Badlands Criterion: Terrence Malick’s masterpiece showed how to humanize serial killers without romanticizing them.
SlateMany moralists think violence should simply be swept away from American cinema because our citizens can’t tell the difference between fantasy and reality. Examining Terrence Malick’s 1973 masterpiece Badlands at a time when gun violence has once again become a topic of heated discussion, now that Criterion has issued a sparkling new edition, enables one to see its superiority to the wave of serial-killer chic that swept American culture in the ’90s and is still with us today. That gore was featured in force in the ’90s, when serial killers seemed to be everywhere in American cinema, most notably in The Silence of the Lambs, Seven, and, worst of all, Natural Born Killers. Korean director Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder and David Fincher’s Zodiac are both based on real-life investigations of serial killers. In this way Memories of Murder and Zodiac hold a mirror up to a culture fascinated by serial killers and show its ultimate emptiness, all without the self-righteous finger-pointing of a film like Michael Haneke’s 1997 Funny Games, which was inspired by the Austrian director’s disgust with Natural Born Killers.
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