MovieChat Forums > Badlands (1974) Discussion > Kit's Journey

Kit's Journey

posted 4 years ago by Fandango (535)
6 replies | jump to latest

As Kit and Holly embark on their journey, I found it interesting how Kit had accepted his fate, knowing beforehand the ultimate outcome. The "lovers on a lam" genre typically sees the main characters running away from their crimes, hoping to evade capture indefinitely and maintain their lust for one another. With Malick's Badlands, we see that in the beginning of the film, Kit and Holly have accepted their fate, understanding the ultimate outcome of their decisions. While they are respectively psychopathic and sociopathic, they are not naive.

Time is symbolized twice throughout the film. In the first act, we see Kit and Holly place some of their belongings in the red air balloon, signifying the transient nature of time. In the second act, however, we see more belongings, this time being buried. This contrast symbolizes that there are elements in life that are variable, and those that remain consistent. We do not know what remains constant in our lives, and when Kit says they may or may not find those objects again in the future, the indication here implies that in looking back, we may notice what part of us has become ingrained and what part has left.

Kit mentions multiple times throughout the film how much fun he is having being with Holly, but he realizes the fleeting nature of their moments. Towards the end, when Kit has a moment to drive away from the police, possibly buying himself another day or two, he decides to take his fate head on. He does not run away from himself. He understands his nature and he understands the consequences of his actions.

In watching this film, I couldn't help but be reminded of Hermann Hesse in, Demian, who wrote, "I realize today that nothing in the world is more distasteful to a man than to take the path that leads to himself.”

[–] twinA (4921) 4 years ago

September 14, 2020 Monday 2:40 a.m. ET

Kit was searching for something that could not be found, unwilling to recognize his own dependence due to his struggle for personal security. Even the otherwise responsible act of giving himself up to the authorities was of selfish motivation - pride in a desperate bid to have some semblance of an ultimately false control over his existence.

He was so dead-set on ensuring himself that his choices were right, no matter how faulty his reasoning (conflated by delusion), he was willing to bring Holly down with him under notions of love that were anything but love, unless you count self-love, which pretty much goes hand-in-hand with pride. The saddest kind of lies are the ones we tell ourselves.

Things of great significance are usually buried or burned when being disposed. Their burial action showed they valued more than just their current situation, symbolizing that there is humanity and compassion in them which they are capable of.

~~/o/

[–] Fandango (535) 4 years ago

This was excellently written. Thank you for your insights. This certainly puts things into a clearer, albeit it different, perspective.

I believe the audience overwhelmingly acknowledges Kit and Holly's actions as inherently selfish. After all, what can be more selfish than taking another human life in order to prolong yours?

A recent post asked whether or not someone like Kit had a choice in his ultimate trajectory. Was he programmed to kill? Psychopathy is often in-grained, through a combination of nature and nurture, so there is a lingering element of nihilistic fatalism present in Kit's actions.

I believe the role of nature in both films once again is an attempt to remark on the duality of the natural, of which man is part of. We see that nature can be beautiful (the forest where Kit and Holly take shelter in), but it can also be cruel (the desert where Kit's colleague was stationed). In both instances, brutality can take over, we see death permeate as Kit kills the men (forest) and his friend (desert). In all of Malick's films, there is the strong presence of nature.

What I find even more interesting is the setting (post-war America at its zenith). There is an aegis of material vacuity permeating the film. This is highlighted through the barren landscapes, symbolizing the emptiness of materialism and the primacy of the soul.

In my view, the film hearkens back on Xunzi, who wrote that "human nature is bad. their goodness is a matter of deliberate effort." The good things that make up civilization, he claims, come from deliberate adherence to codes of conduct and from principles that are adopted through deliberate effort, instead of listening to one's nature.

We see that in times of uncertainty, Kit and Holly follow their base nature base nature instead of their cultivated disposition (shooting Kit's friend without knowing where he was going, killing the couple in cellar).

[–] twinA (4921) 4 years ago

September 16, Wednesday 2:20 p.m. ET

I have thought a lot about this the last couple of days, considering what you've said, finding your references remarkably relatable.

Coming across a copy of The Nature and Destiny of Man by Reinhold Niebuhr recently, filled with the previous owner's notes and personality, I was practically directed to this very relevant statement made by the author (Niebuhr) which is underlined:

"The self knows the world, insofar as it knows the world, which means it cannot understand itself except as it is understood from beyond itself and the world." (Ch.1; p.14)

He says this is "homelessness" of the human spirit, unable to find meaning in nature due to freedom being identified differently from the necessity of nature.

I'm thinking to myself, I need to share this in our talk about Kit here; it fits in with the film's themes like a glove!

~~/o/

[–] Fandango (535) 4 years ago

Thank you for sharing this. It certainly ties in with the film's themes, in one way or another. I had recently embarked on selected readings from The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, and found the following rather interesting—in response to the significance of nature in Malick's films, but more specifically The Thin Red Line:

Nature, nonenchanted, is, as Tall remarks, “cruel,” a warring force that frames the human drama of war but is utterly indifferent to human purposes and intentions. Human death is one more manifestation of the relentlessness of nature, in the face of which calmness is the only truly human response.

[–] Drooch (5333) 4 years ago

There’s a brief mention in the film that Kit had fought in the Korean war, I suspect this somewhat accounts for his blasé attitude to murder.

Malick is a deeply spiritual artist and I suspect the total lack of spirituality in the main characters and their environment is significant. They inhabit a desolate hell, the only humanity we encounter is in the fearful eyes of the innocents they’re about to kill.

The film calls forth compassion and grace in the viewer, we want to bring it to the world of the film, to heal it. Malick might be making a case for religion in an otherwise cruel and indifferent universe.

[–] Fandango (535) 4 years ago

Thank you for the insight; I agree with you entirely.

I've always found the title of Badlands interesting, perhaps because of its subtle "figuration." In one scene, as outlined by Gabriella Blasi in The Orchard in the Land of Garbage (2014), we see Holly's father painting an advertisement, depicting the commodification or domestication of "nature and happiness" set against the backdrop of a vast emptiness. Just as you mentioned, there is a lingering note of spiritual vacuity that pervades the film. The billboard advertisement juxtaposes with an earlier scene, where Kit kicks one of the animals he had just fed. We see the billboard as the figuration of the capitalist dream, with the surrounding desolation as the capitalist reality, with all of its signification—spiritual and moral emptiness

What Malick appears to suggest, is that behind the facade of the 1950s American Dream, there lies a certain "brutality" or emptiness, and this interplay is further enhanced through the film's title and use of nature. Kit and Holly's attempt to escape the materialistic claustrophobia which is their life is symbolized during their walk, where they encounter store-after-store, finally landing on a rather idyllic depiction of nature, with two men under a tree and near a river. Here, we are presented, just as in the scene with the billboard, an idealized, arable version of nature, instead of the garbage-infested badlands, depicted as America during its materialistic jubilation.