The Hot-Blooded Love Cry at the Cold Heart of Badlands

Badlands doesn’t have an answer. From the moment Kit sees Holly for the first time, twirling her baton on a sunlit green lawn, he wants her, but in the context of Badlands, it’s hard to know what “wanting” means to him. Later, when he’s finally picked up by the police, he says, “I always wanted to be a criminal, just not this big a one.” His “wanting” comes from a restless, inchoate need for . . . it’s not clear. Kit has a sense of self-importance but no self-awareness. This missing piece keeps us going back to Badlands, its yawning emptiness, its full moons and thunderclouds, the expressionless faces of Kit and Holly, barreling across the plains, a pile of dead bodies behind them. In “Nebraska,” Bruce Springsteen imagines the story from Starkweather’s point of view, paraphrasing what the killer actually said after he was caught, “I can’t say that I’m sorry for the things that we done / At least for a little while, sir, me and her, we had us some fun.” Staring at those words, the mind goes blank. In that blankness lies Badlands.

When Kit and Holly have sex for the first time, she’s disappointed. She can’t believe everyone makes such a fuss about what she just experienced. In other variations on this lovers-on-the-run premise, like Kalifornia, Wild at Heart, and Natural Born Killers, sex seems like it’s the point of murder, or at least a huge perk. Not here. Kit and Holly don’t have the sexually charged dynamic of the duo in Gun Crazy, or the cocky glamour of Bonnie and Clyde. They are not Godard’s “children of Marx and Coca-Cola,” like Michel and Patricia in Breathless (filmed a year after Starkweather’s murders), who spout theories filtered down through American movies. Kit and Holly, dancing in the forest, are not capable of theory. They are abstraction personified.

“Love Is Strange” was considered very racy in 1957. Seen in the larger context of anxiety about what teenagers were getting up to at night, it’s damn near explosive. The year before, Elvis had a smash hit with the extremely controversial “Baby Let’s Play House,” where he sang the praises of living in sin. In 1954, Joe Turner’s “Shake, Rattle and Roll” rocked (literally) the foundations of propriety. Elvis covered the song in 1956, and was forced to change some of the more explicit lyrics, although nobody seemed to notice that comparing himself to “a one-eyed cat / peeping in a seafood store” was far dirtier than anything else in the song. Parents weren’t wrong to freak out about rock and roll. These songs did threaten the status quo, crack the pillars of society. These songs admitted what was going on culturally, emotionally, hormonally. Once you let that genie out of the bottle, it is not going to want to go back in. And it didn’t.

The origin story of “Love Is Strange” is complicated, involving a cast of characters who all claim total or partial ownership. A guitar riff by Jody Williams on Billy Stewart’s “Billy’s Blues” was the basis for the song, as well as for a number of others. Bo Diddley wrote the lyrics (giving his wife Ethel the song credit, due to a dispute with the record company), although Sylvia Vanterpool claims she wrote them. Diddley recorded it in 1956 (although it wasn’t released for decades), with Williams playing on the track. Then, a year after, Buddy Holly recorded it and released it under the title “Words of Love.” Others covered it later: Sonny and Cher, Peaches & Herb.

But Mickey & Sylvia’s version is the one everyone knows. It reached number one on the Billboard charts in 1957, and would have still been in rotation when Kit and Holly do their flat-affect dance in the woods. In their version, Mickey & Sylvia co-create the song—co-create their love affair—in all its intensity (“You’re in an awful fix”; “Once you get it, you never want to quit, no no”) as the song unfolds. When she growls, “Come here, Lover Boy!” it seems there is nothing else to do but obey, and happily.

It’s a short stroll from the sexual rebellion in 1957 to the political and cultural upheaval of 1968. But what is so fascinating about Kit and Holly dancing in the forest clearing to “Love Is Strange” is that the two of them are so clearly cut off from any cultural trend, from their generation, from anything connecting them to their moment in time, from time in general. 

James Dean in his red leather jacket embodied the angst and isolation of the first generation to come of age post–atomic bomb. Dean’s rebellion may not have had a cause, but it had a source, and teenagers recognized it. Kit and Holly, on the other hand, make the rebellion of 1950s teenagers—having drag races and rumbles, getting each other pregnant at the drive-in—look pedestrian. Those kids, with parents to go home to, were tame and milk-fed by comparison. They would find their way back to the American mainstream. Kit and Holly won’t. They were never a part of it to begin with.