Monthly Archives: May 2011

A New Romanticism: The Poetry of The New World

Written by Nathanael Smith. Posted on May 27, 2011. Filed under Essays, Guest Contributions. Tagged badlands, christian bale, colin farrell, days of heaven, emmanuel lubezski, terrence malick, the new world, the thin red line, the tree of life. 2 Comments.

To celebrate the debut of Terrence Malick’s Palme d’Or winning film, The Tree of Life, Cinémezzo, with the help of some guest contributors, is taking a look back at his four features Badlands; Days of Heaven; The Thin Red Line; and The New World, all of which contain in their sounds and images the ebb and flow of life and time.

With some critics describing it as epic, magical and profound and others dismissing it as ponderous and dull, The New World is Terrence Malick’s most critically divisive film. Coupled with an underwhelming worldwide box office of $30 million (just about breaking even) it’s safe to say that this didn’t have universal audience appeal, either. For those expecting a live action adaptation of Disney’s Pocahontas, they would have been met with a film constructed around minimal dialogue, and one in which John Smith disappears two thirds of the way through and Pocahontas dies off-screen. Yet for those who do fall under its spell, they fall fast and hard, losing themselves in the lyricism and poetry of Malick’s New World.

If The Thin Red Line can be seen as Malick’s war poem in the vein of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, then The New World is “Malick does Romanticism”. The film’s heart beats to the same rhythm of Emerson, Thoreau and Keats. This is cinema as poetry: a thoughtful and moving meditation on the beginnings of America. The discovery and subsequent colonization of the continent has been the subject of art for hundreds of years. Czech composer Antonin Dvorak most notably wrote the magnificent New World Symphony (his 9th) which is filled with the hope, joy and excitement of moving to the US. For Dvorak, America represented the chance for fulfillment, freedom and a whole new life. Malick’s New World shares the same sense of wonder, yet it is mixed with the ugliness of colonialism and the tension between tradition and modernity. He is a true romantic, displaying a near pantheistic appreciation of nature and finding inspiration, beauty and truth within its forests and rivers.

Director of Photography Emmanuel Lubezski shoots the film in a soft light, making great use of sunsets, light breaking through canopies and grass blowing in the wind. It is, without a doubt, one of the most beautiful and visually satisfying films ever. Malick’s detractors say that his visuals are all the director is good for, but his films are far more than just a sequence of pretty pictures. Through the astonishingly gorgeous look of the film, he captures moments of true beauty, and epitomizes the recurring romantic theme of imagination in nature. Q’Orianka Kilcher, in an unforgettable debut role, plays the female lead (essentially Pocahontas although never named as such in the film) with a playful yet spiritual charm. In ‘America’ she hops and ducks through the long grass, imitating an animal: here in this setting, she is free, uninhibited and creative. When she moves to London, nature has either been concreted over – the port they arrive in is made up of bricks and glass – or tamed – even the trees are trimmed into uniform shapes. ‘Rebecca’ is stifled by her clothing and her location. Yet in one of the films most beautiful moments we see her cartwheeling along a river bank in her dress, upon the realization that she can be connected to nature anywhere, and through her family.

Taking this into account The New World, as with the best of Romantic poetry, is occasionally content to simply observe nature and be lost in its awe. Keat’s On The Sea suggests that one can be refreshed and rejuvenated simply by gazing for a while at the ocean, whilst Thoreau eulogizes about the ‘Spirit of lakes and seas and rivers’. There is a definite link between spirituality and nature in the New World, as seen through the rituals and language of Pocahontas, and on the change in character that Farrell’s John Smith undergoes during his time spent with the Native Americans. Once a mutineer and soldier clad in heavy armour, he is stripped down to his raw, base self, and in doing so engages with his emotions. Yet there is also some argument that many of the pleasures of The New World can be found in the simple aesthetic joy of gazing at wild, untouched nature. As the strains of Wagner’s prelude to Das Rheingold drift hauntingly in the background and the ships of the colonists sail into sight, one can fully understand Keats’ awe at the sight of the sea.

The amazing opening scene – the greatest ever, in my humble opinion – perfectly encapsulates many of the film’s themes, most notably that of the invasion of modernity and “civilization” on a world that was not necessarily asking for it. As Smith leaves to try and ask help from ‘the naturals’, Jamestown is nothing but a few poorly built huts and some failing farmland. When he returns from his long spell away, the town has walls, much stronger housing and the obvious intention of staying. Progress is coming, and fast. Yet at the same time, the settlers are starved, suicidal and mad, having failed to properly establish farmland or adapt to the environment they have barged into. Ultimately they rely on the help of those who are at one with nature – the natives give meat, furs and seed to the settlers (for the Brits reading this, this is in keeping with actual historical events). The message is clear: respect, love and embrace nature otherwise death follows, although it is possibly the death of creativity and inspiration.

If this all sounds too high brow or, dare I use the word, pretentious, then fear not. At the heart of the film is a powerful story told with all the skill of a master and an attention to historical accuracy that is almost unrivaled. This has values beyond it’s poetic musings, not least in the performances. Farrell, an actor who is incredible given the right director (another example would be Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges) is phenomenal here, his eyes expressing a wealth of emotion and his voiceover as hypnotic and thoughtful as one has come to expect from Malick. Kilcher matches and even surpasses this excellent performance, which is even more incredible considering she was fifteen at the time. The film also features Christian Bale’s finest hour, imbuing the final act with a tender poignancy that ends on a note of heartbreaking tragedy. Christopher Plummer, Wes Studi and David Thewlis all provide excellent support.

All this meshes together to create a film with characters that go beyond paragons and paramours, instead fleshing out real humans that you believe exist beyond the four walls of your screen. The deliberate pacing allows for real investment in the people of the New World, adding a palpable power to some of the film’s most emotional scenes. One of the highlights is a battle sequence (on a personal note, I first saw this film because it had a guy with a sword on the front cover, but found something entirely different to what I was expecting) which is shot in a typically Malickian way. Cut together with scenes of a concerned Pocahontas running towards the battlefield, and with some sections that happen almost entirely silently, this is not gritty realism but a more abstract approach to violence. Like the rest of the film it has a unique power that is both quiet and powerful.

Yet although the surface values of The New World are many and important, if you are willing to engage with the film on a deeper level then The New World acts as a modern day successor to the Romantic poets. Whilst it has numerous inspirations from philosophy, fine art and other writing (there is a nice comparison to be made with Yeats’ Lake Isle on Innisfree), the film feels like a work of poetry in its own right. This is a New Romanticism, adapting the themes and imagery of the poetry to create a work of art that inspires, awes and enchants. There is no other film like it, a true masterpiece of breathtaking beauty and unforgettable impact.

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Nathanael Smith is a literature and history student in Scotland who really should be studying film. He writes for Hope Lies at 24 Frames Per Second, and has on occasion considered starting his own blog but he always gets bored two weeks in. In June he will be covering Edinburgh International Film Festival for Hope Lies. He is very excited about this.

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The Thin Line Between Life and Death

Written by Adam Cook. Posted on May 25, 2011. Filed under Essays. Tagged badlands, days of heaven, hans zimmer, sean penn, terrence malick, the new world, the thin red line, the tree of life. 2 Comments.

Of all the great many qualities offered by the cinema, one that I hold in the highest regard is consolation. Cinema is inherently consoling; in most any film we can recognize something that offers us some sort of affirmation, even in the most modest of ways. Some films excel in this particular area, and I would apply that acclamation to each of the films by Terrence Malick. Most fervently, I would apply this to The Thin Red Line, which, in the most profound of contexts offered by Malick films, reconciles life with death. The context is the WWII Battle of Guadalcanal between Allied forces and Japan. Perhaps, most strikingly, The Thin Red Line is not necessarily an anti-war film, or at least not in a traditional sense. Many American war films naively set out to be “anti-war”, but any film that somehow wears victory on its’ sleeve is anything but. Saving Private Ryan, which acts as case and point for this (as well as for the argument that Steven Spielberg does not have the necessary moral capacity to handle material with so much at stake). Showing the “horrors of war” does very little in conjunction with the not-so-subtle glorification of striving against the “other” (Spielberg himself deserves credit for subverting this in War of the Worlds, a film far superior to SPR). Malick’s masterpiece has a different ambition, and one far less obvious and simple. The Thin Red Line uses war as a forum in which to discuss the very nature of life and death, and the inherent beauty and cruelty in nature itself.

Famously, The Thin Red Line was Malick’s first film in over 20 years after creating a film as close to perfect as is allowed in the art form, Days of Heaven. One can forgive such a gap between films, when each is a monumental achievement of the medium. The scenarios differ between these, and each of his films, but the same broad philosophical themes underlie each image. Picking favourites is a little arbitrary, but for me the most significant catharsis lies in The Thin Red Line, which through myriad subjective perspectives creates a complex tapestry of ideas and outlooks, which are contrasted with the omniscient presence of Malick’s images, creating a beautiful synthesis, through which we are able, without sacrificing investment in the individual, to perceive a larger picture. A perspective in which the thin line between life and death becomes so blurred that like Private Witt (Jim Caviezel), we may be able to smile at the passing of a life, recognizing the “glory” of living that is behind it. Malick recognizes that beauty is interrupted but constant. In a startlingly wonderful image, we see dying leaves, with the sun shining through their many holes: life and death reconciled with the same beauty.

The Thin Red Line is not so much a war film as it is an allegory about nature, something which war is very much a part of, and as Malick shows us, is something that simply occurs, in spite of the moral component of humanity. Much of the film is devoted to exploring the struggle between this natural evilness and moral human consciousness. There are soldiers who seem less burdened by the existential merit of what they are a part of, like one man who steals from the dead, and asks “What are you to me?” Later, however, he is seen in emotional turmoil, discarding the stolen goods. Morality is just as difficult to shake off as violence, both essential to the spectrum of humanness. But perhaps where there is beauty, there can be naught else. Malick frequently juxtaposes the horrors of war with images of natural beauty that surround it. As the soldiers violently ascend a hill, a sequence that acts as the centerpiece to the film, a beautiful blanket of sunshine spreads over the grass. This struggle manifests itself everywhere in the film.

Even if Malick sees this struggle as inherent, beauty needing cruelty just like life needs death, it does not mean he refuses to pick sides. If such beauty exists than life should be lived in accordance to it, rather than the opposite. He expresses this through the relationship between Pvt. Witt and Sgt. Welsh (Sean Penn) who philosophically find themselves on opposite sides. Witt is able to recognize a beauty to which Welsh is blind. He can understand his smallness amidst something larger, and can therefore be at peace with the passing of life around him, which is simply a part of a greater whole. While there is a spiritual component to Witt’s character, the film itself does not simply argue for the existence of God in order to justify suffering. Malick may sometimes be somewhat synchronized with one of his characters, but there is always a divide between them. This allows Malick to never simply enforce one perspective on the viewer (even when Malick only has one narrator, they still only offer a small portion of the film’s overall perspective, like with Linda in Days of Heaven), part of what makes the film so effective. The viewer always has a level of intellectual and emotional interactivity with the film. Malick does not express philosophical thought in the ways one would associate with literature, but through a transcendental form, in which one is free to explore, with thought bound to feeling.

The experience of the film allows us to elliptically drift from point of view to point of view, rather than continuing along a single thread, something that wouldn’t be possible with a proper narrative. Much has been said about the hours of footage that Malick shot, and the supposed existence of a 5-hour cut of the film, which apparently focuses more deeply on characters who only have abbreviated presences within the final cut, and characters that were axed from it altogether. This has lead to accusations of messiness in the film, and there are many out there who still dream of seeing the longer version. However, this is precisely the technique on which the power of the film is founded. Malick, who wrote a beastly script based on James Jones’ novel, deletes the narrative elements from the film, placing all emphasis on the visceral experience and the poetry of sound and image.

Without this style we would be without one of the high moments in movies, when Pvt. Witt comes face to face with his fate, and accepts it. The viewer needs to be free from the confines of a narrative in order to engage solely on an ecstatic level. Surrounded by enemy soldiers, Witt contemplates, and then draws his weapon, knowing he will be shot and killed. Immediately, Malick cuts to a shot of plants and trees in the forest and then to Witt swimming in the ocean. It is in this sequence that I find a profound cathartic power. Death is not an ending, but a moment amidst living, which will always persist.

The conflict of the film is metaphorically conveyed in a sequence not long after the soldiers land on Guadalcanal. The soldiers hike past the shore, a forest, hills, eventually coming across a field of tall grass that encompasses them. Here they find a dismembered soldier. This is the film: man journeys deep into nature and must confront what he truly is and what he is a part of. The Thin Red Line shares with us different ways individuals react to this confrontation. Some may only see horror and death amidst the tall grass, but Terrence Malick asks us to look closer.

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About Adam Cook

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World Without End

Written by Josh Timmermann. Posted on May 23, 2011. Filed under Essays, Guest Contributions. Tagged badlands, days of heaven, terrence malick, the new world, the thin red line, the tree of life. 2 Comments.

Terrence Malick’s second feature, 1978′s Days of Heaven, is often credited with being one of the most visually and aurally beautiful films ever made. Among admirers, the discussion usually begins with the film’s painterly landscape photography, as shot by the credited (and Oscar-winning) Nestor Almendros and the uncredited Haskel Wexler. From there, it is invariably mentioned how these cinematographers took advantage of Alberta’s (filling in for Texas, circa 1916) extended “magic hour” and used little artificial lighting. And, of course, there’s Ennio Morricone’s haunting score, the perfect compliment to both said compositions and the vivid sounds of the natural, pastoral world that make up the remainder of the soundtrack (along with a memorable use of Saint-Saëns’ “Aquarium” from The Carnival of the Animals). Words like “ethereal,” “lush,” “atmospheric,” and “moody” are usually invoked in some combination.

None of the above is remotely wrong; Days of Heaven looks gorgeous, sounds lovely, and is indeed ethereal, lush, atmospheric, and moody. But to stop there is to underestimate Malick’s masterpiece. The film is richly allusive, and rife with complex human drama. To be sure, that drama is muted by Hollywood standards; it might even have the least amount of narrative thrust of any of Malick’s first four features. Do not, however, mistake purposeful understatement for the absence of substance or a relative lack of narrative urgency for a plot-less aesthetic exercise.

The story of Days of Heaven is one both archetypal within American cultural mythology and, at the same time, more essentially elemental, Biblical even. Its starting point–an outlaw couple on the run–is not all that different from the film that, a decade before Days, supposedly changed the rules of Hollywood movie-making: Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, a movie that echoes even more distinctly through Malick’s first feature, Badlands.

The most radical and fascinating move that Malick makes as a storyteller is to decentralize the narrative away from what might have been a relocated retread of Penn’s film and his own debut. Rather than focusing on said outlaw couple–Richard Gere’s Bill and Brooke Adams’ Abby, who hop a West-headed train and pretend to be siblings after Bill kills a supervisor at the Chicago steel mill where we was working–or on the wealthy, terminally ill farmer (a superb Sam Shepard) who creates the third point in the story’s love triangle, Malick squares his attention on Bill’s kid sister, Linda (Linda Manz, in one of the all-time great youth performances). This decision accounts for the film’s perceived lack of dramatic emphasis. Linda is only half-interested in the romantic dynamic taking shape between the adults around her, and probably only half-aware of why they quickly fled Chicago for Texas. She notes in voice-over what she can gather of these heated goings-on alongside curious observations of the natural world of the farm and stray philosophical ruminations that, if sometimes incidentally wise-beyond-her-years, remain distinctly those of a young girl.

Andrew Wyeth’s famous 1948 painting Christina’s World was reportedly an important influence on the film. Certainly, looking at the painting and select compositions from Days of Heavens side-by-side is almost uncanny. But the “world” suggested in Wyeth’s image of a young girl staring out across the vastness of a seemingly endless sea of wheat (with a Gothic country mansion, a dead-ringer for the home of Shepard’s farmer, in the distance) seems to have informed Malick’s film in ways that extend beyond its photographic palette.

Unlike Bonnie and Clyde or Badlands, Days of Heaven does not end with the death or capture of its criminal protagonist. In fact, the scene when Bill is spotted, chased, and gunned down by the authorities is remarkably brief, and registers as almost irrelevant and strangely out of place, in sync only with the film’s larger sense of Old Testament narrative logic. Situated between the much-praised “plague of locusts” sequence and Bill’s death scene is a trip along the river that feels as oddly enchanted and dreamlike as that of the orphaned runaway children, John and Pearl, in Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter. The cadence of this extraordinary stretch is not one of frenzied escape, but instead of leisure and wonder, as experienced through Linda’s eyes.

The point, at any rate, is that the film continues after Bill has been killed, and after Abby, too, has departed the picture, dropping her late lover’s sister off at a girl’s boarding school. In the indelible epilogue, we see Linda, our mercurial guide through paradises found and lost, leaving the school in the early morning hours, accompanied by a slightly older female companion. “This girl, she didn’t know where she was goin’ or what she was gonna do. She didn’t have no money on her,” Linda tells us over the soundtrack. “Maybe she’d meet up with a character. I was hopin’ things would work out for her. She was a good friend of mine.” Here, in the film’s final moments, Malick has, again, slyly decentralized his focus. Linda ponders where her friend will end up; there is no mention or suggestion of what will become of our narrator herself. The effect of this move is that is that the story–more than most in cinema or on the page–seems to truly linger on, beyond the closing credits and outward, into decades of American life to follow.

This interpretation seems almost too appropriate since, for nearly twenty years after Days of Heaven‘s release, that last shot of Linda watching her friend walk down the railroad tracks seemed like it might be the last on-screen word from Malick. Instead, in his return, we can spot the spiritual reappearance of Linda as the lone female, Private Bell’s idealized sweetheart-back-home, in The Thin Red Line and especially in Q’Orianka Kilcher’s precocious Pocahontas in The New World . Of course, neither continuation works from a chronological perspective, yet they make a peculiar sort of sense within a broader, poetically-aware spectrum of analysis–just the sort of lens that is necessary to appreciate Malick’s work beyond its sensual virtues.

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Josh Timmermann is a film and music critic, originally from Southern Illinois, presently based in Vancouver, British Columbia. His writing has appeared in such publications as Stylus Magazine, where he served as editor for the film section; PopMatters; CineScene; Kitty Magik; and The Village Voice, among others. His fleeting observations on movies, music, television, sports, and whatever else happens to strike his momentary interest can be found regularly at JLT/JLT.

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A Self-Made Man: Badlands and the Legend of Kit Carruthers

Written by Edwin Davies. Posted on May 21, 2011. Filed under Essays, Guest Contributions. Tagged badlands, days of heaven, martin sheen, sissy spacek, terrence malick, the new world, the thin red line, the tree of life. 2 Comments.

“I saw her standin’ on her front lawn just twirlin’ her baton
Me and her went for a ride sir and ten innocent people died”
- Bruce Springsteen, “Nebraska”

Kit Carruthers (Martin Sheen) is an aimless young man just about scraping by as a garbageman whose life changes irrevocably when he meets 15-year old Holly Sargis (Sissy Spacek). The two fall in love, despite the ten-year age gap between them, and spend their days talking about life, death and existence. Then Holly’s father (Warren Oates) finds out about their relationship and tries to put a stop to it, so Kit shoots him dead and burns his house down. This sends Kit and and Holly out on a journey that takes them from their home in South Dakota to the Badlands of Montana, leaving a trail of dead bodies in their wake.

Apart from his almost unseen short, Lanton Mills, and several years as a screenwriter for hire (working on, amongst other films, Dirty Harry) Badlands was the world’s introduction to Terrence Malick. Like many debuts, Badlands is both an aberration and an indicator of what was to come; it is noticeably different from his later work, but there are just enough similarities for there to be a clear development from one project to the next. It’s easily Malick’s most linear and accessible film, with nothing approaching the elliptical narratives of his later films like Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line. Though there are some telltale shots of nature, they are few and are not at the forefront of the work; rather than serving as a riposte to the violence that Kit metes out, the endless landscapes serve primarily as backdrops for his and Holly’s story to play out against.

Yet even at such an early stage in his career, Malick established himself as a unique talent, and the film emerges as an assured and cohesive statement. Despite a troubled shoot which saw Malick lose not one but two cinematographers who refused to work with him, crucial equipment being damaged during the scene in which Holly’s house burns down and the departure of almost the entire crew towards the end of shooting (the film was supposedly completed by a skeleton crew consisting of Malick, his then-wife Jill Jakes and a local high school student), the resultant film is a dazzling, beguiling work that tackles grand themes like love, the loss of innocence and the nature of storytelling with a maturity and insight that is astonishing.

Loosely based on the real-life murder spree of Charles Starkweather and his 14-year old girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, Badlands is narrated by Holly, who describes her journey with Kit as a kind of romantic fairytale. As far as she is concerned, theirs is a love that rivals Romeo and Juliet’s, and there is a wide-eyed innocence to Holly’s interpretation of her situation that speaks volumes about how little she understands Kit’s actions. Holly’s cold, detached descriptions of their time together give the film a cold, detached feel that is complemented perfectly by Malick’s camera, which favours wide shots of the two against the grand vistas of the Midwest, and his choice of music. The piece “Gassenhauer” by Carl Orff, which was used to such iconic effect that Hans Zimmer used it as the basis for his score for Tony Scott’s True Romance, itself a spin on Badlands, gives the film a whimsical quality that is completely at odds with the actual story, yet is perfect for Holly’s own spin on the tale.

The idea of Badlands as a kind of fairytale is especially interesting when we consider the way in which Holly’s view of what she and Kit are doing changes over time. The rush of giddy excitement that comes with adolescent love, a feeling so strong that it can convince someone as naive as Holly that staying with Kit, who she describes as the “most trigger happy” person she knows, is a good idea, wanes as she becomes more aware of the wrongness of their actions.

In my favourite moment in the film, she describes their infamy in relation to incidents of schools employing armed guards, people leaving their lights on at night and the police bringing in a “famous detective” from Boston to track them down. These details all have the heightened feel of a child exaggerating details of a story to sound more impressive, but they also suggest that Holly is aware of the kind of bogeymen that she and Kit have become. If their life is a fairytale, then they have become the monster that must be slain to protect the town.

All this plays into Badlands‘ most fascinating theme; the ways in which people create their own legends. Several times in the film, Kit is referred to as looking like James Dean, and he comports himself like he is the star of his own biopic. As Kit, Martin Sheen delivers his lines with a laconic, affected cool that he has clearly learned from hours watching Dean and other movie stars on the silver screen. (The ease with which Sheen slips into the role of a Dean surrogate is probably as much down to Sheen’s own obsession – he has always cited Dean as one of his chief inspirations as an actor – as the story itself.) In fact, both Holly and Kit at times act like people who have only learned how to behave through watching movies – during the climactic car chase, Kit checks his hair in the mirror to make sure that he looks just right for when the police catch him; Holly’s response to Kit gunning her father down is to slap Kit like she’s the fatale in a film noir. Given their youth and the late ’50s setting of the film, this is entirely possible; Kit and Holly are part of one first or second generation to grow up in a culture in which cinema is the dominant artform.

Viewed this way, more or less everything that Kit says and does in film can be seen as part of his attempt to create The Legend of Kit Carruthers. When Kit and Holly take a rich man and his maid hostage, Kit sits down and records a message on the man’s dictaphone about the nature of his crimes in which he downplays the significance of their actions, putting them down to the actions of two kids having fun, but clearly hoping that people will listen to it later and analyse the words to try to find some greater meaning. When caught, he tells the arresting officers that they have acted as heroes, and that he will speak of them that way when they get to town. As far as Kit is concerned, they have now become part of his legend. Even after he is caught, Kit hands his possessions out to police officers and talks to them like he’s a movie star addressing his adoring public.

Even the manner in which he is caught is a carefully considered act of myth-making since he shoots out his own tyre, then waits around for the police to catch up. The film gives no explicit explanation for this act, but since Kit lies about it later by saying that he stopped because he got a flat tyre and didn’t fight because he ran out of bullets, the idea that he is creating the story of his own life is reinforced tenfold. It is better that he be captured through bad luck or the conspiring hand of fate than through the police’s success or his own mistakes.

Ultimately, Kit’s legend becomes real. One of the policemen that captures him remarks, in wonder, that Kit is no bigger than he is, in that moment suggesting the kind of mythic figure that Kit has become in the minds of ordinary people. In doing so, the film mirrors the real cultural impact of Charles Starkweather, whose crimes shocked America and have reverberated through its culture over the last 50 years in Badlands, Natural Born Killers, Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Nebraska’, and countless other works which have sought to either examine or exploit the killings.

Malick doesn’t offer any concrete explanation for why Kit (or Starkweather, or the countless others who have commited similar acts) would go out and start killing people, but the closest he comes to doing so comes right after Kit is arrested. As he is riding in the police car with the officers who arrested him, one of them asks Kit why he did what he did. After a brief period of consideration, Kit replies:

“I always wanted to be a criminal, I guess.”

It’s a chilling moment that captures the sense of isolation and loneliness that someone like Kit, growing up in the middle of nowhere with no prospects, cut off from the mainstream of American life, might feel, but there’s also something romantic about it. It conjures up the image of the tragic criminal whose name lives on long after he has been caught or killed. The greatest legacy of Kit Carruthers has nothing to do with the people he murdered, or the immediate grief of their families, but with the untold thousands who had had no direct contact with, but who were terrified by his mere existence. That’s a legend.

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Edwin Davies is a writer and critic based in Sheffield, England. He is the editor of the film and culture site A Mighty Fine Blog, the television writer for Hope Lies at Twenty-Four Frames a Second and a contributor to Box Office Prophets. He can be found on Twitter here.

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