Drift should be required reading for all elected officials. Washington has forgotten James Madison’s warning against vesting war-making powers in one man:  “… what the history of all governments demonstrates (is) that the Executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it.”  If a president is allowed free hand in regard to making war, then “it is evident that the people are cheated out of the best ingredients in their Government, the safeguards of peace which is the greatest of their blessings. ”

Congress needs to be reminded of what Abraham Lincoln said some fifty years later, that  “Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This, our Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us.”

While Congress slept, the Executive branch co-opted war-making to the extent that Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney warned (in the run up to first war in Iraq) that “asking for any kind of congressional approval for war in the Persian Gulf would set a ‘dangerous precedent’ and ‘diminish the powers of the Presidency.’”  In the militaristic world in which we live, the quaint idea of a “peace dividend,” a time when public money could be diverted from military to peace time uses is just that:  quaint.

“Congress has never effectively asserted itself to stop a president with a bead on a war,” Maddow says.  “It was true of George Herbert Walker Bush.  It was true of Bill Clinton.  And by September 11, 2001, even if there had been real resistance to Cheney and Bush starting the next war (or two), there were no institutional barriers strong enough to have realistically stopped them.”

The book also explores the drift toward privatization within the military.  When we go to war in these modern times, over 50% of our forces are private contractors.  Where soldiers once built their housing, peeled potatoes, repaired their vehicles, private contractors now do the work.  Maddow documents the drift of the CIA from a spy agency to a killing one; it is a newly-empowered CIA that is lobbing drones into Pakistan.  They are accountable to no one but the President.

Ultimately the power grab by the Executive Branch, a grab that has been largely ignored by Congress, threatens to bankrupt our nation.  Maddow believes the situation can be reversed.  Her book may go a long way toward waking our country to what’s happening, the drift toward a permanent state of war, a bloated military ravenous for all the borrowed money it can get, a Congress too timid to stand up to a power-addicted Executive branch.

Read this book, then email your congressmen and tell them to read it too.

To see this beautiful, impassioned women arguing for a divorce, and her husband who insists he cannot leave his father provides a glimpse into a system of justice that is foreign to anything we’ve ever seen.  Yet the emotionally-wrenching arguments and the determined attitudes of both husband and wife are all too familiar.  Ultimately, the request for a divorce is denied.  Simin goes to live with her parents.

The story takes an unexpected twist:  Nadar hires a young woman named Razieh to care for his father while he works.  This seemingly innocuous act leads to disaster in ways that seem unimaginable.   Razieh, a devout Muslim, must seek permission before she can change the old man, who has become incontinent.  We sit in breathless wonder while she calls a religious hotline to ask if it would be a sin to wash and dress the old man.  Uncomfortable in the job, she pleads with Nadar to hire her husband.  When the husband is arrested for unpaid debts, she has no choice but to return to her job.

Each character in this film feels justified in the actions they take.  When disaster strikes, they feel aggrieved, wronged, mistreated.  In a clash of religion, values, and cultural mores, their lives spin out of control.  The divorce not granted is revisited, but now there are three people before the judge instead of two:  Simin, Nadar, and their daughter.  All are dressed in black, an ancient Persian symbol of death.

The movie is set in a country few of us will ever experience.  Iran is a hostile country, we believe.  It is part of the axis of evil.  If given a chance, they will do us harm.  We should gird ourselves to fight against them.

See this movie, and you will begin to question these things.  See how tenderly Nadar cares for his demented father.  See the anguish in the eyes of his daughter.  See the fear on the Razieh’s face when she’s accused of stealing and told to get out of Nadar’s home.

See this movie, and you will think of Iran differently.

History is full of examples:  think of Mormon founder Joseph Smith with his 41 wives, pedophilia in the Catholic Church where bishops shuffled wrongdoers to new parishes, Sharia law where fathers murder daughters,  Mormon leaders like Warren Jeffs marrying 12 year-old girls, the list goes on and on.  Think of the reformation, the selling of indulgences to raise money to build the Vatican, the alliance between Rome and the Nazis during World War II.  Think of disgraced televangelists like Jim Baker, Jimmy Swaggart, Ted Haggard, and a host of others who milked their followers for all they were worth.  Think of fur-lined dog houses, fleets of limousines, palatial mansions, bank accounts so large the sides of the banks bulged out.  Think of the money collected on Sunday mornings that goes to compensate victims of sexual abuse, pay for lawyers and insurance policies.

When churches lose their way, it’s the job of the people to bring them back.  In a democracy, we rely on civil law to criminalize polygamy, jail child rapists like Warren Jeffs,  require Catholic bishops to report pedophiles to local authorities, send con-men wrapped in biblical clothes to jail.  We rely on government to protect us from religion gone astray.

The community is the final arbiter, and that’s as it should be.  Were it otherwise, we’d be living in a theocracy, not a democracy.

Published in the Tennessean, Monday, Feb. 27, 2012

The Grey

In one of the first scenes, Neeson kills a wolf.  The camera goes in for a closeup.  Blood from her head and mouth spreads over the snow.  She does not move, but her belly continues to rise and fall.  Is she still breathing, or is she carrying pups?  Neeson goes to her, lays his hand on her belly, and the movement stops.  The camera cuts to a closeup of Neeson’s face; he’s old and he’s tired.  He’s killed a wolf.  If there’s meaning to this senseless act, we’ll have to wait to discover it.

Death is everywhere in this movie.  The men who survive the plane crash make foolish decisions, and they die. Why leave the shelter of their downed plane to head into a woods where there is no shelter?  Ah, because Neeson’s character thinks their plane has crashed into a wolf den.  Wolf den?  Out in the middle of a snowy nowhere?  No rocks, no trees, no place to den?  The movie is based on such falsehood, such non-understanding of wolves, it’s hard to sit through.

Wolves do not attack humans.  The few accounts of such “attacks” are either suspect or figments of someone’s overactive imagination.  The men in this movie evidently never got over their fear of the big, bad wolf in Little Red Riding Hood.  These supposedly grown-up, weather-hardened, hard-drinking men persist in believing these myths about wolves, despite studies that absolutely, irrevocably disprove these selfsame myths.

Throughout the centuries, wolves have been labeled as minions of Satan, indiscriminate killers, fearsome animals that must be hunted down and killed.  We set snares for them.  We trapped them.   We set them on fire.  We injected them with contagious strains of mange.  We laced meat with strychnine.  We gassed their dens.  We set a bounty on wolf hides.  We did all that to them, and more.  By 1970, wolves were nearly extinct.

The cry of a wolf is a spine-tingling thing. You can hear the loneliness, the anguish, the grief in it.  And when a single wolf is joined by members of his pack or by other wolves, outliers or juveniles, it can be a chilling thing.  Yet wolves are intelligent, curious, beautiful animals.  Around humans they’re often shy, submissive, as if they realize man can be a fearsome predator, yet they’re drawn to him in much the same way dogs are drawn to humans.

Wolves form family units, they mate for life, and they grieve when their families are broken up.  Their diet consists mostly of mice, birds, and carrion.  Wolf packs cooperate to bring down larger prey:  deer, moose, or elk.  Yet it is the old, the sick, and the weak they attack, leaving the fittest to survive and to reproduce.

This movie does more to degrade science, to obscure the truths that have only within the last fifty years begun to seep into our collective consciousness:   that in nature there is predator and prey, that the natural world is a violent place, that predation is necessary in order to maintain a healthy ecosystem, that the wolf has a role in preserving the delicate balance nature tries to achieve, despite the best efforts of mankind to disrupt that balance.  All these things are cast overboard in this movie.

This portrayal of wolves does nothing to advance our understanding of nature.  Nor does it speak well of those who claim dominion over them.

Luce takes her murdered sister’s orphaned children into her home, and the reclusive life she’d been living is upended.  She tries to teach them language and other skills they’ll need to negotiate the world, with little success.  All she can really do is give them time to heal.  Luce will care for these children no matter how many chickens they kill or how many fires they set.  She will love them and expect nothing in return.

Then the man Luce believes is responsible for her sister’s death comes to town.  He sets up shop in a tavern that fronts a bootlegging operation, and he begins the hunt for his stolen money.  The climactic battle between Luce and this man is an epic one, moving up into the hills to a mysterious black hole.

Read this book for the pure pleasure of going into the mountains with this great writer.  Let him show you the chestnut saplings that “refuse to accept the terms of their extinction.”  See the two kids who “fit perfectly into the sway of the old mare’s back.”  Savor Luce’s reluctant description of the twins:  “a pair of copperheads amid a field of sweet brown mice.”

Read this book and try to decide who will play the role of Luce:  it will be a delicious part for any actress.

Though Garrido was in therapy during all that time, none of his psychiatrists, psychologists, or therapists, ever saw the evil in this man.  None grasped the depths of depravity to which he had sunk.   Parole officers never imagined the crimes he was committing on an ongoing basis.  No one ever suspected he had kidnapped a little girl, was holding her in his back yard, and sexually abusing her at will.

Various law enforcement officials visited the house where Garrido lived, but none bothered to look in the back yard.  No one wondered why a man on parole would build such a shelter.  None asked who might be living in the shelter.  When Garrido tested “dirty” for drugs, they accepted his explanation:  he’d been to a party and someone must have spiked his drink.  Despite his long history of drug abuse, they accepted this bogus story.   Even Jaycee wondered how they could be so gullible.

For 18 years Phillip Garrido got away with it.  Angels helped him, he said.

As Jaycee points out in this book that will break your heart, Garrido never did anything for anyone but himself.  “Phillip is narcissistic and only does things that benefit him,” she says.  “Therapy did nothing to help him.”

She’s forgiven him for what he did, yet at one point in the book she wonders.  “I’m not sure I have the right to forgive him.”

It’s a difficult book to read.   But if you can get through the horrific parts, what you see is an amazing girl.  She’s smart, she’s accomplished, she’s no fool.  She’s a survivor, this girl, now grown to womanhood.

Jaycee didn’t attend Garrido’s sentencing, but she sent a message:  “There is no God in the universe that would condone your actions. To you, Phillip, I say that I have always been a thing for your own amusement.  I hated every second of every day of 18 years because of you and the sexual perversion you forced on me.”

Jaycee Dugard is okay now.  She’s been reunited with her family, and her children are doing fine.  She’s made new friends and is learning how to negotiate the world that was kept from her for so long.  The evil man who kidnapped her and his equally evil wife no longer matter to her.

Leaving his comfortable California life behind, Tom travels to St. Jean de Port where he identifies Daniel’s body and takes possession of his son’s personal effects.  In his hotel room that night he goes through the things his son left behind.  Inside Daniel’s backpack he finds a “credencial,” a pilgrim’s passport that, when stamped at various towns along the route, will document that the bearer has completed the pilgrimage to the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela.  Legend holds that the remains of the Apostle St. James are buried beneath the church there.

Pilgrims have been walking the Camino de Santiago, the Way of Saint James, for over a thousand years.  Beginning the journey at one of several towns in southern France, they cross the Pyranees and walk across northern Spain, Basque country, until they arrive at the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galacia.  It’s a difficult task, one that takes many weeks and sometimes months to complete.

At some point during the night, Tom Avery makes the decision to complete the pilgrimage his son had only begun.  Shouldering the backpack that contains Daniel’s ashes, he sets out on the 500 mile hike across the Pyranees.   An inexperienced trekker, he hardly knows why he’s doing it or what he might encounter.  He knows only that he must complete this journey in place of his son.

Along the way he sleeps in hostels, limps along on sore feet, loses his backpack, is joined by traveling companions who fall in step with him, then disappear, only to reappear.  Despite the near impossibility of the task, he never stops, never ceases to put one foot in front of the other, until he finally arrives at the Cathedral.  He and the three companions who have joined him lay their hands on a pillar just inside the church, and their fingers fit the imprint worn into the stone by those who made the journey before them.

The story is touching, the scenery wonderful, the gift Tom ultimately receives so gratifying, I want to fly to Paris, buy a pair of hiking boots and backpack, and set off on this journey so many before me have taken.

Kirk Anderson was not a particularly handsome man.  In the late 1970s when these outrageous things happened, he was big, bulky, he wore specs, and his hair resembled that of Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich.  Eight years younger than Joyce, he was inexperienced in the ways of the world, shy, and by some accounts, flabby.  But to petite Joyce McKinney, he was heaven.  Her love for him was unquenchable, obsessive, not to be denied.

The film opens with footage of a young Joyce McKinney strolling through a garden, reading from her unfinished memoir, “A Very Special Love Story.” Segue to a middle-aged Joyce being interviewed by Errol Morris about the sex and bondage scandal that swept across two continents.  Thirty years have gone by, and she’s still pretty, still in love with Kirk, and utterly convinced she did nothing wrong.  She trips through the story, laughing at her jokes, tearful at times, but always charismatic, a woman secure in the knowledge that love is the most important thing in life, and the motivation for everything she did.  If this is a theatrical performance, as some suggest, bring it on.  She’s a delight to behold.

Morris keeps the camera trained on Joyce, breaking away for occasional clips from old TV shows, commentary from various friends and accomplices, and psychological insights offered by the blue-eyed, ex-Mormon, Troy Williams.  It’s Troy who provides balance between what the viewer increasingly wonders is fantasy, and the inner struggles Kirk must have felt.

The film is less an examination of tabloid journalism than a view of a woman obsessed with love, determined to free her delicious Kirk from the clutches of the “cult” that has spirited him off to England.  Joyce hires a plane and pilot to take her to there.  In her suitcase are the accouterments she’ll need to pull this off.  Only later do we learn the gun is plastic, the handcuffs are lined with mink, and The Joy of Sex offers advice on how to counter the religious brainwashing to which poor Kirk has been subjected.

Working with accomplice Keith May, Joyce abducts her Mormon boyfriend from the steps of the LDS meetinghouse and takes him to a remote cottage in Devon.  Joyce and Kirk spend three days there, days filled with sex, comfort food, and gentle bondage.  Her plan is to keep him there until she’s pregnant.  She wants nothing more than to marry him and have his babies.

Here the story gets a little foggy.  Did Kirk escape and run back to the safety of his Mormon friends?  Or did the Mormons somehow lure him away from Joyce and convince him to say terrible things about what Joyce had done.  Troy Williams offers his view:  Kirk loved the sex, but he was overcome with guilt.  Back in the safety of the Mormon enclave, he confessed his sins and repented of them.  Loudly proclaiming her innocence, Joyce is arrested.    Mail, delivered to her jail cell, contains numerous offers from men wanting to be abducted, tied spread-eagled to a bed, massaged with her signature cinnamon oil.

Released on bail, Joyce and her accomplice flee to Canada, passing through customs disguised as deaf-mutes.  Meanwhile, tabloids on both sides of the Atlantic are off to the races, alleging that before her sojourn in England Joyce was a high-priced prostitute who specialized in sadomasochistic nude photos.  It’s a charge Joyce vehemently denies.

Kirk opts to go back to the safe and familiar Mormon way of life.  He marries the ample wife the Mormon elders have chosen for him, fathers children, and presumably dreams of the day when he will be lord and master of his own planet.  (Does this vision of the afterlife sound like something akin to the Islamist belief in 72 virgins waiting in heaven?)

At the end of the movie Joyce is alone on her parents’ farm in Virginia, agoraphobic, still working on her memoir.  The notes and clippings she’s collected over the years have been stolen, but she soldiers on, surrounded by the five pit bulls cloned by a South Korean veterinarian from her beloved Booger’s ear tissue.

Kirk chose not to participate in the making of the documentary, so we have no way of knowing what he might have said all these years later.  The three days in the Devon bungalow, the ropes and chains, the ripping off of his Temple garments (a kind of union suit worn by Mormon elders that protect them from temptation and evil), the sex, the comfort food, the massages – we can only imagine what  pleasure he may have felt, and later, the depths of his guilt.  On the subject of those unbleached cotton undergarments, the ones he put on the day of his endowment ceremony, Joyce is equally mum.  All she’ll say is that she ripped them from his body and threw them in the fire.

But this I wonder:  will Kirk Anderson ever catch a whiff of cinnamon without thinking of Joyce?  When that bounteous Mormon wife sprinkles cinnamon on her bread pudding, or she stirs cinnamon into her oatmeal cookie dough, or she makes cinnamon toast for the children, and the cinnamon smell wafts through the kitchen, will he remember Joyce?  How could he not?

Morris has directed other documentaries, including Standard Operating Procedure,  Gates of Heaven, and The Thin Blue Line. He won an Academy Award in 2003 for his film, The Fog of War:  Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara.

Tabloid may be his best yet.

When he turned on the news the next morning he learned of the helicopter raid on the compound in Abbottabad, the shooting, the extraction of the remains, the religious ceremony aboard ship, and the dumping of the body in the Adriatic Sea.   He saw reruns of Obama’s speech delivered at 11:35 PM the previous night.  He watched, he marveled, he felt a surge of pride in the Navy Seals who had pulled off this daring feat, and he got ready to go to work.  Though he’d reached the age when men usually retire, he had no intention of doing that.  He liked his work too much, couldn’t imagine what he’d do if he didn’t have a string of jobs laid out ahead of him.

My brother is an excavator, a road-builder, a man who’s been self-employed for most of his life.  He owns bobcats, backhoes, trucks, trailers, and those heavy metal plates they use to cover road excavations.  Among his clients are the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (they call him when the need help clearing snow from public roads), the Phone Company (they’re always needing trenches dug so they can bury their cables), builders needing roads, foundations, and septic systems, farmers needing to bury dead horses.  He’s good at his job, charges a fair price, and he’s earned the respect of nearly everyone in Adams County and beyond.

His client that morning needed a drain field, so my brother went outside and loaded up his backhoe, and it didn’t occur to him the ten-year hunt for bin Laden had ended on his birthday.

And a momentous birthday it was.   His wife, Edna, and daughter, Teresa, had thrown a surprise party, and they’d pulled it off.  When the three of them walked into the banquet room at The Pike Restaurant in Gettysburg, a hundred of Fred’s closest friends were there, waiting for him.  Someone turned up the lights, and we began to sing Happy Birthday.  Fred stood there, totally shocked, looking around the room, nearly overcome at the turnout.  At one point he made a half-hearted run for the door, but Edna caught him and dragged him back.  We finished the song, and the party began.

He said later he knew something was up when he spotted me, his favorite sister, in the crowd.  I’d come a long way to be with him that day – seven hundred miles – driving from Nashville, TN to Gettysburg, PA.

The birthday was momentous for another reason.  On the day bin Laden died, May 1st, 2011,  Fred joined the ranks of those covered by Medicare.  He’d been waiting a long time.  For years he’d bought private health insurance, which, for the self-employed, is a nightmare.  He paid the premiums, and time after time the insurance company denied his claims.

He had cornea repair.  To save his eyesight.  A man can’t drive a truck without good eyesight.  The state of Pennsylvania will yank your drivers’ license, if they know your vision is less than perfect.  He can’t operate a backhoe or any other piece of heavy equipment.

The bill for the surgery was over $3000.  The insurance company paid $200.  When he complained, they said that’s the amount it should have cost, and that was what they were authorized to pay.  Fred had no choice but to pay the balance.

His eyesight did not improve.  Something was wrong.  Some stitches have broken loose, the doctor said.  It happens sometimes.  We’ll have to go in again.  It’ll be more involved this time.  The outcome is less certain.

The final cost was $4000 and change.  The insurance company kicked in $1000.

A year later Fred developed frozen shoulder.  This time he did his homework:  the cost for surgical repair of the rotator cuff would be around $10,000.   He decided to do physical therapy instead.  Insurance would pay for three visits to a therapist.  It took six months, but the shoulder healed, and he was able to go back to work.

Going on Medicare was a blessing.  Two months before his birthday, he went to the Social Security office and signed the papers.  He bought medigap insurance, but skipped the prescription drug benefit.  He’d take generics.  If he needed more expensive drugs, which seemed unlikely, he’d bite the bullet.

There are other sides to my brother;  he’s an antique car aficionado, a storyteller, and a history buff.   I never visit him that he doesn’t at some point take me down to his garage to show me the car he’s working on.  He likes to tell the story of the day he chauffeured a bride and groom from the church to the reception in his 1940 Buick Super.  On the climb up Caledonia Mountain the car overheated.  He thought he could make it to the top, but the radiator blew, spraying coolant over the engine compartment, the hood, the windshield.  My brother pulled to the side of the road, and they waited, bride and groom, Fred and Edna, for someone to come to their rescue.

Here’s what he’s never been:  a reader.  His days were long and when the sun set in the evening, he still had work to do, keeping his books, maintaining his equipment, repairing things that had broken.  When he was laid up with frozen shoulder, and the pain was so fierce he couldn’t drive his truck or operate his backhoe, I bought him a copy of David L. Robbins book, The Last Citadel:  A Novel of the Battle of Kurst. He’d always been interested in the Second World War.  He knew about tank warfare, knew the battle at Kurst was the greatest tank battle in history, could tell you the names of the different tanks used by each side, knew of the super-tank called Tiger that was terrified the Russians, knew that the Germans went down to defeat despite their superior weaponry.  He read the book and loved it.

For his 65th birthday I gave him another Robbins book, The War of the Rats. I’d heard him talk about the battle of Stalingrad, the bloodiest battle in history, the horrendous cruelty on both sides, the total destruction of Germany’s 6th Army.  This tale of a Russian and a German sniper pitted against each other was a different side of the battle, and I thought he might like it.

Osama bin Laden is dead, my brother is on Medicare, his shoulder is fine, his retinas are intact.  He intends to keep working as long as he’s able.  And when he’s not, there are war stories he might read, and enjoy.

There are other books.  One I think he might like is Larry Brown’s collection, Billy Ray’s Farm:  Essays from a Place Called Tula.

Larry Brown is a literary writer, but he writes of ordinary things, and that is his genius.  I think my brother might see a connection between his life and that of Larry Brown.  I think he’d like to read the story of  how Brown built his “little house” in the woods, and how one of the walls fell on him as he was trying to raise it, and it hurt so bad he cried.  If he read the two essays about Billy Ray’s farm and the cows that kept dying because their calves were either breach or too big or some other unexpected thing, he’d think of our father and how hard it is to be a farmer.  He’d understand Brown’s anger at the coyote who stole the baby goats.  Because he’s operated a backhoe himself, he’d love to know just how “Lynn Hewlett… once loaded up a bad bull in a backhoe bucket.”

It would be a cornucopia of deliciousness, for Fred to read Larry Brown’s collection of essays.  I just know it would.

If his shoulder should freeze up again, or his retinas or corneas do something to cause new problems, or his arthritis become too painful for him to jump onto his trailer to chain the backhoe or the bobcat in place, there are other books I can send him.

Badlands is a film unlike any I’ve ever seen.  Written, produced, and directed by Terrence Malick, the movie stars Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek.  Released in 1973, it’s a dramatization of the Starkweather – Fugate crime spree of 1958 in which the couple kills 11 people, beginning with Fugate’s parents and two-year-old sister.

I loved this movie.  I loved it so much I watched it twice.  I love the non sequiturs, the bits of dialog that seem so random, the voice-over technique Malick uses, the sparseness of the story set against the vast, western sky.

Kit Carruthers, Malick’s fictional version of Starkweather,  is collecting garbage in an alley in Fort Dupree, South Dakota, when he sees Holly Sargis twirling a baton in front of her house.  He is immediately smitten.

Kit: “Just thought I’d come over and say hello to ya. I’ll try anything once….Listen, Holly, you, uh, I don’t know, want to take a walk with me?”
Holly: “What for?”
Kit: “Aw, I got some stuff to say. Guess I’m kind of lucky that way.”

Holly narrates:  “He was handsomer than anybody I’d ever met. He looked just like James Dean.”  Later, in a more reflective mood, “Little did I realize that what began in the alleys and back ways of this quiet town would end in the Badlands of Montana.”

Holly is 15 years old, Kit 25.  Holly’s father disapproves of the relationship.  Holly:  “Dad found out I been running around behind his back. He was madder than I ever seen him. His punishment for deceiving him: he went and shot my dog.”

Kit, in a confrontation with Holly’s father:  “Suppose I shot you. How’d that be?  Huh?  You want to hear what it sounds like?”   Later, he talks of the killing:  “He was provoking me when I popped him. Well that’s what it was like.  Pop.  I’m sorry.  I mean, nobody’s coming out of this thing happy.  Especially not us.  I can’t deny we’ve had fun though.”

Kit, after having shot his friend Cato:  “I got him in the stomach.”
Holly: “Is he mad?”
Kit:  “He didn’t say nothing to me about it.”

Like two children in a magical land, they go into the forest and build a tree house.  “We hid out in the wilderness down by the river in the grove of cottonwoods.  Being the flood season, we built our house in the trees.”   It’s an idyllic life, almost a fairy tale, until three bounty hunters arrive, and it all comes crashing down.

Kit Carruthers kills without emotion, remorse, or a twinge of conscience.  Holly observes with a child-like innocence,  never judging, never attempting to justify Kit’s actions.  “I’ve got to stick by Kit,” she says.  “He feels trapped.”

Martin Sheen considers Badlands his best work.  Sissy Spacek says the movie and her role in it changed the way she thought about film making.  “The artist rules,” she says.  “Nothing else matters.”

The two young lovers, Kit and Holly, are fascinating because stories like theirs fill our newspapers and tabloids.  We read about them, and we wonder how such things could happen.  No matter how precise the details of their lives, how horrendous their backgrounds, how deep the psychological studies, still we do not understand.  Charles Starkweather killed Caril Fugate’s parents and strangled her sister.  They hid the bodies and lived in the house for six days, until the grandmother got suspicious and called the police.  A woman in Orlando was accused of using chloroform to put her two-year-old child to sleep so she could party and not have to pay a baby sitter.  Lyle and Eric Menendez killed their parents with a 12-gauge shotgun so they wouldn’t have to wait for their inheritance.  Susan Smith drowned her two sons in the hope that men would find her more attractive, less “encumbered.”  Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Charles Manson.  Killers all.

Malick shows us the face of a killer, and he is young, handsome, and charming.   He turns his camera on a pretty, red-haired girl who falls in love and follows her lover into the Badlands of Montana, until she tires of life on the run.

Badlands is a powerful movie.  A perfect blend of dialog, action, and setting, it’s as near to a perfect film as any I’ve ever seen.

In the forty years that followed the release of Badlands, Malick went on to write and direct four feature films:  Days of Heaven (1978), The Thin Red Line (1998), The New World (2005), and The Tree of Life (2011).   I look forward to seeing each of them.