"Dead people are all on the same level."
Attributed to Charlie Starkweather
Driving I-30 in western Nebraska, in that part of the state where the map is notched by Eastern Colorado, you ride the idiosyncratic boundary between two landscapes. One of these is the Platte River Valley, a flat green quilt of irrigation circles where the geometry of industrialized agriculture suppresses the natural features of the place. The other is an empty, buff-colored corrugation of sandy gullies and dry grass, the tail end of the Nebraska Sandhills. On I-30, if you look away from the highway, you see on one side of the car a managed Eden, and on the other, abruptly, a high plains desert.
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As I write this, my daughter is fourteen. I mention this to put the next remarks in context. Her favorite films, just now, are probably Groundhog Day, Seven Samurai, and Jim Jarmusche’s Coffee and Cigarettes. Last summer, in a film program for high school students, she made a short homage to Coffee and Cigarettes, using for her key prop a rigged deck of cards instead of the coffee pot and ash tray. I like her taste in these things, and she mine, but I cannot interest her in a film that has always fascinated me: Terence Malick’s Badlands. As she says, Who wants to know about people like that?
Indeed.
The other reason I mention her age is that, this year, she is the same age as Caril Ann Fugate was when Fugate and her nineteen year old boyfriend, Charles Starkweather, murdered eleven people, for the most part in and around Lincoln, Nebraska, in the winter of 1958, and became, sixteen years later, the subject of Malick’s film. I would like to consider, for a moment, Fugate and Starkweather’s victims: Robert Colvert, age twenty-one, a gas station attendant with a wife and child, robbed and kidnapped and executed the first day of December, in 1957; Marion Bartlett, Caril Ann's stepfather and Velda Bartlett, her mother, both killed by Starkweather, perhaps in an argument that got out of hand, in their home, January twenty-first, 1958; Betty Jean Bartlett, Caril Ann’s two year old half-sister, Marion and Velda's daughter, stabbed and smothered, for crying; August Meyer, age 72, a family friend of Starkweather, killed on his farm six days later; Robert Jensen, age seventeen, and Robert's sixteen year old girlfriend Carol King, who picked up Charlie and Caril Ann hitch-hiking on the same day –January 27, 1958 – and died for their generosity; C. Lauer Ward, who is usually described, in the curious language of class, as a Lincoln industrialist, murdered the next day after returning from work, in the Lincoln home where his wife, Clara Ward, had already been killed after serving Starkweather and Fugate coffee and breakfast; Lillian Fencl, the Ward’s fifty-one year-old maid, tied up and stabbed to death after the Ward murders; and Merle Collison, a traveling shoe salesman from Montana, murdered by the side of the road in Wyoming, January 29, 1958, for not being quick enough to trade cars – Ward’s stolen Packard for his own Buick – with Starkweather and Fugate.
Malick takes the facts of Starkweather and Fugate and bends them to his own narrative ends. He changes names and places, moving the action from Nebraska and Wyoming to South Dakota, Wyoming and Montana; Charlie becomes Kit, Caril Ann becomes Holly. He shifts seasons, from winter to an endless summer. He draws out the story, so that it grows from an episode that, at its centre, lasts barely a week, until it has become an Odyssey of sorts, a journey across the high plains that goes on for weeks, perhaps almost forever. And, while he does not absolve Starkweather of guilt, he mitigates it, making his murders more a matter of survival, and less simply the impulsive acts of a borderline personality.
Malick doesn’t back away from Starkweather’s murderousness but, in the interest of his narrative, he establishes a poetic of sorts for it. Among Starkweather and Fugate’s killings, five were women or children; In the course of his story, Malick’s protagonists – Kit and Holly - may murder one; we are left, in passing, with a slim hope that she might live, but we never know. Malick edits out the female victims: Holly‘s father becomes a widower, she has no sister; although Kit and Holly invade a home like Lauer Ward’s, Clara Ward is edited out, and when Kit and Holly leave, we no more than a suspicion that they have murdered Ward and his maid. Instead of the women and children, Malick substitutes men who may be bounty hunters of sorts, three, killed by Kit in a virtuoso display of ambush and gunplay. He also substitutes a younger man for Meyer, and reworks the murders of Jensen and King, leaving their fate in question. This general re-shaping has the effect of eliminating the grimmest killings – a child stabbed and smothered, women mutilated – and leaving Holly less complicit in the mayhem.
At trial, when he learned that Caril Ann’s testimony would leave him responsible for all the killings, Starkweather recanted earlier statements absolving her, and worked instead to implicate her in the grisliest killings, especially the stabbing and sexual mutilation of Carol King.
