MovieChat Forums > Badlands (1974) Discussion > Holly - psychopath or autistic??

Holly - psychopath or autistic??


I love Badlands. I first watched it when I was 9 years old and I fell in love with it because it's such gritty story. One of the things that stood out was Sissy's portrayal of Holly. Holly, imo, seemed a bit autistic because she comes off as idiosyncratic in most scenes and most people say that she's a psychopath with no remorse at all of the killings. What's y'all's opinion. Is Holly a psychopath or autistic to you???

reply

Great question!
I always wondered the same thing, if she were a sociopath she would get something out of the spree with Kit, a thrill, gratification, etc. But she seems detached from everything, she's like a tumble weed just tumbling along wherever the wind blows. I'm guessing she was autistic

reply

Nah, just bored. Think Manson Girls.

reply

[deleted]

She is neither one. I used to work in the mental health unit of a federal prison, so I know something about this stuff.
She's just a fairly dumb little teenager who has never thought through much of anything in her life, never experienced much, never been taught to make mature judgments, and fell in love with this guy and went along with whatever he wanted.
I knew girls much like this in the small town in Oklahoma where I spent my teenage years. She was a totally believable character to me, as was everyone in the film.

reply

She's just a fairly dumb little teenager...



This thread, and your description of her in particular, raises the question: which Holly are we talking about? Because there are actually two Hollies. The one you see and hear on the screen, barely reacting to the world around her and following Kit like a puppy dog, might fit the "dumb little teenager" description if it were not for the one scene in which she reads a book to Kit; I've known people quite intelligent who do not read aloud as well or as expressively as Holly does in that scene. But aside from that, you could be forgiven for thinking she's a bit slow at the very least. Except for the voiceover. Sissy Spacek, possibly the most brilliant natural actress of her day (neck-and-neck with Sally Field), delivers a soaring, lyrical, almost poetic narration, so startlingly different from what appears NOT to be going on inside Holly's head that one immediately is forced to ask "Just who IS this girl?" which of course leads to the obvious question "Who is the REAL psychopath in this movie?"

These are questions that Malick elects not to answer, possibly because in the real life case those questions went unanswered as well. It is these questions that made this film haunt me for days after I had first seen it.





Never mess with a middle-aged, Bipolar queen with AIDS and an attitude problem!
roflol ><

reply

These are questions that Malick elects not to answer,
For what it's worth, Malick did say this in a 1974 interview with Sight & Sound magazine:
“Holly’s Southerness is essential to taking her right. She isn’t indifferent about her father’s death. She might have cried buckets of tears, but she wouldn’t think of telling you about it. It wouldn’t be proper. You should always feel there are large parts of her experience she is not including because she has a strong, if misplaced, sense of propriety…Kit…is a closed book, not a rare trait in people who have tasted more than their fair share of bitterness in life. The movies have kept up a myth that suffering makes you deep. It inclines you to say deep things…People who’ve suffered go around in movies with long, thoughtful faces, as though everything had caved in just yesterday. It’s not that way in real life though, not always. Suffering can make you shallow, and just the opposite of vulnerable, dense.”

reply

I thought Holly was just incredibly naïve and impressionable.

I've been chasing grace/ But grace ain't easy to find

reply

Holly is a mask of sanity. She's not just another dumb teenager or bland girl from Oklahoma. Dumb teenagers and bland girls from Oklahoma can have genuine emotions other than only a core of cold rage. Holly was full of cold rage, the most lethal and silent kind. When she is expressively reading to Kit, she is modeling herself after him and "feeding back" his own expressiveness. When she repeats gossip from movie books in a much duller tone, it is a more tired, real inner view. The true Holly is the one who you hear narrate. Most humans, even dumb teenagers, have some rudimentary form of empathy. Nurturers of babies bond with them through it. I have autism and it is ignorant to believe people who are autistic do not possess empathy, because many of us do. I don't always know how to appropriately show how much I care and I feel, but I care and I feel far more deeply than is healthy. Even though Terry is from Texas, Southern women (I am one of those, too) are not known for playing ladylike when it comes to genuine emotion. They are, in fact, known for going way over the top when it comes to emotion, geninue or otherwise. It is only conjecture, anyway. No one's point of view is more valid than another's. You can quote the filmmaker, work with juvie girls, hang around bland girls from Oklahoma, be Southern, be autistic or have antisocial personality. It still doesn't make one view more credible or compelling than another in the larger scope of life ... in my humble opinion.

reply

Autism is such a complex diagnosis, with so many nuanced factors, I would never attempt it casually. Even with a movie character.

_______________

Nothing to see here, move along.

reply