Easy Rider (1969)

Date Seen: 7/24/17

Score: 4.5/5

DIRECTOR: Dennis Hopper

PRODUCER: Peter Fonda

STUDIO: Raybert Productions & Pando Company

DISTRIBUTED BY: Columbia Pictures

SCREENPLAY: Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper & Terry Southern

CINEMATOGRAPHY: Laszlo Kovacs

Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper 

Peter Fonda

Luke Askew, Dennis Hopper, and Peter Fonda

Jack Nicholson's friendly drunkard talks his way into some favors 

Jack Nicholson

Jack Nicholson

Actual locals from Morganza, Louisiana

Dennis Hopper and Karen Black

The Mardi Gras acid trip sequence, shot in grainy 16mm

Toni Basil, Peter Fonda, Karen Black & Dennis Hopper

During the cemetery acid trip sequence, Hopper encouraged Fonda to engage with the statue as if it were his mother, Frances Ford Seymour, who committed suicide when he was only ten years old.

Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider is widely considered one of the most important-if not the most important- countercultural films of the twentieth century, standing alongside Mike Nichols's The Graduate (1967) and Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967) as one of the cinematic pillars of the New Hollywood film movement. New Hollywood, also known as the Hollywood Renaissance, was the product of the wide-scale decline of the Hollywood Studio System, marked by serious financial recession during the mid-to-late 1960s. Following the devastating failure of big-budget films like Twentieth Century Fox's Cleopatra (1963), as well as the overturn of leadership at the top of these studios, the film industry was in dire straits. Responding to both the economic necessity of low-budget, independently-produced films as well as giving voice to the youth counterculture, New Hollywood was born. To actors-turned-filmmakers like Dennis Hopper, New Hollywood's approach was the only way to preserve and reinvent the entire art of filmmaking; as Hopper said of his cinematic mission, "We've gotta save the movie industry, man. We've gotta save it, or it's all over for the movies."

Easy Rider marked a significant turning point for both the revised industry that created it and the counterculture that necessitated it. Coming several years after films like Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate set unprecedented norms for onscreen violence and sexuality, Easy Rider set its own precedent by being a film shot through the surrealist lens of a drug trip. In doing so, it also became a cinematic eulogy for the Hippie movement, a response to its dying out and an apocalyptic precursor to the violent turn it would take in the late 1960s and early 1970s, from the advocation of peace and nonviolence to the deluded horrors of the Manson Family and the Hells Angels. 

Throughout the film, Hopper uses editing as a tool to loudly reject any connection between his film and the Hollywood Studio System pictures it was replacing. It was no secret that Hopper's brand of filmmakers were taking the old Hollywood hostage during a time of financial crisis and waning popularity, but it was also a time of mutual hostility and threat. While New Hollywood held a gun to the Studio System's head, allowing for a total overturn of rules for filmmaking, the Studio System was still New Hollywood's only chance at financial success through distribution. This ironic paradox ties directly into one of the main themes of Easy Rider- freedom through money, and its consequences.

Just as Hollywood royalty Peter Fonda and Actors Studio darling Dennis Hopper were allowed the privilege of making a countercultural film due to their wealth and powerful connections, the characters they portray onscreen, Wyatt and Billy, are allowed the opportunity to embark on a road trip in search of "freedom" by the money earned from a successful drug deal. What they don't understand- at least not until it's too late- is that they are entirely slaves to the capitalist system they wish to escape from. As they travel farther and farther away from their starting point, they become stripped of the freedom and privilege they've set out to find, and by the end of the film Fonda's character wearily sighs, "We blew it." In possibly its most complex theme, Easy Rider establishes the paradox of freedom and money- that those who wish to achieve freedom from society's capitalist chains must first play into that system in order to escape from it. This theme becomes most clear and fascinating during the scene in which a young Jack Nicholson's character, a drunkard ACLU lawyer, explains the trouble with freedom nowadays. "I mean," he says, "It's real hard to be free when you're bought and sold in the marketplace." His lessons apply not only to the fates of the main characters, but also to the fate of the New Hollywood film movement AND to the Hippie countercultural movement, which so desperately sought to throw off the shackles of the old, oppressive systems, but found themselves too easily corruptible and subject to the financial necessity of being tied into those very old systems they hated so much.

Easy Rider chooses to depict this very modern struggle through the lens of an updated Western film, and in doing so create a unique backwards narrative to a classic genre, yet another way of revising traditional Hollywood standards of narrative filmmaking. Fonda and Hopper ride from West to East, not on horses but on motorcycles. Along the way they face hostilities from local white citizens rather than from any Native Americans, Mexicans, or, as Harriet Polt put it in her 1969 review of the film, the "nouveaux-tribesmen" of the hippie commune they visit. The protagonists share their names with famous outlaws Billy the Kid and Wyatt Earp, and represent two loners constantly ridiculed by society, just looking for a way to find the freedom they crave by way of a long trek across the American southwest. If Easy Rider is a neo-Western, though, it brings apocalyptic undertones to the traditional cowboy's quest. Along the way Wyatt and Billy come across the dying out of a movement they themselves feel tied to- an idea that freedom can be found by throwing off the shackles of an unforgiving society and attempting to work the land. Through encounters with doomed hippies at an unprosperous commune and local rednecks at a Louisiana restaurant, it becomes clear to the viewer (and to Fonda's Wyatt) that they have missed the point of their noble mission. It's a tragedy that is only foolishly seen as unavoidable; as the cinematography regresses from vast, open roads and gorgeous sunsets in front of which the protagonists cast the only shadow, to the crowded and dirty swamps of the Deep South, the film shows the dream and its corruption with the nostalgic and stubborn undertone that maybe, just maybe, all those beautiful ideas could have been something.

I don't know what to make of Easy Rider entirely. I think it speaks to a generation that I don't belong to, and the forcefulness with which it rejects the Hollywood standards that have made a serious comeback since Spielberg's Jaws in 1975. In this way it's an honorable New Hollywood picture- a film that gets to the heart of the Hollywood Renaissance's complexities and, in doing so, says a lot about the culture by and for which it was made.

Sources Used:

"Easy Rider," review by Harriet R. Plot in Film Quarterly, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Autumn, 1969)

"We Keep Heading West: Dennis Hopper and the Post-Western" from the book Post Westerns: Cinema, Region, West by Neil Campbell (2013)

"The New Hollywood and the Independent Hollywood" from the book American Independent Cinema: An Introduction by Yannis Tzioumakis (2006)

"Dennis Hopper" from the book Jack Nicholson: The Early Years by Robert Crane and Christopher Fryer (2012)

"American Film: Turmoil and Transformation" from the book Film: An International History of the Medium by Robert Skylar (2002)

"Easy Rider" from Wikipedia

All photos from FilmGrab.com and Pinterest. All GIFS from Giphy.