By Tom Ryan
CINEMA
Dirty Real – Exile on Hollywood and Vine with the Gin Mill Cowboys
Peter Stanfield
Reaktion Books, $39.99
The outlaw has long been an iconic figure in popular culture. The phenomenon isn’t just about those who have entered mythology by living outside the law, such as Robin Hood, Bonnie and Clyde, and co. It’s also about the ways in which adopting the appearance of an outlaw has become a badge of honour: a way for people to differentiate themselves from others by their life-styles, their dress and their general demeanour.
Fashion statements can become an implicit sign of rebellion against the norm: the long-haired, mop-top look ensuring that the Beatles wouldn’t be mistaken for the Four Preps; tattoos asserting a breakaway from the cleanskin class; cowboy hats signalling that their wearers aren’t ordinary suburbanites; the dramatic look and outfit announcing the presence of a “hippie”, a “punk”, a “goth”, or a “metalhead”.
This topic is central to film professor and commentator Peter Stanfield’s book, which examines how the idea of the outlaw fuelled a particular branch of Hollywood filmmaking during the late 1960s and early ’70s.
That was the post-Production Code era which led to the establishment of the “New Hollywood”, the permissiveness that was central to it, and films such as Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Easy Rider (1969), Five Easy Pieces (1970), The Last Movie, Two-Lane Blacktop and McCabe and Mrs Miller (all 1971), Dirty Little Billy (1972), Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974).
Stanfield discusses these films and others in some detail, assessing the various ways in which they all aspire – some more successfully than others – to get down and dirty, to break with convention, and to build the distinctive style of filmmaking that his title names as “dirty real”.
Peter Fonda (left) and Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider.
He proposes that their anti-hero protagonists were, sometimes loosely but sometimes exactly, cast in the mould of Humphrey Bogart, in particular of Fred C. Dobbs, the ill-fated drifter the actor played in John Huston’s 1948 classic The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
At the same time, he speculates about the “personal myth-making” that went hand-in-hand with the production of the films, his sardonic subtitle revealing what he thinks about many of those involved. “Hollywood and Vine” refers to the intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street in Los Angeles and is a widely used shorthand for the centre of the Hollywood film business; and “the Gin Mill Cowboys” refers to those whose contact with the cowboy way of life goes no further than saloon stopovers.
Stanfield never quite puts it like this, but he’s saying these filmmakers haven’t fooled him. That, while their films might sometimes be pretty good, many of those involved in their creation are basically wannabes, people putting on a show, pretending to be something that they’re not.
Early in the book, he reveals exactly where he’s coming from. “The middle-class dropout resurfacing as a bohemian artist, poet, painter, troubadour, or filmmaker is the shadow who flits through the pages of Dirty Real, both as a protagonist in the films and as a persona adopted by the filmmakers themselves. The films’ characters, as with the actors, writers and directors, were costumed in the pitch that defileth and showed too an acute nostalgia for the gutter none had known at first hand.”
Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty in Bonnie and Clyde.Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. & Seven Arts
It’s in this context that he’s especially scathing about Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda, the former for his often-bewildering shooting-off-at-the-mouth about his maverick credentials, the latter largely because of his out-there shunning of the expectations imposed on him as a member of Hollywood royalty. But his criticism of how the pair were wily and audacious enough to try to use their star status to turn media interviews into publicity machines for themselves and their endeavours is naive about how the business has always worked.
And who cares what kind of image they’re trying to convey to the world anyway? Why should it matter? Surely, what’s important is the quality of what they’ve done and are trying to market, the art not the artist.
Stanfield is also mistaken when he suggests that some of the contemporary commentary about the “dirty real” films shouldn’t be taken seriously because it’s somehow cultish. “The existential dynamic of cult film appreciation,” he writes, “is always less about the film than it is about the critical discourse in which it circulates.” That’s something that can be said about the critiques of any work in any medium at any time, whatever labels are attached to it.
Nevertheless, he’s right to take a sceptical view of the “dirty real” phenomenon. And his observations about how the meetings between on-screen outlaws and their soul mates in the music industry – Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Kris Kristofferson, the Eagles and others – turn them into mirror reflections of each other are especially astute.
In its sometimes snarky way, Get Real suffers from a bit of a split personality. A lively read, it’s smartly written and full of provocative ideas about the ongoing appeal of the outlaw in contemporary life and about the workings of popular culture in general. But too often it seems driven by a putdown principle that only diminishes its strengths.
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