SPOILERS

The Hitcher – The Psychology Of A Psychopath

The way he stops and smokes at the end, you would think that it was a cycle beginning to repeat itself. He just killed a man, he was forced to it, and then he goes to the car and lights a cigarette in the setting sun in the middle of the wild west.

This film is the story of a young boy trying to travel towards a better future in California, but he almost falls asleep while driving through the endless mid-west, so he decides to do a good deed and pick up a hitcher in the pouring rain.

The man doesn’t answer any questions directly as he lights his cigarette and eventually he laughs in our faces and says this reminds him of the last guy who picked him up, whose legs and arms, and head, he had cut off. Such gruesomeness is terrifying. The hitcher pulls a knife to the boy’s throat and says he wants to hear the boy say four words: ‘I want to die.’

With all the strange things we experience, these words are easily forgotten in the mass of adrenaline and unexpected twists and turns.

‘I want to die.’ This feeling resurfaces in the last moments of the film when the boy seems to have finally broken this man beyond repair, when we hope that he is finally gone, and he turns his back on him and the dust to move on. But it isn’t so: the man stands up and tauntingly throws handcuffs at the boy: are these the shackles he will be confined by from now on? Undoubtedly the hitcher wants to die: he will not be satisfied until he dies; it is the ultimate form of destruction. He has been tormenting this boy relentlessly to the point that he will kill him. Why does this man search for destruction? Why does he savour death?

The wedding ringing on the man’s finger glistens in the sun in the last fight of the film. The story behind it might echo the story of the boy — who falls in love with a waitress, but she is killed by the hitcher, who tears her heartlessly in half as he tows her behind his truck. Perhaps this is a similar fate to what the hitcher experienced with his own beloved. Losing her, possibly in the same sadistic way, made him want to smash this younger version of himself into his broken form.

When you see the boy smoking at the very end, as the credits roll pass him, you realise, maybe he will be hitching this same stretch of road, trying to get justice for his lost love and the injustices he suffered.