Camera And Action, page 16
The shanty scene unselfconsciously draws viewers into the connection between hair and oppression, yet the film's dependence on counterculture oppression also depends on solidarity with blacks to convince a sixties audiences that appearance is legitimately an expression of liberation.28 In view of black farmers and their historically limited social liberties, this passing gesture ironically points at blacks' location socially and the South's place regionally. The psychology of the film and the psychological investment it confers gloss over the contingency of individualism and autonomy that emphatically rests on being white, not black, in America. Freedom, as one reviewer explained about the film, was simply the "concomitant health, leisure, and affluence (their Harley-Davidsons, their luxuriant dress)" accessible to whites.29
Billy and Wyatt, meaning to separate themselves from the racial attitudes symbolized by the "redneck" South, become an affront to those whose struggle has not included the choice of movement. The standing, waving black Southerners contrast to the roaming riders who leave behind those unable to share in real solutions to racial and class struggle, if what freedom takes is a bike, a helmet, and money in the tank. As critic Paul Warshow recognized at the time, the sixties generation finds "the aims of the industrial society ... no longer satisfying" and in turn "reject[s] materialism because it takes abundance for granted." The "oppressiveness of industrial society is psychological and that salvation lies in the inner sanctuary of the senses, where the young can be in touch with themselves and aware."30 Psychological marginalization versus economic and racial displacement in the context of 1969 appears naive. Signifying brotherhood, this micro-scene invites viewers to imagine the counterculturalist as facing the same struggle as the racially oppressed. Indirectly, the wave reinforces the hippie as black, as part of the oppressed on a mission to create a more equal America.31
Billy and Wyatt arrive at the heart of the Mardi Gras celebration and they track down the "best little whorehouse" according to buddy George's recommendation. The film indulges in psychedelic visuals and engages in its most experimental features. Billy and Wyatt drop acid but the trip goes bad. The surreal sequence superimposes images of crucifixes and Virgin Marys. New Orleans becomes the American monster, a dream skewed, and guarantees that the narrative of pure landscapes way out West remains real America. As one reviewer remarked, the "wacked-out motor-psycho nightmare collid[es] with the breathtaking landscape of the western."32 Instead of being saved by the grace of the Western, the story ends with the individualists' annihilation. At the last campfire, Billy gloats. "We've done it, we've done; we're rich, Wyatt ... we're retired in Florida now, man." In a reflective moment, Wyatt replies, "You know, Billy, we blew it." Underneath the veneer of weed, open skies, and counterculture discourse lies the one fact of freedom - that it costs.
Bob Dylan's "It's Alright, Ma, I'm Only Bleedin'," portends the final tragedy. The lyrics warn about "darkness" in daylight that "shatters" fortune. The isolated, two-lane Southern highway appears lush initially but, at high noon, Billy and Wyatt inadvertently face a showdown. A white pick-up truck pulls to the side of the bikers and one of the occupants points a shotgun at Billy. Meant as a joke to "scare the hell outta them," the passenger jests, "Why don't you get a haircut?"33 They are intruders in an America that does not recognize "their kind," but Los Angeles-bred Billy flips the driver off and the farmer fires. Billy lies dying and Wyatt heads back on the two-lane road for help. Deciding to finish the practical joke, the southerners also turn back. In four quick moments, the camera alternates point of view shots between the pickup and Wyatt on his Harley, each speeding head-on toward each other. The last image shows in slow motion Wyatt's bike blown to pieces. The camera pulls back and leaves viewers seeing a ball of fire burning in a jungle-like setting of the South.
The final scene denies Wyatt's words, "we blew it," their full impact. Instead of the words, it is the image that determines the film's worthy message. Easy Rider validates a 1960s era of social activism amidst racial oppression because the real meaning of America is senseless murder. The white pick-up truck becomes the fiend for a 1960s generation of social activists. By killing off the innocents instead of restoring order, as in classic Westerns, this film denies the possibility of a renewed society. The deaths prove George's earlier statement about "maimin' to prove freedom." Those men who defy convention and risk their lives for the freedom to ride and sport long hair reflect generational authenticity. The two bikers retain their masculine appeal for a younger generation that sees appearance as a form of selfhood and defiance as an entitlement. "They die gratuitously," one critic remarked, "for the way they look. We identify their innocence with our own, and in pitying them, we pity ourselves."34
At the same time, if the film illustrates the desire for freedom from material trappings, it also holds up for audiences the most important contradiction of a 1960s rejection of materialism as Wyatt's remark intended. Long hair and shabby appearance determine the bikers' outlaw status, but not without ambiguity. If hair and appearance opened for middle-class whites a potential avenue of solidarity with the oppressed at the time, that bond also depended on appearance's ideological features - injustice alongside individualism and autonomy. Reconciling collective oppression as a matter of injustice places the counterculture outside the problem of racial and class oppression and especially outside the system that fostered inequities. Billy and Wyatt have no investment in that momentary wave to black farmers, for example, other than to show a lack of bigotry. The bikers are really just passing through. This "passing gesture," more than anything else, signals divisions.35 Shared discrimination is impossible simply because of choice. It is as obvious as the money in Wyatt's tank. While Wyatt's comment advances the rebellion against materialism, the ending avoids reconciling the mistake in claims of oppression.
With the help of cycles, the film shows that untrammeled spaces mean freedom and ultimately the salvation of society in general and men in particular.36 If the reductive West signifies the real America, then its objectification is the imperative that validates the two men's own authenticity and empowerment. Similarly, to justify the riders' ideological impact, to represent bigotry as commonly Southern and responses to those criticisms as backlash, the film perpetuates the South as metaphor for everything racist, wicked, and predatory. The shrinking of place is the film's larger truth.
Easy Rider connected counterculture truth to ideas about oppression and assumptions of privilege. The time-honored western autonomy was mythologized once again. Like the view from the horse, the view from the bike confirmed the men's identity. This particular vision of what counterculture, oppression, and Westerns have in common suggests the discursive role of Fonda and Hopper's film. The bikers accomplish untrammeled manhood discursively, since they retain a measure of heroics as representative rebels against a corrupt society. Locals (as themselves) stand for the "telling it like it is" mantra and the film convincingly conveys the notion that freedom exists only in the lyricism of wide, open spaces. The result is reification or materialization of freedom as a place. The movie's utopian desire for valuing where the bikers had been versus where they end up answers its question about bigotry obliquely because places of freedom contrast to places of oppression.37 Counterculture discourse mixes with western icons, set against southern racism. The film subverts conventional ideals of the Western's ethical stance, and solves the problem of real America, the truth about it. Like the assumption about hair's connection to political consciousness as expressed in Martin's letter to the editor, Easy Rider's argument of counterculture oppression sidesteps personal implication.
This "now movie" had some critics refuse it a standard of experimental excellence belonging to other films of the time. Certainly, "Easy Rider's content is contemporary," Stephen Farber admitted, "but only on the lowest level - the level of mass fantasy." Farber quipped, "Artists are always distinct from the herd, ahead of it, challenging it to catch up; but the people who made Easy Rider still belong to the herd." Farber was bored with "men born wild and living free" and tired of their Western victimizing. "Even in frontier folklore," he contended, "the celebration of individual freedom often slipped indistinguishably into a glamorization of brutal self-reliance and self-righteousness."38 Stanley Kaufmann pointed out how the film's imaginative "sense of journey" gets trite and "tedious" with the "pseudo sagacity and rue" found in the story's ending.39
Village Voice reviewer Andrew Sarris called it a "dope opera" and argued that the film pandered to the generation gap sensibility just like soaps did to bored housewives. Just like "adulterous wives [who] were always neglected, mistreated, or misunderstood by their husbands," he mocked, "so now are the young people neglected, mistreated, or misunderstood by their elders." Sarris detested the simplistic collapse in the film of "all young people" into the generic group of having "exactly the same problems and the same values despite differences in class, income, race, sect, or even sex." Moreover, as he remarked, "The pot-smoking hippies, like the adulterous wives before them, come predominantly from the ranks of the bored bourgeoisie." Sarris refused to accept Fonda's character as an embodiment of "an entire culture - its heroes and myths" or to see Billy and Wyatt as "sacred cows beyond criticism, judgment, or disbelief." Captain America, a faddish anti-hero, also seemed "spoiled, jaded, corrupt. "40
Yet the film, not the critics, prevailed. The widespread acclaim of the story of two counterculture characters cannot be ignored. In the spring of 1969, Easy Rider received two awards, with Dennis Hopper taking Best Film for a First Director at the Cannes Film Festival. That same month, the Protestant International Interchurch Film Centre (IIFC) granted the film the International Film Prize.41 The organization based its decision on their observation that "this film expresses with authentic emotion, through the bewilderment and wildness of today's youth, the search for a sense of life and the search for God in a world without pity."42 In December, the New York Museum of Modern Art enshrined it "as a landmark film of the 60s" and one of three American examples chosen to represent the country's artistic merit in the eleven-day run of the "Decade's End" program. Easy Rider enjoyed being "the only [American] film chosen since 1966."43
It was a film of the time, for the generation that made up half the audiences. Said Roland Gelatt of Saturday Review, "Fonda and Hopper evidently intend the gentle hippies they portray to stand for that entire sector of contemporary youth who want only to love and to live their own lies - and who are constantly being thwarted by an abrasive, corrupt, and intolerant society." This older-generation critic admitted he felt "hopelessly out of tune" with this "under-thirties" viewer who "seemed persuaded of the movie's truthfulness."44 Similarly, as even Farber admitted, it "is so phenomenally popular because it is so completely in tune with its college and teenage audience - the movie-makers and the movie-goers share identical fantasies and anxieties." 45
Columbia exploited generational discord by mandating the press to "go after the `Easy Rider' Generation." Publicists sold it as a film that "dramatically shows the many faces of America, from Los Angeles to the East Coast." Touting it as "the official U.S. entry at the Cannes Film Festival," marketing specialists appealed to art audiences, film students, and local independents. Some selling strategies included "arrang[ing] for school publication reviews of the film, as well as ample advance publicity - school paper, bulletin boards, college radio stations, etc." The publicity guide recommended that local venues "involve students, parents, and educators in panel discussions, forums, etc. on the so-called `generation gap' and the manner in which the meaning of `the American way of life' is so differently translated today." Parents and other adults could get in touch and "see the America their children see." The idea was to have students and parents meet with film personnel in person to set up roundtable discussions. Marketers encouraged church groups to show their youth that "there is much that is beautiful in `Easy Rider"' and a great deal of material for sermons about truth and beauty. Strategies for getting the film out there reminded church leaders the film had IIFC endorsement. Peter Fonda became the "actor who probably is closer to the younger generation than anyone since the late James Dean!" The "Hollywood Profiles" program aired interviews with Fonda and Hopper over 850 radio stations while Columbia's profits soared.41
Ultimately, the search for America passed the most crucial test of all. It became Columbia's biggest box office draw at that time and made the production company one of the few reporting a profit by the end of the 1960s. By September the film had vanquished Columbia's box office slump by earning $256,694 during its four-week run in Westwood, California, at the Village Theater.47
Underneath its updated look, the film reinforced the myth of masculinity and open space as the source of renewal, but it was not restricted to the screen. Waging war through the lens of film could not have successfully carried a generational voice without the power of one more component, the flawless musical score. The beat of masculine rock completed the film's governing argument and the generational endorsement of it on its own term. Like The Graduate and Alice's Restaurant, Easy Rider's musical score became its own legend. Biking became synonymous to the sounds of The Byrds, Steppenwolf, Jimi Hendrix, the Electric Flag, Roger McGuinn, and others from the soundtrack. Those who passed judgment on the narrative and style praised the soundtrack. Through rock music, as one enthusiast reported, the film "treats the youth-dropout thing successfully. You can't have one without the other."48 Fonda's musical tour made advertising simple. "`Hear the Music-See `Easy Rider'!" ads read. "Arrange for credit cards on all juke-boxes in town," instructed Columbia's publicity notes. "Offer guest tickets to record collectors who bring all 12 of the discs listed below (and keep discs for return after your `Easy Rider' engagement has been concluded)!" The musical score cemented identity to activism and brought the 1960s revolutionary onto the screen in a lasting way. The legendary odyssey highlighted nostalgic desires for untrammeled freedom, landscapes of grandeur, and rock music as the liberating truth.
Along with The Graduate and Alice's Restaurant, the success of this film helped open studio doors to low budgets and identify the reality of the new national audience. Faddish riderheroes or not, they satisfied and spoke for those who saw generation as advocacy itself. To think young meant confronting fears as Hopper suggested: "What I want to say with Easy Rider is `Don't be scared, go and try to change America, but if you're gonna wear a badge, whether it's long hair or black skin, learn to protect yourselves."' Protest was a means to enlightenment and a necessary step toward self-fulfillment. "They can't tromp you down," Hopper explained, "maybe they'll start accepting you. Accepting all the herds." As he told one interviewer, "I took a chance, man, but I believe in the picture, and it's going to give me my freedom - to make more like it, and to get out of cities."49
If the film used rock well and did what one reviewer called "justice to its spirit," their production odyssey encouraged filmmaking to tell it like it is.50 The band of stars and technicians loaded up semi-trucks and produced the film on the road. As the press book noted, "Fonda and Hopper simply went out looking for Americans - to play themselves." When they found a regional location, they "set up cameras and recording equipment and then scout[ed] around for interesting onlookers, many of whom usually ended up in the film itself."51 Newfound actors would react to a situation and show life "out there." Digging the country was tried, true, and tested.52
In keeping with 1960s form of social life, the film did not conclude with its final scene. On September 17, 1999, at 7:00 P.M. at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences commemorated thirty years of Easy Rider prominence. At the same time, Fonda raced through New Orleans on his star-spangled chopper to commemorate thirty years of "the counter culture film," as Entertainment Today called it. Fonda shared his last lines of the film, "You know what Billy? We blew it," he remarked. "Hell's Angels has more family values than most U.S. families." Fonda warned, "We better wake up or my prophetic words at the end of Easy Rider will come true."53
The filmmakers reinstated Easy Rider's panoramic road journey, the search for the real America, in their own lives. Today "I travel with a tent and sleeping bag," Fonda says. "On the road there are no fences and an extraordinary sense of freedom," he explained to the New York Times. It could have been this way 150 or 100 years ago," he explains, "the Old West, with the sense of endless possibilities.... I ride as many summits as I can. I never ride freeways longer than necessary.... So free."54 Moreover, as Fonda related to The Los Angeles Times in 2000, "I've become an icon, whereever [sic] I go in the world, I'm introduced as `Captain America' or `Easy Rider.' And that's 25 years of it. And it'll never be different. But that's OK. 1155 Fonda enjoys a gracious and subdued life in Montana and proves that attitudes toward that place seem to be a bit different now than they were in Arlo's time. Big Sky country has become a repository for the Hollywood sect, those who grew up on the Western, and hippies gone Bobos, as writer David Brooks calls them.56
While the stars-and-stripes-Harley and Fonda are inseparable, the film's attitudes about counterculture rebellion followed Dennis Hopper through thirty-some years of cultural status. Broadwing, an Internet company, chose him for its marketing strategy. "When Americans think Dennis Hopper," the company proclaimed, "they'll think cutting-edge services and products." Broadwing explained they chose Hopper because "he exemplifies the image the reborn company is seeking"- edgy and not afraid to attack the marketplace. He brought the magical element of futuristic credibility to the product as he ranted about dinosaurs in network providers; "When you say jump, they fly."57
