I had a bad day and wanted to watch some senseless violence. We have all been there. It’s why there’s so many Saw movies, why MMA fights are broadcast right when the late restaurant shifts get off work, and why people love to get drunk and watch football after a long work week. Because I picked tonight’s little sense of senseless violence from a tumblr gifset I saw a couple years ago, I didn’t expect much. Homoerotic violence and pretty scenery at most. The last thing I expected was a movie with something to say.
But The Hitcher knows what it’s about from the jump. “Violence is the bloody, beating heart of America,” it screams, “And nobody comes out clean from it.” The first words we hear on screen is a dulcet toned radio man telling us the prices of various cattle slaughters. When Jim Halsey, our plucky hero, initially believes he has escaped John Ryder, the mysterious drifter who is tormenting him, he shares a sweet moment with two young boys who are….pointing realistic toy guns out of their backseat window at him. And then we see Ryder’s face in the car, as if to drive the point home.
The aesthetics of violence are dripping all over the world of The Hitcher. Nash, the sole woman who exists in this movie, says her uncle will ‘beat her ass’ if he knew she was letting Halsey in, a tv is turned on briefly to the sound of a war movie splitting open a tense silence, and the entirety of the action takes place in a desert landscape littered with broken buildings and busted vehicles. The violence is inescapable, you were swimming in it way before you let that man in your car.
And the cars! My god does this movie have something to say about cars! The car is both the site of violence and the object that that perpetuates it. The car is a violated body, clipping busses when Halsey tries to warn a family about Ryder, and, in one stunning car chase in a movie that is mostly car chases (not a complaint, Fury Road is my favorite movie) a stolen cop car is chipped to bits by deranged cops shooting parts off it it, small bit by small bit, getting closer and closer to Halsey and Nash, until a literal serial killer comes to their aid.
Because that’s the other thing. Ryder is less character and more folkloric devil. He appears out of nowhere, with no warning. He is mostly unstoppable. He kills without warning, and up until the second half of the movie, we never actually see him do it, just the bodies left behind. And the movie respects him. Is even in awe of him. But the cops?
The cops are just as dangerous as Ryder, if not more so. They are incompetent and cocky, all but Esteridge, their captain, and even he is mostly useless. They throw Halsey to the ground, play as many mind games with him as Ryder does, arrest him despite, initially, being convinced of his innocence, try to goad him into making a false move in order to extrajudicially execute him. In this latter scene, Nash steps in, and then the camera pans to Ryder, who was clearly ready to step in and save Halsey, as he does later when a police helicopter shows up.
Which is the biggest strength of the movie, the attraction-repulsion between Ryder and Halsey. “I want you to stop me.” Ryder says during their initial confrontation, in a scene so sexually loaded it would almost be more accurate to call it an attempted rape scene than a murder, down to Halsey being worried Ryder is going to ‘stick it in him no matter what I do.’ The ‘it’ in question is a knife, of course, but it isn’t a far leap to make, and the movie wants you to make it.
But stopping Ryder means killing him, and Ryder wants Halsey to kill him as badly as Halsey wants to not kill anybody. He confronts him in a diner, mocks him for not checking if his gun is loaded, and gives him the bullets to shoot him. He sets up a lose-lose situation where Nash dies regardless as to if Halsey shoots him in the head. He chooses not to, then. And in the end, even after Halsey runs him down with another stolen cop car, he still does not go down until Halsey puts a bullet in him.
“Why are you doing this to me?” Halsey asks in the diner scene. Ryder answers “You’re a smart kid. You’ll figure it out.” And I do think the answer is this: to show that the line between himself, the embodiment of American Violence (it is not coincidence that, when asked where he’s from, Ryder answers: “Disneyland.” America distilled into a theme park.) and the archetypical clean cut midwestern kid bound for a better life in California that Halsey exemplifies.
Ryder torments Halsey until he has no one to call and nowhere to turn, goading him into shooting people. Halsey screams at Nash to shoot cops she knows on a first name bases, and keeps her in a hotel room with him, forbids her from calling her father. Halsey disrobes, and the camera lovingly pans up and down his lanky, bruised body as Ryder climbs in the bed with Nash and curls around her in a sickly parody of a lovers embrace, culminating in a shot where a figure runs toward the camera in a dark shadow between two semi trucks, and we cannot tell until the light hits the figure’s face, whether it’s Halsey or Ryder.
Because in the end there’s no difference. Nash dies, wether Halsey kills Ryder or not. And he, in the moment, decides a death due to inaction is better than one he caused, but she’s still dead. And he still ends up in an interrogation room spitting on Ryder’s face in a scene that’s filmed like a cum shot, down to the beatific smile on Ryder’s face as he rubs the spit between his fingers. Because he knows what’s coming. Halsey has grown a backbone, and Ryder’s got his soul. Which makes this a better tormented by the devil movie than any movie that’s actually about the devil.
I won’t pretend this movie’s perfect. Is it super misogynist? Yeah! It’s a horror thriller from 1986. The only woman in the movie gets bound and gagged in a way that shows off her tits and then gets killed via semi truck to further the violent homoerotic tension between the two leads. These things happen, in movies like this. I can see quarreling with the structure and pacing, though I liked it. It gave the proceedings an odd, dreamlike quality. All in all, I didn’t think any missteps took away from the core of the film.
And the core of the film is this: Halsey, bruised, bloodied, and battered, killing an almost mystical force of evil, leaning against a car he stole at gunpoint, and lighting a cigarette. He has nowhere to go from here. America ate him. And the credits roll over this image as if to say ‘Look at yourselves. This is what we are. We’d like to think we aren’t, but you’re one bad day and one car wreck from violent desperation. Remember that. Reckon with it.”
And I loved it. It was a nasty, brutal, claustrophobic hour and 38 minutes. I absolutely recommend it if you like: deconstructions of the American road movie, senseless violence, homoerotic violence, car crash stunts, watching a skinny long haired man suffer, movies where a character has one very long, very bad day, and, again, car crash stunts. Highly recced. Please watch this.
Signing off,
Marlowe
Marlowe Writes 