River’s Edge
BY
Keva York
Revisiting the teen movie they called “the most frightening horror” of 1986.
River’s Edge plays 7 Ludlow from April 20 as part of Filmcraft: Frederick Elmes.
Several years before the plastic-wrapped debut of Twin Peaks’ homecoming queen in 1990, the corpse of another young blonde was found on a Pacific Northwest shoreline in River’s Edge (1986). While millions would tune in to Peaks every week, desperate to know “Who killed Laura Palmer?”, in Tim Hunter’s dank cult melodrama, the killer is identified at the outset as the dead girl’s boyfriend: Samson “John” Tollett (Daniel Roebuck) is introduced sitting beside the corpse, calming his post-strangulation nerves with a joint. The deep and stubborn mystery coursing through River’s Edge is not whodunnit, but why?
If Twin Peaks is David Lynch’s Transcendental take on the soap opera format, then River’s Edge is a heavy metal riff on the made-for-TV movie; it’s a work of scuzzy utilitarianism, rendered in a palette of acid-washed blues, browns, and grays. Though Hunter’s film never approached anything like the popularity of Lynch’s landmark TV show, it did send its own little ripples of disturbance (and acclaim) through the Reaganite cultural consciousness. In the New York Times, Vincent Canby pegged River’s Edge as the year’s “most frightening horror film”—but there’s nothing paranormal going on here. A tale of teen anomie to rival Less Than Zero (1987), its horror is of an enigmatic, roundabout sort, and likely not registered until one is at least waist-deep in the story’s muck. What gnawed at Canby was the revelation that no ghoul or beastie could pose as serious a threat to the social fabric as a gaggle of disaffected, double-denimed youths.
Hunter, incidentally, would go on to helm several episodes of Twin Peaks, but unlike Lynch, he is no artiste. This actually works to strengthen the film’s after-effect: the disquiet it evokes is not something wholly in the director’s control, and so can’t be alleviated by the reassuring idea of an auteur at work. It’s more a product of mismatched performance styles and non-sequitur-sounding lines—and if the corny dialogue initially gives rise to laughter (say, when one baby punk instructs another, “Go get your nunchucks and your dad’s car. I know where we can get a gun”), just wait until the chill sets in, like rigor mortis in an unwitting corpse.
At no point in the film does John conduct himself as one would expect a newly minted murderer. He makes no effort to hide the body before heading to school, where he links up with his metalhead clique—distinguished by the star presence of an early career Keanu Reeves, Ione Skye in her screen debut, and Crispin Glover, running hot after Back to the Future (1985). Asked by the group where his girlfriend Jamie is, John—a little stoned, sure, and swigging from a tallboy, but essentially compos mentis—offers up a blunt confession. Asked why he killed her, he responds with close to a verbal shrug: “She was talking shit.”
River’s Edge (1986)
Even more disorienting is the reaction from John’s friends: their impromptu group field trip to the scene of the crime (on the American River, no less) elicits only silent gawping. Later that day, Skye’s Clarissa mulls, “I cried when that guy in Brian’s Song died. You’d at least figure I’d be able to cry for someone we hung around with.” Never mind how this 1986 highschooler saw a 1971 TV movie; the out-of-touch references in River’s Edge—Starsky & Hutch, Mission Impossible—add to the overarching feeling that these teens lack a means of authentic expression beyond their Iron Maiden tees and proto-grunge flannels.
The exception to the prevailing blankness is Glover’s Layne, the livewire leader of the pack, blitzed on a bidirectional cocktail of speed and weed. On sight of Jamie’s corpse, he clicks into mastermind mode: if they can bury her and pool the clinking contents of their pockets, maybe they can get John over state lines and out of the Californian PD’s way. The way Layne sees it, Jamie is dead, but John can still be saved. “It’s like some fuckin’ movie,” he drawls, voice crackling with excitement and a faraway look in his eyes. “We’ve gotta test our loyalty against all odds.”
Glover dominates his scenes, striking broad, angular poses and imbuing every line with a declaratory slant. At the time, writer Neal Jimenez thought he was ruining the movie—certainly, Glover is in a different one to everyone else, but that dissonance is really what makes River’s Edge stick. Hopper, possessed of a keener eye than Jimenez, compared Glover’s outré performance to his late friend James Dean. Perhaps it’s more accurate, however, to say that it’s Layne who thinks he’s the titular Rebel of the 1955 Nick Ray film. His exhortations to the group evoke those of Dean’s ur-angsty teen, Jim, in the aftermath of another teen’s senseless death: “But I am INVOLVED!” Jim tells his parents, “We are ALL INVOLVED!” It’s just that Layne has a different idea of what the right thing to do is than Jim: where Jim was for going to the cops, Layne is gunning to evade them.
If Layne’s schemes at first present as an expression of stick-it-to-the-man generational solidarity, they quickly reveal themselves as the measure of his own delusion; like the rest of his gang, he’s really just “involved” with himself. Contrast Layne’s hot air with the tried-and-true moral code espoused by a crop-topped, pubescent Matt Dillon in Hunter’s first film credit (as co-writer, not director), 1979’s Over the Edge: “A kid who tells on another kid is a dead kid.” The film—which, like River’s Edge, is a highlight of the troubled teen canon, and was beloved of no less a misfit idol than Kurt Cobain—chronicles the maltreatment of the youngsters in an incipient planned community in Colorado, and climaxes with their coming together against parents, teachers, and local law enforcement in a terrific act of mutiny; a cri de coeur as conflagration.
River’s Edge (1986)
With its apparently unfeeling ensemble, River’s Edge seems cut to the measure of boomer fears about their offspring (see: Canby). And yet, like its Edge-y predecessor, it was loosely based on real-life events: in November of 1981, 16-year-old Anthony Jacques Broussard raped and then strangled his friend Marcy Renee Conrad before dumping her body into a ravine. The Milpitas High student reportedly boasted of his crime at school, even driving a bunch of his peers out to see the body. One of them helped cover it with leaves (for which he’d be sentenced to three years in juvie), but none reported anything until two days later. “Youths’ Silence on Murder Victim Leaves a California Town Baffled,” bleated a headline in the Times. The case was seized on as an indictment of suburban teens nationwide.
That same year had seen the release of The Decline of Western Civilization, Penelope Spheeris’s landmark chronicle of LA punk rock at its short, sharp peak. One bizarre anecdote from that film strikes as the inverted double of the Conrad episode: a girl identified as Michelle, housemate of the Germs’ Darby Crash, giggles as she relates finding a body in her parents’ backyard—a painter who’d been working on the house while they were away, later determined to have died of a heart attack—and then describes how she and Crash and co. snapped a bunch of “family pictures” with the corpse. “Didn’t you feel bad that the guy was dead?” asks Spheeris. “No. Not at all,” Michelle replies, “I hate painters.” (A perfect deadpan response, except seemingly in earnest.) Amusement and apathy: equally jarring next to human remains.
Riffing on the Conrad murder, Jimenez wrote River’s Edge in 1982, when he was just 21—not that much older than his subjects—and studying at UCLA. (The script originated as an assignment for which he apparently received a C+.) Although Jimenez didn’t attempt to redeem or even make likeable his fictionalized characters, neither did he endow their elders with any real moral authority. Parents are too frazzled or disinterested to be of any use; a would-be hip teacher’s grandstanding about ’60s ideals comes off as pure condescension. No potential candidate for viewer identification stands up to much scrutiny.
The nearest thing to a moral center is the local dope dispenser, Feck (Dennis Hopper, newly sober but still scary as hell), whose privileging of passion comes as a relief in a film otherwise drained of the same. He is the character most genuinely perturbed by John’s act of killing—but he’s also a paranoid recluse who, we learn, shot and killed his own girlfriend 20 years ago. At least he did it for love? (These days, he only seeks companionship from a blow-up sex doll he calls Ellie.)
River’s Edge (1986)
Hopper wasn’t the first choice for Feck—that was Harry Dean Stanton, who passed—but his casting is necessarily going to come freighted with significance when the role is a pot-puffing ex-biker. Left one-legged by a road accident, the skeleton of a chopper still stashed in his vestibule, Feck could well be what became of Hopper’s legendary Easy Rider (1969) outlaw had he managed to survive that film’s brutal finale. Those last moments, a shock of blood and fire, dramatized the death of the hippie dream itself; in River’s Edge, his generation limps on, haggard, crazy-eyed, and no less guilty than the generation to follow.
Generation X—“X” as in refusal; “X” as in nothing at all. “Getting sick and tired of hanging around / Gonna get so lost, and I just can’t be found,” promises Wipers’ Greg Sage in “Land of the Lost,” as featured on the River’s Edge soundtrack (a cut selected by Hopper, ever a diviner of musical currents). Where Easy Rider and teen pics from Rebel through to Over the Edge and Hopper’s devastating Out of the Blue (1980) build to spectacular, explosive conclusions—apocalypses of varying stripes—River’s Edge denies viewers any such catharsis. More than that, it denies the idea of catharsis as anything but an illusion.
Before the film’s end, two more bodies will be found down by the river. One is that of Ellie, Feck’s cherished plastic consort: she bobs face down, suspended among the branches sprouting canted from the churning, muddy waters. The teens make no attempt to retrieve her. Perversely, it’s one of the film’s more affecting images; the fact of Feck’s love for her carries across to the viewer. There may be no catharsis here, but there is a sense of something lost.
Keva York is a New York-born, Melbourne-based writer and critic.
River’s Edge (1986)
