Dennis Hopper, 1936-2010
http://www.laweekly.com/2010-06-03/film-tv/dennis-hopper-1936-2010?src=newsletter
Remembering an American dreamer
By F.x. Feeney
Jun 3 2010
Dennis Hopper and I only briefly shared a table one morning at a film
festival four years ago, but we hadn't talked more than five minutes
before he alluded to the death of James Dean. Hopper's brief
friendship with his co-star and mentor on the sets of Rebel Without a
Cause and Giant marked him for life; they shared a passion, which
Dean was the first person in Hopper's world to fully articulate.
"I took Jim aside when we were on Rebel," he told me, reiterating a
story he told often. "I said, 'You're doing something I don't
understand.' " As a teenage stage actor, Hopper had trained hard,
honing classical chops, but he'd been moved out of his comfort zone
by this new friend's charismatic anarchy. Dean advised him, "Don't do
so much. Stop doing 'line readings.' Stop acting. Smoke the cigarette
or drink the coffee or whatever, but take it moment by moment. If
you're not feeling anything, accept that. If the emotion comes, great
but don't 'presuppose' it."
This philosophy enriched Hopper's work at every stage of his life, up
until his death last weekend, of prostate cancer, at age 74. You
could compile an uproarious anthology film simply from clips of his
best bit parts and cameo moments: the raggedy hero-worshipper acting
as an emcee to Colonel Kurtz's jungle in Apocalypse Now; the cracked
"husband" of an inflatable sex doll in River's Edge; the stoic dad,
playing psychological chess with the man he knows will kill him, in
True Romance.
A festival of Hopper's best lead performances, on the other hand,
would constitute quite a marathon. Apart from his astonishing turn in
Blue Velvet (1986) and films in which he directed himself (especially
his love-struck hit man in 1989's Backtrack), a proper Hopper fest
would include Night Tide (1961), his sweetest role, as a vulnerable
sailor in love with a mermaid; Henry Jaglom's Tracks (1975), as a
Vietnam vet disintegrating over the course of a homeward train ride;
Wim Wenders' The American Friend, in which he plays Patricia
Highsmith's "talented Mr. Ripley" as a fallen angel attempting to
right his own wrongdoings against a defenseless man; and Boiling
Point (1993), a little-known gem directed by James B. Harris, in
which Hopper gives tragic weight to a petty crook grown too gentle
for his profession. Add your favorite, but capping the lot would be
Elegy (2007), based on The Dying Animal, by Philip Roth. There, in a
supporting role opposite Ben Kingsley and Penelope Cruz, Hopper is
particularly moving, persuasive in his erudite arguments regarding
women, art, poetry and mortality. It is a fitting and memorable
conclusion to his career.
Hopper carried a unique wound from childhood. At age 6, early in
World War II, he was told that his father had been killed: This was a
deliberate lie for security purposes (his dad was an agent in the
OSS, forerunner of the CIA); only his mother knew the truth. The
agony of that loss, followed by the trauma of discovering the lie,
left him with a lifelong mistrust of both women, and male authority.
Small wonder Dean's passion for honesty mattered so much to him.
Small wonder that after his friend's sudden death, Hopper fought
director Henry Hathaway on From Hell to Texas (1958), running up a
legendary 87 takes of a simple bit on the last day of principal
photography and derailing what had been a highly promising mainstream
acting career. Small wonder that when he came back in triumph with
Easy Rider in 1969, he burnt this success to the ground with his next
directorial effort, The Last Movie (1971). As if having crushed every
other authority he could rebel against, he rebelled against himself
embracing exile once again on the margins of the mainstream, where
the pressures were entirely internal. Finally considering how these
agonies had piled onto one another by the time he was pushing 50 it
is no wonder that his most symphonic on-screen performance should be
as Frank Booth, the baby-talking, stimulants-happy killer and
misogynist at the dark heart of Blue Velvet (1986). Hopper's
greatness in this role is that he enacts every terrible impulse in a
man from murder to sexual assault, from fascist crocodile tears to
infantile self-pity and owns these repugnant furies from the
inside, with the naked honesty of an artist who is actually free of
them for the first time. The film itself marked his survival, and the
definitive rebirth of Hopper's career.
One fellow critic with whom I recently discussed this "rebirth"
objected, "You're forgetting all those self-parodying performances in
bad movies."
No, I'm not! If he's up there talking with his hands (his one
lifelong vice as an actor); or has been formulaically positioned
(hello, bad guys of Waterworld and Speed); or if he's just a
mad-poet-drifter hired to channel the ghost of that dead biker from
Easy Rider, Hopper's weakest moments on-screen ring no less true for
me than his most disciplined stuff, precisely because his was
essentially a Zen attitude. Once he'd come back with Blue Velvet, he
showed up "ready for work." It was up to filmmakers to use him well.
His hoke-a-delic turn in Hoosiers (1987) was a deliberate affirmation
of this, perhaps even a subversive one, given that it netted him an
Oscar nomination his only one, for acting well befitting the
sentimental era of Driving Miss Daisy. In the long history of delayed
reactions that are the Academy Awards, let us consider that he was
really nominated for Blue Velvet, but voters were too scared of the
character to admit this.
In the early 1960s, briefly reduced to playing bit TV parts on
Bonanza and Petticoat Junction, Hopper was forced to reinvent
himself, mostly as a photographer. His portraits of fellow actors are marvels.
One study of a corner gas station, framed by a car's windshield,
dashboard and rearview mirror (Double Standard, 1962) has no people
in it at all but needs none: The personality is behind the camera.
This quiet period of training his interior vision proved essential to
Hopper's formation as a film director. Easy Rider may have
revolutionized the film business, but its virtues as art are of a
piece with the strength in Hopper's photography, his relentless
appetite for this moment, whatever that moment is. This is why Easy
Rider so captivated people of all ages in 1969; perhaps this is also
why the film now dates so badly, at least in certain parts. He was
not only being true to the inchoate dreams and nightmares of the
culture but to its bullshit as well. He clearly recognized this
because the film culminates in a cryptic, mischievous line of
dialogue: "We blew it."
Hopper supplied his co-star Peter Fonda with that line; it was an
intuitive prompt, and generally speaking it is his loyalty to things
that are irrational yet true which gives all the films he directed
their abiding afterlives. The Last Movie, crazy-quilt jigsaw puzzle
that it is, is all the same, uncannily true to the spirituality of
the Peruvian natives among whom its hero is marooned. Out of the Blue
(1980) took on abused children well ahead of the cultural curve, just
as Colors (1986) was the first mainstream American film to wrestle in
depth with L.A.'s gang subculture. For all that it was jinxed in
postproduction, and still suffers from canned mood music even in the
director's cut Hopper restored for DVD, Backtrack succeeds against
steep odds in its funny and feverish fantasizing by creating a very
tangible empathy for the two radically opposed strangers at its
epicenter, and the unexpected love they share for art, and beauty. In
my own favorite of Hopper's work as a director, The Hot Spot (1990),
intuition is practically the protagonist. The charming drifter who
blows into town finds himself at the mercy of any number of hidden
agendas, just as we do in watching, and all of us must attempt in
tandem to sort them all out before the local Venus flytraps close
over his fool head.
It is difficult to communicate in today's terms what a comet-sized
blast Easy Rider created in the film industry. Made for $300,000, it
grossed $60 million on its first release: That's 180 times its budget
vastly more than Star Wars, E.T. or Titanic earned in proportion to
their costs. The entire business model of moviemaking transformed
overnight, making Easy Rider one of scant movies this side of Birth
of a Nation and The Jazz Singer to redirect the industry in a single
blow. To this day, even as films compete with games, the Internet and
pay-TV, wildcatters making their low-budget and no-budget magnum
opuses are working a marketplace Hopper cracked open.
That Jack Nicholson became a star because of Easy Rider is no
accident of his own charisma, either. He'd been in other movies
without making anywhere near this kind of splash. The character he
plays is many men rolled into one: a wised-up son of wealth; a
drunken lawyer; a motley fool in a football helmet; a stoned sage of
the spaceways, apprehending a holy order in UFOs. Terry Southern
wrote the dialogue, but it was Hopper's direction that allowed these
clashing manifestations of one man to shine, to become unforgettable.
At its depths, behind the camera or in front of it, Hopper's legacy
as a filmmaker is defined by a multitude of excellent performances,
each alive with the iconic honesty Dean had pressed him to seek in
himself. His particular genius as an artist was that he made himself
at home within his own contradictions and was perpetually eager to
invite the rest of the world to join him there, laughing at the darkness.
.
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