The Vanishing and American Sociopathy

A Simple Nightmare Idea

In 1988 a bizarre little Dutch thriller disconcerted enough people on both sides of the Atlantic to generate some serious word-of-mouth—so much, in fact, that its director, George Sluizer, was handed a pile of money a few years later to make an American version. About that second version, the less said the better. The first, though, earned itself a cult following not only of connoisseurs of the killer next door subgenre but also of cineasts transfixed by the intricacy of the narrative structure and the icy persuasiveness of the central performances. Both versions had the same title—The Vanishing (Spoorloos, for those of you following along in your Dutch–English dictionaries)—but the first version accomplished something that almost no other examples of that sub­genre have been able to pull off: it left audiences de­molished by their implied identification with what had taken place on-screen. Of course, all killer next door movies by definition aspire to that: there’s a little killer in all of us. Oooo: and we all give a little shiver. But until The Vanishing, no movie had so smoothly and im­placably led its audience to a glimpse of the size and casualness of its capacity for sociopathy. And it’s the casualness of that sociopathy that seems to me so reminiscent of where Americans are to­day, as our society has finally begun to register in a widespread way what our elected officials have in our name brought down on all sorts of people in all sorts of places. Having registered that, we’ve gone about our business. Many—maybe most—of us are filled with regret, or distaste, to be sure. But meanwhile those elected officials are still sitting where they were eight years ago. And what are most of us doing about it? Well, a number of us are complaining to one another. There’s been a lot of shopping.

The Vanishing spins out of an ap­pealingly simple little nightmare idea: a quasi-happy young couple, Rex and Saskia, pull into a rest stop in France on a cycling vacation. After they hang out for a little while, Saskia heads into France’s version of a Quik Mart to buy them a beer and a Coke. She never comes back.

What happened to her? Rex spends the rest of the movie trying to find out. We find out almost im­mediately, at least in terms of who did it. We don’t know, however, what he did. And of course, we want to know almost as much as Rex does.

It turns out that Raymond, placid family man and infinitely com­­fortable petit bourgeois, is be­hind her disappearance....