“Now it’s Dark,” Remembering Hopper and Blue Velvet

It was 1986. I’d graduated high school three years earlier. As with most things back then, the way into genius was usually through the tastes of older boyfriends. They weren’t that much older, but that they knew more made them appealing to me. And what I had to offer in trade was my youthful self. This boyfriend was five years older than me. He loved movies. “It’s the new David Lynch movie,” he said. “We have to see it.”

So a few of us packed into some car we were driving at the time. There were two things I know for sure without even seeing that in my mind: it was a beater and it was cheap. “Blue Velvet,” what could that mean, my dumb young self was thinking. And who’s David Lynch? He was someone people like my boyfriend were really excited about. Me, I was much more of a mainstreamer, like I am now. But at least now I know, love and appreciate David Lynch.

Needless to say Blue Velvet was unlike anything I’d ever seen. What I remember about that screening, though, is that the sound cut out right after the famous scene between Dennis Hopper and Isabella Rossellini. The audience nearly shrieked in horror – not because they’d just seen Hopper, already a legend, don that oxygen max and put Rossellini through untold scenes of perversion, but because the sound had cut out and we’d had to leave the theater and come back the following night.

We had an entire evening to think about “that scene” and what we thought the movie was going to be about. The next night, we found ourselves anticipating that scene with Hopper, and every scene he was in, no matter how hard to watch they were. And they were. Hard to watch.

Dennis Hopper has acted in, written or directed (or all three) over one hundred films. He’s made many throw-aways, but he’s also made some great films. None of them, even Easy Rider, can top his performance in Blue Velvet. It was the right role for the right actor at the right time. Only David Lynch has been able to really tap into what Hopper was capable of, the level of twisted cruelty and sexuality of Frank Booth. And probably no other actor could have gone there.¬† There still hasn’t been a more memorable character in a Lynch film, and that’s saying a lot.

He managed to be grotesque and funny. “Heineken! Fuck that shit! Pabst Blue Ribbon!”

Blue Velvet rocked our worlds when it first came out. It remains to this day one of the weirdest, most beautiful things ever put to film. Lynch pulled together our memory of Ingrid Bergman, and our safety in our cinematic conventions and flipped them. And we’ve really never been the same since.

I wasn’t there for Easy Rider. I wasn’t really there for Apocalypse Now, although I’ve watched it many times. I was there for Blue Velvet and so it has stayed with me. Dennis Hopper, and the odd characters he brought to the screen, even in throwaway films (of which there were many), somehow the image of Hopper always make me laugh a little. He’s just always been so damned weird. And great. One suave fucker.