I’ve been thinking about Hardcore since I watched it.

The weird thing is, I can honestly say that I disliked nearly everyone in this movie except for one character yet I am still a fan of this movie.

Director and writer Paul Schrader partly based the story on his own experience growing up in the Calvinist church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he studied theology at Calvin College. Calvinism is a Protestant faith that follows the theological tradition and forms of Christian practice set down by John Calvin and is steadfast in the belief of the sovereignty of God and the authority of the Bible.

As explained in the movie — and with help from Learn Religions — Calvin based his theology on the Bible alone. The five points that the church lives by is summarized by the world TULIP, which means T- Total Depravity, U – Unconditional Election, L – Limited Atonement, I – Irresistible Grace and P – Persistence of the Saints. In short, sin pervades all areas of life and human existence. People cannot independently choose God or save themselves. Only God can intervene and do all the work. God also chooses who will be saved. Those are the Elect, who God has selected not on merit, but out of his kindness and sovereign will. It also means that election for salvation is not based on God’s foreknowledge of who would come to faith in the future. Since some are chosen for salvation, others are not. Those not chosen are the damned to Hell for all eternity. And when Jesus died, he didn’t die for all of mankind but just foe the Elect (there are four point Calvinism that believes that Jesus did die for all men). Finally, Calvinism teaches that the Elect cannot lose their salvation.

You have to understand that or at least get your head around it to understand some of this.

Back to Pauil Schrader.

After writing Taxi Driver, he worked with executive producer John Milius at Warner Bros. until Warren Beatty came on. He clashed with Schrader, as he wanted the story to change so that he was searching for his girlfriend and not a daughter. Warren Beatty couldn’t be old.

George C. Scott could be.

He played Jake Van Dorn, a businessman from Grand Rapids, Michigan — you can spot Schrader’s childhood school and parents in these scenes — who is a Calvinist. When his daughter Kristen (lah Davis) goes missing at Knott’s Berry Farm, he gets help from Andy Mast (Peter Boyle), a private detective in Los Angeles, to find her after she’s been missing for several weeks.

Five weeks later, Mast brings him some news. Calling him Pilgrim, he has rented an adult theater to show Jake a loop of his daughter in an adult film called Slave of Love. Now calling herself Joanne, it appears that Jake has lost his little girl.

But he won’t let her go easily.

Following Mast to Los Angeles and throwing him out of the home he’s been paying for, Jake pretends that he’s a porn producer, beating everyone he finds nearly to death. Everyone except Niki (Season Hubley), a sex worker and adult star who promises to help him. Their relationship is strange. She listens intently while he discusses religion but compares it to being sold on bestiality by a client. Yet it’s intriguing that she’s the first person he can open up to about his wife leaving and she feels safe around a man that doesn’t see her just for sex. She says that he doesn’t see any need for sex so it’s not a big deal while she can have sex with anyone and it’s not a big deal, so they have something in common.

He says they have nothing in common.

By the end of the movie, Jake has gone deep into the underworld of pornography which, predictably, has snuff movies and has his daughter dating the creator of those movies. There’s a gun battle and Jake finds his daughter who tells her she did everything on her own and no one forced her to do anything. She refuses to go home with him and he breaks down, which changes her mind. I found the end of this movie really artificial in that she gives in so easily. No one has learned anything, as Jake had to basically beat Niki to get what he wanted from her. But he’s saved. She won’t ever be.

I was mad, at the end, because she felt like he would be the person to take her away from all this. There’s a look between them and she’s smarter than anyone else in the film. She realizes she’s been lied to again, lied to by religion that she almost believed in and she walks away. Jake wonders if there was some way he could pay her. But if he got his daughter back, he lost the faith of perhaps the one honest person in this entire film.

Also, her Rorer 714 shirt is incredible.

The story originally had Scott’s character discover that his daughter has been killed in a totally unrelated car crash. He feels like this choice messed up the ending.

This is one of those movies that exposes porn and yet has no idea what the industry is. Marilyn Chambers auditioned and the casting director said she was too wholesome to be cast as a porn queen. 99 44/100% pure, right? They were looking for something fake, not the reality of what existed.

Speaking of real life, George C. Scott and Schrader did not get along, so much that at one point Scott refused to come out of his trailer and threatened to quit the film. Scott told Schrader that he was a good writer, a terrible director and “this movie is a piece of shit.” Supposedly, he only agreed to come out after forcing Schrader to promise that he would never direct again.

The first meeting between the director and his star should have let him know what he was in for. Scott never showed up but he was found in a bar. Schrader said, “George came out, and he was just wearing his undershorts, and he saw me in the distance and says “Where’s that cocksucker who thinks he can direct?” At which point I said “That would be me George.””

The Kino Lorber blu ray release of this movie has two commentaries, one by director and writer Paul Schrader and the other by film historians Eddy Friedfeld, Lee Pfeiffer and Paul Scrabo. You can get it from Kino Lorber.