1969: Easy Rider

Easy Rider (1969, Hopper) 6/10

"You know this used to be a helluva good country. I don't know what's gone wrong with it" (George Hanson)

In southern slang an "easy rider" refers to a man who is financially supported by his prostitute girlfriend. Almost forty years later, the term has come to equate to other things: rebellion, motorcycles, counter-culture, drugs and so forth. The notions of spiritual bankruptcy and indolence attached to its initial colloquial meaning have all but disappeared from our modern vocabulary. Most audiences would connect the parlance with stretching out on one's motorcycle, rather than taking shortcuts at the expense of others and one's integrity.

Easy Rider is a film entrenched in myths. Passing through pastoral landscapes and arid strips of desert, the film is a cross-country journey between two men Wyatt a.k.a. Captain America (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper) who search for America, or the more precisely the American Dream, and fail to find it anywhere. Fashioned as two modern outlaws, the film's anti-heroes begin their quest in Mexico, where they purchase cocaine sold onto a Los Angeles pusherman (Phil Spector) for profit.

Dipping into their funds, the pair acquire two motorbikes. Stashing the remaining money in their gas tanks, Wyatt and Billy head to Florida in order to "retire" after a brief stopover in New Orleans to celebrate Mardi Gras. Along the way, they meet farmers, communards, rednecks, prostitutes and a drunken ACLU laywer named George Hanson (Jack Nicholson). Camping on the outskirts of the string of southern towns they traverse through, the group take copious amounts of drugs, philosophize and come into confrontations with individuals unsympathetic to their nomadic, long-haired lifestyle.

Filmed in 1968, the picture sat in an editing room for almost a year, while Hopper tried to make sense of the four and a half hour rough cut he had assembled. Reputedly costing under $350,000, Easy Rider made $60 million dollars worldwide and changed Hollywood overnight. Or so popular memory has told us. In actuality, the groundwork for change had arguably been simmering since the mid-Sixties. The influence of French Nouvelle Vague directors such as Godard and Truffaut, as well as other Europeans like Michaelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini had already creeped into popular British films released in the United States such as Richard Lester's A Hard's Day Night and Antonioni's Blow-Up. The controversy over the latter film's sexual content was a key movement in the collapse of the Production Code.

The power of the studios prevented the type of laissez-faire narrative and editing structures popularized by Godard from being incorporated into American cinema until around 1967. For over a decade, the aging studio heads had believed a continuation of cinematic orthodoxy was key to wooing audiences. But the audiences had long left cinema for television and as a result the former was in a crisis. The studios scrambled to find the next "thing" to lure in young audiences. Thus prior to the release of Easy Rider the major studios had released Arthur Penn's 1967 Bonnie Clyde, John Boorman's Point Blank, Mike Nichols' The Graduate and Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odysseyto success with younger audiences. With their utilization of avant-garde cinematic techniques in editing, blatant anti-heroes and moral complexities these films certainly demonstrated that Hollywood was granting directors more freedom in order to fill their coffers.


But the most influential changes toward the creation of Easy Rider came from a smaller company outside the system. Most famously known for the Edgar Allan Poe adaptations starring Vincent Price, AIP were signficant in creating properties suited to the tastes of America's youth. Unafraid to import dubbed versions of European films such as Fellini's La Dolce Vita and Roger Vadim's Brigitt Bardot vehicle ...And God Created Woman, AIP had long tested the restrictive measures of the Production Code. Furthermore, through their "Beach Party" films starring Frankie Avalon, the studio garnered a receptive teen audience. Yet, perhaps their biggest contribution was in the resurrection of the biker sub-genre. With its roots in Lazlo Benedek's The Wild One was biker film used by Roger Corman's American International Pictures (AIP) to corner the youth market.

Still associated with rebellion, the biker films offered an exploitative counter-product to the placid histronics of Hollywood. Peter Fonda became the sub-genre's biggest star in films such as Roger Corman's 1966 Wild Angels. Fonda also starred in the emerging counterculture films the studio was producing such as 1967's Jack Nicholson-scripted The Trip. Nicholson himself had starred in the 1967 biker film Hells Angels On Wheels. The Trip can be seen as the starting point for Easy Rider in that it brought to together Nicholson, Fonda and Hopper: the former scripted the film, the latter two starred in it.

And while Nicholson only appeared in his star-making, Oscar nominated supporting role as George Hanson after Rip Torn abdicated, his contacts enabled the picture to be developed. Nicholson had developed and produced The Monkees psychedelic film Head. The man behind The Monkees and Head, Bert Schneider had created the show in part due to classic Hollywood nepotism. His father Abe was the head of Columbia Pictures and Bert was assigned to the studio's television division in order to stay out of trouble. When The Monkees became a cash cow, Abe agreed to release any films his son produced. Subsequently this gave Easy Rider major studio distribution, although the film's box-office numbers were fostered via word of mouth rather than studio marketing.

While Dennis Hopper has long claimed with the creation of Easy Rider he was attempting to make the first American art film, history proves him wrong. Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, Boorman's Point Blank and John Schlesinger's 1969 film Midnight Cowboy were not only all released prior to Easy Rider, but they are also far more abstract and indebted to European filmmakers such as Resnais and Godard than Hopper's film. What truly was revolutionary about Easy Rider was perhaps not its content or narrative structure, which had already been the subject of various other films, but three key points.

First the film was able to blend the exploitative elements of the biker and counterculture sub-genres into a setting that was more realistic than in its predecessors. Secondly, although copious drug use had been seen in American films prior to Easy Rider such as 1959's Gene Krupa Story and 1955's The Man With The Golden Arm, Easy Rider was one of the first major American films to have its characters suffer no moral consequences because of this drug use. Thirdly, while young European-influenced, university trained filmmakers had already begun to work their way into Hollywood, the financial profits from Easy Rider made it easier for those filmmakers to develop their own pictures. For instance in 1967 Martin Scorsese had released his debut film Who's That Knocking On My Door? at a Chicago Film Festival, but it would only be after the release of Easy Rider that filmmakers like Scorsese and Coppola were given more leverage in Hollywood.

Steeped in the folkloric qualities of the Old West, the film posits itself as a modern western. With motorcycles replacing horses, gasoline stations substituting for trading posts and paved highways instead of dusty trails, Easy Rider procures a variety of elements from the Western genre. Utilizing the names Wyatt and Billy, the mythical auras attached to those names bore through with the reflective Wyatt always trying to serve the public good and the wild Billy selfishly nitpicking over inocuous issues.

Although in terms of editing the film is heavily influenced by Godard and Resnais, there are several sequences that could easily have been extracted from a John Ford or Howard Hawks western two decades earlier. Camping out on the outskirts of town next to Indian burial grounds and abandoned houses, the pair replicate an image of anti-conformity: two outlaws trekking across a topography filled with decay and greed. Remnants of ghost towns such as Sacred Mountain provide a brief rest from the vacant landscape surrounding them.

The theme of the American Dream is prominently displayed amongst the buttes and mesas. With his jacket and motorcycle prominently displaying the American flag, Fonda's Wyatt represents notions of American pop culture in his nickname (Captain America) and the Japser Johns-esque fetishization of the American flag. Yet, the dream Wyatt and Billy is a perverted one. Through their drug smuggling, the pair mistakenly assume they have bought freedom. Wyatt even throws away a gold watch symbolizing the release of further responsiblities and pressures. But as Nicholson's lawyer informs them, freedom is not equated with money or materials. Yet, it is this type of freedom, he informs is the cause of conflicts and violence. And it is this backward and racist conception of "freedom" that Wyatt, Billy and George encounter on their travels.

The real type of freedom Hanson alludes to is perhaps found in the two communities Fonda's Wyatt dearly admires at a distance. Their first encounter is with a New Mexican farmer. In a symbolic gesture of the times, while he mends a horse shoe, they repair a wheel on their motorcyle. With his young Hispanic wife and their brood, they are slowly reaping the pleasures of working their land. The same can be said for the hitchhiker who takes him to a commune on the outskirts of the desert. Impoverished, but connected the community has been fostered by like-minded youth who are blighted by the materialism of the city. Despite their inability to grow anything, their belief and spirit touches Wyatt. He admires their intellectual and communal freedom.

Conversely, Billy is unamused by their antics. His rebellious attitude is fabricated on reckless behaviour more than non-conformity. His attitude toward the commune is centered on the possibility of scoring more drugs and free love. His dream is found in a teardrop gas tank emblazoned with the American flag on it. Yet this not money earned not by painful labour, but by deception. In the late Sixties, cocaine was associated with paranoia and wealth and thus when Wyatt informs Billy that "We blew it," he is referring to their chance of real freedom.

Instead, by selling an affluent drug, the pair have conformed to the same goal as every middle-class American: to make a lot of money and then retire in a sunny locale. Billy doesn't seem to understand this. The theme of "selling out" is also related to the film's infamous LSD trip in a New Orleans cemetery. In return for driving the hitchhiker, Wyatt is offered in secret drugs to take with the right people at the right place. With death and decay still enveloped around them, Wyatt shares the drug with Billy and two prostitutes played by Karen Black and Toni Basil. The subsequent result is a "bad trip" in which the Christ-like Wyatt foresees his future in this twisted Garden of Gethsemane.

Severely dated at times, Easy Rider is an interesting capsule into late 60's American counterculture. Filmed in an improvisational manner, Easy Rider can often be endearingly beautiful such as Lazlo Kovacs' cinematography of Monument Valley, or utterly annoying as in Dennis Hopper's Billy. Dropping "man" as about as many times as his character drops acid, Hopper's Billy is a condescending and often vicious perma-stoned character. His paranoia constrasts with Fonda's gentle charm and Nicholson's career-shaping manic performance.

The film's unique editing structure is an ideal method for the snapshots of life, Hopper seeks out. The film's thematic symbolism focuses on ideas pertinent to the Vietnam-era culture: issues of violence, spiritual decay, death, selling out, freedom and non-conformity. Therefore, the savagery and cynicism imbuing Easy Rider is an ideal counterpoint to the naïvete of the counterculture movements, which were engrossed with the film. Yet, unlike Godard's Weekend, Hopper's film lacks the sardonic visual wit that thrusts Weekend or the films of Buñuel which Hopper claimed to be influenced by.

Thus, contrary to popular opinion Easy Rider appears more to be subtly attacking American counterculture than lauding it. The appraisal that even rebels have a cause to "sell out" for adds a sharp edge of realism to the proceedings. However, the agrarian lifestyle the film promotes as an alternative is more in-tune with anti-modernist conceptions during the era than a genuine solution. Within the simplicity of the agrestic commune filled with starved children and demoralized hippies engaging in childish sing-alongs and (in what has to be an allusion to Blow-Up) pantomime one can find all the spontaneous optimism and violent despair that the Sixties represented.

* Easy Rider is available through Columbia Home Video

Copyright 2007 8½ Cinematheque