The Hatchet Wielding Hitchhiker review: Mind of an unhinged social media star

Film: The Hatchet Wielding Hitchhiker Language: English with Hindi audio option In early 2013, a 24-year-old American named Caleb Lawrence McGillvary broke the internet with a chain of events that would make bizarre seem like an understatement. Caleb, a hobo who prefers to be known as Kai, had hitched a ride around Fresno, California. He recalls the car’s driver, a six foot-plus white man weighing over 300 pounds, as claiming to be “Jesus”, on earth to deliver all people from the Blacks. The driver would ram his car into a Black man on the road hurling racist abuse, and attack a women who rushed in to help. Kai then smashed the driver’s head with his hatchet, apparently to save the woman. “Smash… smash… suh-mmash!” the mercurial Kai chants, describing his hatchet-work to a news TV reporter in a viral video. The chant would become a social media anthem for his rapidly growing fan brigade via memes and remix numbers and, dubbed the “Hitchhiking hatchet hero”, Kai, who insists being called “home-free” to homeless, would emerge America’s sweetheart — the sort of unlikely hero social media forever roots for. As Terry Woods, the news channel cameraman who captured an exclusive interview of Kai after the incident, says in the film: “If you are going to tell a story, you need a villain, you need an unlikely hero, you need an amazing scenario and you need someone in distress.” The incident, Woods, notes, “had all of that”. In a short while, Kai was invited to Jimmy Kimmel Live. The producers of Keeping Up With The Kardashians were sending feelers, too, to set up Kai with his own reality TV show. Yet, Kai’s meteoric rise was just a mid-point high in his life story, which would spiral downward from that point. He would go “from a heroic beautiful person to ‘wanted for murder’” in just about three months after being arrested for a gruesome killing, and end up an inmate at a maximum security prison in New Jersey with a jail term of 57 years. Colette Camden’s documentary feature is captivating in its narration of a true crime saga that turns on its head as it unfolds, and defines our times in many ways. For, the film does more than recount the tale of a hero who would turn a villain. Maintaining most traditional storytelling devices while setting up a classic tragedy around the life of Kai, Camden incorporates a scathing comment about social media culture as well as news television. The Hatchet Wielding Hitchhiker uses its uncanny chain of incidents to rise above genre specifics of a thriller to subtly highlight the indiscriminate frenzy that social media platforms resort to, in a rush to create stars and influencers. A person interviewed in the film rightly talks of the media and social media’s need to deliberate over who they project as a hero, of the necessity to “know who you are glorifying publicly”. The hysteria around Kai was a classic case where hero worship was built entirely around sensationalism that news TV reports built. “Did we create this celebrity and monster without doing our homework?” an interviewee rightly asks of the media. Was Kai a monster? Or was he merely an unhinged homeless man with a flamboyant personality that news television and social media recklessly accorded footage to, for the sake of trending news? “I believe Caleb has mental issues. He seems well but when it comes to certain situations of pressure, you either become a diamond or you get crushed. And, in this case, Caleb gets crushed,” says Kai’s cousin Jeremy McGillvary Wolfe in the film. Camden’s narrative avoids arriving at a straight conclusion on Kai’s state of mind, and prefers to look at him as a mire of ironies that only lets us guess his reality. He clearly loves being on the edge, is an iconoclast who doesn’t think twice before taking a leak on a sidewalk star of the Hollywood Walk Of Fame in front of The Roosevelt hotel. He urinates on a signboard of Jimmy Kimmel Live, too, moments before going into the show for a hearty chat with Kimmel himself. When journalist Jessob Reisbeck mentions he is like Batman without “a bat signal”, Kai retorts: “I’m not a filthy rich f*ck who looks down upon others either”. Yet for all his renegade attitude, he relishes the “Kai for President” trends coming his way and, asked how it feels to be a viral sensation, declares: “I’m not a virus, I’m a sensation. I’m Kai.” The conflict about Kai’s persona is written into the screenplay also in the way the world worships him after his video goes viral, and his reaction to all of it. “Everyone in the world wanted a piece of this kid,” says Reisbeck, as Hollywood and reality TV come knocking. Kai’s retort is peculiar, expectedly: “I’m going to go to the Bay area and smoke weed.” Camden ably sets up Kai as a complex man, balancing his happy-go-lucky streak with the dark and dangerous recesses of his mind. For, he is a man who can easily give away a five hundred-dollar show appearance fee to the security guard at the studio gate and yet write crude Facebook posts making horrifying claims about his childhood. With a runtime of 87 minutes, Camden prefers sticking to a particular aspect of the Kai saga. The filmmaker’s focus is on dissecting Kai as a maverick who rises to stardom from nowhere, triggering off popular imagination over those three months before his downfall. In adapting that narrative stance, Camden allots comparatively lesser footage to the criminal case that ultimately lands Kai in jail, perhaps because the case had already been widely reported. As the film ends, we leave Kai in prison, flexing his muscles in mock body-builder poses for a photo-op. He claims till the end that he had committed the grotesque murder in self-defence because he was being raped. Kai has continued with the rape allegation, although with little or no evidence, and lost an appeal against his 57-year sentencing. The jail term has given a permanent address to “home-free” Kai, as the film notes. Rating: 3.5 (out of 5 stars)

Vinayak Chakravorty is a critic, columnist and film journalist based in Delhi-NCR. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News ,  India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and Instagram