California may have spent the last five years under the rule of a Republican movie star, but news that major industry players are anything but super-lefty liberals still seems to strike many as a surprise. Responding to a story in which it’s casually mentioned that Dennis Hopper is expected to attend the Republican National Convention, Defamer’s Kyle Buchanan writes, “Did we miss the memo that said the countercultural director of freaking Easy Rider was a Republican? We’d assumed his appearance in the right-wing Zucker film An American Carol was a strict paycheck gig…”
I’m not sure when the “memo” first went out, but Hopper has been a registered Republican for over 25 years. This 2005 interview is the most concise story that I could find on Hopper’s “conversion” from, as he puts it, being “probably as Left as you could get without being a Communist,” to believing in “the idea of less government, more individual freedom” and voting “on the straight Republican ticket.” In that story, Hopper mentions palling around with then-Senator John McCain, of whom he said, “That’s the kind of guy I’d like to be president.” (Hopper has since flirted with supporting Obama, but if he’s attending the RNC I imagine that attraction has cooled off.)
Hopper is the living embodiment of that old adage about how if you’re not liberal at 20, you don’t have a heart, and if you’re not conservative at 40, you don’t have a brain (and those of us who are socially liberal and fiscally conservative at 28 simply have no candidate). That 2005 interview says Hopper is “still part of the counterculture” because of his political beliefs, and that might be true if you consider him alongside other aging 60s icons. But in terms of that generation as a whole, simply moving from the far left to the middle right with age doesn’t make him much of an anomaly.
As far as An American Carol goes, the much fretted-over satire of Michael Moore from newly converted “9/11 conservative” David Zucker, Hopper’s participation might still been motivated more by a paycheck than by politics––after all, Paris Hilton’s in the movie, too––but it might be safe to assume that it was a small paycheck, considering that the independently financed and distributed film has a reportedly low budget, and Hopper is billed pretty far down on the cast list.
In terms of finding that perfect storm of the ideologically defensible sell-out, Hopper’s much-mocked side gig as an Amerprise spokesmodel actually makes a kind of sense. In one of these ads, Hopper even ties his former, Easy Rider-associated, counter-cultural hero self to his paycheck-cashing, Republican-voting current incarnation.
All of the ads are set to a brightly-orchestrated version of the Steve Winwood-penned hit “Gimme Some Lovin’,” which was a hit for Winwood and the Spencer Davis Group in 1967 (the year Hopper starred in The Trip, the acid-sploitation flick scripted by Jack Nicholson and directed by Roger Corman). In the “Flower Power” ad, Hopper stands in a field of sunflowers in front of a Rider-reminiscent Western backdrop. After telling us that those who say dreams “are like delicate little flowers” are “WRONG!”, there’s a cut to Hopper set far back in the field. “I want to make my own movie!” he says, well, dreamily. The ad closes with Hopper intoning, “Flower power was then. Your dreams are now.” The message: the world in which he made Easy Rider no longer exists. Grow up. Having money is no longer a contemptible spoil of The Man––you ARE The Man. Oh, and start a retirement portfolio with Ameriprise.
Hopper is the poster boy for the 60s cultural revolutionary who, when “the drugs that were free suddenly weren’t free anymore [and] the party was over,” put aside their youthful ideals and refocused their big appetites on power, wealth and mainstream commercial consumption. It’s not surprising that this icon of the anti-establishment has come over to the conservative side. What’s surprising is that more stars of his generation haven’t likewise decided that fortunes are more important to protect than hazy memories and followed him over.
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SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth