Trauma, Class, and the Nation's Divide

Dennis Hopper and Linda Manz

Source: Discovery Productions / Fair Rights Usage

Who stormed the U.S. Capital on January 6, 2021? Who are the members of armed militias? Who sit riveted to the invective coming daily on the world-wide-web? Many have offered their (varied) psychological and demographic profiles. But what seems missing are those people who are under- and unemployed, with limited educations and a childhood littered with toxic, psychological trauma.

Recall, the groundbreaking, revelatory study by Kaiser and the CDC (1998) that introduced ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences)¹? This work was done predominantly with white families. ACEs include growing up in a household with: violence in the home or community; active substance use in one or both parents; a parent (or other family members) who has been incarcerated; neglect; and verbal physical and abuse (The CDC Violence Prevention/Injury Center²).

ACEs are cumulative, with three or more predicting, by early adolescence, mental and physical disorders, dysfunction in school and life, and trouble with the law. While national studies report a higher incidence of ACEs in black and Hispanic families, they are quite common in white families as well².

The decades-old film Out Of The Blue drags us into the mesmerizing, progressively downward spiral of a white urban family. Don (Hopper), is an alcoholic, released after five years in prison for a DUI that killed a busload of children; Cebe (Linda Manz), is his teenage, androgynous, punk, traumatized, and psychologically captive daughter; and Kathy (Sharon Farrell) has the unnerving role of the mother and wife, who uses both sex and heroin to sustain herself. A psychiatrist (Raymond Burr) is helpless in trying to aid Cebe, a poster child for a heap of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs).

This film is being re-released and it is oddly timely, 40 years later. It seems to foreshadow the opioid epidemic and the “deaths of despair” we now have today³. When viewing Out Of The Blue, we can’t shield ourselves from seeing a curse that has pervaded middle America and middle Americans. Heartbreak passed from one generation to the next, with furor mounting along the way. La plus ca change, la plus ca meme.

The “white rage” propelling our nation’s divide seems inescapable for those whose lives seem irredeemable, “stolen” from them, leaving them behind, with little hope for relief. That’s the family portrayed in Out Of The Blue.

Opportunity and employment are highly correlated with education. But 21 percent of US adults— 43 million people—are illiterate, according to the National Center for Educational Statistics²). There are perilous grievances and emotionally traumatic damages borne of the misfortune generated when jobs and hope evaporate, from one generation to the next.

Dennis Hopper (d. 2010) is the lead character and director of Out Of The Blue, first released in 1980 and now digitally renewed, distributed, and touring the country. It has lost none of its raw depiction of human pain.

Mr. Hopper appeared in more than 200 films and a score of TV shows, filling the screen with his familiar, sly and menacing smile. His credits include Giant (1956); Hoosiers (1986); Blue Velvet (1986); Apocalypse Now (1979), with A-list actors, including Marlon Brando, Martin Sheen, Laurence Fishburne, with Hopper taking on the future embodiment of The Matrix. It’s said that he regarded Out Of The Blue to be his best directorial film.

It’s a kiss of a certain kind of death when a reviewer lauds the actors for doing their damn best with a script they should have been spared; Out Of The Blue included. This cast had the job of conveying profound misfortune, misery, and hate from a hastily rewritten script (by Hopper), meant to lay bare individual and family psychopathology in the context of damages often inherent to poverty and social station.

Despite its acclaim at Cannes, Out Of The Blue was considered so bleak it was not initially released. When life feels inescapably worthless, what is there to lose, other than your life? It was subsequently released, no less bleak, but it did make it to cinemas.

Forty years later, a group of Hopper aficionados redid this dismal, though timeless film, where nothing redemptive will see the light of day. They did not remake the movie to cheer us up, we must conclude.

Trauma Essential Reads

To Tell or Not to Tell: Disclosing Your Painful Past

Healing in Motion

Yet, might this 40-year-old film have foreshadowed our nation’s current social divide? Were the writers prescient, peering ahead to our lives today? If so, I hope they’re not right about the body count.