img_1706.jpg, Badlands National Park, SD 1024x768

The film's score makes repeated use of the short composition Gassenhauer from Carl Orff's Schulwerk, and apparently also uses other pieces from the Schulwerk. The same piece was used for a scene in the film Ratcatcher as well as the films True Romance, Monster and Finding Forrester.

Though Malick paid close attention to period detail, he did not want it to overwhelm the picture. "I tried to keep the 1950's to a bare minimum," he said. "Nostalgia is a powerful feeling; it can drown out anything. I wanted the picture to set up like a fairy tale, outside time."

Badlands is narrated from the perspective of Holly (Spacek), a teenaged girl living in a dead-end South Dakota town. One day she meets Kit (Sheen), a rebellious young greaser who sweeps her off her feet and takes her as his accomplice on a cross-country killing spree. Holly's narration, describing her adventures with Kit with romantic is juxtaposed with the grim reality of Kit's sociopathic appetite for grisly violence. This use of voice-over to create a dialectic between sound and image has become a dominant feature of Malick's work.

 
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