Dennis Hopper, 1936-2010

Apocalypse Now (1979)

I learned of Dennis Hoper’s death in a bowling alley in Humboldt, Saskatchewan, while drinking warm Canadian, trying to figure out what I was doing in this place, and losing badly at five-pin. I tend to take it hard when my heroes die, even when they’ve had a good run, and this didn’t seem the ideal scenario in which to hear sad news. Yet somehow, there in that bowling alley, with the leering local drunks and ill-fitting shoes and the unseasonably bone-chilling, desperately lonesome prairies unfolding forever just outside the doors, it struck me that this place was perfectly emblematic of my personal experience of Hopper’s singular body of work. It wasn’t difficult to imagine Feck, Hopper’s character from River’s Edge (1986), perched by the bar, slapping his artificial leg, embracing his rubber doll, hardening his beady eyes, and launching into a monologue about bikes, beer, and pussy. This gave me comfort.

River's Edge (1986)

Feck. Father. Photojournalist. Frank Booth. For moviegoers of my generation, Hopper’s story didn’t begin with Rebel Without a Cause (55) or Giant (55), or even with Easy Rider (69). It began with River’s Edge and Blue Velvet (86). That famous anecdote, how Hopper phoned David Lynch, already in production in North Carolina, just to assure him that he could play the drug-addled, sexually deranged, murderous, mommy-fixated sociopath Frank Booth because he was Frank Booth, how Lynch got off the phone and confessed to Isabella Rossellini, Laura Dern and Kyle MacLachlan that Hopper’s identification with the character could be great for the movie but how are they going to have lunch with him?, endures not only because it fuels the legend of the then recently rehabilitated Hopper, but, more importantly, because it functions as a declaration of an artist’s devotion to his work. Hopper recognized something of his own weaknesses in Frank Booth, and he used that recognition to elevate what in less disciplined hands might have been a cartoon villain. I will never forget hearing in an interview how the only thing that got Hopper through his worst times was his persistent belief that the cameras were always rolling.

Blue Velvet (1986)

In any case, Frank led me to Feck, then back to Father, his wonderful supporting role in Rumble Fish (83), and to Apocalypse Now (79), and Hopper’s unforgettable photojournalist or, as Hopper enunciates it in the movie, “I’m a photo. Journalist.” Between moments of eerie stillness he rattles off his monologues like a Beat auctioneer, with multiple cameras dangling round his neck like so many eyes, trying manically to take in everything. By the 1980s Hopper’s infamous past exploits, even Easy Rider and The Last Movie (71), didn’t matter as much as what he was doing right then, giving one performance after another that seemed that much more virtuosic, focused, dynamic, scary, and inventive for Hopper’s new straight edge. He seemed to convey genuine craziness with greater force when he wasn’t wasted. His work from this period, at least in the better movies—there were plenty of very bad ones, too—dispelled the notion that the demise of the New Hollywood meant the demise of great ambition in American movies. Blue Velvet was a masterpiece, and Frank Booth a walking, talking, horny, nightmare Id figure, at once terrifying and hilarious and the likes of which we’d never seen, barking lines as impossibly banal as “Let’s fuuuuck!” and rendering them gleeful howls from the collective unconscious.

Night Tide (1961)

Over time I began to grasp the larger story, to catch up with Hopper’s long and winding career, his photography and art collection and years in alcoholic abyss. For years I was merrily tracking down The Trip (67) or Out of the Blue (80) or, wow!, Night Tide (61) on VHS, while still trying to see every new movie he appeared in or directed, which wasn't easy because there were so damn many. He was always coming back, from blacklisting, humiliation, disaster, and addiction, but even Dennis Hopper’s resurrections are numbered. His death from metastasized prostate cancer at 74 came not as the last ember of a long fading away but as a sudden burning out. To the very end he worked like a madman, perhaps because he was a madman, a suggestion not meant to diminish his talents but simply contextualize his sensibility. He radiated unnerving intensity, and while he could play softer, more palatable roles, such as the schoolteacher hero of Carried Away (96), he had a special gift for weirdoes who left such indelible impressions on a movie that he barely needed names, guys known only as Goon, Moon, Prophet, Chicken, Shooter, Cracker, Doggie, and Kansas, his state of birth. He first left Kansas at 13, and it was then he first saw mountains, skyscrapers and the ocean. In every case he was disappointed because in his imagination these things were always grander than reality. For better and for worse he was born to seek grandeur, and through the most ragged and at times ridiculous routes, whether scaling the lower depths or shooting to dazzling heights, his life and work achieved it.

Drugs and movies: getting high, coming down, wigging out, and managing the addiction

Is film the most potent art for relaying drug experiences? Its hypnotic, fluid, unprecedented fusion of sound, image, movement and forced perspective certainly feels aligned to some essence of the stream of consciousness, even to dreaming. But where drugs are concerned, I have to wonder if movies don’t get closer to the heart of the matter when they show restraint in how they use their multiform tools and effects.

Once you begin to survey movies that deal in drugs, it becomes clear that the medium’s generally most forceful when it evokes rather than illustrates. When filmmakers attempt to recreate hallucinations, the results are often malnourished or silly. But there are plenty of movies that approach drug states—of mind, body and soul—in thoughtful, inventive or insightful ways. For some reason most of them are American.

Is drug use a distinctly American movie theme? The numbers would have us think so. And there are certain American faces that keep reappearing in drug movies (or at least doing drugs in regular movies): Dennis Hopper, Max Perlich, Chloë Sevigny, Dean Stockwell, Roy Scheider, Keanu Reeves, Peter Fonda, Johnny Depp, William Hurt. Why these actors? Is it something written on their faces, something suspicious etched in their crooked smiles or glassy eyes? I wonder.

It’s these faces, captured in a moment of transition from relative sobriety to relative inebriation, that prompt my richest memories of delving into cinema’s drug state: Scheider’s Joe Gideon in All That Jazz (1979) snorting a line to trigger “Showtime,” Hopper’s Frank Booth in Blue Velvet (86) inhaling some unnamed gas before changing into the scariest babbling stoner in the history of movies. Just thinking about these moments gives me a chill and a thrill.

Movies make a pretty good drug in themselves. The duration changes from film to film, but you can always split if you start tripping out. They can take a while to come down from, but generally cause no hangover. They are, however, potentially addictive, and encompass an impressive variety of experiences and perspectives.

Freaking Out

Some guy on acid attacking a pony-tailed Jack Nicholson with power tools in Psych-Out (68), Rudy Ray Moore flipping out on angel dust at the loopy finale of Avenging Disco Godfather (80), Al Pacino wielding machine guns in Scarface (80), Richard E Grant turning his eyeballs into bulgy little rocks and definitely not staying cool in Withnail & I (87), William Hurt turning into a goddamned goat-eating monkey in Altered States (80): there’s no end to what the movies can tell us about bad trips. Such scenes smear together in my foggy memories of drug movies, but the films as a whole don’t necessarily propose any particular take on the role of drugs in our lives. To do that, it might be best to ease into things, to start with something mellow before digging into the heavy stuff.

Feeling Groovy

If pot is arguably the least harmful of illegal substances, the movies have, over a long period of diminishing hysteria, responded with stories that neither overtly praise nor condemn a pot-smoking lifestyle but rather use it for inspired comedic fodder. In this regard, while it’s not much of a movie overall, How High (2001) has given us one of the most brilliant pot-based premises, with Redman and Method Man smoking their dead friend’s ashes in order to summon up his ghost, who then materializes to help them to ace their entrance exams for Harvard.

A far more esteemed if equally hazy ballad for blunt-smokers is, of course, The Big Lebowski (1998). What lazy bliss is conjured up in the tumbling of tumbleweeds, the gliding of bowling balls, and Bob Dylan’s “The Man in Me,” where rock’s most revered wordsmith is never so pleasing as when he just sings “la-la-la-la, la-da-da-da-da-da-da.” No one would mistake Jeff Bridges’ Dude—a guy who lights candles in the bath and splays out in the floor to listen to tapes of old bowling matches—for a go-getter protagonist, yet how much more satisfying that his clumsy apathy actually aids instead of inhibits him in his playing detective.

The Mark Inside

Things get weird fast in drug movies, but they can also prove to resonate as metaphors. In The Addiction (95), the drug is already inside you: it’s blood. Shot in a black and white that seems to saturate the urban grime, Abel Ferrara’s NYC vampire film is a thinly veiled allegory of junkie agony, treating addiction itself like a contagious virus. Everybody in this movie spouts existentialist philosophy: it’s terrifically pretentious, highly body conscious and surprisingly unnerving. Lily Taylor writhes on the floor a long time before pushing the limits of consent in her desperate search for a bloody fix. Christopher Walken, a veteran bloodsucker, shows up to advise her on coming to terms with being undead. He’s in the William S Burroughs role of the wise old junkie —he even cites Naked Lunch.

In fact, the shadow of Burroughs looms over a number of drug films, but none so much as David Cronenberg’s wildly inventive interpretation of Burroughs’s most famous novel. Naked Lunch (91) hasn’t a single recognizable drug in it, but, drawing upon Burroughs’s biography as liberally as from his fiction, it conveys the most complex and harrowing closed circuit of addiction and eternal return in movies. Peter Weller is trapped is a cycle of sexual repression, schizophrenic disassociation, murder and dependency. The sense of unreality is beautifully heightened by the use of soundstages and the refusal to give any physical object a fixed appearance. And as the eloquently staged, chilling final sequence makes clear, the whole thing’s really about the birth of an artist and the devastating price to be paid for one’s muse.

The Palace of Wisdom

Life after drugs is rarely glamorous. Drugstore Cowboy (89) gives us a nice primer right in its opening moments: Matt Dillon, resigned to a new life with no woman and no dope, working in a machine shop, his beatific face calmly recalling how he found himself in the back of this ambulance, while Abbie Lincoln sings “For All We Know” in her strange, staggered cadence and Super 8 reminiscences flicker melancholically on screen. The tone is elegant, eccentric and bittersweet.

Is it any surprise that Burroughs eventually turns up here, too? Seeing the man in the flesh gives Drugstore Cowboy that extra tinge of authority, the slow steady way Burroughs turns in his seat to recognize Dillon, those small but lucid eyes that never seem to change in expression, that insect-like body. Walking with Dillon in the overcast daylight of Portland, Burroughs is an unforgettable presence, and it’s as though Gus Van Sant was suddenly making a documentary.

The Big Picture

Evocatively ungrounded in its floaty animation, A Scanner Darkly (2006) is inspired by that other great voice of authority on dope in American letters. Paranoid and somewhat dysfunctional, Philip K Dick was very likely schizophrenic, yet his troubled mind was still organized and intelligent enough to work as a virtual conduit for a larger phenomenon of collective psychic malaise. Like Cronenberg did with Burroughs, and like Terry Gilliam did with Hunter S Thompson in the supremely drug-addled Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), Richard Linklater channeled Dick’s spirit as much as he did the source novel in bringing shape and sharpness to A Scanner Darkly, which proposes to reveal the US as a vast drug-pushing machine, thrusting Keanu Reeve’s narc into a maddening house of mirrors, assigned to spy on himself before the drugs in his system finally reach critical mass.

Where movies can take us with regards to drugs now is ambiguous. The subject has been explored from an impressive variety of angles in the last few decades, yet there are as many drug experiences as there are drug-takers, and those who take drugs, whether for transcendence or escape, don’t seem to be diminishing in number. No doubt there will be new stories to tell, new revelations to share, and with any luck, some of them will still sound good after the high has worn off.

Asleep at the wheel

It’s long been fashionable amongst critics to disparage American indie films that locate themselves in smaller, economically marginalized communities. Such settings are often regarded as a cynical trope, as though the mere vision of a trailer, run-down duplex or wood-paneled diner were enough to gain a film entry into Sundance. This attitude toward the use of a milieu that, let’s face it, a hell of a lot of people actually live in, is irksome. A lousy movie is a lousy movie, whether set in Beverly Hills or in the shantytowns of hillbillies, and I for one welcome any movie that expands our imaginative landscape to include all manner of geography and class. Yet in the case of Sleepwalking, we’re confronted with a movie that wears its small town despair like an impenetrable suit of armour, which is to say it’s an airless, self-consciously slumming affair, and is admittedly just the sort of thing that should send those antipathetic to the blue collar blues into fits of vehement dismissal.

Sleepwalking was written by Zac Stanford (Chumscrubber) and marks the directorial debut of Bill Maher. It opens with single mom Joleen (co-producer Charlize Theron, most recently embodying dinge in North Country and Monster) getting busted for running a grow-op out of her house in some bitterly cold corner of Northern California. With her place getting gutted by the fuzz, Joleen barges her way into the hovel of her pushover brother James (Nick Stahl) with her rightfully pissed-off preteen daughter Tara (AnnaSophia Robb) in tow. After drowning her sorrows and scoring some action from an anonymous good ol’ boy (a bit-part sadly played by the far too talented Callum Keith Rennie), Joleen abandons James and Tara with no forwarding address.

Tara is soon whisked away from James’ dump to an even more depressing dump of a Foster Home, and just in time too: James is not only fired but evicted soon after, forced to sleep on the floor in a buddy’s basement. If things weren’t bad enough, James, with barely enough cash to fill the tank, then deduces that his only recourse is to abduct Tara and hit the road. Stahl has no problem imbuing James with a convincing balance of dopey sweetness and poor judgment, but his implausibly stupid choices as the film goes along reek of dramaturgical convenience. By the time he gets to visiting his unsurprisingly evil old pa (Dennis Hopper, performing the perverse shtick he can do in his sleep), who unsurprisingly abuses both James and Tara, the story becomes perfectly exasperating.

We often mock movies in which, for example, some struggling university student transplanted from a modest Midwest farming community lives in some wildly expansive Manhattan loft. We roll our eyes at how movies seem so out of touch with the relationship between income and real estate, as though the affluence of Hollywood bigwigs renders them oblivious to the standards by which the rest of us live. But the reverse problem can be just as risible. The places where people live in Sleepwalking feel, not overly cramped (the crew does have to fit somewhere), but overly emphatic in their white trash squalor. James’ dark, dank apartment, with its unfinished walls, might turn off a discerning crackhead, but it fits all too well into Sleepwalking’s low-rent drudgery schematics, which are so demanding that they don’t even allow James to pay his rent, even though he performs not un-lucrative roadwork and seems to harbour no vices whatsoever that might exhaust his funds.

The fact that Sleepwalking is so relentlessly bleak is a problem mainly because it finally gets in the way of storytelling. Despite the efforts of a largely laudable cast (young Robb included), the movie just never seems to move, so bogged down in faux realism that it can’t work up the energy to convey even a fleeting sense of genuine joy in the escape plan James and Tara enact. (The incongruous pool sequence most certainly doesn’t count.) With no plausibly urgency to the characters’ desperation, no plausible hope to contrast their despair, Sleepwalking finally feels as shapeless and unengaged as its title.