“I found a toaster”1 is all Kit Carruthers has to say to his blank young girlfriend after he takes her father’s freshly murdered body into the basement and emerges with a neglected kitchen appliance. This subtle gesture marks the beginning of a killing spree that will drive Kit and Holly across the apathetic plans of South Dakota. A rampage that fictionalizes the true life story of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate as a violent portrait of myth and meaninglessness. Asserting its difference amongst other crime films,Terrence Malick’s Badlands departs significantly from classical Hollywood norms through conventions that portray a narrative in self conscious ways. In a quiet, subtle, and oblique way it transcends New Wave films by being radically different and …show more content…
Malick presents them as true-to-life people facing empty lives and identities. By becoming outlaws, both of them, especially Kit, believe that they have found something to live for. The quality of being notorious outlaw lovers is something that they can take on and perform, for perhaps nothing else other than to kill time. Although this might appear to resemble Bonnie and Clyde, unlike Kit and Holly, Bonnie and Clyde feed off of their notoriety by sending the press photos and poems. Badlands is distinctive because by the end, Kit and Holly’s short lived lives as outlaws amount to an empty gesture, devoid of any clear motivation, meaning, or