Badlands: A Modernist Meditation on Existence and Lawlessness Anonymous College

Terrence Malick’s 1973 film Badlands transforms the real-life killing spree of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate into a modernist film that questions the purpose and belonging of youth in the suburban Midwest. Badlands philosophizes on the defining power that law and societal expectation have on youth through the heavy use of modernist cinematic techniques, as defined by scholars Peter Wollen and David Bordwell. The use of direct address, an episodic structure, estranged characters, and a non-causal narrative all question what it means to live in an increasingly urban and lawful society – or society at all.

Film scholar, David Bordwell, provides a broad definition of modernism in cinema in his essay The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice. The modernist films that emerge in conjunction with art cinema show realistic places and realistic problems. It employs psychologically-complex characters whose actions are motivated by their psyche. Clear causation is absent which leaves the characters to drift through the narrative rather than to successively move through it. The hero has a “realization of the anguish of ordinary living, [a] discovery of unrelieved misery” (Bordwell 562). Spatial representation is justified...