As Time Goes By
I recently dug up an essay I’d read many moons ago by Italian author, philosopher and flaneur Umberto Eco entitled ‘Casablanca: Cult movies and intertextual collage’. In it Eco uses Casablanca as a lens to discuss why cult movies become so even though they may not have any particular artistic merit. In brief he suggests that Casablanca is a mash up of a variety of recognisable movie tropes, genres and characters all meeting in Rick’s Café Americain. The spy film, the romance film, the war movie, the adventure movie, the noir film and more all collide. There is such an abundance of cliché that it transcends kitsch.
"Just as the extreme of pain meets sensual pleasure, and the extreme of perversion borders on mystical energy, so too the extreme of banality allows us to catch a glimpse of the Sublime."
In a sense the characters and genres begin communicating with each other and the film becomes not just a film but an analogue for film itself.When discussing this with someone recently I mentioned the 1984 Alex Cox cult movie Repo-Man. That film likewise seems to be a collection of disparate sub-plots originating from different genres that don’t quite fit together, populated by hammily performed, clichéd characters. I’ve never understood why it was so revered, beyond it having a good soundtrack and I think Eco’s analysis offers a reason. While talking about Repo-Man I’d half joked that it was a cult movie by virtue of it having Harry Dean Stanton in it, as any film with him in it automatically becomes a cult movie. And then he died this weekend at the ripe old age of 91 and I thought about that half joke and figured that there was at least some semblance of a truth in it.
As my interest in film grew in the early 90s Harry Dean Stanton was a regular staple of many of the independent films I was discovering at the time on Moviedrome or some other late night film showcase that you don't get on terrestrial channels any more. Always understated, usually a secondary or minor character his only lead role was in Wender’s 1984 ‘Paris Texas’ which, if you haven’t seen it, you should stop reading this and go and watch instead.
Despite the size of his role his charisma and presence always filled the screen. A presence that, like all the truly great film performers, spoke of something despairingly complex, tragic or sad without them needing to say a word. Even the great comic actors possess that - Pryor, Jerry Lewis, Robin Williams, they all look like they’ve stared into some great darkness but, in their case, decided to laugh about it. Stanton also was funny as fuck.Stanton had been making films since the 50s and was in more than a hundred throughout his career. He straddled the genres – Cool Hand Luke (prison drama), Pat Garret & Billy the Kid (western – he had a face for westerns), Godfather Part 2 (gangster), Kelly’s Heroes (War movie), Two-Lane Blacktop (counter-cultural, indie movie), Alien (Sci-Fi), Pretty in Pink (teen movie), The Last Temptation of Christ (Biblical epic) and he became a regular collaborator with David Lynch, appearing in Wild at Heart, Fire Walk With Me, The Straight Story, Inland Empire and the recent re-emergence of Twin Peaks on television.
I think it fair to say that all of the above and many more besides have, to one degree or another, acquired a cult movie status.As already mentioned, in these films Stanton was almost always in some small role but his appearance in them, the variety of genres, and the period of time over which they stretch, along with his silent, life-etched demeanor lends him the strange quality of having just appeared in them almost by accident. Writing this I’ve noticed how many road movies he’s in – Two-Lane Blacktop, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Straight Story, Wild at Heart, Paris Texas, there are probably more and that feels about right as, whatever role, in whatever movie he’s in, he has a sense that you (or the film) has just bumped into him along the way while he’s been wandering mute around the desert. He seems like he’s about to impart some profound insight or anecdote that he never quite gets round to telling. When you see him you connect him to all those other films through all those other decades. Like a cinematic Wandering Jew he crops up, takes part in someone else’s story, then wanders on again. Somehow without ever sacrificing the authenticity of his performance it was like he knew where he was no matter what was going on around him. He was just in somebody else’s dream.
Harry Dean Stanton was never just a bit actor in a movie. He became an intertextual analogue for acting in movies.In this way he was a fitting accompaniment to Lynch who, perhaps more than any other filmmaker, has an uncanny understanding of the dreamlike nature of cinema. Lynch’s movies are nothing if not perplexing dreamscapes – disturbing and funny with the promise of a profundity that never feels the need to spell itself out. Lynch uses all the classical tropes our imaginations and our dreams have been fed from the flicker of the film screen while sitting in darkened rooms throughout our lives and he puts them together in such a way that it allows us to peak into those parts of ourselves that those tropes have somehow connected with and at the same time concealed. Harry Dean Stanton was the perfect performer for these weird fever dreams. Not only because of his own brand of quiet depth and ambiguity but because of his association with American film throughout the last half century.I keep thinking of the last scene in the Straight Story. Alvin Straight, (played by Richard Farnsworth) has heard that his estranged brother, Lyle, who he hasn’t seen for 10 years is ill. Forbidden from driving a car, Alvin decides to ride his lawnmower across Iowa and Wisconsin to see his brother. At the end he gets to Lyle’s shack and Harry Dean Stanton, as Lyle, appears. Saying barely a word they just sit on the porch and look up at the stars. Why did they let so much time go by?
He’d been with us so long it’s difficult to imagine Stanton's not going to crop up in any more films. He’s gone to prop up the bar in Rick’s place in the sky, smoking and drinking and shooting the breeze with Bogart, Bergman and Peter Lorre, so the movies won’t ever be able to bump into him again. But if we’re lucky, some of us might just bump into him, from time to time, in our dreams. A quiet figure that knows some secret that he'll never reveal but it doesn't matter because just knowing that someone knew it can be enough.