DENNIS HOPPER was on the cover of Metro in 1986 for an interview he did plugging his film Hoosiers, where he played a recovering alcoholic basketball player and fan. This was reportedly Hopper’s favorite film, in an acting career lasting some 55 years. And it was the film that got him nominated for the Oscar. (Michael Caine won instead for Hannah and Her Sisters.)
As Hopper was happy to state at the time, there was plenty of real-life experience behind his work in Hoosiers; during the 1960s and 1970s he had been an infamous drug casualty. As he put it, “I heard voices from the other room … and I was in a cabin where there wasn’t another room.” Most serious film fans knew that Hopper ought to have been nominated for other work that year: something a little less palatable to sports fans everywhere. That is, of course, the 1986 role for which Hopper must be remembered: as Frank Booth, outwardly terrifying, inwardly infantile small-town thug, the devil in the woods in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. Huffing some indefinable substance and re-enacting some unspeakable primal trauma, Booth is both a bad baby and a bad father: making a man out of Kyle MacLachlan’s Jeffrey the hard way.
To say he punched a hole in the 1980s acting is no exaggeration; I’d say that Hopper really punched a hole in the 1980s themselves. All props to Lynch—a reticent, conservative type himself—who urged the hiring of Hopper over the objections of conventional wisdom: “He’d been as good as gold,” Lynch explained.
However, when you look at Hopper’s mid-1980s career, there was more fine acting—this was his peak time, not the late ’60s and early ’70s, despite the memories of Easy Rider bruited about in his first obituaries. Hopper is delightful singing “Bringing In the Sheaves” in Texas Chainsaw Massacre II, and he has a memorable line about cunnilingus in The River’s Edge, in addition to some shenanigans with a blow-up doll: another day, another haunted burnout, another desert-dweller, another lament for wastage and loneliness.
It was shortly after he directed Easy Rider in 1969 that Hopper started to chart the exile’s terrain. I saw Hopper’s The Last Movie (1971) at a Film on Film screening in San Francisco in 2008. It has a dreadful reputation, and it’s unavailable on DVD; it’s considered as a film of tremendous self-indulgence—it played to great wails of critical disappointment after the supposedly zeitgeisty Easy Rider.
The Last Movie is hard to take, and I can remember writing that it’s the kind of movie that won’t end until the audience rises up and rips the screen to shreds. It’s patchy and catch as catch can, but also full of great autobiographical insight. Hopper, who spent years working on it, tells us exactly what it was like to have been an actor in his line of work: to have been the villain shot off every horse by every cowboy actor of the 1960s—to understand how the Westerns of the time fed the insanity of U.S. foreign policy.
Then, understanding this, he went to take a psychedelic break from moviemaking in the Andes, to a place where cinema is unknown. D. Burns’ piece in Film Quarterly, retrieved by an online partisan of this roundly panned film, suggests that Hopper’s interest in Renaissance art and the Gnostic gospels of Thomas is a key to The Last Movie. So are Hopper’s premonitions of an early death, like the death of his good friend and influence as an actor, James Dean.
Consider Hopper’s 1980s an afterlife, then, begun with 1979’s Apocalypse Now: there, as Hopper told TCM, “was no script, no end to the movie … some movies are like life experiences that cannot be duplicated in anyway.” Playing a deranged acolyte of a photographer naturally attracted this edge-city dweller, and the rant about Col. Kurtz—a great man too great to be described in words—came to everyone’s mind when they learned that Hopper had died: “What are they going to say about him? Are they going to say he was a good man? That he was a kind man?”
Lucrative work in Speed and the ridiculous Waterworld kept him going; the Tarantino-scripted bit in True Romance—one of the finest pieces of imitation Hemingway in our cinema—has Hopper laying down his life in front of a murderous thug played by Christopher Walken.
Indefatigable as only a man with an art collecting habit could be—did you know he played Sinatra once, in a barely released Australian movie?—Hopper gives use ever more to discover. A frontiersman, a patron of the arts, and one of the last great method actors of the 1950s, Hopper left enough work behind for a film festival. All one can ask is that it take place from midnight until dawn, solely during full moons.
