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181 8 The Last Place on Earth? Allegories of Deplacialization in Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie ARA OSTERWEIL Peru is an epic fantasyland. Imagine scenery on the scale of an Indiana Jones or Lara Croft flick, with forgotten temples entangled in jungle vines, cobwebbed imperial tombs baking in the desert sun and ancient bejeweled treasures beyond reckoning. Wild rivers that rage, pumas that prowl in the night and hallucinogenic shaman rituals that are centuries old—and it’s not just a movie here, it’s real life. —Lonely Planet Peru In 1969, Dennis Hopper’s independently produced Easy Rider captured the counterculture’s pulse beyond the wildest dreams of the studios. Exploiting the techniques that had defined underground cinema in New York for the previous decade, Easy Rider represented the countercultural lifestyle as a perceptual euphoria that was simultaneously antiestablishment and accessible to the mainstream. As Jack Kerouac had famously described it a generation earlier, freedom in Easy Rider meant being “on the road,” where loose women, fast bikes, and most memorably, a psychedelic LSD trip updated the frontier myth for a new generation. But as the apocalyptic end of the film suggested, freedom was also the end of the road. Rebellion may have been ecstatic, but Easy Rider’s hippie outlaws paid the ultimate price for their attempt to live on the outskirts of the dominant order. Riding the unprecedented success of Easy Rider, Dennis Hopper set out to make The Last Movie, a film he had originally intended as his first but hadn’t believed would find an audience. Self-styled as the young Orson Welles—a comparison Hopper himself made in interviews in the documentary The American Dreamer1 —Hopper gained absolute personal control over all aspects of production for his second feature. Granted access to a whopping $850,000 budget (far less 182 | ARA OSTERWEIL than most Hollywood films but more than twice what Easy Rider had cost) and industrial means of production from Universal Pictures,2 the mercurial director had managed to convince the studios—if not the actual counterculture—that his impression on the youth audience was akin to the Midas touch. The inspiration for his second feature occurred to Hopper during the filming of the John Wayne western The Sons of Katie Elder (Henry Hathaway, 1965) in Durango, Mexico. Confronted with the enormous contrast between the archetypal artifice of the production and the impoverished reality of the local community, Hopper wondered what would happen when the Hollywood movie cast and crew departed and the indigenous people were left living among the detritus of Western sets and other movie production paraphernalia.3 What, in other words, was the afterlife of Hollywood mise-en-scène for the indigenous populations who were compelled to incorporate Hollywood’s waste products into their daily lives? Whereas the ill-fated protagonists of Easy Rider had sought to fulfill their romantic desire for self-determination within America’s borders, the Ulyssean antihero of The Last Movie went to South America in search of the financial success that had eluded him in the States (Figure 8.1). Playing capitalist industry man rather than romantic outlaw, Dennis Hopper’s character in The Last Movie sought not an untouched wilderness but an untouched market. Yet, instead of discovering a population eager to serve as the faceless, red backdrop to the heroic antics of a gang of cowboy cronies, the protagonist of The Last Movie discovered an indigenous community ready to resist foreign domination. If the end of Easy Rider suggested that the cherished dream of freedom could not be sustained when confronted with the violent racism of the Deep South, then The Last Movie refused to accommodate the outsourcing of this dream to a land south of the border. Perhaps unconsciously, The Last Movie demonstrated that the capitalist desire for an unregulated market and the hippie desire for an unregulated social body were two sides of the same fraught ideological game. Yet The Last Movie didn’t merely move beyond the geographic location of the United States; rather the film turned the cameras around on America—both literally and figuratively—to reflect on the ideological presumptions that defined Hollywood, alternative cinema, and Hopper’s own evolving posture from Method-trained actor to avant-garde outlaw. Though the film failed miserably with audiences of its time, in the nearly forty years since its debut, it has been recognized, by critics such as David James and J. Hoberman, as one of the most provocative...

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