THE AMERICAN DREAMER D
USA (90 mi) 1971
d: L.M. Kit Carson and Lawrence
Schiller
Art as narcissism—as films go, it doesn’t get much worse
than this, shown using the cheapest film stock possible, which has already
started to fade, an endlessly monotonous portrait of an uninteresting subject,
Dennis Hopper himself in a portrait of his own self-indulgence, shot during the
editing process of his film THE LAST MOVIE (1971), where throughout the camera
is basically pointed at the subject and the audience is subjected to all the
drivel that comes out of his mouth, feeling very much like we walked into
personal therapy sessions. The
confessional quality of the film lacks any sense of coherent themes other than
to subject Hopper to utter adulation.
It’s like having to listen to the same song over and over again, where
Hopper is on auto repeat, taking all the feeling out of the experience until
all that’s left is monotony. That’s not
to say it’s worthless, which is something else altogether, just a horrible
film. While this only works as an art film,
there is no actual artistic technique involved except a point and shoot camera
approach, reminiscent of Warhol’s SLEEP (1963), 321 minutes, footage of John
Giorno sleeping for five hours, and EMPIRE (1964), 485 minutes, a single shot
of the Empire State Building from early evening until nearly 3 am the next
day. With the camera constantly pointed
in his face, with wall to wall music except when Hopper is speaking, Hopper is
then supposed to act natural, where at times he’s a ham, more often, however,
he takes himself seriously as he attempts to ponder his existence. Why would anyone be interested in what Dennis
Hopper has to say, especially when the truth is he has nothing to say? What’s actually revealed, if anything, is
just how insecure he is to believe placing himself in front of a camera would
help him deal with his own insecurities.
While that may work for him, offering a kind of self-analysis, what
interest should that hold to anyone else?
Speaking personally, there were two, and only two things of
interest during the entire 90 minutes.
One was the opening song, “Easy Rider” heard here: v/a the american dreamer..
chris sikelianos - easy rider ... - YouTube (4:42), where the filmed
version cuts in and out of the song, seen here:
[RIP 1936-2010]*
Dennis Hopper - The American Dreamer
(6:45), with Hopper subjecting us to his various thoughts. At least in this opening section, the loping
camera looks out onto the Southwestern desert landscape as he’s approaching
Taos, New Mexico. The laid back style of
the song is a perfect introduction to the emptiness of the landscape, and
ultimately, as it turns out, the existential void of the artist himself. This is also the only section of the film
where Hopper narrates offscreen without a camera pointed at him, so it offers a
more pre-conceived poetic vision, a rambling inner dialogue written out ahead
of time as a script matched against the unchangeable arid desert. What is probably most striking about the film
is the way Hopper identifies with Charles Manson, something nearly
inconceivable to think about today, which, as it happens, was part of the
allure of the recent film Martha
Marcy May Marlene (2011), as it resurfaced the horrifying psychological
damage resulting from blindly following cult leaders, whose sole motivation
seems to be to redefine the entire world around their own image, where everyone
and everything belongs to them, breaking any concept of free will in his cult
followers. Hopper namedrops Manson as a
flirtatious device with a woman he obviously finds sexually attractive, as if
she’d be turned on by that. Much of
Hopper’s behavior emulates that of Manson, including his desert sexual
fantasies of having orgies and running naked in the desert, high on whatever he
could find.
What’s conceivable here is that Hopper is playing various versions
of himself, balancing reality and fiction, offering a provocative view of an
everchanging identity. Hopper spends
plenty of time high on drugs, running his mouth endlessly, surrounded by
groupies who worship his every move, and even surrounded by a group of naked
women who have expressed an interest in having sex, he instead bores them to
tears with his endless monologues. One
of the other pre-conceived segments includes Hopper undressing as he walks down
the street of a Los Alamos suburban subdivision, noted for developing the
nuclear bomb, which is not nearly as interesting as his narrative thoughts,
where he is defining and labeling the people that would live here as
conservative and closed minded, the kind of people who would never be drawn to
anything new. This is, of course,
Hopper’s biggest fear, that he might turn into one of these people who have no
identification with freedom and open expression. Ironically, what’s peculiarly evident to the
viewer is that Hopper is just as conservative and closed minded, following the
deluded belief that he’s any different, or that he somehow knows what the
people inside those houses think, some of whom may be teachers or artists,
perhaps more into free expression than he is.
As it turns out, the methods of open expression that Hopper copies are
mostly the kind of thing prescribed in acting classes or therapy sessions of
the era, where people are taught to loosen up and trust themselves. So it’s actually Hopper who is showing a
surprising lack of originality, haunted by the inability to break through his
own self-imposed personal barriers.
