Road Movies Tale of Two

Road Movies

Tale of Two Outlaw Couples, of Children and Adults -- "Badlands" versus "True Romance"

The American road is a place of motion, with no real, concrete destination other than wandering. It is a place or a country in and of itself in the sense that it has its own rules or mores, but these 'rules' usually only mean that the identity of travelers are forever fluid, impermanent, and fixed outside of real time and societal regulation. The road is thus the ideal postmodern space of self-definition for people who feel uncomfortable in their home spaces, like the protagonists of "Badlands" (1973), directed by Terrence Malick, or "True Romance" (1993), directed by Tony Scott. But these films, which both anchor an outlaw couple at their center, also raise the question of what occurs when two people seeking freedom are anchored to one another, through the bonds of love and violence? Both films suggest that the presence of another in a romantic relationship can validate the other person's existence and worth, often for the first time, and thus normalizes the violence that transpires. However, while Malick's Kit and Holly are immature, childish figures who only tangentially connect with one another as people, Scott's Clarence and Alabama form a kind of perverse, but ultimately fully mature quasi-marital alliance when they embark upon the road.

Badlands," based upon a real-life, notorious killing, details the deceptively normal upbringing of a young South Dakota couple Kit and Holly. Holly does not commit the actual executions featured in the film, but the actress Sissy Spacek's voice-overs provide the main narrative structure to the killing spree chronicled by Malick.

Holly's presence gives the slightly older Kit the confidence to kill, although his murders seem to have little purpose other than to validate his masculinity, despite the fact he rather unconvincingly justifies them to her at the outset of their spree. Vaguely, he finds reasons for continuing to kill people, just as vaguely the couple forms an idea of fleeing to the Far North, to hide from the pursuit of the law. The one thing that unites the couple, beyond murder, seems to be their inability to morally or emotionally comprehend the magnitude of Kit's killings, and their initial sense of outsiderness. Their complicity in what transpires seems to be the result of their inability to connect meaning to their actions, which arises out of a greater, psychological sense of meaninglessness.

True Romance" likewise shows two misfits, a store clerk named Clarence played by Christian Slater and a prostitute named Alabama played by Patricia Arquette, fleeing their unpleasant home situations. But they do so with a clearer plan than Kit or Holly, namely to sell cocaine that has fallen into their possession and hop a plane to Rio. Ultimately, they succeed in their endeavor, unlike Kit and Holly, and the film ends with a morally ambiguous validation of their success, which seems partly rooted in the character's love for one another and their ability to become better people, after uniting together against a morally corrupt world.

The great naivete in the perspective of Kit and Holly was deliberate upon director Terrence Malick's part. "My influences were books like The Hardy Boys, Swiss Family Robinson, Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn -- all involving an innocent in a drama over his or her head. I didn't actually think about those books before I did the script, but it's obvious to me now. Nancy Drew, the children's story child detective -- I did think about her," he said in a 1975 interview, shortly after the film's success at the box office. (Walker, 1975, pp. 82)

Malick's couple goes off in search of adventure, much in the way such positive, childlike characters of popular books for young people went off to seek answers, away from the confines of adult society. Kit and Holly's inability to recognize that murder is wrong, and that although society may have made them feel rejected, their way of expressing their suppressed anger at such a rejection is misguided is affirmed in Holly's narration, which evolves like a guidebook, more than a moral confessional, as if creating an upbeat narrative of murder makes what occurred normal. "When they're crossing the badlands, instead of telling us what's going on between Kit and herself, or anything of what wed like and have to know, she describes what they ate and what it tasted like, as though we might be planning a similar trip and appreciate her experience," or as if writing an essay on what she did for her summer vacation. (Walker, 1975, pp. 82) Through cataloging her experiences on the road, Holly tries to define an emerging sense of self, in an ultimately ineffectual manner.

Similarly, Kit longs for peramancy, a stable sense of identity and place, and only finds a meaningful narrative of the self through the road and through murder: "Unknown and lost in a small backwater town at the start of the film, Kit consistently attempts to record or mark their murderous adventure: on a recorded 45; on a Dictaphone; by a monument of rocks at his roadside capture; in a book belonging to Holly; in a time capsule buried roadside or floated high into the air by a balloon; in a suicide note; by leaving his body to science; and by his unemployment registration," and finally, by writing his criminal record in the form of murder. (Danks, 2000)

According to Adrian Danks, the two main characters of "Badlands" exist on parallel, rather than mutual psychological tracks, and essentially engage in two different filmic narratives. "Whereas Holly's narrative is presented as a minor break from the repetition of small-town life, Kit's is a linear spiral to death," as is more indicative of the traditional, murderous version of a road movie genre film. In contrast to Holly's schoolbook enthusiasm, "Kit's reference points are more ephemeral, modern, and relate to his aping of various movie stars and popular singers." (Danks, 2000) Although both characters lack a mutual anchor of 'selfhood,' Kit is even more of a blank than Holly because he "does not attempt to place himself in a continuum of 'universal' images as Holly does, instead Kit's self-fashioning are based upon images that are even more postmodern in their nature, more "obscure, cinematic and blank." (Danks, 2000) For Kit, "these images represent a microcosm of his attempt to make a mark on the world, his stab at a kind of iconic immortality." (Danks, 2000) Even in contrast to the director's own stated belief in the unity of innocence; Danks sees the identity provided by murder both of "Badland's" protagonists as different. For Holly, the road and romance provides maturity and novelty in the form of travel, for Kit, the mythologization of an alienated self like his hero James Dean.

The marriage and romance narrative does not fuses these characters identity, unlike most romantic journey pictures, not because one character is less violent or more mature than the other, but because both come to the road seeking different needs, and thus see different selves mirrored in the face of their romantic companion, either of maturity or affirmation. (Wilding, 2003, pp.373-389) Holly sees a man who gives her independence from an uncomfortable family situation; Kit sees someone who respects him and gives him a mirror, a sounding board for his thoughts about his crimes. Yet neither character really recognizes or sees the other. Both remain in a state of suspended, childish emotional development, even while the presence of another faceless human being who does not object to murder validates the act of killing.

Clarence and Alabama, however, embark upon a more purposeful and defined quest in the film "True Romance." Their fates are aligned with one another despite the anonyminity of the road, because they have a relatively more structured plan of escape from the stultifying existences they dwelled in before they met one another. Their pursuers, who include the Mob as well as enforcers of the law, are more ambiguous in their morality, and the characters seek not simply excitement and self-definition through murder, but which to complete a specific scheme of selling their stash and eluding all of those persons, who are trying to kill or capture them. Although the road reinforces the normal quality of illicit behavior, the characters do not constantly mythologize their actions to fulfill a psychic need, like Kit and Holly do, by reading about their killings in the newspapers, and the violence that occurs has a concrete, defined purpose to facilitate Clarence and Alabama's escape.