In writer-director Paul Schrader’s Grand Guignol of white guy shame, 1979’s Hardcore, George C. Scott is Jake VanDorn, a middle-aged small business owner from Grand Rapids, Michigan who must travel to California to rescue his teenage daughter from the porn industry. A boring and arguably pathetic man, he leaves the Midwest for the West Coast, propelled by desperation into a nightmare he could have never anticipated.Â
Jake’s mind-bending culture shock is maybe best encapsulated in one scene, early in the film, when the deeply religious man is shown an X-rated film starring his daughter. Immediately, Jake’s face becomes a throbbing knot, his torment accentuated by the projector’s flickering light. He claws at his skull, hoping to relieve the pain of his mind being torn asunder, unable to grasp how little control he has over the bleak, unforgiving vastness of the cosmos. “Turn it off!” he hollers, over and over—this is the helpless plea of an Extremely Michigan Man rendered impotent by existence. It’s very funny.
Tim Robinson looks a lot like Scott in Hardcore. A Detroit native who made his way through Second City Chicago before joining the cast of Saturday Night Live, Robinson has based much of his career around embodying Midwestern-coded nobodies constantly begging the universe to turn off. And, as the co-creator of Detroiters and I Think You Should Leave, he seems to understand the existential quandary of Extremely Michigan Men more than most.
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