Finally, Thomas presents us with a universe of what Northrop Frye calls "total metaphoric identification" in which everything is potentially identified with everything else. The point of merger is also the point of liberation. Thus:
When you make the two one
and make the inside like toe outside
and the outside like the inside
and the upper side like the under side
and (in such a way) that you make toe man (with)
the woman a single one. . .
When you make eyes in place of an eye
and a hand in place of a hand
and a foot in place of a foot
an image in place of an image
then you will go into [the kingdom] .
Other sayings extend the identities until toe two opposing worlds merge in the All.
Thus we have in The Gospel According to Thomas an eschatological universe of daydream and nightmare imagery-the kingdom of light and toe kingdom of darkness- presented as paired opposites which are metaphorically identified with each other and with everything else. This scheme is congruent with Hopper's tendency to view the real world through "dialectic logic" (to use his own term) and with his stated belief that symbolism, mysticism, and reality are inseparably combined.
Hopper pays direct homage to the Thomas gospel in The Last Movie, for toe sermon board of the church facade, featured twice in medium shot, is labeled "Church of Didymos Judas Thomas" and contains a paraphrase of Thomas' saying number sixty-seven: "Show me toe stone toe builders have rejected, for they are toe corner stones." But toe influence of toe Thomas gospel runs far deeper than this. In fact, as I shall argue, its pattern of imagery provides a master plan for Hopper's film- a blueprint which, when understood, not only helps elucidate the "plot" but which transforms The Last Movie into a full, rich, and deeply moving experience. Astounding as it may appear to most readers, toe underlying pattern is simply this: that toe visual motifs in The Last Movie, like toe major imagery in The Gospel According to Thomas, consist of inverse image pairs belonging to toe daydream and nightmare worlds, that the "plot" consists of the conversion of motifs, and that at the climax of the film these opposing images merge. In this paper it is my intention to explicate the design of the film. I will isolate the major motifs common to the daydream and the nightmare worlds, trace the conversion of motifs through toe plot line, and show how these opposing images coalesce at toe climax.
The Daydream World, or the world of desire fulfilled, is presented in a series of linked episodes in which Kansas and Maria wander through a flower-laden countryside that suggests, with its majestic landscapes, its sun rays, and its heraldic colors green and gold, a paradise on earth. Here Hopper, who plays Kansas, is cast as a second Adam with Maria as his Eve. The movement in this series of episodes is upward, beginning with Kansas on his horse in the idyllic fields, following the lovers hand in hand toward the foot of the mountain, past silhouetted children who stand like angels at the gates of Eden, through the gates themselves-present here as steps leading up through an oval cleft in the precipice-into a small, rounded, womb-like canyon where, naked on a table of rock at the foot of a waterfall and within sight of the Priest and his entourage of children hiking on the trails above, Kansas and Maria make love. Later as they sit overlooking the valley, they continue making plans for an ascent to toe daydream world. "Just give me a little adobe up on those rocks," says Kansas, pointing to a mesa, "and I'll be a very happy man."
Present in these idyllic episodes are eight motifs which recur as daydream imagery throughout the film: Kansas as Adam, Maria as the virgin, or madonna figure, the canyon as the womb or temple, the slab of rock on which the couple makes love as the table, the child conceived here as the infant, imaginary adobe as the pinnacle, the horse as the servant, and the setting as a paradise under countenance of the Priest. Together these eight motifs represent the world of aspiration and desire.
In opposition to the daydream world is the world of nightmare imagery: the familiar world, in Northrop Frye's words, "of bondage and pain and confusion ... of perverted and wasted work, ruins and catacombs, instruments of torture and monuments of folly."17 As in the case of the daydream motifs eight major nightmare images, generated early in the film, run throughout The Last Movie. Thus the opening sequence with its shots of the Corpus Christi procession intercut with the aimless parade of mock-movie paraphernalia and followed by a haggard and bleeding young man give us Kansas the scapegoat. Similarly the fur-stoled and miniskirted Maria who poses on toe steps of a ruined church facade is Maria the harlot- an identification confirmed by later events. Meanwhile toe juxtaposition of processions creates a sense of confusion appropriate to the labyrinth. Throughout the early scenes flash shots of the jail, which like shots of the coffin-strewn sanctuary, serve as prototypes for the dungeon. During the cast party the ear-piercing ceremony, staged as a mock Eucharist, gives us a model for the altar, with toe masked figures behind it as four versions of the beast. The dead man is present in the opening scenes not only as the corpse strapped to the red car but also as the stone monument which seems to tower over the graveyard sequence. The churchyard itself with its tombstones, dry bones, and burning tree is representative of Golgotha, existing (like the rest of the nightmare world and its inhabitants) under countenance of the mock Director, whom toe Priest calls "the Evil One."
Thus we have in the opening scenes eight pairs of linked images which function as motifs throughout the film. Maria, for example, is not just the virgin or madonna figure; she is also, in Hopper's terms, "Mary Magdalene, the Mary that Christ talked about." Similarly each image characteristic of toe daydream world has its dialectic counterpart in nightmare. The chart with dichotomies is based on a close analysis of the imagery. Throughout the central part of the film, which carries the weight of the narrative, we may trace the conversion of motifs from daydream to nightmare imagery in preparation for his sacrificial death.
The Archway
These terms are linked at one end by the Archway and at the other by the Cross.
The descent is foreshadowed even as Kansas and Maria reach the pinnacle, for his rapidly escalating scheme to build a hotel in place of the "little adobe" of his dreams is symptomatic of the perverse sense of values that would despoil the very paradise he sought. Economics is important here, for it is in part their desire for the products of civilization that destroys the dream. Thus the decline begins when the couple actually acquires a "little adobe"- with swimming pool- on a mountain overlooking the city, for as Kansas says, "There's an awful lot goin' out and there's nothin' comin' in." Descending from their pinnacle in hope that the movie company will return, Kansas and Maria enter the labyrinthine city below. Here begins the drinking, gambling, and whoring section (accompanied intermittently by the "hee-haw" siren reminiscent of a ravenous beast) that ends with Kansas broke, evicted, alienated from Maria and wandering across the desert in search of a phantom gold mine. On his return to the village, in a completion of the descent, he is thrown into jail by Mercado, the mock Director, who is shooting his own make-believe version of The Death of Billy the Kid in which the "actors" commit real violence. Maria is back at work in the whorehouse, and Kansas is conscripted to play the leading role in the make-believe production, which Mercado calls the "Last Movie." As his part in the "Last Movie" is announced, Kansas is surrounded by the masked animal figures familiar from the mock Eucharist section, above.
Thus we have moved with Kansas and Maria from the pinnacle through the labyrinth, from the paradise through Golgotha, the desert, from the home or temple to the dungeon. Maria is a harlot, and Kansas is the scapegoat cast in the role of the "dead man" who must perish under the cross on an altar-like street to be consumed by the beast. The conversion of motifs is complete.
In The Gospel According to Thomas the two opposing worlds so carefully delineated merge. Thus in saying twenty-three, "When you make the two one, and make the inside like the outside, and the outside like the inside . . . then you will go into [the kingdom] ." And in saying three, "The old man in his days will not hesitate to ask an infant of seven days about the place of life, and he will live, For many of the first will be last, and they will be a single one." Ih The Revelation of St. John the Divine a similar merger occurs in the person of Christ, who says, "I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last." In fact the merger of opposites seems to be typical of eschatological works, which end by recombining polar images into the original unity of creation. In the screenplay for The Last Movie this kind of merger takes place at the very conclusion, in what was originally scripted as Kansas' death scene. As the villagers lay the dying man (who was to have been called "Tex") on a litter we see into his mind:
His MOTHER'S BREASTS, lull, tne milk leaking out. MARIA'S FACE and TEX splashing it with milk from the goat. MARIA'S MOUTH seeking. TEX'S MOUTH, seeking. The MOTHER in the photograph. A BABY (Tex) suckling at the Mother's breast . . . TEX on the pinnacle, screaming in terror. Klee klee klee klee klee! The BABY (Tex) crying. The RACE TRACK the runner, faraway . . . The withered, dried-out BREASTS of an OLD WOMAN (Tex's Mother). A HORSE raises its tail and defecates. WIMPY stops eating his hamburger. TEX, as a man, is ..CR YING on his DEAD MOTHER'S BREAST as she lies in a coffin.18
Thus Maria and the Mother are allied in metaphorical identification, as are Tex, the baby, and the man.
But in The Last Movie as we have it, this merger of opposites is further extended and presented at a different point in the narrative, for in the film version it is Kansas' state of delirium prior to the sacrifice that serves as an "apocalyptic vision" in which daydream and nightmare imagery coalesce. After the fight in the whorehouse as Kansas drags himself onto the saddle of the servant, his horse, we hear the continuing wail of the beast. As he lurches through the maze-like, echoing Inca arches- present here as temple, labyrinth, and dungeon- he imagines himself in a pinnacle in the posture of Adam triumphant although the lyrics which accompany this section, "Who nailed you up there/and strung you limb from limb," identify him as a Christ figure in the scapegoat role. Maria is present as a mini-skirted nun- an amalgamation of the virgin and the harlot- perched on the barren sterile rocks at the cleft in the "gates of Eden," which by juxtaposition consolidate the fertile paradise and Golgotha, toe desert. A close-up of a baby turning his head away from its mother's spurting breast is matched with a close-up of Kansas in the same act while he moans, "I'm dying I'm dying I'm dying," metaphorically uniting toe infant and the dead man. Furthermore, while awakening from his delirium, he is attended both by toe Priest and by a villager who resembles toe mock Director, pressed close to toe Priest's shoulder. Thus Kansas' question, "who are you?" is ironically appropriate at this point, for here the image pairs characteristic of toe two worlds have merged.
It is clear, of course, that Kansas is scripted to die in the mock Director's movie, "like Dean did." He is captured, jailed, shriven, and shorn. After toe confession, in which he accepts responsibility for what has happened to the village ("I sinned Father . . . toe movies! "), we see him led to toe killing spot by a parade of drunken revelers while he is participating in the festivities-smiling, drinking, waving, and nodding approval of toe Priest's call for "Joy! Joy!" Apparently Kansas is to serve as a kind of scapegoat whose "death" will affect a catharsis, freeing the village from violence and apostasy. And in toe original screenplay Kansas (known as "Tex") actually does die of an imaginary gunshot wound which he believes has been inflicted by toe mock Director, although according to toe script, "In reality there is no wound-only the old makeup blood around toe tear in toe shirt."
Much that is controversial in The Last Movie-its improvisational technique, its relationship to the audience, its defiance of expectations based on linear plot patterns- is focused on this projected death scene. For as Hopper says, "By toe time I got to toe end I didn't feel that it was advantageous to toe film that he die." Thus when Stern was invited to view a rough assembly of toe film he was astounded to discover that toe death scene he had envisioned as toe climax of his screenplay had never been shot. Stern says,
I went down and saw all this glory spinning out on the screen and also all this *beep* I was exalted and horrified. I kept asking to see those scenes and then it turned out that they weren't there. I tried and tried to prevail upon him as to the sense of putting them in . . . and he was really adamant. He said "Look. There are many movies in a movie . . . but this is my movie, my movie, and that's the movie that's going out on the screen."19
Hopper's judgment seemed to be vindicated when The Last Movie won toe best picture award at toe Venice Film Festival in 1971. But even after this toe executives at Universal Studios demanded that he change toe climax. "They didn't deny that it was an artistic movie," said Hopper, "but they told me toe only good artist was a dead artist. They said it would never be commercial . . . and that they were going to shelve toe picture unless I killed toe guy at toe end. They didn't care how I killed him- if I dropped a camera on him or ran him over with horses or how I did it. They just wanted me to kill him at toe end.
Kansas' death would indeed have served as a focal point for toe major themes of toe film while satisfying toe audience's sense of narrative conventions. But in The Last Movie as we have it, Hopper has created something quite unusual: something which strips away the accretions of convention and reveals The Last Movie in its affinity with the Dionysian origins of drama. For at this point in the film the fictional world so carefully assembled begins to fall apart. The "Priest" blows his lines and laughs at the camera, the "mock Director" appears out of costume, and "Kansas," shirtless, says, "Hey, fellas, I don't even have my *beep* scar on." It appears that we are watching documentary footage of Dennis Hopper and his crew preparing to shoot the last scene of their film. This realization is followed by the disintegration of film technique: the "Priest" sticks out his tongue in slow motion, the "mock Director" shoots a gun which goes off out of synchronization, the sound track degenerates into a medley of motifs-the alarm bell, a chisel, wailing, the "hee haw" siren, a baby, sheep- which bear no clear relationship to what is happening on the screen. At the conclusion of this section there is an amplified and attenuated gunshot sound mixed with an ominous guitar chord as Hopper gets up and walks out of the shot with the "mock Director" clinging like a demon to the back of his shirt. What we have at this point in The Last Movie is something like the medieval masque (associated like Hopper's film with the Corpus Christi festival) in which, as a final gesture of surrender, the actors unmask and join the audience in a dance.20
The following shot of children silhouetted on a hill, recalling a similar shot from the graveyard sequence, suggests the innocence of a game, just as (finally) The Last Movie has become a game. And when the climactic death scene does occur it, too, has become play acting: Hopper falls into a "crucifix" pose, flat on his back with arms outstretched above his head, in an unmistakable imitation of the death of Billy the Kid- then, in front of his assembled audience, rises and repeats the fall. This act, we may assume, would climax the movie fiesta if there were still any fiesta to climax. It is the great "death" scene we have been expecting since the opening shots, and to delay it to this point, after the actors have unmasked, is to force a reconsideration of everything that has gone before. It is Hopper, not Kansas, who plays the scene, and it is the real inhabitants of Chincero, not the make believe villagers, who watch the "resurrection." We can now see The Last Movie as a series of envelopes, beginning with Fuller's "Billy the Kid" Western, expanding into the mock Director's "Last Movie," unfolding into The Last Movie as Stern and Hopper once conceived it, and opening finally into the movie on the screen in front of us-Dennis Hopper's last movie. Thus at the climax of the film we have the merging of art and life at the same time that, in a final liberation of opposites, death and resurrection become one.
Once the concept is understood, the "plot" of The Last Movie becomes clear, and may be summarized, as we have seen in four parts: the presentation of opposing worlds, Kansas' descent from the daydream to the nightmare world, the merger of opposites focused through Kansas as sacrificial victim, and liberation of the conflict thus created into game. It is true that The Last Movie all but defies linear description, and it is also true that this very complexity makes it a potentially fascinating experience. Like Antonioni's Red Desert and Fellini's 8½-both earlier examples of nonlinear films-Hopper's second movie (which is surely not his last) is ready to reward those who will give it toe close attention it deserves and commands. Critics who watch the film unprejudiced by anachronistic notions of plot may find, as I have found, that TAe Last Movie is a coherent, rich and deeply satisfying work of art.
Dan E. Burns
[Footnote]
NOTES
1 Axel Madsen, "California Dreaming," Sight and Sound, summer 1970, p. 129.
2 "You're Wrong If You Write Off Dennis Hopper," New York Times, 24 October 1971, p. 160.
3 "From Adolescent to Puerile," Time, 18 October 1971, p. 87.
4 "The Last Shall Be First," Saturday Review, 16 October 1971, p. 63.
5 "Visions of the End," The Atlantic Monthly, December 1971, p. 132.
6 "Films in Focus," TAe Village Voice, 14 October 1971, p. 80.
7 "Movies in Movies," TAe New Yorker, 9 October 1971, p. 152.
8 Take One, March-April 1971, p. 31.
9 Kaminsky, p. 31.
10 New York Times, 24 October 1971, p. 160.
11 Hirsch, p. 160.
12 Anthony Macklin, "Easy Rider: The Initiation of Dennis Hopper," Film Heritage, Fall, 1969, p. 9.
13 See, for example, his work as presented by Henry Hopkins, "Dennis Hopper's America," Art in America, May-June 1971, p. 80.
14 Interview with Dennis Hopper, Taos, New Mexico, 10 April 1976. Subsequent quotations of Hopper, unless otherwise noted, are from this unpublished interview.
15 Brad Danach, "The Easy Rider Runs Wild in the Andes," Life, 19 June 1970, p. 49.
16 Robert M Grant, TAe Secret Sayings of Jesus (London: Fontana Books, 1960), p. 131.
17 Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 124.
18 Stewart Stern, "The Last Movie" (an unpublished screen play), pp. 117-18.
19 Telephone interview with Stewart Stern, 2 April 1976.
20 A comparison of The Last Movie with medieval drama, especially the masque, would make a fascinating study. It is sufficient here to cite Northrop Frye's comments on the form. "The archetypal masque," he says, "like all forms of spectacular drama, tends to detach its settings from time and space, but instead of the Arcadias of t
reply
share
HolyShackles
14 years ago
WOW, that is one hell of take on it, better than anything I could have ever hoped for, thank you so much for sharing that, it greatly adds to my appreciation of the film.
reply
share