Dennis Hopper (1969)
Whatever its other merits or faults may be, Easy Rider, on its original release, got into the American bloodstream in a big way. Forty-five years later, it’s remarkable for several reasons. The film remains a vigorous expression of how many young Americans – relatively privileged white ones, at least – felt at the end of a volatile but increasingly demoralising decade, the last two years of which had intensified the 1960s’ twin national traumas of political assassination and the Vietnam War. The pothead protagonists, Wyatt aka Captain America (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper), are heading away from Los Angeles and towards Mardi Gras in New Orleans. In retrospect, this direction of travel has a larger resonance: Easy Rider was one of the seminal movies in the shift from old Hollywood structures to the more independent film-making that was able, in conjunction with major studios, to flourish during the 1970s. (The protagonists’ names also presumably refer to Wyatt Earp and Billy the Kid: the Harley Davidsons that they ride instead of horses are one element of Easy Rider’s reinterpretation of Western conventions.) The film is important too in that Jack Nicholson’s screen career took off as a result of his performance in it. (The prime movers in Raybert Productions, the company behind Easy Rider, were Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson; the latter, whose first feature was the Monkees film Head in 1968, followed that in 1970 with Five Easy Pieces.) As the drunkard lawyer George Hanson, whom Wyatt and Billy meet during a night in the cells and who joins them on the road to New Orleans, Nicholson is brilliantly witty and vital. Once he disappears, when Hanson is murdered by Louisiana rednecks, the film suffers a serious loss of energy.
In the final sequence, Billy and Wyatt also die at the hands of local bigots – the kind of people who, Hanson tells them, when the trio are first assailed by threatening looks and words in a diner, can’t handle the ‘freedom’ that the main characters embody and practise. These reactionary forces are too specific; they don’t mesh with the scope of generational disillusion that Easy Rider tapped into so effectively. ‘This used to be a hell of a good country – I can’t understand what’s gone wrong with it’’, says George Hanson as he, Wyatt and Billy talk and smoke pot after making camp on the outskirts of the town they’ve just passed through. George appears to be commenting, however, on nothing more than the hillbilly prejudices that the trio is encountering. It’s hard to believe that these prejudices sprang to life as a reaction to hippies or that George Hanson would ever have felt comfortable with the inveterate racism and homophobia of the local culture. In other words, the screenplay, which Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda wrote with Terry Southern, didn’t make much intellectual sense but didn’t either prevent Easy Rider from being emotionally powerful. The closing God’s-eye view of Captain America’s burning motorcycle depicts American dreams gone up in flames; that Wyatt’s death, like George’s and Billy’s, has been caused by a few ill-educated hicks, and therefore can’t reflect the entirety of ‘what’s gone wrong’, is relatively unimportant. Pauline Kael rightly noted the ‘sentimental paranoia’ of Easy Rider and the potency of this – the film’s gut connection with its primary audience (as she also noted) was reinforced through a soundtrack of songs many of which already meant plenty to that audience. There are contributions from, among others, Steppenwolf, The Byrds, Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan. (Dylan and Roger McGuinn also wrote a number, ‘Ballad of Easy Rider’, for the movie.)
The aerial shot of the combusted Harley Davidson is seen twice by the audience – the first time as Wyatt’s momentary premonition of his own death. This is part of a psychedelic bad trip, dominated by Catholic imagery, which he and Billy experience after taking LSD in a New Orleans cemetery. The premonitory insert fits with both the attention-getting visual rhythm of the film as a whole (there are jump cuts and zooms to enhance the trippy feel) and its intermittently religiose flavouring. For example, Wyatt’s and Billy’s journey includes an episode in a hippy commune, where people say grace and/or talk about star signs. Dennis Hopper presents this group as both touching and ridiculous but much of what gets said here and elsewhere on the road gets said slowly and tonelessly – this is why the advent of Jack Nicholson makes such a difference. He was a terrific actor in those days (and, when Easy Rider was made, a hungry one too, which may have made him all the more terrific). Nicholson is head and shoulders above anyone else on screen here, although Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda are both effective. Hopper’s lines are mostly stoner-babble but he’s skilful and occasionally affecting playing a not very bright man. Fonda, with the family’s strong jaw, gives Wyatt a nobler (verging on pompous) quality. More thoughtfully anti-materialist than his friend, Wyatt tells Billy, just before they die, that the money the pair have made from the drugs they’ve sold means that they ‘blew it’. The cast also includes Karen Black and Toni Basil as a couple of prostitutes and Phil Spector as a wealthy cocaine customer.
6 July 2014
