| Penny Folger |
Hardcore plays at the Trylon Cinema from Sunday, May 11th, through Tuesday, May 13th. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
Hardcore is an amusing fish-out-of-water story starring George C. Scott as a devout midwestern Calvinist who must plumb the depths of the California porn industry to seach for his missing teenage daughter. It’s also a film that its director, Paul Schrader, is not terribly fond of. He was raised in Grand Rapids in the Calvinist religion, and is very closely channeling his own background in the film’s opening. It plays like a montage of his childhood haunts: his street, his church, even his own parents serve as extras in the film.
The movie is meant to be a variation on John Ford’s The Searchers, which I myself have never felt much of a connection to, despite multiple viewings. Yet, I find Schrader’s version of this tale riveting and delightful. There’s something both heartbreaking and humorous, sometimes simultaneously, about watching Scott’s Jake Van Dorn stumble through a world whose very existence makes him profoundly uncomfortable. Agreed Schrader, “So much of this film is a slow burn: the fun of putting George in these environments, and just watching his reactions.”1
The original intent of Schrader was to leave Van Dorn unable to achieve his goals, but forever tainted by the experience. He wanted to finish the film without the classic John Wayne ending, trading it in for one much darker and more ambiguous. Due to protests from the studio, he would not get his wish.
This was one of two deep regrets Schrader had about the film. The other was casting Season Hubley as the female lead, who he felt was too pretty to play someone in the porn industry of that era. (He had wanted Mommy Dearest star Diana Scarwid, but again the studio refused him.)
Ironically, the film’s cinematographer also initially wanted a different film—one that was presented more as an anthropological documentary on the porn industry: 16mm, hand held, and all. This vision was dashed when George C. Scott signed on. His attachment to the project immediately ensured it would become a more traditional feature.
Weirdly, even executive producer John Milius seems not to have thought much of the film after it was made, calling it “A wonderful script that turned out to be a lousy movie.”2 He blamed Schrader’s direction.
Schrader, in turn, blames Milius, stating that because he was hanging around him at the time he absorbed some of his sensibilities. “He by nature was inclined to bombast. To be obvious about things, to be big about things.” As a result, according to Schrader, the film ended up “full of unnecessary obviousness.”3
Schrader’s intentions to dismantle his protagonist in a sea of corruption were all the more interesting since this was a film he considered to be about his Calvinist father. The dark humor one could use to view that juxtaposition is similar to the humor that carries the film itself. When watching an orgy scene in the adult film that’s being shot in front of them, the producer remarks, “Kid’s a good director.” Responds a crew member, “UCLA.”
Schrader is such a great writer that even a film he finds such fault with is riveting, and prior to listening to his comments it never occurred to me that this film might be perceived as a failure by anyone. It always seemed to be more of a witty masterwork, helmed by one of the greatest actors of his time. Scott was allegedly difficult to work with, once disappearing with a friend on a three-day drinking binge that temporarily shut down production. In anticipation of this, a certain amount of alcohol induced lost days were accounted for in the production schedule in advance.
Once Scott even refused to come out of his trailer to shoot a scene unless Schrader got on his knees and promised never to direct again. Humorously, but clearly bluffing, Schrader complied. He quipped later, “Between Richard Pryor in my first film and George in my second film, I pretty much hit my quota of colorful stories.”4
The characters who turn up along Van Dorn’s journey in the film are similarly lost souls who are just trying to get by, often through immoral means. Van Dorn stumbles across them like an Alice who has fallen down the rabbit hole into the world of the sex industry. A funnier candidate—a devout Calvinist from Grand Rapids—could not have been chosen for the task.
One of these lost souls is the inept private investigator he hires early on, played by Peter Boyle. Boyle is just another part of the corruption, staying to watch the shoot he has come to investigate just for kicks, and fooling around with the women he is investigating on the side.
Then there is the sex worker Jake befriends, played by Hubley, who becomes a sort of convoluted surrogate daughter on the road to find his own. There is heartbreak in the realization that Van Dorn can’t help her out of the life she’s in as she hopes he will. They have a connection that is real, and refreshingly not romantic, but ultimately doomed. This relationship, not the relationship between himself and his actual daughter, feels like the true heart of this film.
Two lost souls from opposite ends of society form a doomed friendship
Her character, Niki, tries to show Van Dorn that they’re not so different, two outsiders living on opposite ends of a society that resides somewhere in the middle. She asks him, “How important do you think sex is?
He responds, “Not very.”
“Then we’re just alike. You think it’s so unimportant that you don’t even do it. I think it’s so unimportant that I don’t care who I do it with.”
The film’s director of photography, Michael Chapman, also made this connection, describing the Calvinist world the protagonist originates from as, “in its own way as weird a world as the world of porn. Very different but not so completely dissimilar I guess.”5
The onscreen connection Van Dorn has with his real daughter, when she actually surfaces, isn’t enhanced by the fact that the actress who plays her was cast for her experience in the soft-core porn industry, not for her acting skills. When the ending was changed and she was called upon to do more in the film, this posed a challenge, though one that Schrader was ultimately able to navigate successfully. Her awkwardness arguably even makes her added scene more believable.
The film’s seedy underworld and its inhabitants, juxtaposed with a protagonist who is such a beacon of morality, are what make this film so fun to watch. Van Dorn is forced “down” to their level by the situation he finds himself in. The film’s dark humor comes from the ridiculous lengths he will go to save his daughter, enmeshing himself deeper and deeper into this world of commodified sex in which he is a foreigner. Even the film’s soundtrack evokes the sensation of a descent into the underworld. It’s simultaneously wonderful, funny, and sad to see his transformation, and as an audience member, you are totally along for the ride. Though Schrader bemoans that he’s “sold out” the film to be too much like the parts of The Searchers he was trying to get away from, it’s difficult to imagine John Wayne posing as a porn producer. Therefore, Hardcore still has a unique vision all its own.
Footnotes
1 Hardcore, commentary by director Paul Schrader, 2016
2 Tarantino, Quentin, “Tarantino on Milius 1982,” New Beverly Cinema, April 11, 2020
3 Hardcore, commentary by director Paul Schrader, 2016
4 Hardcore, commentary by director Paul Schrader, 2016
5 Michael Chapman, interview by Glen Ade Brown, Shooting Hardcore: Director of Photography Michael Chapman on ‘Hardcore,’ 2004
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon