The River’s Edge (1986) Film Analysis
Tim Hunter’s film The River’s Edge (1986) is based on a real life murder committed in 1981 by a 16 year old boy in Milpitas, California. He showed the body to at least 13 fellow students, none of whom reported the body for 2 days [1]. In the film, we are introduced to Samson (called John by his friends). We immediately see him commit a murder and watch as both he and his friends deal with the aftermath with a prevailing sense of detachment. After the real life murder, many think pieces were written about the post Vietnam generation being desensitized by common scapegoats such as rock music, drugs, and violent TV. The film puts all of this on display through its detached characters. In a 2017 interview with Vice, one of the producers Midge Sanford said “Teenagers take themselves very seriously, and this movie was a morality play. What would you do? And it’s not just about kids. What if you found out your husband had killed somebody? What’s your moral stance? People are still murdered, and people still don’t tell. Kids can still feel alienated from society, too. If having a legacy means will it continue to have meaning to people years later, then it feels to me like it will.” [2] The same criticisms of the post-Vietnam youth at this time are repeated every few years about the newest generation when some tragedy they do not know how to deal with arises. The film stresses the importance of having a guiding reason for your actions and places before the viewer a spectrum of moralities in its characters. No moral lesson is explicitly spelled out in the end, only the lesson that some set of morals is needed. If you have not seen the film, please do as the following analysis will spoil most of it for you.
The film opens with a young boy named Tim, played by a 12 year old Joshua Miller, throwing a doll off of a bridge and into the river. He is unknowingly mirroring the actions of the murderer Samson, who is strangling Jamie to death just below him in that same moment. Tim sees this murder and is proud he can keep it a secret throughout the movie, often using it as a means by which to be accepted by the generation above him. He follows the murderer to the local convenience store and steals beers for him, then uses his knowledge about the dead body to get Samson to score him some dope. We learn that Tim is the little brother of Keanu Reeves’ character Matt and that he also has a younger sister to whom the drowned doll belongs. Tim brags about killing the doll and is berated by Matt as a result. Matt tells him it is “stupid enough you pull a stunt like that, but then you go and brag about it.” Matt does not say this when the exact situation happens with a real body in a few scenes. For one third of the film, Matt misplaces his emotions about Jamie’s murder onto the drowned doll situation. Before Matt has any meaningful conversation with Tim, Layne pulls up and honks for him. Layne is played by a beautifully manic Crispin Glover. Layne pulls Matt’s focus away from the situation and wants to take him to Feck’s house to score some weed. Tim asks Layne if he wants to see a dead body and says “I’m dying for a joint.” Layne laughs off both statements and drives away with Matt. Tim disobeys his mother and follows the car.
Now we are introduced to Feck, played by a newly sober Dennis Hopper. Feck is playing saxophone for his blow-up doll Ellie. At other times, he talks to the doll, dances with it, and tells it that it is his friend. This doll will have important metaphorical meaning later. Feck answers the door brandishing a gun and immediately lets Layne know that he once shot a girl for love and that he is now a shut-in because people are after him. Layne responds in a somewhat bored tone as if this is a daily greeting saying “I know Feck, women are evil. You had to kill her.” Again we are seeing a younger generation learning from or mirroring an older generation. If Layne believed his words even slightly, this would explain some of his later feelings about the murder, and we know Samson is acquainted with Feck as well, because he went to see him to get dope for Tim earlier (Feck was not home at the time). We never see concrete proof of either of Feck’s claims about being pursued or the murder, throughout the film. Feck gives weed to Layne for free, apparently only for his companionship. Feck’s gun in this scene is definitely a Checkhov’s gun that becomes central to the film’s resolution. The editing draws attention to the fact that the spying Tim sees the gun and knows it will be inside Feck’s house when he needs it later. Alone in the house again, Feck puts the gun to his temple and pulls the trigger without hesitation. It is empty. It is probably always empty.
The boys are now at school where the rest of their friends are talking about Jamie. Samson says that he killed her, but he does not say it in a bragging way. The two girls in the group of friends play it off as a joke and leave. The guys are incredulous, but Samson persists and takes them to the body. Layne first thinks it is a joke and pokes the body with a stick. Realizing it is not a joke, he asks Samson why he did it and gets a deadpan reply of “she was talking shit.” but we learn through a flashback later that she did not say anything at all. Layne only seems worried about the consequences Samson will face. Matt looks slightly distraught, and exits the situation. Layne chases after him and we cut to them all in the car driving home. Layne is driving, talking to them both and says “One of us gets himself in potentially big trouble, and we’ve gotta deal with it, we’ve gotta test our loyalty against all odds. It’s kind of exciting.” The director said that Layne is “the moral center of the film, even though it is a false moral center.”[1] There are two ends of a moral compass here. Layne is standing behind his friend and wanting to protect him, Matt is following his lead for now, but will ultimately point true and turn Samson in. In this car scene, Matt is quiet and does not mirror his own actions from earlier when talking to his brother about drowning the doll and bragging about it. We have one morality with which we can identify at present: help your friends above all else.
Word of the body spreads through the social groups at school and more people make a pilgrimage to see it. We see that Tim is once again bragging about knowing of the body and is trying to align himself with Samson to seem cool to a higher peer group. At least 7 people have now seen the body. In the actual case, at least 13 were known to have visited the body and the sheriff said more showed up while the police were there investigating the crime scene. One person even took a souvenir from the clothes the dead girl was wearing. The Sheriff also stated that no one came forward because many of them thought they would get in trouble, but the only person charged as an accessory was one friend who covered the body with leaves. [4] Layne must be written after this person because he tries to get everyone to help him bury the body so that Samson will not get in trouble. Everyone, including Samson, leaves at this suggestion. When asked by Layne why he is leaving, Samson says, “she’s heavy” and walks away. None of the actors in this scene aside from Clarissa (played by Ione Sky) emote about the dead body. There is no indication that the heaviness Samson speaks of is a metaphorical heaviness on his conscience. The editing and framing draws special attention to Jamie’s friend Clarissa looking at the lifeless body. She does have a look of shock on her face, but later she will express concern that she was not able to cry at this time. Clarissa’s expression is intercut with Matt in class, shifting and fidgeting in his seat, showing us that these characters are being affected by their moral centers, but not yet acting on them to tell anyone. Clarissa confronts Layne (her supposed boyfriend) at the arcade about ignoring the fact that Samson killed their other friend. Layne says “he had his reasons, she was shooting her mouth off about his mom” (which is not exactly what was said earlier). Layne threatens her by saying “you wouldn’t want John hearing you shooting your mouth off about it, right?” Leaving Layne, Clarissa has a fairly one-sided conversation with her friend about turning Samson in. Neither ultimately takes responsibility to do it, as they are still following Layne’s lead. Cut to Matt at home, holding the telephone while watching an old noir film in which the dialogue mirrors his own quandary about turning in his friend for a crime. His little sister comes and asks for his help planting a grave for her drowned doll. He does so, and this allows him to offload his feelings for now so that he does not feel the need to make a call to the police.
We see Samson talking on the phone with Layne, who wants to go that night and move the body. Samson wants nothing to do with it, and Layne declares he will do it himself. Layne clearly feels this is the right thing to do in his morality so that Samson will not have to fry. Matt is staring at the doll’s grave holding a flower as he places it on the grave, there is a cross-cut to the dead body. Matt stops misplacing his feelings and makes up his mind internally to call the police. Tim sees the new grave and Matt’s flower gesture and decides to tear up the grave marker when no one is around. That night, Layne unceremoniously rolls Jamie’s body from the river’s edge, down to the water, mirroring what Tim did with the doll at the beginning. Shortly thereafter, Matt is leading the police to the now empty spot on the river’s edge. After a few seconds of confusion, Matt hears another officer yell out that they found her in the water. The police take Matt to the police station and he blows up in anger when they accuse him of the crime. He is again misplacing emotions. The cop tells him that he can be charged as an accessory for not reporting the body and needs to talk to him. Interestingly, the officer interviewed by the New York Times in 1981 said that it was not a crime to not report a body, only to actively try covering up the murder [4]. I am not sure if this writer was unaware of this, or if an adult is lying to Matt here. Matt also lays out why Samson is called John; it is just a toilet joke based on Samson’s last name. I wondered if this was a reference to the real life bully who bragged in the paper that he beat up the murderer every day, or if this is just a joke somehow based on an acquaintance of the writer’s since he said he based most characters on his high school friends. [2]
Layne and Samson see that the police are out in the neighborhood, and for the first time Samson shows an emotion. He is difficult to read, but it seems like fear turning to shock. Samson becomes stoic again quickly and agrees to hide out at Feck’s while Layne enacts a plan to get him money to go on the run. In Feck’s house, immediately after hearing that Samson killed someone, Feck wants to compare murders. Samson says “I strangled mine” , Feck asks if Samson loved his too, and he mutters “she was okay” before walking off into the background. When Layne asks for Feck’s car, Feck declines and says he needs it because “they’ve been after me for 20 years. I mean you kill a person, they don’t let you forget. They stick after you like ghosts. I mean they don’t believe you when you say you’re sorry. They want you to pay somehow.” This hearkens back to when the younger sister did not want a new doll or an apology, she wanted Matt to beat Tim up for drowning her doll. Home from the police, Matt and his sister discover that Tim has destroyed the grave they planted for the doll. The sister cries “He’s still killing her!” Just then Tim comes home, Matt chases him down and punches him while sitting astride him. Matt clearly has a morality here, he is just not yet letting it guide his actions appropriately. The stepfather pulls them apart and Tim rides off saying “you’re gonna pay for what you did. You’ll die for what you did.” Tim goes to his friend’s house to embark on a mission to steal Feck’s gun and shoot Matt. Tim has seen at least twice now that violence is an acceptable answer to solving problems, and now he has escalated from the violence he has seen before (strangling, and this most recent beating) to planning to shoot his brother. His role models are giving him actions, not morals to dictate his behavior.
Feck and Samson are comparing mental states. Samson asks if Feck is a psychopath for loving a blowup doll. Feck says he knows she is not real and maybe Samson is a psychopath for killing a girl. Samson agrees that he probably is. This seems to be another clue that Feck never killed anyone or else he would not have turned the question around in that way, since he too supposedly killed a girl but already denied being a psychopath. Samson changes the subject to ask about Feck’s biker days, and he tells Samson the story of losing his leg. Feck and Samson leave to get beer at the convenience store. Meanwhile, Layne has been driving around with Matt and Clarissa, trying to get money from their friends to help Samson go into hiding. Clarissa fights with Layne about going to the police while Matt hums some sick guitar riffs to himself. Layne tells her not to joke about going to the police and that he is clearly the only one who can handle a crisis. He kicks Clarissa out of the car and sends Matt to protect her. They talk and decide to camp at the river together, but first they arrive at the same convenience store as Samson and Feck. The clerk will not sell Matt beer because it is too late. Samson points the gun at the clerk and says he is here to turn back time, then he tells Matt to steal the beer and go. Right after this, Samson goes to a gun store to steal bullets for the gun, so we know the gun is not loaded here. You could read the line about turning back time as a wish that he had only threatened Jamie and not killed her, or a wish that he had shot her, but based on his lines in a few scenes after this, it was probably just something cool to say. Tim and his friend are in Feck’s house at this same moment, looking for the gun which Samson is brandishing. Instead, Tim’s friend finds a photograph of a blonde woman in a white dress, posing on a bike, and Tim finds a stash of weed which he is very excited about. This photo is lingered on just long enough for the audience to put together a few more clues about Feck. This is probably the girl he killed for love. She knew him back in his motorcycle days before he lost his leg and stopped riding a bike, and the blowup doll is dressed to look like her. Another scene later will reveal that killing this woman was probably a story concocted for her leaving him or him pushing her away, and the blowup doll sits in for her in his life. The doll also ties back to the doll in the beginning that was drowned and had a funeral given for it. Both dolls will be Jamie before the film ends.
Clarissa and Matt are lying next to each other and talking by the river. Clarissa guesses that Matt told the police about the body after he insinuates as much, to which Matt says “I didn’t think I’d be the only one”. After they both talk about how surprised they were that they were not emotionally affected by the death of their friend, Matt says “it will hit us, I know it will, probably at her funeral.” It never hits them. Samson and Feck are on the opposite shore of the river from Matt and Clarissa. Samson is lewdly playing with the blowup doll and Feck gets increasingly perturbed until he screams at Samson. His scream echoes across the river, and Samson puts down the doll, now distracted by the echo effect. Samson’s echo turns into a faceless responder with whom he argues before firing the gun into the river. Samson tries to get Feck to fire the gun too. Feck says “it’s not something that I just shoot off without reason” because “it’s got a sentimental value”. Samson realizes this is the gun Feck used to commit the murder he is always talking about, and then Samson relives his murder that he committed with his bare hands in a flashback. He admits that he was not even mad and that it was all about being in control, and that dialogue is repeated as we cut to Matt and Clarissa having sex on the opposite side of the river. I am not sure of the intention behind this drawn parallel. Clarissa is on top of Matt so it could be showing a reversal of control or showing a healthier relationship than the one Samson and Jamie had. Cutting back to Samson, he tells Feck that the murder made him feel so alive, but he knows he is dead for sure now. Feck reminds him that Layne has a plan and Samson says Layne was never really his friend because he does not even know him. Feck says that he will be Samson’s friend then, and, if we apply the transitive property to their words, Feck is saying he will try to know Samson. There is now a montage of everyone involved falling asleep. Layne falls asleep in his car while stopped at a stoplight. Tim and his friend are asleep at Feck’s house, probably having smoked some of the weed they found. Clarissa and Matt are holding each other, asleep on the opposite shore. Samson is asleep where he killed Jamie, below Feck’s feet. Feck is awake, holding his blowup doll, Ellie. He looks at the doll, picks some cracking vinyl from around her mouth and says disheartened “you aren’t supposed to get old.” Feck looks at his gun, starts to break down, but composes himself and looks toward Samson. Cut to Matt asleep on the other side of the river, starting awake at a distant gunshot. Feck has killed Samson, and I believe that Feck never killed anyone before this. He loved a girl who did not love him back, and who parted from him sometime after he lost his leg and left his biker days behind. So he made up a story in his mind about killing her, and replaced her with a blowup doll which represented a timeless idea of her that he could always have next to him, and it also represented his innocence. That timeless idea begins to crack and age and he ultimately leaves the doll and his innocence behind when he shoots Feck. The gun was never loaded because it was merely there for sentimental value, it was sentiment, it was the story of his love for the actual Ellie. Feck is about to lose his innocence; he is about to drown his doll in the river and leave it. Feck knows Samson. He knows that they are not speaking in metaphors, that Samson has committed a murder, that he is amoral and has no reason, no driving force for his actions. Samson’s feeling given was not a reason for the murder, but an in the moment feeling of control. If he only lives in the moment and has no guiding force, he has nothing by which to live, he has no way to live, he is already dead. Samson already knew it. Feck will follow his morals and act to shoot Samson. Again, no value judgment is placed on this type of morality.
Feck goes home and gets knocked out by Tim’s brother and his friend so that they can steal his gun. Tim checks and finds that there are three bullets in the gun. Shortly after the boys leave, the police come with guns drawn, and get Feck up off the floor then take him to a hospital. It is never clear why they came. The body of Samson had not been found at that point yet, and Layne never gave any information when the police interrogated him.
The remaining gang of friends is hanging out by the river and they see a body floating face down. One of them says “not again” and Matt starts throwing rocks at the body. He reveals that it is not a body, but Feck’s blowup doll. Feck had left her behind after shooting Samson. Feck made her real by making her mirror Jamie. Layne shows up looking for Samson and ready to fight everyone else for not helping him. He storms off from the group and begins sobbing loudly. The group finds him sitting next to Samson’s shot body. He waivers between crying and what might be read as manic glee. The gang move toward Samson and Layne, but Matt’s brother shows up with the gun and Matt stops. Tim says both “you shouldn’t’ve hit me” and “you finked on john” while aiming the gun at Matt. Matt yells at him that he is his brother and apologizes for hitting him, but does not address the fink charge. He yells once more that they are brothers and takes the gun from Tim. The closest thing to a reasoned morality here is that family trumps friendship, but we are still not given explicit moral guidance.
Feck has his head bandaged in a hospital room and begins talking to someone offscreen. He says “There was no hope for him. No hope at all. He didn’t love her, and he didn’t feel a thing. I at least loved her, I cared for her. I don’t like killing people; sometimes it’s necessary.” He then asks everyone to leave and says he is very tired and sort of depressed because “I lost a good friend today.” He probably means the blowup doll, and if we stretch his words a bit wider, he may now equate friendship with knowing and be saying further that he knows what Ellie the doll was now, and he has lost that innocence. We never see who he is talking to, so he is most likely addressing the audience. It is never stated whether or not he was charged with killing Samson.
The police arrive at the river and take Samson’s body away. Cut to a funeral. Many of the classmates walk by the open casket and look down with no expression on their faces. Matt and Clarissa are followed back to their seats where they sit next to each other without shedding a tear. The editing directs you to think it was Samson’s funeral, but it is the funeral for Jamie. They said earlier that emotion would probably hit them at the funeral, but it still has not. The film ends on a lifeless, expressionless Jamie. She now has makeup applied and could be any of the living but expressionless, emotionless kids we have seen throughout the movie.
Glenn Bunting, writing for the San Jose Mercury in 1981, broke the story of the actual murder and spent time with classmates of the victim and perpetrator in Milpitas, CA. He reviewed the film River’s Edge in a 1987 article for the LA Times. In the article he recounts briefly, stories from the kids he interviewed at the Milpitas high school. Many of his stories are reflected directly by scenes in the movie. Bunting finds fault with the film for creating new characters and cites the film for not exploring the characters’ motivations with the same depth that Stand By Me did. He only praises the movie for the scenes of deliberation about reporting the crime. He ends the commentary with “There’s much to learn from Marcy Conrad’s death–the combination of drugs, TV violence, deafening rock music, arcade games and, most of all, neglectful parents have anesthetized our children. It’s too bad ‘River’s Edge’ missed the point.”[3] I would argue however that it completely jibed with his desired point, but it does not offer any answers. Repeatedly throughout the movie, the kids are seen smoking dope, hanging out at arcades, and being neglected by or abusing their parents. Music is not touched on too much, though Slayer is ever present in the soundtrack. I already mentioned the scene where Keanu Reeves’ character seems to be drowning out a moral debate by mindlessly humming a guitar riff to himself. One theme of the film is anesthetization as Bunting asked. For the most part, everyone in the film does not emote, not while carrying out a murder, not while seeing the dead body of their friend, not while talking to each other about it, and not even when being strangled to death. The River’s Edge presents the elements Bunting and many think pieces from the time wanted to blame and still do blame for such detachment, but Bunting is correct that the film does not delve into the motivation behind the moralities we see. We do not know why Matt went to the police other than that the body affected him. Two scenes I did not cover above take place in the classroom and feature a speech by Matt and Clarissa’s teacher. In the first scene, he is talking about the struggle for civil rights and equality, mentioning that there was violence, but that “as crazy as it all seemed though, there was a meaning in the madness, a clear and a real purpose.” One kid asks if violence is not always the wrong choice and another kid says “wasting pigs is radical, man.” The teacher mutters to himself “you missed my point,” echoing Bunting’s sentiment about the movie itself. Later in the film, we are again in the classroom, this time after everyone in town knows the details of Jamie’s murder. The teacher is now haranguing the students, saying “Nobody in this classroom gives a damn that she’s dead. It gives us a chance to feel superior and to point out a fundamental breakdown in society, but it doesn’t really affect us does it? Because if it did, none of us would be in this classroom right now. We’d be out on the street, half crazy from lack of sleep, hunting down Samson Tollet with a gun.” The teacher then is a stand-in for all the think pieces and even the above review of the film itself, providing condemnation for actions, but no meaning or purpose behind his morality.
In his review of the film upon its release, Roger Ebert said that films like this pose 2 questions: “Why do we need to be told this story? How is it useful to see limited and brutish people doing cruel and stupid things?” he goes on to say “ I suppose there are two answers. One, because such things exist in the world and some of us are curious about them as we are curious in general about human nature. Two, because an artist is never merely a reporter and by seeing the tragedy through his eyes, he helps us to see it through ours.” [5]
[1] Across the Edge: The Making of River’s Edge (2012)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tTDHIp13v0
[2] “An Oral History of ‘River’s Edge,’ 1987’s Most Polarizing Teen Film”
by Matt Gilligan, Vice, May 9, 2017
[3] “‘RIVER’S EDGE’ NOT QUITE AS HE RECALLS : Commentary”
by Glenn F. Bunting, Los Angles Times, July 4, 1987
http://articles.latimes.com/1987-07-04/entertainment/ca-31_1_corpse
[4] “YOUTHS’ SILENT ON MURDER VICTIM LEAVES A CALIFORNIA TOWN BAFFLED”
by Wayne King, New York Times, Dec. 14, 1981
[5] “River’s Edge Review”
by Roger Ebert, May 29, 1987
