Go Ahead and Kill Her, as Long as We Don’t Care About Her, Part One

Remember Siskel and Ebert, before the one’s death and the other’s mouth cancer all but silenced them?  

I was a mere kid in 1986 when they broadcast their “thumbs down” review of the Rutger Hauer psycho-killer flick The Hitcher, and you’ve never seen such righteous wrath in your life as those two served up. 

Both thought the film was an outrage, with gratuitous and needless violence; one crowning act had them both traumatized during the viewing.  Siskel afterwards said something to the effect that “since we believe in artistic freedom, we think a film like this should be allowed to be made, and then not seen by anyone.” 

What were they so horrified about?  The killing of Jennifer Jason Leigh.  She played a waitress, an innocent drawn into the cat and mouse game of Hauer and the protagonist, C. Thomas Howell.  She is just a sweet girl trying to help a guy in trouble, acting out of pure human charity.  And she dies for it.

And this is no ordinary death.  Hauer chains her arms to a stationary pipe and chains her legs to the back of a semi-truck.  And after an insufferably long session tormenting Howell with the threat of her death, he actually hits the gas, effectively pulling her apart.  

Siskel and Ebert had never seen such a death on film before; probably no one had, except the viewers of snuff films.  Check out www.kindertrauma.com for a brief discussion of it, where the author of the blog admits it still bothers him, decades later.  Maybe it really shouldn’t have been seen by anyone.  

The irony is that it wasn’t.  The actual dismemberment took place off-screen; the sounds of screams (and, as I remember, tearing flesh) fed the imagination well enough.  As long as the imagination gets fed, the horror hits home. 

The Hitcher was not a big hit (the 2007 remake with Sean Bean in the Hauer role was an even more resounding flop), but the 1986 film’s producer had a different reason, the polar opposite of Siskel and Ebert’s.   He thought the film would have done better box office if JJL’s killing had been shown.   His rationale was that people need to see a horror that is promised; that it cheats the audience when you don’t show it. 

Speaking of feeding the imagination, Stephen King once evinced that we have alligators in our minds.  He figured that you can be a civilized, outstanding non-Hitcher type who does good and never harms a fly “as long as you keep the gators fed.”   Feeding the gators probably includes the catharsis of watching violence, but it’s interesting that Siskel and Ebert’s view, over time, has grown silent, while producer’s view has grown more prophetic.

Some major studio releases have shown some fairly horrific deaths, in box office blockbusters, no less.  And in common with JJL’s killing,the victims were all women, innocent and young, and regrettably well known to the viewer. 

Why was it “regrettable” that we got to know them?  Who were these unfortunates?   And why did these films succeed where The Hitcher didn’t?  

That’s for part two.