(20:03)

“I’ve been hearing somethin’ on the streets the last couple of weeks. Weird stuff. Some sort of epidemic of violence, is what they been saying. I was talkin’ to one old boy, he’s from, uh, San Anselmo. He told me they got some sort of cult up there. End of the world kind of stuff . . . You know, shootin’ people, robbin’ banks. Same old thing as always. Whole lot of people gone crazy over some nutty dream they just had. You want to know the truth? This kind of shit happens the end of every century. It does. It’s just people afraid to face the future, it’s all it is.”

—Drifter

A homeless denizen of Justiceville, named in the credits as “Drifter” (and fourth-billed, overall, after Nada, Frank, and Holly), has begun to distinguish himself. As with Nada, no other character calls him by this name—perhaps it seemed too telling to speak aloud, since Drifter’s special place in the film will be to make an unlikely passage from one realm to another seem as effortless as drifting with the tide.

Played by a pet actor of Carpenter’s with the marvelous name of George “Buck” Flower (beginning with 1980’s The Fog, Flower appears in five Carpenter movies), the drawlingly jaded Drifter seems more irritated than unsettled, both by the hacker’s interruptions in his television shows and by the rumors of disquiet leaching down from San Anselmo, even as he propagates them himself. With his squashed hat and Members Only jacket, he seems a bit too vain and self-possessed to read as homeless or indigent; he reads more as a no-good husband kicked out by some Roseanne Barr-ish wife, or maybe just a free-range couch potato.

Drifter’s role in the film expands stealthily. At first introduction he barely registers, partly because his muttered conspiracy-mongering is intercut with foreboding shots of the gathering assault on Justiceville: the hovering helicopter casing out the fake church, and Nada, patrolling from the hillside with a pair of borrowed binoculars, like Nick Nolte in Who’ll Stop the Rain? By the end of the sequence, evening’s creeping in, and Nada’s still watching. We feel something coming, nearer now than San Anselmo: a millennial “epidemic of violence” or collective “nutty dream,” or, maybe, some combination of the two.