Journey by Frame

Ferrara is not interested in either clear-cur morality or the play of ambiguity for its own sake, the shifts between emotions and points of view being undertaken because what he values is not this emotion over that, or even an awareness of conflicting values, but the transition from one position to another: the ability to be in a constant state of moral and emotional flux is a prerequisite for the achievement of full humanity.

–Brad Stevens, Abel Ferrara: The Moral Vision

The reveal, the perverse moment of enlightenment that sets in action the narrative of Paul Schrader’s Hardcore, occurs around the twenty-five minute mark. Jake Van Dorn (George C. Scott) has lost his daughter, gone missing, and hires private investigator Andy Mast (Peter Boyle) to find her. When Boyle’s character finally turns something up, he asks Jake to accompany him to a seedy adult movie arcade. Jake takes his seat alone in the theater, skeptical of what the private investigator will show him. He’s subtly dismissive; after all, what could this man, a respectable businessman and devout Calvinist, a family man who lives with a quiet, though aloof and superior, assurance that he will be saved (as per his faith), possibly want to see here? Boyle’s Andy begins to play the footage with a devilish solemnity, disappearing in the projectionist’s booth as he presents, like bitter fruit, knowledge that has eluded Jake and will plainly change him. Before we, the audience can see anything, the light from the movie screen flickers across Jake’s face. The actual reveal is not very surprising: Jake’s daughter Kristen (Ilah Davis), who vanished suddenly, appears in an 8mm pornographic film with two young men. A brief close-up of her flashes like a lost echo from the screen; this is the reality that will soon lodge itself in Jake’s memory, replacing all the imagined scenarios of where his daughter could be. She gives herself to the two men with a fragile eagerness that could never have been glimpsed by Jake; did that part of her even exist until that moment, locked away somewhere deep inside her, or did it emerge in the moment of contact with the outside world, free from the cloistered life of Grand Rapids, Michigan’s devout Calvinist community? This can’t possibly be my daughter, Jake must have thought, but it is. For a moment, there are two Kristens, the one known by Jake for the entirety of her life, and the real one, existing at this moment only on scraps of cheap celluloid. The footage Jake watches is silent–we hear only the dumb noise of the projector–but it seems to loudly intrude upon Jake’s life, interrupting his every memory of Kristen with vulgar materiality. Schrader once again shows us Jake watching this footage, the light dancing across his face with the tense throbbing of blunt, irreducible physicality.

After the agony of enlightenment has hit him–Jake muttering “Can’t be…” as reality sinks in–he flails about and begs, “Turn it off!” As this moment of torture reaches its climax, it becomes clear that this scene is, for Schrader, about two things, simultaneously, flickering back and forth from one to the other: sadism, masochism. This is a film that feels palpably like a form of enlightenment, a powerfully destructive blast of zen, but despite the revelations witnessed by Jake and the increasing discoveries he makes, it’s not necessarily certain that the enlightenment belongs fully to him. Hiding voyeuristically underneath the surface of the film is Schrader himself, hushed and ever-watchful. We must consider, above all, how he feels in this scene, Schrader being not only writer and director but also the film’s ever-present and invisible subject. The movie is one of the most intimately autobiographical films ever made, not because any of this happened to Schrader, but because the film enacts and brings to a conclusion the ripples of conflict and tension deep within this auteur’s heart and soul (for there is no other way to speak of a film so deeply personal and religious). It must be pointed out that Schrader grew up in a community much like the one Jake Van Dorn is from; the film is even partly set in his hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan. How else to interpret a film in which a Calvinist man and a prostitute have a conversation with, of all things, the five points of Calvisnim, otherwise known as TULIP (which begins with T for, not coincidentally, “total depravity”)? Schrader himself is suffused throughout this story; he is not simply Jake Van Dorn because he is equally Kristen Van Dorn, a woman who, as Schrader has done, escapes the confines of this religious community to work in, of all places, the (adult) film industry. But the film is also not simply autobiographical in this way either. Schrader is ultimately not any of the film’s characters. He is instead the film’s gaze, while also being the object of this gaze. Both subject and object, Schrader puts himself through the crucible that is the film’s experience of the journey taken by Jake, seeking enlightenment on the other end.

The moment of the reveal pivots on the relationship between sadism and masochism because, as throughout the film, Schrader cannot decide whether he aligns sympathetically with Jake or whether he gleefully delights in the unraveling of Jake’s ego. The difference is not so clear, for true enlightenment is also always a moment gained through deep, seemingly unending embarrassment, the shame of life lived in a physical world and in a physical body. The increasing tranquility of the film’s surface, as opposed to the increasingly energetic nature of the narrative itself, contrasts with Schrader’s sinister delight, coupled with a remorseful solemnity, as he literally brings to life this tale of one man’s journey into utter shame and, qua Calvinism, “total depravity.” Does Schrader, the men who left behind this Calvinism (at least physically, if not always emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually), secretly rejoice in the high-minded self-righteousness of Jake Van Dorn being thrown back in his face as he watches the very thing closest to him, his daughter, dragged into “total depravity”? After all, it is Calvinism’s neurotic duality, its separation of the elect (those chosen by God to be saved) from the unelect, that paves the way for the very fate that befalls Kristen: as we later find out, Kristen abandoned her family and community because she didn’t feel loved, and given the intensely black-and-white way of viewing the world within Calvinism, it made just as much sense, in abandoning the elect, to seek the company of pornographers (no different in their lives from the “total depravity” of the other unelect) as anyone else. Does Schrader sadistically turn the screws on Jake, wickedly destroying the foundations of this man’s world, or does he instead masochistically empathize with Jake in this moment, allowing his own mise-en-scène to heap greater torture upon himself for abandoning his community, for the countless sins that the Calvinist Schrader identifies himself as having committed? Is this torture and pain something that Schrader thinks he needs to feel, somehow, in order to transcend his own confusion? Hardcore is like a closed circuit for these manic flickerings, suspending in a moment of time the forceful heaving from sadism to masochism, from embarrassment to enlightenment, from imprisonment to liberation.

Ever so slightly, the image of Jake glimpsing his daughter’s descent into “depravity” calls to mind another scene inside a movie theater, this one from Abel Ferrara’s King of New York (1990). Schrader’s Hardcore would seem to have been an influence on Ferrara, and the two directors have a few things in common with one another. The quote that opens this essay, from Brad Steven’s book on Ferrara, describes the director’s modus operandi, but it could just as easily describe what Schrader accomplishes, perhaps with a little less gusto, in Hardcore. The film accumulates its power from the violent blending of dualities. The Catholic Ferrara and the Calvinist Schrader have, no doubt, sought a way to transcend these dichotomies through their films. If Ferrara bends toward a heartfelt wildness, Schrader seeks a kind of muted transcendence, much like what he found in the films of the three directors he wrote about in his book Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer. Schrader’s Hardcore so eagerly whips back and forth through the sacred and the profane, the spiritual and the material, that it collapses the two, observing with bare attentiveness the world residing underneath these abstract categories. Years later, Schrader’s script for Scorsese’s Bringing Out the Dead (1999) would include the following lines: “As the years went by I grew to understand that my role was less about saving lives than about bearing witness… It was enough I simply showed up.” These words could have been spoken by an older, wiser Jake Van Dorn and they typify Schrader’s successes here, achieving a glimpsed view of what it looks like to “simply show up” and bear witness to the world’s pain without trying to condemn, control, or change it, as Jake does instinctively. It’s a daring, shocking idea because it risks indifference, but as we find out by the end of Hardcore, this “showing up” and paying attention was precisely what Kristen wanted from her father, and nothing more. For us, Hardcore the film allows us to see the world in this way, to bear witness to the pain tied like a knot into our sacred-profane dichotomy.

The relevance of Jake’s journey may not be entirely transparent to Jake himself, but Schrader understands. His film is itself an act of pornography, a smeared and dirty celebration of materiality, the destructive force that, like a hammer, shatters the illusions his Calvinist faith uses to separate the world into disparate halves; through blurred excess, the boundary gives way. Schrader hints at this in a shot of Jake and Andy elongated and distorted in a convex mirror as they leave the adult movie theater, a moment of rupture that begins Jake’s journey. In order to gain further clues as to his daughter’s whereabouts, Jake enters the world of the adult film industry; donning a mustache and changing his wardrobe, he attempts to become like one of the men who make these pictures. This blurs the boundary line separating Jake from the “totally depraved” unelect; it is a risky act because if Jake fails, he may find himself tainted by them, something promised by the very understanding of human nature that characterizes Calvinist thought. Key to Schrader’s phantasmagoric vision is his intense and vivid use of colors. This reaffirms the dull ache of ever-present materiality that Jake seeks to escape but cannot; when he enters a brother in order to seek information, he passes through a series of planes bathed in colored light. In Hardcore, light itself has a strong physical presence; it almost seems to coat Jake in a sickly film of seedy debauchery. And try as he might to convince the women he meets that he is not interested in sex but solely in information, they cannot help but take their clothes off, flashing Jake with inescapable physicality. Instead of being the depraved people he expects, most of the sex workers Jake meets are kind, helpful, and sweet-natured, unlike the contemptuous Jake with his barely concealed superiority. They are proud of their work too, also unlike Jake (earlier seen dispassionately making business decisions as if going through the motions and waiting for it all to cease); in one scene, where Jake pretends to be hiring men for a pornographic film, he is visited by “Dick Black,” who proudly recounts his physical and sexual talents. His confidence and sense of self-worth are endearing in a way Jake could never be. All Jake has is his precious and presumed salvation.

As the film continues, the sense of physicality intensifies and overwhelms Jake’s belief system, which from our vantage point flounders under the weight of materiality. It becomes apparent that Jake’s beliefs, so treasured by him, don’t amount to much in the world; instead they alienate him from others, forestalling any ability he might have to actually get to know other people, people different from him. It speaks to the apparent absurdity of these religious beliefs that when the prostitute Niki (Season Hubley) who he later befriends, somewhat reluctantly, engages him about his religion, her own “Venusian” faith appears more agreeable and likable to us, if a little less logical yet no less sane. This scene, which finds Jake exasperated by his inability to communicate, feels so personal, as though Schrader is acknowledging the anti-social nature of the beliefs in which he was raised, the way he cannot speak to outsiders about them in any meaningful way. Schrader exposes Jake to more and more situations that confound his attempt to separate the world cleanly and sanitize himself. Schrader uses statuesque framings to depict Jake’s own loss of stature in this world, the great, wide world in which the “unelect” live. Schrader also exposes Jake’s own inherent violent tendencies, as when he discovers one of the men who appeared with his daughter in the 8mm film and beats him until he gets the information he needs; in this scene, Schrader shoots Jake holding the shower faucet and spraying this man in such a way as to emphasize the unbounded physical energy that has been unleashed in Jake. This is echoed in the scene where, out of wild and uncontrolled anger, he threatens to attack Niki, which in turn echoes the pose he witnesses in a snuff film made by a man with whom his daughter has been hanging out. This physicality culminates in a scene where, chasing after yet another lead, Jake enters a BDSM dungeon and then proceeds to tear down the flimsy walls that have been set up to create individual compartments where pleasure co-mingles with pain–the confusion between two being precisely the point here. This scene is harrowing and intensely dark, stuffed with the energy not of “total depravity” but of the repressed emotions and psycho-sexual obsessions that would make a man like the stuffy Jake Van Dorn an ideal customer for S&M play. Jake’s tearing down of the walls is the culmination of the film’s vibrant physical energy, a moment in which Jake’s impassioned emotionalism takes him to confrontation with the facts and actualities of the wide world outside of Grand Rapids.

As the strips and layers of psychic anguish, repressions, and constricting dualities are shaved away, Jake finds, at the exact center of his journey, the figure of his daughter, so fragile and vulnerable. He thinks he is saving her, but it was he that caused her to run away in the first place. “Don’t touch me, you cocksucker,” she greets him, before protesting “You never gave a fuck about me before.” She has gained the sharp tongue of the totally depraved and uses it to speak the truth, banishing the lies that Jake would reach for in order to smooth over their collective pain: “I didn’t fit into your goddamned world. I wasn’t pretty or good enough for you. You never approved of any of my friends; you drove them all away. I’m with people who love me now.” Amidst these bitter truths, Schrader shows us the deflated, punctured figure of Jake, weeping with his head buried in a blood-spattered hand. It is hard to accept, but his Calvinism, the most important thing in his life, means nothing in this moment, because it caused his daughter utter pain, because his daughter was able to find love and acceptance more easily amongst pornographers and prostitutes than with the seemingly ideal American family. It seems that it is not true that “the family that prays together, stays together.” Jake realizes, or at least must come eventually to realize, that everything he has built up through his abstract-theoretical religious beliefs and worldview mean absolutely nothing if they leave his daughter unloved. Jake has taken steps to this realization in his relationship with Niki. In a beautiful moment of connection, after pulling back from almost hitting her, Jake accepts Niki as a surrogate daughter and plants a tender kiss on her forehead. “I won’t forget you,” he tells her and wants to believe it, but in the end there’s nothing he can do for her; he “doesn’t belong” in that world. Niki is Jake’s guide, accompanying him through the rupture in Jake’s emotional and spiritual life, letting him accept this lowly creature as a surrogate daughter and play-act the love with her that was meant for his own daughter. The fundamental rupture of Schrader’s film is foreshadowed by the opening credits, bold bold red-and-black lettering superimposed upon and erupting from idyllic images of familial and communal harmony (over which plays the very same song that closes the film).

Niki’s bare humanity, her presence as a real person with thoughts of her own and emotions capable of being trampled upon, helps to crack open Jake’s chilly, granite-hard world and let blinding reality flood in. Niki strips away Jake’s complex theological construction of this world and forces him to bear witness to her humanity, to “simply show up.” This bare attentiveness, this interest merely in reality itself unclouded by dichotomies and abstractions, is Schrader’s own attempt at transcendence and an end to his religious confusion. It is a powerful vision but one that ultimately seals itself over as the film draws to a close, the rupture fixed and the wound covered over in a scab. We don’t know whether Jake and his daughter will find what they are both looking for. Every rupture must come to an end because it is impossible to exist forever in this liberating and enlightening liminal space. Like Ferrara, Schrader is interested in what happens in this in-between state, this “constant state of moral and emotional flux,” which is “a prerequisite for the achievement of full humanity.” And like Amos Gitai’s examination of a similar religious conservatism in his Kadosh (1999), Schrader dares to position dogmatic adherence to a religion, in this case the very religion in which he was raised, in opposition to this flux. This sense of personal exploration, of a deeply felt sifting through the layers of religious faith and doubt, is part of what makes Schrader’s film so special. In the end, this is a powerful and harrowing vision of life turned upside-down, where a devout religious man (whose only apparent flaw is his stunted capacity to emotionally relate to his daughter) is shown to be fundamentally lost and where pornographers and prostitutes circumscribe a world that serves as a sanctuary for a lost and lonely girl. Anything can be anything, and the only way to know what’s what is to accept the flux and navigate the world with honesty and attentiveness. By the end, even the desire to shape and control the world around us becomes atrophied; we are simply asked to show up and bear witness without judgment.