Image: Badlands National Park landscape. Photo by Karlee Heck via Pexels.
A love story told by a killer
Badlands, Terrence Malick’s debut feature, released in 1973, is one of the most beautiful and disturbing American films ever made. It is loosely inspired by the real-life killing spree of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate in the late 1950s, but Malick transforms that grim material into something stranger: a road movie narrated by a teenage girl, Holly Sargis, played by Sissy Spacek, who describes murder, flight, and the South Dakota badlands in the flat, dreamy voice of a school essay. At the centre of her story is Kit Carruthers, played by Martin Sheen, a 25-year-old garbage collector who imagines himself as James Dean and who kills Holly’s father, then a series of other people, as the young couple flees across the plains.
Sheen’s Kit is not a monster in the conventional screen sense. He is polite, soft-spoken, and oddly boyish. He wears a denim jacket, combs his hair, and practices his drawl. He tells Holly that he is just like her, that they are both misunderstood, and he seems to believe it. That belief is what makes the performance so chilling. Kit does not kill out of rage alone. He kills because he has absorbed a romantic idea of himself — the rebel, the outlaw, the man who will be remembered — and because no one has ever told him that the story in his head is not the same as the world outside it. Sheen plays that gap between fantasy and reality without ever winking. Kit is sincere, and sincerity, in Malick’s film, is terrifying.
Kit and Holly: innocence and performance
The relationship between Kit and Holly is the film’s engine, and Sheen and Spacek play it with a restraint that makes it feel both tender and doomed. Holly is fifteen, bored, and eager to be part of a story larger than her small town. Kit offers her that story. He takes her to a treehouse in the woods, builds a life out of stolen food and borrowed books, and talks about the future as if murder were a detour rather than a crime. Holly narrates these events in retrospect, with a detachment that suggests she never fully understood what was happening — or that she understood it and chose the romance anyway.
Sheen’s achievement is to make Kit believable as Holly’s first love. He is not leering or overtly menacing in their early scenes. He is attentive, funny in a quiet way, and genuinely fond of her. When he kills, the violence is sudden, almost casual, and then he returns to being gentle. That rhythm — tenderness, then a shot, then tenderness again — is what gives Badlands its queasy power. The audience, like Holly, can see the charm and the danger at the same time, and cannot easily separate them. Malick’s camera helps: it lingers on wheat fields, sunsets, and animals, creating a lyrical world that seems indifferent to human violence. Kit moves through that world as if he were its hero, and Sheen lets us see how much Kit needs that illusion.
Malick’s eye, Sheen’s face
Terrence Malick would become famous for his philosophical, image-driven cinema, but Badlands is his most narrative film, and Sheen’s face is its anchor. Malick shoots Kit in long takes and in close-up, often in profile against a wide sky, and Sheen responds with a performance built on stillness. Kit rarely raises his voice. He explains himself in short sentences, as if he were reading from a script he has memorized. When he is arrested at the end, he is almost relieved to be famous at last, signing autographs and chatting with the police as if they were fans. It is a devastating final image: a killer who has finally gotten the attention he wanted, and who does not understand why that attention should be a punishment.
That ending works because Sheen never plays Kit as a caricature of evil. He plays him as a young man who has mistaken movies for life. Kit imitates James Dean’s posture, his jacket, his way of speaking, and Sheen imitates that imitation with precision. The result is a double performance: Sheen playing a man who is always performing. It is a sophisticated idea, and Sheen, still in his early thirties, carries it without strain. He would later say that Malick gave him freedom on set, allowing him to find Kit’s rhythms rather than forcing a conventional villain’s arc. That freedom shows. Kit feels improvised and inevitable at once, like a person the camera happened to find rather than a character it invented.
Violence without explanation
One of the reasons Badlands still unsettles audiences is that it refuses to explain Kit. There is no childhood trauma scene, no social-issue speech, no psychological diagnosis. Holly’s narration offers observations, not answers. She notes that Kit liked to read magazines, that he was good with his hands, that he once said he was “kind of a loner.” The film leaves the rest blank, and Sheen fills that blank with presence rather than backstory. His Kit is a product of a culture that sells rebellion as a style, and the film trusts the audience to make that connection without being told.
That refusal to explain was radical in 1973, when many crime films offered clear motives and moral lessons. Malick and Sheen offered something else: a portrait of American violence as a kind of daydream, pursued by people who do not think of themselves as violent at all. The badlands themselves — eroded, golden, empty — become a mirror for Kit’s inner life. He drives through them, hides in them, and finally surrenders in them, and the landscape never judges him. Sheen’s performance does not judge him either, which is why it is so effective. Judgment is left to the viewer, who must decide what to do with a charming young man who has done terrible things and who still smiles for the camera.
Why Kit Carruthers endures
Kit Carruthers endures because he is the first great Sheen role, the one that proved he could carry a film not by dominating it but by unsettling it. Later Sheen characters would be soldiers, fathers, and presidents — men with authority and responsibility. Kit has no authority and no responsibility, only a fantasy, and Sheen shows how dangerous a fantasy can be when it is never interrupted by reality. The performance also set the template for Malick’s cinema: a beautiful world, a voiceover that tells only part of the truth, and a central figure who is both inside the story and oddly apart from it.
Watch Badlands for its images first — the wheat, the light, the long roads — and then watch Sheen’s face in the quiet moments between killings. Notice how he listens to Holly, how he rehearses his own legend, and how he seems almost surprised when consequences finally arrive. That surprise is the film’s saddest joke. Kit never expected to be caught, because in the movies he loved, the rebel always got away. Martin Sheen makes us believe that Kit believed it, and that belief, more than any single act of violence, is what makes Badlands a masterpiece.