Camera And Action, page 14
While the critical merits of films measure their historical worth and ticket sales gauge the value of production, in many ways the weight of these experimental films rests on the health of their cultural longevity. Like The Graduate, the film has enjoyed a hearty afterlife. It was screened at the Royal in Los Angeles for the Common Cause 1981 Summer Film Festival weekend series of classics. Film critic Jack Slater explained that the "movie about a youth in search of commitment and identity in the late 1960s, apparently still has the power to evoke strong reactions." Quite possibly, he added, Alice's Restaurant "reminded many in the audience of their own youthful search for commitment and identity."71 In January 1994, the Sundance Film Festival advertised the film as central to Penn's work. The Festival catalog offered it as a "definitive portrait of the tumultuous and frenetic sixties" and a "consummate expression" of "the longing for family and a sense of stability." The ad described Arlo as "a kind of Everyman of the sixties."72 To be sure, Alice's Restaurant enjoys the status as "one of the best of the films examining the `hippie' subculture of the late 60's, that phenomenon which ended up touching, either directly or indirectly, the life of almost every American."73
For many in the cast and crew, the process of filmmaking turned fiction into reality, changed perceptions permanently, and became an endearing emotional experience. As Alice recalled, "During the shooting we all learned that we're all just human beings -vain, silly, confused -whether you wear a badge or long hair." She further commented, "that, because of the filming, `Obie and us got to look past uniforms and really dig each other. He saw past our weird costumes and long hair, that we weren't just dirty hippies to arrest. I dig Obie now. He's a pretty good actor too, sort of a John Wayne type. 1117' The real Alice remembers that "when Obie picked up Arlo for littering he was a real Fascist. He would handcuff anybody ... two or three years ago," she reminisced "I walked into a bar with a long-haired friend of mine, a kid named Billy Russell, and Obie asked me, `Who's that girl you're with?' And started giving Billy the business about his long hair." Yet, during film production on location, the three of them "went into the same bar and some of the tough guys there started taunting Billy. Obie grabbed one of them by the collar and said: `Take it easy, this kid's a friend of mine. He works hard and if his hair bothers you it's because you're bald and jealous .11175
In Obie's words, "Before the film, I didn't like these kids very much. They had long hair. They dressed weird."76 When the song came out, Officer Obie was furious. "Kids kept passing through Stockbridge to ask him to sign album covers or pictures of the local garbage dump, and Obie muttered a lot to himself about that punk kid who was making millions on his [Obie's] story." Obie contended, "If I knew I was goin' to cause all this fuss, I would've picked up that garbage myself."77 Later, when Penn decided to make the film, Officer Obanhein accepted the job of playing himself because, as he maintained, "In the end if someone was going to make a fool out of me, it had better be me." From there, attitudes changed. Obie "learned making the movie that ... these kids ... were really thoughtful and polite and damn nice. They work as hard, some of them, as any ten people in Stockbridge. As long as they make $90 a week, they're OK with me."78 When Officer Obanhein's obituary appeared in People Magazine in September 1994, Guthrie reminisced, "He was a wonderful guy.... Even when he arrested me I didn't hate him. He was nice even then. We ended up becoming friends and stayed friends all these years."79 Even the church that inspired much of "Alice's Restaurant" took on a life of its own. The Old Trinity Church of Alice's Restaurant became the Guthrie Center. There, Arlo provided a variety of services for everyone from preschoolers to interfaith spiritualists. Residents generally liked the idea of Arlo buying Alice and Ray's church until he moved in and began working. Annoyed neighbors pointed out that Arlo's philanthropy encouraged "unwanted outsiders."80 The struggle for ownership of the community surfaced at one point when locals objected to a big bash there and the prospect of setting up a "meditation center for AIDS patients." Neighbor Winona Harding complained, "It wasn't supposed to be some guru running in and out with beads. We're tweed people."81
The film's success lay in helping set the standards of the "now movie" and showing that its audience was out there, opening the possibilities of what Sight and Sound critic Paul Warshow predicted: that the 1970s would be a decade offering filmmakers "no other limitations than themselves." Filmmaking in the 1960s had displayed a "subtle shift in sensibilities, perception and awareness." The hope, to Warshow, was for American cinema to "continue to explore its own subterranean wealth and find out `how' to reach out." The result would be a "true renaissance. "82
Two young filmmakers in the same year reached far and wide to redesign cinematic narratives in a counterculture mode. Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper brought Easy Rider to America that December and decided for viewers the right way to look back at the last few years of the decade. In a film that would revisit the Western, Easy Rider introduced Captain America and Billy to show viewers how to convert subversion into hipness. These two young rebels revisited the frontier to redesign cinematic narratives and give them a more popular language for the younger generation. The experimental film exploited the stunning manliness of Hopper and Fonda by rerouting the Western from the West to the Southeast and bringing film, hippies, and men in line with generational debates and conventional westernness by the end of 1969. Easy Rider both reinvented and restored the rebellious, rugged-individualist cowboy on the road. Where Arlo's character departed from virile masculinity as a component of his identity, Easy Rider flaunted it. Rounding out the year with their Cannes Film Festival winner, these two sharpshooters rode into town in a new, revved-up Western and discovered not only how to win the West again but also how to sustain that discovery.
Taos, man, Taos, New Mexico. There's freedom there. They don't mind long hair. The herds mingle.
- Dennis Hopper, Easy Rider Original Screenplay
Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper had a hunch about the importance of two men with long hair riding Harleys cross-country during the late 1960s. Fonda's passion for biking and Hopper's penchant for defiance turned into an experimental project that led to Easy Rider, released in America in December 1969. This film updated rugged individualism by reimagining contemporary men in open spaces and made a statement about an eroding patriarchal authority. Fonda and Hopper produced, directed, and acted in what would become a cultural icon and one of the most memorable road trips in American film history.
Fonda's "modern Western" was conceived at the Toronto Film Festival following the release of his biker movie, The Wild Angels (1966).' "It all started with an image" for Fonda. He wanted to make a film of "ultimate freedom" where two men would have "no schedule, no timetable, just the desire to `dig' the country along the way." It would be "both odyssey and ballad" but most of all a search for the truth about America.' Hopper and Fonda transformed cowboys into hippies, horses into bikes, and guns into joints.
Rather than dusty desert trails, his characters glide along open highways, but in the spirit of the Western, they do get chased, thrown in jail, and run out of town. The film draws on the authority of the Western to test the concept of freedom and the older generation's America. At the same time, Peter Fonda as Wyatt (a.k.a. Captain America) and Dennis Hopper as Billy subverted convention by legitimating a counterculture sensibility. Not only did the characters question the meaning of the American dream, but they also answered it. "We blew it," Captain America lamented.
Two newcomers took a chance with western mythology to produce an innovative image of men with legendary potential, but Easy Rider does not just place modern-day men in the genre again. Rather, the picture remythologizes a male persona that incorporates old with new and legitimizes a new man. Reinventing the rugged individualist by placing the cowboy/outlaw on a bike, Easy Rider integrates the counterculture sensibility into the old Western formula. Drawing on the authority of the Western to test the concept of freedom and American manhood, Fonda's "hippie manifesto," as Hollywood Reporter called it, reinstates male authority in the process.'
The essential American genre, the one narrative most strongly embedded in American mythology, facilitated the film's perspectives and recorded the latter sixties. Easy Rider touched a generational nerve by gathering together essential realities of the 1960s and ensured it would be widely revered in popular culture. With its classic reference to the buddy ride on the Harleys and its famous soundtrack, how it brought Western mythology into a counterculture discourse and became a cultural icon defines its importance as an American cinematic emblem.
Revisiting the Western in the late 1960s meant making sense of a dying genre for boomers who grew up on thousands of its images. This most nationalist narrative imprinted its American heroes on the minds of audiences with countless popular serials such as Gunsmoke, Rawhide, Have Gun Will Travel, and others.4 These television staples paralleled numerous movie reruns on TV and provided a constant link to the American past and its particular landscapes.' Filmmakers grappled with the loss of interest in the Western by 1969 but refused to let it die. True Grit, The Wild Bunch, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, in one way or another, updated the conventional narrative. Clint Eastwood safeguarded the genre with post-1969 renditions in High Plains Drifter (1973) and Pale Rider (1985), but his pictures lamented the loss of the genre itself. The 1990s saw a resurgence of the classical formula with Dances with Wolves, Unforgiven, Tombstone, and others. While these films expanded the Western's stock collection, making sure the traditional Western did not disappear, after 1969 its popular dominance did. Easy Rider's December 1969 release marked the waning of the old Western's function as a central national narrative.
For over a century, Westerns have appropriated the West as a proving ground for national character and male identity. American filmmakers such as John Ford and Howard Hawks drew on the open territory of the West to draw connections among westward expansion, American exceptionalism, and masculinity. Classic Westerns promoted American ideals and values of Manifest Destiny while also serving as an allegory for social and political realities. High Noon (1952), for example, critiqued the Cold War and Cheyenne Autumn (1954) addressed America's blemished settlement history. By 1969 these competing discourses evolved into a question about what had been accomplished in the West and what settlement ultimately meant. Whether promoting or censuring America, classic Westerns typically depended on a central white male persona whose heroic identity was inextricably tied to the frontier. In this model of American progress, the training of men was critical. Except for a few revisionist pieces, the genre has remained about men and their task of cleaning up the .6
Billy and Wyatt reverse (with an attitude) the standard role assigned men in the Western. Two hip counterculture outlaws appropriate the rugged individualist ideal, give it a new look, and challenge their elders' world. Instead of following the ethos of the professional world embodied in Hollywood veteran ideals such as John Wayne and celebrated through a myriad of cinematic Western classics, they quit their jobs as circus performers, where they were "headliners," and commit a crime. With no witnesses to alert authorities and no posses to chase them, they make a drug deal and there begin the pursuit of personal fulfillment and their emblematic cross-country ride .7 Shedding any burdens of ambitions and goals, save their own desire to make it to Florida their way, Hopper and Fonda's characters show the John Wayne-trained how to cast aside patriarchal responsibility and authority.
Like youth in the larger culture, these rebels exemplified the younger generation's new guide, a "premise of self." As sociologist Charles A. Reich wrote, "real needs," satisfaction, and a "change of goals" enticed many. Rather than being men "dominated by technique ... and training" and instead of "deriv[ing] meaning from the function [they perform] for society," it was personal fulfillment that mattered. Reich astutely noted that the younger generation preferred to replace "achievement by character" and a "meritocracy of ability and accomplishment" that required "dedication to ... training, work, and goals" with a search for self. Their decision to enjoy, relax, and dig the country along the way left no room for the task-oriented professional. Those who ignored personal search were targets of ridicule.' Wyatt and Billy validated that critique. After all, they would die for the right to decide the length of their hair, thus converting a symbol of rebellion into the ultimate sacrifice for freedom.
Marketers explained that the picture would show its viewers "the truth about America," and the bearers were none other than two young "hippies," as the production notes officially labeled them. The promotional poster explained, "A man went looking for America and couldn't find it anywhere," and showed a Ray-Ban-clad Fonda standing like an explorer on a rock gazing into western terrain and claiming his role as captain of the "search for the real America of today."9 Wyatt and Billy represent the rugged, handsome, prototype "heroes" of the counterculture discourse of antiestablishment and dropping out. They are, as the Steppenwolf song title says, "Born to Be Wild."
The film was marketed in the context of a hippie-generated consumer market defined by collage, bright colors, and new artistic expressions of liberation. The visuals of radicalness suggested that one could denounce America's claim to freedom (in view of its myriad inequities and incongruities) by dropping out of society and donning a new appearance. The commercial potential of counterculture rebellion confirmed the power of hippieness to resonate and take on a life of its own. More than just criticizing middle-class excess, participants reproduced an alternative lifestyle, blending hippie counterculture with the already popular concept of the generation gap and formed a hippie frontier of sorts. The city streets and country communes provided places for proclaiming freedom from the production-directed, goal-oriented society of modern America. There, they could replace the values of straight society.
The hippie counterculture also blended with political activism and antiwar protest on campuses and in the streets during the latter sixties and helped heighten an environment of antiestablishment. Through appearance, attitude, and lifestyles, the lines between political and cultural rebels blurred. The famous San Francisco Be-ins blended signifiers, resulting in a shared generational identity based metaphorically on the belief in the "anyone-under-thirtycredo." Hippieness was fluid and elusive and generally built on the belief that it was as much a sense of being as it was a practice.1° Beads and flowers came to signify that state of mind. Like Billy and Wyatt's drug deal, counterculture revolution involved a level of affluence that allowed young people to opt for a freer lifestyle.
Hippies and film had a two-fold significance in American culture. Film's productive direction, following mid-decade industrial changes, depended in part on the hippie narrative as authentic America. Appropriating a counterculture experience of dropping out provided filmmakers with subject matter that could claim a truth for the popular rebels, based on the American fondness for the popular over the elite. As Fredric Jameson has argued, popular culture gained its place as a valued preference because it was believed to "clearly speak a cultural language meaningful to far wider strata of the population than what is socially represented by intellectuals."" The popular argument of antiestablishment suited film's standing as a medium for the masses.
Fonda as Captain America drops out of society, dons his stars and stripes, and brings his search for truth to the screen in Easy Rider (1969) (Photofest).
It especially made sense for independent filmmakers to draw on the counterculture experience to connect with the general feeling that film should be art. Fonda and Hopper experimented with both and helped force filmmakers to pay attention to the heart and soul of the young's rebellion. An antidote of sorts, the power of pleasure was the motivation for Billy and Wyatt to "head out on the highway" in the first place. The importance of the counterculture was its tie to the consumer culture and to the politics of upsetting middle-class America. As one historian claimed, it was a "genuine subversion of the status quo through pleasure rather than power."" Rejecting the parent generation's middle-class civility convincingly challenged bourgeois authority. Thus, Wyatt and Billy become counterculture prototypes, defined by their degree of hippieness and their resonance as classic Western individualists. In this way, Billy and Wyatt reinstate the masculinity of the Western by finding the experimental screen. They represent the 1960s version of the "under thirties" men on the road and transform a nearly exhausted narrative into a mode of resistance.
Easy Rider claimed its radical perspective by converting sacrosanct American icons into fashionable and sympathetic counterculture symbols. Fonda as Wyatt transposed the American flag into a popular fashion statement by placing the stars and stripes on his jacket, helmet, and bike. The flag was thereby deconstructed, reinvented, and reborn with a new patriotic function. Hopper's character, Billy, maneuvered Hollywood westernness by wearing a Codyesque suede, buckskin-fringed jacket; cowboy boots; an Indian-style necklace; tattered cowboy hat; and a "hippie-style" headband. He insisted that familiar frontier symbols become forms of resistance. Sporting unruly hair, Hopper updated Western signifiers and changed the iconography for the eternal cowboy.
The Western hippies begin their journey once they seal the drug deal with a gum-chewing, dark-haired man (Phil Spector) sitting in a Rolls Royce at the Los Angeles airport runway. Fonda's character stashes the cash in a plastic tube fitted into his chopper's gasoline tank and the film begins its search for truth. Between California and Louisiana, where they end up, they stop at a ranch, a motel, a commune, a local town parade, and a cafe. The script describes these riding sequences as a "traveling montage," a simulation of "the Chrisler [sic] commercial approach to Traveling Visuals, establishing the feeling of adventurous freedom that is experienced in riding a bike full-out - a romantic treatment of motorcycle riding, such as is used about SKIING AND SURFING." The camera "impart[s] to the audience the ultimate sensation of the abstract, ballet-like experience of the BIKE-RIDE." Images of "telephone poles whipping by, white lines, double white lines, road-signs, signals, etc., flash[ing] past" allow "the bikes [to] erupt from the center, crisscross, change directions, make circles, and come into FRAME from opposite sides.""
