Last
month we lost another cinematic icon when character actor Harry Dean
Stanton passed away at the age of 91. Of course Stanton was one of
America's greatest character actors, but to a genre film fan like
myself, he was also a key figure in the genre-film world, appearing
in the films of Alex Cox and Ridley Scott, while also maintaining
brief collaborations with John Carpenter and David Lynch, who put
Stanton's talents to amazing use in memorable and near-iconic roles
of starkly satirized Americans. Often, Stanton could bring any given
film epic waves of emotion and intelligence by his subtle and equally
expressive manner from underneath an all-American baseball cap. Wim
Wenders exemplified Stanton's talents in his film Paris,
Texas, which incidentally had
been written by L.M. Kit Carson, who had also scripted The
Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 for
Tobe Hooper and which starred another Vietnam-era American acting
icon, Dennis Hopper. Hopper and Stanton were somewhat cut from the
same American, (or Americana)
cloth, with the likes of Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda, and Warren
Oates, the last of which Stanton had appeared alongside in Monte
Hellman's Cockfighter. Like
Hellman's own films, Harry Dean Stanton was as American as the Road
Movie itself, born of and bred by American cinema. Stanton himself
could effortlessly inject a deeper Americana into any of the genre
films he played in, often simply just by showing up. And often this
imbued culture of Stanton's Americana came from a comfortably
paradoxical angle; such as the baseball-hat wearing spaceship
mechanic in Ridley Scott's Alien, a
film that itself was conversely on the fringe of the science fiction
genre back in the late seventies as it was on the fringe of American
culture itself. The charm of Scott's vision of Alien that
has never been (and could never be) replicated is the down-home
American feel of the working-class characters aboard the ship,
characters that are clearly a product of the ideals of the
working-class US citizens of the seventies, farm enough removed from
the Vietnam War to achieve a little skeptical hope, and not yet
embroiled in the Regan administration of the eighties. Much of this
working-class idealism is what Harry Dean Stanton seemed to embody in
his work as an actor, and as America progressed towards narcissism,
riches, and fame-mongering, so Harry Dean Stanton began to appear,
through his characters, as slightly more sardonic, a little more
weary, a little more cautious about
his previously-embodied Americana. Strangely, these characteristics
culminated very well for Stanton in his cameo for Korean director Kim
Jee-woon in his first American film, the Schwarzenegger-comeback
action-comedy The Last Stand, where
Stanton plays a farmer taking his last
stand against an evil Peter Stormare who wants to bulldoze his land
in order to facilitate a ridiculously over-the-top (yet hugely
entertaining) jailbreak for his billionaire boss. Of course, Stanton
has portrayed this typified character elsewhere in more
critically-celebrated films, like his last movie Lucky
(released to film festivals just
this year), but being a genre fan, movies like those of Kim Jee-wong,
John Carpenter, Alex Cox, and David Lynch is where my cinematic
compass happens to be magnetically attracted. My own memories of
Stanton's performances are encapsulated in John Carpenter's Escape
from New York and Christine,
David Lynch's Wild at Heart, Ridley
Scott's Alien, Alex
Cox's Repo Man, Wayne
Wang's Slamdance, and,
perhaps a little oddly, John Binder's 1985 American sci-fi comedy
UFOria, which I saw on
Superchannel that year as a 10-year-old-kid, and from one of
Stanton's lines “Well, everybody's gotta believe in
something... And right now, I believe I'll have another beer,” was
honestly the first time I'd ever heard that joke and I practically
busted a gut when I heard that.
As
a actor, Harry Dean Stanton, without exception, brought a greater
depth in general to the films and stories that surrounded him (or his
characters), even if he (or his characters) were not the exact center
of those stories. He could always fit into any film he was hired to
contribute to with stunning ease; his presence would undoubtedly make
a viewer think “of course Harry Dean Stanton was PERFECT
for that role!” – but that
in itself was all Harry Dean Stanton; that was the true embodiment of
his talents, it was his talent to be able to embody any part of any
type of story, and to seat himself into his roles perfectly, so that
ultimately all of his roles were the perfect roles for him. In the
end, Harry Dean Stanton was the last of the truly genuine performers.
-V.
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