The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Terrence Malick · a film · 1973 · about 94 minutes
Mode
Lovers-on-the-run film told against itself; crime ballad, pastoral and deadpan comedy held at one distance
Mythos
The garden and the expulsion; the outlaw couple of the American ballad; the frontier run out into empty country; a man raising his own monument
Phase
One flight in stations from a South Dakota town in 1959: a house burned, a garden in the cottonwoods, a farm, a rich man’s house, the Montana badlands, an airfield; told after the end by the girl
Presentation
Feature film in colour, widescreen, mono sound, about 94 minutes; photography by Brian Probyn, Tak Fujimoto and Stevan Larner, design by Jack Fisk; the girl’s narration throughout, and a children’s tune from Orff and Keetman’s Schulwerk over play and killing alike
Register
From a young man recording good advice in a stranger’s house to a father shot on his own floor; one level girl’s voice over both
Scale
Two people and one road, out of the settled world into the empty one
Governing Proposition
A girl twirling a baton on a front lawn in a South Dakota town in 1959 goes off with a young garbage collector who looks like James Dean, and he kills his way across the plains with her until she tires of him. She tells it afterwards, in the voice of a schoolgirl’s diary, and the film sets that voice against what it shows. The wager is that the distance between the acts and the account of them can be the film’s whole knowledge: that a self made of borrowed images can kill without meaning anything by it, that the culture which made the images will admire the result, and that the girl beside him need never be reached.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins on a girl lying on her bed with her dog, and with her voice. Holly Sargis, played by Sissy Spacek, tells in the past tense where she has come from. Her mother died of pneumonia when she was small. Her father, a sign painter, moved them from Texas to Fort Dupree, South Dakota, and kept the cake from his wedding in the freezer for years before he gave it away. A family’s grief is told as an anecdote, in the voice of a school composition, and the voice will not change for the rest of the film. It belongs to someone who already knows how the story ends, and it is the only voice the film lets tell it.
Kit Carruthers, played by Martin Sheen, works the alleys of the town as a garbage collector, and is fired. On a front lawn he sees a girl twirling a baton. Of that first sight of him Holly says, “He looked just like James Dean.” The line is borrowed: one young man is described by the picture of another, and it is the picture Kit has made himself from. He courts her. Her father, played by Warren Oates, whom the film has shown at work painting a billboard, forbids the boy, and shoots her dog to punish her. It is the first killing in the film, and it is the father’s. Kit’s first killing will answer it.
The film was written, produced and directed by Terrence Malick, and it was his first feature. He was twenty-nine when it was first shown, at the New York Film Festival in October 1973; four years earlier his translation of Heidegger’s The Essence of Reasons had been published. Brian Probyn, Tak Fujimoto and Stevan Larner are credited for the photography, Jack Fisk designed it, and Warner Bros. released it in 1974. The story is loosely drawn from the Starkweather and Fugate killings in Nebraska and Wyoming in the winter of 1957 and 1958, moved to 1959 and to South Dakota and Montana. The opening settles the method. We will see what happened, we will hear Holly tell it, and the two will not agree.
Movement II
Kit comes to the house for Holly. Her father threatens to call the authorities, and Kit shoots him. The death is on screen, quick and plain, with no suspense in the cutting and no weight in the frame: a man on the floor of his own house. Holly slaps Kit. Then she packs. The film sets the two acts side by side and explains neither. Sheen plays the moment as he plays the whole film, with an ease and a charm that have nothing behind them, and Spacek plays the girl as someone to whom this is happening at a slight distance, as if in a story read aloud.
Kit stages their deaths and sets the house on fire. The camera moves from room to room among the furnishings as the fire takes them, one after another, and the sequence is staged and lit as a series of rooms, unhurried. Over it Holly’s narration runs as level as before. This is where her account first fails to meet what is shown. Her father lies dead in the house and the house is burning, and the voice tells it in the cadence of a diary about a summer. The gap does not trouble her. That it does not is the film’s first disclosure, and everything after is built on it.
Holly narrates throughout, in the past tense, from after the end; Kit never narrates. The film’s whole account of him is hers, and hers is written in the language of the magazine romance and the school composition, the only language she has for anything. Spacek speaks it flat and exact and never signals the irony, which is why the irony is complete. Under the flight comes a children’s tune, the Gassenhauer of Carl Orff and Gunild Keetman, from the Schulwerk, music made for the schoolroom. It will return over the pair at play and in flight alike. A children’s tune over killing is the sound of a child’s consciousness.
Movement III
They go down to the cottonwoods by a river and live there. There is a tree house; there are traps, fishing, reading, dancing in the woods. Light comes through the leaves, the river runs below, and the camera holds the place long and wide. It is the one place in the film where the pair are happy, and the film lets the happiness last long enough that everything after it is exile. The shape is the oldest there is, a garden and an expulsion, and the garden is a child’s: a house in a tree.
Men come for them. Kit shoots them from cover, and the film hardly shows them: figures in the trees, there and then gone. The killing here is an incident, not an event, and nothing in the film’s manner rises to meet it. The pair leave the garden for the open country, and the children’s tune that played over their games plays over their flight. The film will not distinguish the two, because Kit and Holly do not.
The landscapes are the film’s second voice. Held wide, at the ends of the day, the river, the trees and the plains put the pair inside a nature that does not notice them; what they do in it leaves no mark on the light. Here and there the images rise toward a reverence that Holly’s narration does not share, and a few passages are beauty for its own sake. In those places the film briefly has two minds about what it sees. It is the first sign of a manner that Malick would make his own in the films that followed.
Movement IV
Out on the plains they come to the farm of Cato, a friend of Kit’s, played by Ramon Bieri, who takes them in. When Kit thinks Cato means to go for help, he shoots him. Cato walks to the house and sits down to die, and the film walks away from him. A young couple arrive at the farm. Kit locks them in the storm cellar and fires through the door, and the film does not open it. Whether they die is not shown.
Taken in order, the deaths move further from the frame as they grow. The father dies on screen; the men in the woods are barely seen; Cato’s death is walked away from; the couple’s is behind a door. The film looks away more as the killing grows, and the looking away is the argument. To move the camera close, to cut for suspense, would give the deaths the weight the film refuses them, and the refusal shows how little they weigh to the two who cause them. It is a crime film that will not let its crimes be the subject.
They take over a rich man’s house, the owner played by John Carter, and hold him and his maid. Kit records a message of advice to the young, and it is a citizen’s platitudes: the one place in the film where he speaks to the world in his own words, and the words are everyone’s. It is a record of himself, left in a stranger’s house. They leave the owner and the maid shut in and drive away in the owner’s car. The comedy of the scene is real, and it is played at exactly the distance of the killings at Cato’s farm, in the same light and the same voice. Nothing in the film is weighted more than anything else.
Movement V
They cross the plains into the badlands of Montana, the car small under the sky at dusk. At night, on the empty plain, they dance in the headlights to a record. It is beautiful, and it is two people dancing in the middle of nowhere because there is nowhere left to go. Holly tires of him. Her decision is quiet, and he accepts it; she gives herself up.
Kit is chased, and stops. Alone on the plain he builds a small cairn of stones to mark the place of his capture, runs a comb through his hair, and gives himself up. The outlaw’s monument is a few stones, raised by himself for himself: the last of his records. At an airfield the lawmen and soldiers crowd round him, and he hands out his belongings, his comb and his lighter, and they take them as souvenirs and remark on his likeness to James Dean. The men who caught him are already watching the film this one declined to be, about a handsome killer, with keepsakes.
The last shots are from a plane, above the clouds, and Holly’s voice tells in a few level sentences what became of them both. The National Film Registry selected the film in 1993, twenty years after its first showing. What Malick made in his first feature was a lovers-on-the-run film in which neither lover is given a reason, told by the one who left, at one distance from everything it shows. The instrument made here, a voice in the wrong key set against images in another, became his own, and went on into Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line and The Tree of Life, where the voices pray rather than misjudge. The gain was precision. The cost was scale, and the film accepted it.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged mainly on structure, with Holly’s narration as its verbal part. Much of the film resists the subtractive test, and the test also finds give. The dog is required: the father’s punishment is the first killing in the film, and it is his, so the second answers it. The burning house is where Holly’s account first fails to meet what is shown, and the film is built on that failure. The garden is required so that the rest is exile; the rich man’s house holds the one place Kit speaks to the world in his own words; the cairn is his last record. The give is real: the road is additive by nature, Cato’s farm or the rich man’s house could go with its beat moved elsewhere, and the men in the woods, shot from cover and barely seen, are incident, not event.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and holds: a self assembled from the culture’s images can kill without meaning anything by it, and the culture that made the images will admire the result. Kit models himself on James Dean; Holly says of him, “He looked just like James Dean”; at the end the lawmen who caught him crowd round, take his things and remark on the likeness. The second truth is Holly’s. Her narration is in the language of the magazine romance and the school composition, and it cannot hold what she has seen: a father shot dead and a house burned, told in the cadence of a summer diary. Held at the figure because part of what the film opens is a mood, a weightless calm, and Kit’s social cause is shown without being entered.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Elevation is frequent and cool: the house burning, the camera moving from room to room as the fire takes the furnishings, under Holly’s level voice; the tree house in the cottonwoods, light through leaves, the river below; the Gassenhauer, a children’s tune, returning over the pair at play and in flight; the dance in the headlights on the empty plain at night; the badlands at dusk, the car small under the sky; Kit alone building his cairn, then fixing his hair to be taken; the last shots from the plane, above the clouds. The beauty is constant and the terror is held under it; the killings are never staged for height. The film rises often, but always in one key: the register is lyric by design and never reaches grandeur or dread at full stretch, and that ceiling, chosen and kept, holds the axis where it is.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Myth built, and built to be shown hollow. The structure is the garden and the expulsion: the town, the garden in the cottonwoods, then the wilderness of the badlands, where the frontier ran out. The inherited form is the outlaw couple of the American ballad, with Bonnie and Clyde and Billy the Kid behind it, and Kit’s last free act is a man raising his own monument on the empty plain. The particulars stay particular: the baton, the dog, the recorded advice, the comb. Held well below the gate by the film’s method, which drains each myth it builds: the garden is a tree house, the frontier a stretch of empty country, the monument a few stones. Myth deflated is still myth built, which keeps the axis above allusion; but the archetypes give the road its shape more than they bear its weight, and the deep is reached as absence.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The tradition is the lovers-on-the-run film, from You Only Live Once (1937) and They Live by Night (1948) to Gun Crazy (1950) and, six years before, Bonnie and Clyde (1967), which had made the outlaw couple glamorous and their death a ballet. This film turns every term: the killer has no psychology and no grievance; the violence is quick, plain and unglamorous; the love is thin; the music is a schoolroom tune, not period rock and roll; and the narrator is a girl whose voice is in the wrong key for every event she tells. The stake was real: a first feature, in a genre whose box-office logic it refused. Held below the top because the turn is of tone and voice within an inherited plot, and the New Hollywood was already turning genre.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Change the form and the film stops knowing what it knows. Its knowledge is the distance between the acts and the account of them, and the form is that distance. Remove Holly’s narration and it becomes a crime film about a handsome killer, the film the lawmen in its last scene are already watching. Give the narration to Kit and the emptiness becomes a confession. Move the camera close, cut for suspense or score the killings, and the deaths take on the weight the film refuses them; the refusal shows how little they weigh to the two who cause them. A children’s tune over killing is the form of a child’s consciousness. The cost is at the edge, and it is paid: some of the nature photography is beauty for its own sake, and there the form is a container.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Evidence rather than promise, and there are fifty-three years of it, grown since Malick’s return to film in 1998 made the debut the first term of a body of work. The film yields on return in both ways the axis names. A first viewing sees a cool crime film; later ones hear how little of Holly’s account is about Kit and how much is about herself, and how the film lets her judge him only by leaving. Formally, the counterpoint of voice and image rewards study, scene against scene. What holds it at the figure is the film’s lucidity and its size: its ironies, once heard, are heard, return sharpens them without overturning them, and it does not hold the incompatible readings that the deepest films hold.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Released in 1973, so force and reach are scored together. The force: the film made a new register for American violence, flat, lyrical and ironic at once, and it founded a mode, the naive voice set against image and landscape, that Malick extended in Days of Heaven (1978) and that a generation borrowed. Much of the wider influence of that mode runs through his later films rather than this one, and it is discounted here. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach that runs through this film directly is documented and lasting, in True Romance (1993), which takes its girl’s narration and echoes its Gassenhauer, and in Wild at Heart (1990), Kalifornia (1993) and Natural Born Killers (1994), which work in its line.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Survival is demonstrated across fifty-three years: selection for the National Film Registry in 1993, twenty years after the premiere; continuous exhibition and restoration; and a standing that has risen with Malick’s later work rather than been eclipsed by it. The surface fixed to a moment is well guarded. The film was set in 1959 and made in 1973, so its period surface was period on the day it opened and ages as history, not as fashion: the cars, the radios and the records are the furniture of an elsewhere. Its condition, the celebrity of the killer and a self made of images, has grown more legible, not less. Held below the top by the span, decades rather than centuries, and by a standing a step below the medium’s oldest touchstones.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight throughout: the photography of the plains and the river, held wide in the light at the ends of the day; the burning house, staged and lit as a sequence of rooms; Jack Fisk’s design, which makes 1959 out of found places and a few right objects; Martin Sheen’s Kit, his ease and charm and the blankness under them; Sissy Spacek’s flat, exact voice, which carries the narration’s whole irony without once signalling it; Warren Oates, a father of few words in a few scenes; the music, chosen against the image. The costs count against it: three cinematographers are credited, and the look is not wholly of a piece; a few transitions are abrupt in the way of a low-budget production; the minor parts are unevenly played.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the comedy, Kit recording good advice to the young in a stranger’s house and handing his comb and lighter to the men who have caught him; and the murders, the father on the floor, Cato walking off to die. One law governs them: everything is seen at the same distance and spoken of in the same voice. The fire and the dance obey it; so do the dog and the cairn. The range from farce to death to lyric beauty is wide for a film of an hour and a half, and the law holds across it. The strain is real and recurs: in the woods and on the plains the images sometimes rise toward a reverence the narration does not share, and there the film’s physics is double.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Six orders are held in one structure: consciousness, Holly’s as the film’s medium and Kit’s seen only from outside; the family, a widowed father and a daughter, and the destruction of the house; class and labour, in the garbage round, Cato’s farm and the rich man’s house; the law and the state, in the sheriff, the posse and the soldiers at the airfield; the culture’s images, James Dean, the records, the magazine voice; and nature, the river, the plains and the badlands, in which the pair are small. Each is reached through the flight, and each is one or two scenes deep. What holds the axis lowest is that depth: the family is one father in a few scenes; history is present as period, not entered; the sacred is absent except as nature’s indifference. The film is a ballad, and its scope is a ballad’s.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form at 9.0, then The Made and The Inner Law at 8.9. A form that is the distance between the acts and the account of them, a making in which a level girl’s voice, the wide plains and a children’s tune carry the argument, and one law, the same distance and the same voice for everything, holding from farce to murder to lyric beauty.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.3: six orders are reached through the flight, but each is one or two scenes deep, history is present as period and the sacred only as nature’s indifference, a ballad’s scope. Above it, The Archetypal Deep at 8.2, where the garden, the frontier and the outlaw are built in order to be drained and give the road its shape more than they bear its weight, and The Bottomless Well at 8.4, where the ironies, once heard, are heard. The three share a cause: precision at a small scale.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.5 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.0, The Made at 8.9, The Inner Law at 8.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on four of five: The Swerve at 8.8, The Imperishable at 8.8, The Unconcealment at 8.6 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5; The Archetypal Deep at 8.2 falls three tenths short of it. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.2, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.3. The work is held below the summit by one condition, The Archetypal Deep at 8.2 against the 8.5 the Epochal Gate requires, and by its aggregate, 8.5 against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Badlands as first shown at the New York Film Festival in October 1973 and released by Warner Bros. in 1974, from Holly on her bed with her dog to the plane above the clouds: written, produced and directed by Terrence Malick, photographed by Brian Probyn, Tak Fujimoto and Stevan Larner, designed by Jack Fisk. No print, script or recording was consulted. The film as released is the object. The Starkweather and Fugate killings of 1957 and 1958, from which the story is loosely drawn, are not part of the work, and nothing from them is imported; Malick’s later films are cited only as evidence of what this one began. One line of narration is quoted, where its words are certain; the rest of the narration and dialogue is described. The running time is the commonly given figure; sources give 93 to 95 minutes. Figures and details that could not be verified, among them the budget, the editing and score credits beyond the Gassenhauer, the titles of the songs, the ages given to Kit and Holly, the means by which the deaths are staged, the particulars of the closing narration, the count of the dead and the box-office returns, are not given.