The cast featured a combination of young, dynamic actors, and one legendary Hollywood hellraiser in the midst of a monumental comeback after a public downfall with booze and drugs.
The film's soundtrack also strayed from most contemporary films, featuring metal and punk bands such as Slayer, Hallow's Eve, Agent Orange, and the Wipers-the perfect soundtrack for a story about alienated young people with no hope and no direction. The film's characters also looked different than the polished mallrats of other 80s films they perfected the "grunge" look years before the American mainstream had even heard of the term. These young people were the anti-Brat Pack: They drank, smoked weed, popped pills, and seemingly had no moral compass and no role models.
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The kids in River's Edge stood in direct contrast to the shiny, plastic teenagers that movie audiences were accustomed to seeing in the mid-to-late 1980s. By the film’s end, only Feck says, “I lost a good friend today.” Though they have trouble articulating it, Clarissa and Matt come to recognize a buried morality in each other.Working from a script by Neal Jimenez, Hunter's film offered a dark, intense portrait of troubled teenagers. Jamie’s nude, inert corpse shown throughout the film, as much a part of the town’s casual cruelty as Matt’s younger brother shooting crayfish in a bucket, is sanitized for public display at her open casket funeral-her friends pass by it blankly staring.
Like John he too killed his girlfriend, the difference being Feck killed out of love, while John did it to feel a brief surge of power and control-to feel anything, really.įeck is horrified by John’s utter nihilism, but at least he can feel horrified.
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Hope and excitement are so lacking in their lives they latch on to TV and movies as metaphors-after seeing the body Layne says, “…I feel like, Chuck Norris, y’know?” Facing her own dispassion Carrie confesses, “I cried at Brian’s Song, but I didn’t cry for her.” The ghost of Easy Rider even lives among them: Dennis Hopper plays Feck, former biker turned recluse, handing out dope to local teens and enjoying a meaningful relationship with blow-up doll Elly. The students do have feelings, but how they feel won’t change anything around them. “There was a MEANING in the madness!” he boasts of his hippie protesting, to a roomful of students facing a failing economy and the looming threat of instant nuclear obliteration beyond their control. Answering a barrage of questions, the detective shouts at him “I’M SICK OF ‘I DON’T KNOW’!” The older generation repeatedly mistakes lack of articulation for lack of emotion, particularly a Boomer teacher using Jamie’s death to berate students for their passionlessness. Matt actually gets through to the police, and is rewarded by being dragged to the station. Clarissa’s learned helplessness is so ingrained that, picking up a phone, she has her friend dial for her before ultimately hanging up. Only Clarissa and Matt ( Ione Skye and Keanu Reeves, each 3 years away from their breakout roles) feel uneasy enough to separately consider telling the police.
Layne ( Crispin Glover, fresh off Back To The Future and stretching words like taffy), is invigorated by the opportunity to actually do something and prove his worth, even if that means covering up a murder not even the murderer cares enough to hide. Confronted with their friend Jamie’s body by the river, they react with numb inaction. Hearing their friend John’s casual confession of murder, they dismiss it.
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“We could just… take off, discover America, and make like we’re Easy Rider plus five.” Likely he picked up the vague notion of freedom the film represented to his parents’ generation without ever having seen it, but the movie’s grim ending-arbitrary, random death-applies far more directly to their lives.Īpathy weighs so heavily among them they do little but self-medicate with beer and weed. Early in 1986’s River’s Edge, the film’s core group of friends slump on the school steps, cutting class, smoking, and fantasizing about their ideal lives.
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