The Two ‘Badlands’: What the Classic Terrence Malick Movie Has To Do With The Bruce Springsteen Movie ‘Deliver Me From Nowhere’

It doesn’t approach you like you might expect from a movie this influential. There’s narration, sometimes a technique used to draw viewers into a narrative the filmmakers aren’t sure if they’ll easily accept without it, only here it’s at once detail-packed, plainspoken in its quickness, and a little eerie: “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 Fort Dupree, South Dakota.” Then the soundtrack goes quiet as the movie switches from an image of Holly (Sissy Spacek) petting a big dog on her bed to shots of quiet suburban streets, until the camera catches a garbage truck and its attendant rolling through. Soon he’s asking his coworker if he’ll pay him to eat a dead dog. The sanitation worker is Kit (Martin Sheen). The movie is Badlands.

Terrence Malick’s first feature was released in 1973, set in 1959, and inspired by Charles Starkweather, a teenage killer who went on a killing spree with an even-younger girl starting in 1957, with her immediate family among the victims. Kit from Badlands is a little more sparing than Starkweather, in that he only shoots Holly’s father dead. Her mother, as mentioned, is already gone, and she is an only child. Best not to think about what would happen in the film if she weren’t. Violence lurks at the edge of the movie even without Kit enacting it; when Holly’s father is incensed by her involvement with Kit, she shoots her dog, as she nonchalantly reports in her narration. Soon enough, the father is dead, Holly’s house is burnt down, and Kit and Holly are criminals on the run, though Kit continues to do the actual killing. They head for the badlands of Montana; Holly may be seeking a fresh start, but Kit sure doesn’t seem like he’s looking for peace.

Badlands arrived just six years after Bonnie and Clyde, the 1967 crime film that helped change American cinema. Bonnie and Clyde was directed by Arthur Penn, and Malick was his protégé – yet there’s no sense that Badlands is just Bonnie and Clyde Babies, even though Kit seems less stable than Clyde and Holly far more naïve than Bonnie. It’s more of a distant, lyrical translation of that movie. Though it’s set decades after the events depicted in Bonnie and Clyde, it often feels as if Kit recalls some faint echo of the famous couple. He also poses a bit like James Dean, which Holly likes. The undertone of doom, the sense that there isn’t a workable endgame for this strange young couple, haunts the movie, especially with Holly continuing to narrate as in a reflective daze, as if she’s watching herself on a giant silver screen, or maybe a drive-in theater.

How, then, to extricate the Badlands influence when Malick’s film itself recalls other inspirations? Sometimes it’s direct: “Gassenhauer,” a dreamy passage of music from composers Carl Orff and Gunild Keetman used repeatedly in the film, turns up again as the unofficial theme of the Tony Scott/Quentin Tarantino collaboration True Romance, also about young lovers on the run. It’s a formulation that Tarantino explored repeatedly in his early scripts; Natural Born Killers, further distorted into something else all together by Oliver Stone, is like Badlands with two Kits; both Mickey and Mallory do the killing there. In True Romance, the leads are more like two Hollys, never reaching Kit’s level of genuine sociopathy. Director David Gordon Green, meanwhile, has never made a lovers-on-the-run picture, but Malick’s influence on his work, particularly movies like All the Real Girls and Undertow, is clear – and he tends toward the more offbeat, character-driven Badlands rather than the more sweeping likes of The Thin Red Line.

You can also see bits of Badlands more literally in the new Bruce Springsteen biopic Deliver Me from Nowhere, wherein our Bruce (Jeremy Allen White), haunting his hometown in the depressed wake of his success with The River, happens upon the film on late-night TV and holds on it, transfixed. This leads him to Starkweather, the film’s real-life inspiration, which in turn inspires Springsteen to write “Nebraska” – the title track for the spare, moody record whose making the movie chronicles. The opening lyrics of the song reflect the film more than the real account of Starkweather: “I saw her standin’ on her front lawn, just a twirlin’ her baton” is an image straight from the beginning of Malick’s film.

Curiously, the movie’s Springsteen never seems to take note that in an apparent coincidence, he had already written a song entitled “Badlands” several years earlier, making it a cornerstone of the 1978 Darkness at the Edge of Town album, which was released a few months before Malick’s second film, Days of Heaven. Movie Bruce also goes to see The Night of the Hunter, another one-of-a-kind classic that also directly influenced Green’s Malick-produced Undertow, though not much connection between that film and Badlands is explicated. Fair enough that the movie is ultimately more interested in the chapter-from-the-memoir nature of Springsteen’s psychology at this time of his life than the ways that culture can echo and reflect down long, mirror-lined hallways. That’s more of a Bob Dylan thing – and Dylan’s biopic didn’t really do that, either.

But showing The Boss watching Badlands within a movie that reflects some of the drive-all-night intensity of his song “Badlands” does hint at the surprising influence Terence Malick has wielded in the time since Badlands, even as he made himself scarce for large chunks of it. Deliver Me from Nowhere is set in the early years of a two-decade hiatus from filmmaking that Malick would end with 1998’s The Thin Red Line, working on a bigger canvas and an army’s worth of stars (some unceremoniously cut from the picture almost entirely; Adrien Brody famously went into the premiere mistakenly thinking he was a lead).

In other words, Malick was not much part of the current cinema in 1981, and would become even less so throughout the remainder of the decade. But still the ethereal beauty and uneasy menace of his debut wafts out over the airwaves and hypnotizes Springsteen, helping along one of his best albums in the process. It’s hard not to wish for a little more of a Malickian sensibility to Deliver Me from Nowhere itself, though it’s understandable why the movie wouldn’t agree. (I haven’t seen Predator: Badlands yet, but I assume the influence isn’t especially strong there, either.) For all of Malick’s stealth influence, his movie isn’t easy to imitate. Bonnie and Clyde was the bolder lovers-on-the-run movie with clear connections to Warner Bros. gangster pictures of old and the coming New Hollywood revolution. Badlands doesn’t lock into the timeline quite so neatly. It feels more than a little outside of it, something that travels through America’s vast empty spaces, hiding in plain sight.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.