Reviews2.Main Content
Badlands
Sheen and Spacek
Wed, 12 Nov 2008
This month Trevor Johnston tackles the voiceover in Terrence Malick’s Badlands and finds just how much it completes the picture.
(Don’t forget that exploring this fascinating area in print necessarily involves giving away some story details, so please be aware that you’re about to enter the spoiler zone of spoiler zones. If you don’t want to see the results…hesitate before you read on!... and scroll to the end of the review for a chance of bagging a pair of free tickets to see the film at BFI Southbank and a Badlands poster).
BADLANDS
Martin Sheen - Badlands“My mother died of pneumonia when I was just a kid. My father had kept their wedding cake in the freezer for ten whole years. After the funeral he gave it to the yardman... He tried to act cheerful, but he could never be consoled by the little stranger he found in his house. Then, one day, hoping to begin a new life away from the scene of all his memories, he moved us from Texas to Ft. Dupree, South Dakota.”
The scene is an ordinary domestic bedroom, the time is 1959, the speaker is fifteen-year-old Holly Sargis, as played by the young Sissy Spacek. Back in 1973, these words began one of the great film-making careers of our times, as Terrence Malick opened his début feature Badlands with a statement of intent: voiceover as an integral part of his creative armoury. The former Rhodes Scholar philosophy student’s subsequent sporadic output – Days of Heaven (1978), The Thin Red Line (1998), The New World (2005) – certainly bears this out, rendering Malick modern cinema’s prime exponent of voiceover. As Badlands returns for a welcome cinema reissue, it’s an opportune moment to examine his first feature again and assess what part this technique plays in a movie widely regarded as a modern American classic.
Actually, there’s a double-take moment in the midst of that initial monologue. It’s when we realise that when Spacek’s character says ‘the little stranger he found in his house’, she means herself. Right away, we have an image of a widowed father struggling to communicate with his daughter and both of them starting afresh in a new town. Already, we’ve got reasons why this girl might not fit in, and when we see Martin Sheen’s Kit, a cocky twentysomething who reckons he’s much too good for his job as a garbage collector, we can surmise instantly how these two misfits might have something in common. As he enters the frame while she’s outside twirling her cheerleader baton, the next line of her voiceover carries a frisson of foreboding: “Little did I realize that what began in the alleys and back ways of this quiet town would end in the Badlands of Montana.”
She knows, in other words. She knows what’s about to happen because the voiceover sounds as though she’s reading from her journal or autobiography. What follows in the course of the film is a series of such reflections, which comments on her response to the love-on-the-run scenario which befalls Holly and the trigger-happy Kit, but, significantly, does so from a point somewhere in time after it’s happened. Malick feeds us little snippets, as if they’re almost diary entries, but Holly’s thoughts on her world are generated from a position of hindsight. Initially, this is a bit disorientating, but we soon grasp that it’s establishing a distinction between the character’s in-the-moment outward expressions and her more considered interior monologue, couched in the language of children’s adventure tales. There’s the Holly we see – a shyly acquiescent teenage girl – and then there’s Holly as she sees (or would like to see) herself, as a character in a dramatic fable. Indeed, when the couple hit the road, the bloody reality of their murder spree makes a jarring contrast with Holly’s seemingly naïve musings – “At times I wished I could fall asleep and be taken off to some magical land,’ she adds, “but this never happened…”
That’s all very well, but what’s the dramatic justification for Malick’s taking all this trouble to frame Holly’s voiceover in such a specific fashion?
Well, it’s a story about two young people breaking out of their social constraints and making a doomed attempt to seek some sort of freedom for themselves – a freedom ultimately only attainable in Holly’s inner world, in the language she arranges for herself. One of the prime uses of voiceover, after all, is to delineate an individual consciousness often in conflict with the world around them, whether it’s Joe Gillis giving us a jaundiced view of Hollywood in Sunset Blvd (even though he happens to be dead), or Travis Bickle insidiously involving us in his own paranoid views on 70s New York in Taxi Driver. Voiceover is character too, obviously, since Holly’s often child-like expressions underline the sense she’s simply not equipped to deal with the moral questions posed by Kit’s seemingly conscience-free gunplay.
Why though, does Holly’s voiceover often tell us what’s happening in the story before or even at the same time as we see it on screen? Hasn’t this Malick guy heard the supposed screenwriter’s mantra: show don’t tell?
Unlike some weaker scripts, which use voiceover as a catch-all for the secondary information the writer wasn’t otherwise able to wedge in, the longer Badlands goes on, the more you realise that Holly’s voiceover is actually carrying the exposition and even some of the character development (“He needed me now more than ever, but something had come between us”), something you might expect would give the game away and seriously dissipate tension. Malick though, is astute enough to realise that having Holly know everything in advance actually creates an underlying sense of foreboding, and with it a different kind of suspense. Are they really trapped? Might they somehow escape the law? Moreover, whether or not the viewer’s aware that Badlands was inspired by a real-life case (the 1958 Charles Starkweather / Caril Ann Fugate killings which left ten dead across Nebraska and earned him the electric chair), this kind of story’s familiar in outline from the likes of Gun Crazy, and Bonnie & Clyde, right up to True Romance and even Thelma & Louise. We pretty much know in advance that Kit and Holly’s chances of finding their place in the world are pretty slim, so in that respect micro-managing the course of tension and release within the story becomes less of an issue, especially for a film-maker like Malick who’s perhaps more interested in the byplay between the characters’ inner and outer worlds.
There’s a valuable lesson here in how an easily readable genre template can give a personal film-maker the space to follow their own obsessions. What’s more, the 1959 setting already inscribes a greater sense of social conformity than you might have if the story unfolded in the early 70s, so Malick only has to place us in a sleepy South Dakota backwater and we understand the crushing restrictiveness that unpopular schoolgirl Holly and prospect-free labourer Kit are facing up to. The sheer originality of the film, and what makes it so highly regarded, isn’t in the fairly elementary story outline and easily understood conflicts, but the individual texture with which Malick expands on them. If Holly’s hindsight-inflected voiceover (not to mention Spacek’s wonderfully vacant reading of it) prompts a feeling of impending doom, it also keeps us at a slight remove from the action, from which vantage point the audience can ponder just how Kit’s impulse towards escape blends with his need for notoriety to render him morally anesthetized to his murderous actions – all of it presented non-judgmentally by the film-maker so we have to shape our own response to, in Roger Ebert’s memorable words, ‘inhabitants of lives so empty that even their sins cannot fill them’.
That said, here’s a film where surely the spell it casts is not all in the script?
Very true. While the screenplay sets the terms for Badlands, as ever with Malick it’s the magic-hour lighting and his connoisseur’s ear for music (the mesmerising xylophone theme is from Carl Orff’s music for schoolchildren, ‘Gassenhauer nach Hans Neusiedler’, since you’ll search in vain for a Badlands soundtrack CD), which creates an immersively airy melancholia that’s so much a part of the viewing experience. Even so, the particular cadences of the human voice are always a major part of his individual aesthetic, especially here where they lead us into philosophical territory far beyond the remit of the familiar love-on-the-run thriller. If the defining moments in Martin Sheen’s career-best performance aren’t in the way he holds the gun as if it were a magician’s wand zapping his troubles away, they’re in his stumbling yet resilient efforts to record a testimony (in a dimestore recording booth, and on a borrowed Dictaphone) to sustain the legend he knows will be his once he’s captured and his story makes the press. While he seeks a sort of stardom to justify an existence which would otherwise have been unremarkable, Holly’s thoughts go even farther in what’s perhaps the film’s most haunting moment, as the screen fills with a series of seemingly arbitrary antique tourist views and old family portraits while Holly thinks out loud…
“One day, while taking a look at some vistas in Dad's stereopticon, it hit me that I was just this little girl, born in Texas, whose father was a sign painter and who had only just so many years to live ... It sent a chill down my spine, and I thought ‘Where would I be this very moment if Kit had never met me?’...”
It’s an intimation of mortality, a recognition that she too will one day be but a memory, or an image in a faded photograph. What she shares with Kit is an anxiety about making some sort of mark on the world, as her journey takes her away from home, through a brief pastoral idyll in a tree-house, and out eventually into the barren badlands – a landscape of nothingness. In the end, it’s the voiceover which sticks. Her words. Her voice. Her legacy. Echoing in the consciousness of everyone who’s ever seen this pellucid chronicle of death and longing.
Hints and Tips
A character’s values can be delineated through voiceover, which can be particularly useful if you’re trying to indicate that they’re going against the flow of their particular society.
A voiceover in the past tense, suggesting that the character knows everything which is about to happen, can bring a note of foreboding to a story if it suggests impending doom – and we wait to see whether this prophecy is borne out.
Voiceover is character, so both the content and the style of the writing can provide the viewer with a valuable portrait – especially if we realise there are no secrets or holding back in terms of this inner voice.
Voiceover which anticipates or runs simultaneously with the events it’s describing can, if deployed adeptly, usefully distance the audience from the action if the writer is seeking a more thoughtful and considered response to the events of the story rather than an upfront visceral reaction.
And finally…
Terrence Malick is famed for being the world’s most reclusive film-maker and has it written into his contract that he won’t give any interviews. He does however make a cameo appearance in Badlands as the architect who turns up at the grand residence where the fugitive duo are ‘house-sitting’. The actor due to play this part never turned up and the location was only available for a day, so Malick filled in for a brief moment of on-screen immortality.
This review is by Trevor Johnston, a film critic with a sideline in development, who’s been right through the system here at The Script Factory – from reader training right through to graduating from the Script Development Diploma. During that time he’s certainly learned the value of looking under the bonnet of movies since that’s where you really appreciate the nitty-gritty of the scriptwriter’s art.
Badlands is being re-released by the BFI this month starting at London’s BFI Southbank and then will be heading out around the UK. Our friends at BFI Southbank have offered two pairs of tickets to see the film on Wednesday 10 September in big screen glory in NFT 1 – plus a gorgeous Badlands poster to two lucky Script Factory winners. All you need to do is tell us which other film you think best uses voiceover. It’ll be your opinion – and the winners will be the choices Trevor Johnston most agrees with! Email your answers to us at info@scriptfactory.co.uk by 1 September 2008 – and we’ll let you know what wins next month.
If you'd like to discuss this review with Trevor Johnston you can email him at info@scriptfactory.co.uk
©Trevor Johnston/The Script Factory 2008