Badlands Headlines Paste’s Criterion Collection Picks of the Quarter for Spring 2013
Each quarter, Paste Movies Editor Michael Dunaway and critic David Roark have the task of making their way through the new offerings from The Criterion Collection. Nice work if you can get it! For our money, everything TCC does is top notch, but since your time is limited, we bring you our top picks each quarter. For the Spring 2013 releases, Badlands is the featured film. Other picks are discussed below.
BADLANDS
“Our sense of the past is always already influenced by our present understanding of the world (we see the past through the present); and yet our present understanding of the world is itself always already influenced and determined by the past (we see the present through the past).” Theorist Leland Poague’s understanding of the “reception theory” provides an ideal framework for Terrence Malick’s 1973 debut feature. It’s impossible to view Badlands outside the lenses of his later work, but it’s also impossible to view his later work outside the lenses of Badlands.
In light of Malick’s succeeding films, particularly The Tree of Life (arguably his masterpiece) and To the Wonder (his underrated meditation on love and marriage), Badlands represents an aesthetic and worldview yet to be fully realized. That’s not to say the film doesn’t make for a unique and satisfying experience; it’s merely to say that, in hindsight, the film only skims the surface of all that Malick was later to become. This proves particularly true in the juxtaposition of Malick’s medium and message. At the core, Malick is a poet. He engages dense philosophical and theological ideas, yet not in the way a traditional scholar might; he engages the objective through the subjective, the rational through the irrational. As Nick Olson points out in his review of To the Wonder, like poetry Malick’s work not only expresses emotions to the viewer, but it actually shapes its hearer. Olson writes, “He seems to me to be pressing for us to awaken our own inner depths of subjectivity and inhabit the outlines he’s setting forth. He wants these grace notes to profoundly shape us—to impress upon us in the most personal way.”
Malick’s content exists as a poem or song, but in Badlands he doesn’t completely match that content with his medium. In the films that followed, even to some degree in his 1978 follow-up Days of Heaven, Malick employs a severer lyrical visual style and non-linear narrative structure to create a cohesive bond between his message and medium. We, of course, get glimpses of these elements in Badlands, like beautiful images of a fire that invoke even more beautiful images of a bigger fire in Days of Heaven, as well as light handheld camerawork, a technique that’s become a staple of the Malick canon. There’s also the lyrical narration of Sissy Spacek, with her youthful country twang; this is an ingredient that stuck with and shaped Malick’s entire body of work. Yet in Badlands the director barely taps into all the possibilities available through voiceover, possibilities that he uncovers more and more with every film. While it would be untrue to conclude Badlands as a straightforward, literal-minded work, because for all its limitations the film does breach new forms of cinematic language, it never accomplishes what Malick’s later films do in marrying his aesthetic to his ideas.
Still, the interesting part of Badlands is that, even while it fails in comparison to other Malick films, never quite attaining the aesthetic acheivement or cohesive worldview of his later films, there would be no later films without it. So, for all its missed moves and failed potential, Malick’s debut at some level embodies the foundation of his great filmography—the stuff from which Malick pulls time and time again, the stuff that sparked the genius in him. For that reason alone, we must see Badlands as something special.
—David Roark
Other Criterion Collection releases of note for Spring 2013:
MARCH 2013
A Man Escaped
“The reward in watching this film doesn’t come in the moment, as you watch it,” says director Bruno Dumont in an interview among the extras for The Criterion Collection’s edition of A Man Escaped. “The reward comes later.” It’s a counter-cultural notion, but it’s absolutely true. Robert Bresson’s 1956 masterpiece can be slow and difficult at times. He insisted on using one focal length the entire film, and telling a very simple story with few plot points, little dialogue, and long takes. But oh, does the film live on in the viewer’s memory. I actually can’t wait to go back and watch it again, after it marinates for awhile in my mind. Another extras highlight: seeing lead actor Francois Leterrier in a 2010 interview, remembering the filming of the movie over half a century later. Overall, perhaps my favorite of my share of the Criterion titles this quarter. —Michael Dunaway
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