The site with the pictures is what got me going. I found a bit more about her under the name Ilah Rogers. There's an incredibly long hippie site that mentions her death, but you have to wade through endless rants against Bush to get there. Don't mind that, except that the aging hippie also asks for financial donations while he's trashing the materialism of Bush. Can't have it both ways.
Since the only obits I could find for her were submitted by members of the Rainbow Family, I wonder if her birth family rejected her when she entered the Family? It doesn't sound as though the Rainbows are one of those "To join us, you must renounce your worldly goods and give everything you have to the Family" cults. In fact, they sound to me like the equivalent of Wicca (white magic, rather than black magic). They seem to be inclusive, open to anyone who will accept their principles, such as their pro-marijuana stance. I'm not here to either condemn or praise them.
Ilah seems to have found herself when she joined the loose-nit Rainbow Family. Ironically, in the film HARDCORE, the daughter seems to have found a family with Ratan. After all, when Scott finally finds her, she isn't tied up in a dungeon, but is comfortably sitting at a nightclub table with Ratan and perhaps other members of his entourage. Ratan's entourage may have become a kind of "family" for her, until Scott and Peter Boyle blow that away, literally.
Some feel that the film has a "happy" ending, but I do not. It wouldn't surprise me if the daughter, after having returned to Grand Rapids with him, eventually bolts again and ends up joining a "Rainbow Family" kind of hippie group. We'll never know, since there was no HARDCORE TWO, but the real-life Ilah Davis seems to have blazed that very trail. RIP Ilah.
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WarpedRecord
15 years ago
Excellent post, Jobla!
I think you may be on to something when you raise the issues about how Ilah was cast. Watching her scenes early in the film, it was apparent to me she wasn't a trained actress. It's entirely likely she may have been cast based on her connections to the porn industry and Paul Schrader's, uh, "research in the field." Mr. Schrader has been very open about his past vices and addictions, so this could have been where Ilah entered the picture. I'm not looking for gossip so much as an explanation about how she was discovered, and why she vanished just as suddenly afterward.
By all accounts, Mr. Schrader wasn't really pleased with this film, though, so I suspect he wouldn't care to revisit the issue of Ilah 30 years later. And of course, all this is speculation because we don't know.
It is entirely likely that Ilah was estranged from her family. Often that's the case when someone does porn or joins a commune. As for the Rainbow Family, their Web site was very hard to read both for its design and its inflammatory tone, and frankly, any group that is so polarized (be it left or right) alienates me. There is great room to follow your muse in this wide world of ours, but I don't think demonizing the opposition elevates yourself.
You are right on the mark in questioning whether the ending of this film was indeed happy. As I've said previously in other posts on this board, it wasn't clear to me why the daughter leaves home because her character is so thinly developed in the first place. But I suspect that whatever problems existed in this home would have lingered after her return. In some ways, I think Mr. Schrader wanted to create another fabled Jodie Foster-type character from "Taxi Driver" here (which to me does have a happy ending, at least for her), but in the case of "Hardcore," the ending is the equivalent of placing a band-aid on a gaping wound.
Thanks again for your thoughts and your research. We can only hope Ilah would be flattered by the interest in her. Sadly, we'll never know.
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pemory09
12 years ago
Jobla:
Many thanks for your excellent detective work here.
~pemory
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wmlopez
9 years ago
Anybody else think she looks like a young Kylie Jenner?
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