The “criminally underrated” guilty pleasure that inspired Christopher Nolan
Oscar-winning director Christopher Nolan has a profound love for cheap thrills and popcorn flicks – as detailed in his list of guilty pleasures. With a selection peppered with films like Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, The Fast and The Furious: Tokyo Drift, and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the man clearly loves to have fun, and who can blame him?
While the director has a habit of creating deeply intellectual and, oftentimes, almost impenetrable movies, Nolan’s filmography is a gradually turning globe which looks set to encapsulate everything that makes going to the movies perfect. Oppenheimer may still have been an intellectual affair, but it was a blockbuster moment nevertheless, and it is this duality which Nolan has perfected, borrowing from a variety of different sources to get the perfect blend of specialism and spectacle.
Nolan, when discussing some of his favourite films, highlights the 1986 effort The Hitcher as a notable influence. This cerebral and nightmarish road thriller seems to have left a lasting impression on the Tenet director. Starring C Thomas Howell and Rutger Hauer, the film follows a young man travelling cross-country from Chicago to California to deliver a luxury car.
The Hitcher was not necessarily a smash hit. The film opened to a relatively tepid critical and commercial response. Impassioned film critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert agreed for once, both giving the movie zeo stars. Ebert called it “diseased and corrupt”, writing in the Chicago Tribune that the film was “a thinly veiled but more gruesome ripoff of Steven Spielberg’s Duel.” Let’s put that review into perspective, though. Ebert was hardly the target audience for the high-octane thriller. Conversely, it was the perfect film for a young Christopher Nolan.
“As a teenager, I never questioned the logic of this 1980s chiller, but now it seems mind-bendingly arbitrary plot-wise,” Nolan wrote. “However, it does feature the criminally underappreciated Rutger Hauer in his finest and most influential Euro-psycho performance this side of Blade Runner.”
The non-stop thrill ride is heavily centred around the sensory experience of watching – filled with explosive set pieces and nasty, brutal deaths. At its heart, though, it is a film about an everyman faced with an entity that is utterly unstoppable. Hauer’s performance seems like a notable influence on The Dark Knight’s iteration of the Joker, played by Heath Ledger. Two characters who present themselves as amoral but hide more complex motivations below the surface. The relationship between our psychopathic villain and noble here can also be likened to The Hitcher.
The unstoppable force of this hitchhiker, which, as Ebert rightly points out, is heavily reminiscent of Spielberg’s Duel, also harkens back to the plights of Nolan’s protagonists in films like Inception and Dunkirk. Both the 2017 Oscar nominee and the 1986 guilty pleasure can be likened to monster movies – fights for survival against human enemies that are presented as faceless, almost supernatural.
The Hitcher is the exact kind of narrative that Nolan seems particularly interested in weaving, through almost every film he’s made: ordinary people shaped by their struggles against insurmountable odds.
