Rewatch/Rewind: River's Edge
A haunting "what's wrong with these kids today" drama still lingers more than three decades later.
(Rewatch/Rewind is a feature in which I revisit a film that once made an impression on me, but I haven’t watched in at least a decade. Spoilers should be expected.)
When I was young, maybe 16 or so, a kid murdered another kid in the quiet little New Jersey town where I went to high school. I didn’t know them; they were a little younger than me, but it happened not far from where I lived, in a long, lonely stretch of woods bisected by a country road. There was no mystery as to who did it, and the motive was brutally, bleakly simple: Michael tried to coerce Jamie, his female classmate, into having sex with him, and when she refused, he beat her to death with a lamp. Even though he hadn’t even started high school yet, Michael was tried as an adult and quickly convicted, and as far as I know, he’s still in prison now, well into middle age.
Already a bit of a weirdo who was taken by all things dark and gruesome, I found myself morbidly fascinated by the story. I never went so far as to try to find the crime scene, but I read whatever I could find about it, which wasn’t very much. This was the late 80s, before true crime became a cottage industry, and there seemed to be precious little interest in the case outside the immediate area. Even then no one seemed all that motivated to report on anything but the most salient details. Both victim and killer were special education students from working-class homes, so there was no lurid “this could happen to your nice middle-class family” angle to draw in and scare readers.
I also found it puzzling that no one talked about it. I didn’t know these kids, but obviously, someone did, and yet it felt like there had been some tacit agreement by the entire town to pretend it didn’t happen, whether because it was too unpleasant or too sad. I had no idea. As unusual an occurrence as it was then, it just seemed to be eventually forgotten1.
Around this time, a movie showed up on cable over which I developed a mild obsession, Tim Hunter’s River’s Edge. Written by Neal Jimenez, River’s Edge was loosely based on another real-life murder of a teenager, 14 year-old Marcy Renee Conrad, who was raped and strangled by a classmate. Unlike the murder in my town, however, Conrad’s death met with some national attention, thanks to the lurid twist of her murderer allegedly telling at least ten other classmates about the crime, none of whom reported it to the police until two days later. Dovetailing nicely with the rise of Satanic Panic, Conrad’s murder was not viewed as a preventable tragedy, but as a clear sign that there was “something” wrong with the youth of today (“today” being the 80s). They had a blank space where their souls were, and should have been treated with fear and distaste.
The movie opens with the murder at the center of it already taken place. Samson (Daniel Roebuck), a hulking teenager with a thousand-yard stare similar to that of a post-boot camp Private Pyle in Full Metal Jacket, has strangled his girlfriend, Jamie (coincidentally the same name as the murder victim in my town), and left her nude body along the banks of a river. Not knowing what else to do, John goes to school, where he tells his burnout friends what he’s done.
Nobody believes him until he takes them to see the body, and they all debate how the situation should be handled. Matt (Keanu Reeves) and Clarissa (Ione Skye) are disturbed over what’s happened, and eventually, Matt decides to go to the police, though it’s not an immediate decision. Clarissa is frightened at the possibility that Samson may hurt someone else, possibly her, and so is reluctant to say anything. Maggie (Roxana Zal) and Tony (Josh Richman) feign indifference because they don’t want to get in trouble themselves. Meanwhile, Layne (Crispin Glover, at his most Crispin Glover-iest) wants to protect Samson, possibly by helping him leave town. He’s the one who pushes Jamie’s body into the river, hoping it won’t be found, and insists, with growing paranoia (the amount of pills he pops doesn’t help here), that the others go along with him.
Already unsettled by what’s happened to Jamie, Matt is further troubled by his younger brother, Tim (Joshua Miller, who briefly cornered the market in creepy kid roles during the late 80s), a budding sociopath who does things like destroy their little sister’s dolls and then mock her sadness over it. Their father isn’t in the picture, and their mother has all too eagerly handed over disciplinary duties to her boyfriend, who’s ill-suited to the task, so it’s up to Matt to provide Tim with some guidance, even though he’s not even out of high school yet. He can see that Tim, already a petty criminal with a vicious streak, is a future Samson in the making, but doesn’t know how to set him straight in any other way but how he’s been “set straight,” with violence and threats.
Samson remains a cipher from the film’s beginning to his own death at the film’s end. He doesn’t seem particularly upset about what he’s done, nor does he seem concerned about getting caught. Layne is frantic about it, driving around in a panic and shaking their friends down for money to help Samson escape, while Samson just quietly goes along with whatever he says. He doesn’t talk much at all until he gets drunk with Feck (Dennis Hopper), the local weed dealer, who claims to have murdered his own girlfriend years earlier. Feeling an evident kinship with Feck, Samson finally opens up about Jamie’s murder, in a way that disturbs Feck, who ends up killing Samson. “There was no hope for him, no hope for all,” Feck tells the police later, after Jamie and Samson have been found, and it’s all over. “He didn’t love her. He didn’t feel a thing.”
River’s Edge, while not overtly violent2 or lurid, was described by critics as both “a nightmare” and “a contemporary horror story.” The same age as the characters at the time, I didn’t find it scary, I found it hauntingly moving, because I knew these kids. I knew their dreary little town, where there was nothing for young people to do except drive around and get drunk. It was 1988, and the first time I had seen teenagers depicted in a real and familiar way.
I’ve mentioned it before, but it cannot be stated enough how strange it was to be a teenager in the 80s. With aggression not seen since the 1950s, conformity was emphasized as the key to success, and anyone who diverted from that in any meaningful way, whether intentionally or not, was treated with pity and scorn3. The vast majority of media involving teenagers4 depicted them as having largely carefree lives in two-parent, upper-class suburban homes, where the most pressing issue might be where to go to college (not how to pay for it, just which one to go to), or what to do if your rival wore the same dress as you to homecoming.
On the flip side, anti-drug and teen pregnancy propaganda was becoming increasingly hysterical, in keeping with the growing perception (heavily promoted by journalists and talk show hosts with an agenda) that Generation X was already a “lost” generation, even though many of us weren’t even adults yet. Little to no effort was made to explore why teenagers engaged in drug use, or seemed so miserable and out of reach5. The blame for being “lost” was placed solely on us, as if we were hatched from eggs and raised ourselves.
That was, of course, one of the pressing issues: many of us did raise ourselves. Though many viewers’ takeaway from River’s Edge was “What’s wrong with these kids?” it should have been “Where the hell are these kids’ parents?” They’re all perhaps 16 or 17 at the oldest, and, save for Matt’s mother and her boyfriend, and Tony’s father, none of whom seem interested in being positive role models, they might as well be orphans. How is it that Feck, the mentally unstable town weed guy, can see a darkness in Samson that no other adult either saw, or thought to do something about before it was too late? Why is Tim, who’s maybe 12 at the oldest, allowed to roam around town unchecked at all hours of the night? What damage has already been inflicted upon him that he takes such pleasure in tormenting his sister?
These are systemic failures reflective of a real-life “raised” by parents who were checked out of the whole parenting deal and left us fending for ourselves. And still, adults looked at these tragedies with barely concealed disgust, and blamed the kids, throwing up their hands and claiming there was nothing they could do. It was the music we listened to, it was the movies we watched. There was something wrong with us that nobody could figure out, and after a while, it wasn’t worth the hassle to try. Maybe they’d have better luck with the next generation6.
I didn’t find it strange that Matt and the others didn’t initially tell anyone about Jamie’s murder. If I were one of them, I would have hesitated too, and for the same reason: who were they supposed to tell? What adults did they have in their lives that they could trust with this information? The one teacher we see, rather than offer sympathy or comforting words once it’s learned what happened to Jamie, shames her classmates, claiming “nobody gives a damn” about it. It’s an unfair and unhelpful accusation7, and only reinforces what we already knew: that adults simply found it easier to point fingers and criticize rather than look inward and wonder if there was something they could have done.
Even when Matt finally does the right thing and goes to the police with what he knows, they initially treat him like he’s as responsible for Jamie’s death as her killer. Rather than show appreciation for his bravery and assistance in the case, they’re incensed that this teenage boy, this child, can’t articulate how he feels about the situation8. It’s likely that long after the case is closed, everyone, peers and adults alike, would look at Matt askance, wondering if he had more to do with Jamie’s death than he said, even though the audience knows he didn’t. The only “crime” he committed was being around when Samson showed up at school that morning. But rumors spread in dreary little towns where no one has anything better to do, and it’s all in keeping with what people already decided about Matt and the others: they’re losers, criminals, empty shells who are only good for being used as cautionary tales for someone else. They’re lost.
In the end, Jamie, whose funeral closes the film, is the only person who’s granted some peace. In her final rest, she’s been given dignity. Her eyes are closed, and she’s dressed and wearing makeup. Poignantly, there’s a corsage around her wrist, like something she’d be given on Prom Night, even though kids like Samson didn’t take their girlfriends to prom. It suggests an alternate life Jamie could have had, if she had lived in a different place, in a different time, with a different version of Samson. Maybe that version of Samson, and his friends, would have grown up in loving homes with adults who took their pain and doubts seriously and didn’t treat them as burdensome mistakes. The world was theirs, and they all had bright futures ahead of them.
I keep expecting the case to pop up on some show like Forensic Files or Dateline, because it plays right into the “we never thought it could happen in this small town” trope that true crime loves so much, but it never has. If not for the fact that I could find a couple of articles about it on Newspapers.com, I’d have thought I imagined the whole thing.
Jamie’s murder is only briefly depicted in flashback, and Samson’s death is off-screen.
The most obvious example of this is, of course, The Breakfast Club, where it’s determined that the solution to troubled goth chick Ally Sheedy’s problems isn’t therapy and parents who pay attention to her, but a makeover that allows her to look like everyone else. This makeover, which mostly involved pushing her hair back and putting her in a sleeveless shirt, is now viewed as one of American cinema’s great injustices.
A precious few, like Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Lucas, tried for something a little more realistic, but even in those, everything worked out for everyone in the end.
Any suggestion that teenagers may be depressed or need psychological help was dismissed with the argument that teenagers had no reason to be depressed, and that those were “the best years of their lives.”
The “joke” here, of course, is that the next generation, Millennials, would be regarded with disgust by their elders too, but for entirely different reasons. This time, the problem was that they were coddled and unambitious after receiving too many participation trophies. Once again, parents held themselves blameless, as if said participation trophies were mysteriously generated out of thin air.
The teacher elaborates on this, claiming that if anyone actually cared about Jamie’s death, they’d be forming vigilante posses to hunt down Samson, which is a bizarre thing to say to a bunch of kids, but what do I know.
Think back to when you were 16, and how you would have answered if someone who was already angry at you asked how you felt about knowing that a friend of yours killed someone. If you could have come up with something better than a muttered “I don’t know,” you were a better person than I was at that age.
Excellent write up on one of my all time favorite films! The story that it's based on has taken on a sort of local legend status in the area where i grew up. Like i rememebr a group of kids i knew from pinole california claiming that it had happened there, when in fact it was across the bay in milpitas. Not that there was any discernable difference between those towns back then
This is such a strong example of the kind of writing you do so well. I like the way you weave your own lived experience into this piece, because our lives shape how we see film and understand the stories. I also never gave any thought to what would happen after the events of the film, which is also upsetting. And I'd never noticed the corsage, or if I had I'd never understood the significance of it. Excellent work, Gena.