Reckoning with 'River's Edge' (1986)

On the moral framework of one of the 80s' best and bleakest films

NOTE: This essay contains spoilers a-plenty of River’s Edge (1986). Reader beware.

Returning to Tim Hunter’s utterly bleak and controversial coming-of-age film River’s Edge (1986) after a period of two decades, I am struck by the cascading figures of inanimate women. In the film’s opening shot, Tim (played by a menacing, cherubic Joshua John Miller) coldly tosses a baby doll — belonging to his kid sister Kim (Tammy Smith), we later learn — from a bridge into the river below. He tracks its path downstream until the sound of yawps draw his attention to the opposite bank, where sits Samson (Daniel Roebuck) alongside the naked corpse of a young woman. Elsewhere in the film, a third such lifeless figure: Ellie, an inflatable sex doll, a spouse of sorts to the reclusive Feck (Dennis Hopper) and a stand-in for a former blonde lover he claims to have killed in the distant past.

If one were to take angst-ridden teens of Rebel Without A Cause (1955), plop them down in the Reagan era, white-trash them up a bit, ply them with drugs and alcohol, and inure them to the likelihood of nuclear annihilation, you would get something like River’s Edge. Received by many upon its release as a tale of moral decay and youth alienation, the film concerns Samson’s murder of his girlfriend Jamie (Danyi Deats), his lack of motive and remorse for doing so, and his circle of friends’ seemingly callous response to the crime. The teenagers are shocked, but not exactly repulsed, at the sight of the girl’s body, and despite her being a longtime friend, they shed no tears for her. Furthermore, they do not (openly) condemn Samson’s actions, nor do they alert the authorities or their parents about the crime. Instead, the group stay their quiescent course, anesthetizing themselves with beer and weed. At the behest of Layne (Crispin Glover, in a performance dialed to 11), they vow silence as he sets about hiding the body and plotting to protect Samson from arrest. This arrangement weighs heavy on protagonist Matt (Keanu Reeves), who ultimately summons the courage to “narc” on Samson to the police, thereby setting into motion a chain of fateful events.

Samson’s stated justification for killing Jamie is that “she was talking shit,” and it is implied that that shit was in regard to his dead mother. Neal Jimenez’s screenplay, in outfitting Samson with Oedipal mommy issues and an emasculated mythical namesake, provides something of a shorthand for Samson’s actions. Why did he kill Jamie? In a word, misogyny. While hiding out at Feck’s house, Samson recounts to the older man that while suffocating Jamie with his bare hands, he had “total control over her.” And when the deed was done, “She was dead right there in front of me, and I felt so fucking alive!” — Hence the victorious squawks in the opening scene that alerted Tim to his presence.

Samson’s indifference towards Jamie extends to himself, as he possesses practically no impulse for self-preservation. He calls attention to the murder by howling on the river bank in broad daylight, and he matter-of-factly announces the crime to his friends. What’s more, Samson makes no efforts to hide the body. When Layne takes the initiative to do so on his behalf, Samson declines to assist. “She’s heavy,” he says dryly. Later, after Layne phones him to coordinate a nighttime corpse disposal, Samson declines. “It’s not that important,” he says. Why run from the authorities or live in hiding, Samson wonders, when “The whole world is going to blow up anyway?” For him, being resigned to whatever penal or nuclear fate awaits is an act of defiance. “I might as well keep my pride,” he says.

Aside from carrying out the murder or shoplifting six-packs, Samson is a remarkably passive character, unthreatened by the prospect of capture or death. His only drive, it seems, is for ever greater quantities of beer. Thus, while Samson’s actions might initiate the film’s crisis, it’s Layne’s that propel the plot forward. Shortly after seeing Jamie’s body and poking it like a doubting Thomas, Layne springs into action. The circle of friends, it should be noted, betray no great affection for Samson, and vice versa. And yet throughout the film, Layne will go to great lengths to protect this sullen young man. Driving away from the scene of the crime, Layne, taking a cue from pop culture, articulates a mission statement to which only he will subscribe:

It’s like some fucking movie! Friends since second grade, [tight]. And then one of us gets himself into potentially big trouble and now we’ve got to deal with it. We’ve got to test our loyalty against all odds. It’s kind of exciting!

But in a subsequent conversation with Feck, Samson scoffs at his friend’s dedication. “Layne was never really a friend anyway,” he says. “He doesn’t even know me.”

At the root of Layne’s willingness to protect Samson, then, is not love or friendship so much as the comfort her derives from the concept of loyalty without condition. Like Rebel Without A Cause, the adults in River’s Edge are largely out to lunch when it comes to the emotional needs of the teenagers it depicts. Layne’s efforts are misguided and hard to fathom, sure, but there is something poignant about his hope-against-hope belief in devotion, especially since the film suggests that these characters have experienced nothing of the sort from their parents. Layne, hopped up on speed and circling the town all night in search of the fled Samson, says as much to himself aloud: “I’m going to take care of you until the end; Somebody’s got to take care of you.”

Of course, Layne is ill-equipped for the task he has set for himself. In the climax, after discovering that Samson, too, has been killed (by Feck, we later find), Layne falls to the ground in wailing sobs. River’s Edge is such a uniquely disturbing film precisely because it depicts characters who display no outward emotion in relation to their friend’s murder. It’s quite the reversal, then, to see Layne, the one most indifferent to Jamie’s death, leveled at the sight of Samson’s. In a visual rhyme of the opening scene, Layne sits beside corpse of the burly boy, still dressed in the same plaid flannel he wore when he took Jamie’s life.

In contrast to Samson’s nihilism and Layne’s ethics of devotion is the outlook of the film’s other killer, the crippled hermit Feck. Like Samson, he is quick to tell others about his dispatching of a former girlfriend. But Feck also insists that he loved her nevertheless, fucked though that logic may be. This reframes his attachment to Ellie, the blow-up plastic sex doll, as not a pathetic means of getting himself off but as a substitute object standing in for his fleshy, departed lover. Indeed, it’s Feck’s detection of Samson’s incapacity for love that leads the older man to end his younger foil’s life. “There was no hope for him,” says Feck to the police towards the film’s end. “No hope at all.”

Samson, the fatalist, psychopathic oaf who slays his girlfriend without motive, is the ostensible villain of River’s Edge, but he is by no means the movie’s most broadly malevolent figure. That superlative belongs to the character from the film’s very first shot: Matt’s younger brother Tim, aged 12. Tim sees Samson with Jamie’s body moments after her death. Like the teenagers, he does not recoil; but instead of being simply inactive in response to Jamie’s death, Tim schemes to capitalize on it by using his knowledge to blackmail Samson for drugs.

Like Samson, Tim boasts about his violent acts (towards Kim’s doll, in his case) and he subsequently desecrates the homespun grave she made for the toy, just to twist the knife. As Kim puts it, Tim “keeps killing her.” After Matt retaliates on her behalf and bloodies the younger boy’s nose, Tim vows revenge — not merely for his wounds but for Matt dropping a dime on Samson, which the seemingly all-seeing Tim witnessed from afar.

It’s remarkable, a child like this, willing not only to afflict emotional pain upon his grade-school sibling but to plot to kill his older one for his treachery with regard to Samson. He even lies in wait at Feck’s home so as to steal his car and his pistol in order to execute the sinister plan. I’m taken with one critic’s description of the boy as “alarmingly evil” and “the most malevolent kid this side of the Styx.”

But here is where River’s Edge offers the thinnest glimmer of what one might call “hope.” In the film’s climax, along the same river bank where Jamie and Samson met their fates, pre-teen Tim draws the gun on his elder brother. But the latter reminds the former of their familial bond — the sort of yesteryear institution that would otherwise seem out of step with such a bleak film as this — and Tim relinquishes the weapon. In a most unlikely reconciliation, they embrace for a moment before being placed side-by-side in a police cruiser.

And even then, Hunter, the director, is quick to undercut any supposition that a proper order has been restored. In a film dominated by rock and metal music, Hunter deploys a conspicuously old-fashioned — and deeply ambiguous — needle drop. As paramedics cart Samson’s body on a stretcher and the detectives escort the brothers to the police car, a 1961 rhythm & blues torch song from Hank Ballard & The Midnighters enters. “Please don’t say your last goodbye,” and “You know I love you,” Ballard belts. And this song bridges into the next scene, Jamie’s funeral service, where the teenagers file past her open casket as Ballard delivers the chorus: “I’m gonna miss you” some eight times over.

I’m getting ahead of myself. Recall the scene wherein Matt and Clarissa (Ione Skye) describe being shocked that day by the river, not by the purpled corpse of a friend but by their own passivity. “I kept seeing her face,” Matt confides. “It affected me. Did it affect you?” Clarissa concurs, only to lament her inability to cry for Jamie when melodramatic TV movies easily bring her to tears. But Matt reassures her: “It’ll hit us. I know it will. Probably at her funeral.” And yet, at the service, the teens’ cheeks remain dry, their faces stony.

Are we to take Ballard’s plaintive wails of “I’m gonna miss you” as the narration’s ironic commentary or condemnation of these pitiless youth? Or, more charitably, might we say that the song expresses that which they most certainly feel but cannot say, cannot make manifest?

I land with the latter. River’s Edge, I find, does not chronicle or diagnosis the disaffection of Cold War American youth. If anything, it gives us characters who are deeply affected, to the point of being overwhelmed, by the circumstances in which they find themselves. Hunter’s film, like the postwar cinema philosopher Gilles Deleuze describes, dwells on a “disturbance of equilibrium between stimulus and response.” Faced with an act of violence, and a grief, they can scarcely comprehend, Matt “does not know how to respond,” is “undecided as to what must be done.”¹ Put differently, the youth in River’s Edge (or the bulk of them, save Samson and Tim) aren’t callous and indifferent; they are instead frozen, unable to react according to conventional expectations, manners, and habits. They have seen the face of a low friend, and continue to see it long after, and are enervated by it.

River’s Edge is streaming on Amazon, Apple TV, and free (with commercials) on Tubi.

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1. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, p. 3, 272.