Badlands, and accumulated meaning

post from Digital Poetics on 27 August 2008 08:56:00 PM. © Digital Poetics

There are some films, some songs, some albums or cds, some people, whose meaning accumulates over time. "This one fact the world hates," Emerson once wrote, "that the soul becomes." Becomes what he never said.

Terrence Malick's Badlands, from 1973. So full of contradictions and tone shifts that even after scores of viewings its meaning remains scattered. You were a boy, at first, in your teens. You knew the movie was special, but you weren't sure how, or why. You loved the quiet parts, the parts in nature, but you also loved the violence. Without the violence, the quiet parts would have been less powerful.

Each time you watch it, a new meaning. But the old meanings--from your initial viewing--are still there. In this sequence, you love her voice, and fall in love with her dreams even more than your own.