Gene Hackman died last week. He was one of the greatest actors America has ever produced. A performer of near infinite utility, able to carry a film single-handedly (Hoosiers) or loom over it with just a few minutes of screen time (No Way Out). Ask a dozen people what their favorite Hackman performance was, and they’ll give you a dozen different answers, none of them wrong. Mine was Crimson Tide. Let me tell you why.
It was 1995. I’d just finished a disastrous freshman year of college that saw me transfer from one school to another at the turn of second semester. I was lonely, disappointed, and deeply unsettled. More important, my spine was fucking killing me. What I thought was some sort of hip pointer—to this day, I don’t actually know what a hip pointer is—turned out to be a blown disc in my back. I needed surgery to fix it. At the end of the school year, a doctor in Manhattan cut into my back, removed the piece of disc lodged against my spinal cord, and then stitched me back up. From there, my mom drove me all the way back to my folks’ house in Connecticut, where a long, manic summer of convalescence awaited me.
I had to stay in bed for days at a time, listening to Howard Stern on K-Rock in the morning and perusing shitty fantasy football preview guides in the afternoon. With my dad working in Chicago that whole year, it was just mom and me. She fed me. She brought me ice packs. She rented movies for me. She did all of the nice mom things that mom has always done for me. I love my mom lots and lots.
Thanks to mom, I was eventually able to get up, walk around, and go to physical therapy appointments. Once I was able to sit down without excruciating pain, she and I decided to try a night out together. I got to pick the movie we’d go to. There was only one theater near the house and it was a rundown, piece-of-shit multiplex situated across from a K-Mart. But they always had first-run movies, and this weekend they were showing Crimson Tide.
I knew Crimson Tide was forthcoming, because I’d already read Entertainment Weekly’s comprehensive summer movie preview. Twice. Crimson Tide was a submarine thriller (the best kind of thriller) directed by the god Tony Scott, with a script doctored by Quentin Tarantino. As if that wasn’t enough of a draw for my 18-year-old sensibilities, the leads were Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman. I didn’t have posters of Hackman adorning my wall but, like everyone else, I already knew that he was money in the bank after seeing him in primo shit like Superman, Mississippi Burning, and Unforgiven. Like Washington, Hackman was an actor who could give any story momentum, no matter how thin the script was.
“Let’s go see Crimson Tide,” I told mom. She was in. We both agreed that if my back started to cause a fuss during the movie, we could bail on it and I could return to the comfortable monotony of my bed upstairs.
We never had to bail. We made it all the way through my first venture out into the suburban wilderness. That’s a credit to Scott, to Washington, to credited screenwriter Michael Schiffer, and to Tarantino (who, being Tarantino, injected the storyline with both comic book references and some casual racism). But above all else, it was a credit to Hackman, who took a villainous role and, as only he could do, built a character that you respected despite yourself. I saw that movie 30 years ago and, to this day, I can still hear Hackman’s delivery of, “Mr. Hunter, I’ve made the decision. I’m the captain of this boat. NOW SHUT THE FUCK UP,” with stunning clarity.
That’s how good of an actor Gene Hackman was. That’s the kind of standard he set for his profession. So it was Crimson Tide that came to me the second I got news of his death, which made me want to text my mom. I told her that I will always remember going to see the movie with her that summer, and she was delighted to be able to share the memory with me again.
When a famous artist dies, the first thing that people often think of is their own connection with that performer. OMG that movie changed my life!, etc. But it’s the connections that those artists help us form with one another that matter the most. My mom had no memory of us seeing Crimson Tide together. I did, and this week we got to share that little date we had 30 years ago all over again. That’s how good Gene Hackman was at his job. We were lucky to have him.
