The philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote that in a state of nature the life of man would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Unlike Rousseau, who felt that man in his natural state was noble and that society was to blame for his ills, Hobbes believed that human nature, left unchecked, would result in a lawless world, every man for himself. This was how Hobbes saw America in the seventeenth century.
Hobbes believed in the creation and preservation of a lawful society, one dedicated to establishing the safety and security of peoples. If man, left to his own natural primitive devices, is vainglorious (and vicious), a sovereign authority is necessary to police him. How else to react to sociopathic behavior?
As one who has often pondered the question of the malcontent individual’s place in an enlightened society, I maintain that 1985’s The Boys Next Door, an independent cult classic, is a movie that is worth a fresh look for the light it throws on the problem that boys in America face -- and the problems they create.
The Boys Next Door is a Hobbesian parable. It emphasizes that hostile individuals are among us, acting upon their homicidal tendencies whether because of greed, out of frustration, or on a random impulse. Society requires a capable police department, composed of officers that protect innocent people from predators.
Penelope Spheeris directed The Boys Next Door, one of her first films, starring a young Charlie Sheen and Maxwell Caulfield as Bo Richards and Roy Alston, two high school graduates-turned spree murderers in mid-1980s Los Angeles.
The opening credits display dossier photographs of notorious serial killers and mass murderers accompanied by voiceovers emphasizing the seeming “normality” of the killers, and how well they blend into society. This throws the concept of "normality" into question. Is the psychopath "a natural-born killer" or has the social system helped transmogrify him? No doubt there has been a decline in social norms and moral standards. It is nevertheless the individual who must bear full responsibility for his behavior.
The Boys Next Door has a loud heavy-metal soundtrack playing throughout, as well as quick cinematography. The camera angles are widely and intensely shot. This speaks to how rapidly events are spiraling out of control, and the escalating ugliness of the boys’ violent behavior.
Bo and Roy’s grand ambitions are incompatible with the hard-pressed reality of the future they face. As the trailer’s narrator says, “they’re trapped, and they don’t fit in.” The boys come from dysfunctional families. They are destined to stay in their small town, working at menial jobs, and perhaps raising dysfunctional families of their own. The narrator asks the rhetorical question, “What happens when there is no way out?” What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object?
The film begins with a typical high school prank. Roy traces a chalk outline of Bo on the pavement outside the school, and then the next morning the boys watch in awe as the other students mill about, speculating about what kind of “crime” could have occurred. A female student carries a book with the initials “JFK” on the cover. It is possible that the naming of the school after John F. Kennedy signifies the slow decline of Kennedy-style idealism (“Ask what you can do for your country”) that once prevailed in the national sentiment. The New Frontier has died, and in its place are two violent members of Generation X, who exist in order to wreak havoc on their country.
The bald, bow-tie wearing teacher congratulates the graduating class by speaking of what bright futures they have ahead of them. "You have got a unique opportunity to ride the crest of the third wave,” he says. Roy and Bo just roll their eyes, and make ‘jerking off’ motions; they know their futures are bleak. After class, Roy scoffs, “What the fuck does he know about humanity? What the fuck does he know about anything?” As far as the boys are concerned, they are too cool for school if only because school has nothing to do with "humanity." They radiate disdain. It doesn’t help them that the other students despise them back.
Roy considers joining the marines. This would be a healthy outlet for his pent-up rage. But the potential recruiter notes politely that Roy “doesn’t seem interested in the corps, he’s just curious.” After Roy asks, “have you ever killed anyone?” The officer sees the eager expression in Roy's eyes and understands that Roy isn't interested in the ideals the corps stands for. The marines, who consider themselves the most disciplined and honorable of people, would be an unsuitable option for a budding psychopath.
As they begin their odyssey to Los Angeles, the guys stop outside the factory where they are designated to begin working on Monday. Roy laments: “We’ll run the drill press the rest of our lives.” Bo answers: “It could be worse. We could have no jobs at all.” Both agree: “Either way we’re screwed.”
Although these teenage slackers have probably never heard of Thomas Hobbes, they hold fantasies of living in a Hobbes-defined state of nature. “I mean wouldn’t it be great, if the government declared an official ‘caveman’ day,” Bo says, “I mean you could just knock girls over the head, drag them back to your house, and just completely drill their socks off. You could do anything. You could throw rocks at people. Run around naked. Take a shit, in the middle of the street. Just be totally prehistoric.” Imagine a seventeenth-century America, in which there is no law and order and Bo and Roy can find themselves at home, unrestrained in their appetite for mayhem.
While their small California hometown is almost entirely racially homogeneous, Los Angeles captivates the boys with its multiethnic diversity. In one sense, they are like fish out of water, but somehow they feel right at home in the weirdness of Hollywood. Here, with relative anonymity, they can act without any impulse control or self-restraint. Their roster of victims represents a cross section of different racial and social subsets. One man they viciously beat is an Iranian gas station attendant. They throw a beer bottle at the head of an old woman who is complaining about the Rastafarians smoking dope on the beach in front of all the young people – an act that represents the assassination of a conservative-minded older generation. They murder a homosexual young urban professional, a WASPish-looking teenage couple, and a flighty female astrology buff.
That Bo and Roy do aspire beyond the drudgery they seem to be destined for is reflected in a scene where Bo stands over the beach, reciting lines from Edgar Allen Poe's poem “Annabel Lee.” The moment is spoiled when the cruder Roy abruptly cuts Bo off from this recitation, telling him to shut the fuck up. He has no patience for great poetry.
The boys are not entirely unaware of their inner demons. Roy confidentially tells Bo that he has a fury inside him that makes him want to kill people, but he hasn’t had the opportunity to act on his impulses until now. Roy justifies his desire to kill by saying after the gunshot murder of a teenaged couple in their convertible, “I gave her two seconds of pain. Girls like that would have given us eighteen years of pain.” Roy is the dominant partner, while Bo is submissive to his rage. Where Roy commits the physical attacks of maiming and killing, Bo makes half-hearted attempts to dissuade Roy from continuing his endless crusade of wanton destruction. He appears genuinely conflicted about the murders of women and girls, to whom he is attracted, and his dependence on keeping Roy’s friendship. In the eyes of the law, of course, both are equally guilty.
After the thugs’ attack on the Middle Eastern gas station attendant, a phony witness comes forward to claim that the crime was perpetrated by two blacks and a Mexican. The falsity of this statement underscores the discrepancy between people’s assumptions of who are responsible for committing crimes and the reality. It would be convenient to suppose that only minorities are violent people, not Caucasian American kids.
In the aftermath of this attack the two detectives from the LAPD’s robbery-homicide bureau enter the picture. The elder is grizzled veteran Detective Ed Hanley (Hank Garrett), who expresses profound disgust at the wanton cruelty inflicted upon the Iranian, and for what? A dispute over a lousy two dollars (“un-fucking believable”). “I can’t calm down. I feel so fucking useless”, says Mark Woods (Christopher McDonald), the younger detective. So affected is he by the escalating body count that, after the shooting deaths of the teenaged couple in the convertible, he equates the criminal situation with an epidemic. Unlike cops as depicted in some currently popular narratives, these detectives exhibit the futility of their own rage as well as compassion for the victims. Following the murder of a homosexual accountant whom Bo and Roy follow home from a bar, Hanley pushes a bigoted colleague up against the wall, snarling that he “has a mouth like a toilet!”
The killing of Chris, the doomed gay yuppie, signals that Roy might be repressing homosexual impulses himself. Bo and Roy had naively entered a gin mill, not realizing that it was a gay bar. When Chris invites Bo and Roy up to his apartment, Roy, panic-stricken, beats Chris and throws him through a glass table. The deadly duo then steal Chris’s 38 caliber pistol and they use it to fire a fatal shot into Chris. Now that they are armed as well as dangerous, Roy’s bloodlust and Bo’s acquiescence to that bloodlust are fully awakened.
The rage that drives Roy’s madness reaches its apex in the final homicide, when he reaches out and grabs a young astrology aficionado named Angie in the middle of her lovemaking session with Bo. Over Bo’s protests, Roy beats Angie and breaks her neck, yelling at Bo, “you fucked that?!!!” It is as though Angie’s and Bo’s intimacy had unwittingly exposed Roy’s latent homosexual attraction to his best friend, and he cannot tolerate letting any woman coming between them.
In the last killing, Bo finally takes a shot with the stolen 38. Ironically or fittingly, Roy is the victim. In the aftermath of a grueling police car chase and then a chaotic foot pursuit through a closed shopping mall, Bo turns the gun on his accomplice, saying “you’re my best friend, Roy.” The frozen look on Roy’s face is one of sheer disbelief, and then instant death: “two seconds of pain, Roy,” is what Bo mutters before Detectives Hanley and Woods, and a phalanx of uniformed officers and mall security guards surround Bo.
“Why did you kill your friend?” Woods barks at Bo as he is taken into custody.
Bo answers hesitantly “because I had to.” But we think of what Roy had said earlier about "two seconds of pain" as a release from "eighteen years" of suffering.
Perhaps, then, Bo’s releasing Roy’s demonic spirit from his body is a merciful gesture. Everything comes full circle when the police trace a chalk outline around Roy’s now-deceased body, an echo of the the prank he and Bo commit in the opening scene. What a hell of a way to spend the weekend.
Stephen Dunn passed away in June of this year. He was 82 and had suffered from Parkinson's. An exquisite and life-affirming Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, he took the ordinary and made it extraordinary. He moved silence to new depths of sound. He touched the untouchable and handed us the treasure of what can be discovered in all that's buried between us; within us; in all that we have. -- Howard Altmann
