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"...And into the black." A decade following Easy Rider's roam for freedom, the poisoned dead-end of the family home. The tomboy (Linda Manz) has two sanctuaries, a bedroom shrine to Elvis and a rusty truck carcass in the backyard, she climbs into the latter and peppers the airwaves with Johnny Rotten war cries ("Subvert normality!"). Dad (Dennis Hopper) is in jail but turns up in her memories ramming a rig into a bus full of schoolchildren, Mom (Sharon Farrell) numbs herself with flings and heroin. Small-town life is a matter of cowboy bars and bowling alleys and empty theaters (the Chaplin epiphany from Days of Heaven is nullified at a Modern Times screening, "I hate happy endings"). A trip to the big city for a concert showcases Hopper's gift for grungy-lyrical composition: The heroine is serenaded by a raucous street performer (gutter, portable microphone, dwarf with crutches), then briefly curls up on a fleapit mattress with thumb in mouth (lurid light, stoned cabbie, slumped moll with hiked-up stockings). "She forgets how young she is." Ahead of Pixote and À Nos Amours, the new decade's teenage wasteland. Neil Young's "Thrasher" over an endless stretch of rubbish pecked at by albatrosses, a tottering circular pan for the father's homecoming party, a bit of Mouchette in roadside lights reflected on a child's wall. The progression toward oblivion includes the killing of idols, the girl sticks her panties into Dad's mouth with one hand and reaches for a blade with the other. (Dynamite does the rest, "a punk gesture, meaningless.") Hopper's great American annihilation, envisioned naturally in Vancouver. Harmony Korine lifted the whole kit and caboodle for Gummo, Manz above all—a porcupine Tatum O'Neal raging at the world when not murmuring "Heartbreak Hotel" to herself ("I get so lonely... I could die."). With Don Gordon, Raymond Burr, and David L. Crowley.
--- Fernando F. Croce |