#84 - Easy Rider (1969) - Dennis Hopper

When Easy Rider was released in 1969, its slogan said, “A man went looking for America. And couldn’t find it anywhere.” and the movie is that serious. It tells the story – if it can be called a story – of two bikers travelling across the US. They run into some Mexican farmers, pick up a hitchhiker, spend time at a hippie commune, end up in jail, make a friend in jail, find some prostitutes, and take drugs. It’s all 1960s counterculture. The plot and details are all sparse and vague, and yet dense and complicated.

The bikers, played by Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda, are clearly anti-establishment. And yet they’re not hippies (though sometimes they are far out, man) and they make money selling drugs to businessmen and they want to retire in Florida. But they don’t have jobs or family or friends and they go where the wind and the road takes them, sleeping in the woods when motels reject them. And they are rejected often because they are different. They’re a symbol of freedom but freedom doesn’t always go so well. It’s an interesting contradiction – it’s both pro-rebellion and nihilistic and cynical about the fruits of such rebellion.

The scenery is beautiful, the performances are wonderful, and the drug trip scene is genuinely disturbing. It’s a difficult to movie to grasp, but that makes it interesting. The contradictions it presents feel true to life where things are never black and white. And the message may be a window into how the counterculture movement viewed itself. By the late 60s the free-spirited idealism had faded to a jaded and fatalistic cynicism. Easy Rider is in the middle of this shift. Freedom only lasts so long, it says. It burns bright, but it burns out. You can stick it to The Man, but sooner or later The Man will stick it right back.