After processing Deren’s frighteningly authentic vision into the female psyche, one can’t help but parallel this experience to that of gaslighting. Gaslighting is a form of manipulation within intimate relationships that causes the victim to forget their very self. The abuser holds power by contorting reality to his liking and distorting memories for his benefit. In Meshes of the Afternoon, the central figure desperately attempts to piece together her memories with three main objects: the flower, the key, and the knife. These are symbolic objects alluding to romance, privacy, and violence respectively.
Rather than display the timeline of events, Deren sequences the film in a way that permits the audience to experience the emotional turmoil behind gaslighting. This act of prioritizing emotion over rigid time structures dismisses the gendered division between emotion and logic. While mainstream film productions are subjected to the male gaze, the abstract and independent nature of avant-garde films allows for some escape. Meshes of the Afternoon explores the volatility of gaslighting through surrealism and the rejection of the male gaze.
Sumeyye Korkaya graduated from the University of Michigan with a Women’s Studies degree. She loves cultivating relationships with her sister-friends by dissecting romantic comedies, planning exclusive soirees, and blueprinting a future women’s resort.
The Hitch-Hiker
RKO Radio Pictures, 1953, USA | Black & White, 71 minutes, Thriller
Two men are held hostage by a dangerous serial killer.
Director: Ida Lupino
Producer: Collier Young
Cinematography: Nicholas Musuraca
Screenplay: Collier Young, Ida Lupino, Robert L. Joseph
Starring: Edmond O’Brien (“Roy Collins”), Frank Lovejoy (“Gil Bowen”), William Talman (“Emmett Myers”)
“Often I pretended to a cameraman to know less than I did. That way
I got more cooperation.”
—Ida Lupino
At the very beginning of The Hitch-Hiker, a short piece of text appears. Over footage indicating the murder of two newlyweds, it reads, “This is the true story of a man and a gun and a car. The gun belonged to the man. The car might have been yours—or that young couple across the aisle. What you will see in the next seventy minutes could have happened to you. For the facts are actual.”
The plot of this suspense thriller is indeed based on a true story: that of hitch-hiker William Cook, who went on a killing spree and murdered six people. It tells the story of Roy Collins (Edmond O’Brien) and Gil Bowen (Frank Lovejoy), two friends driving to Mexico for a weekend fishing trip. They hope to escape their home lives, their children, and their wives, but on the way there they make the mistake of picking up a hitch-hiker. This turns out to be Emmett Myers (William Talman), a serial killer wanted for the murder of several other people who had unknowingly picked him up. He is now attempting to flee to Mexico. With his gun pointed at them, Roy and Gil are forced to do what Myers wants. Along the way the killer abuses his power in a sadistic cat-and-mouse game.
The director responsible for The Hitch-Hiker was Ida Lupino. Shot with an all-male crew, there are virtually no female characters, no love interests, and no typically “feminine” situations in this story. The film noir genre is one that is especially associated with masculinity, typically providing a commentary on the place of men in postwar America: their losses, their sense of passivity, their distrust of authority, and how their identities are challenged on their return home. They may have escaped the trauma of war, but they now face uncertainty about what lies ahead.
The Hitch-Hiker plays with these themes of escape, passivity, identity, and uncertainty. The two friends had been planning an escape from their own lives, but now experience the uncertainty of not knowing if they will survive. They are too paralyzed by fear to react, trapped by their identities as “unheroic” men. The character of Myers represents a certain form of masculinity, relying on a gun to feel powerful. As Roy says to Myers at one point in the film, “You haven’t got a thing without a gun. Without it, you’re nothing.”
It is an incredibly tense movie, with the question of what Myers might do to these men left hanging over the entire run time. Will he kill them? Will they escape? At seventy-one minutes, The Hitch-Hiker is a taut, economical film, sparse in dialogue and completely without subplots. It features only a handful of characters and just a few locations. This ramps up the tension, keeping the focus on the three men inside the car, all driving toward an inevitable end—one way or the other.
The constant threat of violence is heightened by the enclosed space of the car, a tension Lupino maintains by using a series of tight shots centered on the faces of the men. Outside the car lies the vast, desolate landscape of the Mexican desert, but even these wide-angle shots feel constricted. She uses white-hot lighting to demonstrate just how inhospitable the terrain is, making any escape impossible. Lupino has explained her thinking in the book, The Making of The Hitch-Hiker, saying, “To heighten the film’s suspense, I shot scenes in the claustrophobic confines of the car, and to intensify the grit outside, on hot, barren expanses of the desert.”
In those rare moments when the three men stop and get out of the car, Lupino offers tantalizing glimpses of a possible escape. But as each of those ideas are thwarted, the tight close-ups return, echoing the constriction felt inside the car…until soon that is where they are, once again.
It is also a beautifully atmospheric film, shot in exquisite black-and-white by cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca. Musuraca was especially gifted at stark chiaroscuro camerawork, as demonstrated by his work on Out of the Past and The Spiral Staircase. His style involved highly contrasting the light and shadows—a signature of the film noir genre.
Notably absent from this example of film noir is the femme fatale. The villain here is Myers, portrayed in a chilling performance by William Talman. Like the real killer, William Cook, Emmett Myers has one paralyzed eye that always remains open. Roy and Gil never know when he’s asleep or awake. And the way he toys with them is disturbing—there is a scene where Myers forces Gil to shoot a can out of Roy’s hand. “It’s just a game,” he says; “What’s the matter? You scared?”
At the time The Hitch-Hiker was made, Ida Lupino was the only female director working in Hollywood. She was born into a family of entertainers in England in 1918. When she arrived in Hollywood in the early 1930s, Lupino was initially styled as a Jean Harlow-esque teenage sexpot, and she fought for years to win more substantial acting roles. But by the 1940s, with films like High Sierra with Humphrey Bogart behind her, Ida Lupino had become one of the most successful actresses around. She studied the work of the directors with whom she was paired and had her first chance to step behind the lens by accident. In the late 1940s, Lupino and her husband Collier Young had decided to set up their own production company called, “The Filmmakers.” Their goal was to make realistic movies based around social issues. The first film they produced was Not Wanted, which looked at the stigma surrounding unwed mothers. Lupino and Young had hired veteran Hollywood director Elmer Clifton to helm the picture, but when he suffered heart problems during preproduction, Ida Lupino stepped in to finish it.
From there, her directing career took off. And after making four films focused on women’s issues, she transitioned into hard-hitting, fast-paced thrillers with The Hitch-Hiker. Lupino wrote the screenplay alongside Collier Young, who by that stage had become her ex-husband, with writer Robert Joseph also doing some work on the script. For research, Lupino interviewed the real-life hostages of William Cook and was able to get permission to make the film from both the victims and from Cook himself. This allowed her to sprinkle in true facts among the fiction—though in order to appease the censors, Lupino had to cut down the body count from six to three.