Finally on Saturday night I caught a movie I wasn't permitted to see back in 1973 when it first released, which I haven't seen in the years going from 15 to 52. And, as Lauren Bacall once said, any time you see an old movie for the first time, it's really a new movie.
Pretty ironic, to finally watch "Badlands." Martin Sheen is lean and gorgeous, playing a small-town hustler who's so desperate for a sense of importance, he fixates on other men's hats as a way of adding to his own stature. There is foreshadowing of the bad boy Charlie Sheen played later in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off," but the character of Kit is neither irreverent nor iconoclastic. This guy's an outright psycho, trigger-happy and self-involved, all the more because it's dressed up with a chilling good-ole boy courtesy—meaning he'll open the door for you after he's shot you in the back and sees you're staggering to get out of the sun.
And then there's Sissy Spacek, ostensibly a small-town good girl, so virginal she grabs her schoolbooks after Kit's shot her father, before she hops into the car to join Kit on a cross-country killing spree. His shootings garner little more than an eye roll, as if she's saying, "Oh, there you go again." She doesn't concern herself with the same social niceties as Kit. On the surface she seems passive, strangely dead-assed, but her voice-over sounds so much like a cheap novel, you realize this kid's got some twisted pathologies as well.
Why so ironic? Because these two are so desensitized and self-absorbed, I couldn't help thinking of Ravi and Michelle, the two Rutgers students who so cruelly outed a fellow classmate, he committed suicide last month rather than face what they'd done to his life. Like their prototypes, Caril Fugate and Charlie Starkweather, Kit and Holly invaded a rich man's home and went through his things.
They relied on a gun, whereas Ravi and Michelle had video cams and the Internet. Back then they put Starkweather in the electric chair, then wrote off the spree killers as a grotesque blip on the social radar. Nobody wanted to contemplate a world routinely populated with Starkweathers, no more than we want to think maybe kids like Ravi and Michelle aren't anomalies but part of a norm — kids who are bright and promising, but utterly lacking in empathy and compassion. Academic excellence with zero character. No one who would say, "Ravi, you're being a first-class jerk. Nothing good will come of this. Stop it now or I'll do something to stop it."
We lament the bullies but don't ask, "Where are the kids who risk social censure to protect the vulnerable and stand up to bullies?" What is done to support them? (Meanwhile prosecutors are muddling, "Is this a hate crime? Is it merely invasion of privacy? What is it, exactly?")
One imagines Ravi finding himself center stage among his mates, a temporary king of comedy. Nothing else could explain the audacity of his Twitter posts. Little is yet known about Michelle Wei, but could she have been a seemingly passive sidekick whose pathologies found a catalyst in Ravi? Did they really think Tyler Clementi would join them later in laughing about it all, like one of Ashton Kutcher's "Punk'd" episodes? that he wouldn't mind their invasions? because whether the invasion is done with a gun or a Twitter account, it's still all about violence, and I'm not sure the Ravis and Michelles of our times get that. We still think "real" violence is meted with physical blows, maybe from a gun.
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