malick's Music

David Thomson looks under the hood of Malick's Badlands (one of my favorite films) and finds out what that pretty music is doing there. (Sight & Sound)

Nicholas Ray would have soaked us in Kit's backstory - a tortured home life (so no going home), wretched schooling, premature delinquency, a rough life on the road and a deep if inarticulate denial of the values of Eisenhower's America. Malick's Kit does not buy that package. There is no backstory, beyond our feeling that “Kit Carruthers” is a fancy and suspicious name for so chronic a faker (the model in history was named Charles Starkweather). Kit is a life force and a trickster, beyond pity or social diagnosis. He is vicious, comic, image-fixated - close to crazy. And Sheen plays him with a thoroughly cool detachment that simply underlines how much Dean always ached for pity. Kit is a psychopath given to all manner of conversational curlicues. He can hardly say anything, or hear anything said without adding some trite Reader's Digest footnote. “What you doing?” he asks a man he has kidnapped. “Just thinking,” says the scared guy. Kit chips in with his usual smartass flourish and some fancy nihilism - “As good a way to kill time as any.” He is somewhere between Sam Goldwyn and Wittgenstein. (“Aren't we all?” I hear him reply.)