Farmlandz (2008)
For a true parody, look no further than an amusing 16mm student film I dug up by Dana Shimko, whose biggest professional credit since appears to be as a production assistant on David Gordon Green’s The Sitter. Farmlandz is a spoof of both Badlands and Bonnie and Clyde, though it focuses on the former with its spot-on narration. The end credits acknowledge the source of inspiration: “Thank you to NYU for making me watch Badlands and Bonnie and Clyde over and over and over…”
St. Vincent (2009-2011)
Annie Clark, best known as her professional alias St. Vincent, is another recording artist who has named Badlands as an influence on her music. Some places even credit the film as one of her favorites. Her 2009 album Actor is the product of many cinematic influences, including Badlands, though not all are said to specifically be directly linked to any one song the way The Wizard of Oz is to “Marrow” and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is to “The Stranger.”
“The Bed” seems most evocative of Badlands with its lyrics about Daddy’s gun and telling someone to put their hands up and not scream or they’ll be shot. But perhaps “The Sequel” is one more heavily inspired by Badlands since its own thematic sequel arrived on the 2011 yMusic album Beautiful Mechanical as the instrumental composition titled “Proven Badlands.” Of Badlands and other movies’ impact on Actor, she told The Austin Chronicle:
“I revisited a lot of the Disney films from the Thirties. This Terrence Malick film, ‘Badlands.’ ‘The Piano Teacher.’ ‘Stardust Memories.’ A lot of Woody Allen. But rather than literally influence me, I’d say they osmotically influenced me. I watched it and let it soak in, and it comes out in the writing.”
When asked specifically about what she likes about Badlands, she added:
“The imagery of the house burning down. The idea of young, crazy love. My favorite scene is when [Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen] have that period in the forest, making a life for themselves. I started thinking, ‘OK, if I was dropped in the mountains, how long could I survive, what would I eat, could I make weapons?’ The idea of, ‘We’re gonna make a tree house and live there forever.’
One year later, interestingly enough, St. Vincent’s song “Now Now,” from her 2008 album Marry Me, would be heard in Malick’s To the Wonder.
Moonrise Kingdom (2012)
Wes Anderson‘s seventh feature is an obvious descendant of Malick’s first, and parallels were drawn by a number of critics due to its young (children) lovers on the lam narrative. But I have to credit film critic David Ehrlich, who went deep and detailed on their connections in a 2013 review of the Criterion release of Badlands for MTV, for making me realize just how much Moonrise Kingdom belongs on a list about the earlier film’s legacy.
He addresses the similar soundtracks — although it’s more Orff and Gunild Keetman‘s Passion (the tune in Badlands over the house burning sequence) that is a model for Alexandre Desplat‘s “The Heroic Weather-Conditions of the Universe, Part 2: Smoke/Fire” from his score, while Anderson’s selection of Benjamin Britten‘s “Songs From Friday Afternoons, Op. 7: ‘Old Abram Brown'” seems an homage to Orff’s “Hexeneinmaleins” as used in Badlands.
Here’s an excerpt of Ehrlich’s lengthy comparison of the movies’ stories, characters, and themes:
Both movies are ostensibly about young people (children, in Anderson’s case), who join forces and jettison society, absconding to the wilderness in order to elude capture by the authorities (the feds in ‘Badlands,’ merciless Khaki Scouts in ‘Moonrise Kingdom’). Beginning a new life in the thick of nature, both couples exchange disaffected dialogue (Holly admits that she “doesn’t have much personality,” a strange and earnest line that would fit comfortably in the mouth of a Wes Anderson character), dance and surrender their sexual innocence to whatever varying degrees they can. In each case, the women clumsily apply makeup, trying to find an aesthetic means of expressing their newfound agency.
I definitely never thought of the makeup parallel. Read the rest of that piece and also see Anderson’s acknowledgment of the Badlands treehouse’s link to the young runaways in Moonrise Kingdom in Matt Zoller Seitz’s The Wes Anderson Collection.
Related Topics: Badlands, One Perfect Archive, Terrence Malick
