Review:  Easy Rider

dir Dennis Hopper, starring Hopper, Peter Fonda, Jack Nicholson

by Paul Murphy

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.  Hopper, washed up at the time, a star of the 1950s know 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 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).