Dean Stockwell: The Gate.

When I was young I didnt have much of a grip on reality. I didn't care for it much either, what was there just didnt interest me much. I believed very much in worlds that bordered ours, and in heavens and hells, and dimensions, and that imagination found several confirmations and vessels in various forms. There were bent trees over large fields whose brush touched the ground as the roots knelt in it. There were my pencils and pens which drew on paper and in the air, secret doors like in CS Lewis's definitive childrens Chronicles -to these alternate universes, and then there were actors whom I fixated on as obvious occupants from these various worlds who acted as gateways. One such actor was Dean Stockwell whom I first discovered in David Lynch's fever dream adaptation of Frank Herbert's essential Science fiction text. I didnt care or even know about the movie as a box office failure or whether it hot the text right, I saw it and Stockwell in it as further visual proof of the otherworldly, and fully grown I still think so.

I've seen David Lynch's lynch's “Blue Velvet” probably 4 times, it's possible it's 5 over my life, but like most of lynch's films save for Dune, I could not tell you still what that movie is about and whenever I recall it it comes to me more so as a collection of scenes and images than it does a coherent idea or feeling about the film. Of course one of those images or scenes is iconic and burned into I think most peoples memories. It's the “Roy Orbison” scene in which Dean Stockwell occupies a certain space a certain time that feels disconnected even for Lynch from the rest of the film which felt like a hostage movie on LSD. In a TCM interview avaiable on YouTube, Stockwell tells the story of how his work on Francis Ford Coppola's “Tucker: The Man and His Dream" came to to be. He tells of Coppola giving him 3 pages with 3 varying iterations with varying intensity of the short scene in which he would play fellow dreamer Howard Hughes. Coppola then allowed him something most directors don’t, he told him that he could put together these pages in any way he wished and he said that he basically didn't see him ( Coppola ) again for 3 weeks or so and wrote it himself and in exactly the way he wanted. It plays like a dream, and he plays as if he is already a ghost of himself come to visit Tucker. He speaks in a drawl soaked in Texas and distance, a deliberateness that borders on being android like. Maybe he hails from another world, place, time, dimension, whatever you want to call it, but once again it feels both foreign and at home. Back in the interview Stockwell called Coppola “dreamy” as a director almost immediately followed by naming Lynch as the same. By “same” he means he was again allowed to create his own character through invention with very little to no intervention. In a PIECE on Stockwell's role as “Ben" by the unassailably brilliant Sheila O Malley, she writes : “The script said NOTHING about him. Lynch knew that whatever Stockwell came up with, in terms of inventing Ben, was going to be great – he just trusted him with the character (a rare thing. Most writers and directors OVER explain characters because they’re nervous that the pesky little actors are going to be ruin everything with their interpretation).Stockwell went to work. He created that guy’s look on his own – the makeup, the clothes, the energy … He hasn’t made too many mistakes in his career. He hasn’t over-reached, or missed the mark too much in his 100 plus films, which is quite a record. Who has seen Blue Velvet and doesn’t remember Ben? Not possible. Also – doesn’t it seem as though Ben HAD to have been written that way? The whole character seems completely inevitable … and perfect. Of course he wears makeup, of course he dresses like that, of course he stands around in large groups with his eyes closed – communing with candy-colored clowns in the ether of his brain. But no: none of it was set out in the script. Stockwell MADE that guy. I think that is so hysterical, so wonderful. It must have been such fun.” She was right and Stockwell confirms. I saw blue velvet for the 1st time when I was 19 I concluded that his character was an alien and I see nothing haven't watched a few more times to change my mind, but This was always the space that Stockwell occupied for me it was coded within his acting as it spoke to me. For me Stockwell was kind of born to play with somebody like Lynch because as an actor he always made choices that seemed foreign to any idea of space and time, but not so far that he also never knew how to find some way back to the path, whatever path of whomever was directing him - back to the world in which this character needed to occupy. A prime example exists in the lead up to the Orbison Karaoke, Stockwell stands being a gracious but equally weird host to the very outlandish Frank Booth. While Hopper goes off doing his very best Hopper, each one of the surrounding actors giving different beats he kind of just disappears. Theres this strange minute where he closes his eyes and he keeps them closed as if he just teleported himself somewhere else. It occurs at around the 2:50 second mark here and ends at around 3:15.

Where did he go I wonder? Was he like younger me in commune, and attuned with places that we're outside this particular rental space we call reality? Could he conjure them up at a moments notice? What did he find there? A time limit? The way he comes back is like a stop watch, it’s not just Hopper’s words it’s a suddenness that implies a condition, and that implied to me an alien-ness. Whatever it was, whatever he found is inconsequential to the film, but vitally important to the character of Ben and his place in it . It also displays another important facet of of Stockwell's career and to his own particular magic and that is his peculiar understanding of the importance of a closed and opened eye. Sheila notices it too. I latched onto it instantly as a kid watching what is still one of my ga favorite movies and sequels, Beverly Hills Cop II. Most actors understand the importance of an open line but the widening of the or the closing of especially of a especially as something that I've never seen deployed and quite the way that Stockwell does it. Only one actor I could think of right off top understands this in anyway like Stockwell, though to completely different effects and purpose and that is Samuel L Jackson. In the Blue Velvet scene you'll notice Stockwell likes to widen his eyes upon certain words for effect, or close them on another's and almost a glare like state that underlines his characters mental state, but also his sense of the dramatic. You then watch Beverly Hills Cop II, which is completely different movie and you seem the same thing, despite the fact that you couldn't find two more vastly different characters with vastly different motivations, it totally works. As deployed in several completely different ways distinctive from each other it feels vital to the ideation of Charles Kane.

When he delivers the line “Adrianos was perfect” he opens his eyes, and then closes them not fully, but into a glare in one fluid motion. It suggests a sort of confusion, and an indignance in concert with his enunciation, it evokes ego, but carefulness. Not but a few moments later as Jurgen Prochnow insults him he does it again, but this time it indicates a slight tinge of hurt, propelled forth by his pride, which bades him to listen further rather than immediately go on the defensive. When he does it again at around 1:34 it’s pure delight in his own work. He just knows it was great work, and that pride extends beyond the context of character. Stockwell always came off as an actor who took immense pride in his work and that is not to suggest he was proud of every single one that he did, but that in the actual doing he took a certain pride and it's at least one of the reasons why in his entire career which is a very long, extending from his childhood to the 00's especially as he starts to formulate as an adult I don't find a bit of work that I don't enjoy from him. But more importantly what connected me personally to Stockwell was the distance he maintained from this sort of homogenized idea of not only performance but humanity that provided this consistent and persistent sense of other worldliness. It's at home and and it belongs to everyone of his most memorable characters whether on TV as Al Calavicci in “Quantum Leap”or in a film like Tucker this sense of the fantastic, of pure fantasy. His eyes would act as the window to another world, his mouth as an anchor to this one and he was always able to in any number of roles transport us, transcend us, but never without emotion never without structure and never without power. Stockwell in that same TCM interview talks of the loss in a certain aspect of his childhood in the movies, one that he wouldn't wish upon his own children and I've always had the feeling that when something like that happens it's not really that it is lost, but that it is stunted and then continued along a slower trajectory. In that context it's no wonder the Dean appeals to me on a bone-deep level, me a person who now deels not fully separate, but veiled away from that weirdness I was so in touch with, so in love with when I was a child but I let go of in order to safely fit within the world around me. That same alien alien-ness that is so much apart of who I am, that I only find whenever I'm on stage, or behind a camera when and where I’m given freedom to imagine once again the infinite possibilities of my own humanity. That's what a Stockwell performance is to me, A doorway, an opening, a link to a distant place, but right within your home.