A River's Edge

This film is an incredibly convincing and dark alternative to 1980's suburban films like pretty in pink or the breakfast club. It's characters all fall prey to a vicious brand of nihilism peculiar to Reagan era cold war culture, a nihilism that very well might be the logical extreme of other rebellious adolescent sentiments. The youngsters' indifference to the death of their friend, their partially developed sense of remorse comes not from the event but from an incapacity to feel bad about it. They admit that the only aspect of life which holds their attention is drug use, an unsurprising conclusion to a psychological story whose premise is the death of the Real. Unlike their playful cultural equivalents (whose commitment to shirking social expectation is never tested in quite the same extreme), these people discover that violence is the only manner in which contact with the Real can be restored. The psychoanalytic content continues with the series of obsessive pygmalionisms--the child to doll, the adult to sex doll, the teen to girlfriend. If the grand apocalyptic threat of nuclear holocaust leads to nihilism, then the nihilism in turn yields to desperate attempts at generating meaning. This is to say nothing of what seems to be a scathing social critique of loveless and mismanaged middle class households, that infamously american hotbed of repression and the unlikely birthplace of protagonistic valor.

River's Edge