Camera And Action, page 15
Key to these sequences is the panorama of the land.14 A virtual reality tour of open space, the land seems to be, as Sight and Sound critic Tom Milne put it, a "vast, mysterious continent, forgotten and ignored by its tribes of city-dwellers." It is "America, naked and unashamed, as Columbus might have seen it."15 Romantic and real, the open territory, as seen from the view from a bike, harkens to classic Westerns' use of the land where male identity was defined through action. These satisfying images reinforce the importance of the road experience and give the film its most significant moments of fantasy and desire. The untrammeled land regenerates the two men. Although the setting is contemporary in Easy Rider and the obvious narrative is absent, the film's dependence on the Western's centering of men and landscape remains unquestioned.
Billy and Wyatt reclaim the value of openness as American ideals within the Western's tradition. Riding in the brilliance of desert sunlight, they celebrate land as freedom. Billy trickrides his Harley as if performing in a circus and Fonda contemplates the cleansing effect of the open space. They pull into an Arizona ranch where Wyatt fixes a flat tire. Wyatt pines for the life of a yeoman farmer. "You do your own thing in your own time. You should be proud," he tells the man in jeans and cowboy hat (Warren Finnerty). This scene advances the narrative's search and confirms the urban fantasy of country life as real America, the icon of pure independence.
The open land as a wholesome space is repeated later when the bikers stop at the "naked and unashamed" landscape of the site John Ford made timeless, Monument Valley. Wyatt and Billy tour the site at sunset. The camera shows their silhouettes as they climb to the highest points of the land formations. Against the setting sun, backs to the audience and gazing into the distance, they pause in a moment of silence, as if to pay respects at a holy shrine. This land site connects the two trekkers to popular landscape aesthetics and the counterculture to American heritage.
At the same time, their visit changes the meaning of this space of Hollywood cowboys from historical significance to a sacred memorial of a time before westward expansion. Their new companion, a hippie hitchhiker (Luke Askew), tells Billy, "The people - this place belongs to the ones buried right under you." Thus, what traditionally functioned as a stage for westward expansion now becomes a memorial to Monument Valley's hidden history, dedicated to Native American ancestry rather than remembered as backdrop for stagecoaches. The "underthirties" West updates Monument Valley's reference point through the film's visuals. Once again, the counterculture bears truth about America. Less national, the monument is now more personal.
By advertising the journey as a search for truth, circulated through a younger generation's view of America, the narrative convincingly draws on the counterculture sentiment to presume its own innocence and begin its story of tragedy. The Monument Valley sequences legitimize the new male image, the contemporary man's rugged individualism, and sets up the narrative's turn to its most obvious indictment against America as a bigoted place. Open spaces turn into nightmare lairs when the riders face their adversaries. To this point in the narrative, the riders have convinced audiences of their trek as a freedom of expression. That they are really criminals never surfaces.
The next episode in their search takes their hitchhiker friend Luke to his commune. This southwest commune recalls others that popped up during the latter 1960s to give youth meaning and provide "food for the stomach and rest for weary feet" or "food for the soul and joy for the mind .1116 The camera pans what one critic described the "Christ-like faces" of those who pray together, eat together, plants seeds together, and sing folk songs. As one member tells Billy and Wyatt, "This could be the right place. You know your time's running out." Billy scoffs at the communalists' silliness and ineptness when he sees the members' impractical choice of farming on the desert. "This is nothing but sand," Billy jokes. "Man, they ain't gonna make it. They ain't gonna grow anything here," he scoffs. The sequence documents "the pathetic, hopeless optimism of a marijuana dream" for the white middle-class radical who connects to the sanctity of the land and advocates the rejection of bourgeois material security.' Billy and Wyatt finally reject the commune despite the invitation to join.
Clearly, the commune is not for the individualist. It is claustrophobic and demanding. Through Billy's perspective, the film recognizes the commune as a manifestation of a new kind of delusion. The commune members have taken hippie sensibility to its literal conclusion. As a practice of rebellion and even liberation, the hippie hope of generating a new society has little foundation and chance for sustenance. They are pipe dreamers (no pun intended). The search for the real America must continue and the two buddies cast aside the desert for the open road. The commune is important as a point of reference for the protagonists' solidarity with counterculture sensibility. Yet, rugged and handsome compared to the hippie communalist, they show how to appropriate counterculture discourse without indulging in the lifestyle.
Underpinning the film's main argument is that there exists a deeper malice than deluded communalists. For that reality, the narrative proceeds to the South, the one last pocket of prejudice in American society. It is impossible for the younger generation's hope for an ideal America to survive if such hostile territory is allowed to exist. At this point, the story draws on the authority of the Western's connection to openness to legitimize the bikers' place in American narratives. The bikers' entrance into Louisiana begins when Billy and Wyatt ride into a local parade, interrupting the flow of marching bands. Entering as counterculture and biker outsiders, the two get arrested for "parading without a permit" and are thrown in jail. When Billy asks for a cigarette, he and Wyatt are derided as "animals [who] ain't smart enough to play with fire." Billy concludes that the sheriff and deputy are "weirdo hicks, man; a bunch a weirdo hicks here." The camera makes much use of Western mythology with pans of dark, shadowy jail interiors and close-ups through iron bars. Inside the cell sits George (Jack Nicholson), the southern American Civil Liberties Union attorney, a local rich kid and an alcoholic. He is dressed in a stereotypically Southern white summer suit. He befriends the two and finagles the bail. George scrounges around for his high school football helmet and joins Billy and Wyatt on the ride to freedom. Together, the three of them leave town.
In football helmet, George sits on the back of Fonda's bike. He is the everyman who educates his fellow travelers in the ways of the South. "You're lucky I'm here, see 'at you don't get into anything," George explains. "They got this here ... scissors-happy-beautify-America thing going around here. They're tryin' to make everybody look like Yul Bryner," he jests. George describes what happened to "the last two longhairs they brought here and I wasn't here to protect 'em." Nicholson's character is necessary to implicate the South and validate Billy and Wyatt's point of view and innocence. His charm deflates his vices and legitimates his insight. His fraternizing and antiestablishment stance provide a point of identification for the younger generation and differentiate him from those people Billy called a "bunch of weirdo hicks." George symbolizes hope for a new society if attitudes change. "This used to be a hell of a good country," George observed earlier. Like the bikers, he "can't understand what's going on." He has now become a "hippie's natural blood brother," as the New Yorker put it.18
Following their break from the local jail, Billy, Wyatt, and George pull up on their Harleys to a Southern cafe, a typical place to test the American ideal of equality. With Billy's long hair flowing and the American flag pasted on Wyatt's jacket, they enter, sit down, and proceed to order a meal. A slow pan of the cafe ends on a close-up of the sheriff. "What the hell is this?" he asks. "Troublemakers," he concludes. A farmer in a CAT cap joins in, "I think she's cute." A local businessman remarks, "Look like a bunch of refugees from a gorilla lovein." The everyday, Southern worker is the paranoid conspirator plotting against interlopers. As critic Paul Warshow explains, the film intends to argue "that the rednecks hate, fear, and will even murder the hippies for what they `represent'; and what they represent is 'freedom. ""I By contrast, the Arizona rancher/cowboy remains the American archetype of independence.
Jack Nicholson as George in Easy Rider (1969) joins Dennis Hopper as Billy and Peter Fonda as Wyatt on the back of the legendary Harley Davidsons for their ride to freedom (Photofest).
The cafe scene foreshadows the fate of men who choose to make hair length a heroic act and confirms the journey's imminent danger. As in the Montana cafeteria in Alice's Restaurant, the cafe in Easy Rider is a place where the male patrons display the contemptuous assumptions about long hair. The trouble with the South is that these men are not only bigoted, but homophobic. A young (under-thirty) local generalizes about long hair. "I saw two of'em one time," he chides, "they was just kissin' away. Two males." "Some Yankee queers," the farmer joins in.
Outside the restaurant, Wyatt and Billy start up their bikes in front of six giggling teenage girls who beg flirtatiously for a ride. Well aware of the consequences, the bikers enjoy the moment but leave without them. The girls establish the bikers' sexual attractiveness."Tight pants revving up a pack of giggly teenaged girls," with white Southern men watching, as Playboy described it, fuses together long hair, bikes, and virility.20 Filmed at a Louisiana restaurant for regional authenticity, this sequence provides the freedom riders with a point of connection to the reality of humiliation and prejudice in the larger society. The girls validate the bikers' masculinity even if they are denied their request and substantiate representations of the "small towners" as hickish men - obsessed and threatened by Billy and Wyatt's form of freedom. As George shared earlier with his hosts, "Don't ever tell anybody they ain't free, 'cause they're gonna get real busy killin' and maimin' to prove they're free." The frightening nature of establishment America is located within the legitimate claims of cafe oppression. It is a regional problem.
Fonda and Hopper on the film set for the cafe scene in Easy Rider (1969)(Photofest).
The riders become the progeny and progenitors of the self-reliant, self-righteous fabled men in frontier mythology, born to be wild in the counterculture sensibility.21 Like prototypical cowboys on thoroughbred horses in archetypal Westerns, the rebels on their Harleys represent the moral point of the narrative. Billy and Wyatt rolled into Louisiana, having already established the "bond" among masculinity, hippieness, and the wide, open spaces of American landscape. Recalling the rugged individualist portrayed through heroes from John Wayne to Clint Eastwood to Robert Redford, the film establishes the value of counterculture protest. White marginalization, based on the choice to appear different, is now just.
The film's principal argument about the search for truth also recalls the culture wars over long hair. One young resident of New York City, Paul E. Martin, complained about the power and problem of hair in a letter to the editor of the New York Times. "May I add a final chapter to the subject of long hair?" he asked. Addressing a former statement, he explained, "Tom Andrew's letter about his experience after he saw Alice's Restaurant' and `Easy Rider' was no surprise to me." Martin's appearance gave him a chance "to set myself apart from the rest of the world" and to be instantly recognized "in the Village ... and on public transportation but mainly on the street." Long hair on men seemed like a liberating mechanism. "I am happier now than I was, with my crew cut, which I had up until the age of 20." Martin used hair as a "symbol of independence and ... freethinking. We do not expect to be accepted all over," he conceded, "and we have to deal with the objections and the retaliations (like the boys in `Easy Rider') in an intelligent manner." Hair politics became a way to contest the elders' value of conformity but also to claim discrimination. It meant tolerating "the feminine name-calling, the giant shears ploy, the two bucks for a haircut, and the ever-popular, `you look terrible!""' Martin's references to Easy Rider in his letter personalized the movie's fight and further defined long hair as symbolizing both oppression and a lack of bigotry.
The film recognizes the ambiguity in the counterculture argument of dropping out of society but not the irony in claiming hippie appearance as liberating. The common denominator - hair as freedom - depends on the discourse of contention representing men as innocent rebels. Wyatt and Billy look the part. Billy has long hair and a mustache and Wyatt has appropriated American symbols in ways that some Americans would find insulting. Long hair reinforces the film's ideological viewpoint of the South as bigoted but also circulates a view of the younger generation's struggle and opens a potential avenue of solidarity for middleclass whites with racial and class oppression. The contentious sign of long hair during the decade could have it both ways. Appearance and difference became at once controversial and matter-of-fact. Long hair on men was controversial enough to carry the film's argument of freedom but matter-of-fact enough to put to rest any justifiable resistance to it as a legitimate mode of expression and taste. Easy Rider's popularity depended on neutralizing hair but keeping it shocking, too.23
The story is a saleable fantasy and produces and validates popular thought about staking a claim to social change in America and resolving generational issues. The two bikers' tragic odyssey is consistent with counterculture sentiment that insists on the evidence of their own oppression. To be current, however, the film has one more task to fulfill. Its historical status as a generational emblem rests on successful naturalization of the 1960s counterculture, clearly legitimizing middle-class youths' claims of oppression and struggles with their inherited establishment. American autonomy via 1960s symbols resonated through the one component that confirmed cutting-edge counterculture: marijuana. During the latter 1960s, marijuana was advertised widely. Posters and t-shirts marketed the craze at a time when law enforcement was not prepared to crack down on white middle-class rebels.24 Similar to popular use, joints smoked throughout the film signified liberated minds.
In a visual tutorial, George learns the world of marijuana. At the campsite following their release from jail, alcoholic George appears provincial in comparison to Billy and Wyatt's revolutionary practice. "What's that? Marijuana?" George asks innocently. Wyatt offers a joint to George who refuses. "Oh, ah couldn't do that. Ah've got enough problems with the booze and all; ah mean ah can't afford to get hooked." But Wyatt reassures him that he "won't get hooked" and George eventually partakes. "You say it's all right, well ... all right, then, how do ah do it?" George's collaboration suggests an aspiration for the younger generation. If attitude separates him from the bigoted Southerner blamed for America's fall from grace, then it is neither George's money nor his social status that defines him as a good American. To the contrary, it is but raised consciousness and new attitude.
This colorful treatise about the benefits of marijuana compared to the effects of alcohol produces a convincing marketing strategy for the drug and unites counterculture politics with open spaces under the open night sky. The Captain of America releases the Southerner from his past addiction and places him in open-mind territory. A freer and lighter George, still dressed in white Southern respectability, transcends the local community of hard conditioning and is emancipated by comparison. Yet, having George smoke a joint does not carry the same political message that it does for Wyatt and Billy. George may have been liberated in mind by Wyatt's drug culture, but not in body, since local predators beat him to death while he sleeps in his own backcountry.
The film produces a provocative but not risky demonstration of marijuana's positive value. Portraying sympathetic characters smoking joints was relatively safe in 1969 if the now audience was the college-aged who understood LSD and marijuana as a sign of generational identity and independence. Easy Rider is the quintessential counterculture movie signified by drug use on and off screen. Completely comfortable with his own habit, Hopper volunteered, "this is my 17th grass-smoking year. Sure, print it, why not? You can also say that that was real pot we smoked in Easy Rider. I've already been busted once for possession, in L.A., but that's another story."25
Both narrative and cinema interlinked attitudes with social practices and constructed an idealized America, declaring marijuana a new form of independence and alcohol an old form of addiction. Making Billy and Wyatt the counterculture "authentics" imparts counterculture sophistication and knowledge and affirms the general authority of the younger generation's advocacy for lifestyle changes. Counterculture discourse fit with Hollywood's Code breakup, the move of a younger generation into the experimental mode of filmmaking, and the popularity of university film courses. The nuts and bolts of the young's structure of independence were solidly in place and added one more layer to America cinematic tradition.
Easy Rider updates American autonomy by bringing together timely elements of counterculture vision, antiestablishment attitude, masculine desires of travel, and the mythic grandeur of the American landscape. Hence, the film's burden successfully foils fear of and opposition to counterculture identity. Yet promoting the counterculture as authentic America depended on connecting hippieness to something more substantial than drug use. That critical connection between counterculture and oppression comes in the film with a lyrical bike ride past the shanties of the South.26 Watching the riders zoom through town, a couple of black bystanders wave. The film implies a gesture of solidarity. The scene recalls freedom marches and civil rights protests played out in previous years. Audiences could connect Dennis Hopper's personal participation in the actual freedom marches and his role as advocate in the film. Hopper once commented on the friction between marchers and locals at the Selma march. "There was this guy," Hopper remembered, "at the side of the road who was urinating on us as we passed and yelling `White trash,' and I thought, `Wow! Can't he see ... we only look different, we're all part of the same herd."' Hopper continued, "he kept shouting at me, `Hippie, Commie, long-hair!' Wow, I mean, I don't care it he has short hair!"27
