Dennis Hopper: The American Dreamer

Dennis Hopper will be remembered as an unconventional movie star, but his directing deserves equal recognition.

“The Last Movie,” another Hopper film that never made it to DVD, is his purest, weirdest work — the first film he ever wanted to make, and the one that nearly destroyed his career. Hopper, who co-wrote the script with “Rebel Without a Cause” screenwriter Stewart Stern, plays Kansas, a movie stuntman who rides onto the set of a western shot on location in Peru. (Samuel Fuller plays the director.)

The hero stays behind after the shoot is finished, drinks, takes part in a cockamamie scheme to find gold and finance a mining operation, drinks, plays house with a gorgeous native, shtups the bored wife of a potential investor, drinks some more, then returns to the village where the film was shot and finds that the movie’s storyline and production processes have become part of the villagers’ religion. The villagers, commanded by a resident who has anointed himself “director,” re-enact the Hollywood movie’s storyline with wicker facsimiles of cameras, tripods and boom mics, entrapping the alienated Kansas as their movie star-cum-Christ figure and forcing him to re-enact a violent narrative that ends with a spectacular death scene. The film’s bizarre and lovely climax is a musical montage showing Kansas embracing (and repeatedly replaying) his demise.

Or should that be “demise”? In a film like this one, it’s hard to tell if such a sequence is a “real” representation of fake (dramatized) death or a symbolic representation of actual death. Along the same lines, the locals’ “movie” is clearly some kind of religious ritual, as well as Hopper’s metaphor for First World cultural imperialism transforming Third World cultures and replacing religion generally; and yet when Kansas briefly escapes his captors and gets shot, the bullet wound is bloody and Kansas’ pain is genuine. A few scenes after that, Kansas observes, with some astonishment, that his wound has healed. Is this an example of a filmmaker messing with our sense of what’s real and what is “just a movie”? Or is Hopper suddenly realizing on camera that he’d let a major continuity error slip past by, and trying to work it into the story à la Ed Wood?

Either, neither, both: you decide. Dialectical to a fault, the film is of two minds on everything, including its own right to exist; it draws on the power of charismatic film actors, naked young flesh and poetic montage even as it blasts the movie industry for manufacturing false idols and propping up the Western industrial ruling class. A true dream film in the vein of Luis Buñuel’s “The Exterminating Angel,” Peter Greenaway’s “A Zed & Two Noughts” and David Lynch’s “Inland Empire,” “The Last Movie” doesn’t just shoehorn surreal imagery into a conventional narrative framework. Its very structure mimics the absolute liquidity of a dream state — repeating and reworking certain images and moments, shifting in and out of tones, genres and modes, and switching between a straightforward, unselfconscious narrative and one in which the hero (Kansas) becomes aware of the absurdity of his predicament and tries (and usually fails) to seize control of it.

Hopper drove his bosses at Universal crazy with his endless shooting and editing, then compounded the offense by exercising final cut on a film that seemed impenetrable to anyone not named Dennis Hopper. Reviewers savaged “The Last Movie” and Universal yanked it after one week in release. The film went down in history as a synonym for hubris and pretension, and — more damningly — as a flat-out bad film with no redeeming value whatsoever. Most critics dismissed Hopper’s style as a high-end version of the arty-flashy-trippy aesthetic that was already seeping into mainstream movies, TV shows and commercials, and wrote off “The Last Movie” as a classic case of the sophomore jinx.

But in retrospect, “The Last Movie” seems more heartfelt, complex and ambitious than its detractors claimed. Its sheer originality deserves a measure of respect. This is a film whose vision is eclectic and expansive enough to include old fashioned western movie shootouts, nightclub musical numbers, dense Catholic symbolism, meta-commentary on cinema’s ability to propagate ideology, a soft-core interlude beneath a waterfall, several John Cassavetes-style ugly drunken arguments, and a borderline Mel Brooks moment in which a montage of Kansas wandering a locale marketplace is intercut with Kris Kristofferson performing “Me and Bobby McGee” on location in Peru. At the end of the sequence, Hopper cuts to Kansas finishing a journey on horseback that we’d seen him begin near the start of the film; Kristofferson addresses Kansas directly and tells him he’s wanted on the set. Every sophomore should dream of surviving a jinx this strange and special.

[Additional photos: "Easy Rider," Columbia Pictures, 1969; "The Hot Spot," Orion, 1990; "Backtrack," Vestron, 1990]

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