The Triple Talaq in Dennis Hopper's Oxygen Tank

It's impressive, how thoughtfully Penn handles this material. The good brother isn't a straight arrow, and the bad brother isn't romanticized as a rebel without a cause, and there are no easy solutions or neat little happy endings for this story.--Ebert's relative digital archive

Celluloid is merely a flammable plastic. Images print at 24 frames per second. There may be gaps in my knowledge as to how digital design and upload changes this basic camera technology, but this is the way it works at a material level. There is nothing to signify that Dennis Hopper's violent ends in the medium relate to his obituary, succumbing to cancer, as opposed to a heart attack or stroke, the three main killers in American medical models. In Easy Rider, he is merely a tag along biker taken out in a brutal shot gun sequence by Peter Fonda's suppliers. Perhaps it is merely a question of aesthetic appeal, but Easy Rider is too conscientious in making sure its audience understands the ruthlessness of commune culture radicalism.  Robert Blake's Electra Glide in Blue, though its title character is softened by a nascent simplicity which  ultimately dooms him, is equally too deliberate on this point, five years older as it may be. Hopper's biker wants to authenticate attachment. Blake's cop ends his life trying to live up to the imprimatur of every police force: to protect and serve. Hopper is more of a diode. For the always borderline hysteria of David Lynch, which despite itself, bears the signature of an auteur, Hopper is the flawed menace of Blue Velvet, a film the dowager always wanted to see after the whirlwind of Twin Peaks, and Kyle MacLachlan's masturbatory sequence in Sex and The City, and due to the fact that a local syndicate in Reading does not submit its schedule to the broadcast grid, the first 30 minutes were missed, to an interior howling, as the consumption of  usage might have been avoided, here Hopper still serves up an appearance of sharp definition, despite the necessity of the oxygen mask and the vein in his right temple, protruding. Lynch'es intent is still puzzling, with the yellow man's statuesque bleeding contusion, but Hopper's destructive morbidity is not, whatever the rationale for the freak torture he inflicts, a 180 degree curve from the clueless barkeep in The Indian Runner, an old man who just happens to get in the way of Viggo Mortensen's triggers, a culmination of the domino effect more effectively scarring American can do sensibility than altering Indochina's xenophobic collectivism. 
What does all this convey about Hopper's morbid mortality? Being eaten alive by metastasized tumors at the age of 73 is not exactly an untimely demise, to be sure, but it seems predictable through the projection of a callow rebelliousness that has no purposeful aim.