One big dusty place in the South.

I went to see Terrence Malick's Badlands at the Los Angeles County Museum of Arts on Thursday. I wanted to start exploring the legacy of Malick, who is known to have made only four features in the past 40 years, all of them celebrated as masterpieces or widely regarded as gems of film. Malick has remained elusive and distant from the public eye and hence created a mystique around his persona. I guess that in the film world he's seen like some sort of J.D. Salinger as he declines making appearances or even have his likeness used for any promotional purpose and like Salinger he keeps tight control of his work. I imagine that when you're out of the public eye there is less distraction that goes into one's work, and that reclusive persona adds a poetic personality to an artist.

This was Malick's filmmaking debut, which was just as impressive as Peter Bogdanovich’s Last Picture Show(of which we'll discuss in a later episode). Both contemplate the boring life of the scorched lands of the south and in a very stylish way it shows its young characters, who are heavily influenced by the image of the movies in the 50's, as ennui ridden people in the search of anything that may lift them from their crude reality. In Badlands, for example, Martin Sheen’s character Kit sports tight blue jeans and a white t shirt and carries a comb at all times to make himself resemble James Dean. Sissy Spacek’s is Holly, a 15 year old nymphet, eternally sleepy and who lives her life through the movie magazines. Holly sees Kit as a fantasy boyfriend and his disdain towards life (animal or human) makes no horrific impression on her as they embark on a killing spree after Kit kills Holly’s father in her presence and burns her house.

The sporadic narration of Holly are like intimate entries of a teenage girl's diary. You can see that her dewy freckled face, her delicious immaturity and her eagerness to grow older (which in a way has the same qualities as the taciturn girls in the Sofia Coppola movies) as she clumsily applies on make up or runs around with rollers in her hair in a treehouse Kit and Holly built to hide from authorities.

Yes, they're outlaws, but it's the naive way in which they do things, their spontaneous decisions in order to survive the circumstances they built for themselves what makes them relatable to the public. Unfortunately the public I saw the movie with seemed a bit dumb. When Sissy Spacek came out for a Q&A, instead of taking the opportunity to ask an insightful question about her work with Malick in Badlands they kept asking her about her work in the movie "Carrie" and the bucket of blood that drenches her in said movie. Sissy seemed disappointed. Spacek is clearly and genuinely attached to Badlands and how can she not be, it's the film that propelled her to do all the impeccable work she's done in the past 40 years and to become one of the most important American actresses. Gracefully she scolded her dunderheaded audience "Don't you want to talk about Badlands?" "I do", I responded within myself, "I do."