52 Essentials: No. 17, The Hidden (1987)

Welcome to Maps & Legends, a project by two new parents looking forward to sharing our favorite art and culture with our new edition. Each week in this space, we'll pick a personal favorite of ours (or at least a favorite of one of us) and write about what it means to us and why we're excited to pass it down.

If it's true what they say, that kids learn first and foremost by the examples set by their parents, then the loudest and clearest lesson I got growing up was that you never let an opportunity to see a movie at the theater pass you by. My dad was the religious parent between the two, making sure we made it to church every Sunday. But my mom was the keeper of the real family ritual, getting us to the theater on time and on a regular basis. Sci-fi. Action. Horror. Those were the homilies that taught me how to understand the world and how to get by in it.

With home-popped popcorn in ziplocks tucked into an over-sized mom bag, we took up nearly an entire row of the theater, my mother, four siblings and me. We learned to respect the screen, to whisper when we spoke if we spoke at all, and to discern between high and low cinema.  We also learned the value of a good B-movie, the primo trash that flies below the radar. As Robin Williams said in Fisher King, you can find some wonderful things in the trash (particularly when you have a mom willing to stretch the definition of "age appropriate"). 

I recently picked up one of my absolute favorites of 80s trash cinema for a re-watch, one that I first saw before I turned ten and then a few dozen times more before I went to college. With the Twin Peaks revival in sight, I was inspired to revisit its cinematic prequel. And no, I'm not talking about Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. I mean the other one, The Hidden. 

So, okay, it's not actually a prequel to Twin Peaks. But check out this synopsis and tell me that it's not a spiritual cousin of Twin Peaks at least:

A string of murders committed by an unlikely suspect leads an FBI agent to arrive and take over the investigation from a local homicide detective. The agent's strange methods and offbeat personality initially puzzle the detective , but the two eventually form a strong bond. The investigation takes a bizarre turn when it's revealed that the "killer" had actually been possessed by an alien entity that jumps from body to body, and we eventually learn that the FBI agent is harboring a secret as well... 

And did I mention that the FBI agent was played by Kyle MacLachlan?

In addition to some remarkable parallels with Twin Peaks, The Hidden also shares a lot of DNA with John Carpenter's The Thing, both in style and in substance. And like any good 1980s genre film, it's thick with commentary on the crass commercial excess of that decade. Take the opening scene, which begins with security footage of a bank lobby. A man in a plain overcoat enters the frame, surveys the room, and calmly unloads a shotgun on the security guards and patrons before collecting all the money he can fit in a bag, smiling casually at the security camera, and firing one more bullet right at the audience.

There is no motive given for the robbery, nor is there any aggression, desperation or even any exhilaration on the robbers face in the course of the crime. He simply wanted money, and he had no qualms whatsoever taking out a room full of innocent people to get it.  The movie never bothers giving him any more motivation than that. He's pure id. He sees something that he wants and he takes it, without regard for the well-being of anybody or anything that gets in his way.

It's the sort of paper-thin characterization that makes so many modern blockbusters feel inert and pointless. But it works in this case because the cold single-mindedness of the killer is the entire point. The inexplicable nature of the crimes renders local law enforcement incapable of dealing with the threat until they come to terms with the sort of amoral monster they're dealing with. Well, that, and the fact that the killer is actually an alien slug who takes over human bodies and runs amok until the damage to the host body is too great. (That's kind of a spoiler, I guess, but it's a light one since it's revealed about ten minutes into the first act. Stop reading now, though, if you want to avoid the real spoilers.)

The alien slug is a literal manifestation of a rotten soul that seeks nothing but power and self-gratification, even at the expense of his own body. At the same time, though, we also see that the alien is observing the greed and avarice on display all around him and mimicking it. The real monster, as they say, is us. He may not pay for the things he steals, and he surely resorts to violence quicker than your average consumer, but his drive to consume was exactly what 80s capitalism was proscribing for everyone.

Early on, he entered the body of a man with severe gastric problems, undoubtedly from a lifetime of abusing his body with a diet high in fat, cholesterol and salt. The gluttonous meal the alien has at the diner is probably no different than the meals the human host had before the alien took over. When the alien spots a sports car out the window and immediately chases after it, that's exactly the reaction the car company is hoping for (even if they hope you won't proceed to shoot the coke-sniffing dealer to acquire their car). And in one of the film's most telling scenes, the alien sees an 80s corporate guy "shoot" at a woman passing by from his car who then gets in the car with him, and the alien immediately attempts the same move on a different woman only to be told to "fuck off." The alien, now enraged, pulls out a gun and nearly shoots the woman for real before he's distracted by another shiny object.

It's as tight and direct a commentary on male privilege and rape culture as anything I've ever seen. But it gets even better after that, as the alien eventually jumps his way into an up-and-coming politician. The lust for power that led him first to rob, murder and rape leads him finally to this chilling moment, the proverbial final straw before the hero must take drastic measures to end the alien once and for all no matter the costs:

Huh, a fat, greedy, sexually violent man with no moral compass and an insatiable appetite decides that he wants to be president no matter what it takes. Why does this now sounds so familiar?

We had no way of knowing at the time that The Hidden would essentially be a warning for future generations, a presidential biography in advance. But it's all there. The moral message of the film is clear and unequivocal. The only question for us now is who will save us from the monster in the White House. Where is our Kyle MacLachlan with a beam of pure light to save the day?

The final scene of the film plays one more trick on the audience. We knew that MacLachlan's FBI agent was also an alien, both from his quirky personality to the barely veiled comments to his homicide detective partner. So it's not a real surprise when he's also exposed as a parasite inside a human host, just like the killer they were hunting. What is a surprise, though, is that unlike that horrible slug, the alien inside the FBI agent is a being of pure light, not unlike the very weapon used to destroy the slug.

It's easy to think that the filmmakers were being simplistic here, contrasting a nasty, ugly "bad guy" with a pure, beatific "good guy." Usually, I'm put off by that sort of moral simplicity, equating goodness with beauty and badness with ugliness. But here, I think the message is a little deeper. Earlier in the movie, we're led to believe that the FBI agent and the killer are from the same planet, or at least that they're the same species. It would stand to reason, therefore, that they'd have similar "bodies." The fact that one is really a slug while the other is a beam of light could be explained away by saying that they're actually two different species entirely that just happen to inhabit other bodies.

But I don't think that's it. I think they are the same species, but that a life spent acting selfishly and acting on impulse turns you rotten on the inside (no matter what you look like on the outside), whereas an altruistic life in pursuit of the greater good makes you a truly beautiful person. It's the final rebuke of 80s greed, and it had as much to say to us then as it does today under President Trump, truly a slug of a man.

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I'm fairly certain that my mom didn't always know what she was getting us into when she took us to see all those movies. Judging from the fact that she pulled me out of the theater during the strip club scene, she maybe hadn't fully thought through taking a nine-year-old kid to an R-rated movie she hadn't seen yet herself. It's hard for me to say from my perspective, but I didn't feel damaged by all that sex and violence at the time. I knew by then that movies were too important to let something silly like a rating keep you from experiencing them. They had important lessons to teach us, after all.

Today's Mother's Day, and I could probably spend all day listing off the advantages and opportunities my mom gave me. But if I had to pick just one to be grateful for, it'd be the opportunity to see all those movies with her, in the theater with a bag of home popped popcorn. Good movies, bad movies, and above all, all of the wonderful, wonderful trash.