I've never seen all of Easy Rider, and what I did see of it didn't especially make me want to see more. I don't remember Dennis Hopper from the James Dean/Giants era. What I do remember is Dennis Hopper as the edgiest, craziest Tom Ripley ever in Wim Wenders' The American Friend.
The little scraps that I've read about Dennis Hopper's struggles with drugs and alcohol don't seem surprising to me. I don't think Dennis Hopper was a genius of the method acting school. I think he was the Tom Ripley of The American Friend. Apparently, he satisfied his affinity for aggressive violence by keeping loaded guns scattered about his domicile. If he ever used them, I never read about it. Still...
Patricia Highsmith doesn't give us much context for her Tom Ripley. He appears out of nowhere: hungry, manipulative, envious, and totally devoid of empathy. The angry violence sort of leaks out of him, as if by accident. The Tom Ripley that Dennis Hopper realized on the screen never would have passed for normal the way that the Tom Ripley of Highsmith's novels (or Matt Damon's portrayal, for that matter) was able to. And the Dennis Hopper Ripley is more noticeably sadistic: he enjoys the violence and the inexplicable suffering he imposes on others. Garrotting is such an intimate way of murdering someone, and Hopper makes the event seem as erotic as a snuff film. It adds to his pleasure that he has lured an innocent into being the stunned voyeur for his live performance.
It would be wrong to say that Hopper's Ripley has no meaningful human relationships in his life, as his connection with those whom he victimizes is intensely personal. His relationships with the purportedly dead painter Elstir and the hapless framer whom he victimizes are charged with longing for connection. I don't think the homoerotic overtones, which are much more explicit in the Matt Damon portrayal, are the product of my own imagination. Even the signal to a friend about a fraudulent painting at an auction that takes place at the beginning of the film is like a flirtation.
Ripley is totally disconnected from everyone and invasively connected with everyone he deals with at the same time. He speaks, looks, or shakes a hand and almost seems to inhabit the mind and body of another at a single stroke. In the end, though, such is his power that he is left with no one to interact with but images of himself, like the Polaroids he is taking at the beginning of the film. Luring others into his hellish world of violence and deceit appears to be Ripley's strategy for making friends--Ripley's Game, as the novel from which the film is taken is titled.
Perhaps that is why I am so drawn to the portrayal. Hopper's Ripley wouldn't be the only serial killer who is really seeking connection, but murder is usually such a lonely business. For all the gratuitous violence, Dennis Hopper makes his Ripley's neediness obvious. He doesn't want to be alone. At the same time, he is understandably paranoid. But somehow still strangely likable. Just crazy.
The premise of the movie, which isn't explored in detail, is the irony that a painter, or rather his work, becomes more valuable once the painter dies, because his entire corpus becomes a limited edition to which there will be no further additions--unless, that is, some previously unknown work is "discovered." The further irony is that the fakes Ripley is peddling are, in reality, the genuine article, except that they aren't the work of a painter who is dead.
It's a hall of mirrors world that Ripley has entered and cannot ever leave. To avoid being alone, he tries to make others a part of it. As crazy behavior goes, it all makes perfectly good sense. For all of the fractured craziness of the personality Hopper portrays, it has a kind of integrity that seems absent in those around him, who allow themselves to be manipulated or who helplessly play out their assigned roles.
A film like The American Friend, like Highsmith's novels, is pure escapism. Normal social expectations count for nothing. One need not worry about whether or not the laundry is folded properly or becoming hopelessly wrinkled while cooling in the dryer. Hopper's Ripley seems puzzled when his new-found "friends" drive away from his madness at the end of the movie. When the movie is done, we get up and leave.
Movies and stories like that rarely explore how the central character got to where he is. The earliest story in the Ripley series does describe a fairly gradual descent into disillusionment and deceit, but it does nothing to explain what separates a pure psychopath from the rest of mankind, not even by way of conjecture. Hopper shows us the florid finished product. It was his most memorable performance. One wants to know more, but like the supposedly dead painter's work, Hopper's life is now an oeuvre complet, and I suspect we will never know what was acting and what was not, or why.
