That's right everyone: it's Dennis Hopper Night here at the '80s movie blog! Specifically my favorite two films of his, which happen to be from the same year, 1986. A helluva year. But first, let me apologize for the delays between posts. I recently took a temporary job that has taken up my days and left me exhausted at nights. Really put a crimp on the blog.
The first move I selected is one I saw in the theaters in my late 20s during an '80s revival festival and it really made a huge impact. Shook me, even. River's Edge is based on a true story of a group of teenagers in an impoverished corner of the Pacific Northwest. One of the teens, a real sociopath, kills a girl who is also a member of the group. The death has no impact on him at all, and he proceeds to tell the rest of his friends. Most of them are completely disaffected and have no discernable reaction at all. Only two - the ones played by Keanu Reeves and Ione Skye - are bothered by it to the point of telling people, doing something, doing anything.
But the movie is really stolen by two other characters: first, Dennis Hopper, as Feck the town recluse, weed supplier, outcast, and professional nobody. Is there a better name for a town outcast than Feck??? He is simultaneously deeply bothered and self-impressed by a supposed murder he committed years ago, where he supposedly shot his girlfriend, but the facts are foggy and you're never quite sure his bragging is serious. He keeps a blowup doll around that purportedly resembles the girl he (maybe) killed, and talks to her all the time. He seems generally pathetic and agitated, but harmless. The scenes where he interacts with the teen killer, who is totally without conscience, are amazing to watch.
But the movie really belongs to the leader of the group of friends, Layne, played by the incredible Crispin Glover. Most people know him as George McFly in Back to the Future (Michael J. Fox's dad), and he's been somewhat notorious in a number of other eccentric roles... but here he is completely electric.
Layne is a speed freak who drives a souped-up dune buggy and talks in a wild spaced-out way that is spellbinding. Every vowel seems to go on for ages. He shifts moods like a chameleon, and is obsessed with doing right by his friends - even if it means covering up the murder of one of their group without a second thought. Layne in some ways is the center of the movie, as his actions drive most of the plot until Keanu can't live with the guilt anymore... and even then, you are holding your breath until Keanu has a showdown with Layne and finally tells it like it is.
This movie is technically a cult classic, not having garnered much attention in the theaters when it was new, but then came on strong via video and word of mouth. I had heard about it before I ever went to see it at the midnight revival. In my opinion, it's a really underrated masterpiece. It's the most disturbing "teen" movie I've ever seen, but it's disturbing because it feels so real. I feel like I grew up with kids exactly like Layne, and knew adults like Feck who would ply kids with drugs for some momentary company. The whole movie feels like it could be any poor small town in American. Highly recommended.
David Lynch's Blue Velvet, meanwhile, has enough notoriety to not need a lengthy introduction. I should say that I have a huge bias towards Blue Velvet - it's one of my five favorite movies (!).
Let's start, instead, with the incredible opening theme, by Angelo Badalamenti:
Immortal. The horns, the strings, the weird lilting theme. It really sets a strange tone - a la the the later theme of Twin Peaks - for a movie named for a famous song. Although the song is in there, and after seeing how it's used you'll never think of it the same way again.
Bobby Vinton wouldn't be smiling like that if he watched Dennis Hopper's reaction to his song...
OK, so the plot of Blue Velvet, in a nutshell. We open in Lumberton, North Carolina, which the famous intro shows us is All-America USA on the outside, and creeping black insects just under the surface. We see a man have a stroke, and the movie then follows his son Jeffrey who comes home to tend to the business and the family while the dad recovers.
But Jeffrey quickly becomes bored, as any college age kid stuck in a small town might. One day he walks through a field behind some apartment buildings, and starts mindlessly chucking rocks across the grass. He reached down for another rock... and finds a severed human ear.
And that's when this movie really takes off. Jeffrey (played by Kyle MacLaughlin) and Sandy, the daughter of the local detective (wonderfully played by Laura Dern) decide to investigate this ear by themselves and get enmeshed in a dark, dark world - the seedy underbelly hinted at in the opening sequence.
That's how we get to Dennis Hopper, here in his most iconic role as Frank Booth, a man of childlike desires and so emotionally stunted he can only express himself through song lyrics (the words of others) or through violence. He is perplexing, and entrancing, and he is frightening as hell. He is an alternate world father figure for Jeffrey (so violent and potent when Jeffrey's own father lies helpless in the hospital) whose interactions with the world are infantile and savage. You can't take your eyes off of him for a second.
The plot unfolds, like all Lynch movies, with a sort of dream logic that makes emotional sense sometimes more than literal sense. Although, along with The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet is fairly tightly scripted and doesn't sprawl out into strange terrain of dreams and alternate realities. There are also a lot of strange references to the Wizard of Oz - a main character is named Dorothy, a prominent villain wears a bright yellow suit and fairly closely resembles the Cowardly Lion. There is a great shot from the nose of Frank Booth's '68 Charger that shows the yellow lines in the middle of a road at 100 mph ... a sort of yellow brick road.
I really can't say enough good things about this movie... but I DO note that it is not for the faint of heart. Not even a little. This is a very disturbing movie across the board, and will induce nightmares even in the well-prepared. There are many, many famous scenes I want to describe here but won't, both to avoid spoilers and to avoid losing sensitive readers. That said, highly recommended.
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