It starts with those familiar winter scenes—red-faced children bobsledding, men shoveling the driveway, children sitting in front of the television watching a Christmas special. It’s Home Alone before the robbers show up. Everything seems as it should be: the girls are leaving for a church-sponsored trip and their fathers will miss them. The opening scenes strike a dissonant chord as the title flashes on screen: Hardcore, in bold orange, against a snowy backdrop. From the credits, Director Paul Schrader introduces contradiction—the provocative title and provincial background, the fundamentalist and porn actress, the good church girl in California’s seedy underbelly.
Hardcore (1979), screened at Doc Films, follows Jake Van Dorn, a conservative, Calvinist businessman whose daughter, Kristen, suddenly goes missing from a trip to California. Van Dorn attempts to find her, first enlisting the help of a private investigator and his brother-in-law, but eventually striking out on his own. He grows disillusioned and desperate as he sinks deeper into the illicit world of pornography in search of his daughter, finally persuading Niki, a young woman deeply entrenched in the world he is growing increasingly horrified by, to assist him. Van Dorn battles his resentment for the new sex-centric culture and his growing sympathy for and connection with Niki while confronting the question of whether Kristen was taken or chose to leave.
The movie shines when Schrader lets his incredibly compelling characters simply stand, talk, and look at each other. Van Dorn is a man stripped of all context on a single-minded quest. He leaves behind his family, religious community, and, upon realizing that his outward appearance arouses suspicion within the illegitimate tides he has waded into, even his way of dressing and speaking. He explains the principles of his sect to Niki, speaking to his passionate faith in his role as one of God’s chosen, making it all the more jarring how easily he slips into his performance of a sleazy producer and how quickly he gives into his violent urges. Upon finally finding ‘Jism Jim,’ an actor who starred across his daughter in a pornographic movie, Van Dorn nearly beats him to death during an interrogation. Jim is hardly positioned as a likable figure and the violence enacted against him is shocking primarily for its abruptness and extremity. It isn’t until later when Jake slaps Niki, his unlikely partner in his search with whom he develops a touching and almost paternal relationship, that the hollowness of his supposed principles comes through to the audience. His religious values fall away as quickly as the Christmas decorations come off the telephone wires, leaving them bare and a little ugly in the light. Worst of all, Van Dorn’s violence doesn’t spark any personal interrogation, and he doesn’t seem to perceive it as antithetical to his religious beliefs at all. Schrader suggests that regardless of their purported values, or lack thereof, men’s violent behavior pervades the whole spectrum of life from an upstanding member of a religious community to the participants in a world of cruel and taboo pornography.
Van Dorn is an avenging knight on behalf of respectable society, but Niki is the one who truly earns the audience’s sympathy. The film is at its most compelling not when father and daughter reunite but when the audience realizes, alongside the characters, that Van Dorn will not rescue Niki; he will go back to his small-town life with his daughter, and she will return to her drifting life. The film falters near the ending, famously a studio-imposed change, diverting into action movie territory and abandoning its core emotional themes only to return to them all of a sudden. Still, the messiness and slightly unsettling tone of Van Dorn’s reconciliation with his daughter echo the movie’s preoccupation with challenging his straightforward Calvinist ethos. Schrader reveals that his rigid religious upbringing prevented him from connecting with his daughter and cultivated the feelings of isolation that motivated her disappearance. In running away to the unseemly world of pornography—particularly to the film’s attempt at a real villain, Ratan, a creator of snuff films—Kristen replaced one neglectful and unsatisfying father figure with another.
With Niki, Van Dorn feels little of the restrictions of his religious background due to their unconventional relationship and he is free to open up to her. Their honest conversations about sex and religion are a stark contrast to his stilted interactions with his daughter earlier in the movie. Even when they seemingly have an honest, revelatory conversation stripped of inhibitions later in the movie, their dialogue is desperate and accusatory, each word a struggle as they try and reveal themselves to each other. The stark disparity between his and Niki’s worldviews seems to allow them to have an honest dialogue without the expectations of a conventional relationship weighing them down. All the same, in the end, they go their separate ways. Niki is like the movies her world produces, “Nobody sees it. It’s like it doesn’t even exist.” Van Dorn will return to his world with his daughter, presumably to live happily ever after, but the melancholy of his goodbye with his unlikely companion reminds the viewer that he will also return to blissful ignorance. He will be blind to the world around him, to his own daughter, to his beliefs, and to what lies ahead of and within him.