Dennis Hopper, The American Dreamer

My esteemed friend Robert Kennedy posted a negative, grade D review of L.M. Kit Carson and Lawrence Schiller's 1971 documentary portrait of Dennis Hopper, The American Dreamer, shot while Hopper was editing The Last Movie in Taos, New Mexico:

http://cranesareflying1.blogspot.com/2012/02/american-dreamer.html

I simply had to respond:

Robert, I quite agree with most of your description of The American Dreamer - but not with your assessment of it. I love the movie. Partly I love it because I am glad that it exists, as a memento of a crazy time, and partly I love it for Dennis Hopper's performance as himself (I recall that you recently praised Ameena Matthews for her performance as herself in The Interrupters, so I believe you'll know what I mean). Besides, The American Dreamer documents a director during the editing of a great film - I think The Last Movie is a masterpiece - and what wouldn't I give for more such documents? Although, if I recall correctly, the documentary doesn't focus as much as it could on Hopper's artistic decisions during that process. It simply cannot be true that Hopper has "nothing to say," because The Last Movie is, precisely, one of the richest statements in the history of American film. It could be that Dennis was a wise fool, but I prefer to believe that he was just wily as heck.

I forget whether it was Jonathan Rosenbaum or J. Hoberman who pointed out that Hopper was under intense pressure to deliver a hit, since Universal expected another Easy Rider, and the making of The Last Movie had been a media circus, with a cover story in Rolling Stone and plenty of coverage elsewhere. Hopper must have known that the one thing The Last Movie could never be was a hit - it is far too philosophical for that. It is interesting that Hopper allowed Alejandro Jodorowsky, whose The Holy Mountain (1973) is, especially in its concluding sequence, the most spiritually similar picture to The Last Movie, to have a go at the editing of The Last Movie himself, although Hopper ultimately went with his own instincts, and later absolutely refused to re-cut the picture - he had the final edit contractually - when Lew Wasserman of Universal requested him to do so. Wasserman then buried the picture but good.

It is amusing that The Last Movie (which was originally to be called Chinchero) and the confusingly similarly titled The Last Picture Show opened in New York City exactly four days apart, September 29 and October 3, 1971, and were reviewed by Pauline Kael in the same issue of The New Yorker. The two movies have even more in common than that; both were originally BBS productions (Bob Rafelson-Bert Schneider-Steve Blauner), as Easy Rider had been also. BBS bailed on The Last Movie before Hopper began shooting, so it is not included in Criterion's America Lost and Found: The BBS Story box-set (which includes all seven BBS films: Easy Rider, The Last Picture Show, Rafelson's Head, Five Easy Pieces, and The King of Marvin Gardens, Jack Nicholson's Drive, He Said, and Henry Jaglom's A Safe Place). Hopper's project landed in Universal's low-budget (under $1 million) independent unit, which was also responsible for Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop, Peter Fonda's The Hired Hand, Milos Forman's Taking Off, Douglas Trumbull's Silent Running, and George Lucas's American Graffiti. Those two sets of films, the BBS and the Universal, both of which Hopper had a hand in, are, to say the least, historically significant.

So, even though Hopper appears to be bat-shit crazy in The American Dreamer - and, although I would insist there is a consciously performative aspect to that, may actually have been bat-shit crazy as well - and even though he was undoubtedly consuming massive quantities of drugs at the time, I put forward my strong belief that he was also an artist going full-throttle, that there is nothing necessarily inconsistent in any of these apparently contradictory facts, and that the title The American Dreamer is not in the least ironic, but merely descriptive. Therefore, I do have to demur from the closing lines of your review, which I think are unfair to Hopper's achievement.

POSTSCRIPT: I would entirely endorse this fine IMDB comment on The Last Movie by Chris Bright, whose other reviews there are also very much worth checking out:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067327/reviews?start=0

It's difficult to see why people have such a hard time with this movie. Anyone who is interested in European art cinema of the '60's or even the novel since Joyce should have no trouble reading the film on at least some levels. Hopper's method here is to try and get inside the head, to put thought and memory on the screen, not just pictures.

Part of the problem may be the sheer complexity. There are probably enough ideas crammed in here for a dozen movies, and Hopper throws them all at us, often simultaneously. There's a story about American imperialism, there's a story about the artifice of film-making, there's a story about the way audiences view cinema, there's a Christ allegory wrapped up with a general sacrificial victim theme, a story about men and women, sex, money and power, there's Hopper's own story, the story of cinema itself, there's a satire of Hollywood conventions in general and the Western in particular, very notably there's a story about the Peruvian landscape, ravishingly shot by Laszlo Kovacs. There's even the story of Hopper's gofer lost in a society he doesn't understand if you want a simple narrative to hang on to. The film combines all these facets into a structure which can only be described as crystalline.

Devotees of "folding" should find plenty to occupy them here - there's the film about Hopper's character "Kansas", the film Sam Fuller is making, the villagers' "film", "The Last Movie" itself, an on-set home movie and probably several others besides.

Hopper gaily references (and steals from) everyone from Fellini and Godard to John Huston and Nicholas Ray, and of course goes bonkers in Peru well before Werner Herzog got around to it (and appropriates tribal culture in a strikingly similar way).

Definitely not a film to be missed by anyone interested in fractured narratives, postmodernism in film or the beautiful image. Vastly underrated and well worth its Venice prize, this is to "Easy Rider" what "Pulp Fiction" is to "Reservoir Dogs". Hopper as a director has never been better.

UPDATE: Robert wasn't buying it, which is fine, but I kept on with my tribute:

I respect your reaction, but I must have found much more entertainment value in Hopper's over-the-topness, because I recall "The American Dreamer" with the pleasure I experienced while watching it. I wasn't offended, I was simply agape. I love the moment when Dennis describes himself as just a lesbian chick at heart. It's as if he has in mind lines he has yet to say in the movies (in "Apocalypse Now") and cannot know yet except as intuition - "The man is clear in his mind, but his soul is mad" (but reverse that!) and "Sometimes he goes too far. He's the first one to admit it."

And yet somewhere beyond the ragged fringes of "The American Dreamer" lies the magnificence of "The Last Movie," its ghostly unexplored ostensible subject, which is what makes the two films a wildly fascinating double-bill (and that is how I saw them). I hope you get the chance to see "The Last Movie" soon, now that I've built it up!