By Travis Johnson
Even if you don’t know his name, you know Harry Dean Stanton’s face. In a world of “that guy” actors, he was that guy. He got lured to his death by the damn cat in Alien. He was Molly Ringwald’s dad in Pretty in Pink, anchoring the teen dramedy with an incredibly grounded turn as a heartbroken alcoholic. He told Bruce Banner he had a condition in The Avengers. He was the nervy, untrustworthy Brain in Escape From New York. He cropped up in everything.
In the rare moments when he was given a centre stage role, his ubiquity made sense – Stanton had a strange magnetism, a flat-out arresting screen presence. He wasn’t a chameleon, per se – Harry Dean looked too much like Harry Dean for that – but he brought a truthfulness, a bitter soulfulness, to every role.
The problem is that few directors knew how to deploy Stanton in a leading role. Even his frequent collaborator, David Lynch, kept him in support. It is notable that his two leading roles – Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas and Alex Cox’s Repo Man, both 1984 – are considered classics. In the former, Stanton’s craggy face, set against the equally rugged American desert, does all the heavy lifting, occasionally aided by Sam Shepard’s poetic dialogue. In the latter, he brings his own existential sensibilities to Cox’s punk rock absurdist epic. There’s a strange alchemy at work in both films that is hard to pin down – perhaps the easiest way to encapsulate how important Stanton is to the success of each is to imagine them without him. Plug any other actor into Paris, Texas or Repo Man and they kind of fall apart.
Over the course of his career, Stanton appeared in over 110 films and a staggering amount of TV, culminating in his final appearance in, fittingly enough, Twin Peaks: The Return, but our best look at the man comes in the documentary Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction, an examination of his life and philosophy. An existentialist and a fatalist, Stanton neither took credit for his own success, nor put much value in it. At one point in the film, David Lynch asks Stanton how he would like to be remembered. “It doesn’t matter.”
He will, of course, be remembered. He was a singular talent, one of the finest actors ever to grace the screen and, perhaps ironically given his worldview, he is now immortal.
