# Hitcher, The (1986)

### reviewed by
Philipp Lenssen

An HTML version of this review is part of the movie section of Culture Club Central, a website which will hopefully be online some day. If you have comments on this I might include them at the site. Please excuse bad english, it's not my mother tongue.

The Hitcher (Review by Philipp Lenssen/ Jester@T-Online.de, Jan. 1998)

"Out on the desert highway, the rule of thumb has a different meaning..."

The story here is basically good man against evil man. Jim Halsey (C. Thomas Howell) is driving a car through Texas and takes up hitcher John Ryder with the words "My mother told me never to do this", foreshadowing the tragedy ahead. The man sitting in his car, played by Rutger Hauer (seen in Blade Runner), turns out to be a psychopath. Little does Jim Halsey know when he bravely throws the hitcher out of the car that by escaping death he just qualified himself for his worst nightmare. The hitcher found someone to play a deadly game with...

The nice twist here is the Hitchcock-like innocent hunted as murder theme... when he cannot even turn to the police, the hero is suddenly very alone. The other interesting thing is the neverending nightmare, when you're never sure when it's over, and you never quite get behind the hitchers mask and now what it's all about anyway. The Hitcher's brilliant play (Robert Townsend writes "C. Thomas Howell declared later that he was actually frightened of Hauer throughout the filming, and not just acting") and shooting makes this for an atmospheric, unforgettable experience.

    The Halsey Ryder relation-ship

During the course of the movie we see that the hitcher John Ryder focusses on Jim Halsey. Other peolpe surrounding Halsey are massacred, but he himself is even getting help, and Ryder tells him how to do things. Ryder's not making it easy for Halsey but he's also making sure there's a fair chance for Halsey to always escape. Nash, a waitress Halsey gets too know, will cry out: "Why didn't he kill us?"

Roger Ebert states in his 1986 review of The Hitcher that "there is something sadomasochistic going on between the two men". He also writes "this movie is diseased and corrupt. I would have admired it more if it had found the courage to acknowledge the real relationship it was portraying". Ryder might be sadistically enjoying his actions, but I don't see Halsey getting into this situation deliberately, or enjoying it, or not wanting to get out of it.

"'The Hitcher' begins and ends with the same sound: a match being struck, flaring into flame. At the beginning of the film, the sound is made by the villain, a hitchhiker who is a mass murderer. At the end of the film, the sound is made by the hero, a young man whose life has been spared so that he can become the special victim of the hitchhiker."

What Ebert describes here is wrong. The person striking a match at the beginning and at the end is both times the hero Halsey. I don't want to analyze this symmetry (we'll see many cigarettes lit during the movie, which is not too absurd when the characters smoke), but it shows Ebert uses false proof. Still, "there is something strange going on between the two of [them]", as a police man tells us near the end.

Keith Myles quotes "Derek Winnert's assertion that the relationship of the protagonists is dominated by latent homosexuality". There is a subtle sexual undertone in the way Rutger Hauer plays the character, and it emphasizes Ryder's evil ironic humor. But not only do we see him touching Halsey, we see him kiss the little girl in the car and the same tender scheme towards Nash. A cat's playing with the mouse before striking, showing a certain elegance which might arouse sympathy in us... it makes the movie even more ambigue and intriguing.

The hitcher chooses a male counterpart because he is looking for both a contrast and reflection. The contrast is that Halsey is the good man (you can't play a game without conflict), and the reflection is Halsey's youthful male energy. It'll become a teacher - pupil/ master - apprentice relationship. Halsey's survival skill is trained. The pupil chosen has to be good enough to be able to understand the scope of evilness he sees and to challenge his master.

    At the beginning:
    Halsey: "What do you want?"
    Ryder: "I want you to stop me."

    And later on:
    Halsey: "Why are you doing this to me?"
    Ryder: "You're a smart kid, figure it out."

When Jim Halsey's girl Nash is being is tied between the two trucks, Ryder makes Halsey put the gun against his face, he wants Halsey to pull the trigger and kill him. It's again very clear who's making up the rules of this game. When Halsey can't do it, Ryder is disappointed and suddenly stops to smile: "You're useless waste." He punishes him by killing off Nash (the importance of Nash to Ryder is only in her relation towards Halsey: For Ryder she is functioning as hostage and "price to pay" for Halsey here). Ryder's disappointment expresses that he thought Halsey to be a worthy opponent so far, expecting him to be an equally good judge now. When he steps on the gas it becomes, though not graphically violent, a truly horrible scene. We're put back and shocked by the reminder that the hitcher is not following any convention - Ebert thinks this is "so grotesquely out of proportion [...] that it suggests a deep sickness at the screenplay stage", which I would rephrase by saying it suggests a deep sickness of the hitcher, and suggesting anything else would be glorifying mass murder.

When Nash is killed, the screen fades to black and this event will result in a turning point in Halsey's character. Halsey knows that the killer will not stop until he's put to death by him; he understands the perverted game and the fact that he has to play it (he's clearly forced to act). When the police is questioning the hitcher, Halsey enters. He touches Ryder and spits him in the face, and in that scene Ryder knows that Halsey has understood the game and hates Ryder for it.

Later when Halsey is sitting in a police car, he tells the police man: "You'll never hold him." "There's something I gotta do." When we look back on Halsey's character we see this is his second turning point in the movie. The first crucial moment was Halsey resisting the urge to commit suicide when he put the gun up his head earlier on: by choosing to live on he accepted to be the hitcher's contrahent and play his game. Now, when Halsey takes over the police car and turns around, for the first time Ryder is the one who's being followed: Halsey accepts to be the hitcher's judge and kill him.

After what happened Jim Halsey does indeed feel relieved when he gets his revenge. It's true that a bond is created during the move, the unyfing element of hunter and prey. The hero ends this game - he had to switch the roles and became the hunter for this purpose.

At the police station Ryder says he feels tired. His suicidal rampage makes clear he's tired of life. Shane R. Burridge writes about the possible salvation and succession motif: "Has [Ryder] found a way to end his curse--or worse, pass it on--by goading [Halsey] to end his life? (When he places coins on [Halsey]'s eyes, he is suggesting that he is damned). Significantly, during their final confrontation, [Ryder] drops a chain to the ground and smiles: he is free at last."

When John Ryder laughs as he knows he's going to be killed now, this final satisfaction is triggered by Halsey's proof of a learned lesson (the relevance is not in eventual masochism): The teaching was a success, because Halsey accepted the god-like responsibility of playing judge over Ryder's life. The hitcher's game of survival, and his archaic view of an amoral world which seperates the strong and the weak, has been absorbed by his apprentice. He didn't want to kill Halsey, he wanted to make him "gaze into the abyss", so that his ego projects itself onto Halsey.

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