"hippie values." Critic and biographer Michael Doyle describes the film as a "haunting elegy" for the failures of the hippie movement. Doyle elaborates that the film "isolates and illuminates the death and corruption of counterculture values" from the era, and anticipates the "festering paranoia" that occurred throughout the 1970s, with the Watergate scandal, the assassinations of Harvey Milk and George Moscone, and the Jonestown massacre. Director John Hancock, though ambivalent about whether it was consciously or subconsciously integrated into the screenplay, has conceded this interpretation, commenting: "You could already feel that negativity brewing when we were making "Jessica"; that things weren't working out the way some of us had hoped and dreamed they would."