Easy Rider (1969) dir Dennis Hopper, starring Hopper,
Peter Fonda, Jack Nicholson

A further re-tread of this magnificent film that
looked nothing but tired. Engaging all the senses
once again, Easy Rider fills those senses with a
vastly entertaining window on the late 60s. The
soundtrack is still excellent, not just the choice of
music but the sound, image matches. The initial burst
of Steppenwolf Born to be Wild, the bikers on the
highway, Peter Fonda on a customised California
chopper wearing a stars and stripes helmet, Dennis
Hopper riding a conventional bike in buckskin. The
rest of the film is an unwinding of the first few
spectacular moments. At the time Hollywood (America)
was in the doldrums. The fiasco of the Vietnam War
was a backdrop, but also chaos in Hollywood, a result
of financial mismanagement, poor artistic judgement,
an unwillingness to invest in the future but merely to
rest on the laurels of past glories. This opened the
door to independent film-makers who might steal the
initiative with something low budget but glorious.
Easy Rider is a total summation of this moment.

The direction is refreshing, engaging. Instead of a
storyline, the characters Captain America\Wyatt, his
sidekick Billy embark on a bike ride across America to
find themselves, freedom, oblivion, after selling
their cache of drugs to an identityless hoodlum
(played by Phil Spector). Wyatt naively stuffs the
money into the fuel tank of his chopper, makes rash
decisions, choices. On the way they pick up a (good)
hippy, visit a commune, meet a lawyer, George Hanson
(played by Nicholson), who is then murdered by local
hicks, go to the Mardi Gras in New Orleans, pick up
some prostitutues, have a seeming trip\sex with the
prostitutes in a cemetery, are then murdered in turn
by some red neck duck hunters somewhere south of the
Mason-Dixon line. All this doesn´t add up to much of
a storyline. In fact like many journey parables, a
typical theme of much romantic literature, nothing
much happens at all. The characters don´t find
freedom, their identities or even themselves, but
merely their own deaths, part of their foolish stunt.
Even though Wyatt, Billy seem to be fools, their
foolishness becomes identified with personal liberty,
individualism, truth, fulfilment making their journey
seem more like an LSD trip, imbued with excitement,
edginess, risk, loss of control. Seemingly that all
adds up to excitement, but why should it? The quality
of total innocence, naivety of Wyatt, Billy, their
willingness to believe in the total goodness of
humanity that makes their quest living. But what they
find on their journey is also very disturbing. An
America infested with hillbillies, rednecks, hicks,
harmful crazies, but also naïve city-born hippies
attempting to grow crops in their wired-up commune
replete with attempted theatre, free love naturally,
the stunning American landscape (complete with
soundtrack by Steppenwolf, Dylan et al). Isn´t the
film saying, this is an America where people who are
different, like crazily harmless George Hanson, Wyatt,
Billy, are deserving of a death sentence. This is the
background to the films message that is never told but
shown (and this must be down to the writing skills of
Terry Southern, who also worked on Kubrick´s Dr
Strangelove: that being different is good, that
killing people who are different for that fact is
insanity. That, indeed, is part of the film´s themes,
messages, that seem, in their own way to have some
nascent authoritarianism written into them about the
others that infest America, but only part.

Yes, local people have a right to object to the
presence of drug dealers\addicts in their
neighbourhood. When the film was shown in the deep
south, audiences cheered at the ending, thus upsetting
the film-makers intentions. The druggy sequences do
have an eerily hypnotic quality, do seem to bring over
some of the edginess or disassociation of the
experience, but in most ways the film adds up to a
mess. What distinguishes it is the direction of
Hopper, the performances of Hopper, Nicholson, who
seem to get on very well indeed especially when they
are zonked on marijuana. The film does very well in
assembling audience sympathies for the main
characters, in showing what is wrong with America:
small-minded, small town, backwater attitudes add up
to a very disquieting portrayal of middle, southern
America, far away from liberal New York or California.
Peter Fonda never did so well as this, for it is the
only film in which he ever distinguished himself. He
appears to be the only straight character, engaging
our sympathies, in the film and may only be in it in
order to make a kind of genetic connection between new
Hollywood with Old Hollywood. Hopper, washed up at
the time, a star of the 1950s known for his
aggression, need for narcotics re-invented himself
here, re-emerged a decade later with another defining
performance in Apocalypse Now as the photographer in
Kurtz´s ‘plantation’, then a decade later as Frank in
David Lynch´s Blue Velvet. Nicholson himself went
onto have an incredible Hollywood career, re-defining
(I don’t want to use this word too often, but it seems
pertinent here) himself over and over again in crazily
hammy roles in films as One Flew Over the Cuckoos
Nest, The Shining.

This is the film that launched the careers of
Nicholson and Hopper. It also launched the New
Hollywood cinema of the 70s that was to be brought to
fruition by directors such as Francis Ford Coppola,
Martin Scorsese (but also Steven Spielberg, George
Lucas).

Paul Murphy, Berlin