Easy Rider, directed by Dennis Hopper (1969)
"course don’t ever tell anybody that they’re not free ‘cause then they’re gonna get real busy killin’ and maimin’ to prove to you that they are. Oh yeah, they’re gonna talk to you, and talk to you, and talk to you about individual freedom, but they see a free individual, it’s gonna scare ‘em." George Hanson (Jack Nicholson, Easy Rider)
Peter Fonda told an interviewer, "Liberty becomes a whore and we’re all taking an ‘easy ride’." The promotion for the film reads: ‘A man went looking for America and couldn’t find it anywhere.’ The Summer Of Love. Sex, drugs and rock n roll. ‘This used to be a helluva country’ and ‘We blew it.’
Easy Rider is about a lot of things besides the search for freedom. It’s as much a soundtrack as it is a movie. It’s French New Wave meets low budget/independent versus television culture and a dying Hollywood. It’s a revisionist western that uses motorcycles instead of horses and moves east instead of west.
Easy Rider is a buddy movie with capitalists disguised as hippies, a morality play about trying to shirk work and duty for the quick fix. The search for independence, freedom, individuality, happiness, adventure, liberation, the open road, a place to put down roots, generational and social conflicts, the meaning of life and getting high.
The film has become a staple in American mythology and is usually used as a bookend, along with Woodstock, Altamont, Charles Manson and Vietnam, to mark the end of the counter culture and the proverbial ‘Sixties.’ What is its influence today? What would Easy Rider look like if it were revised to fit 2003? The same? What’s changed? Are we still looking for the same things? Are we still afraid of true independence? Is the American dream as elusive as ever? Do we still mistake money for freedom and is connecting with something meaningful just a fantasy before the shotgun goes off?
The final scene shows our fallen superheroes, Captain America (Peter Fonda) and Billy The Kid (Dennis Hopper) lying dead with their bikes on the side of the highway. A river flows towards the horizon as we hear ‘Ballad Of Easy Rider’: ‘Flow river flow, let your waters wash down/Take me from this road to some other town/All I wanted was to be free/ And that’s the way it turned out to be… If you like freedom in the cinema, you are free to check out Easy Rider.
