Badlands vs True Romance: Outlaw Couples on the Road

The Road as Postmodern Space of Identity

The American road is a place of motion, with no real or concrete destination other than wandering. It is a place — a country unto itself — in the sense that it has its own rules and mores, though these "rules" usually mean only that the identities 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.

Both films anchor an outlaw couple at their center and raise the question of what occurs when two people seeking freedom are bound to one another through love and violence. Both films suggest that the presence of another person in a romantic relationship can validate the other'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 perverse but ultimately fully mature quasi-marital alliance when they embark upon the road.

Kit and Holly: Childlike Innocence and Moral Vacancy

Badlands, based on a real-life notorious killing spree, details the deceptively normal upbringing of a young South Dakota couple, Kit and Holly. Holly does not commit the actual murders featured in the film, but actress Sissy Spacek's voice-overs provide the main narrative structure to the killing spree Malick chronicles. Holly's presence gives the slightly older Kit the confidence to kill, though his murders seem to have little purpose beyond validating his masculinity — despite the fact that he rather unconvincingly justifies them to her at the outset of their spree. Vaguely, he finds reasons for continuing to kill; just as vaguely, the couple forms an idea of fleeing to the Far North to hide from the law. The one thing that unites them, beyond murder, seems to be their inability to morally or emotionally comprehend the magnitude of Kit's killings and their initial sense of being outsiders. Their complicity in what transpires appears to result from their inability to connect meaning to their actions — an incapacity that arises from a deeper 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: to sell cocaine that has fallen into their possession and board 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 characters' love for one another and their capacity to become better people by uniting against a morally corrupt world.

The great naivety in the perspective of Kit and Holly was deliberate on 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, p. 82).

Malick's couple goes off in search of adventure much in the way such positive, childlike characters of popular books for young people 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 that suppressed anger is misguided — is affirmed in Holly's narration. Her voice-over evolves like a guidebook more than a moral confessional, as if constructing 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 we'd 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" (Walker, 1975, p. 82) — as if writing an essay on what she did over summer vacation. Through cataloging her experiences on the road, Holly tries to define an emerging sense of self, but does so in an ultimately ineffectual manner.

Parallel Tracks: Disconnected Identities in Badlands

Similarly, Kit longs for permanence — a stable sense of identity and place — and finds a meaningful self-narrative only 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 itself (Danks, 2000).

According to Adrian Danks, the two main characters of Badlands exist on parallel rather than mutual psychological tracks and essentially inhabit 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," which is more indicative of the traditional, murderous version of the road movie genre. 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 is 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 setting aside the director's own stated belief in the unity of innocence, Danks sees the identity provided by murder as different for each protagonist. For Holly, the road and romance provide maturity and novelty in the form of travel; for Kit, they enable the mythologization of an alienated self modeled on his hero James Dean.

The romance narrative does not fuse these characters' identities — 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 therefore see different selves mirrored in the face of their romantic companion (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 provides a sounding board for his thoughts about his crimes. Yet neither character truly recognizes or sees the other. Both remain in a state of suspended, childish emotional development, even as the presence of another human being who does not object to murder validates the act of killing.

Conclusion: Two Couples, Two Outcomes

The protagonists of True Romance are more successful than those of Badlands — not simply as outlaws, but as human beings. They win their quest for fulfillment, money, and excitement because they are able to work together as a functioning romantic and criminal team. Although togetherness provides the psychic fuel behind the meaningless murders of Badlands, the Kit-and-Holly pairing is not really a couple at all. The two never connect, and their partnership is more a combination of fuel and fire than a real merging into a romantic dyad. Ultimately, both films suggest that self-definition through violence is only sustainable — and only humane — when it is anchored in genuine mutual recognition between partners. The road offers freedom, but freedom without connection leads, as Kit's fate confirms, only to a spiral toward death.

Works Cited

Danks, Adrian. "Death Comes as an End: Temporality, Domesticity and Photography in Terrence Malick's Badlands." Senses of Cinema, issue 8, July–August 2000.

Rafter, Nicole. Shots in the Mirror: Crime Films and Society. Oxford University Press, 2000.

Stam, Robert. Literature through Film: Realism, Magic and the Art of Adaptation. Blackwell, 2004.

Walker, Beverly. "Interview with Terrence Malick." Sight and Sound, vol. 44, no. 2, Spring 1975, pp. 82–83.

Wilding, M. "Romantic Love and 'Getting Married': Narratives of the Wedding in and Out of Cinema." Journal of Sociology, vol. 39, 2003, pp. 373–389.