The Candy Coloured Clown is Dead
What to make of Dennis Hopper? Two great scenes:
Hopper singing In Dreams to Kyle MacLachlan in Blue Velvet. There is nothing quite like this: Orbison’s song mixed in with a crazy rant; part love letter, part death threat. A woman climbs onto the car roof, Hopper with his knife out giving it to the man… how disturbing; and then the song takes him over: a few simple words controls a psychopath. When I first saw this film what was so unsettling, so frightening, was Frank Booth’s unpredictability – he is inhuman in his freedom to hurt and intimidate.
And Hopper in a café talking to his two boys; explaining why the Motorcycle Boy was born at the wrong time, at the wrong side of the tracks… a prince without a princedom. Coppola captures his eyes so well here: the unearthly light of a seer. In Rumblefish Hopper plays it low key: that of an intelligent alcoholic, shambling along at the twilight of his days. Was this acting or real life? Either way, utterly convincing.
The Guardian obituary reads like a synopsis of Hollywood itself: great popular movies of the 50s, the turn towards art in the next two decades, followed by a slide into the blockbusters of the 80s, 90s and the last ten years. A symbol of Hollywood’s ambiguity; and an artform’s decline?
Hopper singing In Dreams to Kyle MacLachlan in Blue Velvet. There is nothing quite like this: Orbison’s song mixed in with a crazy rant; part love letter, part death threat. A woman climbs onto the car roof, Hopper with his knife out giving it to the man… how disturbing; and then the song takes him over: a few simple words controls a psychopath. When I first saw this film what was so unsettling, so frightening, was Frank Booth’s unpredictability – he is inhuman in his freedom to hurt and intimidate.
And Hopper in a café talking to his two boys; explaining why the Motorcycle Boy was born at the wrong time, at the wrong side of the tracks… a prince without a princedom. Coppola captures his eyes so well here: the unearthly light of a seer. In Rumblefish Hopper plays it low key: that of an intelligent alcoholic, shambling along at the twilight of his days. Was this acting or real life? Either way, utterly convincing.
The Guardian obituary reads like a synopsis of Hollywood itself: great popular movies of the 50s, the turn towards art in the next two decades, followed by a slide into the blockbusters of the 80s, 90s and the last ten years. A symbol of Hollywood’s ambiguity; and an artform’s decline?
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