Genre Theory: The Road Movie

From: The Media Book, edited by Chris Newbold, Olver Boyd-Barrett & Hilde Van Den Bulk

Terence Malick 'Badlands': Recurring Shots/Themes

The American Dream

The term “American dream” is used in many ways, but it essentially is an idea that suggests that anyone in the US can succeed through hard work and has the potential to lead a happy, successful life. Many people have expanded upon or refined the definition to include things such as freedom, fulfillment and meaningful relationships. Someone who manages to achieve his or her version of the American dream is often said to be “living the dream.” This concept has been subject to criticism, because some people believe that the structure of society in the US prevents such an idealistic goal for everyone. Critics often point to examples of inequality rooted in class, race, religion and ethnicity that suggest that the American dream is not attainable for everyone.

History

The idea of an American dream is older than the US, dating to the 1600s, when people began to have all sorts of hopes and aspirations for what was a new and largely unexplored continent to European immigrants. Many of these dreams focused on owning land and establishing a prosperous business that — theoretically, at least — would increase one's happiness. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, authors often wrote about the idealistic American dream, somewhat codifying the concept and entrenching it in American society.

'Badlands' (1973): Audio analysis from Left Field Cinema

Click photo to download audio analysis

Extract:

But there is a darker ironic turn in the tale for Holly and Kit, and consciously they wish to rebel against social confines and acceptable behaviour, but subconsciously they appear to do the exact opposite; Neil Campbell in his essay: The Highway Kind: Badlands, Youth, Space and the Road, states that:

“Contrary to the assumed traditions of youth and road movies as subversive texts, Kit’s actions can be read as his quest for conformity and responsibility rather than as a counter-cultural rebel, for what he desires, above all, is a return to some ideal lost time of manners, respect and honesty. In fact many youth texts have concerned themselves with rediscovering forms of stability, authenticity and values perceived as lost in the ‘phoney’ adult world, as in The Catcher in the Rye, Rebel Without a Cause and The Outsiders.” Campbell clarifies this contradiction in the mythos of the rebel: “The impossibility of fulfilling myths that assert mobility and settlement, freedom and restraint, individualism and conformity. Ultimately, in these joyless, brutally cold lives, youth rebellion on the road goes nowhere and offers nothing, for any hopeful spaces are temporary and transitory at best and seem only to lead back to where the social codes of normalisation and discipline wait to reclaim the highway kind.”

Full written analysis can be found @ Left Field Cinema

'Badlands': Love Is Strange - Very Useful Article on Cinespect

Before Terrence Malick became Terrence Malick, he was mostly just the oddball screenwriter (of “Pocket Money” with Paul Newman and Lee Marvin, “Deadhead Miles” with Alan Arkin) with a sardonic sense of humor and a talent for evoking local color and the eccentric details of American life lived on the margins. And of course he was also the director of “Badlands” (1973), probably the best and strangest of the vast wave of low-budget lovers-on-the-lam movies that followed in the wake of Arthur Penn’s “Bonnie & Clyde.”

Malick’s debt to Penn was personal—he considered him a friend and mentor, and “Badlands” is dedicated to him. Martin Sheen’s disaffected serial killer Kit evokes not only aspects of Warren Beatty’s Clyde Barrow, but bears an even more striking resemblance to Paul Newman’s psycho punk take on Billy the Kid in Penn’s debut feature, “The Left-Handed Gun” (1958). Which is all to say that where currently Malick seems like one of cinema’s great anachronisms, making movies whose rhythms and sensibilities seem radically and beguilingly out of tune with virtually everything else in modern American filmmaking, in 1973 he was more clearly of his time, part of a tradition and responsive to the creative and commercial currents of the era. While Malick remains a distinctive, intriguing filmmaker, “Badlands,” a fable of love doomed and damned and in retreat amidst a sensuous rock and roll oblivion, is still his most compelling feature, largely because it’s such an eerie and succinct distillation of the ethos of desolation and revelation that took hold of the best American movies of the early ’70s.

The film, very loosely based on the 1957 crimes of Charles Starkweather and Caril Fugate, tells the story of Kit (Martin Sheen), a 25-year-old ne’er-do-well, and Holly (Sissy Spacek), a 15-year-old girl recently transplanted to South Dakota from Texas by her stern, recently widowed father (Warren Oates), two misfits who strike up a romance motivated more by desperate boredom and loneliness than ardor. Holly’s father disapproves of the pairing, and soon forbids his daughter from seeing Kit, resulting in a confrontation that kicks off a murder spree that eventually costs eight lives over the course of several days.

The film echoes the dreamy lyricism of “Bonnie & Clyde” and its antecedents (especially Truffaut’s 1962 masterpiece “Jules and Jim”) while simultaneously defusing it, creating an ironic juxtaposition between the pulpy teen romance delusions shared by Kit and Holly and the desultory world they incidentally inhabit, an irony that helps differentiate Sheen’s matinee idol psychopath from his cinematic brethren. Where “Bonnie & Clyde” at least partially bought into its heroes’ heroic outsider self-image (particularly in the Hooverville scene), in “Badlands” there’s no doubt that Kit is simply a coldblooded killer, albeit one with delusions of grandeur. Sheen’s performance is remarkably opaque, very physical and reactive but with little of the kind of gestural nuance that might evoke unspoken desires, and he conveys a sense of a man who lacks any significant inner life. He’s a rube constituted of postures and attitudes copped from the movies (at the film’s end, he’s clearly chuffed when one of the cops who apprehend him tells him he looks just like James Dean) and American kitsch myths gleaned from records and comic books. As a consequence, Kit is eternally likable and easygoing, because he’s so lacking in depth that he winds up seeming unnervingly innocent of his own evil. Unlike the ersatz Freudianism that always explained away the violence of so many American antiheroes, Kit is an enigma, without any back story or clinical diagnosis that might make his violence comfortingly familiar.

In his laconic blankness and his deceptive evocation of James Dean’s wounded menace, Kit comes across as a consummate male creature of the 1950s. “Badlands” was made at a time when American pop culture was in the deep thralls of a deceptive nostalgia for the America of the long, pre-JFK assassination ’50s, an infatuation that manifested itself in the likes of Sha Na Na Na and George Lucas’s “American Graffiti.” The latter, released in the same year as “Badlands,” epitomized a sweet melancholia about the era that went hand in hand with a prelapsarian myth about American manhood before Vietnam, a myth “Badlands” casually deflates every time Kit pulls a gun or flashes a grin at somebody. “American Graffiti” became a hit and got an Academy Award nomination, while “Badlands” closed the New York Film Festival to mixed reviews and quickly sank into box office oblivion, a testament to the former film’s exuberant, rock & roll juiced affection for the fable of American innocence and the latter film’s spare, bitter, darkly beautiful treatment of innocence as a catastrophically dangerous alibi for evil. And as guileless purity incarnate, Spacek (in her first major film performance) gives a marvelously strange performance. Her affectless narration came to define Malick’s style—that bland-unto-profound “True Teenage Confessions” Romanticism which pours forth from wise-ass punkettes, warrior dime store poets, and moody hippie mystics alike in Malick’s subsequent movies. Holly’s blank, bland acceptance of all of life’s little atrocities is alternately comic and terrifying. She’s the kind of little girl lost who can blandly and curiously ask a man about his pet spiders as he lies on his bed bleeding to death and a few minutes later can mutter best girlfriend chit-chat banalities to a girl who has to walk across a foreboding Andrew Wyeth landscape toward Kit and his pistol. Like Kit, she seems to exist slightly out of phase with the rest of the world, and it’s this dangerous and lonely distinction that makes their sad, muted rapture attractive despite its lethality.

Early in the film, shortly after they’ve gone on the run after having murdered her father, Kit and Holly have created a forest refuge, complete with booby traps and a nifty treehouse, and amidst all the deranged Swiss Family Robinson shenanigans, the two young lovers dance to Mickey & Sylvia’s “Love Is Strange” as its plays from a portable radio. The scene distills the mad, awkward allure of that song’s camp passion into a funny little waltz—she swings her hips delicately back and forth and he does a cutesy little chicken walk around her. It’s as weird and unsettling as Kenneth Anger’s use of Brill Building euphoria to score biker gang nihilism in “Scorpio Rising” (1964) and as serendipitous as Martin Scorsese’s understanding that no one articulated an angry Catholic boy’s hunger for meaning and feeling in the urban abyss like the Ronettes did when they desperately implored some spooky specter for his devotion in “Be My Baby” in the opening sequence of “Mean Streets” (1973). This electric current of pop desire at its most urgent and angry and mysterious flows through much of the best American cinema and music in the ’60s and ’70s, and it’s bitterly conveyed by every haunted, elegiac frame of “Badlands.”

Source: cinespect.com/2013/05/badlands-love-is-strange/

Rich Hall On Road Movies (Lovers on the Lam)

Watch and record: This programme as it will be invaluable for your study of genre and American Cinema in the new year.

'Rich Hall's Continental Drifters' on BBC4 this week (time/date is below)

Returning from his successful BBC Four documentary The Dirty South, comedian Rich Hall embarks on a new journey across America to explore the symbolism of the classic road movie.

Cruising through the breathtaking badlands of South Dakota to the mountains of Montana, Rich follows in the famous Thunderbird tyre-tracks of Thelma And Louise and serial killer classic Natural Born Killers, as well as Vanishing Point, Badlands, Lost In America, Easy Rider and Sugarland Express, to name a few.

This seductive exploration of the open road leads him on an inspiring journey of freedom and escapism, as he chases the horizon, discovering why the combination of road and rubber has become so iconic.

Rich Hall’s Road Movies is not only a visual feast, but also a fascinating insight into classic Americana and the history of the American highway system.

With historians, motel experts and interstate scholars joining him on his captivating journey, and with a remarkable mixture of history, symbolism, wit and classic clips, viewers can sit back, enjoy – and let Rich do the driving.

Wednesday 16/11/2011

21:00

BBC Four