In an article you talk about “chemistry” between a man and a woman and it’s immediately a horoscope, but I’m playing the joker because we will have to give a name to what flows between Adria Arjona and Glen Powell in Hit Manthe new film by Richard Linklater which arrives in Italian cinemas on 27 June.
A film of a spurious genre, which we could define as black romantic comedy, in which Powell plays a mild-mannered philosophy professor, Gary – luckily for Linklater we live in an era in which it is not so far-fetched that a mild-mannered philosophy professor who lives with two cats and drives a Civic has the physique of a crossfit instructor of Glen Powell – who in his free time works undercover with the police posing as a hitman (Ron).
Gary turns out to be a master of disguise, infallible in leading potential instigators to incriminate themselves, until he meets Madison/Arjona, who would like to hire him to liquidate her abusive husband. He manages to dissuade her, but without giving up the role of Ron, who from a hired killer becomes a sort of dark and fascinating redeeming angel for Madison. What follows is irrepressible passion, misunderstandings, revelations, pills from Nietzsche and Freud.
“I said [a Glenn Powell, che aveva già recitato con lui in Everybody Wants Some e Apollo 10 ½, e in questo caso esordisce come co-sceneggiatore, nda] there will be sex, it will be passionate, it will be carnal, it will be desire that moves everything”, Linklater told the BBC, regarding the early stages of writing. «People say that there is no more sex in films, but in my opinion the adult dimension is missing, because in films sex equals the adult dimension».
Hit Man debuted in Venice 2023, almost a year ago, enthusing audiences and critics (I was there and I can testify that the mass of critics, usually very silent for a range of reasons ranging from ecstasy to torpor, went wild as if they had dissolved something in the lukewarm macchiato) without yet having an American distribution. It took this triumphal reception, followed by similar results in Toronto and London, for Netflix to buy it, according to Linklater without the competition exactly tearing their clothes off.
According to Linklater, the reason is an involution which he summarizes thus: «At 13 I saw films and the adult world seemed quite interesting, fun, I thought “I can’t wait to be there” (…) not just for the sex , but for the adult situations they showed (..) But at a certain point Hollywood reversed course. It’s as if they said: “We’ll make films where you can be 13 years old forever, you’ll remain a kid with kid concerns”, so I think a drift began where complexities were no longer the subject of mainstream cinema.”
Okay, these are somewhat boomer statements, and it’s not clear why mature directors always place the first call of the muses in this kind of pubertal elegies, as if art in the male was secreted through endocrine pathways. But Linklater is not one to talk nonsense, the issue he raises deserves to be taken seriously. In May there was a lot of talk about the study, commissioned by a journalist fromEconomistaccording to which sex scenes in the most successful films have decreased by as much as 40 percent from 2000 to today, but perhaps quantitative metrics do not have the reach to fully capture a real cultural landslide.
Hollywood for decades has been an agency – perhaps the main one – of emancipation, discovery and decoding of desire. The more repressed society was, the more people found models of sexual desire and behavior in films. On the big screen it is much more important (and difficult) to know how to credibly pretend to want to fuck someone than to kill them, and in fact it is on the basis of the first type of body count that cinematic glory and immortality have been distributed, since the days of Bogart and Bacall, Valentino and Garbo. Several of the genres on which Hollywood was built (it, and the Arabian Nights mansions of its producers), such as the noir of the 1950s or the erotic thriller of the 1990s, were in a certain sense complex systems of sublimation and representation of the erotic problem in their eras. Marylin said, “Hollywood is a place where they pay $1,000 for a kiss and 50 cents for your soul.”
Today this is no longer the case, the soul has greatly re-evaluated itself. The fluidity of Gen Z – which according to approval surveys they would like even less sex scenes in movies – looks a lot like a growing disinterest in sex, and this what adult magazines thoughtfully call sexual recession instead it seems to be experienced by those directly involved as an emancipation. In Barbie, like it or not, is a generational work, there is a scene in which Ken/Ryan Gosling would like to go up to Barbie/Margot Robbie’s room, but neither of them really knows what they should do next. It’s a good gag even beyond its intentions, which could reflect on a generation that doesn’t know what to do with genitals, and perhaps fantasizes about doing without them.
Not by chance Hitman moves in a territory dear to those who started going to the cinema in the nineties or early 2000s, when genres were intertwined but were distinguishable, not yet dissolved into the ubiquitous league that made the fortunes of, say, Netflix as much as the MCU. In the electricity of the exchanges between Powell and Ariona, William Hurt and Kathleen Turner find themselves in Warm shiverClooney and Jennifer Lopez locked in the trunk by Soderbergh in Out of Sightagain Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones in First I’ll marry you, then I’ll ruin youin addition of course to Brad and Angelina in Mr. and Mrs. Smith. They are films in which desire is not politicised, it is not even thematised, it is the primary force that moves the characters and above all allows the audience to enter into a relationship with them.
After a few minutes, Gary/Ron’s voiceover informs us that in reality “contract killers don’t exist”, but that doesn’t stop people, who have seen them in movies and on TV, from trying to hire one. His job, Gary explains, is therefore to “embody a fantasy”. This is the trompe l’oeil that holds together the two extremes of the film, the detective one and the romantic one: Gary/Ron choosing to redeem Maddy instead of framing her ends up embodying another “total pop culture fantasy” capable of producing very real effects in people’s lives: that of romantic, passionate, mysterious love.
It is no coincidence that this angular scene and the one in the pre-finale that resolves the conflict, when Gary and Ron definitively become the same thing, the synthesis between fantasy and reality, are the only two in which Linklater inserts direct and unequivocal references to cinema. In the first, Gary’s exposition is illustrated by a cut of scenes from hitman films, from Profession: assassin to In Bruges. In the second, which I try to refer to in spoiler-free mode, Gary “directs” Madison like a director does with an actress, appropriating her fantasy and making it somehow real.
This idea of fantasy prevailing over reality in a violent way is moreover at the basis of the very ideation of Hit Man: Gary Johnson really existed, and Linklater had read an article by Texas Monthly about him more than twenty years ago. However, he had never managed to derive a convincing idea for a film from it, until together with Powell they decided to start from an anecdote just mentioned in the newspaper – the real Johnson, in fact, dissuaded a woman from killing her husband – and develop it in the realm of fiction. It is this material triumph of the imagination that makes the ending of Hit Manperhaps the most apt and rewarding part of the film.
Evidently Hitman it is not the countercultural work that Linklater feared, or the public is less Quaker than he thought, because it remained for 10 days at number 1 of the most watched films on Netflix in the United States, the record on the platform in 2024. A triumph in streaming which, as the Los Angeles Timesincreases the regrets for the blindness of the studios who did not distribute it in theaters «sabotaging the best quality of the film: which works really well with an audience».
