The Difference: Fate and the Gun in The Hitch-Hiker
Detours, episode 12
The Difference: Fate and the Gun in The Hitch-Hiker
Stephen Broomer, November 8, 2024
When Gilbert Bowen and Roy Collins, old friends on a trip to Mexico, stop to help a stranded motorist, the hitch-hiker’s frightening appearance is a warning sign of the difference between the travellers and the hitch-hiker, of the impassable distance between them. Soon enough this hitch-hiker, Emmett Myers, has them at gunpoint, directing them to drive him into Mexico so he can escape from the law. He has killed many people, all of them, it's implied, like Bowen and Collins, good samaritans who made the mistake of offering him a ride. The Hitch-Hiker was made by Ida Lupino, then better known as an actress, though she had already directed four other films, a series of social-issue-oriented docudramas, films that balanced compassionate humanism with lurid curiosity. They were message films about polio, rape and bigamy. The Hitch-Hiker emerges naturally from this trajectory: like the earlier films, its story is torn-from-the-headlines.
In this video essay, Stephen Broomer locates Lupino's film along two trajectories: a mythical, symbolic journey into the male psyche, and the issue-driven docudrama. The Hitch-Hiker is a film that places its protagonists in a situation that draws out their ordinary, everyday humanity to combat a devilish stranger.
SCRIPT:
The mid-century American hitch-hiker was an evolution on the wandering tramps of the Great Depression. They were a reminder that the image of the itinerant traveller was immune from rehabilitation, despite a noble strand that ran from Walt Whitman to Leon Ray Livingston, from the heroic dissension of Woody Guthrie to the mawkishly sentimental minstrelsy of Charlie Chaplin. The infrastructure that hobos navigated was that of an aspiring century—industrial train routes and New Deal infrastructure, touting bindles, sons of the open road—but the growth of freeway and highway systems made hitching more common to backroads and truck stops, places that already bore inherent shadows. The hitch-hiker was a thing of terror in the nascent whispers of urban legends, from spectres that vanished mid-ride, to nomadic killers, a desperate and pitiless variation on the boxcar stowaways whose impossibly dangerous lifestyle could thumb a ride out of the train yard and into the passenger seat of the family automobile. Hitch-hikers were easy targets in mid-century America because their presence questioned the safety of road travel for driver and hitch alike. To local governments, the presence of hitch-hikers was something like visible prostitution, and so the practice was often outlawed. That didn’t make it any less common. Setting aside the circuit of peril and predation that overshadowed their journeys, the hitch and the ride represented a common fellowship, a neighbourly kindness that couldn’t be legislated out of human nature.
The masculine world of film noir accommodates many kinds of quests: the men of noir are often in search of brotherhood and fellowship and belonging. When Gilbert Bowen and Roy Collins, old friends on a trip to Mexico, stop to help a stranded motorist, the hitch-hiker’s frightening appearance is a warning sign of the difference between the travellers and the hitch-hiker, of the impassable distance between them. Soon enough this hitch-hiker, Emmett Myers, has them at gunpoint, directing them to drive him into Mexico so he can escape from the law. He has killed many people, all of them, it's implied, like Bowen and Collins, good samaritans who made the mistake of offering him a ride. The Hitch-Hiker was made by Ida Lupino, then better known as an actress, though she had already directed four other films, a series of social-issue-oriented docudramas, films that balanced compassionate humanism with lurid curiosity. They were message films about polio, rape and bigamy. The Hitch-Hiker emerges naturally from this trajectory: like the earlier films, its story is torn-from-the-headlines. Lupino and ex-husband Collier Young have adapted the story of Billy Cook, a spree-killer who terrorized American roadways between Missouri and California for a period of 22-days. He was 13 years younger than William Talman, who plays Emmett Myers as a thinly-veiled fictionalized version of Cook. Cook was executed by gas chamber before Lupino’s film was completed. His last words were “I hate everybody’s guts and everybody hates mine.” Talman is older than Billy Cook would ever get to be; his road-weary look and ragged, pained expressions may even offer a fleeting recognition of the dim bargain by which Cook viewed life: to take and be taken by cruel force.
Arthur Redding has argued that The Hitch-Hiker pits “a vision of empathy and male solidarity against an aggrieved libertarianism.” It is a strange definition for Emmett Myers and one that doesn’t quite suit him. He doesn’t so much romanticize the open road as thrive and prey on it; he isn’t a creature of liberty or even of individualism, as much as he is one of hunger and need. He is the antithesis of empathy and solidarity; this is not because of honed grievance, but because of fate. He is mythic, but like Billy Cook, he is also a man who knows no ideology and who acts out of unvarnished instinct and callous indifference. His callousness and menace transcend ideological labels: he is less an ideological object as he is the edge of humanity itself, the wasted end of ideologies. He is a man crushed by life; he is a devil; and he is an absence, a hole punched in the story. Billy Cook, considered in retrospect, had the benefit of a social explanation: he was a product of violence and abuse and poverty. He set out to make the world hurt worse than he did. Emmett Myers simply radiates violence, much as Cook must have to his victims.
Billy Cook had told his father in a rare encounter in the days before his spree that he intended to “live by the gun and roam.” Emmet Myers is exceptional where hostages Roy Collins and Gilbert Bowen are not. They are like the fate-flung characters of a Simenon paperback: their ordinary lives are upended and how they respond to that upset defines their characters. They respond, for the most part, by begrudgingly going along with Myers, even when he asks one to shoot at the other. To them, there is no choice, to flee would be suicide, and death is the only option that has been presented for them. Myers is right to mock their friendship, that one would not leave the other to save his own life; for Myers knows only a lonesome survival, vivere cum gun et vagari, to live by the gun and roam. To be your brother’s keeper—or saviour—is a task of no value. Lupino disagrees, and it is in keeping with her social-issue films that The Hitch-Hiker offers Collins and Bowen as self-sacrificing figures in an increasingly harsh and barren landscape. Lupino was a natural fit for film noir because her films never dealt with heroism; they were films about survival, endurance, and the preservation of human dignity, themes that often underline even the most melancholy of film noirs.
The Hitch-Hiker is a comprehensive and compassionate film about masculinity: Myers was born outside of the kind of fellowship his companions share. Myers is Godless, one of noir’s hanging men, and he's reminded of his doom in an encounter in a provisions shop in Mexico, in this telling exchange between himself and Bowen, who has become the conscience of the trio. Myers’s accursed state is communicated symbolically, with his dead eye, which watches the men from a state of ambiguous sleep. When the men attempt to sneak off, the car itself becomes an extension of Myers’s eye: they find their path illuminated by their own car, driven by Myers, barrelling down on them. The masculinity that Bowen and Collins represent is complex, and harmonious, but for the presence of this intruder; for Myers, his restless condition cannot be alleviated. All three men are guided in the narrative by what they perceive manhood to be: the nobility of self-sacrifice; the passion to fight; the mastery of the world. Bowen’s self-sacrifice is that of a martyr; Collins’s desire to fight back is inhibited and impotent, the flailing gesture of someone with something to prove; Myers’s sense of mastery is self-deception. Even as he’s hunted and desperate to escape, Myers imagines himself as an apex predator.
Lupino remains committed to the docudrama, and the film’s roots in reality infringe on the allegorical drama that is playing out between these three men. Digressions to scenes of the police following procedure in their search for the men achieve their prescribed function: they break the tension. These scenes of interagency process, on a historical scale, show the police on both sides of the border putting together clues. The fateful encounter on the road takes a backseat to this trial of border harmonies. The fate of the men would seem to be dependent on the success of the police, enhancing the social dimension of the story: but the mythical nature of the encounter is compromised, transforming it, however momentarily, from a story of individuals confronted with their humanity, their inhumanity, and that which has been repressed, to a story of social good effected by the collaborative efforts of justice on either side of San Ysidro.
Imogen Sara Smith has described the desert scenery as “prehistoric, a fit setting for a battle between cavemen.” Smith identifies Myers as a man whose shallow boasts of independence fail to conceal his need for an audience. It is this ironic failure of character that allows Myers to become uniquely devilish. Bowen becomes more than conscience and Myers, for his part, becomes more than just Godless. Bowen and Myers become God and Devil; hapless Collins, who follows his base instincts, who wants violent reprisal, is simply an everyman. When Myers speculates on the possibility of posing Collins’s body for his own, this is the plainest demonstration of the film’s spiritual dimension, the imposition of evil on an ordinary man. Collins is not torn by temptation, as such stories tend to go; no, here he’s a pawn. His true character emerges in the climax, when his rage manifests in a righteous final stand against Myers, in which he underscores the film’s central theme: what it means to hide behind a gun. Dressed in the clothes of his captor, a surrogate corpse walking, it is everyman Roy Collins, everyman, and not Saint Bowen, who strips the devil down to nothing. Myers’s deformity gives his face a constant, and often pitiful, quiver. In these final scenes, that quiver is genuine. When he is cuffed by the police, it is a fate worse than death.
