“Society is, if anything, benign. This is the haunting truth of Badlands, something that places it very much in the seventies in spite of its carefully re-created period detail. Kit and Holly are directionless creatures, technically literate but uneducated in any real sense, so desensitized that Kit (in Malick’s words at a news conference) can regard the gun with which he shoots people as a kind of magic wand that eliminates small nuisances. Kit and Holly are members of the television generation run amok.”

It’s fun to watch each generation talking ‘bout its own generation, isn’t it? And finding there something dark and disturbing? Although this film reviewer sees in Badlands nothing except the vacant and violent stare of the young Boomers (the “television generation”), Malick’s film was actually part of a conversation that began in the 1950s about another generation run meaninglessly amok. This generation was comprised of the Boomers’ older cousins, the teenagers born in the late 1930s and early 1940s, stuck between the new post WWII families and their boom of babies born from the mid 1940s through the mid 1960s.

U.S. birth rates, twentieth centuryThis generation of teenagers, their parents worried, were just no good. Along with the country’s birth rates, juvenile delinquency rates were on the rise across the United States, a fact that was heavily played up in the media. Some sensational reports indicated rates had climbed by as much as 11,000%. In 1953, the United States Senate formed a Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, which conducted televised investigations that focused in large part on the influence of graphic comic books and their potential impact on juvenile delinquency. The more general perceived cause was consumer culture, rock n’ roll and Hollywood culture, and a decline in family cohesion.

A questionable comic book full of murder and other very bad things

Elvis Presley being bad in “Jailhouse Rock,” 1957This obsession with juvenile delinquency also eventually took shape as the fear of the “bad seed” that could erupt at any moment in the girl or boy next door, causing them to go into a frenzy full of sex, drugs, and violence. (This corresponded to a similar fear gripping the nation at the time – the fear of communism, which was often portrayed as a hidden threat that could erupt at any moment in even the most American-seeming neighbor or co-worker.)

Cover of the first edition of Bad Seed, a postcard magazine published in 1983-84 by rocker Miriam Linna which celebrated the delinquency scare of the 1950s.

The threat was serious. One minute comic books, hot rods, Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis, and the next minute – well, just watch for yourself:

1950s Juvenile Delinquent Movie Trailers (#3)

I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957); Lost, Lonely, and Vicious (1958); and Young, Willling, and Eager (1958) are just a few examples of literally dozens and dozens of exploitation films that, throughout the 1950s, capitalized on this fear of the juvenile delinquent.

Other little representative gems that I particularly enjoy include Joy Ride (1958) and Girls on the Loose (1958).

These graphic exploitation films followed on the heels of earlier, tamer icons – including, of course, those starring Marlon Brando and James Dean:

The Wild One, 1953

When, then, the photographs of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate – him sporting his James Dean hairstyle and cigarette and her with her kerchief and bottle of soda – were splashed across newspapers nationwide in 1958, their shocking story was actually not so shocking at all. Instead, they and their story fit into an already understood and popularly dramatized narrative. The apparent meaningless of their violence was actually full of meaning, brimming over with it, in fact – theirs was already a widely told public story about something that was going terribly, terribly wrong in young, postwar America.

Malick’s1973 film Badlands is a glance back to the Starkweather story – and the larger cultural phenomenon which surrounded it like haze – from the distance of a decade or so, a half-generation away. And Springsteen’s 1982 “Nebraska,” is another glance back at the story, through the hazy lens of the film, this time from a full generation away.

Seen standing alone, “Nebraska” is a bit of a misfit – and a sinister one – among the other songs on Springsteen’s album of the same name. As noted in the last post, it’s a song about a young man and a young woman who kill for no reason at all, who kill just because:

Although the other songs on the album all share the same bleak perspective, they are immediately understandable as songs about young American men who’ve gone bad or over the edge because of something – something specific, something understandable. Because of Vietnam, for example:

Or because of organized crime: