BENS⌖N

before we begin, a brief warning for mentions of suicidal ideation (canon-typical benson thought patterns) and my little moon face in a couple of the photos! and a disclaimer: as a tourist in a town notoriously overrun with tourists, i really wanted to be respectful driving through people's very real neighborhoods and visiting their very real homes and places of business. for that reason i didn't take any photos of benson's or ms. beard's houses, and i did my best to keep bystanders out of frame anytime i did take pictures. you can check out the street view of all these places on google maps if you want a closer look! i've linked all the locations we visited so you can check them out yourself.

something really remarkable about the passenger is its pervasive sense of place. the film does a fantastic job of creating this bleak, empty atmosphere of isolation and suffocation. and by and large in fandom we all sort of accept that whether randy and benson live in chalmette or kutzberg or some other real or imagined southern small town, this place ultimately represents anytown, USA, where that sort of thing doesn't happen. and if it did happen, and it happened to you, then it was probably your fault.

in visiting these locations in person, i found a lot of rich conceptual ground in the space between the setting created in the film and these same places as they exist in reality. as i rode in the passenger's seat through the suburbs of new orleans, i saw firsthand the contrast of development and decay in a part of the country where the constant cycle of creation and destruction is a way of life. whether you take the greater new orleans area as the canonical location of the movie or not, there's no denying it's an incredibly fitting backdrop for a story about stagnation, and change, and just trying to survive in spite of it all.

and make no mistake--i might write like this is big serious, but i haven't felt this particular brand of fandom euphoria since i was a teenager on the playground in shitty cosplay. this was so fun. i bumped my ranson playlist and wore my most sleeveless tee and had a wonderful time.

so without further ado....

stop #1: benson's house (& ms. beard's) in gretna

nowhere is the disconnect between the setting of the passenger in film and the setting in real life as dramatic as it is in this neighborhood. when randy & benson visit benson's house, the overall impression is one of insidious neglect. the porch is messy, the yard is a little overgrown. there's an obvious bare patch with a ramp over the curb where a car has probably been parked for a long time. the house is small and pale and unassuming from the street, dim and dated inside.

by contrast, ms. beard's house is fairy-tale adorable. at a glance it looks much larger than benson's, brightly colored, with neat little details on the windows and a well-kept lawn. all that's missing is the white picket fence (there is a black wrought iron one, though). in my head i always pictured it closer to the center of town than benson's house, somewhere bystanders might see and admire it.

in actuality, ms. beard's house is on the same street as benson's, only five houses down. the neighborhood as a whole is maybe a five-minute drive from downtown new orleans. in the film, you can see the crescent city connection bridge leaving the city, crossing over the mississippi river and the neighborhood about three blocks north of benson's house. gretna isn't just a suburb of new orleans--it's barely outside its boundaries, and monroe street itself is less than 300 yards from the banks of the mississippi. the homes here are built on visible raised foundations to prevent flood damage.

benson's house, and the others around it of the same style, are much larger than they appear from the front. the lots are much deeper than they are wide, so the houses extend far back from the street and there is very little space between homes. it was evident that people are probably pretty well acquainted with their neighbors through proximity if nothing else. in fact, part of the reason i opted not to take a bunch of pictures here was because there was a gaggle of people hanging out right where benson parks his car.

rest assured, ms. beard's house looks absolutely identical in person. the lawn is neat and green, a line of rosebushes in the front flowerbed. benson's house has been repainted--it's blue now! the yard was quite neatly kept, the porch clean, and there was a black cat lounging in the alley. the tree just beside the house looks to my untrained eye to be a southern live oak. they can be found all over new orleans and the south in general, sprawling and beautiful. it's quite a bit more overgrown than it was at the time of filming.

within a single-block radius, there is a laundromat, a corner grocery store, two churches, and a bar, but unfortunately there is no swath of woods in which to practice your aim with a shotgun. there's also a black funeral home and the mcdonoghville cemetery very nearby, which was historically a cemetery for enslaved and formerly enslaved people and is still in operation today.

imagine for a moment that we pluck benson out of his peaceful redneck existence on the edge of town and instead we set him in a metropolitan area with a population of about one million. his quiet desperation and terminal misanthropy take on a particular sort of bitterness when paired with the notion that support and connection could be so physically close and still completely out of his reach. that all the freedom and opportunity* of the city could be so near and yet so unattainably far. all those people, and he still finds himself completely and utterly alone. all those people, and not a single one took notice of the way he withered and withdrew in the third grade.

furthermore, consider the draw of that bridge looming over the house. the pull of the river just out of sight on the other side of the street. the mississippi reaches a depth of 200 feet when it hits new orleans. it is notoriously treacherous, full of debris and unpredictable eddies and undertows. how easy would it be to leave everything behind, to walk into the cold current and simply disappear?

on a sunnier note, if we grant the two houses in question factual proximity, consider the concept that ms. beard--living antithesis of the teacher who shaped benson's childhood, unwitting catalyst for all of randy's deep and abiding neuroses--might perhaps be a part of benson's very own neighborhood community. that she walks crisco around the block and smiles when she sees the yellow chrysler parked on the street. that she and tessa drop off cookies on the porch around christmas because no one ever answers when they knock on the door. that when they wheedle her address out of the secretary at the school, benson does a double-take because that's patricia beard? the monochromatic lady with the dust mop dog who lives in the gingerbread house at the end of the block? no fucking way. small world, if not a small town.

*it's worth mentioning that 2010 data from the census bureau lists the median household income in gretna as $36,065 at the time. based on the 2024 american community survey, over a quarter of the city's population currently falls below the poverty line. louisiana as a whole has the highest poverty rate in the united states. all the opportunity in the world is meaningless if you can't afford it.

stop #2: the mall in gretna

in the film, quite literally every storefront in focus is vacant. so is the parking lot. the beloved animal fun-stuff workshop is the only functional location we see. there are exactly two extras in the mall hallways. the entire establishment is little more than the dead, empty husk of a commercial beehive. coupled with the rest of the setting, it compounds the sense of minimum-wage misery that pervades so much of the movie. if we take for granted that randy & benson live in a small town, i always wondered how far outside of that town the mall might be. close enough to be worth the drive, and far enough from any larger population centers to be going out of business wholesale.

there's much less to extrapolate upon here because quite frankly, the real-life oakwood center is every inch the platonic (bensonic?) ideal of a mall: a giant, glittering, air-conditioned asshole. it is also located in gretna, only a couple of miles from benson's house on monroe street. it will have been in operation for 60 years this may.

all things considered, it seemed to be doing fine economically--we saw only one vacant storefront and there was even a new store set to open within a couple weeks. in classic fashion, the itty bitty food court was crawling with teenagers. the mall, like all malls these days, was a far cry from a bustling commercial hub, but the parking lot in front of the main entrance was quite full. by contrast, the parking lot on the southeast side where randy's confessional scene was filmed was almost as devoid of life in person as it is in the movie.

please note: that handicap parking sign right in front of the building is still just as crooked. the doors benson & randy exit from lead directly into a jcpenney. they were both locked, which gave the hilarious first impression of the mall being fully shut down at 3 PM on a tuesday. i had initially assumed that the jcpenney sign was digitally removed from the outside of the building in post-production, and this may still be the case, but funny enough, i discovered that jcpenney actually reopened their location here in june of 2022. being that this was just a couple months after the passenger wrapped filming, it's possible the sign wasn't even installed at the time.

the animal fun-stuff workshop is not a real store, and we had no success piecing together which storefront they might've used for it given the lack of context clues in the film. funny enough, the mall does not have a build-a-bear at all, knockoff or otherwise. they do, however, host a spring carnival in the parking lot for a week or so every year. we actually saw the big portable rides all packed up in the far corner of the lot, as the carnival ended the weekend before we got into town. from what i can tell, in 2022 the carnival started up just two days after filming ended.

it was the wrong season for mall santa and we just missed the easter bunny, but we did get soft pretzels at the food court before we left (this is your sign to go read stocking stuffers by @rabidheartt on ao3). they were every bit as soggy with butter as you'd hope.

detour⚠️

we interrupt your idyllic trip through the suburbs of new orleans to inform you that the next three stops on our tour are on the east bank of the mississippi river, which we unexpectedly had to cross by ferry!

there are two ferries on this section of the river, but the lower algiers-chalmette ferry just seven minutes from randy's house is currently nonoperational due to issues with the chalmette ferry bridge. we got to take a detour down to the belle chasse-scarsdale ferry instead, wait nearly an hour for the next crossing, and take a little trip across the mighty mississippi to get to bbb, the elementary school, and randy's house.

consider, if you will, benson making a portion of his daily commute via ferry. sitting half-asleep in the long line of cars waiting to board, missing the 7:30 crossing by a mere two cars' capacity, and having to sit and wait for an additional 30-60 minutes to get across. and then bradley's not even working and he has to deal with chris. i'd kill someone too.

stop #3: burgers burgers burgers in braithwaite

our ferry detour was pretty kismet, actually, because the gas-station-turned-restaurant that is burgers burgers burgers is in reality a gas station and convenience store called the ferry stop, and it is quite literally across the street from the scarsdale ferry dock. it was shockingly busy, so my photo-taking reflects my attempts to avoid snapping candids of regular folks just buying snacks.

i find bbb as a setting so captivating. the restaurant feels shoehorned into what was obviously originally a gas station which, if the wide-angle shot during the opening credits is to give us any indication, is set smack dab in the middle of nowhere. it's such a garish embodiment of the hell that is minimum wage food service: it's painfully small, bathed in fluorescence, parasitic in the way it insists upon its own existence.

we're compelled to ask ourselves who even eats here? who is making their way down those long two-lane roads just to get their curly fry fix? almost nobody, if we are to judge by the general behavior of the staff. the concept of running out the clock with few customers and far too many sex-crazed coworkers in what amounts to a backwoods burger king is nightmarish. it's an environment designed to foster discontent and stagnation, the exact sort of place you'd expect to hear described in a true crime podcast about small town killing sprees.

in actuality, the location is not nearly so isolated. in the wide shot of the area, the road splitting off in the lower right is the exit road coming directly off the ferry dock. the outside of the ferry stop is still quite similar to the way it looks in the film: same gas pump out front (which does work, by the way), same empty sign frame sitting on the corner. the debris* in the woods to the south is even still there, albeit a little worse for wear in the four years since filming, slid down almost out of sight in the brush. the palm tree to the right beside randy's car has since toppled into the undergrowth. the road benson tears down when they leave the scene is louisiana highway 39, which you can follow almost directly to the elementary school about seven miles down the road.

the outside may be the same, but the inside is jarringly different. the yellow and orange are gone. the cinder block is an off-putting shade of tan, the trim is dark blue, and the entire exposed ceiling is painted a heavy black. the combined effect makes the space feel even smaller and darker than it seems in the film. the laminate flooring has been stripped away to concrete. almost all of the booths have been removed and the dining floor has been converted back to a gas station, with aisles of snacks and drink fridges along the far wall. the restaurant counter is still there and still operational, although instead of burgers, it's a pizza place now--the entire place reeked of fast food pie. two of the original booths were still affixed to the floor over by the window where chris pulls up.

strangely, the door leading to the back where the stockroom, the walk-in, and hardy's office are located was...gone. the main area of the gas station certainly looked and felt to be the same size as the dining floor in the film, so i can only assume it was boarded up in the remodel. however, the door we see in the center of the wall as benson & randy are cleaning was still extant and accessible. behind it there was an entire other section of the building that looked to be set up as a separate restaurant (the side door proclaimed it the ferry stop diner, but it was completely empty and unstaffed).

this is where all the booths had been relocated! this is also where the restroom was tucked away. the restroom was, in short, everything you would expect the restroom at bbb to be: terrifying, barely lit, with a no smoking sign on the painted plywood wall and no soap in the dispenser. i could not square this part of the building with anything in the film. i don't believe they used it for any visible part of the set, although i do wonder if the backrooms of bbb are somehow accessible through this area. i did not snoop around to find out.

i think it's obvious that canon events would have unfolded in a dramatically different fashion, if they unfolded at all, had bbb born any resemblance to the real ferry stop. customers were in and out constantly, the ferry runs from 5 AM to 10:15 PM daily, and the building in its entirety was so much larger than bbb appears to be. that being said, the sweaty, greasy, poorly lit misery of shift work was ingrained in the concrete floor of that place. they didn't have to work hard to conjure that up.

*the debris in question is what remains of a small shack of a house that stood on that exact spot from at least 2008 up until its complete structural collapse sometime between november 2018 and february 2021. the wreckage of the house has remained undisturbed in that place and been slowly subsumed into the undergrowth ever since.

stop #4: bill snyder elementary school in poydras

this is a weird one. randy's elementary school, where ms. beard is still employed (or re-employed, rather) is named bill snyder elementary in the film. the story unfolds on a saturday, so the school is all but abandoned, devoid of kids, only open to host a few devoted administrators. for all intents and purposes, both inside and out, the school seems to be pretty standard in terms of condition, cleanliness, layout, and so on.

in reality, the building appears to be the j.f. gauthier elementary school, based on the name over the front door. however, the real j.f. gauthier elementary school is located two miles east--a completely different building with a completely different street address. this school has been in operation at least since 2005, based on municipal records cataloguing remodels to the building due to damage from hurricane katrina. the school in the film, however, does not even a street address listed on google maps.

the historical google maps image of the school from may of 2011 shows a parking lot full of cars and several children in school uniforms playing on the playground. i was also able to find a 2026 assessment listing* naming the st. bernard parish school board as the owner of the entire property since 1963. the property in question encompasses not only the school building but the nearby kennilworth gym and kennilworth field as well. both of the latter have official street addresses and are regularly in use by the community. i sifted through parish records, the local news, the school board website, the elementary school facebook page, and more. i turned up no information about when or why this building ceased to be j.f. gauthier elementary, and no information about what it might be now, besides abandoned.

this little municipal mystery makes the school feel far more sinister to me as a setting. it's not a real school. it has all the appearances of one--there are multiple playgrounds, there was even a school bus in the parking lot when i visited--but there are no students, no teachers, no records. it is a vacancy in the shape of something familiar. that same unsettling feeling hangs over randy & benson's visit. the fact that there are no children in a place meant specifically for them, the fact that the hallways are dark and silent, the fact that the building is open at all on the weekend and that the only inhabitants are the secretary and sheppard, of all people, is disconcerting at first and outright upsetting by the end of the scene.

for an apparently abandoned building, it is in relatively excellent condition. the windows are unbroken and unboarded. the grounds are far from unkempt. it sits squat and clown-colored in the literal center of an unassuming neighborhood, surrounded on all sides by houses facing inwards. it still proclaims the name that doesn't belong to it anymore. as we turned the same corner benson turns in the chrysler, radiohead's creep was playing. we didn't stay long.

*an assessment is when the fair market value of a piece of real estate is determined for tax purposes. the 2026 assessed value of the j.f. gauthier elementary property in its entirety, including the school, the gym, and the field, was $40,000. the market value, or the amount that the assessor believes the property could actually be sold for, was $400,000. the property as a whole encompasses roughly ten acres of land.

stop #5: randy's house in chalmette

i have often wondered about the economic status of the bradley household. something about the way randy's mother speaks on the phone conjures up images of a textbook upper-middle-class nuclear family: four seats around the dinner table, mrs. bradley with her hair done, hayley in costume for an evening dance recital, mr. bradley still in his white collar work clothes. and randy, in a polo shirt or his undershirt from his shift, caught somewhere between kid and adult, the fledgling who never left the nest.

but as we see in the movie, the bradleys live awfully close to the refinery. the car randy drives is not new or particularly nice (it's a 1994 ford mustang, in fact--thank you @zombielink5). we don't learn a thing about randy's father. for all we know, he may not even be in the picture. something i haven't often considered is the possibility that randy lives at home and works his minimum-wage job because he's helping to support his family. college may not be an option no matter how functional his brain is. bbb might've been his only prospect for a paycheck. it's easy to slip into a benson mentality and fault randy for letting his life pass him by, when in fact that may not be by choice.

chalmette is one of several small census-designated places on this stretch of the east bank of the mississippi. the experience of driving through this area was markedly different than wending our way through gretna. the west bank is decidedly more urban and suburban, with houses tightly packed in gridline neighborhoods and a relatively consistent and visible wealth distribution. the roads were frequently atrocious, uneven and riddled with potholes. i cannot imagine the havoc they might wreak on a classic car with low clearance.

the east bank, on the other hand, is far more rural. there were stretches of forest and ample pastureland with cattle. a mix of apartment buildings and small brick homes in dense neighborhoods gave way without warning to sprawling green lots boasting huge new single-family houses.

randy's house is not one of those. in fact, randy's house is so close to the valero meraux refinery that his backyard is practically the parking lot. or it would be, anyway, if his house was still there. that's right--the squat little gray brick* single-level home has been demolished, with nothing left behind but the concrete slab that used to lead into the driveway. not even a shadow of the foundation remains.

i was able to turn up a property record showing the sale of the home in february of 2023 to the valero energy corporation. historical google maps data shows that randy's street used to be filled with houses, a scant 15 feet between them much like benson's neighborhood. however, take a stroll down despaux drive today, and you will find that only three homes remain on the refinery side of the street, with broad empty stretches of bright green lawn between them. the entire neighborhood is disappearing, one house after another. eventually, i would imagine, the valero energy corporation will have bought and demolished every last one of them to make room for expansion.

the view from what would've been randy's front yard--or perhaps his bedroom if you, like me, like to picture his twin bed tucked behind the window on the far left--is a lovely one, unimpeded by the houses that no longer exist across the street. there are tall, beautiful trees. the grass is lush and dotted with clover. there are eastern gray squirrels in abundance and a playground within walking distance. it's easy to imagine big brother randy taking hayley to the park, walking her carefully around the block at first and then eventually cutting right across the grass and the empty streets once the neighbors are gone.

there is something poignant about this neighborhood's slow, firm fade from existence at the hands of a great big fossil fuel factory. something thematic about the idea of trying to keep your head down and make your way in the world in spite of the inevitable future looming on the horizon. something about knowing that you are not strong enough to be one of the holdouts in the face of change, that it is only a matter of time before you give up and give in, and that when you are gone, barely a trace of you will remain.

in short, of course randy's neighborhood is disappearing piece by piece. if he had his way, he'd probably prefer to disappear along with it.

*if you look closely in the film, you can just make out an X spray-painted on the front of randy's house between the center and the right windows. this is a FEMA urban search and rescue marking, also known as an X-code, left behind after hurricane katrina in 2005. the top quadrant lists the time or date the search & rescue team left the structure (9-15). the left quadrant is the search team's identifier tag (IL). the right quadrant indicates hazards present inside, if any (none). the bottom quadrant indicates the number of survivors and decedents found inside, typically listed in that order (0, meaning none of either). in the wake of katrina, the X-code has become a cultural touchstone in the greater new orleans area, so much so that it has been nicknamed the katrina cross. it is a symbol of collective trauma, abandonment, survival, and resilience.

stop #6: the kutzberg diner in harahan

contrary to the fact that we find ourselves at the diner twice in the course of the movie, it is nowhere near the rest of the filming locations. we were unable to squeeze it in the same day as the others, so it was our final stop of the trip on our way to the airport.

randy refers to it as the kutzberg diner off route 100 in his 911 call, although there is no town called kutzberg in louisiana and state route 100 is 150 miles away in acadia parish. the interior is quaint, the classic all-american diner with a unique flair. there are booths as well as bar seating and a glass case full of pastries. we don't get much of a view of the diner's surroundings beyond a house or two visible across the street and a green-tarped construction fence on the far end of the parking lot.

as far as i can determine, the building was home to a local chain diner & donut shop called tastee restaurant until 2021. their menu does not feature a western omelet, and unfortunately their omelets come with toast, not hashbrowns.

around the time of filming, the building appeared to be vacant and up for lease. you can actually see the little christmas decoration set dressing still hanging on the door in may of 2022! it seems like the white and pink stripes on the exterior building were added in post-production, as that exterior wall is and has only ever been pink. the striking purple neon lighting was added temporarily for the movie as well.

today there is a different donut shop here called tasty cream donuts. the bar seating has been removed entirely and the booths have been repainted bright red. a stack of newspapers sat on the corner of the counter. the pastry case is full of donuts. tasty cream has been here since late 2023, but during our visit there were disassembled cardboard boxes and stacks of storage crates and drinks taking up an entire wing of the store.

the building is located right beside the humming jefferson highway with an advertising bench out front. to the west is a state farm, to the east is a chase bank, and to the north, hidden by the fence in the film, is the harahan branch of the jefferson parish library. the parking lot is patched and shabby, flanking the building on two sides. it is an utterly nondescript, commercially bland location with a catholic church kitty-corner across the street. quite frankly, it is a miserable place to die.

to my deep and abiding regret, because we were in a rush i didn't get to recreate a noncommittal 911 call in the bathroom. we did, however, get a couple donuts and a delicious boudin kolache*. the cashier also gave us a pair of complimentary donut holes in the spirit of lagniappe, a louisiana custom of merchants giving patrons "a little something extra." the opportunity to see all these places in person was absolutely the cherry on top of my first trip to new orleans, but the donut holes were very good too.

*boudin is a type of sausage common in many cultures with a french colonial influence. in louisiana it consists of a pork casing stuffed with meat, rice, veggies, and spices. a kolache is a czech pastry with fluffy dough around some type of filling. they're usually sweet, but they can be savory too!

a few final notes

i hope you enjoyed this secondhand behind-the-scenes tour of the setting of the passenger even half as much as i enjoyed putting it together. and i hope this is maybe a useful guide for those who are as obsessive about setting as i am! i love this movie so very much and it was such a dream to get to see it all in person.

there was one more filming location we weren't able to make it to, as it was well outside the city in the opposite direction of all our other excursions: the gas station where benson threatens the cashier and randy decides not to make a break for it. funny enough, this is a valero station.

the story is set in january, but filming took place in late march/early april and i visited in midapril myself. the weather was clear and the humidity was bearable while we were there but it was pretty warm, with temperatures in the high 70s and low 80s during the day (24-28° C). i don't envy either kyle or johnny running around in a sweater & a trenchcoat in a sticky 77° F, and i really don't know how closeted curly girl johnny berchtold didn't look like a poodle in that humidity.

there are, of course, american alligators everywhere (alligators, not crocodiles). it is safe to assume that if there is a body of water, there is an alligator inside it. we saw plenty of gators during our trip but unfortunately, no giraffes.

new orleans is an incredible place with so much to do and see and eat--i felt lucky to get to squeeze in this little side quest, and i would die to go back and visit again. if you find yourself in that neck of the woods, may you get the chance to check things out yourself!

post-credits scene