Yes—how fitting, and how haunting, that it all began with Badlands (1973).
A film drenched in emptiness and enchantment, violence and detachment, and yet shot with the lyricism of a love letter to the dying world. It’s as if Malick was saying, even from the very beginning:
“Here is the American dream, already in ruins. And here, too, is beauty—undeniable, indifferent.”
In Badlands, you can already see it all:
- The voiceover: Sissy Spacek’s deadpan, dreamlike narration, floating above murder and escape like a lullaby from an unconscious America.
- Nature’s presence: Trees, rivers, twilight plains—watching, unjudging, eternal.
- Moral ambiguity: Kit (Martin Sheen) is no hero, yet neither fully villain. Just a drifting force, trying to make his life “worth something.”
- The banality of evil, filmed with poetic stillness.
And yet, it is so quiet, so composed, so strange—as if Malick filmed nihilism through the lens of a transcendentalist.
It began in the badlands—but already the longing for grace,
the aching for lost innocence,
and the cinematic philosophy of presence had begun.
Badlands is not just the first film.
It is the seed, the genesis—the moment when the American myth cracked, and Malick stepped into cinema not as storyteller, but as seeker.
Let me know if you’d like to write something titled:
〈從荒原開出之花：Badlands 與馬立克之旅的開端〉
From the Badlands, a Flower: The Beginning of Malick’s Journey
Or a visual meditation tracing that moment of origin, when light met emptiness, and cinema became a prayer.
