The Hitcher (1986)

The Hitcher arrives like truck stop coffee at three in the morning: bitter, hot, and served without ceremony. Robert Harmon's 1986 film concerns a young man named Jim, a drive-away car, and a hitchhiker called John Ryder who would like, very much, to be stopped. That is the entire proposition. Rutger Hauer plays Ryder with the serenity of a man who has already read the last page. Eric Red's screenplay treats violence as weather, something that simply happens to the people standing outside.

What the film declines to do is instructive. It never pauses to explain itself. It does not assemble a cast to satisfy a demographic chart, nor does it fold in commentary on the oil economy, the prison system, or the spiritual emptiness of the interstate. The desert is a desert. The exploding gas station is an exploding gas station. Jennifer Jason Leigh's Nash is a capable waitress with a spine, and the film destroys her anyway, strung between a Mack truck and its trailer, because the plot needs Jim to suffer. We log this as a hard fact of 1980s genre mechanics, not as an argument about anything.

Ryder's madness goes undiagnosed, uncontextualized, never softened into a case study with a tidy root cause. He kills because the film requires a killer. The result is a lean, occasionally absurd machine, reappraised over the decades by people who enjoy being frightened on a modest budget. It preaches nothing. It represents no constituency. It offers no instruction on how to live, love, eat, or vote. For those of us who keep a careful ledger of such matters, the page remains blank, and the pen stays capped. A film about a man who wants to be stopped and cannot be, until the shotgun runs dry. There is a purity to that. There is also a severed finger in the french fries, which is its own kind of statement, though not one any sociologist has claimed.